ESSAY ON QUIET PLACES



Translated by Krishna Winston

Stilles Örtchen, “quiet little place,” a German euphemism = privy, outhouse, WC, restroom, bathroom, toilet, ladies’/men’s room, washroom, lavatory, comfort station …



Long, long ago I read a novel by the English writer A. J.—Archibald Joseph, if I’m not mistaken—Cronin, in a German translation, whose English title was The Stars Look Down. It was a fairly thick book, but it’s not the fault of the author or his story, which at the time captivated and filled me with enthusiasm, that I remember very few of the details. What has stayed with me, in addition to those stars, always looking down: an English mining district and the chronicle of a hard-up miner’s family, juxtaposed with the story of the well-heeled mine owners (“if I’m not mistaken”). Much later, when I saw John Ford’s film How Green Was My Valley, the faces and landscapes fooled me, in a good sense, into thinking, though I knew better, that I was seeing the film version not of the novel by Richard Llewellyn but of Cronin’s The Stars Look Down. Yet I did retain one detail from the tale of the stars that look down, and this detail haunts me to this day and provides the starting point for my almost lifelong circling and encircling of the Quiet Place and quiet places, and accordingly that’s where I mean to begin my essay on the subject.

The detail to which I’m referring conveys the following, whether in my memory or in my imagination: one of the heroes in The Stars Look Down—I think there are two, children who grow up as the story progresses, one from the wealthy family, the other from the poor family—anyway, one of them makes a habit of taking refuge in the toilet, lavatory, privy, not when he needs to go but whenever the company of others—adults, family members—gets on his nerves and becomes too much for him, a burden and a torment. He locks himself in the water closet (“as the name suggests”) so as not to have to listen to the incessant jabber, and stays there longer than usual.

The story—or is this now my version?—says it has to be the scion of the wealthy family who feels driven to the Quiet Place, and it wants this place to be located far from the parlors and chambers in the manor house, and decrees that the boy does nothing there but listen to the silence. And I’m fairly sure it’s not so much the original story, the novel, as my own version that wants it to be in that out-of-the-way place, away from the family, that the youthful hero conceives the idea and the sensation to which the book owes its title: that when he’s there, the stars look down on him. His Quiet Place had no roof, was open to the heavens.

For me, too, the Quiet Place has a story, different in some ways, but analogous to the one I’ve just summarized, and a lively and varied one, too, considering the place itself, which is really not “monotonous.” Now I’d like to try to trace the outlines of that story, not filling in the specifics, but parallel and in counterpoint to suggestions for stories and images that several people have sent my way.

It was on the threshold between childhood and adolescence that the Quiet Place began to take on a meaning for me over and above the ordinary and customary. As I sit here at my writing table, far from the sites of my childhood and from childhood itself, and try to remember what toilets were like after the Second World War in East Berlin—in Niederschönhausen, part of Pankow, and later the privy on my grandfather’s farm in southern Carinthia, only sketchy images come to me—not a single one from the city—and besides, and above all, I don’t figure in them, not as a child and not as a living being; those images lack any subject that could say “I,” are disembodied.

Just the usual: thick or less thick packets of newspaper cut into conveniently sized pieces, with a hole punched through them so they could be hung on a string from a nail driven into the board wall, the variant being that the words on most of the pieces were in Slovenian, from the newspaper my grandfather subscribed to, the weekly Vestnik (The Courier). The vertical shaft under the drain hole ran down toward the manure pile outside the cow stalls, or didn’t it continue on to a kind of dry well?—the distinguishing feature being that the shaft was unusually long, or at least seemed so to me as a child, because the privy was located on the second floor of a farmhouse built into a steep slope in the middle of the village, at the end of a long wooden gallery, where the house and barn came together, and it formed a part or corner of the barn as well as of the gallery, completely unobtrusive, its board walls the same weathered gray as the planks of the gallery and the siding of the hayloft, easy to miss, hardly recognizable as a distinct place, even as a shed, let alone as a privy, since the heart shape traditionally cut into privy doors throughout the region was absent, and the door not even recognizable as such—all you saw was a slight bump-out in the wall where the gallery met the hayloft, which a stranger to the village might well have mistaken for a cubby where my grandfather kept his carpentry tools. Visitors rarely came to the house, however, and the regional agent for the insurance company, Assicurazioni Generale, stopped by at most once a year, and to him, should damage caused by fire or lightning have occurred, a room that small would hardly have counted. What I find striking in any case is the distance between that peasant privy and the main part of the house, whether for everyday use or special occasions; hard to picture, in the Slovenian village of Stara Vas, unlike in the more middle-class market towns down on the plain, someone peeing in a public place as portrayed in a number of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings.

But now another special thing about that Quiet Place comes back to me: the light in that little enclosure, which had two sources (without electricity, of course, and I wonder now how the members of the extended family found their way there at night along the dark gallery: with a kerosene lantern? a flashlight? a candle? by feel?). The first kind of light came from above, in the place itself, so to speak—shining through cracks in the board walls? No, my grandfather was competent enough as a carpenter not to have left a single crack—rather the light came through the wooden walls, through the boards themselves, as if filtered, also through dot-sized holes, hardly as big as the eye of a needle, in the knots, more or less round, where branches had once grown out of the tree trunk; over time these knots had perhaps shrunk more than the rest of the sawn trunk. A strange indirect lighting, found nowhere else in the house; indirect meaning without windows, but all the more substantial; light that surrounded one, by which one found oneself surrounded in the privy—one?—me; so there was already an “I” there after all?

And the second source of light? The light that shone into the long vertical shaft from the open-air manure pile below, in the depths, as it were. That light comes up the shaft—please don’t expect me to say “along with the stench”; having no memory of that, I won’t mention it. This light doesn’t reach the person, “me,” peering down through the hole, but at most comes halfway up the shaft, no, not even that, hardly a wrist-to-elbow’s length up, and remaining pooled down below, a substantial shimmer completely different from the one surrounding the person peering down from above, a shimmering probably reinforced by all the yellow from the straw mixed with the cow manure way down there, which makes the inner walls of the shaft visible by following its form, the circle: living geometry, entirely natural. And why does a local anecdote I heard from my mother come back to me now, in which a child presents a basket of well-shaped, gleaming pears to the local clergyman, announcing, “Pastor, I’m supposed to bring you greetings from my parents and these pears from the shithouse tree!”?

For whatever reason: unlike the young hero in The Stars Look Down, in my childhood I didn’t need the Quiet Place as a retreat, not even once. From that time, I remember the Quiet Place or Places, if at all, only from the perspective of an observer, an eye-er, as a kind of medium. I didn’t even experience the place as quiet—either as quiet or secret or in any other way: sounds of whatever kind had, and have, nothing to do with it. (Nor do smells—strange though that may be, or not so strange.) Eye-er? A way station? A minor character, bodiless, invisible, the place empty, nothing but a sight, then as now.

The first time I see myself in such a Quiet Place as the main character, in flesh and blood, the scene takes place far from my native village—yes, that’s the term that was used once upon a time. I’m thinking of my years in boarding school. And the experience that left the strongest impression occurred at the very beginning, on the evening of the day I entered (or what word should I use?). It was a day in early September in the nineteen fifties; rain was coming down hard and darkness came on early. In those days daylight saving time hadn’t yet been introduced in our area. Before the three hundred or so pupils could sit down to our first communal meal in the enormous dining hall—I’d never eaten in a hall, indeed had never been in a hall of any kind other than the gym in my elementary school—all of us had to stand and repeat the blessing offered by the spiritual prefect.

The prayer went on and on, or so it seemed to me, probably also because since arriving at the school in early afternoon I’d had an urgent need to relieve myself but had no idea how to find the toilets in the rambling and bewildering building, a former castle; in fact, I hadn’t even looked for them. What about asking? How did they expect us to behave? So we newbies, a ragtag crew from the most remote corners of the country, stood and stood and repeated and repeated, wishing we could take our seats on the benches at the long, long refectory tables, while outside the closed doors of the dining hall the cold evening rain beat down harder and harder on the gravel paths in the castle’s courtyard, where—or am I deluding myself?—the fountain continued to patter. But no: we had to keep on standing and praying, and when we finally sat down, a flood of something I thought no one could help noticing, eyed by all the other adolescents at the table, trickled onto the handsome old stone pavers, lit by many chandeliers, wound its way for all to see from bench leg to bench leg and then from table leg to table leg, leaving my own legs and my new trousers, purchased for the beginning of this next phase in my life, clammy from the crotch down, and soaking into my more or less brand-new shoes.

So until the evening meal ended I remained seated in this condition, not daring to move, pretending to eat, acting as if nothing were amiss. The minute we streamed out of the hall, however, I slipped away from the crowd and made my way to the darkest corner of the arcade that surrounded the courtyard. In my memory I see myself finally (!) leaning against a column in the dark, completely lost, in the true sense of the word, in this unfamiliar environment, I who had often had to adjust to unfamiliar environments of various sorts since I was little. Escaping into the open was out of the question, and not only because of the locked gates and the rain pelting down, but so was rejoining the others, my age-mates, in the study halls and later the dormitories: my reputation with them was done for.

The sound of running water, noticeably different from that of the rain, made itself heard somewhere behind the new pupil. It seemed to be coming from the other side of a door, and this door turned out to be unlocked, the door to the most secluded, most secret restroom in the boarding school, perhaps meant for visitors, or the groundskeepers, or workmen brought in from the outside, and usually locked, but by chance open on this particular evening. Upon entering I didn’t turn on the light, didn’t hunt for a switch, just stood there in total darkness, with the sound of running water all around me, coming both from the urinals and from one or two stalls in which the toilets hadn’t shut off. For a long time I didn’t budge. I’d already relieved myself elsewhere, for better or worse. But this place now met a very different need, and in the course of the hour or so I spent there, it assuaged that need, at least for the present—for my introduction to the school. Here for the first time I became the main character, in person, in a Quiet Place. And for the first time it got me to listen in a way typical of such a place, which would come into play later on, and left a lasting influence. What could be heard was not limited to the various kinds of running water, both inside and outside the unvaryingly cold stone walls, but also the noises or whatever, muted by the sound of the water and by distance, made by my fellow pupils on the upper floors of the building, which accordingly reached my ears not as yelling and hollering but rather, for moments at a time, as something almost homey, almost. The sound of running water in that unlit Quiet Place as the undertone. But the tone that counted, way off in the background, was the other one.

During the years I spent at that Catholic boarding school, the restroom, and not only this one off the arcade, provided a possible haven, even though I hardly ever sought refuge there again. I’m not sure why my far more prevalent penchant for seeking out the confessional during Mass comes to mind now as similar, albeit only to a certain degree. Similar in what sense? In this sense: without having any sins to confess to the invisible “Father Confessor,” and certainly no specific ones, instead rattling off a few generic ones from the catechism’s catalogue of sins, I felt impelled to get away from the others, my fellow pupils in the pews and the rest, away from the whole ceremony, to an out-of-the-way place, and the confessional, the confession booth, was indeed out of the way, far back in the nave, as I recall, and simply making my way there did me good. Upon my return to my classmates and the service, my heart usually felt free, or at least freer, almost bouncy, but not because I’d unburdened my conscience in the darkness of the confessional into the dimly glimpsed ear of the otherwise invisible confessor—and by the way, what did conscience mean to me in those days?

These two places, the quiet one and the sin booth, aren’t really similar; in fact, they’re altogether different in view of what I have in mind, at once vaguely and urgently, as the main concern or main theme of this essay (yes, it’s hovering before my mind’s eye, and may it continue to do so, unresolved), and on which I want to remain focused: getting up in the middle of the service, with my fellow pupils all around me in the pews, and slipping away, all by myself, to the confessional: neither action came from a compulsion, and certainly not from a pressing need. Every time it resulted purely from boredom. Of course boredom can also turn or develop into a kind of need, and a powerful one. But that kind of boredom, boredom as a form of suffering, as the opposite of being pressed for time, was something I hadn’t experienced yet in those early years, or am I merely imagining that now, or acting as if that were the case, now that I’m working on this essay about the Quiet Place.

There were times when I loved school (“love of learning” still applies), but there I also went through periods, not that seldom, when I wished that I could retreat to the infirmary, leaving the study hall and my desk in the classroom behind, not with a serious illness but maybe with a fairly high temperature, and especially that I’d be allowed to stay there to convalesce for a few days after it went down, with nothing to reflect on and puzzle over from morning to night but the geometric or other patterns woven into the exceptionally white and soft sickroom bedsheets. Such wishes hardly ever came true during those years. On the rare occasions when I did have a fever, it never got that high, and rubbing the thermometer, as others advised me to do, wouldn’t have helped: from an early age I had no talent for pulling off a good scam, except as a game, when nothing was at stake. The moment it turned serious, with something to be gained or someone to be defrauded, I invariably got caught, often when I was completely innocent—the actual perpetrator was sitting in front of, next to, or behind me.

One time I was in luck, however—allowed to spend several days in the infirmary, don’t ask me why, as the only patient there, nursed solicitously by a nun, and as I lay there from early to late, the tall, wide window gave me a view from my bed in a direction and of a landscape entirely different from what could be glimpsed through the classroom transoms or from the study hall, whose rows of desks were bolted down far from any windows: I saw an area that, with its woods and cow pastures, was at once familiar and novel, with no school buildings or other barriers between the landscape and my sickroom, itself quite small, in contrast to all the halls in the former castle: study halls, dining halls, and dormitories.

If only I could stay in this cozy room! But one morning there was no help for it: I had to get up, dress, and make my way back to life and the company of the hale and hearty. Away from the boredom of snow-white sheets, cud-chewing or dozing cattle outside my window, the uniform crests of spruce trees forming an even horizon. (Yet during those days in my sickroom, just as much later, in a hospital, with all kinds of electronic thingamajigs on my chest and a view from the window of a densely occupied cemetery, I never once felt bored, and if I did after all, my memory, which has the last word here, says: no.) While I was away and alone, I may have missed one of my friends or another, or, more likely, certain teachers. But now, after leaving the infirmary, I hadn’t the slightest desire to rejoin them. I should have reported to class immediately, up in one of the schoolrooms under the castle’s eaves. Instead I sneaked along the corridors and the galleries that surrounded the castle’s courtyard, deserted during these early-morning hours, and hid or rather slipped into one of the restrooms, likewise deserted. The next recess was quite far off, and I was in luck again, free to stay there undisturbed for a good long time. But after my warm infirmary room my various refuges felt freezing cold, and the constant sound of running or rushing water on all sides seemed to make the cold more intense. I was chilled through and through. Could it also be that my temperature was below normal after days of being elevated? And this freezing, shivering, and shaking suited me just fine. I’d stay in the restroom till the fever returned, maybe even higher. I locked myself into the stall closest to the half-open window and stood there till the next recess passed, and the one after that. No one came looking for me—not yet. I just had to keep my teeth from chattering. Do your work, cold place, bring back my fever. But the fever refused to return, even after that ice-cold morning.

Later on I had only one more extended stay in a Quiet Place like that. It happened in the monthslong period I had free after graduating from secondary school. I’d transferred for my last two years to a public school, enjoying the social scene thoroughly but glad to see it end, the boarding-school experience faded by then as if it had never been, even as a figment of my imagination. My new classmates, boys and girls, had coalesced into a congenial group, and I, or “the person I was then,” was accepted into it, if not as the cock of the roost, then at least wishing I could be that at certain moments, as did the few other boys, some more, some less, in our class, which was unusually small—which perhaps accounted for our solidarity.

And now, with our school years behind us, the others, the members of the group, my group, all of them but me, set out to travel through Yugoslavia and Greece. They’d all wanted me to come along—and I’m not just imagining that—and I was the one who’d weaseled out of the trip. Weaseled out with various excuses and evasions: my mother couldn’t give me money for the trip. That was true, but it was also an excuse. I also explained that as a stateless person, I had no passport. That was likewise a fact, but according to the authorities there would have been a way around it, and in rejecting that possibility, as I had the earlier suggestion that a collection be taken up for me, I was in essence using the obstacle to get out of going.

To this day I don’t know why something in me resisted so strenuously taking that trip with a group for whom I actually felt considerable affection. Be that as it might, one fine summer day in the early sixties I found myself alone in my village, done with school, separated from my friends, and frantically idle after all the intense times we’d enjoyed together.

So I set out by myself, alone, with the duffel bag popular at the time, stuffed with clothes, etc., on my shoulder, which was supposed to make me look like a boy who’d be on the road for a good long time.

In the end I didn’t get far, and certainly wasn’t on the road very long. True, I headed west, but even in that direction Carinthia doesn’t extend very far, and I didn’t even make it past the western border. On the first day I got as far as Villach, I no longer recall how, a distance (as in a Western) of about fifty miles from home, and there I spent the night, I no longer recall where. On the second day I made less progress—only to the market town of Radenthein, near Lake Millstatt, where I dropped in unannounced on a classmate’s family and spent the night there in my thick sleeping bag, whether on a bed, a sofa, or where or how, I no longer remember.

I do recall, however, where I spent the third night, and especially how. It was in the town of Spittal on the Drau, only a short distance from Radenthein and an even shorter distance from Lake Millstatt. Nowadays the town no longer mentions the river, referring instead to the lake: Spittal on Lake Millstadt.

Got through the night—“spent the night” wouldn’t be the right way to phrase it—in the railroad station’s restroom. I’d run out of money, or at any rate didn’t have enough for a hotel room or even a bed in a youth hostel, which the town of Spittal didn’t have at the time—and perhaps still doesn’t? But in those days railway stations didn’t close at a certain hour of the night, so I could hang out till midnight and maybe even later, in the building and the surrounding area.

For a while it remained almost warm; it was summer, after all. Except that in those days at least it usually cooled off rapidly on summer nights; as I recall, we regarded a summer night that stayed mild all the way through as very unusual, very special: rather than go inside one wanted to stay out no matter what, sitting together, yes, with others, not talking, the occasional words and the sounds of nature forming part of the stillness, and even though no scent of honeysuckle wafted through the summer night, only the night breeze, that breeze meant as much as the honeysuckle in Mississippi and other southern states in the books of William Faulkner.

At and in the railway station in Spittal on the Drau it wasn’t that kind of night. Long before midnight the air turned chilly, and soon the cold spread through the building, which might as well have been open on all sides. First I tramped all around outside, passing the railroad workers’ gardens and going down into the meadows along the river, out of range of the station lights, then gradually making smaller and smaller circuits.

For a while I managed to pass the time, keeping my blood flowing, so to speak, and distracting myself from my tiredness by watching the trains from the various platforms, especially the long-distance trains bound for Athens, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Munich, Cologne, Copenhagen, and Ostende—all of which made stops, by the way. But then fewer and fewer of them came through, and from a certain moment on tiredness got the better of me. It became so overwhelming that I didn’t know what to do. Or rather I did know: I locked myself into one of the stalls in the station’s restroom, which, though out of the way, was somewhere inside the complex.

The door to the stall had to be opened with a one-schilling coin, and when I locked it from the inside, at first I felt somewhat protected or sheltered. Without more ado I lay down on the tiled floor, using my duffel bag as a pillow. The stall was so small, however, that stretching out was impossible, so I braced my head on the back wall and coiled my body around the toilet in a sort of semicircle. The lighting in the rather large restroom, quite bright and white, stayed on all night and shone only slightly subdued into the stall, which was open at the top and also at the bottom, though there only by about as much as a child’s foot was long. Using a few articles of clothing from my duffel bag as covers, I tried to read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which for a long time hadn’t appealed to me but the day before in Radenthein had proved unexpectedly fascinating when, toward the end, with death approaching, the doomed Thomas Buddenbrook almost jauntily begins to reflect on the meaning of life.


Copyright © 1989, 1990, 1991, 2012, 2013 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

Translations of “Essay on Tiredness,” “Essay on the Jukebox,” and “Essay on the Successful Day” copyright © 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Translations of “Essay on Quiet Places” and “Essay on a Mushroom Maniac” copyright © 2022 by Krishna Winston