Slow Homecoming (8 page)
Space Prohibited
S
orger's house was situated, along with similar small houses, in a pine forest in a flat section of the Pacific Coast. Between the sea and the houses there was no road, only bushes and low, grassy dunes. The roads through the forest ran at right angles to the ocean and ended at the dunes; from there, all the houses appeared to be deep in the woods, each with its own driveway, which circled around the trees in complicated loops. The soil was sandy, covered with prairie-high light-yellow beach grass, interspersed with small pine trees. Some of the dunes, displaced by the wind, had moved so far into the forest that here and there they formed light-colored embankments, colonized with new grass, above which only parts of the parched trees, still rooted in the old ground, could be seen; but in the course of time this vegetation had halted the movement of the dunes, and since they were the only hills in the area, they had become playgrounds for children, as had the strange dense prairie, which, because of the trees with which it was interspersed, could not very well be mowed. Nearly all the houses were within sight of others, and yet, because of the woods around them, they gave the impression of hermitages; though trimmed with bright-colored stucco, they were
all, because of the constant threat of earthquakes, built of wood, as a tap of the knuckles sufficed to show. Some ten years earlier a tremor had sent a small hill on the coast nearby sliding into the sea along with the stucco villas on top of it, and since then the colony, its stairways and terraces and great, overgrown clefts, had become an uninhabited Earthquake Park.
orger's house was situated, along with similar small houses, in a pine forest in a flat section of the Pacific Coast. Between the sea and the houses there was no road, only bushes and low, grassy dunes. The roads through the forest ran at right angles to the ocean and ended at the dunes; from there, all the houses appeared to be deep in the woods, each with its own driveway, which circled around the trees in complicated loops. The soil was sandy, covered with prairie-high light-yellow beach grass, interspersed with small pine trees. Some of the dunes, displaced by the wind, had moved so far into the forest that here and there they formed light-colored embankments, colonized with new grass, above which only parts of the parched trees, still rooted in the old ground, could be seen; but in the course of time this vegetation had halted the movement of the dunes, and since they were the only hills in the area, they had become playgrounds for children, as had the strange dense prairie, which, because of the trees with which it was interspersed, could not very well be mowed. Nearly all the houses were within sight of others, and yet, because of the woods around them, they gave the impression of hermitages; though trimmed with bright-colored stucco, they were
all, because of the constant threat of earthquakes, built of wood, as a tap of the knuckles sufficed to show. Some ten years earlier a tremor had sent a small hill on the coast nearby sliding into the sea along with the stucco villas on top of it, and since then the colony, its stairways and terraces and great, overgrown clefts, had become an uninhabited Earthquake Park.
In the airplane the sky had long remained wide. Warmed by an afterglow of friendship for those who had stayed behind, Sorger saw himself with them as though imprinted in the triangle of the Arctic pediment. Immediately after takeoff, he had started saying to himself: “Last summer and fall I was in the Far North.” The West Coast was in a different time zone (two hours later), and night had fallen when he arrived. He had just seen the dark mud rolling in the river he had left, there had been many people on the way, not companions on a long flight, just people picked up and put down by one plane after another. In landing, as the plane circled from the level of a snow-covered mountain range over a hilly countryside descending in distinct stages to the wide coastal plain shimmering with canals, he had glimpsed the sun setting in the ocean mist. Then he was walking over the plastic floor of the air-terminal building, past the backs of little television sets, each of which formed a unit with an egg-shaped chair and a temporarily egg-shaped viewer; and though he had lived here a long time, it was on his return to the Lower Forty-eight (as the Northern settlers called the rest of the United States) that he first noticed the imprint of government on this continent that seemed to govern itself, and though there wasn't a soldier in sight, the glaringly lighted air terminal looked to him like a military installation.
In spite of himself, he looked around twice. Though
no one could possibly have known of his arrival, he looked for a “familiar face” among those waiting at the exit. And then he looked for the man with the too-short trousers and the stiff, white-leather shoes who had boarded the mail plane with him that morning and at each stopping place had taken the same plane as himself. They had not spoken, but had exchanged looks of silent amusement, and Sorger savored the thought that from then to the end of their days, always by chance, never exchanging a word, they would go the same ways. In approaching the exit, he purposely slowed down in the hope that this man (whoever he might be) would see him and catch up with him.
no one could possibly have known of his arrival, he looked for a “familiar face” among those waiting at the exit. And then he looked for the man with the too-short trousers and the stiff, white-leather shoes who had boarded the mail plane with him that morning and at each stopping place had taken the same plane as himself. They had not spoken, but had exchanged looks of silent amusement, and Sorger savored the thought that from then to the end of their days, always by chance, never exchanging a word, they would go the same ways. In approaching the exit, he purposely slowed down in the hope that this man (whoever he might be) would see him and catch up with him.
He stopped the taxi before the housing development and walked the last bit of the way, sometimes in the glow of the house lights, which shone through the trees on the otherwise dark road. The houses in the woods seemed peaceful, yet festive because of all the lights. He trod the unaccustomed asphalt, at one with his image of himself as a figure resplendent with anonymity among the hosts of world travelers, devoid of origin like himself, hurrying this way and that between the arrival and departure gates. And because for him, coming from a different time zone, it was not yet night (and also because his few hours of flight had been largely in bright light above the clouds), he felt the daylight on his eyes and blinked his way through the darkness as though it were artificial.
He picked up his mail at the neighbors', deposited beside the bed the toy sleds he had brought for the children, and, barked at by a dog or two outside, glancing briefly at the sky, amazed that the shape of the waxing moon should be identical here to what it was a few hours before (in the gray of dawn) over another, so distant part
of the world, he retired to his quarters, which were also his place of work.
of the world, he retired to his quarters, which were also his place of work.
There were many letters, containing a good deal of news; most were friendly, some neutral, without threat or hostility. Some saw landscapes in their thoughts of him and wished he were not “so far away.”
All the curtains in the house were drawn. He sat there in his coat, which was still buttoned. Rock fragments were piled up in a spacious glass case, as though they had slid straight out of nature and stopped behind the glass panes. A bluish fluorescent tube at the top of the cabinet illumined the stones and hummed softly (the only sound in the room). The seat of the chair was still indented where someone had been sitting months before. In the dark adjoining room, the door of which was open, he glimpsed the silhouette of a hydrant-like bedpost; there, for a moment, sat the cat with its pointed ears.
The glass table was lit from underneath. On it, letters along with the empty envelopes had been tossed in a loose transparent heap; a few stood up like parts of a card house, confronting the addressee (who was no longer serenely musing, but just sitting there in silence) with their shiny folds and the frayed borders of their envelopes. They had seemed to be palpable objects, but there was nothing else near him that he could name; otherwise, there were only curtains, not falling gently, but stiffly stemmed against him.
Hadn't a steady blowing stopped suddenly when he opened the door, or perhaps when he turned in from the road? In less than a moment, a breathing quietness had turned to rigidity. Sitting upright, someone had tipped over, but had not fallen to the floor as usual in such cases. Now this someone was sitting motionless, pierced through by the plane of the tipped one.
Mere warmth without blood, Sorger on that night of his return to the Western world saw himself dreamless, born into a planet without atmosphere (karst and grotesque emptiness), heavy as lead, but not falling; not alone in the world, but alone without a world; and within himâtimelessâthe stars and nebulae were eyes that did not look at him. He was forsaken not only by speech but by the power to make the least sound; and just as he lay inwardly silent, so he remained outwardly mute. Not a sound; not even a cracking of joints. Only in his imagination was he able to turn toward a rocky wall and, converted into a stone image, nestle in the stones. In reality, his flesh was trembling with weakness.
“To be swept away by a whirlwindâinto what native land?” In the image that followed, Sorger saw the reason for his rigidity; sitting in the “night of the century,” far back in the low, empty “lobbies of continents,” he at least was mourning for himself and his fellow men and this accursed centuryâand yet he was forbidden to mourn, because he “himself was to blame.” In truth, he was not even a “victim” and therefore could not join in the Great Lament with other victims of this century and find his voice again in the ecstasy of common suffering. Maybe the “unknown seated one” was weak, but he was descended from murderers, he regarded himself as a murderer, and the mass murderers of his century as ancestors.
Besieged as he was by closed curtains, threatened by the pile of letters as by an enemy coat of arms, Sorger in that moment realized that without lifting a finger he embodied every one of the forefathers who had been foisted upon him; the rigidity of his paralysis repeated the rigidity of those violent monsters; and not only did he resemble them outwardly; he was inwardly one with them, more so than they had probably been with one
another. Without a destiny, without human ties, without the right to suffer or the strength to live (those letters signified nothing but disorder), he was merely faithfulâthe faithful replica of death-cult masters. He smelled war; right there in his hut, it encircled him.
another. Without a destiny, without human ties, without the right to suffer or the strength to live (those letters signified nothing but disorder), he was merely faithfulâthe faithful replica of death-cult masters. He smelled war; right there in his hut, it encircled him.
But seeing to the bottom restored his speech, and then he was able to hate himself for having been possessed by dead monsters, as though they were his kinsmen. In his hatred, he breathed more deeplyâbreathed himself free from the suction of the tomb. “I no longer have a father.” He shut his eyes and behind his lids saw the bright afterimage of the river. His speech was “play” and in it he regained his mobility; he took his clothes off and washed; under the water he sang a wicked song, which ended well above the water; then he opened all the curtains.
Speech, the peacemaker: it had the effect of ideal humor, reconciling the beholder with the things of the outside world. The wind whirled through the trees; in among leaves and scraps of paper, a whole newspaper spun about, opening and closing in its flight; folded, it rushed at the window in the darkness, but turned aside just in time and slowly opened (“for me”), as once more it fluttered away. Behind it the grass swayed like wheat, and from the ocean came noises of a distant playground. For a moment Sorger was able to think of his child in Europe. He opened the front door and swore never to close a door again.
At length he lay down to sleep (until then the bed had been an unattainable distant object), and with the yellow of the sulfur-containing minerals in the specimen case the brightness behind his eyes vanished. The last thing that occurred to him was that he was lying with his head to the north (in the gabled house it had pointed south).
True, something was lacking, but the clear fact of inexpiability had paled to a vague nostalgia; and he did not forget that he had been branded with inexorable rigidity, his true condition, beside which all others (speaking, moving) reduced themselves to unreal fuss-and-bother.
In the sandy ground below him, a crag detached from the coastal cliff by the waves of prehistory formed a kind of bulwark against the ocean. Turned on its axis during the night, the house slowly settled on this reef (Land's End) like a wooden ark.
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The neighbors had invited Sorger to breakfast at their house. From there, he gazed at last night's trap, which in the morning light looked to him like the cottage of a retired old farmer.
A dangling pine branch half covered the housefront, and in the tall grass that had grown outside the door in his absence a dog with the face of a human eccentric stood as though legless, watching the sea gulls gliding between the trees. Sitting with the neighbor family in a semicircular sun-bright extension of the living room, Sorger knew that for the present nothing could shake him; he was prepared for anything, capable of everything he wanted to be capable of. Without effort his eyes, which in the wilds had grown accustomed to long distances, adjusted themselves to the family circle on either side of him. Back at last, he participated in his neighbors' life with the authority of a man who knows the earth, who is still somewhat tired from what he has been through, and whose tiredness makes him seem alive.
He was not, as usual in company, divided among unstable, disparate images; today his imagination was one, encompassing himself and those with him. All attention,
the (rather abstemious) Sorger actually grew strong in enjoyment; his pleasure in eating (and in things in general) moved him with an aimless desire for conquest; all the rest of his long life would be devoted to enjoyment. Meanwhile, he had a delightful feeling of his own face, especially his eyes and mouth, and the bank notes, which crackled from time to time in his trouser pocket, gave him another, related feeling.
the (rather abstemious) Sorger actually grew strong in enjoyment; his pleasure in eating (and in things in general) moved him with an aimless desire for conquest; all the rest of his long life would be devoted to enjoyment. Meanwhile, he had a delightful feeling of his own face, especially his eyes and mouth, and the bank notes, which crackled from time to time in his trouser pocket, gave him another, related feeling.
“Our neighbor is looking well today,” said the lady of the house, who sat there with her hands in her lap, inspecting him. In reply to which her husband said: “Like a happy man with a destiny.” The children looked at him, frowned, and ran outside to play hide-and-seek with the dogs in the tall grass.
True enough, on the morning after his night of rigidity, Sorger was less anonymous-looking than usual; ordinarily, in a group of bus drivers, electricians, or house painters, he could be mistaken for one of them. His body seemed to have broadened, his face was serene, more so each time you looked at it, as only the face of a leading man can be (his feeling about the preceding night was that he had played a part successfully); his eyes stood deeper in their sockets, and sparkled with omniscience: a man worth looking at. “Yes,” he said, “today my power emanates from me.”
Like Sorger, the family hailed from Central Europe, and like Sorger they had been living for years on the west coast of the other continent; in his eyes the man and woman were a true couple, whose love had thus far struck him as credible. The children, on the other hand, seemed fortuitous, witnesses to the marriage rather than bona-fide members of the family; often they just stood there looking on in amazement as the grownups played.
Sorger's first impression had been: “A pair of innocents.”
Yes, innocent they were, but that turned out to be their brand of kindness: in the course of time, it transferred itself to the less innocent Sorger, who in their company managed to feel guileless. When he came to know them, he felt sure they must have started out as two afflicted halves falling into each other's arms. They sometimes seemed backward and even ugly in their backwardness. Still, they occupied his imagination, they were indeed the content that made it possibleâhardly anyone else prompted Sorger to such tranquil imaginings (instead of imprisoning him in conventional fantasies). All in all, one could think only good of them as a subject for the imagination.
Yes, innocent they were, but that turned out to be their brand of kindness: in the course of time, it transferred itself to the less innocent Sorger, who in their company managed to feel guileless. When he came to know them, he felt sure they must have started out as two afflicted halves falling into each other's arms. They sometimes seemed backward and even ugly in their backwardness. Still, they occupied his imagination, they were indeed the content that made it possibleâhardly anyone else prompted Sorger to such tranquil imaginings (instead of imprisoning him in conventional fantasies). All in all, one could think only good of them as a subject for the imagination.
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