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were not eager for a story, they were satisfied with my evocations. But not content with such marginal participation, I would sit in the midst of the children, as though I were one of them. They took me for granted, but my former playmates, who had become “big” boys and girls in the meantime, made fun of me. Once when I ran a race across the square with some children, hardly any of whom came up to my shoulders, a girl whom in my seminary nights I had often seen swathed in blue veils—I was never able to conjure up a naked woman—passed on stiletto heels. Though she hadn’t even looked at me—a glance out of the corner of her eye had told her all she wanted to know about me; namely, the worst—her lip curled almost imperceptibly.
    At one stroke, not only the children’s company but the square itself was closed to me. Something drove me to the strip of land on the edge of the village, known locally as “behind the gardens.” This area, though inhabited, was not really part of the village. Unmarried persons lived there—the roadmender, for example. He occupied a one-room house with thick dark-yellow walls,
suggesting the porter’s lodge of a nonexistent manor house (there had never been such a manor in or near any of the villages). I never once set foot in the house and altogether kept my distance from the man. He was the only person in the village with a secret, which, however, he displayed freely and had no need to hide. Maintaining the village streets and pathways was only his everyday occupation. But there were days when he abandoned the gravel box out on the desolate highway and metamorphosed into a sign painter, stood, for instance, on a ladder over the entrance to the inn at the center of the village. As I watched him adding a shadowy line to a finished letter with a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating, as it were, a thick letter with a few hair-thin lines, and then conjuring up the next letter from the blank surface, as though it had been there all along and he was only retracing it, I saw in this nascent script the emblem of a hidden, nameless, all the more magnificent and above all unbounded kingdom, in the presence of which the village did not disappear but emerged from its insignificance as the innermost circle of this kingdom, irradiated by the shapes and colors of the sign at its center. At such moments, even the painter’s ladder took on a special quality. It didn’t lean, it towered. The curbstone at its feet gleamed. A haywagon passed, its strands of hay plaited into garlands. The hooks on the shutters did not just hang down, they pointed in definite directions. The door of the inn became a portal, and those who entered looked up at the sign and bared their heads in obeisance. The foot of a chicken scratching about in the background became the yellow claw of a heraldic animal. The road where the sign painter was standing
led, not to the small town nearby, but out into the country and at the same time straight toward the tip of his brush. On certain other days, amid the blowing leaves of autumn, the driving snows of winter, the flowery clouds of spring, the heat lightning of summer nights, I had perceived the wide world as a pure Now; but on signposting days there was something more: an exalted Now, an Era.
    And I saw the roadmender in still another avatar, touching up the paint on the wayside shrines. One of these was shaped like a chapel, with an inner room, but this room was so small it would have been impossible to take a single step in it. Time and again I found him at work, squeezed into this little box at a remote crossroads, visible only from his head to one elbow, which he rested on the frame of the little window that opened outward. The shrine made me think of a hollow tree trunk, an engineer’s cab, a sentry box; and I had the impression that the man had carried it into the wilderness on his shoulders. The painter didn’t even have room