Across Read Free Page A

to order,” because, by pleasantly diverting me now and again, they save me from losing myself entirely in my work.
    The lump of clay with the round black hiding places lay there like an abandoned primeval necropolis where nothing remains but lizards. The lamp illumined the desk, which was bare except for the four objects. The rest of the room, ordinarily unlit, lay in half darkness. In the neighboring apartments, next door and upstairs, water faucets sounded one after another. On the west and east edge of the plain, where the two railroad lines recede into the distance, a long-drawn-out whistling coupled with a rumbling could be heard at regular intervals;
and on the express highway skirting the Untersberg, a roaring and a blowing of horns. Some of the apartment-house windows were open to the balmy evening air; a fat man in a white undershirt was leaning out of one of them, smoking; in another stood a clay jar, holding a papyrus plant that shot up like fireworks, its star-shaped greenery strikingly vivid against the yellow sky; in the window downstairs a caged parrot, luminous blue in the twilight, sat silently shaking its head; one of the open windows was empty.
    Why did I leave my family? Was I sent away? Was it my idea to desert the three of them? Was there any reason for the separation (which has never become an official divorce)? Did I leave for good, or only for the time being? Haven’t I got the daily routine of each one of them in my head, as though I were secretly still living with them? Whenever I run into my son or daughter in the street, isn’t their first question, put without emphasis, rather as a matter of course: “When are you coming over?”—the kind of thing one doesn’t say to just anyone. Would I live with them again someday? To all those questions I have had no answer, though I believe I know one thing: a final separation will never be possible. In any case, my name, “Loser” (common all over Austria, and also frequent in the phone books of northern Italy, especially in such cities as Gorizia and Trieste), does not in my opinion suggest someone who gets rid (los) of something, and certainly not a loser (in the English sense); it is, I believe, connected with the dialect verb losen, meaning “listen” or “hark.” In the Salzkammergut there’s a mountain called Loser, which starts as a gently
rounded hill but culminates in a massive rocky dome; a seemingly unscalable fortress, with sides so steep that they remain almost free of snow in the winter, the few snowy patches suggesting false windows.
    On the other hand, I have no idea what my wife is up to, what people she sees, what kind of work she’s doing. Unlike me, she takes easily to new languages—has she become a translator? Is she going on with her studies, which were interrupted by our marriage? Is she guiding tourists around the town? (I once thought I saw her, holding an umbrella over her head and leading a group.) Is she lecturing at the People’s University? I never ask. Even before, I seldom asked her a question. That may be what led to our separation. Inability to ask questions is often my problem. And yet I’m made up almost entirely of questions. But, as a rule, I regard every question as the wrong one and I can’t get it out of my mouth. Or then again, something in me rebels against the kind of questioning that might better be called pumping.
    Yet I keep going back to the house where my family live. Though considerable time may have elapsed, there’s no great excitement when I come in; only the conventional evening greetings of people who have been going their separate ways during the day. Once, when I’d been away for six months, my son in his room just looked up briefly from something or other and said: “Well?”
    The house is the kind of place where an old-time teacher might have lived—It’s painted yellow, with pointed gables and a