…
Robert was as I had left him, only now his hand was in his lap, a few pieces of paper gripped tightly in his fingers. “I really did want to see you,” he said, and held them up to me.
“But you came for my help.” He nodded, and everything in me caught fire at the implications of that sheepish nod. “You need my help getting published” He nodded again. So this was it: this is what everyone had seen, Clara and Fanny and even my dull close-minded parents: everyone had seen that Robert had come to ask something of me, yet none of them could have guessed the significance of his request.
I pulled him onto his feet, and seated myself in his place, and commanded him to read it to me.
“Oh, no, Peter, no no no, I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”
“Then now’s your time to get back in the habit.”
“This isn’t meant for an audience.”
“I don’t see a crowd. It’s just us, Robert, and it has been so, but so, so long since I have been able to hear a new piece of yours read out by the writer himself.” From where I sat I could see Robert, sunburned and skeletal, and behind him the wall of the garden and out past that the lawn where it sloped down to meet the lake, and beyond that the great flat surface of the lake stretching through the blue haze of the evening and on to the mountains, still streaked with the mid-summer sun. And I felt myself suddenly plummeting, as if the ground had all at once opened up beneath me and dropped me back into my past, to that lakeside in Berlin, and that overgrown garden, and that performance so much further back in time which had taken place just before me on precisely this stretch of lawn, another straw-haired itinerant with his own unknown piece to perform. And I knew I would not stop falling until Robert read his new piece out to me, now, here, in precisely this place at which every significant thing in my life seemed to recur. “Please read it,” I begged him. “I’m helping you, I’m putting myself out for you. It’s the least you could do.”
Robert stood there, unbowed. He had shrunk back into himself, bent his body up in a protective gesture, averted his gaze and pursed tight his lips. But he was like a mineral made dense from the pressure, and he would not crack. He only held out the pages before him, as if to say: this is already more than I can bear.
So I took them, and I have them still. The copperplate handwriting is neat and very small, making efficient use of each sheet. The paper itself seems to have been torn from the endpages of an old book, with foxed edges and a lemony color that had deepened with wear. Robert, it seems, had been raiding his employer’s library for materials, and had probably scrounged whatever pencils had strayed free of the rolltop.
It begins: “On those many nights when I cannot sleep I find myself out on the road, wandering the backstreets and trekking off into the hills and pushing onward, outward, forward, until at long last my shoes drag and my head lightens and the last bit of strength leaves my legs, and I drop right to sleep, wherever I happen to be. I have spent many a night tucked under a hedge or rolled down a verge, dreaming, blissfully, of those nights when sleep was an easy thing, without terror or complication, like a bird touching down for the night.
“But it has been long, so long, since such an option was available to me. While the sun is up I am a distracted and absent-minded man, I sleepwalk through the daylight hours, my movements sluggish and my eyes half-closed. Yet as soon as the sun has gone down I come fully to life, my spine straightens, my sight returns, and I grow restless, striding back and forth, back and forth across my modest room, stomping and muttering and growing increasingly incensed until the man below me pounds on the ceiling and washerwoman to me right knocks against the wall and I know it has come time for me to leave. So I put on my jacket and take up my stick and head out into the dark and shadowed streets, my feet striking lightly against the cobblestones, and echoing back with a determination and a purpose that drives me on through the night.
“I don’t know if you have ever had the pleasure of a nighttime stroll, but it is by far the most humble, pleasing, comfortable, and most of all safe time in which to take a walk, and that by far. You are clear of the press of the crowd, with all its members straining to catch your eye, to grab you by the sleeve and whisper their secrets into your ears, and you avoid the manifold danger of those drivers who cram their great wheezing vehicles down streets proportioned for men on horses, aiming to crack the city wide open and reassemble it according to their own purposes, and you are especially spared the bright shopwindows, whose tastefully assembled suitclothes stand pinned to their mannequins beside your own old-fashioned ensemble, as if these fashionable new suits were in fact the ones walking about the world, while you were set up within the windowframe as if the stocks, as a lesson to all who seek to flaunt fashionable norms.
“None of these threats haunt you on a nighttime walk, no, not landladies or creditors, not old bosses on whom you walked out or acquaintances who have deliberately kept out of touch. On a proper overnight stroll you are more likely to be accompanied awhile by the shy spotted street dogs, their bellies slack and ears put cautiously back and their muzzles dark from grazing scraps left out behind the chophouse. These cautious companions will travel with you a way, sniffing at your pockets and perhaps even daring to lick your fingers, and then they will drop away, and new compatriots will join you on your way.
“Next come the professional tipplers, those deep devotees to the art of drink, who you might find resting on the paving stones between boozing bouts, exercising their bellies and flexing their throats and making sure to air out their tonsils as they make the circuit, making sure only to expend their rarified skills in those professionally certified establishments. Sometimes they will pick themselves up and pass along with you under the church tower, so deep in their trance that they mistake you for an arbiter refereeing the next round. But you are no artist, only a dilettante, with no chance of standing up to them in the ring. And so you will shake their hands and bid them fair play and head out on your way.
“On rare occasions you will even come upon other nightbirds, other tramps driven to press down the nighttime roads, tapping their sticks against the paving, driven by wordless urges to walk down the darkness, and you will avert your eyes, and so will they, and you will pass one another as if you were both alone, through the streets singing only with the sound of your footsteps, and no other voice to join in your song.
“On one recent night I crossed over the railroad tracks and climbed high into the hills along muddy tracks, passing under lamplit farmhouses, joined only by the goats and their bells, until I came upon a small lake sheltered there in the refuge of the hills. A bonfire was burning where a group of young people had gathered to celebrate some private holiday of their own making, and in that brightburning dark they sang along to the accompaniment of a guitar, and toasted the seasons, and read aloud their childish poems, and stripped out of their dresses to plunge into the cold mountain lake, their pale bodies glowing as the mountains glow on bright winter nights, when their snowbound peaks drink in the starlight like a soft summer wine.
“Needless to say I avoided them, turning off before the road reached the lake and circling the lake to its furthest point. I was in no state to show myself to another human being, and certainly not to join in with their revelry and their good cheer. As I fled there from them, slipping off between the beeches shimmering under the half-moon, I thought of the night I had walked, so many years ago, with a woman, along a lake much like this one. We had set out in the dark, disappearing into the woods and pushing on to the shore, talking all the while about what was then the stuff of our lives. Or perhaps I should say that she spoke, and I listened, hanging on her every word as if it were the hem of her skirt and she were leading me through a blind wilderness, a maze of soaring cliffs and impenetrable shadow. All of which seems so foolish now, but it was enough, at least, to fill a night’s walk. We walked for and hour, two hours, speaking and listening, and eventually we had reached a clearing by the lakeside, and I had laid down my jacket and she rolled up her cloak for a pillow, and she slept there, luminous in the moonlight coming off the water, her arms tucked against her chest and her feet rolled into the hem of her dress and her mouth covered by the back of one wrist so that the slim birdbones flexed in her hand with every breath. And I had stood sentry over her, keeping watch as she slept, with the nightjars cackling in the willows and the houselights dim across the water and the sounds of our party hobbling hoarsely through the trees from a great distance.
“Sometimes it seems to me that I should have added a few words of my own, that, if I had tried to explain myself to her, even in a whisper, even in her sleep, then she might be here beside me on my walks, might still be my nighttime partner, even now. Instead I only stood there with my hand over my mouth, and when the day began to dawn I had shaken her lightly awake and turned my back as she yawned and straightened her dress and clipped back a pair of buttons which had slipped free in her sleep, and had led me back through the purple dawn, yet another nightbird headed home to roost.
“Yet here I am, still flying free, tramping through the dark without a destination in mind, or a nest to which I hope to return. No,” he concludes, “I am only a lone man, tapping my way along the roads, walking down the night, searching only for rest, and for sleep, without anyone to keep watch over my body, wherever it falls tonight.”
Robert had walked a ways off down the lawn to look out at the mountains and smoke. He heard me placing the paper in my lap he hunched his shoulders up, defensively, like a turtle drawing back into its shell. What a distance between this shrinking, shrunken man and the brave wayfarer on the page, between my frightened friend and the gallant who had not thought a thing of spending a night keeping watch over his woman friend. And yet as I looked at him standing there, diminished and diminishing in the first blue shadows of dusk, his figure began to shimmer and fade, blurring by degrees into the evening landscape, into the flowers and the trees and the long shimmering expanse of the lake, softening at the edges and dissolving at the core until it was as if I could see right through him to where another man stood, younger and wilder, his hair trimmed and his suit new and his being not yet so withdrawn from us all. This young man stood along another lakeside before another villa in yet another twilight, with still another story singing in his head. His foxface turned to me, and his form began to flicker between both Roberts, alternating young man and old like slides lined up along a projector carousel, and I knew that that figure on the road had arrived where he had always intended, and with this realization came a sudden slamming sensation, as if that body—my body—which had been falling for the past twenty years had at last come to rest on solid ground.