A memory from geography class comes to mind: island? Are we actually standing here on the peak of a high ocean mountain? We ten or fifteen idly observant vacationers, in our colorful madhouse jackets, as the fashion prescribes. I change my mind again and say to myself, it would all be nothing but inhuman loneliness: Bewildered as a horse that has thrown its rider is the earth wherever man is in the minority; moreover, nature proves itself to be not at all healthy, downright mentally disturbed in the high mountains and on tiny islands. But to our amazement, the distance between the dog and the hare has diminished; the terrier is catching up, we’ve never seen such a thing: a dog catching up with a hare! This will be the first great triumph of the canine world! Enthusiasm spurs on the hunter, his breath sobs in gulps, there’s no longer any doubt that in a matter of seconds he will have caught his prey. The hare pirouettes. Here I recognize in a certain softness, because the crucial cut is missing in its turn, that it’s not a grown rabbit at all, but a harelet, a rabbit child.
I feel my heart; the dog turned too and hasn’t lost more than fifteen steps; in a matter of seconds the rabbit catastrophe will occur. The child hears the hunter hot on its tail, it is tired. I want to jump between them, but it takes such a long time for the will to slide down my pant pleats and into my smooth soles; or perhaps the resistance was already in my head. Twenty steps in front of me – I would have had to have imagined it, if the baby rabbit hadn’t stopped in despair and held its neck out to the hunter. He dug in with his teeth, swung it a few times back and forth, then flung it on its side and buried his mouth two or three times in its breast and belly.
I looked up. Laughing, heated faces stood around. It suddenly felt like four in the morning after you’ve danced through the night. The first one of us to wake up from this blood lust was the little terrier. He let go, squinted diffidently to the side, pulled back; after a few steps he fell into a short, timid gallop, as though he expected a stone to come flying after him. But the rest of us were motionless and disturbed. The insipid air of cannibalistic platitudes hovered around us, like “fight for survival” or “the brutality of nature.” Such thoughts, like the shoals of an ocean bottom, though risen from great depths, are shallow. I would have loved to go back and slap the silly little lady. This was a noble sentiment, but not a good one, and so I kept still and thereby joined the general uncertainty and the swelling silence. But finally a tall, well-to-do gentleman picked up the hare with both his hands, showed its wounds to the onlookers and carried the corpse, swiped from the dog, like a little coffin into the kitchen of the nearby hotel. The man was the first step out of the unfathomable and had Europe’s firm ground beneath his feet.
This miniscule story, that in fact is nothing but a punch line, a single tiny tip of a tale, and not a story at all, happened during the first World War. On the Swiss Fodora Velda Alps, more than three thousand feet above inhabited ground, and still much farther off the beaten track: There, in peacetime, somebody had put up a bench.
This bench stood untouched, even by the war. In a wide, right hollow. The shots sailed over it. Silent as ships, like schools of fish. They struck far back where nothing and no one was, and for months, with an iron perseverance, ravaged an innocent precipice. No one knew why anymore. An error of the art of war? A whim of the war gods? This bench was abandoned by the war. All day long, from way up in its infinite altitude, the sun sent light to keep it company.
Whoever sat on this bench sat firm. The moon rose no more. Your legs slept a separate sleep, like men who, having flung themselves down close together, exhausted, forgot each other in the same instant. Your own breath was strange; it became an occurrence of nature; no, not “nature’s breath,” but rather: If you noticed at all that you were breathing – this steady, mindless motion of the breast! – something of man’s swooning at the blue colossus of the atmosphere, something like a pregnancy.
The grass all around was left over from the previous year; snow-bleached and ugly; bloodless, as though a huge boulder had been rolled away.
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