Across Read online

  As I had walked part of the way through the fields, I kicked the caked mud off my shoes before going in. Here, too, the indoor sounds—abrupt bursts of unanimous laughter, competing shouts, the gurgling espresso machine, and in brief pauses the suddenly tenacious keynote of the jukebox—gave the impression of a tightly packed crowd. But when I went in, I found the two low-ceilinged rooms almost empty. At one table sat four card players, all wearing hats, and at the next, three young women, one well advanced in pregnancy, one with a faint mustache and hair dyed reddish-brown, the third with a dachshund at her feet. A fifth man, keeping the card players company, was holding an accordion, on which he softly accompanied the card game, using different chords for different phases of play. The landlord was leaning against the bar; a pencil attached by a string to his belt dangled down below his knees. Piles of illustrated magazines on the window ledges reached to the tops of the potted plants. There were no newspapers in racks as in the cafés of the Old City; if anyone asked for a paper, the landlord brought his own copy from his apartment on the upper floor. Both rooms front on the canal embankment, which extends well above the lower edge of the windows and keeps out most of the daylight. The few tables are oversized, as in a country tavern, an encouragement to “sit down and join us,” and the tablecloths have a pattern usual in taverns, a white lozenge against a larger, darker one; on the tablecloths lie piles of beer coasters and a wicker basket containing condiments and wooden toothpicks (though no longer made of “pliable barberry wood”). The light in the rooms was dim, in striking contrast to the garish sign outside; only at the table, under that lamp over there, was it somewhat brighter.

  After a day of working alone, it does me good to go to some café, if only because of the place names that are dropped here and there in the table conversation: Mauterndorf, Abtenau, Gerlin, Iben. Then, in my weariness, I manage to show that glimmer of interest in everything around me that makes me, or so I believe, inconspicuous; no one, I feel sure, will turn to me, let alone against me. When I leave, no one will talk about me. But my presence will have been noticed.

  I sat in my usual corner, with a view of the two small groups, and also, through the cleft in the curtains, out into the open. There in the northern sky gleamed the gray prison wall of the castle, toward which the canal flows in gentle meanders, in the foreground traversed by one of its many bridges. Two cars were standing side by side on the hump of the bridge, the drivers talking to each other through open windows, as if they had just met. Between them slithered a moped, whose rider’s body while on the bridge seemed airier for a moment. Then the bridge was empty. An old man and an old woman sat on a bench on the embankment, which oddly enough, like all the benches along the canal, faced away from the water. After a while one of the small, box-shaped electric buses, whose routes mark the boundaries of the city proper, appeared on the bridge with a single passenger, who seemed to be sitting on the floor. A moment later, the blue light of an ambulance blinked at the same spot so intensely that it was reflected on the teeth of a laughing woman inside the café.

  Here, too, there are houses occupied by people from southern countries. A black-eyed, brown-skinned adolescent came in with a child who looked like him, and went to the bar, where he exchanged a large empty wine bottle for a full one. He introduced the child as his uncle and talked about himself. He went to the local public school; the special class that had been organized for foreigners was known as the “color class,” not because of the crayons, which are virtually the only teaching aids in use, but because of the different skin colorations represented. The principal, said the boy, is proud of this class; he had even arranged for it to have a special entrance, and the hours are different from those of the Austrian classes. So many drawings had accumulated by the end of the year that not only the walls but all the cabinets were full of them. The drawings exhibited in the auditorium showed not only foreignness but also the beauties of the host country, which the natives had often lost their eye for. The school with the color class was in Schallmoos at the other end of town, behind the Kapuzinerberg, and foreign children were sent there from all over the city; one of the pupils had been run over and killed yesterday; it was in today’s paper. Most of the drawings were about war: Turks against Greeks, Iranians against Iraqis; Yugoslavs against Albanians. While the boy was talking, the child with him picked up a log and fired bursts in all directions.

  On their way out, the two of them stopped in the corridor and inserted a coin in the jukebox, which had one record of Macedonian folk music: the café was filled with a melody without beginning or end. And something that had never happened before: the café turned into the garden terrace of a restaurant on the west bank of the Jordan. The terrace was empty except for crackling gusts of sand, the slapping of palm leaves, and the sound of music without beginning or end. Eastward lay the Dead Sea depression; the pregnant woman straightened up in her chair, gathered her long hair together and piled it on top of her head; while the record was playing, she was a woman on the shores of the Dead Sea, an embodiment of the sea itself.

  The outer door opened and closed. The adolescent appeared in the cleft between the curtains. Outside, on the embankment, he was holding the wine bottle in one hand and, without wavering, was carrying his uncle piggyback. Resting his log on his carrier’s shoulder, the child aimed into the darkness.

  The card players had stopped playing, but remained seated in the same order. They began to talk quietly among themselves, without shouting or laughing; almost voicelessly. The landlord took the last orders and joined them. One of the players, as I hadn’t noticed before, was a woman. The youngest of the men moved closer to her. The three women at the next table had already gone. The little dog had lain down against the table leg and was sleeping. The ventilator on the canal side was whirring. An Asian in an orange plastic cape came in with a bundle of newspapers fresh off the press; a moment later, he had vanished; no one was in a reading mood just then.

  Then came a slowdown, which seemed to suit those present; one by one, all made ready to leave, and then suddenly, after a moment of hesitation, they were in no hurry at all. It was an interval of patience, during which even the landlord stopped looking at the clock. The woman, who, apparently out of sorts, had just thrown the cards down in front of the man, began to toy with his shirt collar, and he kissed each one of her knuckles; the others at the table spoke to one another softly and, at most, looked at the couple from time to time, not out of the corners of their eyes but wide-eyed, almost dreamily. The landlord’s wife, who had finished cleaning up, stood in the white light of the open kitchen door; she was wearing high rubber boots. One of the men at the table inspected the palm of his hand, the lines of which were black with soot or oil. Another let out something resembling a yodel; not of joy or sorrow, but of weariness; the weariest of all yodels.

  Then all had gone home except the lovers. In the kitchen, the landlord discussed the shopping for the next day with his wife. In the toilet, a late guest was standing at the washbasin; seen from behind, the chamois beard on his hat wavered, though the man was hardly moving.

  Meanwhile, man and woman sat face to face, with a seriousness that gave them Egyptian profiles. The cautious though steady tightening of their enfolding arms suggested slowly closing tendrils. The man touched the woman’s neck with his fingertips, as though trying to feel her heartbeat there. From under motionless eyelids, she stared into his eyes, while at the same time, in a quick exchange, one spoke softly and urgently to the other. After that, they sat motionless, face to face, no longer recognizable, for an eternity, like the sun and moon in old engravings. Just for this man, this woman must have been the most beautiful woman in the world! For another eternity, red colored both their cheeks until —in simultaneous movement—he bent over her and she leaned not only her head but her whole body to one side, like a woman getting ready, in self-abandon, to rip the bearskin off the wall to cover herself and her lover with. “And the greatest of all things happened”—a paraphrase for b
odily union occurring in shepherds’ tales. But did those two at the table in the Canal Tavern need to be bodily united? Weren’t they already one flesh? A small yellow pencil sped almost inaudibly downward, like a bird’s beak.

  Afterward I lingered for a while outside on the em. bankment road, my back to the tavern with the drawn curtains. The couple’s voices were in the whirring of the ventilator: not a whispering or a murmuring, not really voices, just sounds, now higher, now lower, unintelligible yet penetrating; punctuated distinctly by the landlord’s voice: “Table 10.”

  The patch of meadow on the other side of the canal was white with fog in spots, while the rest of it was quite open. The fog didn’t lift, but lay impenetrably dense on the ground, barely cloaking the tips of the grass. Two triangular ears were all that showed of a cat that was lurking there. However, a movement was discernible in the mist, not a steady flow of swaths, but a to-and-fro, a reaching out and a pulling back, a sudden surging up and flattening out, as though the fog were not fog at all but smoke from the peat smoldering under the grass. Sometimes the creeping whiteness seemed to boil up above eye level, as though from the subterranean bubbling of a geyser. Above it, the night was clear; the houses at the far end of the meadow rose out of their steamy foundations with contours all the sharper, and seemed more houselike than usual; and in my mind there was no longer a national boundary between me and the pyramid of the Staufen, now pointed in the moonlight.

  The fog accompanied me on my way home. The way leads upstream, always along the canal; just once, it crosses a bridge to the other bank, and then crosses back again by the next bridge. At first, there’s a tarred road on the embankment, then a street belonging to the Colony, and finally, as far as the turnaround, a path for pedestrians and bicycles. Strangely enough, the fog never crossed the canal; the layers to the left and the right didn’t mingle, the water formed a sort of fog shed (each patch of meadow, pasture, or bog generated its own fog, differing from others in color and shape); on the watercourse itself, there were only transparent clouds of vapor. Suddenly a patch of woods, which only a moment before had been an island in the pond of mist, stood free in the black country, as though the underbrush had swallowed the whiteness. The fog piled up behind a fence as though stopped by an obstacle or a threshold. In an orchard, its meandering flow connected a tumbledown bakehouse with a beehive, whose wooden squares, despite the dark night all around, gleamed in every color above the milky whiteness. Once, when I stood still and looked down, the fog was knee-high and I couldn’t see my own feet; yet at the same time I clearly saw the pattern of the kitchen wall tiles in the lighted windows of a house nearby: roses. With all the many continuing sounds, bicycle dynamos, television sets, home carpentry, the silence was so great that a cow with its long-drawn-out mooing seemed to be blowing into a picture-book horn; pictures of an autumn fire, a rainstorm, another watercourse. The horn ended in my own breast; the usual breastplate wasn’t there anymore.

  At regular intervals, the canal was bordered by small wooden signboards covered with posters of the various local political parties (one more election was in the offing) ; for the most part, portraits of local politicians with slogans you pick up in spite of yourself and can’t get out of your head. Mechanically, I kicked one of the signboards. It proved to be unanchored and my little kick almost knocked it over. Without looking around, I picked it up and threw it into the canal, where it sank instantly. The next one had tapering legs and was planted more firmly in the ground. Nevertheless, I was sure—as sometimes when opening a can—that I could get it out with one tug and tip it into the canal (as indeed I did). I disposed of all the other signboards in the same way. In the autumn, when the Alm would go dry for a month, the legs would rise up out of the muck, the discolored scraps of paper would swell, and the dredger that cleans the canal would pile all this junk, along with the usual tires, old clothes, and dead fish, onto garbage trucks. I once asked someone who knows me well whether he thought me capable of committing murder, and now the answer came back to me: “Committing, no. Wanting to, yes.” Was this a case of wanting to commit murder? No. Was it mere caprice, or, as they say, “malicious mischief”? No. In any event, while walking, I kept saying aloud a word which, I was well aware, did not provide the right answer either: “revenge”; with the addition: “I have a right to look at the water. By obstructing my view of the water, you are infringing on my rights.” (My inner cry at first sight of the face—silent, to be sure—on the poster: “Shut up!”)

  Since then, I’ve only once done anything comparable; that was in connection with a slogan on a church wall (though all I did then was to take out my pencil in passing and cross it out). Now, with my penknife, I removed the red-and-white trail markers—European Cross-Country Trail, Bohemian Forest—Stone Sea—Carnic Alps—from the willows on the riverbank and threw them after the wooden stands. I did the same with a birdhouse, a theater showcase, a poster advertising a recently opened hairdressing establishment, showing models that might have been portraits of wanted terrorists. Finally, with my lighter, I set fire to the gable-shape sign planted in the ground outside a house under construction, announcing that a corporation was interested in “land suitable for development” (phosphorescent letters in the darkness), and looked on as it smoldered and then really burned, along with its gable. No one was watching me, and if they had been, they might have thought they were witnessing some anonymous official act.

  Never have the trunks of willow trees looked so thick to me as after that. The little wooden frames projecting over the canal, formerly emplacements for clothes washing, looked a little like docks. What had become of the boat that went with them? The wood-sheathed bed of the Alm was itself the ship, sailing past and standing still at the same time. The water didn’t flow, but stirred far and wide. The bark of the willows buckled like that of cork oaks ready to be harvested and made into life jackets. Willows go with rivers … willows rich in withes … from the withes are fashioned docks for bees … so the bees, “when blown into the water by the east wind, can climb out and spread their wings in the summer sun …”

  Effective facts, or magic formulas that have lost their efficacy? A form of existence with the force of law, or nothing more than pretentious incantations? The ants which, betokening imminent showers, “carry their eggs from the anthills to safety over a narrow path”; the girls who, while spinning at night, “foresee the coming storm by the sputtering of oil in their lamp and the moldy fungus that forms around the wick”—images acting forever anew, or old ones that have lost their force? Striking, in any case, how the repetitions in current phrases usually impress me as something evil, pathological, or even criminal. Could one not, on the other hand, speak of refreshing repetition as opposed to wearisome repetition; voluntary repetition as opposed to forced repetition? The possibility of repetition as opposed to the danger of repetition? Shine for me, hard hazelbush. Glide hither, lithe linden tree. Rounded elderbush, prosper under the protection of the willows. Here is my other word for repetition: “rediscovery.”

  Back home, I ate an apple in the dark; drank a glass of water; watered the plants. The bicycle stand at the bus terminus was empty now. The last bus had left for the city without passengers. The wires would crackle no more, though for a long time they swung to and fro. The moon went down—time to watch the stars. I used to attend the meetings of the Salzburg Friends of the Stars regularly. They were usually held at the top of Morzg Hill, which then was the darkest spot in the vicinity, ideal for observing the night sky. Later, as the glow of the city lights affected a larger and larger area, we moved to the more distant Gaisberg. But after a while there was no proper darkness even there; a diffuse glow veiled the starry firmament, and in the end the Friends of the Stars broke up. Nevertheless, the episode was useful to me; soon after I joined, the group leader gave me a good lesson with regard to my way of searching the sky: “You’re always in such a hurry to identify, instead of just gazing for a while.” On the other hand, I have to admit that, aft
er observing the stars for any length of time, I’m relieved to get back to the murmuring of the trees down below.

  Now that the moon was down, there seemed to be gaps in the sky: deep-black empty spaces. The great winter constellations had not yet risen. The plain down below, except for the chain of lights on the Moos highway, was almost dark; the airfield no longer glittered; the warning lights on the “city mountains” had been switched off; not even a charter plane would land now. Only the border crossing on the Autobahn would shine glaring yellow all night, and with it the not far distant, pale-white gate of the Walserfeld army post, which at first sight looked like another border crossing; when a car didn’t happen to be crossing the border, the deserted concrete road, lit from far above, could be mistaken for the army post’s execution ground. The villages of the plain had vanished in the darkness, but their supposedly Celtic names—Anif, Grodig, Morzg, Gneis, Loig, Wals, Gois—would take on life again. My son once said that those place names made him think of the names of trees.

  Sounds were still heard, but all, even the short, dreamy piping of the titmice outside the window, kept their distance from one another. None had the character of a bang, a crash, a clatter, or a screech; and they sounded regularly, whether far away or in the immediate vicinity, as though reporting for duty; first the motorcycle on the Autobahn, then the refrigerator case in the supermarket; then the farm dog; and still another, high above the plain, was the distant thudding of a boulder blasted off the Untersberg by the overnight freeze and rolling down into the cirque. Each of these sounds fell into the total silence, which it further enhanced; and from the black night, in slow sequences punctuated by long intervals of silence, emerged something akin to Far Eastern calligraphy, undifferentiated black, but formally rigorous and luminous, brightening behind the lids of the man listening as he fell asleep.