1
The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days. At quarter to eight, he came from Bundesterrasse and stepped onto the Kirchenfeldbrücke leading from the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. He did that every workday of the school term always at quarter to eight. Once when the bridge was blocked, he made a mistake in beginning Greek class afterward. That had never happened before nor did it ever happen again. For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this mistake. The longer the discussion lasted, the more it was thought to be a mistake in hearing. At last, this conviction won out even among the students who had been there. It was simply inconceivable that Mundus, as everyone called him, could make a mistake in Greek, Latin or Hebrew.
Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the City of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. Now he noticed the woman in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading in the pouring rain what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn't a rage that could be dumped into words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smoldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and her heels slipped out of her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius left the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren't part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened up and the notebooks slid onto the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.
"Forgive me," she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. "But I mustn't forget this phone number and I don't have any paper with me."
Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.
"Naturally, I could have …" And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius's forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of the hand. "I … I didn't want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall … I had to hold onto it."
The rain on the thick eyeglasses muddied Gregorius's sight, and he groped awkwardly for the wet notebooks. The tip of the felt pen seemed to slide over his forehead again. But then he realized it was now the fingers of the woman, who was trying to wipe away the numbers with a handkerchief.
"It is out of line, I know …" And now she started helping Gregorius gather up the notebooks. He touched her hand and grazed her knee, and when the two of them reached for the last notebook, they bumped heads.
"Thank you very much," he said when they stood facing each other. He pointed to her head. "Did it hurt?"
Absently, looking down, she shook her head. The rain beat down on her hair and ran over her face.
"Can I walk a few steps with you?"
"Ah … yes, of course," Gregorius stammered.
Silently they walked together to the end of the bridge and on toward the school. The sense of time told Gregorius that it was after eight and the first hour had already begun. How far was "a few steps"? The woman had adjusted to his pace and plodded along beside him as if she would go on like that all day. She had pulled the wide collar of her coat so high that, from the side, Gregorius saw only her forehead.
"I have to go in here, into the Gymnasium," he said and stood still. "I'm a teacher."
"Can I come along?" she asked softly.
Gregorius hesitated and ran his sleeve over his wet glasses. "In any case, it's dry there," he said at last.
She went up the stairs, Gregorius held the door open for her, and then they stood in the hall, which seemed especially empty and quiet now that classes had started. Her coat was dripping.
"Wait here," said Gregorius and went to the bathroom to get a towel.
At the mirror, he dried the glasses and wiped off his face. The numbers could still be seen on his forehead. He held a corner of the towel under the warm water and wanted to start rubbing when he stopped in the middle of the movement. That was the moment that decided everything, he thought when he recalled the event hours later. That is, all of a sudden, he realized that he really didn't want to wipe away the trace of his encounter with the enigmatic woman.
He imagined appearing before the class afterward with a phone number on his face, he, Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, working here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little boring perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages, mocked lovingly by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking about the conjecture for a remote passage in an ancient text, only to get every time off the top of his head information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented perfectly and calmly without a soup?on of anger at the disturbance—Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name you simply had to abbreviate, and couldn't abbreviate any other way, an abbreviation that revealed the character of this man as no other word could have, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars. If you want to see a true scholar, the Rector would say when he introduced him to a new class, here he is.
And this scholar, Gregorius thought now, this dry man who seemed to some to consist only of dead words, and who was spitefully called the Papyrus by colleagues who envied him his popularity—this scholar would enter the room with a telephone number painted on his forehead by a desperate woman apparently torn between rage and love, a woman in a red leather coat with a fabulously soft, southern voice, that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.
When Gregorius had brought her the towel, the woman clamped a comb between her teeth and used the towel to rub the long black hair lying in the coat collar as in a bowl. The janitor entered the hall and, when he saw Gregorius, cast an amazed look at the clock over the exit and then at his watch. Gregorius nodded to him, as he always did. A student hurried past, turned around twice and went on.
"I teach up there," Gregorius said to the woman and pointed up through a window to another part of the building. Seconds passed. He felt his heart beat. "Do you want to come along?"
Later, Gregorius couldn't believe he had really said that; but he must have, for all at once they walked to the classroom next to each other; he heard the screech of his rubber soles on the linoleum and the clack of the boots when the woman put her foot down.
"What's your mother tongue?" he had asked her just now.
"Português," she had answered.
The o she pronounced surprisingly as a u, the rising, strangely constrained lightness of the é and the soft sh at the end came together in a melody that sounded much longer than it really was, and that he could have listened to all day long.
"Wait," he said now, took his notebook out of his jacket and ripped out a page: "For the number."
His hand was on the doorknob when he asked her to say the word once more. She repeated it, and for the first time he saw her smile.
The chatter broke off abruptly when they entered the classroom. A silence of one single amazement filled the room. Later, Gregorius remembered precisely: He had enjoyed this surprised silence, this speechless incredulity, that spoke from every single face, and he had also enjoyed his delight at being able to feel in a way he would never have believed possible.
What's up now? The question spoke from every single one of the twenty looks that fell on the peculiar couple at the door, on Mundus, standing with a wet bald head and a rain-darkened coat next to a hastily combed woman with a pale face.
"Perhaps there?" said Gregorius to the woman and pointed to the empty chair in the back corner. Then he advanced, greeted them as usual, and sat down behind the desk. He had no idea how he could have explained, and so he simply had them translate the text they were working on. The translations were halting, and he caught some curious looks. There were also bewildered looks for he—he, Mundus, who recognized every error even in his sleep—was overlooking dozens of errors, half measures, and awkwardness.
He managed not to look over at the woman. Yet, every second he saw her, saw the damp strands stroking her face, the white hands clenched, the absent, lost look going out the window. Once she took out the pen and wrote the phone number on the notebook page. Then she leaned back again and hardly seemed to know where she was.
It was an impossible situation and Gregorius glanced at the clock: ten more minutes until the break. Then the woman got up and walked softly to the door. When she got there, she turned around to him and put her finger on her lips. He nodded and she repeated the gesture with a smile. Then the door fell shut with a soft click.
From this moment on, Gregorius no longer heard anything the students said. It was as if he were all alone and enclosed in a numbing silence. At some time he stood at the window and watched the red female figure until she had disappeared around the corner. He felt the effort not to run after her reverberate in him. He kept seeing the finger on her lips that could mean so many things: I don't want to disturb, and It's our secret, but also, Let me go now, this can't go on.
When the bell rang for the break, he stood still at the window. Behind him, the students left more quietly than usual. Later he went out too, left the building through the back door and sat down across the street in the public library, where nobody would look for him.
For the second part of the double class, he was on time as always. He had rubbed the numbers off his forehead, written them down in the notebook after a minute of hesitation and then dried the narrow fringe of gray hair. Only the damp spots on his jacket and pants still revealed that there had been something unusual. Now he took the stack of soaked notebooks out of his briefcase.
"A mishap," he said tersely. "I stumbled and they slipped out, in the rain. Nevertheless, the corrections should still be legible; otherwise, you have to work on your conjectures."
That was how they knew him and an audible sigh of relief went through the room. Now and then, he still caught a curious look, and a remnant of shyness was in a few voices. Otherwise, everything was as before. He wrote the most frequent errors on the board. Then he let the students work silently on their own.
Could what happened to him in the next quarter hour be called a decision? Later, Gregorius was to keep asking the question and never was he sure. But if it wasn't a decision—what was it?
It began when he suddenly looked at the students bending over their notebooks as if he were seeing them for the first time.
Lucien von Graffenried, who had secretly moved a piece in the annual chess tournament in the auditorium, where Gregorius had played simultaneous matches against a dozen students. After the moves on the other boards, Gregorius had stood before him again. He noticed it immediately. He looked at him calmly. Lucien's face flamed red. "That's beneath you," said Gregorius and then made sure this game ended in a draw.
Sarah Winter, who had stood outside the door of his flat at two in the morning because she didn't know what to do with her pregnancy. He had made her tea and listened, nothing else. "I'm so glad I followed your advice," she said a week later. "It would have been much too early to have a baby."
Beatrice Lüscher with the regular, precise handwriting who had grown old frighteningly fast under the burden of her always perfect achievements. René Zingg, always at the lowest end of the scale.
And naturally, Natalie Rubin. A girl who was stingy with her favor, a bit like a courtly maiden of the past, reserved, idolized and feared for her sharp tongue. Last week, after the bell rang for the break, she had stood up, stretched like someone at ease in her own body, and taken a piece of candy out of her shirt pocket. On the way to the door, she unwrapped it and when she passed him, she put it to her mouth. It had just touched her lips when she broke off the movement, turned to him, held the bright red candy to him and asked: "Want it?" Amused at his astonishment, she had laughed her strange light laugh and made sure her hand touched his.
Gregorius went through them all. At first he seemed to be only drawing up an interim balance sheet of his feelings for them. Then, in the middle of the rows of benches, he noticed that he was thinking more frequently: How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience!
Português. He heard the melody and saw the woman's face as it had emerged with closed eyes behind the rubbing towel, white as alabaster. One last time, he slid his eyes over the heads of the students. Then he stood up slowly, went to the door where he took the damp coat off the hook, and disappeared, without turning around, from the room.
His briefcase with the books that had accompanied him a lifetime remained behind on the desk. At the top of the steps, he paused and thought how he had taken the books to be rebound every couple of years, always to the same shop, where they laughed at the dog-eared, worn-out pages that felt almost like blotting paper. As long as the case lay on the desk, the students would assume he was coming back. But that wasn't why he had left the books or why he now resisted the temptation to get them. If he left now, he also had to go away from those books. He felt that very clearly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really meant: to go away.
In the entrance hall, his look fell on the little puddle that had formed when the woman in the dripping coat had waited for him to come back from the bathroom. It was the trace of a visitor from another, faraway world, and Gregorius regarded it with a devotion usually reserved for archaeological finds. Only when he heard the janitor's shuffling step did he tear himself away and hurry out of the building.
Without turning around, he walked to the corner, where he could look back unseen. With a sudden force he wouldn't have expected of himself, he felt how much he loved this building and everything it stood for and how much he would miss it. He checked the numbers again: Forty-two years ago, as a fifteen-year-old Gymnasium student, he had entered it for the first time, wavering between anticipation and apprehension. Four years later, he had left it with his diploma in hand, only to come back again four years later as a substitute for the Greek teacher who had been in an accident, the teacher who had once opened the ancient world to him. The student substitute turned into a permanent student substitute, who was thirty-three by the time he finally took his university exams.
He had done that only because Florence, his wife, had urged him. He had never thought of a doctorate; if anyone asked him about it, he only laughed. Such things didn't matter. What did matter was something quite simple: to know the ancient texts down to the last detail, to recognize every grammatical and stylistic detail and to know the history of every one of those expressions. In other words: to be good. That wasn't modesty—his demands on himself were utterly immodest. Nor was it eccentricity or a warped kind of vanity. It had been, he sometimes thought later, a silent rage aimed at a pompous world, an unbending defiance against the world of show-offs who made his father suffer all his life because he had been only a museum guard. Others, who knew much less than he—ridiculously less, to tell the truth—had gotten degrees and solid positions: they seemed to belong to another, unbearably superficial world with standards he despised. In the school, no one would ever have come up with the idea of dismissing him and replacing him with somebody with a degree. The Rector, himself a philologist of ancient languages, knew how good Gregorius was—much better than he himself—and he knew that the students would have risen in revolt. When he finally did take the examination, it seemed absurdly simple to Gregorius, and he handed it in in half the time. He had always held it against Florence a bit that she had made him give up his defiance.
Gregorius turned around and walked slowly toward Kirchenfeldbrücke. When the bridge came into view, he had the amazing feeling, both upsetting and liberating, that, at the age of fifty-seven, he was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.
2
At the spot where the woman had read the letter in the pouring rain, he stood still and looked down. For the first time, he realized how deep the drop was. Had she really wanted to jump? Or had that only been an impetuous apprehension on his part going back to Florence's brother who had also jumped off a bridge? Except that Portuguese was her mother tongue, he didn't know the slightest thing about the woman. Not even her name. Naturally, it was absurd to want to recognize the scrunched-up letter from up here. Nevertheless he stared down, his eyes tearing with the effort. Was that dark dot his umbrella? He felt in his jacket to make sure the notebook with the number written by the nameless Portuguese woman on his forehead was still there. Then he walked to the end of the bridge, uncertain where to turn next. He was in the course of running away from his previous life. Could somebody who intended to do that simply go home?
His eye fell on Hotel Bellevue, the oldest, most distinguished hotel in the city. Thousands of times he had passed by without ever going in. Every time he had felt it was there and now he thought that, in some vague way, it had been important to him that it was there; he would have been upset to learn that the building had been torn down or had stopped being a hotel—or even: this hotel. But it had never entered his mind that he, Mundus, had any reason to be in there. Timorously, he now approached the entrance. A Bentley stopped, the chauffeur got out and went inside. When Gregorius followed him, he had the feeling of doing something absolutely revolutionary, indeed forbidden.
The lobby with the colored glass dome was empty and the carpet swallowed all sound. Gregorius was glad the rain had stopped and his coat wasn't dripping. With his heavy, clumsy shoes he went on into the dining room. Only two of the tables set for breakfast were occupied. Light notes of a Mozart divertimento created the impression that one was far away from everything loud, ugly and oppressive. Gregorius took off his coat and sat down at a table near the window. No, he said to the waiter in the light beige jacket, he wasn't a guest at the hotel. He felt scrutinized: the rough turtleneck under the worn-out jacket with the leather patches on the elbows; the baggy corduroy trousers; the sparse fringe of hair around the powerful bald head; the gray beard with the white specks that always made him look a bit unkempt. When the waiter had gone off with the order, Gregorius nervously checked whether he had enough money on him. Then he leaned his elbows on the starched tablecloth and looked over at the bridge.
It was absurd to hope she'd surface there once again. She had gone back over the bridge and then vanished in an Old City alley. He pictured her sitting at the back of the classroom absently gazing out the window. He saw her wringing her white hands. And again he saw her alabaster face surface from behind the towel, exhausted and vulnerable. Português. Hesitantly, he took out the notebook and looked at the phone number. The waiter brought breakfast with silver pitchers. Gregorius let the coffee grow cold. Once he stood up and went to the telephone. Halfway there, he turned around and went back to the table. He paid for the untouched breakfast and left the hotel.
It was years since he had been in the Spanish bookstore on Hirschengraben. Once, every now and then, he had gotten a book for Florence that she had needed for her dissertation on San Juan de la Cruz. On the bus, he had sometimes leafed through it, but at home he had never touched the books. Spanish—that was her territory. It was like Latin and completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against his grain that words in which Latin was so present came out of contemporary mouths—on the street, in the supermarket, in the café. That they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it aside quickly and violently whenever it came. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn't make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages—people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he shut the door. That offended her and he couldn't explain it to her.
The bookstore smelled wonderfully of old leather and dust. The owner, an aging man with a legendary knowledge of Romance languages, was busy in the back room. The front room was empty except for a young woman, a student apparently. She sat in a corner at a table and read a thin book with a yellowed binding. Gregorius would have preferred to be alone. The sense that he was standing here only because the melody of a Portuguese word wouldn't leave his mind, and maybe also because he hadn't known where else to go, that feeling would have been easier to bear without witnesses. He walked along the shelves without seeing anything. Now and then, he tilted his glasses to read a title on a high shelf; but as soon as he had read it, he had already forgotten it. As so often, he was alone with his thoughts, and his mind was sealed toward the outside.
When the door opened, he turned around quickly and at his disappointment that it was the mailman, he realized that, contrary to his intention and against all reason, he was still waiting for the Portuguese woman. Now the student shut the book and got up. But instead of putting it on the table with the others, she stood still, let her eyes slide again over the yellowed binding, stroked it with her hand, and only a few seconds later did she put the book down on the table, as softly and carefully as if it might crumble to dust with a nudge. Then, for a moment, she stood at the table and it looked as if she might reconsider and buy the book. But she went out, her hands buried in her coat pockets and her head down. Gregorius picked up the book and read: AMADEU INáCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO, UM OURIVES DAS PALAVRAS, LISBOA 1975.
The bookdealer came in, glanced at the book and pronounced the title aloud. Gregorius heard only a flow of sibilants; the half-swallowed, hardly audible vowels seemed to be only a pretext to keep repeating the hissing sh at the end.
"Do you speak Portuguese?"
Gregorius shook his head.
"A Goldsmith of Words. Isn't that a lovely title?"
"Quiet and elegant. Like dull silver. Would you say it again in Portuguese?"
The bookdealer repeated the words. Aside from the words themselves, you could hear how he enjoyed the velvety sound. Gregorius opened the book and leafed through it until the text began. He handed it to the man who looked at him with surprise and pleasure and started reading aloud. As he listened, Gregorius shut his eyes. After a few sentences, the man paused.
"Shall I translate?"
Gregorius nodded. And then he heard sentences that stunned him, for they sounded as if they had been written for him alone, and not only for him, but for him on this morning that had changed everything.
Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.
"That's the introduction," said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. "And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archaeologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence." He translated:
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us—what happens with the rest?
"I'd like to have the book," said Gregorius.
The bookdealer closed it and ran his hand over the binding as affectionately as the student.
"I found it last year in the junk box of a secondhand bookshop in Lisbon. And now I remember: I took it because I liked the introduction. Somehow I lost sight of it." He looked at Gregorius, who awkwardly felt for his briefcase. "I give it to you as a gift."
"That's …" Gregorius began hoarsely and cleared his throat.
"It cost pretty much nothing," said the bookdealer and handed him the book. "Now I remember you: San Juan de la Cruz. Right?"
"That was my wife," said Gregorius.
"Then you're the classical philologist of Kirchenfeld, she talked about you. And later I heard somebody else talk about you. It sounded as if you were a walking encyclopedia." He laughed. "Definitely a popular encyclopedia."
Gregorius put the book in his coat pocket and held out his hand. "Thank you very much."
The bookdealer accompanied him to the door. "I hope I haven't …"
"Not at all," said Gregorius and touched his arm.
On Bubenbergplatz, he stood still and looked all around. Here he had spent his whole life, here he knew his way around, here he was at home. For someone as nearsighted as he, that was important. For someone like him, the city he lived in was like a shell, a cozy cave, a safe structure. Everything else meant danger. Only someone who had such thick eyeglasses could understand that. Florence hadn't understood it. And, maybe for the same reason she hadn't understood that he didn't like to fly. Getting on an airplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world with no time to take in individual images of the road—he didn't like that and it bothered him. It's not right, he had said to Florence. What do you mean—not right? she had asked, irritated. He couldn't explain it and so she had often flown by herself or with others, usually to South America.
Gregorius stood at the display window of Bubenberg Cinema. The late show was a black-and-white film from a novel by Georges Simenon: L 'homme qui regardait passer les trains. He liked the title and looked for a long time at the stills. In the late '70s, when everybody bought a color television, he had tried in vain for days to get another black-and-white set. Finally he had brought one home from the dump. Even after he got married, he had held on to it stubbornly, keeping it in his study, and when he was by himself, he ignored the color set in the living room and turned on the old rattletrap that flickered, the images rolling occasionally. Mundus, you're impossible, Florence had said one day when she found him before the ugly, misshapen crate. When she started addressing him like the others, and even at home he was treated like a factotum of the city of Bern—that had been the beginning of the end. When the color television had vanished from the flat with the divorce, he had breathed a sigh of relief. Only years later, when the black-and-white picture tube broke altogether, did he buy a new color set.
The movie stills in the display window were big and crystal clear. One showed the pale alabaster face of Jeanne Moreau, stroking damp strands of hair off her forehead. Gregorius tore himself away and went into a nearby café to examine more closely the book of the Portuguese aristocrat who had tried to articulate himself and his mute experiences in words.
Only now, as he leafed slowly one by one through the pages, with a bibliophile's careful attention, did he discover the portrait of the author, an old photo, yellowed at the time the book was printed, where the once black surfaces had faded to dark brown, the bright face on a background of coarse-grained shadowy darkness. Gregorius polished his glasses, put them back on and, within a few minutes, was completely engrossed in the face.
The man may have been in his early thirties and radiated an intelligence, a self-confidence, and a boldness that literally dazzled Gregorius. The bright face with the high forehead was thatched with luxuriant dark hair that seemed to shine dully and was combed back like a helmet, with some strands falling next to the ears in soft waves. A narrow Roman nose gave the face great clarity, supported by strong eyebrows, set like solid beams painted with a broad brush, soon breaking off at the edges so that a concentration on the middle emerged, where the thoughts were. The full curved lips that wouldn't have been surprising in the face of a woman, were framed by a thin mustache and a trimmed beard, and the black shadows it cast on the slim neck gave Gregorius the impression of a certain coarseness and toughness. Yet, what determined everything were the dark eyes. They were underscored by shadows, not shadows of weariness, exhaustion or illness, but shadows of seriousness and melancholy. In his dark look, gentleness was mixed with intrepidity and inflexibility. The man was a dreamer and a poet, thought Gregorius, but at the same time, someone who could resolutely direct a weapon or a scalpel, and you'd better have gotten out of his way when his eyes flamed, eyes that could keep an army of powerful giants at bay, eyes that were no stranger to vile looks. As for his clothing, only the white shirt collar with the knot of a tie could be seen, and a jacket Gregorius imagined as a frock coat.
It was almost one o'clock when Gregorius surfaced from the absorption the portrait evoked in him. Once again, the coffee had grown cold in front of him. He wished he could hear the voice of the Portuguese man and see how he moved. Nineteen seventy-five: If he was then in his early thirties, as it seemed, he was now slightly over sixty. Português. Gregorius recalled the voice of the nameless Portuguese woman and transposed it to a lower pitch in his mind, but without turning it into the voice of the bookdealer. It was to be a voice of melancholy clarity, corresponding precisely with the visage of Amadeu de Prado. He tried to make the sentences in the book resonate with this voice. But it didn't work; he didn't know how the individual words were pronounced.
Outside, Lucien von Graffenried passed by the café. Gregorius was surprised and relieved to feel that he didn't flinch. He watched the boy go by and thought of the books on the desk. He had to wait until classes resumed at two o'clock. Only then could he go to the bookstore to buy a Portuguese language textbook.
3
As soon as Gregorius put on the first record at home and heard the first Portuguese sentences, the phone rang. The school. The ringing wouldn't stop. He stood next to the phone and tried out sentences he could say. Ever since this morning I've been feeling that I'd like to make something different out of my life. That I don't want to be your Mundus anymore. I have no idea what the new one will be. But I can't put it off anymore. That is, my time is running out and there may not be much more of it left. Gregorius spoke the sentences aloud. They were right, he knew that, he had said few sentences in his life that were so precisely right as these. But they sounded empty and bombastic when they were spoken, and it was impossible to say them into the phone.
The ringing had stopped. But it would start again. They were worried and wouldn't rest until they had found him; something could have happened to him. Sooner or later, the doorbell would ring. Now, in February, it always got dark early. He wouldn't be able to turn on a light. In the center of the city, the center of his life, he was attempting to flee and had to hide in the flat where he had lived for fifteen years. It was bizarre, absurd, and sounded like some potboiler. Yet it was serious, more serious than most things he had ever experienced and done. But it was impossible to explain it to those who were searching for him. Gregorius imagined opening the door and inviting them in. Impossible. Utterly impossible.
Three times in a row, he listened to the first record of the course, and slowly got an idea of the difference between the written and the spoken, and of all that was swallowed in spoken Portuguese. His unerring, facile memory for word formation kicked in.
The phone kept ringing at ever shorter intervals. He had taken over an antiquated phone from the previous tenant with a permanent connection he couldn't pull out. He had insisted that everything remain as it was. Now he took out a wool blanket to muffle the ringing.
The voices guiding the language course wanted him to repeat words and short sentences. Lips and tongue felt heavy and clumsy when he tried it. The ancient languages seemed made for his Bern mouth, and the thought that you had to hurry didn't appear in this timeless universe. The Portuguese, on the other hand, seemed always to be in a hurry, like the French, which made him feel inferior. Florence had loved it, this breakneck elegance, and when he had heard how easily she succeeded, he had become mute.
But now everything was different all of a sudden: Gregorius wanted to imitate the impetuous pace of the man and the woman's dancing lightness like a piccolo, and repeated the same sentences over to narrow the distance between his stolid enunciation and the twinkling voice on the record. After a while, he understood that he was experiencing a great liberation; the liberation from his self-imposed limitation, from a slowness and heaviness expressed in his name and had been expressed in the slow measured steps of his father walking ponderously from one room of the museum to another; liberation from an image of himself in which, even when he wasn't reading, he was someone bending myopically over dusty books; an image he hadn't drawn systematically, but that had grown slowly and imperceptibly; the image of Mundus, which bore not only his own handwriting, but also the handwriting of many others who had found it pleasant and convenient to be able to hold on to this silent museum-like figure and rest in it. It seemed to Gregorius that he was stepping out of this image like a dusty oil painting on the wall of a forgotten wing in the museum. He walked back and forth in the dim illumination of the lightless flat, ordered coffee in Portuguese, asked for a street in Lisbon, inquired about someone's profession and name, answered questions about his own profession, and conducted a brief conversation about the weather.
And all at once, he started talking with the Portuguese woman of the morning. He asked her why she was furious with the letter writer. Você quis saltar? Did you want to jump? Excitedly, he held the new dictionary and grammar book before his eyes and looked up expressions and verb forms he lacked. Português. How different the word sounded now! Before, it possessed the magic of a jewel from a distant, inaccessible land and now it was like one of a thousand gems in a palace whose door he had just pushed open.
The doorbell rang. Gregorius tiptoed to the phonograph and turned it off. They were young voices, student voices, conferring outside. Twice more, the shrill ring cut through the dim silence where Gregorius waited stock-still. Then the footsteps receding on the stairs.
The kitchen was the only room that faced the back and had a Venetian blind. Gregorius pulled it down and turned on the light. He took out the book of the Portuguese aristocrat and the language books, sat down at the table and started translating the first text after the introduction. It was like Latin and quite different from Latin, and now it didn't bother him in the slightest. It was a difficult text, and it took a long time. Methodically and with the stamina of a marathon runner, Gregorius selected the words and combed through the tables of verbs until he had deciphered the opaque verb forms. After a few sentences, he was gripped by a feverish excitement and he got some paper to write down the translation. It was almost nine o'clock when he was finally satisfied:
PROFUNDEZAS INCERTOS. UNCERTAIN DEPTHS. Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?
It is extraordinary, but the answer changes in me with the light that falls on the city and the Tagus. If it is the enchanting light of a shimmering August day that produces clear, sharp-edged shadows, the thought of a hidden human depth seems bizarre and like a curious, even slightly touching fantasy, like a mirage, that arises when I look too long at the waves flashing in that light. On the other hand, if city and river are clouded over on a dreary January day by a dome of shadowless light and boring gray, I know no greater certainty than this: that all human action is only an extremely imperfect, ridiculously helpless expression of a hidden internal life of unimagined depths that presses to the surface without ever being able to reach it even remotely.
And to this amazing, upsetting unreliability of my judgment is added another experience that, since I have come to know it, steeps my life continually in a distressing uncertainty: that, in this matter, the really most important one for us human beings, I waver even when it concerns myself. For when I sit in front of my favorite café, basking in the sun, and overhear the tinkling laughter of the passing Senhoras, my whole inner world seems filled down to the deepest corner, and is known to me through and through because it exhausts itself in these pleasant feelings. Yet, if a disenchanting, sobering layer of clouds pushes in before the sun, with one fell swoop, I am sure there are hidden depths and abysses in me, where unimagined things could break out and sweep me away. Then I quickly pay and hastily seek diversion in the hope that the sun might soon break out again and restore the reassuring superficiality.
Gregorius opened the picture of Amadeu de Prado and leaned the book against the table lamp. Sentence after sentence, he read the translated text into the bold, melancholy eyes. Only once had he done something like that: when he had read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as a student. A plaster bust of the emperor had stood on the table, and when he worked on the text, he seemed to be doing it under the aegis of his mute presence. But between then and now there was a difference, which Gregorius felt ever more clearly as the night progressed, without being able to put it into words. He knew only one thing as two o'clock approached: With the sharpness of his perception, the Portuguese aristocrat had granted him an alertness and precision of feeling that didn't come even from the wise emperor, whose meditations he had devoured as if they were aimed directly at him. In the meantime, Gregorius had translated another note:
PALAVRAS NUM SILêNCIO DE OURO. WORDS IN GOLDEN SILENCE. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in the café, I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over—at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I hear myself and have to admit that I too repeat the eternally same things. They're so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by being used millions of times. Do they still have any meaning? Naturally, the exchange of words functions, people act on them, they laugh and cry, they go left or right, the waiter brings the coffee or tea. But that's not what I want to ask. The question is: Are they still an expression of thoughts? Or only effective sounds that drive people here and there because the worn grooves of babble incessantly flash?
Then I go to the beach and hold my head far into the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts: May it blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid language habits out of me so I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the slag of the same talk. But the first time I have to say something, it's all as before. The cleansing I long for doesn't come by itself. I have to do something, and I have to do it with words. But what? It's not that I'd like to get out of my own language and into another. No, it has nothing to do with linguistic desertion. And I also tell myself something else: You can't invent a new language. But is that what would I like?
Maybe it's like this: I'd like to reset Portuguese words. The sentences that would emerge from this new setting might not be odd or eccentric, not exalted, affected or artificial. They must be archetypal sentences of the Portuguese that constitute its center so that you would have the feeling that they originated directly and undefiled from the transparent, sparkling nature of this language. The words must be as unblemished as polished marble, and they must be pure as the notes in a Bach partita, which turn everything that is not themselves into perfect silence. Sometimes, when a remnant of conciliation with the linguistic sludge is in me, I think, it could be the pleasant silence of a cozy living room or the relaxed silence between lovers. But when I am utterly overcome by rage at the sticky habits of words, then it must be no less than the clear, cool silence of the unlighted outer space, where I pull my noiseless orbits as the only one who speaks Portuguese. The waiter, the barber, the conductor—they would be puzzled if they heard the newly set words and their amazement would refer to the beauty of the sentences, a beauty that would be nothing but the gleam of their clarity. They would be—I imagine—cogent sentences, and could even be called inexorable. Incorruptible and firm they would stand there and thus be like the words of a god. At the same time, they would be without exaggeration and without pomposity, precise and so laconic that you couldn't take away one single word, one single comma. Thus they would be like a poem, plaited by a goldsmith of words.
Hunger made Gregorius's stomach ache and he forced himself to eat something. Later he sat with a cup of tea in the dark living room. What now? Twice more the doorbell had rung, and the last time he had heard the stifled buzz of the phone was shortly before midnight. Tomorrow they would file a missing person's report and then the police would appear at the door sometime. He could still go back. At quarter to eight he would walk across the Kirchenfeldbrücke, enter the Gymnasium and wipe out his enigmatic absence with some story that would make him look ludicrous, but that was all, and it suited him. They would never learn anything of the enormous distance he had covered internally in less than twenty-four hours.
But that was it: he had covered it. And he didn't want to let himself be forced by others to undo this silent journey. He took out a map of Europe and considered how you got to Lisbon by train. Train information, he learned on the phone, didn't open until six o'clock. He started packing.
It was almost four when he sat in the chair, ready to leave. Outside, it started snowing. Suddenly all courage deserted him. It was a crackpot idea. A nameless, confused Portuguese woman. Yellowed notes of a Portuguese aristocrat. A language course for beginners. The idea of time running out. You don't run away to Lisbon in the middle of winter because of that.
At five, Gregorius called Constantine Doxiades, his eye doctor. They had often called each other in the middle of the night to share their common suffering from insomnia. Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity. Sometimes he played a blind game of speed chess with the Greek, and afterward Gregorius could sleep a little before it was time to go to school.
"Doesn't make much sense, does it?" said Gregorius at the end of his faltering story. The Greek was silent. Gregorius was familiar with that. Now he would shut his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose with thumb and index finger.
"Yes, ideed, it does make sense," said the Greek now. "Indeed."
"Will you help me if, on the way, I don't know how to go on?"
"Just call. Day or night. Don't forget the spare glasses."
There it was again, the laconic certainty in his voice. A medical certainty, but also a certainty that went far beyond anything professional; the certainty of a man who took time for his thoughts so they were later expressed in valid judgments. For twenty years, Gregorius had been going to this doctor, the only one who could remove his fear of going blind. Sometimes, he compared him with his father, who, after his wife's premature death, seemed—no matter where he was or what he did—to dwell everywhere in the dusty safety of a museum. Gregorius had learned young that it was very fragile, this safety. He had liked his father and there had been moments when the feeling was even stronger and deeper than simple liking. But he had suffered from the fact that the father was not someone you could rely on, could not hold on to, unlike the Greek, whose solid judgment you could trust. Later, he had sometimes felt guilty about this accusation. The safety and self-confidence he didn't have weren't something a person could control or be accused for lacking. You had to be lucky with yourself to be a self-confident person. And his father hadn't had much luck, either with himself or with others.
Gregorius sat down at the kitchen table and drafted letters to the Rector. They were either too abrupt or too apologetic. At six, he called railroad information. From Geneva, the trip took twenty-six hours. It went through Paris and Irún in the Basque region, and from there with the night train to Lisbon, arriving at eleven in the morning. Gregorius ordered the ticket. The train to Geneva left at eight-thirty.
Now he got the letter right.
Honored Rector, Dear Colleague K?gi,
You will have learned by now that I left class yesterday without an explanation and didn't come back, and you will also know that I have remained incommunicado. I am well, nothing has happened to me. But, in the course of the day yesterday, I had an experience that has changed a great deal. It is too personal and still much too obscure for me to put it on paper now. I must simply ask you to accept my abrupt and unexplained act. You know me well enough, I think, to know that it does not happen out of imprudence, irresponsibility or indifference. I am setting off on a distant journey and when I will return and in what sense is wide open. I don't expect you to keep the position open for me. Most of my life has been closely intertwined with this Gymnasium, and I am sure I will miss it. But now, something is driving me away from it and it could well be that this movement is final. You and I are both admirers of Marcus Aurelius, and you will remember this passage in his Meditations: "Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others… . But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy."
Thank you for the trust you have always shown me and for the good cooperation. You will find—I'm sure—the right words for the students, words that will let them know how much I liked working with them. Before I left yesterday, I looked at them and thought: How much time they still have before them!
In the hope of your understanding and with best wishes for you and your work, I remain yours,
Raimund Gregorius
P.S. I left my books on the desk. Would you pick them up and make sure nothing happens to them?
Gregorius mailed the letter at the railroad station. Then at the ATM, his hands shook. He polished his glasses and made sure he had his passport, ticket and address book. He found a seat at the window. When the train left for Geneva, it was snowing big, slow flakes.
4
As long as possible, Gregorius's eyes clung to the last houses of the city. When they had finally and irrevocably disappeared from view, he took out the notebook and started writing down the names of the students he had taught over time. He started with the previous year and worked backward into the past. For every name he sought a face, a characteristic gesture and a telling episode. He had no trouble with the last three years, then he kept having the feeling that somebody was missing. In the mid-nineties, the classes consisted of only a few faces and names, and then the chronological sequence blurred. What remained were only a few boys and girls who stood out.
He shut the notebook. From time to time, in the city, he had run into a student he had taught many years earlier. They weren't boys and girls now, but men and women with spouses, professions and children. He was taken aback when he saw the changes in their faces. Sometimes just because of change: a premature bitterness, a harried look, a symptom of serious illness. But what usually startled him was the simple fact that the altered faces indicated the incessant passing of time and the merciless decline of all living things. Then he looked at his hands with their first age spots, and sometimes he took out photos of himself as a student and tried to visualize how it had been to cover this long stretch to the present, day after day, year after year. On such days, he was jumpier than usual and then would appear unannounced at Doxiades's office so he could once again dispel his fear of going blind. Encounters with students who had lived many years abroad, on other continents, in other climates, with other languages, threw him off balance the most. And you? Still in Kirchenfeld? they asked, and their movements showed their impatience to go on. At night after such an encounter, first he would defend himself against these questions and later against the feeling of having to defend himself.
And now, with all this going through his head, he sat in the train, after more than twenty-four hours without sleep, and traveled toward a future as uncertain as he had ever had before him.
The stop in Lausanne was a temptation. Across the same platform was the train to Bern. Gregorius imagined getting off in the Bern railroad station. He looked at the clock. If he took a taxi to Kirchenfeld, he could still make the fourth period. The letter—he had to catch the mailman tomorrow or ask K?gi to give him back the envelope unopened. Unpleasant but not impossible. Now his look fell on the notebook on the compartment table. Without opening it, he saw the list of student names. And all of a sudden, he understood: what had started as the temptation to hold on to something familiar after the last Bern houses slipped away, had become more a farewell as the hours passed. To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance. You had to turn the unspoken, diffuse self-understanding it had wrapped around you into a clarity that showed what it meant to you. And that meant it had to congeal into something with distinct contours. Something as distinct as the list of the many students who had meant more to his life than anything else. Gregorius felt as if the train now rolling out of the railroad station also left a piece of him behind. He seemed driven onto an ice floe that had come loose in a mild earthquake, onto an open cold sea.
As the train picked up speed, he fell asleep and woke up only when he felt the car come to a stop in the Geneva railroad station. On the way to the French high-speed train, he was as excited as if he had set out for a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. As soon as he had taken his seat, the car filled up with a French tour group. A chatter of hysterical elegance filled the car, and when someone in an open coat bent over him to put a suitcase on the storage shelf, Gregorius's eyeglasses were torn off. Then he did something he had never done on his own: he took his things and moved into first class.
The few opportunities he had had to travel first class were twenty years ago. It had been Florence who had urged it, he had gone along and sat down on the expensive cushion with a feeling of fraud. Do you find me boring? he had asked her after one of those trips. What? But Mundus, you can't ask me such a thing! she had said and ran her hand through her hair as she always did when she was at a loss. Now, when the train started moving, as Gregorius stroked the elegant cushion with both hands, his act seemed like a belated, childish revenge he didn't really understand. He was glad nobody was sitting nearby who could have witnessed the foolish feeling.
He was afraid of the extra fee he had to pay the conductor, and when the man had gone, he counted his money twice. He whispered the pin number of his credit card to himself and wrote it in the notebook. Shortly after, he tore out the page and threw it away. In Geneva, it had stopped snowing and now he saw the sun again for the first time in weeks. It warmed his face behind the window-pane and he calmed down. He had always had much too much money in his checking account, he did know that. What's going on with your money? said the bank teller when she saw again what had accumulated because he withdrew so little. You must be doing something with your money! She invested it for him and so, over the years, he had become a prosperous man who seemed oblivious to his prosperity.
Gregorius thought of his two Latin books he had left on the desk this time yesterday. Anneli Weiss was on the flyleaf, written in ink in a childish hand. At home there wasn't money for new books, so he had scoured the city until he found used copies in a secondhand bookstore. When he produced his find, his father's Adam's apple had moved fiercely, it always moved fiercely when something weighed on his mind. At first, he was bothered by the strange name in the book. But then he had imagined the previous owner as a girl with white kneesocks and windblown hair, and soon he wouldn't have traded the used book for a new one at any price. Nevertheless, he had later enjoyed being able to buy old texts in beautiful, expensive editions with the money he started earning as a substitute teacher. That was now more than thirty years ago, and still seemed a little unreal to him today. Just recently, he had stood at the bookshelves and thought: I can afford such a library!
Slowly, the memory images in Gregorius were distorted into dream images in which the thin book where his mother wrote down what she earned by cleaning kept popping up like a tormenting will-o'-the-wisp. He was glad when he was awakened by the noise of a smashing glass.
An hour to Paris. Gregorius sat down in the dining car and looked out into a bright, early spring day. And there, all of a sudden, he realized that he was in fact making this trip—that it wasn't only a possibility, something he had thought up on a sleepless night and that could have been, but something that really and truly was taking place. And the more space he gave this feeling, the more it seemed to him that the relation of possibility and reality were beginning to change. K?gi, his school and all the students in his notebook really had existed, but only as possibilities that had been accidentally realized. But what he was experiencing in this moment—the sliding and muted thunder of the train, the slight clink of the glasses moving on the next table, the odor of rancid oil coming from the kitchen, the smoke of the cigarette the cook now and then puffed—possessed a reality that had nothing to do with mere possibility or with realized possibility, which was instead pure and simple reality, filled with the density and overwhelming inevitability marking something utterly real.
Gregorius sat before the empty plate and the steaming cup of coffee and had the feeling of never having been so awake in his whole life. And it seemed to him that it wasn't a matter of degree, as when you slowly shook off sleep and became more awake until you were fully there. It was different. It was a different, new kind of wakefulness, a new kind of being in the world he had never known before. When the Gare de Lyon came in sight, he went back to his seat and afterward, when he set foot on the platform, it seemed to him as if, for the first time, he was fully aware of getting off a train.
5
The force of memory hit him unprepared. He hadn't forgotten that this had been their first railroad station, their first arrival together in a foreign city. Naturally he hadn't forgotten that. But he hadn't figured that, when he stood here, it would be as if no time at all had elapsed. The green iron girders and the red pipes. The arches. The translucent roof.
"Let's go to Paris!" Florence had suddenly said at the first breakfast in his kitchen, arms wound around a drawn-up leg.
"You mean …"
"Yes, now. Right now!"
She had been his student, a pretty, usually disheveled girl who turned all heads with her provocative moodiness. From one semester to the next, she had become first-rate in Latin and Greek, and the first time he entered the optional Hebrew class that year, she was sitting in the first row. But Gregorius would never have even dreamed it could have anything to do with him.
The matriculation exam came and another year went by before they met in the university cafeteria and sat there until they were thrown out.
"What a blind worm you are!" she said when she took off his glasses. "You didn't notice anything! Everybody knew! Everybody!"
It was correct, thought Gregorius, sitting now in the taxi to Gare Montparnasse, that he was one who didn't notice such a thing—one who was so inconspicous even to himself that he couldn't have believed that someone could have a strong feeling for him—him! But with Florence he was right in the end.
"You never really meant me," he had said to her at the end of their five-year marriage.
Those were the only accusing words he had said to her the whole time. They had burned like fire and everything seemed to turn to ashes.
She had looked at the floor. In spite of everything, he had hoped for denial. It hadn't come.
LA COUPOLE. Gregorius hadn't expected to go down Boulevard Montparnasse and see the restaurant, where their separation had been sealed without a word. He asked the driver to stop and looked silently for a while at the red awning with the yellow letters and the three stars left and right. It had been an honor for Florence, a doctoral student, to be invited to this conference on Romance literature. On the phone, she had sounded ecstatic, almost hysterical, he thought, so he hesitated to meet her for the weekend as arranged. But then he had gone and had met with her new friends in this famous resturant, whose reputation for the most exquisite food and the most expensive wines had proved to him as soon as he entered that he didn't belong here.
"One more moment," he said to the driver and crossed the street.
Nothing had changed, and he immediately saw the table where he, very unsuitably dressed, had faced these literary hotshots boldly. They had been talking about Horace and Sappho, he remembered as he now stood in the way of the hurrying and irritated waiter. Nobody could keep up with him as he quoted verse after verse, crushing to dust the witty aper?us of the well-dressed gentlemen of the Sorbonne with his Bern accent, one after the other, until the table grew silent.
On the way back, Florence had sat alone in the dining car while the aftershock of his rage slowly ebbed and gave way to a sadness that he had needed to stand up to Florence like that; for that's what it was naturally about.
Lost in those distant events, Gregorius had forgotten the time and now the taxi driver had to drive at breakneck speed to get to Gare Montparnasse on time. When he finally sat breathless in his seat and the train for Irún started moving, a sense that had assaulted him in Geneva returned: that it was the train and not he who decided that this very awake and very real trip carrying him further out of his former life, hour after hour, station after station, would go on. For three hours, to Bordeaux, there would be no more stops, no possibility of turning around.
He looked at the clock. At school, the first day without him was coming to an end. In these minutes, the six students of Hebrew were waiting for him. At six, after the double class, he had sometimes gone with them to a café, and then he had talked to them of the historical growth and contingency of the biblical texts. Ruth Gautschi and David Lehmann, who wanted to study theology and worked the hardest, kept finding a reason not to go along. A month ago he had talked to them about it. They had the feeling that he was taking something away from them, they had answered evasively. Naturally, these texts could also be examined philologically. After all, they were the Holy Scriptures.
Behind closed eyes, Gregorius recommended to the Rector to hire a theology student for Hebrew, one of his former students. With her copper-colored hair, she had sat in the same place as Florence once had. But his hope that that might not be accidental had been in vain.
For a few moments his head was perfectly empty, then Gregorius pictured the face of the Portuguese woman emerging white, almost transparent, behind the rubbing towel. Once again, he stood in the school bathroom at the mirror and felt that he didn't want to wipe away the phone number the enigmatic woman had drawn on his forehead. Once again, he stood up at his desk, took the damp coat off the hook and went out of the classroom.
Português. Gregorius started, opened his eyes, and looked out at the flat French landscape, where the sun was bending down to the horizon. The word that had been like a melody lost in a dreamy expanse, all of a sudden had lost its force. He tried to retrieve the magical sound of the voice, but what he managed to grasp was only a rapidly fading echo, and the vain attempt only strengthened the feeling that the precious word, the basis of this whole crazy trip, had slipped away. And it didn't help that he still knew precisely how the speaker on the language record had pronounced the word.
He went to the bathroom and held his face under the chlorinated water for a long time. Back in his seat, he took the book of the Portuguese aristocrat out of his bag and started translating the next passage. At first, it was mainly an escape, the desperate attempt, despite the fear, to keep on believing in this trip. But after the first sentence, the text fascinated him again as much as it had in the kitchen at night.
NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.
From time to time, Gregorius glanced up from the text and looked out to the west. In the remaining brightness of the twilight sky, it seemed the sea could now be imagined. He put the dictionary away and shut his eyes.
If I could see the sea just once, his mother had said half a year before her death, as if she felt that the end was near; but we simply can't afford that.
What bank will give me a loan, Gregorius heard the father say, and for such a thing.
Gregorius had been angry at him for this placid resignation. And then, he, who was still a student in Kirchenfeld, had done something that surprised him so much he never got rid of the feeling that maybe it really didn't happen.
It was late March, early spring. People hung their coats over their arms, and mild air streamed into the annex through the open window. The annex had been put up a few years earlier because there was no room in the main building of the Gymnasium, and it had become a tradition to put the seniors there. Changing to the annex seemed the first step toward graduation. Feelings of liberation and fear balanced each other. One more year and then it was finally over … One more year and then you had to … These alternating feelings were expressed in the way the students strolled to the annex, nonchalant and scared at the same time. Even now, forty years later in the train to Irún, Gregorius could feel how it had been to be in his body back then.
The afternoon began with Greek. It was the Rector who taught, K?gi's predecessor. He had the most beautiful Greek handwriting you could imagine, he drew the letters ceremonially, especially the loops—as in Omega or Theta, or when he pulled the Eta down—were the purest calligraphy. He loved Greek. But he loved it in the wrong way, thought Gregorius at the back of the classroom. His way of loving it was a conceited way. It wasn't by celebrating the words. If it had been that—Gregorius would have liked it. But when this man wrote out the most remote and difficult verb forms as a virtuoso, he celebrated not the words, but rather he himself as one who knew them. The words thus became ornaments for him, he adorned himself with them, they turned into something like the polka-dotted bow tie he wore year in, year out. They flowed from his writing hand with the signet ring as if they too were a kind of signet ring, a conceited jewel and just as superfluous. And so, the Greek words really stopped being Greek words. It was as if the gold dust from the signet ring corroded their Greek essence that was revealed only to those who loved it for its own sake. Poetry for the Rector was something like an exquisite piece of furniture, a fine wine or an elegant evening gown. Gregorius had the feeling that he robbed him of the verses of Aeschylus and Sophocles with this smugness. He seemed to know nothing of Greek theater. Or no, he knew everything about it, was often there, guided educational tours and came back with a suntan. But he didn't understand anything about it—even if Gregorius couldn't have said what he meant by that.
He had looked out the open window of the annex and thought of his mother's sentence, a sentence seething with his rage at the Rector's conceit, even though he couldn't have explained the connection. He felt his heart beat in his throat. A look at the board assured him that it would take the Rector a while to finish the sentence he had started and turn around to the students to explain. Without a sound, he pushed the chair back, as the others went on writing with bent backs. He left the open notebook on the desk. With the tense slowness of someone preparing a surprise attack, he took two steps to the open window, sat down on the sill, swung his legs over and was outside.
The last thing he saw inside was the amazed and amused face of Eva, the girl with red hair, freckles, and the squint that had always rested on him mockingly, to his despair, on the boy wearing the thick eyeglasses with the cheap and ugly frames. She turned to her bench mate and whispered something in her hair. "Unbelievable!" she would say. She said it all the time. And so she was called Unbelievable. "Unbelievable!" she had said when she found out her nickname.
Gregorius had walked quickly to B?renplatz. It was a market, one stand after another, and you made your way slowly. When the crowd forced him to stop at a stand, his eye fell on the open cashbox, a simple metal case with one compartment for coins and another for bills, which formed a thick pile. The market woman was now bending over, fiddling with something under the display, her broad behind jutting out in the coarse cloth of a checked dress. Gregorius had slowly pushed toward the cashbox, his look circling over the people. With two steps, he was behind the counter, grabbed the bundle of bills and plunged into the crowd. When he went up the street to the railroad station, panting, and forcing himself to walk calmly, he expected somebody to call him from behind or take hold of him. But nothing had happened.
They lived on L?nggasse, in a gray apartment house with dirty plasterwork, and when Gregorius entered the staircase, which smelled of cabbage from morning to night, he saw himself entering the room of the sick mother he wanted to surprise with the announcement that she would soon see the sea. Only on the last landing before the apartment door did he realize that the whole thing was impossible, absolutely ludicrous. How was he to explain to her and later to the father where he had suddenly gotten so much money? He, who had no practice in lying?
On the way back to B?renplatz, he bought an envelope and stuck the bundle of bills inside. The woman in the checked dress had a tear-stained face when he came back to her stand. He bought some fruit, and when she was busy with the scale in the other corner, he pushed the envelope under the vegetables. Shortly before the end of recess, he was back at school, climbed into the annex through the open window and sat down in his seat.
"Unbelievable!" said Eva when she saw him and she began to regard him with more respect than before. But that was less important than he had thought. More important was that the discovery about himself given by the last hour didn't inspire any horror in him, but only a great amazement that reverberated for weeks.
The train left the railroad station of Bordeaux for Biarritz. Outside it was almost night, and Gregorius saw himself in the window. What would have become of him if the one who had taken the money out of the cashbox back then had determined his life instead of the one who began to love the ancient silent words so much that he granted them sovereignty over everything else? What did that breakout have in common with this one now? Anything?
Gregorius reached for Prado's book and searched for the laconic note the bookdealer in the Spanish bookstore on Hirschengraben had translated for him:
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us—what happens with the rest?
In Biarritz, a man and woman got on, stood at the seat in front of Gregorius and discussed their seat reservation. Vinte e oito. It took him a while to identify the repeated sounds as Portuguese words and to confirm his assumption: twenty-eight. He concentrated on what they were saying and now and then he managed to make out a word in the next half hour, but only a few. Tomorrow morning, he would get out in a city where most of what the people said would swoosh by him incomprehensibly. He thought of Bubenplatz, B?renplatz, Bundesterrasse, the Kirchenfeldbrücke. Meanwhile, it had become pitch-dark outside. Gregorius felt for the money, the credit cards, and the spare glasses. He was anxious.
They came to the railroad station of Hendaye, the French border town. The car emptied out. When the Portuguese couple noticed that, they were jolted and grabbed the suitcases from the shelf. "Isto ainda n?o é Irún," said Gregorius: This isn't yet Irún. It was a sentence from the language course record, only the name of the town was different. The Portuguese people hesitated about his awkward pronunciation and the slowness with which he strung the words together. But they looked out and now they saw the railroad station sign. "Muito obrigada," said the woman. "De nada," replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on.
Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic? But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning. A few minutes later, when he set foot on the platform of Irún, all fear had vanished, and he walked confidently to the sleeping car.
6
It was ten o'clock when the train that would cross the Iberian Peninsula the next morning started moving, the dreary railroad station lamps slid past one after another into the dark. The two compartments next to Gregorius had remained empty. Two compartments down, toward the dining car, a tall slim man with graying hair was leaning on his door. "Boa noite," he said when their eyes met. "Boa noite," said Gregorius.
When he heard the awkward pronunciation, a smile flitted over the stranger's face. It was a chiseled face with clear, definite features, and there was something distinguished and reserved about it. The man's dark clothing was conspicuously elegant and made Gregorius think of the lobby of an opera house. Only the loosened tie didn't fit. Now the man folded his arms over his vest, leaned his head against the door and shut his eyes. With his eyes shut, the face looked very white and radiated fatigue, a fatigue that must have come from other things than the late hour. When the train had reached its full speed a few minutes later, the man opened his eyes, nodded to Gregorius, and disappeared into his compartment.
Gregorius would have given anything to be able to fall asleep, but even the monotonous beat of the wheels coming through the bed didn't help. He sat up and pressed his forehead against the window. Desolate little railroad stations slid past, milky, diffuse lightbulbs, darting past, illegible place names, parked baggage carts, a head with a cap in a railroad guard hut, a stray dog, a rucksack on a pillar, with a blond mop of hair on top. The certainty granted by the first Portuguese words began to crumble. Just call. Day or night. He heard Doxiades's voice and thought of their first meeting twenty years earlier, when he still had a strong accent.
"Blind? No. You just got a bad break with your eyes. We check the retina regularly. Besides, there are lasers now. No reason to panic." On the way to the door, he had stood still and looked at him intensely. "Any other concerns?"
Gregorius had shook his head mutely. Only a few months later did he tell him he had seen the divorce from Florence coming. The Greek had nodded, it seemed not to surprise him. Sometimes we're afraid of something because we're afraid of something else, he had said.
Shortly before midnight, Gregorius went into the dining car. The car was empty except for the man with graying hair playing chess with the waiter. In fact, the car was closed, the waiter indicated, but then he got Gregorius a mineral water and beckoned him to join them. Gregorius quickly saw that the man, who had put on a pair of gold-framed glasses, had fallen into the waiter's cunning trap. With his hand on the piece, the man looked at him before he moved. Gregorius shook his head and the man withdrew his hand. The waiter, a man with calloused hands whose coarse features didn't seem to conceal a brain for chess, looked up surprised. Now the man with the gold eyeglasses turned the board toward Gregorius and gestured to him to play. It was a long, tough struggle and it was two o'clock when the waiter gave up.
Afterward, when they stood at his compartment door, the man asked Gregorius where he was from and then they spoke French. He took this train every two weeks, said the man, and only once had he been able to beat this waiter, while he usually beat others. He introduced himself: José António da Silveira. He was, as he said, a businessman and sold porcelain in Biarritz and since he was afraid of flying, he took the train.
"Who knows the real reasons for his fear," he said after a pause and now the exhaustion Gregorius had noted earlier appeared again on his face.
Then, when he told how he had taken over his father's little business and had built it into a big firm, he talked about himself as about somebody else, who had made thoroughly understandable but altogether wrong decisions. And it sounded the same when he talked of his divorce and the two children he hardly got to see anymore. Disappointment and sadness were in his voice, and what impressed Gregorius was that they were devoid of self-pity.
"The problem is," said Silveira, as the train stopped in the railroad station of Valladolid, "that we have no grasp of our life as a whole. Neither forward nor backward. If something goes well, we simply had good luck." An invisible hammer tested the brakes. "And how do you come to be in this train?"
They sat on the bed of Silveiras's compartment as Gregorius told his story. He left out the Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke. That was something he could tell Doxiades, not a stranger. He was glad Silveira didn't ask him to take out Prado's book. He didn't want anybody else to read it and say something about it.
There was silence when he had finished. Silveira's mind was busy, Gregorius saw from the way he turned his signet ring and the brief, shy glances he cast at him.
"And you just got up and left the school? Just like that?"
Gregorius nodded. Suddenly he regretted talking about it; something precious had been endangered. Now he wanted to try to sleep, he said. Silveira took out a little notebook. Would he repeat to him the words of Marcus Aurelius about the impulses of one's soul? When Gregorius left his compartment, Silveira sat bent over the notebook going along the words with the pen.
Gregorius dreamed of red cedars. The words cedros vermelhos kept flickering through his restless sleep. It was the name of the publisher of Prado's notes. He hadn't paid any special attention to it previously. It was only Silveira's question of how he wanted to find the author that reminded him he would first have to look for this publishing house. Maybe he had published the book privately, he had thought as he fell asleep; then the red cedars would have had a meaning known only to Amadeu de Prado. In the dream, he wandered with the mysterious name on his lips and the phone book under his arm, through twisted, steeply rising streets of Lisbon, lost in a faceless city, knowing only that it was set on hills.
When he woke up at six o'clock and saw the name SALAMANCA before his compartment window, out of the blue, a sluice gate of memory opened that had remained closed for four decades. The first thing it released was the name of another city: Isfahan. Suddenly it was there, the name of the Persian city where he had wanted to go after he finished school. The name bearing so much mysterious strangeness touched Gregorius at this moment, like the code of another possible life he hadn't dared live. And as the train now left the Salamanca station, once again after so long, he lived through the feelings back then when that other life had both opened and closed.
It had started when the Hebrew teacher had them read the Book of Job after a year. For Gregorius, it had been intoxicating when he started understanding the sentences and a path opened for him leading into the Orient. In Karl May, the Orient sounded very German, not only because of the language. Now, in the book read from back to front, it sounded like the Orient. Eliphaz of Telman, Bildad of Shuach, Zofar of Na'ama. Job's three friends. Even the names, in their bewitching foreignness, seemed to come from beyond all oceans. What a wonderful, dreamlike world that was!
Afterward, for a while, he had wanted to become an Orientalist. Someone who knew his way around in Morgenland, the East, he loved the German word, it led out of L?nggasse into a bright light. Shortly before graduation, he had applied for the position of tutor to the children of a Swiss industrialist in Isfahan. Reluctantly—worried about him, but also fearing the void he would leave behind—the father had given him the thirteen francs thirty for the Persian grammar, and he had written the new codes of the Orient on the small blackboard in his room.
But then a dream had begun haunting him, a dream he seemed to dream all night long. It had been a very simple dream and part of the torment was this simplicity, which seemed to increase the more often the image returned. For in fact the dream had consisted of only one single image: hot Oriental sand, desert sand, white and scorching, had blown on his eyeglasses from the smoldering breath of Persia and had settled there as a white-hot crust robbing him of all sight, melting the lenses and gnawing his eyes.
After two or three weeks when the dream kept popping up and haunting him far into the day, he had taken back the Persian grammar and given the money back to the father. The three francs thirty he could keep, he had kept in a small box, and it had been as if he now possessed Persian money.
What would have become of him if he had overcome the fear of the scorching dust of the Orient and had gone? Gregorius thought of how cold-bloodedly he had reached into the cashbox of the market woman. Would that have been enough to cope with everything that would have assailed him in Isfahan? The Papyrus. Why did that decades-old joke that couldn't get to him hurt so much all of a sudden?
Silveira's plate was empty when Gregorius entered the dining car, and the Portuguese couple with whom he had exchanged his first Portuguese words in the early evening, were already on their second cup of coffee.
He had spent an hour lying awake in bed, thinking about the mailman who would enter the lobby of the Gymnasium at nine and give the mail to the janitor. Today, his letter would be there. K?gi wouldn't believe his eyes. Mundus was running away from his life. Anybody else, but not him. The news would make the rounds, upstairs and down, and the students on the steps at the entrance would talk of nothing else.
Gregorius had gone through his colleagues in his mind, imagining what they'd think, feel and say. As he did, he had made a discovery that jolted him: he wasn't sure of a single one of them. At first, things had looked different: Burri, for instance, an army major and enthusiastic churchgoer, found it incomprehensible, downright deviant, and reprehensible, for what was to happen now with the teaching; Anita Mühletaler, who had just gone through a divorce, tilted her head pensively, she could imagine such a thing, even if not for herself; Kalbermatten, the skirt-chaser and secret anarchist from Saas-Fee, might say in the teachers' lounge: "Why not?"; while Virginie Ledoyen, the French teacher, whose prissy appearance contrasted glaringly with her sparkling name, would react to the news with an executioner's look. All that seemed quite clear at first. But then it occurred to Gregorius how he had seen the devout paterfamilias Burri a few months ago with a blond in a short dress who seemed to be more than an acquaintance; how petty Anita Mühletaler could be when students raised hell; how cowardly Kalbermatten was about resisting K?gi; and how easily students who knew how to flatter her could wind Virginie Ledoyen around their little finger and make her drop her strict plans.
Could something be inferred from that? Something about the attitude to him and his surprising act? Could concealed understanding or even secret envy be assumed? Gregorius had sat up and was looking out at the landscape steeped in the silvery shimmering green of the olive groves. His familiarity with his colleagues all these years turned out to be curdled ignorance that had become deceptive habit. And was it indeed important—really important—to know what they thought? Was it only because of his bleary head that he didn't know that or was he becoming aware of a strangeness that had always existed, but had been hidden behind social rituals?
Compared with the face that had become open in the dim light of the compartment at night—open to the feelings that thrust out from inside, and open to the look from outside that sought to fathom them—this morning, Silveira's features were shut. At first glance, it looked as if he regretted opening himself up to a total stranger in the intimacy of the compartment smelling of wool blankets and disinfectant, and Gregorius sat down hesitantly at his table. But he soon understood: It wasn't retreat and rejection that was expressed in the firm, controlled features, but rather a pensive sobriety revealing that the encounter with Gregorius perplexed Silveira, had evoked surprising feelings he was now trying to figure out.
He pointed to the phone next to his cup. "I've reserved a room for you in the hotel where I put up my business partner. Here's the address."
He handed Gregorius a business card with the information on the back. He had to look through some papers before they arrived, he said, and prepared to stand up. But then he leaned back again and the way he looked at Gregorius proved that something had started in him. Had he never regretted devoting his life to ancient languages, he asked. That surely meant a very quiet, withdrawn life.
Do you find me boring? It occurred to Gregorius how the question he had asked Florence back then had preoccupied him on the trip yesterday and something of that must have been shown on his face, for Silveira said hastily, please don't misunderstand, he was only trying to imagine how it would be to live such a life that would be so completely different from his own.
It had been the life he had wanted, said Gregorius, and even as the words took shape in him, he feared there was defiance in his firm expression. Only two days ago, when he had stepped on the Kirchenfeldbrücke and seen the Portuguese woman reading, he wouldn't have had any reason for this defiance. He would have said exactly the same thing, but the words wouldn't have had the trace of obstinacy, but would have come from him as an inconspicuous, calm breath.
And why are you sitting here, then? Gregorius was afraid of the question and for a moment, the elegant Portuguese man looked like an inquisitor.
How long does it take to learn Greek, Silveira asked now. Gregorius breathed a sigh of relief and plunged into an answer that was much too long. Could he write down a few words for him in Hebrew, here on the napkin, asked Silveira.
And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, wrote Gregorius and translated it for him.
Silveira's phone rang. He had to go, he said, when he finished his conversation. He thrust the napkin into his jacket pocket. "What was the word for light?" he asked, standing up, and he repeated it to himself on his way to the door.
The broad river outside must already have been the Tejo. Gregorius started: that means they would soon arrive. He returned to his compartment, which had been converted back into a regular compartment with a cushioned bench, and sat down at the window. He didn't want the journey to end. What was he to do in Lisbon? He had a hotel. He would give the bellhop a tip, close the door, rest. And then?
Hesitantly, he picked up Prado's book and leafed through it.
SAUDADE PARADOXAL. PARADOXICAL YEARNING. For 1,922 days I attended the Liceu where my father sent me, the strictest one in the whole country, they said. "You don't need to become a scholar," he said, and tried a smile that, as usual, failed. By the third day, I realized that I had to count the days so as not to be crushed by them.
As Gregorius was looking up to crush in the dictionary, the train pulled into the Santa Apolónia railroad station of Lisbon.
The few sentences had captivated him. They were the first sentences that revealed something about the external life of the Portuguese man. Student of a strict Gymnasium, who counted the days, and son of a father whose smile usually failed. Was that the origin of the restrained rage conveyed in the other sentences? Gregorius couldn't have said why, but he wanted to know more about this rage. He now saw the first brushstrokes in a portrait of somebody who lived here in this city. Somebody he wanted to know. The city seemed to grow toward him in these sentences. As if it just stopped being a thoroughly strange city.
He took his suitcase and stepped out onto the platform. Silveira had waited for him. He took him to the taxi and gave the driver the address of the hotel. "You have my card," he said to Gregorius and waved a brief good-bye.
7
When Gregorius woke up, it was late afternoon and twilight was sinking over the cloud-draped city. Right after he arrived, he had gotten under the bedspread in his clothes and had slipped into a leaden sleep, clasped by the feeling that he really couldn't allow himself any sleep, for there were a thousand things to do, things with no name, but no less urgent for that, on the contrary, their eerie namelessness made them something that had to be tackled at once to keep something bad from happening, something that couldn't be named. Now as he washed his face in the bathroom, he felt with relief that the fear of missing something and feeling guilty about it fell away along with his numbness.
During the next hour, he sat at the window and tried in vain to bring order into his thoughts. Now and then, his look grazed the suitcase still packed in the corner. When night fell, he went down to the reception and had them inquire at the airport if there was still a flight to Zurich or Geneva. There weren't any, and when he went up in the elevator, he was amazed at how relieved he felt. Then he sat on the bed in the dark and tried to interpret the surprising relief. He dialed Doxiades's number and let the phone ring ten times before he hung up. He opened the book by Amadeu de Prado and read on from where he had stopped at the railroad station.
Six times a day I heard the jingle of the tower bells announcing the beginning of class and sounding as if monks were called to prayers. Thus it was 11,532 times that I clenched my teeth and went back into the gloomy building from the courtyard instead of following my imagination, which sent me through the courtyard gate out to the port, to a ship's rail, where I would then lick the salt from my lips.
Now, thirty years later, I keep coming back to this place. There isn't the slightest practical reason for it. So why? I sit on the mossy, crumbling steps at the entrance and have no idea why my heart is in my mouth. Why am I full of envy when I see the students with brown legs and light hair going in and out as if they were at home here? What is it, why do I envy them? Recently, when the window was open on a hot day, I listened to the various teachers and heard the stuttering answers of anxious students to questions that had made me tremble too. Sitting inside there once more—no, that was certainly not what I wanted. In the cool dark of the long corridor, I met the janitor, a man with a protruding, birdlike head, advancing toward me with a suspicious look. "What are you searching for here?" he asked, when I passed him. He had an asthmatic falsetto that sounded as if it came from a court in the hereafter. I stood still, without turning around. "I went to school here," I said and was filled with contempt for myself when I heard how hoarse it sounded. For a few seconds, a perfect, eerie silence reigned in the corridor. Then the man behind me shuffled off. I had felt caught red-handed. But why?
On the last day of finals, we had all stood behind our benches, the school caps on our heads, as if we were lined up for morning roll call. With measured tread, Senhor Cortês went from one to another, announced the overall grades with his usual strict expression and with the same look, he handed us our diploma. Joyless and pale, my assiduous bench mate took it and held it in his folded hands like a Bible. Giggling, the boy at the bottom of the class, the girls' suntanned favorite, let his fall to the floor like a piece of trash. Then we went out into the midday heat of a July day. What could, what should be done with all the time now before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?
Neither before nor after have I experienced anything that revealed so cogently and impressively as the following scene how different people are. The boy at the bottom of the class was the first to take off his uniform cap, spun around and threw it over the fence of the schoolyard into the pond next door where it was slowly soaked and finally disappeared under the water lilies. Three or four others followed his example and one cap remained hanging on the fence. My bench mate then straightened his cap, anxious and indignant, you couldn't tell which feeling predominated in him. What would he do tomorrow morning when there was no more reason to put on the cap? But what was most impressive was what I observed in the shadowy corner of the courtyard. Half hidden behind a dusty bush, a boy was trying to stow his cap in his schoolbag. He didn't simply want to stuff it in, that was plainly seen in the hesitant movements. He tried this and that to place it carefully; finally he made room by taking out a few books he now wedged helplessly and awkwardly under his arm. When he turned and looked around, you could read in his eyes the hope that nobody had observed him in his shameful act, along with a last trace of the childish thought, wiped out by experience, that you could become invisible by averting your eyes.
I can still feel today how I twisted my own sweaty cap back and forth. I sat on the warm moss of the entrance steps and thought of my father's imperious wish that I might become a doctor—one who might release people like him from pain. I loved him for his trust and cursed him for the crushing burden he imposed on me with his touching wish. Meanwhile, the students from the girls' school had come over. "Are you glad it's over?" asked Maria Jo?o and sat down next to me. She examined me. "Or are you sad about it, after all?"
Now I finally seem to know what keeps compelling me to undertake the trip to the school: I'd like to go back to those minutes in the schoolyard when the past had dropped off of us and the future hadn't yet begun. Time came to a halt and held its breath, as it never again did. Was it Maria Jo?o's brown knees and the fragrance of soap in her light dress that I'd like to go back to? Or is it the wish—the dreamlike, bombastic wish—to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now?
There's something peculiar about this wish, it smacks of paradox and logical peculiarity. Because the one who wishes it—isn't the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn't suffered it? To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap—it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself—the one marked by events—along on this journey. And is it conceivable that the boy back then would have defied the father's wish and not gone to medical school—as I sometimes wish today? Could he have done it and be me? There was in me back then no perspective of experience suffered that could have made me want to take another fork at the crossroads. So what good would it do me to turn back time and, extinguishing one experience after another, to turn myself into the boy who was addicted to the fresh fragrance of Maria Jo?o's dress and the sight of her brown knees? The boy with the cap—he would have had to be quite different from me to take another direction as I wish for myself today. But then, if he had, he wouldn't have become a man who would later wish to return to the previous crossroads. Can I wish myself to be him? I don't think I could be satisfied to be him. But this satisfaction can be mine only because I am not him, only as the fulfillment of wishes that aren't his. If, in fact, I were him—I couldn't wish for what would satisfy me as him, as my own wishes might, as long as I forget that I wouldn't have them at all if they had been fulfilled.
Yet I am certain I will soon wake up again with the wish to go to the school and give in to a yearning whose object can't exist because you can't even think it. Can there be anything more absurd than this: to be moved by a wish that has no conceivable object?
It was nearly midnight when Gregorius was finally sure he understood the difficult text. So Prado was a doctor and had become one because the father, whose smile usually failed, had had this imperious wish, a wish that had originated not in dictatorial arbitrariness or paternal vanity, but had developed out of the helplessness of chronic pain. Gregorius opened the phone book. There were fourteen listings under the name of Prado, but there was no Amadeu among them, no Inácio and no Almeida. Why had he assumed that Prado lived in Lisbon? Now he looked in the business directory for the publisher Cedros Vermelhos: nothing. Would he have to search through the whole country? Did that make sense? Even the slightest sense?
Gregorius set out in the nighttime city. To walk in the city after midnight—he had done that since his middle twenties when he lost the capacity to fall asleep easily. Countless times, he had walked through the empty streets of Bern, had stood still from time to time and listened like a blind man to the few steps coming or going. He loved to stand at the dark display windows of the bookshops and feel that, because the others were sleeping, all these books belonged only to him. With slow steps, he now turned the corner out of the side street of the hotel into the broad Avenida da Liberdade and went toward the Baixa, the lower part of town where the streets were arranged like a chessboard. It was cold, and a fine fog formed a milky halo around the old-fashioned streetlamps with their gold light. He found a coffee shop where he had a sandwich and coffee.
Prado kept sitting down on the steps of his school and imagining how it would have been to live a completely different life. Gregorius thought of the question Silveira had put to him and to which he had answered defiantly that he had lived the life he wanted. He felt how the image of the doubting doctor on the mossy steps and the question of the doubting businessman in the train shifted something in him, something that would never have shifted in the certain, familiar streets of Bern.
Now the only other man in the café paid and left. With a sudden inexplicable haste, Gregorius also paid and followed the man. He was an old man who dragged one leg and stood still every now and then to rest. Gregorius followed him at a long distance into Bairro Alto, the upper part of the city, until he disappeared behind the door of a narrow, shabby house. Now the light went on in the first floor, the curtain was pushed aside, and the man stood at the open window, a cigarette between his lips. From the protective dark of a doorway, Gregorius looked past him into the lighted flat. A sofa with cushions of worn-out needlepoint. Two unmatched armchairs. A glass cabinet with crockery and small, colorful porcelain figures. A crucifix on the wall. Not a single book. How was it to be this man?
After the man had shut the window and pulled the curtain shut, Gregorius emerged from the doorway. He had lost his orientation and took the next street down. Never had he followed anybody like this with the thought of how it would be to live this strange life instead of his own. It was a brand-new kind of curiosity that had just broken out in him and it suited the new kind of alertness he had experienced on the train ride and had gotten out with in the Gare de Lyon in Paris, yesterday or whenever it was.
Now and then he stood still and looked straight ahead. The ancient texts, his ancient texts, they were also full of characters who lived a life, and to read and understand the texts had always also meant reading and understanding this life. So why was everything so new now when it concerned both the Portuguese aristocrat and the limping man? On the damp cobblestones of the steep streets, he put one uncertain foot before the other and breathed a sigh of relief when he recognized the Avenida da Liberdade.
The blow caught him unprepared for he hadn't heard the roller-blader coming. He was a giant who hit Gregorius on the temple with his elbow as he overtook him and ripped off his glasses. Dazed and suddenly sightless, Gregorius stumbled a few steps and felt to his horror that he stepped on the glasses and ground them to a pulp under his feet. A wave of panic washed over him. Don't forget the spare glasses, he heard Doxiades say on the phone. Minutes passed until his breathing grew calm. Then he knelt down on the street and groped for the glass splinters and the fragments of the frame. What he could feel he brushed together and knotted into his handkerchief. Slowly he groped along the walls to the hotel.
The night porter jumped up frightened, and when Gregoius approached the mirror of the lobby, he saw blood dripping from his temple. In the elevator, he pressed the porter's handkerchief to the wound and then ran through the corridor, opened the door with trembling fingers and tumbled onto the suitcase. He felt tears of relief when his hand touched the cool metal case of the spare glasses. He put the glasses on, washed the blood off, and stuck the Band-Aid the porter had given him on the scratch on his temple. It was two-thirty. At the airport nobody answered the phone. At four he fell asleep.
8
If Lisbon hadn't been steeped in that bewitching light the next morning, Gregorius thought later, things might have taken a completely different turn. Maybe he would have gone to the airport and taken the next flight home. But the light allowed no temptation to turn back. Its glow made the whole past into something very distant, almost unreal, the will lost every shadow of the past under its luminosity, and the only possibility was to depart into the future whatever it might consist of. Bern and its snowflakes were far away and it was hard for Gregorius to believe that only three days had passed since he had met the enigmatic Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke.
After breakfast, he dialed José António da Silveira's number and reached his secretary. Could she recommend an ophthalmologist who spoke German, French, or English, he asked. Half an hour later, she called back, gave him greetings from Silveira and the name of a doctor his sister went to, a woman who had worked for a long time at the university clinics in Coimbra and Munich.
Her office was in the Alfama quarter, the oldest part of the city, behind the citadel. Gregorius walked slowly through the luminous day and avoided in time anybody who could have bumped into him. Sometimes he stood still and rubbed his eyes behind the thick lenses: So this was Lisbon, the city he had come to because, while looking at his students, he had suddenly seen his life from the end, and because the book of a Portuguese doctor had fallen into his hands and its words sounded as if they were aimed at him.
The rooms he entered an hour later didn't look like a doctor's office at all. The dark wood paneling, the original paintings, and the thick carpet gave the impression that you were in the home of a noble family, where everything had its solid form and life proceeded without a sound. It didn't surprise Gregorius that nobody was in the waiting room. No one who lived in such rooms needed to accept patients. Senhora E?a would come in a few minutes, said the woman at the reception desk. Nothing about her indicated a medical assistant. The only thing that hinted at commercial matters was a bright monitor full of names and numbers. Gregorius thought of Doxiades's sober, slightly shabby office and the cocky medical assistant. Suddenly he had the feeling of committing treason and now when one of the high doors opened and the doctor appeared, he was glad he didn't have to remain alone any longer with the unreasonable feeling.
Doutora Mariana Concei??o E?a was first of all a woman with big dark eyes you could trust. In fluent German, with a mistake only here and there, she greeted Gregorius as a friend of Silveira, and already knew why he was here. How had he come up with the bizarre idea of having to apologize for his panic about the broken glasses, she asked? Naturally, somebody as nearsighted as he had to feel he had a spare pair of glasses.
All at once, Gregorius calmed down, sank deep into the chair at her desk and wished he never had to stand up again. The woman seemed to have unlimited time for him. Gregorius had never had this feeling with any doctor, not even Doxiades, it was unreal, almost as in a dream. He had expected her to measure the spare glasses, make the usual eye tests, and then send him to the optician with a prescription. Instead, she had him tell the history of his nearsightedness, stage after stage, concern after concern. When he finally handed her the glasses, she gave him a searching look.
"You're a man who doesn't sleep well," she said.
Then she asked him to come to the instruments in the other part of the room.
The examination lasted more than an hour. The instruments looked different from those of Doxiades, and Senhora E?a studied the background of his eyes with the detail of somebody becoming familiar with a brand-new landscape. But what impressed Gregorius the most was that she repeated the test for visual acuity three times. In between were pauses when she had him walk back and forth and started a conversation about his profession.
"How well one sees depends on so many things," she said smiling when she noted his amazement.
At last, there was a diopter number that was clearly different from the usual one and the value for the two eyes was farther apart than usual. Senhora E?a saw his confusion.
"Let's just try it out," she said and touched his arm.
Gregorius wavered between resistance and trust. Trust won. The doctor gave him the business card of an optician and then she called there. With her Portuguese voice, the magic he had felt when the enigmatic woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke had pronounced the word português came back. Suddenly being in this city made sense, a sense that couldn't be named, on the contrary, it was part of this sense that it mustn't be violated by trying to capture it in words.
"Two days," said the doctor after she hung up. "With the best will in the world, says César, it can't go any faster."
Now, Gregorius took the little volume with Amadeu de Prado's notes out of his jacket pocket, showed her the peculiar name of the publisher and told of the futile search in the phone book. Yes, she said distracted, it sounds like a private publisher.
"And the red cedars—it wouldn't surprise me if they were a metaphor for something."
Gregorius had also said that to himself: a metaphor or a code for something secret—bloody or beautiful—hidden under the colorful, wilted foliage of a life story.
The doctor went into another room and came back with an address book. She opened it and ran her finger along a page.
"Here. Júlio Sim?es," she said, "a friend of my late husband, a secondhand book dealer who always seemed to us to know more about books than anyone else alive, it was really weird."
She wrote the address and explained to Gregorius where it was.
"Give him my best. And come by with the new glasses, I'd like to know if I've done it right."
When Gregorius turned around on the staircase, she was still standing in the door, with one hand on the lintel. Silveira had called her. Then she might also know that he had run away. He would gladly have told her about it and as he went down the stairs, his steps were hesitant, like someone who isn't happy to leave a place.
The sky was coated with a fine white veil that softened the gleam of the sunlight. The optician's shop was near the ferry across the Tagus. César Santarém's surly face lit up when Gregorius told him who sent him. He looked at the prescription, weighed the glasses Gregorius gave him in his hand and then said in broken French, these glasses could be made of lighter material and put in a lighter frame.
That was the second time in a short period that someone had cast doubt on the judgment of Constantine Doxiades, and it seemed to Gregorius that his former life was taken out of his hand, a life, as long as he could remember, with heavy glasses on his nose. Uncertainly, he tried on frame after frame and finally let himself be tempted by Santarém's assistant, who knew only Portuguese and talked like a waterfall, to choose a narrow reddish frame that seemed much too stylish and chic for his broad, square face. On the way to the Bairro Alto, where Júlio Sim?es's secondhand bookshop was, he kept telling himself that the new glasses could be spare glasses and didn't need to be worn, and when he finally stood before the used book shop, he had recovered his internal balance.
Senhor Sim?es was a wiry man with a sharp nose and dark eyes emanating a mercurial intelligence. Mariana E?a had called and told him the issue. Half the city of Lisbon, thought Gregorius, seemed to be concerned with calling for him and sending him on, you could almost talk of a ring-around-the-roses of calls, he couldn't remember ever experiencing such a thing.
CEDROS VERMELHOS—there was no such publisher, said Sim?es, in the thirty years that he had been in the book business, of that he was sure. UM OURIVES DAS PALAVRAS—no, he had never heard of that title either. He leafed through it, read a sentence here and there, and it seemed to Gregorius that he was waiting for memory to bring something to light. Finally, he looked once more at the year of publication. Nineteen seventy-five—he had still been in college in Porto and wouldn't have heard anything of a book that appeared in a private publication, especially not if it had been printed in Lisbon.
"If there is anybody who knows," he said and filled his pipe, "it's old Coutinho, who had the shop here before me. He's close to ninety and is nuts, but his memory for books is phenomenal, a genuine miracle. I can't call him because he can barely hear; but I'll write you a few lines to give him."
Sim?es went to his desk in the corner, wrote something on a notepad, and put it in an envelope.
"You have to be patient with him," he said when he gave Gregorius the envelope. "He's had a lot of bad breaks in his life and is a bitter old man. But he can also be very nice when you take the right tone with him. The problem is that you never know in advance what the right tone is."
Gregorius stayed in the used bookshop a long time. Getting to know a city through the books in it—he had always done that. His first trip abroad as a student had been to London. On the way back to Calais, he had realized that, except for the youth hostel, the British Museum and the many bookshops around it, he had seen practically nothing of the city. But the same books could also be anywhere else! said the others and shook their heads at all the things he had missed. Yes, but in fact they weren't anywhere else, he had replied.
And now he stood before the ceiling-high shelves with all the Portuguese books he really couldn't read and felt how he established contact with the city. When he had left the hotel in the morning, he thought he had to find Amadeu de Prado as fast as possible to give a meaning to his stay here. But then there had been Mariana E?a's dark eyes, reddish hair and black velvet jacket and now there were all these books with names of previous owners that reminded him of Anneli Weiss's handwriting in his Latin book.
O GRANDE TERRAMOTO. Except that it took place in 1755 and had devastated Lisbon, he knew nothing about the great earthquake that had shaken faith in God for so many people. He took the book off the shelf. The next book, standing crooked, was titled A MORTE NEGRA about the plague of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With both books under his arm, Gregorius went to literature on the other side of the room. Luis Vaz de Cam?es; Francisco de Sá de Miranda; Fern?o Mendes Pinto; Camilo Castelo Branco. An entire universe he had never heard of, not even from Florence. José Maria E?a de Queirós, O CRIME DO PADRE AMARO. Hesitantly, as if it was something forbidden, he took the volume off the shelf and added it to the two others. And then, all of a sudden, he stood before it: Fernando Pessoa, O LIVRO DO DESASSOSSEGO. It really was unbelievable, but he had gone to Lisbon without thinking that he was going to the city of the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, who worked on Rua dos Douradores and where Pessoa wrote down thoughts that were lonelier than all thoughts the world before him and after him had heard of.
Was it so unbelievable? The fields are greener in description than in their green. This sentence by Pessoa had led to the shrillest episode between him and Florence in all the years.
She had sat in the living room with colleagues, laughter and glasses clinking were heard. Gregorius had gone there reluctantly because he needed a book. As he entered, somebody was reading the sentence aloud. Isn't that a brilliant sentence? one of Florence's colleagues had called out. Shaking his artist's mane and putting his hand on Florence's bare arm. Only very few will understand this sentence, Gregorius had said. All at once, the room filled with an embarrassed silence. And you're one of these chosen ones? Florence asked in a cutting tone. With exaggerated slowness, Gregorius had taken the book off the shelf and had gone out without a word. It took some minutes until he heard anything from there again.
Afterward, when he had seen THE BOOK OF UNREST somewhere, he had quickly passed by. They had never spoken of the episode. It was part of everything that wasn't yet worked out when they split up.
Now, Gregorius took the book off the shelf.
"Do you know what this unbelievable book seems like to me?" asked Senhor Sim?es, tapping the price into the cash register. "It's as if Marcel Proust had written the essays of Michel de Montaigne."
Gregorius was dead tired when he came with his heavy bags up to the memorial to Cam?es on Rua Garrett. But he didn't want to go back to the hotel. He had come to this city and he wanted more of this feeling so he could be sure he wouldn't call the airport again tonight to book a return flight. He drank a coffee and then boarded the streetcar that would take him to the Cemitério dos Prazeres, near the home of Vítor Coutinho, the crazy old man who might know something about Amadeu de Prado.
9
In the hundred-year-old streetcar of Lisbon, Gregorius traveled back to the Bern of his childhood. The trolley that took him, bumping, shaking and ringing through Bairro Alto, looked just like the old trolley he had ridden through the streets and alleys of Bern for hours when he was still too young to have to pay the fare. The same lacquered wooden slat benches, the same bell pulls next to the strap handles hanging down from the ceiling, the same metal lever the driver operated to brake and accelerate and whose workings Gregorius understood as little today as back then. At some time, when he was already wearing the cap of the sixth form, the old trolleys were replaced with new ones. Their ride was quieter and smoother, the other students scrambled to ride in the new cars, and not a few were late to class because they had waited for one of the new cars. Gregorius hadn't trusted himself to say it, but it bothered him that the world changed. He mustered up all his courage, went to the trolley depot and asked a man in a work coat what happened to the old cars. They would be sold to Yugoslavia, said the man. He must have seen the boy's unhappiness, for he went into the office and came back with a model of the old car. Gregorius still owned it and guarded it as a precious, irreplaceable find from a prehistoric time. He pictured it as the Lisbon streetcar rattled and screeched to a stop in the final loop.
That the Portuguese aristocrat with the intrepid look could be dead had never crossed Gregorius's mind. Only now did the thought come to him as he stood before the cemetery. Slowly and apprehensively, he went through the lanes of the necropolis lined with simple little mausoleums.
It may have been half an hour later when he stood still before a tall sepulcher of white weather-spotted marble. Two tablets with ornate corners and edges had been hewn in the stone. AQUI JAZ ALEXANDRE HORáCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 28 DE MAIO DE 1890 E FALECEU EM 9 DE JUNHO DE 1954?was written on the top tablet, and AQUI JAZ MARIA PIEDADE REIS DE PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 12 DE JANEIRO DE 1899 E FALECEU EM 24 DE OUTUBRO DE 1960. On the bottom tablet, which was clearly lighter and less mossy, Gregorius read: AQUI JAZ FáTIMA AMéLIA CLEMêNCIA GALHARDO DE PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 1 DE JANEIRO DE 1926 E FALECEU EM 3 DE FEVEREIRO DE 1961, and under that, with less patina on the letters, AQUI JAZ AMADEU INáCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 20 DE DEZEMBRO DE 1920 E FALECEU EM 20 DE JUNHO DE 1973.
Gregorius stared at the last number. The book in his pocket had appeared in 1975. If this Amadeu de Prado was the doctor who attended the strict Liceu of Senhor Cortês and had later kept sitting on the warm moss of its steps because he asked himself how it would have been to become somebody else—then he wouldn't have published his notes himself. Somebody else had done it, probably a private publisher. A friend, a brother, a sister. If this person was still there after twenty-nine years, that was who he had to find.
But the name on the tomb could also be a coincidence. Gregorius wanted it to be a coincidental congruence, he wanted it with all his might. He felt how disappointed he would be and how dejected he would become if he couldn't meet the melancholy man who had wanted to reset the Portuguese language because it was so hackneyed in its old form.
Nevertheless, he took out his notebook and wrote down all the names along with the dates of birth and death. This Amadeu de Prado had been fifty-three. He had lost his father at the age of thirty-four. Had that been the father whose smile had mostly failed? The mother had died when he was forty. Fátima Galhardo—that could have been Amadeu's wife, a woman who had been only thirty-five and had died when he was forty-one.
Once more Gregorius let his eyes slide over the tomb and only now did he notice an inscription on the pedestal, half covered with wild ivy: QUANDO A DITADURA é UM FACTO A REVOLU?O é UM DEVER. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty. Had the death of this Prado been a political death? The Revolution of the Carnations in Portugal, the end of the dictatorship, had taken place in the spring of 1974. So this Prado hadn't lived through it. The inscription sounded as if he had died as a resistance fighter. Gregorius took out the book and looked at the picture: It could be, he thought, it would suit the face and the restrained rage behind everything he wrote. A poet and a language mystic who had taken up arms and fought against Salazar.
At the exit, he tried to ask the man in uniform how you could find out who a grave belonged to. But his few Portuguese words weren't adequate. He took out the notepaper on which Júlio Sim?es had written down the address of his predecessor, and set out.
Vítor Coutinho lived in a house that looked as if it could tumble down any minute. Set back from the street, it was hidden behind other houses and its lower part was overgrown with ivy. There was no bell and Gregorius stood helpless in the courtyard a while. Just as he was about to go away, a voice barked from one of the upper windows:
"O que é quer?" What do you want?
The head in the window frame was framed with white locks that merged seamlessly into a white beard, and on the nose was a pair of glasses with broad, dark frames.
"Pergunta sobre livro," Gregorius called out as loud as he could and held up Prado's notes.
"O quê?" the man asked and Gregorius repeated his words.
The head disappeared and the door buzzed. Gregorius entered a corridor with overflowing bookshelves up to the ceiling and a worn-out Oriental rug on the red stone floor. It smelled of old food, dust and pipe tobacco. On the creaky steps, the white-haired man appeared, a pipe between dark teeth. A coarse checked shirt of washed-out indefinable color drooped over his baggy corduroy trousers, his feet were stuck in open sandals.
"Quem é?" he asked in the exaggerated loudness of the hard of hearing. The light brown, amberish eyes under the gigantic eyebrows looked annoyed like someone whose rest was disturbed.
Gregorius handed him the envelope with the message from Sim?es. He was Swiss, he said in Portuguese and added in French: A philologist of ancient languages and searching for the author of this book. When Coutinho didn't react, he started on a loud repetition.
He wasn't deaf, the old man interrupted him in French, and now a cunning grin appear on the lined, weatherbeaten face. Deafness—that was a good role to play, with all the twaddle you had got to hear.
His French had an eccentric accent, but the words came, albeit slowly, in a confident order. He scanned Sim?es's lines, then pointed to the kitchen at the end of the corridor and led the way. On the kitchen table, next to an open can of sardines and a half-full glass of red wine, lay an open book. Gregorius went to the chair at the other end of the table and sat down. Then the old man came to him and did something surprising: He took Gregorius's glasses off and put them on. He blinked, looked here and there, while swinging his own glasses in his hand.
"So, we've got that in common," he said at last and returned the glasses to Gregorius.
The solidarity of those who go through the world with thick glasses. All of a sudden, all the annoyance and defensiveness had disappeared from Coutinhos's face, and he reached for Prado's book.
Without a word, he looked at the portrait of the doctor for a few minutes. He stood up now and then, absent as a sleepwalker, and once poured Gregorius a glass of wine. A cat slipped in and sidled around his legs. He didn't notice it, took off his glasses, and grasped the bridge of his nose with thumb and index finger, a gesture that reminded Gregorius of Doxiades. From the next room, the ticking of a grandfather clock was heard. Now, he emptied his pipe, took another from the shelf and filled it. More minutes passed until he began to speak, softly and in the timbre of distant memory.
"It would be wrong if I said I knew him. You can't even speak of an encounter. But I did see him, twice, in the door of his treatment room, in the white coat, his brows raised waiting for the next patient. I was there with my sister, whom he was treating. Jaundice. High blood pressure. She swore by him. Was, I think, a little bit in love with him. No wonder, a fine figure of a man, with a personality that hypnotized people. He was the son of the famous Judge Prado, who took his own life, many said, because he could no longer bear the pains of his hunched back, others conjectured that he couldn't forgive himself for staying in office under the dictatorship.
"Amadeu de Prado was a beloved, even esteemed doctor. Until he saved the life of Rui Luís Mendes, a member of the secret police, the one called the butcher. That was in the mid-sixties, shortly after I turned fifty. After that, people avoided him. That broke his heart. From then on, he worked for the resistance, but nobody knew it; as if he wanted to atone for the rescue. It came out only after his death. He died, as I remember, quite surprisingly of a cerebral hemorrhage, one year before the revolution. Lived at the end with Adriana, his sister, who idolized him.
"She must have been the one who had the book printed, I even have an idea who did it, but the press closed a long time ago. A few years later, the book popped up in my secondhand bookstore. I put it in some corner, didn't read it, had an aversion to it, don't really know why. Maybe because I didn't like Adriana, even though I hardly knew her, but she assisted him and both times I was there her overbearing way with patients got on my nerves. Probably unfair of me, but that's how I've always been."
Coutinho leafed through it. "Good sentences, it seems. And a good title. I didn't know he wrote. Where did you get it? And why did you come looking for him?"
The story Gregorius told now sounded different from the one he had told José Antonio da Silveira on the night train. Mainly because now he also spoke of the enigmatic Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke and of the phone number on his forehead.
"Do you still have the number?" asked the old man, who liked the story so much that he opened another bottle of wine.
For a moment, Gregorius was tempted to take out the notebook. But then he felt this was too much; after the episode with the glasses, he wouldn't put it past the old man to call there. Sim?es had said he was nuts. That couldn't mean that Coutinho was confused; there was no question of that. What he seemed to have lost in his solitary life with the cat was the sense of distance and proximity.
No, said Gregorius now; he no longer had the number. Too bad, said the old man. He didn't believe a word of it, and suddenly they sat across from each other like two total strangers.
There was no Adriana de Almeida Prado in the phone book, said Gregorius after an embarrassed pause.
That didn't mean anything, growled Coutinho. If she was still alive, Adriana had to be close to eighty, and old people sometimes got unlisted numbers, he had also done that recently. And if she had died, her name would also have been on the tomb-stone. The address where the doctor had lived and worked, no, he no longer knew that after forty years. Somewhere in Bairro Alto. It couldn't be too hard for him to find the house, for it was a house with a lot of blue tiles on the fa?ade and far and away the only blue house. Back then at any rate. O consultório azul, the blue practice, it was called.
When Gregorius left the old man an hour later, they had gotten close again. Gruff distance and surprising complicity alternated irregularly in Coutinho's behavior, without any obvious reason for the abrupt changes. Stunned, Gregorius went through the house that was a single library down to the last corner. The old man was uncommonly well-read and possessed a huge number of first editions.
He was well-versed in Portuguese names. The Prados, Gregorius learned, were a very old tribe that went back to Jo?o Nunes do Prado, a grandson of Alfonso III, king of Portugal. E?a? Went back to Pedro I and Inês de Castro and was one of the most distinguished names in all of Portugal.
"My name is indeed even older and also linked with the royal house," said Coutinho, and through the ironic refraction, the pride was evident.
He envied Gregorius for his knowledge of ancient languages and on the way to the door, he suddenly pulled a Greek-Portuguese edition of the New Testament off the shelf.
"No idea why I give this to you," he said, "but that's how it is."
As Gregorius went through the courtyard, he knew he would never forget that sentence. Or the old man's hand on his back softly pushing him out.
The streetcar rattled through the early dusk. At night he would never find the blue house, thought Gregorius. The day had lasted an eternity, and now, exhausted, he leaned his head against the misted panes of the car. Was it possible that he had been in this city only two days? And that only four days, not even a hundred hours, had passed since he had left his Latin books on the desk? At Rossio, the most famous square in Lisbon, he got out and trudged to the hotel with the heavy bags from Sim?es's secondhand bookstore.
10
Why had K?gi talked with him in a language that sounded like Portuguese, but wasn't? And why had he complained about Marcus Aurelius without saying a single word about him?
Gregorius sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Then the janitor had been there, in the corridor of the Gymnasium, hosing down the place where he had stood with the Portuguese woman when she dried her hair. Before or after, you couldn't tell, Gregorius had gone with her into K?gi's office to introduce her to him. He must not have opened a door to it, suddenly they had simply been standing before his gigantic desk, a little like petitioners who had forgotten their petition; but then the Rector suddenly wasn't there anymore, the desk and even the wall behind it had disappeared, and they had had a clear view of the Alps.
Now Gregorius noted that the door to the minibar was ajar. At some time, he had woken up from hunger and had eaten the peanuts and the chocolate. Before that, the overflowing mailbox of his Bern flat had tormented him, all the bills and junk mail, and all of a sudden, his library was in flames before it became Coutinho's library, where there were nothing but charred Bibles, an endless row of them.
At breakfast, Gregorius took second helpings of everything and then sat there to the annoyance of the waiter, who was preparing the dining room for lunch. He had no idea how it should go on. Just now he had listened to a German couple making their tourist plans for the day. He had also tried and had failed. Lisbon didn't interest him for sightseeing, as a tourist setting. Lisbon was the city where he had run away from his life. The only thing he could imagine was taking the ferry over the Tagus to see the city from this perspective. But he really didn't want that either. What did he want?
In his room, he assembled the books he had collected: the two about the earthquake and the Black Death, the novel by E?a de Queirós, The Book of Disquiet, the New Testament, the language books. Then he packed his bag tentatively and put it at the door.
No, that wasn't it either. Not because of the glasses he had to pick up the next day. To land in Zurich now and get off the train in Bern: It wasn't possible; it wasn't possible anymore.
What else? Was this what came from thoughts of time running out and death: that all of a sudden you didn't know anymore what you wanted? That you didn't know your own will anymore? That you lost the obvious familiarity with your own wishes? And in this way became strange and a problem to yourself?
Why didn't he set off in search of the blue house where Adriana de Prado might still be living, thirty-one years after her brother's death? Why was he hesitating? Why was there suddenly a barrier?
Gregorius did what he had always done when he was unsure: He opened up a book. His mother, a country girl from the flatlands around Bern, had seldom picked up a book, at most a sentimental novel by Ludwig Ganghofer and then it took her weeks to read. The father had discovered reading as an antidote to boredom in the empty halls of the museum, and after he had acquired the taste, he read everything that came to hand. Now you're escaping to books, too, said the mother when the son also discovered reading. It had hurt Gregorius that she saw it like that and that she didn't understand when he spoke of the magic and luminosity of good sentences.
There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a nonreader—it was quickly noted. There was no greater distinction between people. People were amazed when he asserted that and many shook their head at such crankiness. But that's how it was. Gregorius knew it. He knew it.
He sent the chambermaid away and in the next few hours he sank into the attempt to understand a note by Amadeu de Prado, whose title had leaped to his eye as he leafed through the book.
O INTERIOR DO EXTERIOR DO INTERIOR. THE INSIDE OF THE OUTSIDE OF THE INSIDE. Some time ago—it was a dazzling morning in June, the morning brightness flooded unmoving through the streets—I was standing in the Rua Garrett at a display window where the blinding light made me look at my reflection instead of the merchandise. It was annoying to stand in my own way—particularly since the whole thing was like an allegory of the way I usually stood by me—and I was about to make my way inside through the shadowy funnels of my hands, when behind my reflection—it reminded me of a threatening storm shadow that changed the world—the figure of a tall man emerged. He stood still, took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, and stuck one between his lips. As he inhaled the first drag, his look strayed and finally fixed on me. We humans: what do we know of one another? I thought and acted—to keep from meeting his reflected look—as if I could easily see the display in the window. The stranger saw a gaunt man with graying hair, a narrow, stern face and dark eyes behind round lenses in gold frames. I cast a searching glance at my reflection. As always, I stood with my square shoulders straighter than straight, my head higher than my size really allowed, and leaning back a trace and it was undoubtedly correct what they said, even those who liked me: I looked like an arrogant misanthrope who looked down on everything human, a misanthrope with a mocking comment ready for everything and everyone. That was the impression the smoking man must have gotten.
How wrong he was! For sometimes I think: I exaggerate standing and walking that way to protest my father's irrevocably crooked body, his torment, to be pressed down by Bechterev's disease, to have to aim your eyes at the ground like a tortured slave who didn't trust himself to meet his master with a raised head and a direct look. It is then perhaps, as if, by stretching myself, I could straighten my proud father's back or, with a backward, magical law of effect make sure his life would be less bowed and enslaved to pain than it was in fact—as if through my attempt in the present, I could strip the tormented past of its reality and replace it with a better, freer one.
And that wasn't the only delusion my appearance must have produced in the stranger behind me. After an endless night when I had remained without sleep or consolation, far be it from me to look down on another. The day before, I had informed a patient in the presence of his wife that he didn't have long to live. You have to, I had persuaded myself before I called the two of them into the consulting room, they have to plan for themselves and the five children—and anyway: part of human dignity consists of the strength to look your fate, even a hard one, in the eye. It had been early evening, through the open balcony door a light warm wind brought the sounds and smells of a dying summer day, and if this soft wave of brightness could have been enjoyed in freedom and oblivion, it could have been a moment of happiness. If only a sharp, ruthless wind had whipped the rain against the windowpane! I had thought, as the man and woman across from me sat on the very edge of their chairs, hesitating and full of scared impatience, eager to hear the verdict that would release them from the fear of an impending death, so they could go downstairs and mix with the strolling passersby, a sea of time before them. I took off my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger before I spoke. The two must have recognized the gesture as a harbinger of an awful truth, for when I looked up, they had grasped each other's hands, which looked as if they hadn't sought each other for decades—and that idea choked me so that the anxious wait became even longer. I spoke down to these hands, hard as it was to hold out against the eyes expressing a nameless horror. The hands clenched each other, the blood leached from them, and it was this image of a bloodless, white knot of fingers that robbed me of sleep and that I tried to drive away when I broke out for my walk that had led me to the reflecting display window. (And I had tried to drive away something else in the lighted streets: the memory of my rage at my clumsy words announcing the bitter message that had later been turned against Adriana only because she, who takes care of me better than a mother, had forgotten to bring my favorite bread. If only the white gold light of the morning would extinguish this injustice that wasn't untypical for me!)
The man with the cigarette, now leaning on a light pole, let his look wander back and forth between me and what was happening in the street. What he saw of me could have revealed nothing about my self-doubting fragility that didn't accord much with my proud, even arrogant posture. I put myself into his look, reproduced it in me, and from that perspective absorbed my reflection. The way I looked and appeared—I thought—I had never been that way for a single minute in my life. Not in school, not at the university, not in my practice. Is it the same with others: that they don't recognize themselves in their outside? That the reflection seems like a stage set full of crass distortion? That, with fear, they note a gap between the perception others have of them and the way they experience themselves? That the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered familiarity with the same thing?
The distance from others, where this awareness moves us, becomes even greater when we realize that our outside form doesn't appear to others as to our own eyes. Humans are not seen like houses, trees and stars. They are seen with the expectation of being able to encounter them in a specific way and thus making them a part of our own inside. Imagination trims them to suit our own wishes and hopes, but also to confirm our own fears and prejudices. We don't even get safely and impartially to the outside contours of another. On the way, the eye is diverted and blurred by all the wishes and fantasies that make us the special, unmistakable human beings we are. Even the outside world of an inside world is still a piece of our inside world, not to mention the thoughts we make about the inside world of strangers and that are so uncertain and unstable that they say more about ourselves than about others. How does the man with the cigarette see an exaggeratedly upright man with a gaunt face, full lips and gold-framed eyeglasses on the sharp, straight nose that seems to me to be too long and too dominant? How does this figure fit into the framework of the pleasure and displeasure and into the remaining architecture of his soul? What does his look exaggerate and stress in my appearance, and what does it leave out as if it didn't even exist? It will inevitably be a caricature the smoking stranger forms of my reflection, and his notion of my notional world will pile up caricature on caricature. And so we are doubly strangers, for between us there is not only the deceptive outside world, but also the delusion that exists of it in every inside world.
Is it an evil, this strangeness and distance? Would a painter have to portray us with outstretched arms, desperate in the vain attempt to reach the other? Or should a picture show us in a pose expressing relief that there is this double barrier that is also a protective wall? Should we be grateful for the protection that guards us from the strangeness of one another? And for the freedom it makes possible? How would it be if we confronted each other unprotected by the double refraction represented by the interpreted body? If, because nothing separating and adulterating stood between us, we tumbled into each other?
As he read Prado's self-description, Gregorius kept looking at the portrait at the front of the book. In his mind, he turned the doctor's helmet of combed hair gray and put gold-framed glasses with round lenses on him. Haughtiness, even misanthropy, others had seen in him. Yet, as Coutinho said, he had been a beloved, even esteemed doctor. Until he had saved the life of the member of the secret police. After that, he was despised by the same people who had loved him. It had broken his heart and he had tried to make up for it by working for the resistance.
How could a doctor need to atone for something every doctor did—had to do—the opposite of a transgression? Something, thought Gregorius, couldn't be right in Coutinho's account. Things must have been more complicated, more involved. Gregorius leafed through the book. Nós homens, que sabemos uns dos outros? We humans: what do we know of one another? For a while, Gregorius kept leafing through it. Maybe there was a note about this dramatic and regrettable turn in his life?
When he found nothing, he left the hotel at twilight and made his way to Rua Garrett, where Prado had seen his reflection in the display window and where Júlio Sim?es's secondhand bookshop was.
There was no more sunlight to make the display window into a mirror. But after a while, Gregorius found a brightly lit clothing store with an enormous mirror where he could look at himself through the windowpane. He tried to do what Prado had done: to put himself into a stranger's look, to reproduce it in himself and absorb his reflection from this look. To encounter himself as a stranger one just met.
That was how the students and colleagues had seen him. That was what their Mundus looked like. Florence had also seen him like that, first as an infatuated student in the first row, later as a wife, to whom he had become an increasingly ponderous and boring husband, who used his learning more often to destroy the magic, the high spirits and the chic of her world of literary celebrities.
They all had the same image before them and yet, as Prado said, they each had seen something different because every piece of a human's outside world seen was also a piece of an inside world. The Portuguese man had been sure that in not one single minute of his life had he been as he appeared to others; he hadn't recognized himself in his outside—familiar as it was—and was deeply frightened at this strangeness.
Now a boy hurrying by bumped into Gregorius who recoiled. Fear at being shoved coincided with the upsetting thought that he had no certainty equal to the doctor's. Where had Prado gotten his certainty that he was completely different from the way others saw him? How had he acquired that? He talked about it as of a bright light inside that had always illuminated him, a light that had meant both great familiarity with himself and great strangeness in the view of others. Gregorius shut his eyes and sat again in the dining car on the trip to Paris. The new kind of wakefulness he had experienced there, when he realized that his trip was actually taking place—was it somehow connected with the amazing wakefulness the Portuguese man had possessed about himself, a wakefulness whose price had been loneliness? Or were these two completely different things?
He went through the world in a posture, as if he were always bent over a book and constantly reading it, people said to Gregorius. Now he stood up straight and tried to feel how it was to straighten the pain-crooked back of your own father with an exaggeratedly straight back and an especially high head. In the sixth form, he had had a teacher who suffered from Bechterev's disease. Such people shoved their head into their neck to keep from having to look at the ground all the time. They looked the way Prado had described the janitor he met on his visit to the school: like a bird. Horrible jokes about the crooked figure made the rounds and the teacher took revenge with a malicious, punishing strictness. How was it to have a father who had to spend his life in this humiliating posture, hour after hour, day after day, at the judge's bench and at the dinner table with the children?
Alexandre Horácio de Almeida Prado had been a judge, a famous judge, as Coutinho had said. A judge who had administered the law under Salazar—a man who had broken every law. A judge who perhaps couldn't forgive himself and therefore sought death. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty, was on the pedestal of the Prados' tomb. Was it there because of the son who had gone into the resistance? Or because of the father who had recognized the truth of the sentence too late?
On the way down to the big square, Gregorius felt that he wanted to know these things and that he wanted to know them in other, more urgent ways than the many historical things he had dealt with through the ancient texts all his life. Why? The judge had been dead for half a century, the revolution was thirty years ago, and the son's death was also part of that distant past. So why? What did all that have to do with him? How could it have happened that a single Portuguese word and a phone number on his forehead tore him out of his orderly life and involved him far from Bern in the life of Portuguese people who were no longer alive?
In the bookstore on Rossio, a photo biography of António de Oliveira Salazar, the man who played a crucial, perhaps fatal role in Prado's life, leaped to his eyes. The dust jacket showed a man dressed all in black with an overbearing but not insensitive face, with a hard, even fanatic look that did however reveal intelligence. Gregorius leafed through it. Salazar, he thought, was a man who had sought power but not one who had seized it with blind brutality and dull violence, nor one who had enjoyed it like the voluptuous, excessive fullness of rich food at an orgiastic banquet. To get it and hold it for so long, he had sacrificed everything in his life that hadn't suited the inexhaustible wakefulness, the absolute discipline, and the ascetic ritual. The price had been high, you could tell that from the stern features and the effort of the rare smile. And the repressed needs and impulses of this barren life amid the sumptuousness of government—distorted beyond recognition by the rhetoric of state—had been vented on merciless execution orders.
Gregorius lay awake in the dark and thought of the great distance there had always been between him and world events. Not that he hadn't been interested in political events abroad. In April 1974, when the dictatorship of Portugal came to an end, some of his generation had gone there and were offended by him for saying he didn't care for political tourism. Nor was he uninformed, like a blind shut-in. But it always felt a little bit as if he were reading Thucydides. A Thucydides in the newspaper and later on the news. Was it connected with Switzerland and its pristine position? Or only with him? His fascination with words, covering horrid, bloody and unjust things? And maybe with his nearsightedness?
When the father, who hadn't gone further than noncommissioned officer, spoke of the time when his company had been stationed on the Rhine, as he said, he, the son, always had the feeling of something unreal, something a little funny, whose meaning was mainly that it could be remembered as something exciting, something that stood out from the banality of the rest of life. The father had felt that, and once he blurted out: We were scared, scared to death, he had said, for it could easily have been different and then maybe you wouldn't even exist. He hadn't shouted, the father never did that; nevertheless, they had been furious words the son heard with shame and had never forgotten.
Was that why he now wanted to know how it had been to be Amadeu de Prado? To move closer to the world through this understanding?
He turned on the light and reread sentences he had just read.
NADA. NOTHING. Aneurysm. Every moment can be the last. Without the slightest premonition, in total ignorance, I will walk through an invisible wall, behind which is nothing, not even darkness. My next step can be the step through this wall. Isn't it illogical to be afraid of it knowing that I shall no longer experience this sudden extinction?
Gregorius called Doxiades and asked him what an aneurysm was. "I know the word means a dilation. But of what?" It was a diseased expansion of an arterial blood vessel through innate or acquired changes in the wall, said the Greek. Yes, in the brain, too, quite often. People didn't usually notice anything and it could be fine for a long time—decades. Then the vessel would suddenly burst and that was the end. Why did he want to know that in the middle of the night? Was anything wrong? And where was he anyway?
Gregorius felt he had made a mistake to call the Greek. He didn't find the words that would have suited their long intimacy. Stiff and hesitant, he said something about the old streetcar, about an odd secondhand bookseller, and the cemetery where the dead Portuguese man lay. It made no sense and he heard it. There was a pause.
"Gregorius?" Doxiades asked at last.
"Yes?"
"How do you say chess in Portuguese?"
Gregorius could have hugged him for the question.
"Xadrez," he said and the dryness in his mouth had disappeared.
"Everything all right with the eyes?"
Now the tongue stuck to the palate again. "Yes." And after another pause, Gregorius asked:
"Do you have the impression that people see you as you are?"
The Greek burst out laughing. "Of course not!"
Gregorius was flabbergasted that somebody, Doxiades of all people, laughed about that when Amadeu de Prado was deeply horrified. He picked up Prado's book, as if to hold on to himself.
"Is everything really all right?" the Greek asked into the new silence.
Yes, said Gregorius, everything's fine.
They ended the conversation in the usual way.
Gregorius lay in the dark, distraught, and tried to figure out what had come between him and the Greek. He was after all the man whose words had given him the courage to make this trip, despite the snow that started falling in Bern. He had put himself through the university by working as a taxi driver in Thessaloniki. A pretty rough bunch, the taxi drivers, he had once said. Now and then, a coarse word would flash out in him. As when he cursed or dragged fiercely on a cigarette. The dark stubble and the thick black hair on his arms looked wild and uncontrollable at such moments.
So he considered it natural that others failed to see him as he was. Was it possible that this didn't matter at all to someone? And was that a lack of sensibility? Or a desirable internal independence? It was growing light when Gregorius finally fell asleep.
11
It can't be, it's impossible. Gregorius took off the new, feather-light glasses, rubbed his eyes and put them back on. It was possible: He saw better than ever. That was especially true for the top half of the glasses, through which he looked out at the world. Things literally seemed to jump at him, as if they were crowding up to attract his look. And since he no longer felt the previous weight on his nose, which had made the glasses a protective bulwark, they seemed importunate, even threatening in their new clarity. The new impressions also made him a little dizzy, and he took the glasses off. A smile flitted over César Santarém's gruff face.
"And now you don't know if the old or the new ones are better," he said.
Gregorius nodded and stood before the mirror. The narrow, reddish frames and the new lenses that no longer looked like martial barriers before his eyes made him into somebody else. Somebody whose looks were important. Somebody who wanted to look elegant, chic. OK, that was an exaggeration; but still, Santarém's assistant, who had talked him into buying the frames, gestured her appreciation in the background. Santarém saw it. "Tem raz?o," he said, she's right. Gregorius felt rage rising in him. He put on the old glasses, had the new ones packed up, and quickly paid.
Mariana E?a's office in the Alfama quarter was half an hour's walk. It took Gregorius four hours. It began with him sitting down whenever he found a bench, sitting and changing his glasses. With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered. The Tagus was no longer a vague brownish surface, but a river, and the Castelo de S?o Jorge projected into the sky in three directions, like a real citadel. But the world was a strain like that. Indeed it was also lighter with the light frame on the nose, the heavy steps he was used to no longer suited the new lightness in his face. But the world was closer and more oppressing, it demanded more of you, but its demands weren't clear. When they became too much for him, these obscure demands, he retreated behind the old lenses that kept everything at a distance and allowed him to doubt whether there really was an outside world beyond words and texts, a doubt that was dear to him and without it he really couldn't imagine life at all. But he could no longer forget the new view either and in a little park, he took out Prado's notes and tried out the new glasses.
O verdadeiro encenador da nossa vida é o acaso—um encenador cheio de crueldade, misericórdia e encanto cativante. Gregorius didn't believe his eyes: he hadn't understood any of Prado's sentences so easily: The real director of our life is accident—a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm. He shut his eyes and gave in to the sweet illusion that the new glasses would make all the Portuguese man's other sentences accessible to him in this way—as if they were a fabulous magical instrument that made the meaning of the words visible through their external contours. He grasped the glasses and adjusted them. He was beginning to like them.
I'd like to know if I've done it right—the words of the woman with the big eyes and the black velvet jacket; words that had surprised him because they had sounded like those of an ambitious schoolgirl with little self-confidence and didn't suit the certainty she radiated. Gregorius watched a girl on Rollerblades. If the rollerblader had held his elbow a teensy little bit different that first evening—right past his temple—he wouldn't now be on the way to this woman—or torn between an imperceptibly veiled and a dazzling clear field of vision that lent the world this unreal reality.
In a bar, he drank a coffee. It was lunchtime; the room was full of well-dressed men from an office building next door. Gregorius looked at his new face in the mirror, then the whole figure, as the doctor would see it afterward. The baggy corduroy pants, the rough turtleneck and the old windbreaker contrasted with the many tailored jackets, the matching shirts and ties. Nor did they suit the new glasses, not at all. It angered Gregorius that the contrast bothered him; from one sip to another, he became more furious about it. He thought of the way the waiter in the Hotel Bellevue had scrutinized him on the morning of his flight, and how it hadn't mattered to him; on the contrary with his shabby look, he had felt he was standing up to the hollow elegance of the surroundings. Where had this certainty gone? He put on the old glasses, paid, and left.
Had the noble houses next to and across from Mariana E?a's office really been there on his first visit? Gregorius put on the new glasses and looked around. Doctors, lawyers, a wine company, an African embassy. He was sweating under the thick sweater, and at the same time he felt in his face the cold wind that had swept the sky clear. Behind which window was the treatment room?
How well one sees depends on so many things, she had said. It was quarter to two. Could he just go up there at this time? He walked on a few streets and stood still before a men's clothing shop. You really might buy something new for a change. For the schoolgirl Florence, the girl in the first row, his indifference to his outward appearance had been attractive. For the wife, it had soon gotten on her nerves, this attitude. After all, you don't live alone. And Greek isn't enough for that. In the nineteen years he had lived alone again, he had been in a clothing store only two or three times. He was glad that nobody scolded him for that. Were nineteen years enough defiance? Hesitantly, he entered the shop.
The two saleswomen took all conceivable pains with him, the only customer, and finally they brought out the manager. Gregorius kept looking at himself in the mirror: first in suits that made him into a banker, an operagoer, a bon vivant, a professor, an accountant; later in jackets, from the double-breasted blazer to the sport coat suitable for a ride in the castle grounds; finally leather. Of all the enthusiastic Portuguese sentences pelting him, he didn't understand a single one, and he kept shaking his head. Finally, he left the shop in a gray corduroy suit. He looked at himself uncertainly in a display window a few buildings away. Did the fine scarlet turtleneck he had let himself be pressured into match the red of the new eyeglass frames?
Quite suddenly, Gregorius lost his nerve. With fast, furious steps, he walked to the public toilet on the other side of the street and put his old things back on. When he passed an entryway with a mountain of junk towering behind it, he put down the bag with the new clothes. Then he walked slowly in the direction where the doctor lived.
As soon as he entered the building, he heard the door open upstairs and then he saw her coming down in a flowing coat. Now he wished he had kept the new clothes.
"Oh, it's you," she said and asked how the new glasses were.
As he was telling, she came to him, grasped the new glasses and tested whether they were sitting right. He smelled her perfume, a strand of her hair stroked his face, and for a tiny moment, her movement merged with that of Florence the first time she had taken off his glasses. When he spoke of the unreal reality things had assumed all of a sudden, she smiled and then looked at her watch.
"I have to take the ferry to make a visit." Something in his face must have made her wonder, for she paused as she was leaving. "Were you ever on the Tagus? Would you like to come along?"
Later, Gregorius no longer remembered the drive down to the ferry. Only that, with a single liquid motion, she had pulled into a parking place that seemed much too small. Then they were sitting on the upper deck of the ferry and Mariana E?a was telling about the uncle she wanted to visit, her father's brother.
Jo?o E?a lived up in Cacilhas in a nursing home, barely spoke a word and replayed famous chess games all day long. He had been an accountant in a big firm, a modest, unprepossessing, nearly invisible man. It never occurred to anybody that he was working for the resistance. The disguise was perfect. He was forty-seven when Salazar's thugs got hold of him. As a communist, he was sentenced to life in prison for high treason. Two years later, Mariana, his favorite niece, came to pick him up at the prison.
"That was in the summer of 1974, a few weeks after the revolution. I was twenty-one and was studying in Coimbra," she said now, her face averted.
Gregorius heard her swallow, and now her voice became raw, so as not to break.
"I never got over the sight. He was only forty-nine, but torture had made him into a sick old man. He had had a full, deep voice; now he spoke in a hoarse soft voice, and his hands that had played Schubert, mainly Schubert, were disfigured and constantly shaking." She took a breath and sat up very straight. "Only the incredibly direct, fearless look from his gray eyes—it was unbroken. It took years until he could tell me: they had held white-hot irons before his eyes to make him talk. They kept coming closer, and he had expected to sink into a wave of white-hot darkness any minute. But his eyes didn't turn away from the iron, he went through its hardness and burning and came out the other side of his torturers' faces. This unbelievable inflexibility gave them pause. 'Since then, nothing can scare me anymore,' he said, 'literally nothing.' And I am sure: he didn't reveal anything."
They landed.
"Over there," she said, and now her voice recovered its usual firmness; "that's the home."
She pointed to a ferry that described a big arc, so the city could be seen from another perspective. Then she stood still, hesitant a moment, a hesitation revealing the awareness of an intimacy between them, which had happened surprisingly fast, but couldn't go on now, and perhaps also the frightening doubt about whether it had been right to expose so much of Jo?o and herself. When she finally went off toward the home, Gregorius looked after her for a long time and imagined how she had stood before the prison at the age of twenty-one.
He went back to Lisbon and then made the whole trip over the Tagus again. Jo?o E?a had been in the resistance, Amadeu de Prado had worked for the resistance. Resistência: The doctor had naturally used the Portuguese word—as if, for this matter, this holy matter, there could be no other word. In her mouth, the word, softly urgent, had an intoxicating sonority, a word with a mythical gleam and a mystical aura. An accountant and a doctor, five years apart. Both had risked everything, both had worked with a perfect disguise, both had been masters of silence and virtuosos of sealed lips. Had they known each other?
When he was back on land, Gregorius bought a city map with an especially precise inset of Bairro Alto. As he ate, he laid out the route of search for the blue house where Adriana de Prado, old and without a telephone, might still be living. When he left the pub, darkness was falling. He took a streetcar to the Alfama quarter. After a while, he found the entryway with the heaps of junk. The bag with his new clothes was still there. He picked it up, hailed a cab and was driven to the hotel.
12
Early the next morning, Gregorius went out into a day that began gray and foggy. Quite contrary to habit, last night he had fallen asleep quickly and plunged into a flood of dream images of an incomprehensible sequence of ships, clothes, and prisons. Even though it was incomprehensible, the whole thing had not been unpleasant and was far from a nightmare, for the confused, rhapsodic changing scenes were set off by an inaudible voice that possessed an overwhelming present and belonged to a woman whose name he had sought with feverish haste, as if his life depended on it. Just as he woke up, the word he had been hunting came to him: Concei??o—the beautiful, fairy-tale part in the doctor's full name on the brass plate at the entrance to the office: Mariana Concei??o E?a. When he spoke the name softly to himself, another dream scene surfaced from forgetting, in which a woman of quickly changing identity took off his glasses while pressing them solidly on his nose, so solidly that he still felt the pressure.
It had been one in the morning and getting back to sleep was inconceivable. So he had leafed through Prado's book and got stuck on a note titled CARAS FUGAZES NA NOITE. FLEETING FACES IN THE NIGHT.
Encounters between people, it often seems to me, are like crossings of racing trains at breakneck speed in the deepest night. We cast fleeting, rushed looks at the others sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision as soon as we barely have time to perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flitted by there like phantoms in an illuminated window frame, who arose out of nothing and seemed to cut into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: that's how it may be when strangers pass one another in rain and wind; there might be something to the comparison. But we sit across from a lot of people longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn't it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to cover and ward off the flickering disturbing haste because it would be impossible to bear it every moment? Isn't every glance of another and every exchange of looks like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travelers who glide by one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the fist of the air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don't our looks perpetually bounce off the others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us behind with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and fictional qualities? Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?
How would it have been, Gregorius had thought, to be the sister of somebody whose loneliness spoke from such giddy depths? Of somebody who in his reflections had revealed such a merciless consistency, but whose words did not sound despairing or even agitated? How would it have been to assist him, give injections and help bandage? What he thought in writing about distance and strangeness between people: What had it meant for the atmosphere in the blue house? Had he kept it completely hidden in himself or had the house been the place, the only place, where he had let these thoughts out? In the way he went from room to room, picked up a book and decided what music he wanted to hear? What sounds did he think fit the lonely thoughts that felt clear and hard as glass figures? Had he sought sounds that were like a confirmation or had he needed melodies and rhythms that were like balm, not lulling and veiling, but softening?
With these questions in his mind, Gregorius slipped back into a light sleep toward morning and had stood before an unreal narrow blue door, in himself the wish to ring the bell and at the same time the certainty that he had no idea what he would say to the woman who opened the door. After he woke up, he went to breakfast in the new clothes and with the new glasses. The waitress gave a start when she noticed his changed appearance, and then a smile flashed over her face. And now, on this gray, foggy Sunday morning, he was on his way to seek the blue house old Coutinho had talked about.
He had inspected only a few streets in the upper part of the city when he saw the man he had followed the first evening smoking at a window. Now in daylight the house looked even narrower and shabbier than back then. The interior of the room was in shadow, but Gregorius caught a glimpse of the tapestry of the sofa, the glass cabinet with the colorful porcelain figures and the Crucifix. He stood still and tried to catch the man's eye.
"Uma casa azul?" he asked.
The man held his hand to his ear and Gregorius repeated the question. A surge of words he didn't understand was the answer, accompanied by gestures with the cigarette. As the man spoke, a bent, very old woman came to his side.
"O consultório azul?" Gregorius asked now.
"Sim!" shouted the old woman in a creaky voice and then once again: "Sim!"
She gesticulated excitedly with her stick-thin arms and shriveled hands and after a while, Gregorius caught on that she was waving him inside. Hesitantly, he entered the house that smelled of mold and rancid oil. He felt that he had to push through a thick wall of repulsive smells to get to the door where the man was waiting, a new cigarette between his lips. Limping, he led Gregorius into the living room, mumbled some question and gestured a vague invitation to sit on a tapestry-covered sofa.
In the next half hour, Gregorius struggled to find his way around in the mostly incomprehensible words and ambiguous gestures of the two people who tried to explain to him how it had been forty years ago, when Amadeu de Prado had treated the people of the quarter. There was adoration in their voices, an adoration you feel for someone far above you. But another feeling also filled the room, which Gregorius recognized only gradually as shyness originating in a long-ago accusation you'd like to deny, but can't get out of your memory. After that people avoided him. That broke his heart, he heard Coutinho say, after he had told how Prado had saved Rui Luís Mendes, the butcher of Lisbon.
Now the man pulled up a pants leg and showed Gregorius a scar. "Ele fez isto," he did it, he said and ran his nicotine-stained fingertips over it. The woman rubbed her temples with her shriveled fingers and then made the gesture of flying away: Prado had made her headaches disappear. And then she too showed a small scar on a finger where a wart had probably been.
Later, when Gregorius asked himself what had been the decisive factor that had finally made him ring the bell at the blue door, he always recalled these gestures of the two people with traces on their bodies left by the doctor who was adored, then ostracized and finally adored again. It had been as if his hands had come back to life.
Now the way to Prado's former office was described to Gregorius and he left the two of them. Head to head, they watched him from the window and it seemed to him that there was envy in their look, a paradoxical envy that he could do something they couldn't do anymore: meet Amadeu de Prado brand new, by making his way into his past.
Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? One whose life had been completely different and had had a completely different logic than your own? How did curiosity for another life go together with the awareness that your own time was running out?
Gregorius stood at the counter of a small bar and drank a coffee. It was the second time he stood here. An hour ago, he had pushed up to Rua Luz Soriano and had stood a few steps before Prado's blue office, a three-story house that seemed altogether blue first because of the blue ceramic tiles, but even more because all the windows were covered with high arches painted dark blue. The paint was old, the color was crumbling and there were damp places where black moss grew rampant. The blue color was also crumbling on the cast-iron bars on the bottom of the windows. Only the blue front door had an impeccable coat of paint as if someone wanted to say: This is what matters.
The doorbell had no nameplate. His heart pounding, Gregorius had looked at the door with the brass knocker. As if my whole future were behind this door, he had thought. Then he had gone to the bar a few houses down and struggled against the threatening feeling that he was losing his grip. He had looked at his watch: it had been six days ago that he had taken the damp coat off the hook in the classroom and had run away from his very certain, clear life, without turning around even once. He had reached in the pocket of this coat and groped for the key to his Bern flat. And suddenly, violent and physically tangible as an attack of ravenous hunger, he was assailed by the desire to read a Greek or Hebrew text; to see the foreign beautiful letters that hadn't lost any of their Oriental, fabulous elegance for him even after forty years; to make sure that, during the six confusing days, he hadn't lost any of the ability to understand everything they expressed.
In the hotel was the New Testament, in Greek and Portuguese, that Coutinho had given him; but the hotel was too far, it was being able to read here and now, not far from the blue house that threatened to swallow him up, even before the door had opened. He had paid quickly and set off in search of a bookstore where he could find such texts. But it was Sunday and the only one he found was a closed religious bookstore with books in the display window with Greek and Hebrew titles. He had leaned his forehead on the fog-damp windowpane and felt overcome again by the temptation to go to the airport and take the next plane to Zurich. It was a relief to see that he could experience the oppressing wish as a surging and ebbing fever and patiently let it pass, and finally he had slowly gone back to the bar near the blue house.
Now he took Prado's book out of the pocket of his new jacket and looked at the bold, intrepid face of the Portuguese man. A doctor who had practiced his profession with rock-hard consistency. A resistance fighter, who tried under mortal danger to wash away a guilt that didn't exist. A goldsmith of words whose deepest passion had been to rescue the silent experiences of human life from their muteness.
Suddenly Gregorius was assailed by the fear that someone quite different might now live in the blue house. He quickly laid the coins for the coffee on the counter and rushed to the house. Before the blue door, he took two deep breaths and very slowly let the air escape from his lungs. Then he rang the bell.
A rattling chime that sounded as if it came from a medieval distance reverberated excessively loud through the house. Nothing happened. No light, no steps. Once again, Gregorius forced himself to be calm, then he rang again. Nothing. He turned around and leaned against the door, exhausted. He thought of his flat in Bern. He was glad it was over. Slowly, he shoved Prado's book in his coat pocket, touching the cool metal of the house key as he did. Then he broke away from the door and was about to leave.
At this moment, he heard steps inside. Someone was coming down the stairs. Behind a window, a lamp could be seen. The steps approached the door.
"Quem é?" called a dark, hoarse female voice.
Gregorius didn't know what he should say. He waited in silence. Seconds passed. Then a key was turned in the lock and the door opened.