Leavetaking (14 page)

swallowed up in the factory’s maw and, amid the pounding of powerful machines, proceeded through the stages of its metamorphosis, rolled through vats and drums in which it was prepared, steamed and drained in the wash room, came alive in the dye house where the dye boss’s control booth hung like a glass ship in the steamy mist, and was slung forth by rotating metal arms, to be sucked up by rollers with broad metal lips, and then fluttered in long ribbons onto the rubber-covered tables of the printing rooms, where in the tropical heat half-naked workers bent over it and let it drink in the colors of the printed patterns, and now one could already guess their future existence, heavy and gleaming with flowers and butterflies and figurines the materials hung stretched out to dry in the long rooms behind whose windows the sky reflected their colors, then they were snatched into a new vat, dragged through new streams, and made compliant by a hail of blows from little hammers, and then they rolled light and fragrant off the belts and were divided up and wrapped up in rolls and supplied with labels, and many of them bore the names of goddesses and their earthly existences began and they shone in the streets and woods as dresses, they fluttered as curtains from windows, and finally they lay faded and torn on the rubbish heaps at the edge of cities. And we kept on producing them. Ceaselessly we kept on, while outside a world fell into pieces. The war did not open my eyes. The frustrated struggle for my vocation had put me in a state of derangement. My defeat was not the defeat of the emigrant in face of the difficulties of living in exile,
but the defeat of one who does not dare to free himself from his dependence. Emigrating had taught me nothing. Emigrating was for me a confirmation of the not-belonging that I had experienced from my earliest childhood. I had never possessed a native soil. I was left untouched by the fact that the struggle that went on outside affected my existence also. I had never come to any conclusions about the revolutionary conflicts in the world. The effort I had made to find some means of expression for my existence had claimed all my awareness. This period was for me a period of waiting, a period of sleepwalking. I spent two years in the factory. I carried out my work in the darkroom of the printing department, where by the feeble red glow of a safety light I developed photos of sample designs, I carried out my work in a little sealed room, deep in the bowels of the roaring factory. Although his wish to see me employed in his field had been granted, my father paid no more attention to me. He never came to me with any questions. It was as if he sensed I would again desert him. The hours I spent together with the family passed in the same atmosphere of estrangement, I sat through one part of the evening in my parents’ company as if it were a debt, silently turning the pages of a book or magazine, while on the radio monotonous anonymous voices reported inconceivable events. Out of this period a cry breaks out of me. Why have we squandered these days and years, people living under the same roof, without being able to speak to or hear each other. What sort of disease is this that makes us so dreary, that fills us with
such distrust and reticence, that we can no longer look one another in the eyes. And yet this period, which at the time seemed completely dead to me, contained expressions of a secret life. At night in my room or on Sundays, pictures, drawings, poems, hidden expressions of someone unknown and renounced came to life. In the depth of this total isolation there was a quiet deliberation as a result of which each month I put aside money for the future. In the late summer of the second year the break-up began with a violent blow. I had gone into the woods to work. The buzzing of the mosquitoes was like a light drone of bells; beetles and spiders rustled in the dry foliage. I settled down at the side of a mountain lake. I fell asleep, wishing that I might never wake again. I dreamed of my way through this forest. There was the old fear of being lost in the forest, of death in the bog, among the ferns in utter stillness. On a narrow path I encountered a man in a hunter’s outfit, a hunting bag and a gun over his shoulder. He went past me and it was as if I had met him once before, a long time ago. Then I wandered along a country road. The road led me through an immeasurably wide and confused life. Again I met the huntsman, he came straight toward me and I had to step aside to let him pass. Hastily he raised his hand in greeting. I came to a lake and let myself drift into the water and out there in the brightness of blurring reflections the huntsman popped up again in front of me, I recognized him and awoke. On a holiday trip many years before as a child I had met him in a wood. There was the resinous tang of freshly felled fir trees,
and I twisted between my fingers a small round wooden disk that had fallen from the beginning of a bough of a sawed-off tree trunk. The huntsman appeared and asked me my name. I told him. He said, That’s my name too. He asked me insistently where I lived. I told him the name of the town. He said, I live there too. He asked me what street. I named it and he said, I live on that street too. He asked me for the number of the house, I told him, and he said, So we live in the same house. He moved off and left me behind in unspeakable astonishment. With the warning of this dream in my mind I jumped up. I could not interpret the dream but only felt that a change had come about, that my life was governed by new forces. I saw my footsteps in the sand at the edge of the lake. For a moment the vision of these steps that had led me from my birth onward to this place filled me. In a single instant I saw the dark pattern of their track. I recognized it and forgot it again immediately and in fear at my past I ran up into the undergrowth. Birds fluttered out of the trees, the sky was blood-red from the sinking sun. And the uneasiness that had now begun could no longer be contained, after weeks and months of slow inner changes, after relapses into weakness and discouragement, I took leave of my parents. The wheels of the railway thumped away beneath me with their ceaseless hollow drumbeats and the forces of my flying forward screamed and sang in incantatory chorus. I was on my way to look for a life of my own.

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