The others turned to the questioner. Had he wanted to “test” us? He replied: “No, not test, just make you tell stories. You see, I've noticed that there's no better way of getting people to tell stories than to ask them about thresholds.” In the enthusiasm of our storytelling, we even interrupted the son of the house, who was still on the telephone, to ask him what he thought a threshold was. He answered succinctly: “A nuisance!” and sank back into his telephone corner.
One after another fell silent. But this was not the usual lull in the conversation before a group breaks up. The storytelling seemed, rather, to continue in the silence, and thus to become more eloquent than ever. Each of us delved deeper into himself and there met his neighbor, with whom he now, without trying, had everything in common. “Once upon a time there was we.” (How is it that I can say “we”? After all, we were not very many. And I trusted this “we.” Once upon a time there was a fact.) One burst out laughing, seemingly out of a clear sky, and another nodded; or one drew a line through a ring of wine on the table, and his neighbor added to it.
We had stopped drinking; our host forgot to pour more wine and the guests forgot to empty their glasses. Cigars went out and so did pipes. A smell of quinces drifted in; and, from outside, puffs of snowy air. Our
host stopped being a host; from then on, he was merely one of the several persons who had met “somewhere.”
We all sat straight in our chairs, as though backrests were no longer needed. Were we waiting for something? No, the eventâthe storyâhad already happened. In the embers of the dying fire, our collective eye discerned a glittering nocturnal metropolis filled with roaring, flashing, and crashing, with relays of light and shadow running from end to end; sometimes sparks shot across it like ambulances. Strange how the gaze sinks into fire, whereas it usually bounces back from flowing water.
We were not waiting; yet someone was still missing. We didn't know it until the lady of the house, just back from somewhere, appeared in a festive midnight-blue coat and boots shaped like birds' beaks, and sat down nonchalantly in our midst. She completed the circle. Beside her the men looked unshaven, and beside them the woman's face, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, betrayed a fatigue that was a kind of happiness. Something had moved her (a musical phrase? the snowy night?). Quite naturally, she took part in the silent, all-disentangling exchange of stories. In the midst of the warm room, her coat gave off cold; the snow crystals on it, interlocking at first, softened visibly into drops of water. A daddy longlegs ran into our field of vision, its little round body duplicated by the shadow under it. Outside the window, a screech owl, so close it might have been perched on the windowsill, let out a catlike screech. The house next door became visible, a yellow wall covered
by a wisteria vine, its arm-thick stem coiled and tangled like a display of sailor's knots. A birch stood white in the darkness, its hanging switches moved only by the falling snow, only one branch vibrating in the void; a bird must have just landed on it. A yew tree grew star-shaped out of the ground, its star-shaped needles pointing like a road sign to the arch in the hollow, which framed the sparse but brightly twinkling lights on the plain below.
We separated outside the house, where the road branches off in different directions. The snow along the edges (it had melted everywhere else, except in the half-rolled leaves of a box tree, the whole of which it transformed into a snowy beacon) heightened the “crossroads” image. Each went his own way. Our host walked backward through the front garden to the house. His wife stood upstairs in the open window, looking out beyond us; her charm was of the kind that made one dream and not stare. For a moment, the houseâthe lantern affixed to the outside wall made you think of a farmyard at nightâseemed to be part of a mountain village.
Instead of heading across the plain on my way home, I turned into a street so narrow that no one could have walked beside me. This street describes a loop which, after a steep hill, leads to the main road to the Old City. A phone rang in a house on the hill just once, as if it were a signal. I wanted to be alone with the falling snow. As I went downhill, something drew me upward, but to a much higher mountain, above the tree line; in my thoughts I saw myself on the crest of the Untersberg
at night, between bare limestone cliffs, with nothing on my mind but the next step and the next handhold: “wholly present!”
Down at the intersection I ran into the painter, who was deep in contemplation of a cleft in the rock that was covered by a climbing plantânot just covered, but completely filled with it; he was holding a heavy robe of tight-meshed blossoms, blue through and through, bedded and framed in leaves. In the blowing, melting, then freezing snow the blue had the color of an old glacier; the flowery train was its tongue. When I looked longer, the blue seemed to stand out against it, and an expression often heard at digs came to my mind: “You must find the edges.” The painter swung the plant-robe and called out to me: “How merry are colors in motion!” And: “There are colors everywhere!” And: “Colors need to act!”
Together we went down the so-called Festival Stairway. On the last step the painter stopped, pointed one hand at the mountain behind us and the other at the Festival buildings ahead of us, and said: “It's not a threshold that made me stop here. No, what stops me is a borderline. Or rather: something in me is stopped here, even if I go on. When I set foot in the Old City, something in me stops breathing. Some say the city puts them in a bad mood. I call that an understatement. A bad mood that makes you scream is more like pain. Whenever I come here, I try to pretend that nothing is wrong. But after a few steps, the borderline makes itself felt, colors lose their meaning, and even if I run, I can't breathe. And the main thing perhaps is not the crowdingânow,
for instance, the city is emptyâbut this overpowering central zone that no crowd can fill. Or is it the other way around, that nothing can fill the center, so that all there can be is a disorderly crowdâa pushing, staggering, shoving, a barring the way to one another, as nowhere else in the world? No, nothing here makes for space, neither the parades nor the march-pasts of scar-faced city officials nor the swaying chamois beards on simpletons' hats. Nor the processions of glittering brocade cloaks and golden monstrances; nor the melancholy idlers. And yet I once saw a procession in the city: a group of feebleminded people, slapping each other on the back, pushing and wrestling, swarming from souvenir shop to souvenir shop, shouting their joy at being let out, at being in town. The big bells, it's true, give one a feeling of the place, except for the chimes, which to my mind evoke the slamming of a tin door, a car that won't start, someone clearing his throat, or the clatter of high-heeled shoes. Did you ever lose your footing in the woods, while climbing a mountain for instance, and reach through the underbrush to grab a rotting tree trunk? Precisely because your hand meets with no resistance, you feel for a moment as if it were gone (severed by a yellow and black salamander or some other crawling thing). I've often had a comparable feeling when coming into this city. Here, too, the transitions are as camouflaged as the boundary between mold and foliage. See how the facade of the Festival Theater in front of us has been adapted to the mountain behind us? In the eyes of those responsible for the building, the gravel embedded in the limestone makes the mountainside
look like concrete; and that was their justification for building with concrete. They even prided themselves on the idea: mountain and theater were one. To make the building even more mountainlike, they chiseled artificial fissures into its concrete façade. That's what I mean by border fraud. And I call it a crime. Take a look at the line back there, where the rock face seems to merge with the concrete. At first sight, the two substances that have been forced together don't even seem related; in the mountain, you see any number of oblique layers, and in each layer, after you've looked at it for a while, the sinking, rolling, stopping, and spreading of gravel is repeated, along with the intervals when the waters were at rest. With each new stripe, the tide seems to change. But in the adjacent concrete wall, the most you can detect is the impetus with which at some time or otherâyou get no feeling of timeâa mixture of cement and gravel was poured into the revetment. The rock is covered with moss and lichen, its recesses and outcroppings with flowers and grass; the imitation, on the other hand, is covered with a film of cement, and not so much as a blade of grass has ever grown in its artificial fissures. How colorful the mountain can be, especially in wet weather; apparent gray turns to brown, yellow and red, even eggshell white, basalt black and bottle green, after the manner of gravel paths in the rainâwhereas this monstrosity thrown up in front of it shimmers eternally in its pallid non-color. Isn't it strange? The mountain, a piece of nature, is real to us, whereas the artifact affecting kinship with it repels us with its ludicrous unreality. Border fraud is in this case a crime,
and such criminals are my enemies. Even on the mountain slopes, criminals erect their bastions with impunity: they need only leave the façades of their residential or commercial bunkers unfinished and they are given credit for respecting the environment. Any sheet-metal shack, any space station, any Bedouin's tent would be more respectful. And the disrespect so typical of our city is most strikingly exemplified in the Festival Stairway, on the bottommost step of which we are now standing; which the experts rave about; and which in my opinion is of all outdoor stairways in the world the least deserving of the name. Ordinarily the word âstairway' makes me think of âairiness'; here I think of âdoldrums.' The mustiness of the whole city begins at the uppermost landing. Here again, on these stairs, there is no space. Hardly anyone lingers here. At the most, someone wanting to catch his breath will lean on the iron bar that has been cemented onto the concrete in lieu of a banister. On the way down, a lot of people run; on the way up, they count the steps either aloud or to themselves, as one might in a tower. The stepsâsplit granite slabsâare too high, too narrow, and too shallow. Footfalls are dull thuds or squeaks; you can't walk two abreast if someone is coming in the opposite direction; if two people do walk side by side, the steepness makes their conversation shrill and it's frequently interrupted by panting; when I meet my best friend here, we hardly recognize each other because the difference in elevation distorts our facesâand often enough they are not just distorted but also obscured by a shimmering film of cementâor else I see him only as a silhouette, it's as if I were seeing him at the far end
of a tunnel. These stairs don't leap up the mountainside as an independent structure, they are a mere accessory of the concrete, which in places they are obliged to tunnel under. Instead of sweeping lines, they move in sharp angles followed by sudden curves, which are as troublesome to a slow walker as to a runner. The middle landing, which in other stairways offers an occasion to stop and look around, is placed in a dark and musty tunnel with a black puddle of urine in one corner and a pile of black-and-white pigeon droppings in the other. No, this isn't an outdoor stairway; it's a sewer. The
Magic Flute
serpent hewn into the stone parapet isn't an ornament, it's just bric-a-brac, and the court at the lower end of the sewer is likewise full of Festival bric-a-brac, and other kinds as well. And I must beg you not to imagine that my nocturnal tirade is my last word about border fraud. I mean to ⦔
The painter stopped and laughed. “Hm. What
will
I do? What will we do? Because my enemies elude my enmity.”
He stepped down from the stairs to city level and continued: “One day, when passing the statue of Mozart, I was surprised for a moment to notice that the face is turned toward the Old City. I had always thought of it as looking toward the river and away from the city. Then another day I was surprised to see that the two Gorgons' heads to the right and left of the New Gateâthe real mountain tunnelâpoint the way out of the city; I had always thought that the snakes in their hair and their blood-curdling eyes were addressed, rather, toward people going into the city.”
We went from one Old City square to another: all deserted, except for one where a drunk was leaning against the fountain, asleep; he was clutching a bottle, and one of his cheeks was puffed up. But the bars were loud with what the painter called the laughter of “triumphant heartlessness.” At that point, to my own surprise, I managed a reply of sorts.
“But,” I said, “would the light and air beyond the borderlines you speak of be so effective, so refreshing, so substantial if not for the dead calm in the center? Without it, would I, in passing from the Old City to the plain, always be overwhelmed by a wave of space? When I stay away from the city, the wave fails me. Doesn't this suggest that the one sphere makes the other possible? And what better example can there be of how emptiness and superabundance complement each other? I, in any case, need the city and I need it as it is. My place is the center; it, too, takes its measure from outside, from the plain, and then I am its master. Every swarm of tourists that bars my way is welcome to me. The circle I describe around camera-toters starts me on my way to the open meadows; every detour I make in the crowd brightens the country daylight for me. The poet Georg Trakl, who celebrated the âbeautiful city'âdidn't they all go strolling on the empty plain almost every day? Maybe it's just that Salzburg should have another name: Charleroi or Taranto, or in a pinch Salinas? Yet salt was once held sacred. It transformed the stranger into an honored guest. Look at a handful of salt crystals under a magnifying glass; those translucent cubes glitter like the walls of a white city, with the crystals strewn farthest
from the center as its outworks. Salt is dear to me-to look at, to touch, to season with. It reminds me of my birth and embodies a kind of measure, or law. Once in a Mediterranean salt marsh I saw the âhouse where it was born,' a stone building on a jetty far out in the water, with an outdoor stairway leading to the entrance on the upper story. In Virgil, salt is always connected with the words âsmall' and âconcealed.' This salt house seemed small and its inhabitants, or so at least I thought, lived in concealment.”