Absence Read online

  While the gambler was speaking, the soldier had picked up a handful of alabaster-white stones no larger than peas, which in times gone by had been pebbles at the bottom of a brook and in other bygone times had fallen from aerial tree roots. He passed them rhythmically from hand to hand; the sound was now as of marbles, now as of a distant hailstorm, now as of shots, and now as of old coins. Though he hadn’t said a word all day, he had no need to clear his throat before speaking: “When I was a child, I could see a plain from our window. It was a large plain, all fields and meadows. I wished it were full of houses all the way to the horizon, white, modern houses with flat roofs. I wanted our village to become a big city. Day after day, I looked out impatiently, to see if they hadn’t started building somewhere; the few wooden farm shacks didn’t count. When at last would the name of our village be known throughout the world like Buenos Aires or Hokkaido or Vladivostok or Santa Fe? My wish has almost come true. The village has not become a city, but the plain is covered with housing developments named after the former owners of the land, and all look equally suburban. ‘North,’ ‘South,’ ‘East,’ or ‘West’ has been added to the name of the village and that makes the scattered developments sound like sections of a city; there’s even a peripheral highway and a feeder road leading to the expressway, where the traffic roars just as it did in my childhood visions. A toolshed has become a telephone booth, still roofed over by the same arching elder bush. Beside the roadside shrine stands the kiosk I longed for, with stationery, newspapers, and even a few books for sale. Only in the pictures my father paints is the plain as empty as in my childhood. He says he works from nature; every morning he sets up his easel in front of some new building, but what appears on his canvas is always the empty landscape. He says all he needs is a little space here and there between the houses; in those small gaps the old open spaces burgeon, and he has only to transfer them to his canvas; he says the paint he uses is like that bacillus which dissolves otherwise indestructible things into air. Which reminds me of another, very different idea I had in my childhood: when I walked across country in those days, I was convinced that the stones in the fields were growing just like the grass and the grain, and that in time they’d get to be as big as houses. I didn’t think of them as having roots; I endowed them with an inner force and regarded them, unlike the plants, as living beings. I was sure that if I measured them, they would become appreciably larger from measurement to measurement. All day today I’ve been thinking through my father’s pictures, step by step and degree by degree, as in a circle: the cliffs in this country have taken the place of my big-city houses. It’s only my father that I miss. I’ve never missed him as much as here. Father, I miss you. I’ve always missed you, I’ll miss you until I die: I miss you because you despised my suffering; I miss you as my authority, my storyteller, my withholder; I miss you as a home, as the hand on my head in dreams, as a smell, as my soul; I miss you to the point of blindness, enough to make me pull a knife, to make me scream. Father, appear!”

  This last word had been shouted. Knife in hand, the soldier jumped up from the bench. But instead of throwing the knife, he threw pebbles, which rained down on the rock. Outside, the upland stars flickered as though twisted by the wind. A wild boar was a motionless hump in the underbrush; some smaller humps lay beside it. A cornfield with its glittering, waving leaves counterfeited the moving surface of a lake; the handcart alongside it played the part of a boat. The curving glow over the undulating, always identically distant horizon rose from the big seaport at the foot of the plateau; it was as though the soldier’s shout had landed there and the glow was its echo.

  Much later, as we were all lying on our bed of foliage, the woman spoke. The oil lamp had been turned low, and the room lay in half darkness. As we were lying prone, our heads to one side and our hands over our eyes, it was impossible to tell who was awake and who was asleep. Only the woman was visible, lying with her eyes closed and her face framed and half buried in her pillow of foliage, as children sometimes do in their autumn games. And so clear was her toneless voice that, again as with children, it would have been hard to say whether she was talking in her sleep or pretending. On her couch, which was somewhat higher than the others, she lay as on a royal bed, and with her under it the army blanket lost its military look. This is what she said: “You’re a liar. You’ve deceived me from the first. You’ve never meant what you said. You’re a cheat, a con man, a swindler. You lured me into a trap. If I go to the dogs, you’re to blame and you should be punished for it. DIM is not an unconquered sun god, it’s a brand of pantyhose. You’re a rotten reader. You say: I like to be disturbed; the truth is, you can only be alone, and not just with yourself, no, you’ve got to be alone with your books, your gold pencils, and your stones. Your supposed sundial wasn’t scratched on the rock centuries ago by some great man, but only yesterday by a child at play, and it’s not a sundial, it’s just a scribble. You’re a phony scholar. There’s no inspiration at the bottom of your reading, deciphering, and interpreting—they’re just a quirk; you invented the voice that said to you: Take this and read; ever since you’ve been able to see, you’ve been obsessed with your written word, your letters, your signs. Your Roman milepost was a prop left here by some filmmakers. Same with your oldest inscriptions, they came from a movie set. Tap your bronze —it sounds hollow; run your fingernail over your runes—the cardboard will squeak. Your Egyptian scarab was manufactured last year in Murano, and the flower on your fragment of a Cretan vase was etched in Hong Kong. And even if they are authentic, what they have to say is old stuff and signifies nothing today. Their meaning is lost, their relevance forgotten, their context broken off. Far from recapturing the thread, we can’t even get an inkling of it. Only your words on your false and authentic stones remain, and they have been drowned out not only by the thunder of war machines but by the fall of the very first empire. Never again will your Euphrates and your Tigris flow from Paradise. Never again will your child carried across the sea by a dolphin serve as a symbol of solace on the graves of those who die young. In none of your books will there be another Odysseus, another Queen of Sheba, another Marcellus. You yourself no longer believe in the fords you’ve shown me. Your springs mean no more to you than they do to me; your crossroads and clearings have long ceased to be special places for you; at your watersheds you stand bewildered like any other tourist—what good does it do you to know that the water from one of the twin pipes flows into the Baltic and from the other into the Black Sea? And for years your country here hasn’t been to you what it once was. The emptiness here no longer promises you anything; the silence here has ceased to tell you anything; your walking here has lost its effect; the present here, which once seemed so pure and uniquely luminous to you, darkens between your steps as it does anywhere else. Here, too, empty has become empty, dead dead, the past irrevocable, and there is nothing more to hand down. You should have stayed alone in your room. Out of the sun, curtain drawn, artificial light, easy chair, television, no more adventures or distractions, gaze straight ahead, no more looking for inscriptions out of the corner of your eye, no more glancing over your shoulder into dark recesses, no more turning about, no more prayer, no more talk; only silence, without you. It would be so lovely there now, without you, in an entirely different prairie from yours. Vanity Fair! Vogue! Amica! Harper’s Bazaar!” While she was speaking, the wind had slackened, and by the time she finished, it had died down completely. In the upper window openings the night sky had come closer; the veil hanging from a branch was the Milky Way. The four sleepers lay in different directions, as though dropped at random. The gambler’s hand above the blanket took the woman’s hand under the blanket, and so their hands rested. Suddenly the sleeping woman cried out with pain; her breath caught, then came a sob that shook her whole body, and tears streamed from her closed eyes. In her dream she saw a man who had just died, and that made her the last human being in the world. She cowered on the ground, and all she had left was a childlike whimpering,
stopping and starting up again each time on a higher note, filling the room but heard by no one.

  The countryside is utterly silent. The cave dwelling takes on steel edges in the dawning light. The mounds of bat droppings on the floor of the bunker are shaped like sleeping bags. No more smoke above the chimney hole; no dew in the grass; certain stones have holes in them like animal skulls, the sky enclosed in them is a grayer, more ancient stone. The old man with the canvas-covered book has stepped out into the open; wet as though newly washed, his hair shows its length. He combs it without a mirror, looking inward. Instead of his cape, he is wearing a wide shirt; hanging down over his belt and buttoned askew, it is well suited to his clown’s trousers; but the creases are sharp, as though he were wearing it for the first time.

  He walks quickly, at first swinging his notebook like a discus, then tucking it into his trousers and drumming on it to the rhythm of his steps. The drumming sounds hollow and soon fills the wilderness; little by little the details of the landscape emerge from the gloom and take on contours.

  Later, when, glancing over his shoulder, he sees the cave dwelling as nothing more than a rock among many others, the old man begins to sing. He has long since changed direction—what started out as an open plateau has acquired steep walls on all sides. Now he is roaming through a jungle almost all of whose trees are dead—roaming happily, as though triumphing every time he stumbles. He has kept on writing, but now he does it while walking, no longer in his book but in the air, drawing big letters. In a hoarse falsetto voice he sings:

  Into the silence.

  Alone into silence.

  Silence alone.

  Where are you, silence?

  You’ve always been good to me, silence.

  I’ve always been happy in you, silence.

  Time and again, I’ve become a child with you, silence;

  through you I came into the world, silence;

  in you I learned to hear, silence;

  from you I acquired a soul, silence;

  by you alone have I let myself be taught, silence;

  from you alone have I gone as a man among men, silence.

  Be to me again what you were, silence.

  Embrace me, silence.

  Take me under the armpits, silence.

  Make me silent, silence;

  and make me receptive, silence—

  only receptive, silence.

  I cry out to you, silence.

  You above all, silence.

  Silence, source of images.

  Silence, great image.

  Silence, imagination’s mother.

  In the first stage of his wanderings, the old man had seemed to be deliberately leaving a trail, bending branches to the left and right of his path, letting thorns pluck threads from his shirt and fluff from his trousers, and making an oblique scratch on every boulder with his steel comb. But then, falling silent, he not only stopped blazing a trail but at a certain point retraced his steps and erased his last scratch, which thus became a natural crack in the stone.

  At first he had followed animal tracks through the prairie grass; now he avoided them. It was through a kind of maquis with increasingly narrow passages between bushes that he twined his way without hesitation.

  He kept going until his shoelace came loose. He bent over to tie it and then sat down, as though he had been waiting for just this. He had come to a place where the thicket opened up into an almost circular clearing, a patch of sandy desert in the middle of the high plateau; the more than ankle-deep sand had long ago been blown into hard ridges, but below the surface it was soft and warm from the sun of the day before. The old man took off his shoes and buried his bare feet in it.

  This desert, no larger than a children’s playground, was not old; a single plant was growing in it, tall, shaggy, half tree, half bush, threaded with dead plants of various kinds that made it hard to identify. There were signs of fruitfulness in the thornbushes around it—blackberries and thirst-quenching anise stems.

  With these the old man rounded out his breakfast—a crust of bread taken from his trouser pocket. In the morning sunlight the tip of the withered tree over his head seemed to have put on fresh green. Deep within the cagelike network of branches, the black silhouette of a bird, also of indeterminate species, motionless, but with head and tail upraised. Nor was the sky entirely empty. A plane was crossing it, so high, so soundless, so slow, and so white that it could be seen literally as an airship.

  The old man reached for his notebook, which lay beside him in the sand, hesitated, and said in a voice from which the last assurance, born of his wandering, had vanished: “Heart, now you are alone with me. At least, as I have always wished, this is happening to me in a foreign country. How long is it since someone put his arm over my shoulder and said: You can’t just write all year long; and how long since someone else said about me: Always reading. From the start I have been incapable of applying the great fundamental law that I read in nature to my life and transmitting it to my fellow men—I have succeeded in applying it only to my writing and only when alone. Only when I was alone did things take on meaning for me, and only the signs I discovered when alone have been communicated to others. And now my writing time is over. My longing is dead. I know it, I know its place in my heart; it’s there, but dead. So where can I go now? And where am I? Do places exist no longer? Have I burned up all the light inside me? Can’t I look forward to beauty any longer? Am I then lost? Is it all up with me? Or am I, in my weakness, at my goal?”

  He arose from the sand and walked back and forth in the patch of desert; suddenly his legs became short and at each turn his shoulders grew broader. He described wider and wider loops around the dead tree with the almost invisible bird in it. Now and then it gave forth a rustling sound. Otherwise there was no sign of life nearby; even the one ant trail was deserted, and the holes in the ground were empty.

  He sat down again with his book, and rested his forehead on it. His eyes narrowed, taking on the shape of two dugout canoes. The silhouette of the bird, still motionless, beak and tail upraised, suggested a fairy tale. Suddenly, as though of its own accord, the familiar sound of the pencil set in, followed by a persistent scraping. The hand with the brownish liver spots wrote in the notebook on the old man’s knees. The writer did not look at the paper but kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Then the movements of his hand slowed down as though for fear of frightening the bird away, and in the end he seemed to be drawing rather than writing.

  The silhouette is gone from the thicket. In place of the bird a cloud of sand blows down, making the dry wood crackle. And of the old man nothing remains but the imprint of his behind. In his absence the blackberries glisten and whitish-yellow umbels blossom at the edge of the desert. The parched soil in which they are rooted shows a polygonal pattern of finger’s-breadth cracks. An airplane in the summer sky sounds as if it were hovering motionless.

  When the others awoke, their eyes fell on a spot of sunlight on the gray wall of their cave. In it, the otherwise dull-white sinter shone bottle-green as though dripping wet, and although this small bright spot had no particular shape, the moment we all of us at once opened our eyes, it spoke to us with the authority of a sign: Arise! It is day, everything is here; out with you, into the open; bestir yourselves.

  None of us felt the usual grogginess, we came to our senses immediately; we knew where we were and arose light-heartedly from our nightmares, looking forward with rare delight to the morning. The spot on the wall seemed to make us inventive. Without even looking, we found among the numerous puddles on the ground a deep one from which to gather water for washing and making coffee.

  We ate breakfast in the grass outside the bunker. The plateau, rising steadily like a ramp as far as the horizon, lay there in the sun as though contemptuous of the four seasons. It seemed hardly imaginable that there could be any life apart from these trees and these few birds. Yet beyond “extensive scree,” “dry ditch,” “stony riverbed,” “bald hill,” our lead
er’s map noted a “lake” (with “landing”) and near the landing a “log cabin,” from which a hatched-in path led to an “old road” (a line), soon prolonged by a “new road” (two parallel lines) beginning at a nameless “village” and ending at an equally nameless “city.” In view of the actual country confronting us, the old man’s map, with its pedantically delineated cliffs and even individual trees, put us in mind of the early fantastic topographies that represented the most inhospitable terrain as accessible and made it seem likely that a whole continent could be crossed on foot in a single day.