Absence Read online

  Yet a number of seats are still vacant after he has sat down. There are only three other persons, who, though thrown together at random, seem to acquiesce in the arrangement. With the gambler the group is complete. The woman at the window does not favor him with so much as a glance—her attention is concentrated on her aluminum suitcase, as though it were in danger; pencil in hand, the old man across from her is immersed in his notebook; and the soldier’s back is turned, for he is standing at the door as though to guard it. True enough, some others try to get in: first a loudmouthed couple, who at the sight of the four fall silent and go away; then a priest in travel dress who, after a greeting all around with one foot already on the threshold, vanishes as though to resume his greetings in the next compartment. Only a child strong enough to open the door by himself pushes past the soldier, and his parents have to stick their heads in and order him out with the words: “Not there. Somewhere else.” The child complies with a shrug.

  The hubbub outside dies away. But the train doesn’t move. There’s plenty of time. The soldier sits down, pulls himself up again as though in expectation—not of an event but of a first word. It’s the woman who turns quite casually to the others and says: “When my childhood was over I began to wander around. I left the house and went farther and farther away, until I didn’t know where I was anymore. When they caught me in some small town or out in the country, I didn’t know my name and address. I usually took the train, never one that was going very far, always a local; no matter where it was going, I never bought a return ticket. What did I do when I arrived there? They told me I just sat around in the waiting room at the last stop or on the loading platform, and sometimes at the edge of a field, in a gravel pit, or by the side of a brook, regardless of the season. People began to notice me because of the way I’d sit there for hours—before that, when I was wandering around, it seems I walked like someone who knew his way and was going somewhere. Men often stopped their cars and told me to get in, but none of them touched me, they never laid a finger on me; there was never any conversation, because my answer to everything was the same: I don’t know. So they took me to the police. I couldn’t be a tramp, that was out of the question; even the village constables came out from behind their partitions when they saw me, and all of a sudden they stopped talking dialect. I always had plenty of money on me. And that is what made them think I was crazy. Instead of sending me home, they took me to an institution. There I was exhibited to students in a lecture hall shaped like an amphitheater. The professor showed me off, not because I was sick but because it was me. Though I only answered his rehearsed questions with yes or no, he always shook my hand with both of his and held the door open for me when my act was done. The students were crazy about me, too. My wanderings can’t have made me very happy, because often when they found me sitting there I’d be crying or even shouting for help—but my act must have opened the eyes of the onlookers to something they’d never known before. While the mental patients were performing, I’d be sitting in the cubicle waiting my turn, and I’d hear the listeners coughing or laughing, but when I appeared, they’d all fall silent. They didn’t feel sorry for me, they envied me. What they heard about me filled them with longing. If only, instead of moving in crowds through familiar streets, they could wander around like me in a dream and alone. My adventures made them long, not for other continents, but for the towns and villages nearby, which up until then had meant nothing to them. Thanks to me, the names took on a resonance and the places became possible destinations. Though I was standing there barelegged in an institutional gown, for them I was a heroine. And it’s true that, though actually I wasn’t so very well off, I was better off than those people, who thought they were well off. One of you was there, too, as a visiting student. He only attended my demonstration because he thought I was the kind of person that moved him. He came because he respected me.”

  Something of hers falls on the floor. The soldier bends down. It is a fountain pen with a mother-of-pearl cap. As he turns it slowly in his hand, the light from outside seems to shine through the cap. A jolt runs through the train, and it pulls out under two trees, the one close to the track, the other by the side of the parallel road. Their branches have become intertwined so as to form an arch, though an irregular one, because the tree beside the track has been pruned to make room for the wires and the pylon, with the result that the arch has scorched or bare spots that make it look like the tusk of a mammoth. The clouds in the breach are diesel smoke mixed with soot, and the birds swerve to avoid them. The deserted platform glitters for a moment; on a high-rise tower the sign appears: HOTEL EUROPA.

  At first the four in the compartment stop whatever they are doing. The gambler has a cigarette between his lips and his lighter in his hand. The soldier has a finger in his closed book. The old man, his pencil point at the ready but motionless, holds his notebook in such a way as to show the letters CUMBERLAND on the pencil. Pocket mirror in hand, the young woman stops freshening her lipstick. Further speech seems unauthorized for the present. The silence adds to their contentment. Only the woman looks questioningly from one to the other; she is the only one of the four whose face is not turned toward the window. Outside, there has been a quick succession of short tunnels and viaducts. Then, though there has been no noticeable change in the vegetation or the shapes of the houses, the light seems different, perhaps because the view of the sky is less obstructed. The train, which for a time was running at high speed like a transcontinental express, has begun to stop as frequently as a streetcar. The track is no longer running parallel to the road; for a time it skirted fields and woods, but lately it has been running straight through a forest. Hardly anyone has been getting on, but crowds of passengers have been getting out at every stop and invariably forming processions that march off on identical roads, heading for village churches miles away, on identical hilltops. At one station—actually no more than a shelter in the woods—just one person gets off, and vanishes into the woods with his worker’s briefcase. Convinced that this was their last fellow passenger, the woman—who has also turned toward the window by now—reaches for the door handle. The old man restrains her with a quick shake of his head. A far from empty train, coming in the opposite direction, stops on the other track, and a group of screaming schoolchildren comes trooping down the center aisle. As the train starts up again, the old man raises his surprisingly high voice in a chant, every word of which can be heard above the hubbub: “In the childhood of peoples, unknown countries came into existence beyond the mountains and the oceans. They had names, but nobody knew where they were. Only their direction was more or less certain. The sources of the Nile were south, the Caucasus east, the legendary Atlantis west, and Ultima Thule north. Then came trading ships and wars of conquest, then came history, and then—violently, by leaps and bounds—came the adulthood of the peoples and it exploded the legends of childhood geography. The sources of the Nile were muddied, the peaks of the Caucasus reduced from heavenly heights to their actual dimensions, and Ultima Thule dislodged from its place as the kingdom at the end of the world. No Atlantis will ever again rise out of the sea. But the names remained; in epics and songs they took on a fantastic power that gave life to the realm of legend. Since then Paradise as the source of the Tigris and Euphrates and the landing of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat after the flood have been all the more real, and the infant Moses in his basket will float for all time in the slowly flowing Nile. The name is the guest of reality. In much the same way, we in our childhood gave our few favorite places faraway names; that was how the brook at the edge of the cow pasture, where we roasted potatoes under a tree in the rain, came to be called Lethe or River of Forgetfulness, how a few spindly vines came to be transposed into the Amazonian jungle, how the cliff behind the house came to be a foothill of the Sierra Nevada, how the wild lilies on top of it took on Indian colors and the hole in the garden hedge became the entrance to our New World. We, too, are grown up now, and all the names from those days, without exc
eption, are null and void. We, too, have a history, and what was then, in those days, cannot be retrieved by any changing of names. I don’t believe that those days could be brought back, even if that brook had broadened into a river, even if those vines had turned into unbreakable lianas, even if a real Apache were standing on top of the cliff where the lilies used to be. But I still believe, in earnest and no longer in play, in the power of places. I believe in places, not the big ones but the small, unknown ones, in other countries as well as our own. I believe in those places without fame or name, best characterized perhaps by the fact that nothing is there, while all around there is something. I believe in the power of those places because nothing happens there anymore and nothing has happened there yet. I believe in the oases of emptiness, not removed from fullness, but in the midst of it. I am certain that those places, even if not physically trodden, become fruitful time and again through our decision to set out and our feeling for the journey. I shall not be rejuvenated there. We shall not drink the water of life there. We shall not be healed there. We shall simply have been there. Over a stretch of rotten plank road, past a wilderness of rusty carpet frames, we shall have gone there. The grass there will have trembled as only grass can tremble, the wind will have blown as only the wind can blow, a procession of ants through the sand will have been a procession of ants, the raindrops in the dust will have taken on the incomparable form of raindrops in the dust. In that place, on the foundations of emptiness, we shall simply have seen the metamorphosis of things into what they are. Even on the way, merely because we are looking at it, a rigid blade of grass will have begun to sway, and conversely, in the presence of a tree, our innermost being will for the moment have taken on the form of that tree. I need those places and—hear now a word seldom used by an old man—I long for them. And what does my longing want? Only to be appeased.”

  In the course of his speech the weather has changed several times, alternating between sunshine and rain, high wind and calm, as in April. One river crossed by the train, hardly a trickle between gravel banks, is followed by another, a roaring, muddy flood, which is perhaps only the next meander of the first. As so often on branch lines, the stations are farther and farther apart. Once, the train has stopped in open country. The wind was so strong that from time to time the heavy car trembled. Withered leaves, pieces of bark, and branches crashed against the window. When at last the train started up again, the lines of raindrops in motion crossed those of waiting time.

  Surprisingly for a place so far out in the country, there are many tracks at the station they arrive at. All end at a concrete barrier; with the exception of the rails on either side of the platform, which have been polished smooth, all are brown with rust. The station is in an artificial hollow; a steep stairway leads out of it. The soldier carrying the woman’s suitcase, the four climb it together, more slowly than the few other people, all of whom are at home here. But even the newcomers are sure of the way. On leaving the ticket hall through a swinging door, they turn without hesitation in the direction indicated by the gambler, who has taken the lead. After crossing an area of bare ground and sparse, stubbly grass, suggesting an abandoned cattle pen or circus ground, they find themselves at the edge of a large forest. The trees in its dark depths seem at first sight to be covered with snow; in reality they are white birches. Here the four hesitate before crossing a kind of border, the dividing line between the yellowish clay of the open field and the black, undulating, springy peat soil. The peat bog and the forest rooted in it are also several feet higher than the field. Instead of a path cut through the earth wall there are several small wooden ladders, to one of which the gambler directs his followers with an easy gesture, showing that this is a man who gets his bearings without difficulty wherever he goes. He climbs up last, and once on top resumes leadership. Strolling through the woods—there is no underbrush between the birches—all four turn around in the direction of the station, toward which passengers are converging from all sides, all goose-stepping in a single file, though there is plenty of room in the field. Seen through the white trees, the shacklike structure seems to be somewhere in the taiga.

  The forest is bright with birch light. The trees stand in beds of moss, as a rule several in a circle, as though growing from a common root. As one passes, they revolve in a circle dance that soon makes one dizzy. Over a footpath that suddenly makes its appearance—white stones sprinkled over the black ground—the four emerge at length into a wide clearing, announced some time earlier by the substitution of berry bushes for moss and by the widening middle strip of grass in the path. By now the path has become so wide that the four are able to walk abreast. On the threshold of the clearing, each of the four, on his own impulse, pauses for a moment; the woman has taken the arm of the old man, who nods his assent. Now they are fanning out in different directions, as though no longer needing a leader.

  The clearing is rather hilly, shaped like a moraine spit thrust into the peat bog, and so large that the herd of deer at the other end goes right on grazing though the arrival of the newcomers has been far from soundless. Only the stag has raised his light-brown head like a chieftain. For a moment, his widely scattered herd looks like a tribe of Indians. In the middle of the clearing there is a small lake, which at first seems artificial but then—with its islands of rushes and black muddy banks, marked with all manner of animal tracks—proves to be a bog pool. Only at one point, at the tip of the moraine, so to speak, can the pool be reached dry-shod over gravel outcrops, and here its water, instead of presenting an opaque, reflecting surface, is perfectly transparent. The bright pebbles at the bottom stand out all the more clearly thanks to the glassy streaks in the water of the spring which emerges underground from the moraine and can be followed as it twines its way through the gravel to the lake which it feeds. This is also the place for a hut built of weathered, light-gray boards, shot through with amber-yellow or reddish-brown trails of resin, and for a strangely curved uphill-and-downhill boat dock that juts out over the water like a roller coaster.

  Here, one by one, they all gather. The woman, the old man, and the soldier look on as the gambler fishes an enormous bunch of keys out of his coat pocket, unlocks the padlock on the hut, throws the door wide open, unlocks the glass-and-metal compartment inside it, and, after turning a last key, drives out in a car that gets longer and longer: a camper. Birch branches—camouflage and ornament in one—slide off the top.

  He pushes open the back door, sets up a folding table on the grass, and spreads a white tablecloth over it. The soldier hastens to help him and brings four chairs from inside the vehicle. But for the time being no one sits down. The old man vanishes purposefully through the trees, the gambler goes into his camper, and the woman, again with her silver suitcase, signals the soldier to follow her to the boat dock. Standing behind him with scissors and comb that she has taken out of her suitcase, she changes his hairstyle. Then with a quick gesture she bids him take off his uniform and, repeatedly stepping back to scrutinize not so much the soldier as her handiwork, dresses him in civilian clothes, likewise out of her suitcase. She keeps tugging and pulling and plucking at the soldier, who doesn’t seem to mind; his transformation from a chubby-cheeked bumpkin to a smooth, ageless cosmopolitan, dressed for summer and ready for anything, seems perfectly natural; only his eyes, when he turns back toward the woman, are as grave as ever; behind the happily smiling woman, ever so pleased with herself, they see the old man, who has just stepped bareheaded out of the woods, his hat full of mushrooms. While the woman takes an awl—she has everything she needs in the suitcase—and makes an extra hole in the soldier’s belt, the old man, sitting beside them on the bank, cleans his varicolored mushrooms.

  By then the table has been set for all. The gambler in the camper also seems changed, not only because he is officiating at the stove in his shirtsleeves and wearing a flowered apron, but also because for cooking he has put on a pair of half-moon glasses. It is only when he suddenly looks over the edges that his glance s
eems as cold and dangerous as it used to. In the cramped galley he moves with the grace of a born cook—carefully wiping the glasses, putting the plates in the oven to warm, reaching for the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling—and shuffles in and out of the camper as though he had been running a restaurant for years.

  Meanwhile, the woman and the soldier are at the table waiting. The old man is sitting on a mossy bank with his canvas-covered notebook, inscribing his columns as though in accompaniment or response to the kitchen sounds. Then he too sits motionless, though without expectation, his strikingly upright posture attributable solely to the place or the light; there is no wind, but his cape is puffed out. A bottle of wine is cooling in the spring at his feet.

  Now all four are at the table and the meal is over. The glasses are still there, but only the old man is drinking wine; the gambler and the woman are smoking; the soldier has moved a short distance away; resting one heel on the knee of the other leg, he is twanging a Jew’s harp rendered invisible by the hand he is holding over it—isolated chords with such long pauses between them that in the end we stop expecting a tune. As though in response to the music, the old man puts his wineglass down after every swallow, or waits with the glass in midair. Under his gaze the open back door of the camper turns into a cave, while the shingle roof of the boathouse becomes vaulted and shimmers like the scales of the fish that dart to the surface of the pool after scraps of food. Now the entire clearing has the aspect of a garden where time no longer matters. The only sounds to be heard are garden sounds, the fluttering of the tablecloth, the splashing of a fish, the brief whirring and chirping of a bird among the ferns at the edge of the forest. The clouds drift across a sky which becomes so high that space seems to form a palpable arch overhead. The blue between the clouds twists and turns and is reflected down below in the water, in the grass, and even in the dark bog soil.