A glass on my desk contains some sawdust, the remains of a threshold I discovered on the Hemmaberg and wrote my first paper about. Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me. During the school year I often devoted an afternoon to it, helping on digs in the immediate vicinity, such as the Celtic Dürrnberg near Hallein or, only recently, the “Roman Road” in Loig. I was usually rather tired the next day, but that actually benefited my teaching; it made me calm and alert, and I listened to my pupils, just as they listened to me.
My report on the Loig dig was just about finished, including the photographs and the drawings of cross sections and horizontal sections with the small initials A.L. (Andreas Loser) in the lower right-hand corner. The task assigned to me was making measurements of the vestibule; describing and interpreting the floor mosaics
was the work of the professionals. “Access to the villa was provided by a door so-and-so many Roman feet wide, with a masonry base for the formerly present wooden threshold. A space so-and-so many Roman feet wide and so-and-so many Roman feet high was set aside for it at the foot of the east wall.” Time and again, while I was doing this work, the black knotholes in the floorboards of my room looked to me like colored mosaic stones, and once a fresco appeared in the white wall: Iphigenia, holding a statue of the goddess Artemis, on her way to the sea, before escaping to Greece with her brotherâa mural from Pompeii, intimating to me that my measurements had not been entirely useless. When toward the end I looked up from my paper for a moment, the Untersberg with its sunlit crest was situated in the ancient world, and I saw the corresponding alluvial cones at the foot of the Staufen.
My desk had been cleared. It's a small, light-colored office model with a chipboard top and steel legs, and it blended nicely with its surroundings. Beside the glass with the sawdust in it, there is an elongated piece of wood with holes at one end, rounded edges, and slanting grooves of varying widthâa so-called hand fondler, carved years ago by my son (more or less as a school exercise), blackened from handling, but still smelling of fresh wood, just as the brown, fist-sized, hardened lump of clay beside it, whenever I pick it up, takes on the smell of the damp gully from which it was taken years ago. Written in pencil on the clay is the Greek word “Galene,” meaning “the calm, radiant sea,” which, according to the philosopher Epicurus, can be taken as
a model of existence (the man sitting over it interpreted the luminous graphite word more as a kind of call to order). The last in this row of objects is an egg-shaped lump of clay which not so long ago was broken from a dried thornbush on a Mediterranean island: a puzzling object, a mixture of sand and tiny stones that some sort of insect may have built around a branch of the thornbush, which now on my desk is still inside it, forming an arrow, whose tip emerges at the other end of the egg. A number of deep holes give it the appearance of an ocarina, except that the holes have no outlet. They seem, deep inside, to be joined in a single hollow, though the passages are so crooked that the eye cannot follow them. The interior of these passages glows an intense bright red that seems to enamel their walls. Once, when someone blew into one of the holes, the long feelers of an unknown, black-armored insect darted out of a neighboring hole, and immediately retracted. All these objects might be termed my “callers to order,” because, by pleasantly diverting me now and again, they save me from losing myself entirely in my work.
The lump of clay with the round black hiding places lay there like an abandoned primeval necropolis where nothing remains but lizards. The lamp illumined the desk, which was bare except for the four objects. The rest of the room, ordinarily unlit, lay in half darkness. In the neighboring apartments, next door and upstairs, water faucets sounded one after another. On the west and east edge of the plain, where the two railroad lines recede into the distance, a long-drawn-out whistling coupled with a rumbling could be heard at regular intervals;
and on the express highway skirting the Untersberg, a roaring and a blowing of horns. Some of the apartment-house windows were open to the balmy evening air; a fat man in a white undershirt was leaning out of one of them, smoking; in another stood a clay jar, holding a papyrus plant that shot up like fireworks, its star-shaped greenery strikingly vivid against the yellow sky; in the window downstairs a caged parrot, luminous blue in the twilight, sat silently shaking its head; one of the open windows was empty.
Why did I leave my family? Was I sent away? Was it my idea to desert the three of them? Was there any reason for the separation (which has never become an official divorce)? Did I leave for good, or only for the time being? Haven't I got the daily routine of each one of them in my head, as though I were secretly still living with them? Whenever I run into my son or daughter in the street, isn't their first question, put without emphasis, rather as a matter of course: “When are you coming over?”âthe kind of thing one doesn't say to just anyone. Would I live with them again someday? To all those questions I have had no answer, though I believe I know one thing: a final separation will never be possible. In any case, my name, “Loser” (common all over Austria, and also frequent in the phone books of northern Italy, especially in such cities as Gorizia and Trieste), does not in my opinion suggest someone who gets rid (los) of something, and certainly not a loser (in the English sense); it is, I believe, connected with the dialect verb losen, meaning “listen” or “hark.” In the Salzkammergut there's a mountain called Loser, which starts as a gently
rounded hill but culminates in a massive rocky dome; a seemingly unscalable fortress, with sides so steep that they remain almost free of snow in the winter, the few snowy patches suggesting false windows.
On the other hand, I have no idea what my wife is up to, what people she sees, what kind of work she's doing. Unlike me, she takes easily to new languagesâhas she become a translator? Is she going on with her studies, which were interrupted by our marriage? Is she guiding tourists around the town? (I once thought I saw her, holding an umbrella over her head and leading a group.) Is she lecturing at the People's University? I never ask. Even before, I seldom asked her a question. That may be what led to our separation. Inability to ask questions is often my problem. And yet I'm made up almost entirely of questions. But, as a rule, I regard every question as the wrong one and I can't get it out of my mouth. Or then again, something in me rebels against the kind of questioning that might better be called pumping.
Yet I keep going back to the house where my family live. Though considerable time may have elapsed, there's no great excitement when I come in; only the conventional evening greetings of people who have been going their separate ways during the day. Once, when I'd been away for six months, my son in his room just looked up briefly from something or other and said: “Well?”
The house is the kind of place where an old-time teacher might have livedâIt's painted yellow, with pointed gables and a wooden veranda that serves as a winter garden. It's in Gois, which lies a few fields and pastures to the west of Loig with its Roman villa. The
guidebooks list Gois as a suburb of Salzburg, but it's a good hour's walk from the center of the city and gives the impression of a remote peasant village. The only connection with the Old City is by bus, and the last bus leaves the city before the end of the working day. The road is narrow and little traveled; for a short stretch before the village, it degenerates into a dirt path through the fields. What one sees first of the village is a scattering of farmhouses; there are few new buildings. The walls of the farmhouses are of porous, untrimmed stone in various shades of gray, inlaid with small black slag stones. The doors are made of a kind of pudding stone, and the thresholds of a reddish marble with light-colored veins and numerous ammonite inclusions. This gives the farms an old-fashioned look, as though they belonged to a different period from the one-family houses in their midst, as though they had been built before the Gothic church on the knoll. They form a kind of unit with the knoll in the flat country, a strange formation suggesting a prehistoric mound. Round about there are fields, their base lines pointing toward Salzburg. Of the city one can see only the castle, which from there looks like a bright, delicately shaped stone crown. The fields, on which more vegetables are grown than grain, seem to extend almost to the city limits, thus giving the impression of a vast plantation, capable of supplying the whole city. At dusk, the red lights in the belfry go onâwarning signals for planes. On its way back to town, the last bus from Grossgmain, dark inside, stops in front of the village inn, whose curtains, as customary throughout Austria, are drawn immediately after sunset. Despite the short
row of streetlamps, no village for miles around is quieter in the evening. Since the church is not a parish church, there are no evening bells. On the other hand, the stars over the fields are brighter here than anywhere else. The constellations can be distinguished at a glance; one doesn't have to look for them. And the soft rustling of the bushes by the roadside is clearly audible. Seen from the city, Gois consists only of the red lights on the belfry, barely distinguishable from the harsh yellow row of lamps beyond it, marking the Walserberg Autobahn overpass.
What stops me from going back to the school when my paper is finished? Don't I need my daily work, or at least my presence there, the comfort of habitual turns of phrase? Hasn't my place always been in an interlocking collective, each member of which, however, keeps his distance from the others? Doesn't the public sphere, without which I am incomplete, begin at the school door? Isn't my ride to my public existence the natural thing for me, and doesn't it open up the possibility of a satisfactory way back? In any event, I don't regard myself as a loner, it doesn't suit me to be a freelancer, and certainly not an independent scholar (though, early in my studies, someone advised me to become one) . I know I should work with others, not just occasionally, but day after day. Only among others does something resembling a world appear to me, if only in the briefly flaring brown of a lichen in the Antarctic. One day perhaps a stranger from the plains, on his way to a still-undiscovered city, will approach our local castle (that
forbidding hulk), and the canal at his feet will flow through timeless lowlands, or through the Chinese limestone province of Kwei-lin. Did I, for that, need a kind, my kind, of job? But now will I have another few days to myself? Won't it soon be Easter vacation, in any case?
I opened both my workroom windows and let the sounds in. From the north, not far away, came the ringing of the bells at Gneis, which is already within the city limits; from the west, almost as audible because of the wind, the bells of the Moos church, which was much farther away. The manager of the store downstairs was moving boxes and chalked signs back inside. A train in the distance didn't whistle, but gave out a sound as of someone blowing into his cupped handsâa brewery locomotive on the way back to its shed for the night. High over the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the plane from Zurich came into view with a violent blinking of lights; the runway was brightly lit to receive it; the plane went into a slow glide and its landing lights flared up; a few seconds after it put down, the din filled the whole plain.
Now I had time. Facts and questions crystallized. This having-time wasn't a feeling; it was a resolution: the resolution of all my contradictory feelings. It was a jolt and a widening; disengagement and devotion; defenselessness and the ability to resist; quiescence and enterprise. Its occurrence was rare. Perhaps what is commonly called a “state of grace” should be called a “state of having time.” It had its counterpart in a traditional paraphrase of the threshold concept as a “transition
between privation and riches.” In a state of having-time, a murmur spread over the countryside, colors shone, grasses trembled, moss cushions puffed up.
Holding my plate on my lap, I ate in the kitchen, which was too small for a table. A colony of daddy longlegs adhered to the walls, clinging to the grainy limestone with their spindly legs, which suggested clock hands. Unceasingly, they swung to and fro, giving the whole kitchen the air of a clockmaker's workshop, filled with pendulums and silent ticking. From time to time the clocks shifted their position, or else one would stand long-legged over another, the two of them swinging together. Down on the tile floor, several of the evidently short-lived creatures lay on their backs, radial forms no longerâsome with legs folded in dying, but quivering violently; others, already dead, had twined their legs tightly around their already dried-out bodies: mummylike balls, visibly gathering dust. The gaps left by the fallen were immediately taken by others, evidently newborn, brighter in color than the rest and conspicuously smaller, which joined at once in the general ticking. These creatures are known to me from excavation sites, where they often keep those working in the galleries company with their pendular motion. Here in my place they serve as household pets, as does the unidentified insect inside the ball of sand on my desk; by making me look up and pause in my work, they, like sundials, help me to “have time.” If it was possible in the past to worship (or at least to see) the sun in beetles, why not in these harmless spiders that spin no webs?
These are animals which, even when they appear in large numbers, provoke no fear, but only surprise and amusement. “Daddy longlegs, patron of threshold seekers,” I said in the night-dark kitchen to the hum of the fluorescent lamp, to the ticking of the real clock (on the electric stove), to the clicking of the trolleys on a bus that was just pulling out from the turnaround down below.