Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

10

There was another recurring passage in the old books: “He” (the hero — why were they almost exclusively men, with a woman rating at most an intermezzo? why, for example, was there no detailed story of a woman to be read, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century?) “traveled on the road for many a mile without encountering anything worthy of telling.” And now, during the drive south toward the Sierra de Gredos, she encountered hardly anything that, according to the more or less established conventions or rules, would have been suitable for her story, which she did want to be thoroughly adventurous.

The sun shone. A still haze hovered over the unvaryingly bare and crumbly tableland. The poplars in the few riverside meadows, or vegas, or lukas, stood ramrod straight and leafless. The olive zone, where a harvest would have been under way, did not begin until the southern foothills of the Sierra. She rolled along, hers almost the only vehicle in her lane. Coming in the opposite direction, at close intervals, however, were mostly trucks, and each time the same model and the same color, bearing the name of one and the same firm, which apparently owned a huge fleet, all with seemingly identical mustachioed men sitting high behind the wheel, all without passengers; yet each accompanied by a dangling, rocking rosary, complete with dagger-shaped cross, in the front windshield, identical to that of the driver in front of him; one after another of these drivers in his cab raised his hand to greet her with the same gesture, each smiling at her with his eyes as a sign of comradeship but also friendly concern, wishing her all the best as he passed: as if she needed that.

And dangling in her windshield was always that same medallion with the white angel pointing rigidly out of the image toward the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ. And no one was walking along the side of the road. And in the sky floated a single cloud that did not change during the entire trip. And no city came into view. And no fire burned in the thousand fields of the meseta, which with time came to represent a single field. And although during those hours nothing worthy of telling occurred, it seemed to my heroine as if one event were following the other, as if the happenings were coming hot on each other’s heels and overlapping harmoniously with one another, as in a traditional story, yet also in a completely different way; as if the narration of her book were moving along all the more emphatically during this interim.

“I experienced spells of faintheartedness, something previously unknown to me,” she told the author later. “This faintheartedness — what a word — urged me to turn around and go home. One time I stopped the car and made a half-turn. And at that very moment I felt: my story was breaking off. And you know how it is with me: feeling myself being narrated — my be-all and end-all, my one and only standard. And I must endure that, I must. Not that I am addicted to danger: but danger is part of it, without danger, no story; without my story: I have not lived, I will not have lived. And so there was only one thing to do: press on. And then came the moment when I accepted the idea of never returning home. It was even all right with me. Inwardly I crossed a line and was ready.”—The author: “Ready for what?”—She: “Ready.” And for the time being she wanted to be alone as she continued her journey.

The only thing that occurred on this stretch: she filled her tank. Where a male hero seeking adventure would perhaps have grown grouchy and impatient, under the same circumstances she drew patience and lightheartedness from the absence of particular happenings; patience she would need for what lay ahead, of that she was certain.

Usually practically a race-car driver, she drove in a leisurely and steady fashion, and at the filling station — this, too, far from any city, along the deserted highway — she inserted a pause after each self-service operation. It suited her fine that the station owner, actually just a shopkeeper, came from his field behind the building, where he was plowing under the previous year’s cornstalks with his tractor, and engaged her in a lengthy exchange about nothing of significance. She even dragged out the conversation, with if possible even more meaningless comments, such as, “Yes, and almost three months till Easter,” or: “Right: the cans of motor oil are heavy,” or: “Yes, soon summer will be here.”

And the conversation ended more or less this way — The station owner: “Your husband back safe and sound from Africa?”—She: “Without a scratch on him.”—The station owner: “Your mother released from the hospital?”—She: “A week ago, still looking very pale.”—The station owner: “Your children still doing well in school?”—She: “The boy’s been slacking off a bit lately.”—The station owner: “I remember how much I enjoyed watching you dance, Mahabba. And then your voice. No one in the whole area sang like you. You should not have given up your singing. Why did you give all that up after your wedding? stop dancing? stop singing? The softer the song, the more your voice went through and through me.”—She: “I will take it up again, perhaps not the dancing but the singing. What I need is a new song. I can feel it coming on. All that’s there now are a few notes, a few words. What’s missing is something to pull it together. Perhaps on the other side of the Sierra?”

She wished the station owner would go on speaking to her as this woman for whom he obviously mistook her. Or was he merely pretending to be confused? — All the better: she would drive off feeling easier in her mind. To let him go on and on about her in the role of that stranger; and if adding anything, doing so without asking questions of her own, or asking why, with no intention other than to get him to digress, again and again, every digression having as its focus the unknown woman, who in the meantime could equally well be her. As she left the filling station, the owner or farmer suddenly took her hand and kissed it. The benefit of an interlude, in which one allegedly wasted only one’s own time, and time in general, and gained so much time. A rich interval. Bright trumpet blasts across the entire barren meseta.

Then nothing at all happened, and for a considerable length of time, once she was alone again with the road and the tableland. That for a while nothing at all happened: what an event these days — what a special circumstance. Nothing but repeated flashing of lightning. The flashes did not come out of the consistently clear blue sky; they came out of or lit up inside her. A flashing of images began inside her such as had never before erupted in such variety and such quick succession; like meteor showers, coming so thick and fast, yet often at distant points in a firmament which for that very reason seems impossible to encompass; the eye cannot keep up, yet does not want to let a single falling star go unnoticed. And again a curious phenomenon: that these image flashes were generated by patience, and almost happiness — yet always pointed instead to something disheartening or even grievously sad.

In front of the car a whirl of chopped cornstalks, long since withered, blew along the carretera, whipped together by a wind spout into a sort of leafy column that spun past a few feet above the asphalt; and at the same time she, the driver, felt the brook flash through her, the brook called Satkula that circled the Sorbian village, more than a thousand miles away, in a great arc.

She put her finger to her forehead, which meant: be mindful. The image of the brook, the glittering of the water oppressive? First of all because she viewed any recollection of her childhood and its setting as over and done with. And then, that village signified to her falling prey to death. In her memory, the villagers there had been obsessed with death, day in, day out, including the children, or perhaps them above all, the children? Yes, the children’s awareness, above all, at least there and at that time, had been riddled with village tales of people’s dying, almost always gruesome, never peaceful, never? no, never. A neighbor had been tied up and his head stuck in an anthill, where the ants had eaten him alive (although it happened during the war, before her time, she had experienced it, as a child, as happening in the present). Another man broke his neck simply by falling to the ground while picking apples, and not even from high up on a ladder but simply from a chair (that could happen to them, the children, just as well). A neighbor woman choked to death simply because a horse whose smell she could not stand passed by. Another woman, so one heard, young and healthy, simply did not wake up one morning, and died, according to the priest at her open grave, in a state of sin, unmarried, with an unborn child in her womb. The miller — for a couple of years there was such a person there — lost the third and last of his children when the little one drowned in the brook, which was especially rapid below the dam, where the millrace joined it.

Perhaps it was less these accumulated deaths themselves than the tales of them circulating from dawn till dusk that populated the entire village for her, even in broad daylight, with terrifying ghosts; for all that was left of her own parents, of whose accidental death the villagers did not speak, at least not to her, the child, was trails of light, primarily due, no doubt, to her grandparents, who dwelt exclusively and insistently on stages of the parents’ lives — and wasn’t that characteristic of old folks? And any death in the village that she witnessed with her own eyes affected her very differently from one described by a third party or, worse still, overheard in passing: the person, the neighbor, whose death, even the most wretched one, she experienced with her own eyes, present until the final breath, would never crouch on her chest at night or pluck out her heart and then jump out at her the next morning as she was on her way to school or in the afternoon as she drove the cows to pasture — for a while this was still done in the village, by some little girl or other, outfitted with a whip and rubber boots — from behind a barn, from the slippery rocks where one forded the brook, from an empty root cellar stinking of rotting turnips.

Yes, the innumerable tales of death and dying, or, more precisely, anecdotes, at times made her village seem toxic. Never again a village, or at least not that one. And in retrospect it seemed to her as if it had been chiefly that sense of being pursued by the villagers’ obsession with corpses that had awakened her interest in money, when she was still a child. In money, simply the concept of it, she saw something that suggested an escape from the grim cycle of cadaver-worship, the hereafter, and apparitions. Money circulated toward life, embodied the living world, and meant now! (and now, and now …). And in the beginning it was just a healthy distraction. The thought of money gradually banished all the ghoulish stories.

And even then her urge to deal with money, to handle it on behalf of others, was far more powerful than the urge to have it for herself, to possess it; even then she had the idea (yes) not so much to multiply money as to let it be fruitful; to manage it — which then became the focus of her university studies — to use money to open new avenues, and still more new avenues, consistent with one of her later guiding principles: “He who steps into the same river has ever different waters flowing past him.” Setting things in motion with money: thus she became the first person from her death-obsessed village to go into the money business. (That she was a woman doing this was no longer particularly remarkable even then.)

And now she said, talking to herself sotto voce, as usual: “‘Thou shalt manage money!’ is a commandment like ‘Thou shalt not steal!’; its positive counterpart, like ‘Thou shalt make it be fruitful and multiply!’ And who knows, perhaps I accomplished as much as I did in this business because the thought of money enabled me to shake off those village death-and-doom stories? That thought gave me the energy to immerse myself completely, to my own and everyone’s benefit, in the world of the here-and-now, of life? But why are the village images coming to me now? Flow on without me, village brook!”

Another image flash: it pertained to the adolescent in the gatekeeper’s lodge at the entrance to her estate. Like all the images that flew to her so unexpectedly, this, too, was thoroughly peaceful; was set in peacetime; generated peace — the image was peace itself. And at the same time the image-spark that lit up the boy, Vladimir, for her appeared, like that of the village brook, accompanied by, or primed or shot through with, a lack — something was missing, if not from the image itself, then all the more tangibly from the subject of the image, the person in the image, and dreadfully missing!

The boy was sitting, just as he had one time in reality, at the kitchen table in her house, not as an intruder but instead very matter-of-factly, as someone who belonged there. He was reading. The kitchen was clean, sunlit, and warm. The large wooden table was bare except for a bowl of quinces, yellow as only quinces can be. Peace? Silent contentment. And nevertheless she sensed, at the very moment the image passed through her, empathy, no, pity, for the actual distant figure there in the, in his and her, in their northwestern riverport city. It — it? a surge — drove her to him; or he was supposed to be here with her in this instant. That he was so distant — from her? from what might it be? — simply far away, separated, isolated — was her responsibility, struck her as her own omission, her (unspecified) guilt.

The image, along with its powerful calm, meant: she should be close to the boy, this other person. Contrary to appearances, this burly Vladimir, who passed her in her own space as if she were not there, was as much at risk of going under as any human being could be; the very personification of a need for attention. He was in danger of falling out of the picture, and she had to rush to his aid. (“I must,” and that smile of hers.) His parents alone would never be equal to the task, ever, and for anyone. (Her “sense of mission.”)

And this lightning image, too, was also followed after a few moments’ hesitation by an audible conversation with herself: “If I ever return from this journey, I shall open an account for you at my bank, Vladimir. For a boy, that kind of thing can be as important as his first bicycle or motorbike. And for you it will be something else besides. And for your sake I regret that I cannot turn back: if this is not my last journey, at least it is the decisive one. And I would like to bring something back for you. What that will be, I do not know yet. But it will be right for you. And you will continue to look right through me, though perhaps in a different way.” As she said this, she turned her head, still driving in a southerly direction, and, accelerating now, she glanced as usual along the axis formed by her shoulder, and blew into the air with a breath that would have extinguished a candle from a great distance or would have made a small branch sway.

A different image — an interpolated image, intersecting the others — lit up her vanished daughter like a flash of lightning. It, too, told of peace. It, too, and that was the unusual thing about this wild succession of images, seemed weighed down by dark embellishments. She saw the girl, grown up by now, as a child. (What she saw in this fashion was always something she had also experienced; usually long ago; the images represented a kind of unexpected and astonishing recurrence, an addition to the usual memories.) The child was sitting on a sofa in a corner of the room, playing the guitar. The music was inaudible; the image was silent, like all the others; but in that fraction of a second she saw that her daughter was not playing a proper tune but rather isolated chords: this was evident from the child’s eyes, focused more sideways on the hand holding down the strings on the instrument’s neck than on the fingers plucking the strings farther down. She was just learning to play. And nonetheless that simple sequence of sounds made the impression of accomplished playing. That had to do with the girl’s gaze, now, in the moment between the last chord, its reverberation, and silence: still completely engrossed in playing and already full of enthusiasm for what had just been played, and full of joy at the anticipated praise, and full of eagerness to continue playing — if not the guitar, then another instrument — eagerness to play, play, play, on and on forever. (It was in fact not a guitar but an oud, an Arabian lute.)

And again an awareness of guilt came over her, though this time a less unspecific one. For she saw and simultaneously reflected (images of this sort could be counted on to bring about insight) that, when it came to her child’s infinite passion for play, she, the mother, had if not betrayed her daughter at least not taken her seriously enough. She had shown no interest in her games, or merely a fleeting one. Even on the occasions when she had played with her, she had rarely given the game her full attention. In contrast to her daughter, who had paid constant and rapt attention to the ball or dice, and likewise to her, her grown-up partner — as witness the little-girl eyes gazing straight at her, with a presence of mind found only in children at play — most of the time she had merely pretended to be playing. She had hardly ever succeeded, even with the best will in the world, in becoming truly involved in the game.

She felt it would be imperative to tell all this to the author when she reached La Mancha, and she actually began now, during her solitary drive; launched her words with great intensity into the air, into thin air, consistent with the way she wanted her whole book to be, setting the air currents in motion: “Just as one speaks of playing at being serious, people could speak of me as playing at playing with my child. And in doing so, I was not doing her any good. I took care of her. I protected her. I caressed her, yes, caressed her. I hugged her. I loved her. I adored her, yes, adored her. But when she played, I was criminally negligent of my child, in my capacity as spectator and playmate. If you ask me whether that is my secret guilt, I will say no. But there is something to it. Perhaps.

“Listen: my child was the personification of play. Whether she was speaking, studying, eating, or walking, whatever her activities, she could not help playing. For her, as well as for anyone who became her audience and/or playmate, that was a joy and a source — yes, a source — of exhilaration. This ability to play meant, and this I came to recognize too late, a magical gift. To be able to transform anything in life into a game, even simple breathing, or turning one’s face into the wind, or blinking, or shivering in the cold: that strengthened the existence and the presence of the player and at the same time that of her playmates and/or observers. It was my child’s playing and my being-in-the-game that made us a family in the first place; would have made us a family. How the house, with all its rooms, was aired out by my child’s playing — there was no need to throw open the windows. How our property became enlivened. What singing had been to my grandfather, playing was to my child. Even when she talked about something that hurt, she talked excitedly, as if it were a game.

“And thus my daughter’s wanting to leave me was also part of her game, part of her inability not to play, as I also recognized too late. Just as she played at shaking her head as a child, as an adolescent she played at being sad, being bored, despising money (and hence my profession), and then wanting to leave. While as a child she was fully aware of my inadequate involvement in her play, yet graciously ignored it — that was how self-sufficient and total her play was at the time — as an adolescent she increasingly needed me not merely to play at joining in, needed me to participate fully as the number-one playmate and/or observer! If that person had laughed heartily at her wanting-to-leave game, she would have moved on to the next game, and so on, as before. As it was, as a solitary player, she became the prisoner of this one game, increasingly dangerous, and then one day had to play it out—”

As she often did, she broke off the story in the middle and said, now talking to herself again, “If I gave up my child, my vanished daughter, I would also give up the world. — When did I forget how to play? Or was I never able to play? Does that have something to do with one’s having been a villager?”(She in particular missed few opportunities to speak of herself in the “one” form. In her story, the moment would not come until later, much later, when it was “she,” the woman, and then what a woman that would be, what a “she.”) “Or one’s being the eldest sibling? And yet precisely as a person in banking one really should be a player? No, no. And yet more and more people in banking are players? In a more and more dangerous game?”

And turning anew to the air, to the engine hood, facing in the direction she was driving, heading south, toward the Sierra and La Mancha: “What a mess. And no coherence. No continuity, no continuity. And yet: life. Glorious life. How grand life is. Let’s have that book. You must record my story, our story. How lost one is otherwise. Getting to the top, victories, and triumphs: the worst form of lostness! One must make sure something continues.” And again, in the end, nothing but an exclamation, a single word, one that did not exist yet in any language, like a distorted word, or the sound made by an idiot.

She was still far from coming up with the song. Perhaps she would never be able to sing it, she who fell silent after a few notes of any song, whether sung with others or solo. But the song, just one, was hiding, or waiting, inside one, had always been there, always wanting to burst out into the open, and for almost an entire lifetime already. And of course it was a love song, a nonspecific one that included one specific person or other, or rather merely grazed the person. Merely?

“Our book,” she said to the author (she unconsciously used “our” instead of “my”), “should omit my early history if at all possible, including the village, my ancestors, also my work in banking — which I prefer to assign to my early history — except for just a few details. And one such detail is the fact that my grandfather was a singer of songs, known far beyond the immediate region, still giving concerts in half of Europe as an old man. A classic singer of the German Lied, who at the same time maintained his residence in his native village all his life: here the house of the smith and wheelwright, there the sawmill, here the farm, there the schoolteacher’s house, here the constable’s house, there the tailor’s house, here the singer’s house, a house of wood, set in an orchard, actually even smaller than the others’ houses (only the constable’s was equally small). Let that flow into our book, casually, in passing.”

Then the series of flashing images of her brother, who in the meantime was where on his journey, parallel to hers or perhaps not, to his chosen people? Traveling only at night, he was sleeping now during the day, but not in the hay in a barn or a stable, but warm and well cared for in a bed. The correspondences he had conducted daily in prison had resulted in a long list of addresses, all of which represented possible places to spend the night. Not only in the country toward which he was heading but also throughout the world, the released prisoner would have been taken in immediately, here as well as there, with hardly a day’s journey between one place and the next. In every town, even small ones, at least one house stood ready to receive him, a sort of network almost like that of a certain sect or a people scattered all over the earth. And should he happen to find one door barred, his sister was certain that one right next to it would immediately be opened to him. Her brother, the enemy of mankind, was at the same time the quintessential social animal. He was aware of thresholds, true, but instead of impeding him, they gave him momentum; he drew the strength from them to open himself up, and others.

Precisely when encountering strangers he was immediately all there, as a matter of course, yet made no assumptions, with the result that he infected every new acquaintance with his attitude, always liberating or refreshing. Women in particular tended to respond to him, and after exchanging two sentences with him began to use the intimate form of address. Accordingly, her brother was at this very moment sleeping, if not at one of his thousands of correspondents’ addresses, then under the coverlet of a young or older “motherly” woman he had met only an hour ago at the bus station (or in the next room), who meanwhile was at work somewhere, having pressed the key to her apartment into his hand after the third sentence they exchanged.

But the present image had nothing to do with her sleeping brother. It, too, obedient to the rule or law governing such images, came flying or flashing out of the depths of time, and this one even from a long-ago past: in it her brother appeared to her as a very small child, almost a nursling still (but nursing from whom? his mother had died in an accident the day before). And this child — like the adult in the present — was sleeping, though not in a bed in a closed room somewhere but rather on a wool blanket outdoors, under an apple tree, back home in their village orchard. Yes, she had seen him this way once, and she had squatted next to him, in the role of the one who was supposed to take care of him, the guardian of his sleep. Her tiny brother lay there on his back, in the light summer shade of the tree, and slept deeply and peacefully, the sleep of the righteous, almost the self-righteous, as only a nursling can sleep, with cheeks puffed out and lips protruding.

This image, like all the rest in the image shower, told of (dealt with) a kind of peace. And this fragment from a very different era likewise contained an element of melancholy, or, worse still, a danger, a threat. And with unabated amazement she recalled that at that moment it had been crucial that her brother not wake up. He was very ill, and this was supposed to be his healing sleep. He had to sleep for a long, long time. If he woke up too soon, or suddenly, it would kill him. And soon the blazing sun would reach his face. Should she pick him up and move his bed? Sit down and shield him? And the tractor sounds growing louder. And the saw blades howling as they sliced into the tree trunk. And now, as she drives steadily southward over the mesa, along the almost always deserted carretera, with the image of her endangered brother before her, a small branch hits her windshield with a pop (in reality more a cracking sound), making her jump. Unlike with the previous images, she remains silent; avoids any sudden noise in the car. Not squirming in her seat, which could set a defective spring to humming. Not turning on the windshield wipers (to remove the sight-blocking branch) — risk of squealing. Maintaining a steady speed so as not to shift. Having to brake suddenly now would be the end, once and for all!

Then, even when opening her brother’s letter with one hand: no ripping, as little noise as possible. Reading, silently, the single sentence: “That the world is still there — wonderful!” (Not to be taken literally, see “secret code”!) The branch blown onto the windshield: from an acacia, leafless, arrow-shaped; studded with sharp, pointy thorns; arranged in pairs, in the form of bulls’ horns.

Then all the image meteors — didn’t “meteor” mean “between heaven and earth”?—outdone in brilliance and duration by one whose content she did not want to reveal to the author. The only thing she told him: “It was just a word.” And then she explained to him: “Even single words can arrive from a distant place and time as images. And perhaps there is no image more penetrating and intense than a pure word image like this.”

Even now, long after the fact, when she spoke of it, the word was present for her as hardly any present could be. Although she kept the word secret, she revealed herself terrifyingly to the author. If he was terrified, it was in this sense: suddenly he viewed her with different eyes; he no longer recognized in her what he thought he knew; he saw before him a total stranger, and at the same time someone familiar; he wanted both to back away and move closer; his terror: not so far from what was at one time called “holy,” at least with a hint of it. And yet she remained unapproachable? Or on the contrary? And he, or one, or whoever, simply did not find the right way to approach her?

After the arrival of that word image—“It flew to me, came sailing to me”—she had driven on at her steady speed. She drove on. She is driving. The highway over the upland plateau is bumpy, and the car bounces and sways like a carriage. While driving she pushes back the Santana’s canvas top. She sticks something between her lips, something that suits her even less than a cigarette: a toothpick, and not even one made of ivory, let’s say, but a wooden one. She takes off her hat and lets down her hair — which does not suit her either, or does it now?

Empty blue sky, devoid of airplanes, devoid of the kites and buzzards so common on the mesa, with that motionless dark cloud still hanging there, though by now low on the horizon, sinking out of sight, like a mountain. In her open rough-terrain vehicle the heroine shows herself to the author for a moment from high above (although he has never written a film script). Then she moves in close again, in a veritable close-up, or a torso shot. And for the first time now he sees her eyes, as if they had always been veiled to him previously, even though he has been preoccupied with her story for so long, including their color, which again does not seem to suit her at all; or perhaps it does, and how! though not her origin and her country, but then what did that have to do with her story?: an indescribable black.

“Indescribable”? How could he, such an experienced writer, let a word like that slip out? And now he tried at least to describe that black, at first mainly for himself, as usual: it was a black that could resist any light, even the most glaring, even the winter sun hanging low over the fallow disk of the earth. The adventurer’s eyes did not merely face down the sun; they literally absorbed it — perhaps, too, because although they were open wide, they did not dry out, at all, at all — and sent the rays back, transformed, and how! A black like the black of the eyes of the white-robed angel on the medallion, whose one finger pointed sideways toward the empty tomb? No! How extinguished those eyes appeared now, almost wondrously extinguished; for how they would flare up again when—. In ancient books, the word for the black of her eyes was gagat or azabache, meaning something like pitch black. But not that either: this was no film. After all, hadn’t the movies made it impossible to find a color and a face? These were supplied ready-made, in close-up? Besides, our heroine bore no resemblance to any angel, including the fallen ones, and least of all at such moments! This black sucked in the light, absorbed it; tasted it; savored the aftertaste. Her entire face, then her neck and shoulders as well, were engaged in silent tasting, motionless, without biting, chewing, or swallowing. Along with the light of day, the air was tasted, the airstream, the hues of sky and earth. And also striking to the author — which subsequently struck him again and again, if anything at all — was how, in addition to her eyes, all the parts of the woman’s body, even the smallest ones, unveiled and unclothed, revealed themselves in the light surrounding her; as aspects of the light, stretching, billowing, arching, even when the woman did not raise her face as she drove along, but rather kept it lowered. Visible even now the seemingly eternal abrasion on her brow, always in the same place. Visible, too, her hardworking villager’s hands: she was strong. But the physical strength was not her own. And nonetheless the many scars on her body.

And how the author will stare when these patches of light he is contemplating on the woman’s body are suddenly joined by one that is considerably more extensive — that is, when a few milestones after the arrival of the aforementioned word image, one of her shoulders, again seen from above, is suddenly bared, her shirt having seemingly slipped down to her elbow of its own accord? And although the bunched material perhaps interfered with her steering, she did not pull the shirt back up. She drove on quite some distance with one shoulder bare. Her skin reflected the light. The lashes above her black eyes stuck out distinctly, without mascara, ever more distinctly, like the acacia thorns from the windshield. And finally she bit the toothpick in two.

“But even this image or word,” she indicated to the author later on, “had a black mourning border. It arrived as pure energy and was accompanied by impossibility. The more insistently it called for unity, the stronger was the echo, and that proclaimed: separation, once and for all! Not mere mourning: pain, almost screaming; pain at the impossibility of staying together forever. So then I tossed the falcon’s wing, picked up in the devastated forest after the hurricane, out the roof of the car.”

And here the moment has come in her story to indicate that, according to tradition, her clan does not belong only to the Sorbian, i.e., Slavic, minority in the easternmost reaches of Germany. More notably it descends from a minority within this minority: from an Arab trader who came to the region even before the turn of the first millennium and conducted his business there. Hence her vanished daughter’s Arabic book? Hence the blackness of her eyes?

Myriads of images, constantly brushing past her, plummeting down on her, shooting up inside her, shining through her, tickling her awake during that solitary drive. As much internal as external, high above as down low, horizontal as vertical. And each of the images, even if it was switched off after a microsecond and at most had a bit of an afterglow, was tangible, and accessible to both the senses and the mind, both leaving an aftertaste and clarifying one’s thought processes; was each image, albeit surrounded, as now, and undergirded by the glow of missed continuity, a treasure that would never be lost, even if one allowed a particular image to disappear again without making a point of tasting and contemplating it, and a treasure whose value — she of course knew all about “value”—exceeded anything one could ever “have” in life or call “one’s own”; the fundamentals underlying any “goods”?: “love” (was love a good?), “loyalty,” including to oneself (was loyalty a good?), “beauty,” and “goodness” (was goodness a good?), “renunciation” (was renunciation a good?), and of course “peace”?

At any rate, each image among the thousands was under the control of its receiver, even if it had flashed by in the twinkling of an eye, as if the receiver were also the transmitter. What remained of the image was the imprint, which, before it faded, sooner or later, and in some cases not at all (in this respect comparable to an unusual dream), could “bear fruit,” and this without exception (whereas with dreams this was the exception). And one could decide which of these images would bear fruit — as the selection and utilization of those just described rested on the intensely personal choice made by the one “image person” in question.

“Those images,” she dictated, for the moment more a “banquière” than an “aventurière,” to the author, “are a form of capital. Capital without any exchange value, but with all the more use value. Capital whose owner one remains only if one chooses to use it to the utmost. If one allows this capital to sit unused, it collapses, and — this is the unique feature of these moveable and/or immoveable image assets, my most liquid holdings and at the same time my soundest real estate — one collapses with it, even if the opposite appears to be true. Having and owning as a process of constant trading, yet not speculating and lining one’s pockets but rather pure usufruct, as much to one’s own benefit as to others’. By putting the image-capital to work, and why shouldn’t one? for profit and enrichment, shared profit and joint enrichment, without claiming to be an owner, without the title of ownership: a way of handling property that has hitherto gone unrealized in any economic and banking system—” She broke off; end of dictation. But had the author taken it all down? His scribbles indecipherable; his private shorthand.

Over time the lightning flashes of images had become sparser. In this barren countryside all one saw, as far as the horizon, was this barren countryside. The cloud behind her had dissipated, as clouds sometimes do over the ocean. Oh (in Arabic, ja), how fruitful this interlude had been: it was right that now the images dwindled and finally disappeared altogether. Although outwardly nothing was happening — which, given the rocky baldness of the mesa, perhaps contributed to the hail of images? — , the lone driver felt like someone who had just crossed a newly discovered and at the same time tranquil, strangely familiar continent. This had been the time for images, and now there would come a time without. Yet she could have spent an entire day, even an entire month, alone in their company. And hadn’t she just experienced an entire month, an entire year?

But at the end she pursued a final image, one that had filled her with particular astonishment. With it came the idiot from the riverport city at home, the “idiot of the outskirts.” He was perched on the site of the weekly fish market. As befitted such an image, she had actually once seen him sitting there in just this way. She walked past him, and he looked at her. He was bald and barefoot. The day was windy and cold — even if in the image now neither wind nor cold played a role. Or, rather, yes, at least the wind did. For between the woman walking past and the idiot, papers and plastic bags are swirling around, intermingled with the gleaming of fish scales. The market is closed. The stands are dismantled; the square is empty, although not yet cleaned up. Fish heads and lemon slices in wooden crates, or littering the ground. The idiot not perched as usual by the side of the road or on the curb, but on one of the hydrants that will be used to wash the trash out of the marketplace. He sits there as on a throne, at eye level with her, the passerby, who has known him, as he knows her, for a long time.

And one day the idiot had been standing beside her in the narrow little Armenian church on the outskirts, both of them equally strangers there, or perhaps not? the others at the mass not any less strangers, only less noticeably so? More than once they had crossed each other’s paths on the way to the forest, he meanwhile riding a motor scooter without a muffler, and now and then with a woman, a different one each time, all of them appearing normal, so to speak, at least in comparison to him, who was constantly throwing his arms in the air and babbling in fits and starts, either in a deep guttural voice or a falsetto — normal, and, in the idiot’s company, in such high spirits that one would not have recognized them if earlier one had happened to run into these particular women or girls alone. And one time he had shouted enthusiastically into her car, from one of his favorite spots, a coach’s brake-chock inscribed with a king’s crown, left centuries earlier along the road leading out of the city: “I know everything about you. I’ve read all about you, everything!”

Now there/here on the market hydrant the idiot is trembling. He is freezing. His teeth are chattering. In a moment he will be shooed from his perch and soaked through, which will make him freeze even more. Far and wide no female companion in sight. And his elderly parents, who have taken care of him for decades, have both died, she the day before yesterday, he yesterday, or at least, mortally ill, were taken away, and now the idiot is living in the house all by himself, an excessively spacious old building with espaliered fruit trees out in front, and many paths through the rear garden, where one sometimes saw him strolling with a small book in hand, like a priest praying from a breviary in earlier times — though merely pretending to read, or perhaps not?

The square smells of fish, the often rather oily kinds from the rivers. The sky northwest-gray. The idiot hungry. And without any money either, except for the two coins he has always jingled in his pocket; which he lays on the counter in the suburban bars; and which would not pay even for the sugar in the coffee to which they always treat him, which he sweetens with so many cubes that the cup almost overflows. And how strange that outside of the office she almost always ran into people who had no money and, stranger still, had no interest in money, and that this suited her, strange or not?

In contrast to the others, that shower of images with the idiot as its central figure was not set in peacetime. The figure on the hydrant there was suffering. Not merely that he was cold, and so on; there was also a terminal hopelessness; the imminent prospect of being dragged away from his house and from the region where he had spent his entire life; of being removed, perhaps in an hour, from the only sphere of existence halfway possible for the idiot.

And yet, also in contrast to the rest of the current image series, not a trace of grief in his face; no sorrow at parting; no hint of fear of dying or perishing. In the midst of the swirling market debris, and his dire straits, the idiot remains untouched, and untouchable. On his temporary perch there, he is the essence of untouchability, beyond peace and war, heaven and hell. He crouches — no, sits “enthroned”—there, defying death — and life as well? no, transcending all our stupid thoughts of imperfect continuity, transitoriness, and irrevocability; the epitome of presentness, beyond my sorrows and joys; the embodiment of the current moment; simply there, and above all, as only an idiot can be, there and then.

And thus one sees oneself perceived by that figure on the cistern in a manner unlike any other; a form of perception that accompanies one, step for step, and meanwhile registers one, word for word, or sentence for sentence — note the movements of the idiot’s lips; if not narrating one, then enumerating one, in an impartial, merciless, seemingly inhuman manner; precisely the kind of enumeration specific to an idiot, which, however, can occasionally validate and acknowledge one like a particular kind of narration; a registering that does not categorize — a blessing. How affirming such enumeration by the idiot is, in that it challenges one to do a better job at anything one does in his field of vision, or at least to do it more clearly, which means more rhythmically! And so, as she passed him back then, she set her feet down more firmly and let her shoulders roll back a bit more. And now on the highway she does nothing for the time being but drive.

She drives on. Dust flies up. The sun shines in her face. She does not squint. It is possible she will be dead soon. She is wearing a ring. Her belt is broader. Her mouth is the broadest. I caress her. She does not notice. Maybe she is a man? In her heart a white lily blooms. Her ribs are sharp as a knife. You stink. She turns the wheel. The road is straight. By the side of the road lies a skull. Another over there. The fields are gray and yellow. There stands a tree, full of dried-up leaves. The leaves tinkle. From that tree hung a black boar. It was slit open. The intestines were spilling out. Who will wash them? On a pole sits an owl in the bright sun. My girlfriend has a small mole in the hollow above her collarbone. Now she drives faster. My mother smoked, one cigarette after the other. One time I beat her because of that, in a dream. Another time she had an operation, but thirteen nurses blocked my way to her. Where will she turn in to spend the night? An empty bed is already waiting for her somewhere, or perhaps not. She is hungry. There is a line of dust around her nostrils. She is alone. I have never seen her not alone, except in photos. In the company of others she is unrecognizable. She plays at being sociable. And she does not play very well. She would play better with me. And in the pictures she plays particularly badly when she is in the company of a woman. She looks disfigured to me then, and ugly. Or no, not ugly, worse than that, a beautiful caricature. And her gestures and body language toward the other woman. She seems to be waving five hands in the air, jerking two heads, shifting from one foot to the other, jiggling like a millipede, her hips constantly bent like a tailor’s dummy. My father was a tailor, down in New Orleans, and in his deserted shop still hang a couple of suits and garments dropped off for alterations. And nevertheless, nonetheless, despite everything, and even so, I would like to see her in her story with someone else, at long last. Perhaps she just cannot stand being photographed? Even though she was a film star in her youth? Although or precisely for that reason? (This expression I picked up during the time when my parents listened to “Radio New Europe.”) To see her with someone, where she would be more, by a factor of one, by a factor of one hundred, than she is by herself.

She drives on. The dust flies up more and more. The sun shines on the nape of her neck. She pins up her hair. She pulls her shirt up over her shoulder. Her knees are sharp as daggers. She clamps her legs around me and draws me home into herself. There I curl up blissfully. There is a fragrance of lilies. And perhaps she will die this very night.