Repetition (8 page)
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Because the day before I left for Yugoslavia I saw with waking eyes the truth of my dream vision. I should already have boarded the train; I had an unsuccessful, distraught, unfeeling leave-taking behind me, but after an hour alone at the Mittlern station I decided to go back and spend one more night at home. I left my sea bag with the men at the ticket office and turned back eastward, first along the railroad line, then through the sparse Dobrawa pine woods, the largest coppice in the country. It was an early-summer afternoon, and the sun was behind me. In the woods, where I knew the places to look, I found the first mushrooms of the year: small, firm chanterelles, almost white in the gravelly Dobrawa soil; then boletes, each a perceptible weight in my hand, more and more of which beckoned to me as, while walking, I, ordinarily none too sure of my sense of color, began to distinguish the colors more clearly; and finally, at the edge of the woods, jutting out from the grass, its tall, thin, hollow stalk swaying in the wind, a single parasol mushroom, visible from far off. I ran to it as though I had to be first to reach this king. Its cap, as large as a shield and domed in the middle, extended beyond the palms of both my hands but weighed less than the thinnest wafer.
After wrapping my mushrooms in my brother's enormous handkerchief, which like various articles of his clothing had been forced upon me for my journey,
I approached Rinkenberg and the house, where I was sure of finding my mother lying with her face to the wall, my sister on all fours about to relapse into her confusion, and my father sitting down among the ashes like Job.
I approached Rinkenberg and the house, where I was sure of finding my mother lying with her face to the wall, my sister on all fours about to relapse into her confusion, and my father sitting down among the ashes like Job.
Not at all. The house stood open and empty, my mother's bedclothes hung out of the window, airing. I found the three of them on the grassplot behind the house, with a fourth person, a neighbor, who had helped my father carry my mother out of the house in an armchair. She was sitting there barefoot, in a long white nightgown, an old horse blanket over her knees, and the others were sitting around her on the grassy bench provided by a slight hollow in the plot. At first it seemed to me that I had surprised my family in some secret, as if they were glad at last to be among themselves without me, able at last to let themselves go. For, though quiet, they seemed exuberant; my sister was amusing herself making faces in all directions, imitating the expressions of various people, challenging the others to guess who; one of these various people, the most laughed atâby my father as well, whose hat was on crookedâI recognized as myself. (I had many times felt myself to be unwanted, an intruder, a spoilsport, and often enough I really was.) But when they noticed me, the grassplot was suffused with a radiance which now, a quarter of a century later, brightens this deserted place for me. My ailing mother gave me a smile of infinite kindness, a smile such as I had never known, and it lifted me off the ground.
I sat down with them, the family was complete. My sister quickly prepared the mushrooms, and even I enjoyed them, though as a rule I was keener on gathering
than on eating them. Though no table was set up, no cloth laid, it was a banquet, and our neighbor, who had just been leaving to answer the call of work, took time out for it. From then on, all I remember is sitting there for hours without anyone saying a word. Long, narrow eyes, bent at the corners like boat keels. From that unaccustomed vantage pointâwe seldom sat on this grassplot, ordinarily our washing was spread out there to bleachâmy father's house seemed to stand alone, not in the village named Rinkenberg, but in an unknown and nameless part of the earth, under a strange sky. In the rooms, a breeze that could be felt out here in the soft meadow grass. A pear on the espalier wobbled and fell. The boards of the long-abandoned apiary showed their colors, which taken together disclosed a face, and that face was repeated in the white of the cat half hidden under the dark green box tree. The barouche in the shed, superannuated like the farm implements, stood out from the other vehicles and parts of vehicles with its festive unweathered gloss; one last time it drove out of the shed and over the countryside alone, followed by a flock of birds which proceeded to dive through the air like dolphins. But we were not in an enterprising mood; we had been seized with a kind of timidity, along with a confidence that was all the stronger because there was no reason for it. Only my sister disturbed the order of things with her activity, coming and going, talking, combing my mother's hair, washing her feet. True, in disturbing the order she also reinforced it; her activity was needed to make the order cogent and enduring; and whenever she touched the woman in the armchair, took hold of her, turned her around, she did so officially, so to speak,
as our representative. In my recollection, it is not a group of people sitting there in the sun, but only the usual dazzlingly white sheets, spread out on the grass. Someone is sprinkling them from a watering can, the sound of water is a sharp crackling, the little puddles on the sheets evaporate quickly, and the grassplot is an inclined plane from which everything else, including myself, has vanished, slid away.
than on eating them. Though no table was set up, no cloth laid, it was a banquet, and our neighbor, who had just been leaving to answer the call of work, took time out for it. From then on, all I remember is sitting there for hours without anyone saying a word. Long, narrow eyes, bent at the corners like boat keels. From that unaccustomed vantage pointâwe seldom sat on this grassplot, ordinarily our washing was spread out there to bleachâmy father's house seemed to stand alone, not in the village named Rinkenberg, but in an unknown and nameless part of the earth, under a strange sky. In the rooms, a breeze that could be felt out here in the soft meadow grass. A pear on the espalier wobbled and fell. The boards of the long-abandoned apiary showed their colors, which taken together disclosed a face, and that face was repeated in the white of the cat half hidden under the dark green box tree. The barouche in the shed, superannuated like the farm implements, stood out from the other vehicles and parts of vehicles with its festive unweathered gloss; one last time it drove out of the shed and over the countryside alone, followed by a flock of birds which proceeded to dive through the air like dolphins. But we were not in an enterprising mood; we had been seized with a kind of timidity, along with a confidence that was all the stronger because there was no reason for it. Only my sister disturbed the order of things with her activity, coming and going, talking, combing my mother's hair, washing her feet. True, in disturbing the order she also reinforced it; her activity was needed to make the order cogent and enduring; and whenever she touched the woman in the armchair, took hold of her, turned her around, she did so officially, so to speak,
as our representative. In my recollection, it is not a group of people sitting there in the sun, but only the usual dazzlingly white sheets, spread out on the grass. Someone is sprinkling them from a watering can, the sound of water is a sharp crackling, the little puddles on the sheets evaporate quickly, and the grassplot is an inclined plane from which everything else, including myself, has vanished, slid away.
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That is the story of those hours. But what of the event that made me turn back? Was it just a momentary impulse? Why, to begin with, had I gone to the Mittlern rather than the Bleiburg station? I had missed the midday train and had so long to wait until the afternoon train that I decided to kill time by walking two stations and ten kilometers westward. But incapable as I was of dawdling, of walking slowly, of making a detour, I was still much too early. The Mittlern station, built of undressed gray stone, lies outside the village, at the edge of the Dobrawa Forest, and is a massive, imposing edifice for the Jaunfeld Plain, where almost everythingâthe houses, the trees, even the churchesâand the people tend to be rather small. For an hour I walked back and forth outside it. Not a sound but for the crunching of the black gravel under my feet and, on the other side of the single-track rails gleaming in the sun, the occasional sighing of the wind in the pines, which with their thin trunks and small dark cones I now regard as the emblem of that whole countryside, along with the whiteness of the isolated birches (even the surface roots are white) which fringed the forest and at that time had not yet been moved into parks as ornamental plants. The stationmaster lived on the second
floor; the window curtains were torn and in the window boxes grew the inevitable gleaming-red geraniums, the smell of which had always repelled me at home. Behind the windows, no sign of life. At intervals, petals shot downward, somehow reminding me of insect wings. I sat down on a bench in the shade, facing one end of the station. The bench stood beside a bush on which hung, instead of the present scraps of white paper, greenish condoms. At my feet, almost submerged in grass, a circular stone. An old foundation? I raised my head and saw in the end wall of the station a rectangleâa blind window the same whitish-gray color as the wall, but set in from it. Though no longer in the sun, this window shimmered with reflected light from somewhere. In Rinkenberg there was only one such window, and it happened to be in the smallest house, the roadmender's, the one that looked like the porter's lodge of a nonexistent manor. It, too, was the color of the wallâyellow in that caseâbut was bordered with white. Whenever I passed, it caught my eye, but when I stopped to look, it always fooled me. Nevertheless, it never lost a certain undefined significance for me, and I felt that such a window was lacking in my father's house. Now, at the sight of the Mittlern blind window, I remembered: one night in January 1920, forty years ago, my father carried my brother, a child barely able to walk at the time, here in a wheelbarrow. The child was suffering from “ophthalmic fever” and my father was taking him to Klagenfurt to see the doctor. His nocturnal effort was in vain, the eye was lost; in the picture in the radio-and-crucifix corner there was nothing in its place but a milky whiteness. But this memory explained nothing. The significance of the blind window
remained undefined, but suddenly that window became a sign, and in that same moment I decided to turn back. My turning backâand here again the sign was at workâwas not definitive; it applied only to the hours until the following morning, when I would really start out, really begin my journey, with successive blind windows as my objects of research, my traveling companions, my signposts. And when later, on the evening of the following day, at the station restaurant in Jesenice, I thought about the shimmering of the blind window, it still imparted a clear messageâto me it meant: “Friend, you have time.”
floor; the window curtains were torn and in the window boxes grew the inevitable gleaming-red geraniums, the smell of which had always repelled me at home. Behind the windows, no sign of life. At intervals, petals shot downward, somehow reminding me of insect wings. I sat down on a bench in the shade, facing one end of the station. The bench stood beside a bush on which hung, instead of the present scraps of white paper, greenish condoms. At my feet, almost submerged in grass, a circular stone. An old foundation? I raised my head and saw in the end wall of the station a rectangleâa blind window the same whitish-gray color as the wall, but set in from it. Though no longer in the sun, this window shimmered with reflected light from somewhere. In Rinkenberg there was only one such window, and it happened to be in the smallest house, the roadmender's, the one that looked like the porter's lodge of a nonexistent manor. It, too, was the color of the wallâyellow in that caseâbut was bordered with white. Whenever I passed, it caught my eye, but when I stopped to look, it always fooled me. Nevertheless, it never lost a certain undefined significance for me, and I felt that such a window was lacking in my father's house. Now, at the sight of the Mittlern blind window, I remembered: one night in January 1920, forty years ago, my father carried my brother, a child barely able to walk at the time, here in a wheelbarrow. The child was suffering from “ophthalmic fever” and my father was taking him to Klagenfurt to see the doctor. His nocturnal effort was in vain, the eye was lost; in the picture in the radio-and-crucifix corner there was nothing in its place but a milky whiteness. But this memory explained nothing. The significance of the blind window
remained undefined, but suddenly that window became a sign, and in that same moment I decided to turn back. My turning backâand here again the sign was at workâwas not definitive; it applied only to the hours until the following morning, when I would really start out, really begin my journey, with successive blind windows as my objects of research, my traveling companions, my signposts. And when later, on the evening of the following day, at the station restaurant in Jesenice, I thought about the shimmering of the blind window, it still imparted a clear messageâto me it meant: “Friend, you have time.”
THE EMPTY COW PATHS
WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN thus far about my father's house, about the village of Rinkenberg and the Jaunfeld Plain, must have been clearly present to my mind a quarter of a century ago in the Jesenice station, but I couldn't have told it to anyone. What I felt within me were mere impulses without sound, rhythms without tone, short and long rises and falls without the corresponding syllables, a mighty reverberation of periods without the requisite words, the slow, sweeping, stirring, steady flow of a poetic meter without lines to go with it, a general surge that found no beginning, jolts in the void, a confused epic without a name, without the innermost voice, without the coherence of script. What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurred but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly, I look on memory as more than a haphazard thinking backâas work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.
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It is strange that even then, as often as I in my booth looked toward the bar, the waitress looked back, as
though my way of looking, sitting, moving, tapping my fingers on the table, told her the whole story for which I have only now found the words, as though there were no need for me to tell her anything more. For hours, wordlessly busy with my story, I had been fiddling with my empty bottle and the woman at the bar had been twirling an empty ashtray to the same rhythm. Unlike my enemy's aping, this parallel twisting and turning invigorated me. And another reason why I felt no pressure to get up and go was that some men were still playing dice in the next booth; as long as they were playing, I could sit there. It pleased me that I could not understand the language the invisible men were speaking and that I, a foreigner, was able now and then to pick up a die that had fallen on the floor and hand it to these men, who almost certainly were no more at home in Jesenice than I was (Serbs, Croats, or Macedonians, no doubt; wouldn't they, otherwise, have gone home long ago?), fancying as I did so that I was someone from a neighboring village showing a group of real foreigners, who had drifted in from the ends of the earth, the way. And it gave me special pleasure that by looking at the waitress I would for a while be seeing a recovered, vivacious, healthy version of my mother. Of course I must have been tired, but the sight of her kept me awake, so I can't remember any tiredness. It was only when the dice players had gone that the actress playing the part of my mother broke the spell by reverting to waitress and coming from behind the bar. Her movements now running counter to mine, she asked me to leave: “It's almost midnight.”
though my way of looking, sitting, moving, tapping my fingers on the table, told her the whole story for which I have only now found the words, as though there were no need for me to tell her anything more. For hours, wordlessly busy with my story, I had been fiddling with my empty bottle and the woman at the bar had been twirling an empty ashtray to the same rhythm. Unlike my enemy's aping, this parallel twisting and turning invigorated me. And another reason why I felt no pressure to get up and go was that some men were still playing dice in the next booth; as long as they were playing, I could sit there. It pleased me that I could not understand the language the invisible men were speaking and that I, a foreigner, was able now and then to pick up a die that had fallen on the floor and hand it to these men, who almost certainly were no more at home in Jesenice than I was (Serbs, Croats, or Macedonians, no doubt; wouldn't they, otherwise, have gone home long ago?), fancying as I did so that I was someone from a neighboring village showing a group of real foreigners, who had drifted in from the ends of the earth, the way. And it gave me special pleasure that by looking at the waitress I would for a while be seeing a recovered, vivacious, healthy version of my mother. Of course I must have been tired, but the sight of her kept me awake, so I can't remember any tiredness. It was only when the dice players had gone that the actress playing the part of my mother broke the spell by reverting to waitress and coming from behind the bar. Her movements now running counter to mine, she asked me to leave: “It's almost midnight.”
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My fatigue didn't hit me until I was out on the street. It wasn't the different place but the transition. I had
gone through it without stopping, as though there were nothing there, and after a few steps the surroundings of the last few hours had disappeared. I was no longer anywhere, and what now stopped was my breath.
gone through it without stopping, as though there were nothing there, and after a few steps the surroundings of the last few hours had disappeared. I was no longer anywhere, and what now stopped was my breath.
I couldn't go back to the station and I didn't know where else to go. I stood still. This was not a contemplative standing-there as when I arrived, but a blind loitering in no way connected with my first day in another country. How often in my life before and since I've stood around like that! Where would I go next? What was the solution? There was one and it had to be found. Distraught, I turned this way and that, describing a pattern of aimlessness. How often in my life I've wandered like that, even in my own house, my own room, with my eyes in a clothes cupboard, my hand in a tool drawer.
By then there were no buses running, only a file of Yugoslavian army trucks, one after another, all headed for the border. The tarps were open and in the caves thus created I saw soldiers sitting back to back on both lengthwise benches. The two in the foreground at the edge of the platform were resting their arms on the cross strap barring the exit from the cave. Even in this detail, each truck was a repeat of the one preceding it. The straps were narrow and sagged, and yet the soldiers' arms resting on them were as inert, as motionless as if they had been tied fast, not by cords, but by fatigue. I followed the column out of town northward, in the direction from which I had just come. A smaller patrol car rolled slowly past me. The occupants looked at me but didn't stop. Remembering my Humtschach persecutors, I raised my hand in a quick salute, which was actually returned; a fugitive from the army wouldn't have looked like me. Then more covered wagons with
their pyramids of backs, their rigid double heads, their arms supported by straps, their dangling hands; this caravan would never end. And then, almost disappointingly, there came a last truck, open at the back like the rest, but empty, and this empty cave reminded me of a particular tunnel through the Karawanken Mountains, the exit of which, as I looked back from the last car of a train a few hours agoâseen through the Jesenice night, that moment was already part of a meaningless pastâhad been as far away from me as the black semicircle was now. No more army trucks. The road was deserted. But a trail of fatigue and exhaustion seemed to cover the whole width of the valley, a cloud of smokeâincomparably more stifling than that of the big iron foundries in the southâwhich blotted out the last patch of sky and, like the legendary army of the air, attacked me momentarily from above, applying screws to my temples and straps to my forehead, and pushed me past the last houses of the town, into no-man's -land.
their pyramids of backs, their rigid double heads, their arms supported by straps, their dangling hands; this caravan would never end. And then, almost disappointingly, there came a last truck, open at the back like the rest, but empty, and this empty cave reminded me of a particular tunnel through the Karawanken Mountains, the exit of which, as I looked back from the last car of a train a few hours agoâseen through the Jesenice night, that moment was already part of a meaningless pastâhad been as far away from me as the black semicircle was now. No more army trucks. The road was deserted. But a trail of fatigue and exhaustion seemed to cover the whole width of the valley, a cloud of smokeâincomparably more stifling than that of the big iron foundries in the southâwhich blotted out the last patch of sky and, like the legendary army of the air, attacked me momentarily from above, applying screws to my temples and straps to my forehead, and pushed me past the last houses of the town, into no-man's -land.
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This first night in a foreign country might perhaps be told briefly, but in my memory it has become the longest in my life, decades long. At the age of twenty I wouldn't have dreamed of stopping at a hotelâand not only because I wanted to save money. Yet my only thought was sleep, and the tunnel did not strike me as an insane idea. I would go in where my train had just carried me out. All that mattered was a niche to sleep in.
Unseeing, I found the path alongside the tracks; unseeing, I found the hole in the fence, as though it were bound to be there. Already I was in the tunnel, as though in a house, and there, as I had foreseen, I
found a niche, a recess in the rock, screened off from the tracks by a concrete parapet. “My stall,” I thought. With the flashlight I had brought with me to search for some trace of my brother in a cave farther south (that at least was my youthful fancy), I lit up the clay floor, which looked rather like a brook with glittering mica along its banks. The concrete wall revealed nothing but a bit of hair clinging to it, an eyelash, which made me think of my history teacher in Villach at the Austrian end of the tunnel. Only that afternoon he had told me that the vehicular tunnel running parallel to mine had been built by prisoners during the last World War, and that many had died, some of them murdered; he had even advised me, though only in jest, to spend the night there if I found no other place. The sleep of one “still innocent,” he said, “would help to purify the place of injustice, to banish the evil spirits, to blow away the horror”; he was writing just such a fairy tale, he told me. Since the last war, he said, he had seen something sinister in all tunnels, even the innocent Jesenice tunnel built under the Empire.
found a niche, a recess in the rock, screened off from the tracks by a concrete parapet. “My stall,” I thought. With the flashlight I had brought with me to search for some trace of my brother in a cave farther south (that at least was my youthful fancy), I lit up the clay floor, which looked rather like a brook with glittering mica along its banks. The concrete wall revealed nothing but a bit of hair clinging to it, an eyelash, which made me think of my history teacher in Villach at the Austrian end of the tunnel. Only that afternoon he had told me that the vehicular tunnel running parallel to mine had been built by prisoners during the last World War, and that many had died, some of them murdered; he had even advised me, though only in jest, to spend the night there if I found no other place. The sleep of one “still innocent,” he said, “would help to purify the place of injustice, to banish the evil spirits, to blow away the horror”; he was writing just such a fairy tale, he told me. Since the last war, he said, he had seen something sinister in all tunnels, even the innocent Jesenice tunnel built under the Empire.
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I began, in the darkness, by eating a piece of bread and an apple, the smell of which dispelled my initial queasiness, as though the fruit gave off a breath of fresh air. Then I lay down and curled up. But I could not sleep, or if I did, it was only to have instantaneous and interminable nightmares. My father's house lay empty, a ruin. The Drava rose from its deep valley and overflowed the whole plain. The sun shone on the Dobrawa heather and war had been declared. But I also woke up drenched in sweat because I had lost one of my shoes, because all of a sudden the part in my hair was
on the left side instead of the right, because the soil in all our flowerpots at home had cracked and the flowers had dried out. Once, what made me start up was no dream but a night train, which sped by with an enormous din, scarcely a step from the parapet. It could only be an international express on its way to Belgrade, Istanbul, or Athens, and I thought of my schoolmates bound for Greece, who would be sleeping out of doors in their tents or sleeping bags, a good deal farther south no doubt. Excited by their evening expedition through a foreign town, by the warm night, and by the unaccustomed company of the boy or girl who sat beside them in class, they would talk and talk, and those who had already dozed off would be slumbering peacefully, free from nightmares, under the protection of their comrades. And I cursed myself for not being with them.
on the left side instead of the right, because the soil in all our flowerpots at home had cracked and the flowers had dried out. Once, what made me start up was no dream but a night train, which sped by with an enormous din, scarcely a step from the parapet. It could only be an international express on its way to Belgrade, Istanbul, or Athens, and I thought of my schoolmates bound for Greece, who would be sleeping out of doors in their tents or sleeping bags, a good deal farther south no doubt. Excited by their evening expedition through a foreign town, by the warm night, and by the unaccustomed company of the boy or girl who sat beside them in class, they would talk and talk, and those who had already dozed off would be slumbering peacefully, free from nightmares, under the protection of their comrades. And I cursed myself for not being with them.
What tormented me most was not this place I had got myself into, this dark, supposedly haunted tunnel, but a sense of guilt. Not because I had left my family in the lurch, but because I was alone. That night, I discovered that even if I had done no particular wrong, it was a crime to be alone of my own free will. I had known that before and would learn it again in the future. A crime against whom? Against myself. Even the company of enemies would now have been a lesser evil. And hadn't my girlfriend, who unlike myself was fluent in Slovene, offered any number of times to guide Filip Kobal through his legendary homeland? Could I conceive of anything better at this moment than our two bodies breathing together? Than to lie beside her all night and wake up in the morning with my hand on her belly?
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But the real nightmares were still to come. The story interrupted when I left the station restaurant went on in my sleep, but now it was different from what it was in my waking stateâit was violent, abrupt, incoherent. It no longer poured out of me with an “and,” a “then,” and a “when,” but chased me, harried me, drove me, sat on my chest, choked me until the only words I could get out consisted entirely of consonants. Worst of all, no sentence was ever completed, all my sentences broke off in the middle, rejected, maimed, garbled, disqualified, while at the same time I was forbidden to stop talking and, without pausing for breath, I had to keep starting all over, trying again, as though chained for life to a verbose, senseless rhythm which brought forth no meaning but with its retrograde movement destroyed and devalued what meaning I had arrived at during the day. Dragged into a dream light, the storyteller in me, only a short time before seen as the secret king, had become a forced laborer. Caught in the embrace, which would end only with death, of a story that had struck me when awake as the soul of gentleness but had now become a cruel monster, I was powerless to frame a single serviceable sentence. How malignant the spirit of storytelling could be!
And then, after a long onslaught, I suddenly succeeded in turning out two clear sentences, the one following naturally from the other, and in the same moment the pressure on me was relieved, I had a companion again. In my dream, this companion was a child; true, the child corrected me, improved on my story, but in so doing commended the teller. After that a tree, laden branch after branch not with fruit but with stones, which if not for the child would have signified
“disaster,” proved to be a miracle tree; a number of confident swimmers including myself disported themselves in the raging flood, and the sleeper felt the ground under his cheek to be a book.
“disaster,” proved to be a miracle tree; a number of confident swimmers including myself disported themselves in the raging flood, and the sleeper felt the ground under his cheek to be a book.
Thus, my longest night included an enjoyable hour of half sleep, during which I was able to stretch out. Part of my pleasure consisted in lying on my back with my hands clasped under my neck, listening to the dripping from the ceiling of the tunnel. For a change, I didn't have to lie on my left side to feel at peace with myself. I had crept into the tunnel as a refuge, and now I made myself at home, using my brother's overcoat as a blanket. The darkness around me was a good deal lighter than long ago in the potato cellar. From the nearby exit, gray on gray, glowworms kept flying in and out. Holding one in the palm of my hand, I lit up an astonishingly large circle around me. I always associate the sleep of the exhausted Odysseus on reaching the isle of the Phaeacians with this sort of sheltered feeling.
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But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron
bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or executionâbut that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the
S
, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.
bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or executionâbut that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the
S
, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.
So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel's history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a linemanâI'd have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown languageâbut in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing
(mea culpa)
to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworldâwhether to defend a treasure there or for my protection, I do not know.
(mea culpa)
to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworldâwhether to defend a treasure there or for my protection, I do not know.
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