Regina Ullman: The Country Road

The world seemed to spin. Oh — laughing, I watched a star fall. Silently, perhaps it fell into this garden. .

But it appeared she didn’t want to wait, my neighbor, she gave no indication of it.

She kept on speaking, but in a quiet tone, as if otherwise we might really miss the sound of a fiddle, she continued:

“The respectable groom could tell at once that the dance was over. That is to say, I kept dancing for a while by myself, but a different dance: I fell ill. For three days and nights my dreams followed one and the same course. I dreamt I was dancing with my hangman. Then his head fell off. But he kept dancing on and on with me, without his head. But then the dream would begin again. And even in its beginning I could always feel the end. Oh, God only knows what I suffered in those three days and nights.” Yes, those were her words. And as horrible as they were, I have rarely heard these words spoken so beautifully.

Then I went to sleep. That is to say, I lay for hours in my bed, with the moonlight streaming over me. I hardly knew anymore whether I had dreamt or whether it was true. Only as the light of day itself slowly restored me like a sick person to health, and woke me (for its meaning is not always the same), did I see that it had not been a dream.

And once this was clear to me, I resolved to be on my way. For this certain knowledge of hers, this way of becoming common, this melting together of many into one, had suddenly become repugnant to me. And within me I heard a voice, as if I had not recently spoken these words myself, as if someone else were comforting me with my own words: “I was myself, and even if I had wanted to be better, more beautiful, it was from myself that I would begin.” (And little by little the moonlit night inside me was ebbing.) One ray of sun after another broke through the steel mantle of the morning dew. I left money for the day laborer. Then I left the house, silently and in a hurry, as if it were my last chance. .

When I had arrived at the bottom of the hill, where the path meets the road, I encountered a small hunchback. He was pushing a bicycle with one of his elongated hands, and in the other he held a fiddle or a mandolin, wrapped in cloth. From the way that he turned the bicycle, I could see that he meant to go in the direction from which I had just come.

The sun was bathing itself in the shadows. The shadows in the sun. I could hardly tell a real bird from a flicker of the light. Just a fervent chirruping — did it come straight from the heavens, or from the field itself? — pounded in my heart. Now only my memory believed in the course of the past few hours, in the footstep from the room and the rattling of the never-tiring sewing machine. But all that I could see was a brown line, the roof over all of those experiences. . And finally, a shepherd loomed up into the sky like a star from the heights above. For what is God’s will, but that we should be reconciled to ourselves.

Some years ago, in a hidden corner of Styria, there stood an old tavern. There it stood, where no one would ever have hoped to find it. It stood there with its single story, as if it had been left vacant, like an etching made by one soul to tell another just what a house really is. But above the door hung a sign emblazoned with a magnificent stag. With its front legs it was springing into the forest, while its back legs lingered behind, allowing a church spire and several houses to peek through. A whole world, with a hunter kneeling at the other end, so small and insignificant, a shotgun in his hand. He aimed and aimed, as if it had only belatedly occurred to him, when the stag had long since leapt away. (So it goes for men at times, and not just with woodland game.) But of course this image was only meant to depict the power and grandeur of the animal, and to imprint the house more firmly there in its meadow in the middle of the woods, this house that claimed to be a tavern. Yet no one but a hunter and forester, or a coal burner, or perhaps a mountain shepherd heading home, could find his way to this uncharted place; and then it wasn’t for wine or beer, but to breathe the vapors of a glass of schnapps poured from the large clear bottle. Then silence would follow, since no one else was there anyhow, except the deaf old woman who always left the glass and the bottle to her guests, because she couldn’t pour those drinks drop by drop anymore without shaking and trembling. In fact, she must have been almost blind, too, because the one time a stranger actually came and asked her to pour him a glass, not knowing the customs of this tavern, she poured it right onto the table; carefully, to be sure, but right onto the table. Nor did she speak as she went about her business, there wasn’t any point, she was deaf. She was empty like a vacant house, where you call and call and no one comes. She was deaf. And she was so old that a great-grandson of hers, already grown, could remember the quavering lullabies she had sung beside his crib. She was so old that it seemed death had started his count high for her, and would keep on counting, up to a hundred or more. Oh, this woman was a wonder. Did she do anything? Indeed, she did. She did just what needed doing in a nearly lifeless house like that. She laid a fire in the hearth and whipped the porridge into shape. There wasn’t much else to eat in her house, except the milk that a little shepherd boy brought every morning and evening. Of course her people sometimes drank schnapps, too, but that wasn’t her way. She seemed to serve life just as life served her. But she hadn’t dealt with the cattle in quite some time. The men took care of that, the grandsons and the farmhands who were around the house in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. They yodeled now and then, too, but mostly for themselves and the fields and the Alps, those heights to which they aspired; and the old woman didn’t set the bowls on the table any faster or straighten the chairs when the men were drawing near, because she didn’t hear them. For her there was only one time, and it was within her; an ancient time. It started early and had no need for sleep. God knows how many clear, moonlit nights had already made their home there, at the small window of her room. And besides, there was rarely anything out of the ordinary. What was there, was there. And mostly that was work. You would have thought all of these workers were little old men if you didn’t see them in broad daylight. But they were just men of few words, peculiar men. Every now and then one of them would stray off to a dance floor or some other spot. But that was only on jubilee days when the whole country was on the move: around carnival and at harvest time; then no one asked why they had come, these men everyone had forgotten. And when they left because they didn’t like it there, no one asked after them then, either. For the women at the dances are common property (unless a man picks one out for himself and won’t let her go, and buys her wine and roast; but then before he knows it he can find himself waiting late into the night). Life always holds a special charm at the height of pleasure, a summit that responsibility and obligation and duty and guilt seem unable to attain. Where there’s nothing to do but dance and stamp your feet, now with this woman, now with the next.

But when someone abstains from such things, that’s not so easy to believe. People think he’s just gone off to dance somewhere else. And if it should happen that he’s taken a special liking to an old, forgotten Bible and the mysteries it reveals in its letters and images, inside and out: well then this Bible is his chosen one; and he may dance with it all the way to heaven. For as hard as life is, weighed down with men and the burdens they have to bear hither and yon, and with the clods of earth stuck to their clumpy shoes; even if life is hard, still, in some invisible, unknown way, it is rapturous. Truly, somewhere in this life there is still music playing for the dance, even if we have not quite found its pace.