Danube-Networkers
The unknown within ourselves
Text: Wolfgang Sator
Translation: Eva Linton
“Home is a myth. Foreignness is the opposite. What is the contrast to myth?”. In a rented house in Marengo there is sitting Thomas and thinking. He could not bear it at home anymore and left everything behind besides some belongings. Not only things, also emotions and relationships. He wanted to be far away. However, not far enough for him.
Marengo seems more ordinary to him than all the other places that he ever has been to. Maybe that is also the reason why he is staying here.The people in the village rarely pay attention to him. He notices that when they observe him from the distance. When he is close to them, they look away furtively and pretend that he doesn’t even exist. He neither knows their names nor their jobs. With one exception: At the grocer’s, where he buys his groceries, there is written “Raimondo Greco” above the entrance door, and he even had asked him a couple of times where he is from. Thomas always avoids his questions and makes jokes. Sometimes he says he is a wanted criminal, then a man that has to find his way in a foreign country, he often speaks about a big secret that he is not allowed to tell anybody. There are many possibilities to hide home, Thomas is thinking. “When we live we move from the known to the unknown, a steady development.” Thomas takes his note book, writes some sentence and crosses them out immediately. Then the pencil breaks in half. He gets up and leaves his housing.
He walks up on a small hill, that is nearby and an easy aim for a walk. Almost every day he walks up there and back in the twilight. In Marengo it doesn’t rain very often and the climate is mild like in the South. From the top of the hill he overviews the village that also seems featureless from a distance. An omnipresent but also lost village.
Shortly after the sun went down he starts walking back. The twilight starts early at this time of the year and Thomas can’t stand the dark in the open. Not being blind,too, he thinks, don’t deliver yourself to the dark. But it is still bright enough. “I walk relieved like Sisyphos down from the hill, after I have rolled the stone up. Every day, every hour.” Thomas feels the relief walking down. He spreads his arms, turns around his centre line and dances. He feels happy for a moment.
In his housing he takes a well-thumbed book from the shelf and opens it at page 139. He reads:” Our confined being, that only knows the two benchmarks birth and death and between experiences the unrestrained chaos and also wreaks it, screams for eternity and boundless freedom. Amidst the unknown we experience an echo of our scream and want to adjust to that. But because most of the people are full of fear, they step back and hide behind the things they are used to. They are afraid of the unknown.” Thomas browses the pages and reads until his eyes shut. Half sitting, he sleeps until the morning hours of the next, still unknown day.
