Slow Homecoming Read Online Free PDF Page B

tombstones, effaced more quickly than in other regions by the radical extremes of the weather. But in this moment it formed a conscious, eternal current in the timeless, unconscious river. In perceiving it, Sorger felt cheered and comforted and eager to accomplish something.
    The firm, smooth paper of his drawing pad; for the alternation of thin and thicker lines, a drawing pencil sharpened to an asymmetrical cone; the beautiful first glow of a cigarette; a windless day, in which the smoke did not fly away but sank slowly to the ground.
    The first colors in the landscape were objects in their own right: a gravel red, an oil-drum blue, an ash-leaf yellow, a birch-tree white. Little burst puffballs in the grass. Elsewhere a hairy poppy stem, whose flower was
not red but a wonderful silken yellow. The locusts—bushes rather than trees—had dark thorns all over them. The flaming-red rowan berries, icier than snowballs inside; you can feel the sting in the palm of your hand. The brick-red willow bark, as though to bind a book with. The brown shaggy bearskin nailed to a shed.
    The first movements were the clouds of mist just over the river, drifting eastward. Sand martins darted out of holes in the clay embankment and soon turned back. The black mongrels, rooting about in the shore rubbish, proved to be giant crows, which rose into the air with a whirring of wings, circled around the man, and flew away with raucous cries; one came back again, this time without a sound, and flew over the standing man, so low that its wingbeats sounded like a flapping fan belt.
    Almost all the fish washed ashore during the night had been eaten; here and there the picked-out eyes had left their imprints in the soft sand. A stray dog ambling down the beach was silvery gray, its head white from the bluish eyes down: a real face. He dragged a dead sea gull back and forth over the sand, crunching it—that was the only sound far and wide—with his side teeth. The chained village dogs emerged from their underground kennels and ran as far as they could, whining and yapping with still-tamed violence.
    Then came the usual sounds of morning traffic: not a single car driving over dry land, but several small planes rose above the bushes, and the hum of others could be heard from beyond the river. “You must know that no one ever abandoned himself to such an extent in this life that he might not have abandoned himself still more.”
    Whom was he to honor? Wasn’t that what he needed—someone to honor? Didn’t he want to be independent?
Where was the person for whom he could do something? Where was he at this very moment?
    The beer cans, which in addition to being crushed flat had been ground into the road, seemed to demonstrate extreme violence and a despair, which he had never known but could now suspect, over an insurmountable privation and a stony absence, that had set every last dog in the village to howling with murderous fury.
    His colleague Lauffer, already uniformed in his coat of many pockets and his high boots, was trotting back and forth in the background, playing basketball with himself with the help of a windblown net that had been fastened over the door of the house. Sorger started running, snatched the ball from his friend, and joined in the game.
    Far away in the flatlands, the sun rose slowly, darkening the landscape with deep shadows: a darkness, or rather a gloom, which would persist all day, with barely shrinking and barely moving pits of shadow among the trees and bushes; and on the spot, from the moment when Sorger joined in the game, time transformed itself, as on an open stage, into a dimly sunny space, without particular events, without day and night, and without self-awareness, a space in which he was neither a doer nor an idler, neither an actor nor a witness.
    He had just jostled his opponent, sniffed at the ball, breathed in the other’s sweat and then his own, had once been grabbed around the