Vertigo

  During the years when we lived above the Engelwirt, I would unfailingly, in the early evenings, be seized by the desire to go down to the taproom to help Romana wipe the tables and benches, sweep the floor or dry the glasses. It was not, of course, these chores but Romana herself who drew me and in whose company I conspired to spend as much time as I possibly could. Romana was the elder of two daughters of a family of small-holders who, in the hamlet of Bàrenwinkel, rented a few patches of land and a crooked, timber-framed house which, toysized in comparison with the other farmsteads, stood all by itself on a hillock and always reminded me of the story of Noah, especially as in and around it there appeared to be two of every kind - apart from the parents and the two sisters, Romana and Lisabeth, there was a cow and a bull, two goats, two pigs, two geese, and so on. There were larger numbers only of cats and hens, and they sat or scratched about way into the surrounding fields. There were also a sizeable flock of white doves which, when they were not clambering back and forth over the ridge, soared above and around the little house which, with its shingled and much-mended hipped roof, unusual for the area, looked for all the world like the biblical Ark stranded on the brow of a hill. And every time I passed by there, Romana's father, who was a canny old rogue, would be peering out of one of the tiny windows like Noah himself, smoking a cheroot. Romana came over from the Barenwinkel every afternoon at five, and I often walked to meet her at the bridge. She was then twenty-five at most, and everything about her seemed to me to be of exceptional beauty. She was tall, with a broad, open face and water-grey eyes and as much flaxen hair as a Haflinger pony. She differed in every respect from the womenfolk of W., who were almost without exception small, dark, thin-haired and mean. She was so unlike the other women and maids that no one, despite her conspicuous beauty, ever made a proposal of marriage to her. If, later in the evening, I was allowed down into the taproom again to fetch a packet of Zuban cigarettes for my father, Romana would be sailing through the throng of peasants and woodcutters, who would regularly be sozzled by nine, as if she came from another world. At night the taprooms made a fearsome impression, and if it had not been for Romana I would probably not have dared enter that dreadful place where the menfolk sat hunched on the long benches with a vacant look in their eyes. Occasionally one of these motionless figures would rise and sway, as if he were on a raft, towards the door that opened onto the hallway. There were pools of beer and melted snow on the oiled floorboards, and the smoke, drifting through the bar in dense swathes towards the rattling ventilator, joined with the sour reek of wet leather and loden cloaks and spilled gentian schnapps. Mounted on the walls above the brown-painted panelling, stuffed martens, lynxes, capercaillies, vultures and other exterminated creatures were awaiting the time until they could take their long overdue revenge. The peasants and woodcutters almost always sat together in groups at the top or bottom ends of the bar. In the middle stood the large iron stove, which quite often in the winter months was stoked and poked so much that it started to glow. The only one who sat alone, unheeded by all the others, was Hans Schlag the huntsman of whom it was said that he hailed from other parts, from KoEgarten on the Neckar in fact, and that he had managed extensive hunting grounds in the Black Forest for several years before moving from there to the district around W., nobody knew precisely why. He had been out of work for over a year until he had been taken on by the Bavarian forestry commission. Schlag the hunter was a fine figure of a man, with dark, curly hair and beard and uncommonly deep-set, brooding eyes. For hours, frequently until far into the night, he would sit with his half-emptied tankard without exchanging a word with anyone. His dog, Waldmann, slept at his feet, tied to the rucksack hanging from the back of the chair. Whenever I went down into the taproom to fetch a packet of Zuban for my father, Schlag the hunter would be sitting at his table like that. His eyes were always lowered, looking at the gold pocket-watch, an exceptionally fine piece, which he had placed in front of him, as if there were some important appointment he had to keep; but in between times he would look across through his half-closed eyes at Romana, who would be standing behind the high bar filling the schnapps and beer glasses. On one evening that has remained stardingly clear in my memory, at the beginning of December, when snow had fallen as far down as the valley for the first time, the hunter was not sitting in his place when I came into the taproom after supper, and Romana, inexplicably, was nowhere to be seen either. Intending to fetch the packet of five Zuban from the Adlerwirt, I went through the rear of the house out into the yard. A myriad minute crystals glittered in the snow all around me and in the sky above glittered the stars. The headless giant Orion with his short shimmering sword was just rising from behind the black-blue shadow of the mountains. I remained standing for a long time amid that winter splendour, listening to the ringing of the cold and the sound the heavenly lights made in their slow orbits. I suddenly had a feeling then that something was moving in the open doorway of the woodshed. It was Schlag the hunter, who, holding onto the slatted frame of the shed with one hand, stood there in the darkness like a man leaning into the wind, his entire body moving to a strange, consistent and undulating rhythm. Between him and the slatting he gripped with his left hand, Romana lay on a heap of cut turf, and her eyes, as I could make out in the light reflected from the snow, were turned sideways and as wide open as those of Dr Rambousek when his head had lain lifeless on the top of his desk.

  From deep in the hunter's chest came a heavy moaning and panting, his frosty breath rose from his beard, and time after time, when the wave surged through the small of his back, he thrust into Romana, while she, for her part, clung closer and closer to him, until the hunter and Romana were but one single indivisible form. I do not think that Romana or Schlag had any idea that I was there. Only Waldmann saw me. Fastened as always to his master's rucksack, he stood quietly behind him on the ground and looked across at me. That same night, around one or two o'clock, the one-legged Engelwirt landlord Sallaba destroyed the entire furnishings and fittings of the bar. When I went to school the following morning, the whole floor was ankle-deep in broken glass. It was a scene of utter devastation. Even the new revolving display cabinet for the Waldbaur chocolates, which reminded me of the tabernacle in church because it could be rotated, had been ripped from the bar and hurled right across the room. Things were not much better outside in the passage. Frau Sallaba was sitting on the cellar steps, crying her eyes out. All the doors were wide open, even the enormous door, fit for a bank vault, that led into the ice store, inside which the ice, stacked in big blocks one on top of the other for the summer, glinted a pale shade of blue. At the sight of the open ice store, or rather at the memory of this sight, it suddenly came to me that, whenever I stepped into the ice store with Romana, I imagined us being locked in there by accident and that, holding each other tight, we would freeze to death, life ebbing out of our bodies as slowly and silently as ice melts in the warmth of the sun.

  At school Fràulein Rauch, who meant no less to me than Romana, wrote up on the blackboard in her even handwriting the chronicle of the calamities which had befallen W. over the ages and underneath it drew a burning house in coloured chalk. The children in the class sat bent over their exercise books, looking up every so often to decipher the faint, faraway letters with screwed-up eyes as they copied, line by line, the long list of terrible events which, when recorded in this way, had something reassuring and comforting about them. In 1511 the Black Death claimed 105 lives. In 1530, 100 houses went up in flames. 1569: the whole settlement devastated in a blaze. 1605: another fire reduced 140 houses to ashes. 1633: W. burned down by the Swedes. 1635: 700 inhabitants died of the plague. 1806-14: 19 volunteers from W. fell in the wars of liberation. 1816-17: years of famine in consequence of unprecedented rainfall. 1870-71: 5 fusiliers from W. lost their lives in battle. 1893: on the 16th of April a great conflagration destroyed the entire village. 1914-18: 68 of our sons laid down their lives for the fatherland. 1939-45: 125 from our ranks did not return home from the
Second World War. In the quiet of the classroom the nibs of our pens scratched across the paper. Fràulein Rauch walked along the rows in her tight-fitting green skirt. Whenever she came close to me, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. That day it never grew light outside. The greyness of the early hours lasted almost until noon and was followed immediately by a gradual nightfall. Even now, at one o'clock, half an hour before school ended for the day, the lights had to be on in the classroom. The white luminous globes hanging from the ceiling and the rows of children bent over their work were reflected in the darkened window-panes through whose mirrored surface the just discernible tops of the apple trees were like black coral in the depths of the ocean. All day an unwonted silence had spread out and taken possession of us. Not even when the caretaker at the end of the last lesson rang the bell in the hall did we break into our customary uproar; rather, we got up without a sound and packed our things away in an orderly fashion without so much as a murmur. Fràulein Rauch helped this or that child, struggling in thick winter clothes, to straighten the satchel on his back.

  The schoolhouse stood on a rise at the edge of the village, and, as always when we came out at lunchtime, on that, for me, memorable day too, I looked over the open valley to my left across the rooftops to the forested foothills, behind which arose the jagged rocky ridge of the Sorgschrofen. The houses and farmsteads, the fields, the empty roads and tracks - all was deadened and still under a thin dusting of white. Above us hung the leaden sky, as low and heavy as it only ever is before a great fall of snow. If you put your head right back and stared long enough into that incomprehensible void, you could believe you saw the first flurries of snow swirling out of it. My way took me past the teacher's house and the curate's house and by the high cemetery wall, at the end of which St George was forever driving a spear through the throat of the griffin-like winged creature lying at his feet. From there I had to go down Church Hill and along the so-called Upper Street. A smell of burnt horn

  came from the smithy. The forge fire had died down, and the tools, the heavy hammers, tongs and rasps were lying abandoned all round. In W., noon was the hour of things deserted. The water in the tub, into which the blacksmith, when working at his anvil would plunge the red-hot iron so that it hissed, was so calm, and shone so darkly in the pale light that fell on its surface from the open gateway, it was as though no one had ever disturbed it, as though it were destined to remain preserved in this inviolate state for ever. In the shop where Kòpf the barber practised his trade, the padded chair with its extendable headrest stood abandoned. The cut-throat razor lay open on the marbled top of the washstand. Since father had returned home from the war, I was sent once a month to have my hair cut, and nothing frightened me more than old Kòpf setting about shaving the fuzz from my neck with that freshly stropped knife. The fear became so deeply engrained in me that many years later, when I first saw a representation of the scene in which Salome bears in the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter, my thoughts immediately turned to Kòpf. To this day I cannot bring myself to enter a barber's, and that I should have gone of my own accord a few years ago at Santa Lucia station in Venice to have my overnight stubble removed still strikes me as a bizarre aberration. The fear that seized me at the sight of Kòpf's cabinet gave way to feelings of hope when I paused in front of the small co-op to gaze into the display window at the golden pyramid constructed by Frau Unsinn, the shopkeeper, entirely of Sanella margarine cubes, a sort of pre-Christmas miracle which, every day on my way home from school, touched me like a beacon heralding the new age which was now about to begin even in W. In contrast to the golden sheen on the Sanella cubes, everything else you could buy in Frau Unsinn's shop, the flour in the barrel, the soused herrings in the large tin drum, the pickled gherkins, the massive block of ersatz honey which resembled an iceberg, the blue patterned packets of chicory coffee, and the Emmental cheese wrapped in a damp cloth, seemed to have passed into oblivion. The Sanella pyramid, I knew, towered into the future, and while, before my mind's eye, it grew higher and higher, so high that it almost reached up to the heavens, a vehicle such as I had never seen appeared at the far end of the deserted Long Road which I had now reached. It was a lilac limousine with a lime-green roof and huge tail fins. Infinitely slow and quite soundless it came gliding towards me. Inside, at the ivory-coloured steering wheel, sat a black man who showed me his teeth, also ivory-coloured, grinning as he went past, perhaps because I was the only living soul he had seen while driving through this remote place. Since among the little clay figures assembled round our Christmas manger, it was the black-faced one of the three Magi who wore a purple cloak with a lime-green border, there was no doubt in my mind that the driver of the car that had drifted past me at that sombre midday hour was none other than King Melchior, and that he bore with him in the vast boot of his streamlined lilac limousine several ounces of gold, a frankincense caddy and an ebony box filled with myrrh. It may well be that I became quite convinced of this only later when, in the afternoon, I re-imagined that scene in the minutest detail as the snow began to fall more and more heavily and I sat at the window watching it twirl down without cease from on high and covering everything by nightfall, the stacks of firewood, the chopping block, the roof of the shed, the redcurrant bushes, the water trough and the kitchen garden in the nunnery next door.