Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

14

Back at the hostel, with the help of a tiny light attached to the front-door key, she lit her way up to her compartment in the gallery off the interior courtyard. The curtains to all the sleeping compartments were drawn and hooked from the inside. If there was a light on in any compartment, it did not show.

On the other hand, at considerable intervals, and each time from farapart sections of the patio, came a variety of noises and sounds; yet hardly the usual, more-or-less regular sounds made by sleepers; rather almost inaudible ones here, more distinct ones there, and in particular sudden sounds that ceased abruptly, like voices responding to each other, or like certain voices involuntarily led by others, amid the all-the-more-powerful silence that enveloped the hostel from top to bottom; a silence as physical as only the deep sleep of a very disparate crowd can generate; a crowd in which each person is not at home in this place, having found his way there from quite distant parts, by difficult, if not life-threatening, paths, and, in his sleeping compartment at last, and safe for this night at least, has tossed and turned for hours before finally falling asleep; but then from sleeping berth to sleeping berth; and one person right after the other, the first as a sort of sleep-leader among maybe a hundred, drawing the rest along into the now general deep sleep; and as if this sleep had come only with the arrival of the woman, the last guest to turn in.

Yes, not until their numbers were complete was it permissible for this little band of lost, dispersed, and asylum-seeking folks, united by nothing but their restlessness, to give themselves up to rest (a palpably only temporary rest). A great breath of relief sweeping through the venta, now in the form of a soft whimpering, now in the form of a sighing that expressed itself only in the moment of falling asleep; here as a giggling, a release from the earlier daylong stress, even a burst of laughter, such as the man or woman in question could never have uttered while awake; then over there as a cry, so brief that one cannot believe one’s ears and thinks one must have been mistaken, but on the other hand so piercing that one still recalls it decades later and wonders whether it was not a death cry — so shrill and at the same time broken off in the middle: that could not have been a cry of sexual pleasure, or at least not only that? Or: a cry of pleasure, long held back, welling up, and at the same time a death cry? And thus she made her way to her own sleeping berth — now and then jingling her key on the stairs and in the gallery, as if to provide additional reassurance to those who had had such a hard time finding rest.

The curtain to the compartment drawn back. But the space was not unoccupied. In the glow of the lamp affixed to the wall sat a lovely young girl with an overly serious mien, playing chess with herself in her nightgown. Glancing up, she said only, “Too early—,” and pulled the curtain to. The chess pieces had been of transparent rock crystal, powerful, almost lumpy shapes, such as once upon a time the caliphs, and in particular King Almanzor in Andalusia, had taken along to pass the time during their campaigns against the Christendoms.

The next compartment over was the right one (her mistake). Here she now sat, like the girl next door, with her back to the walnut partition, as thin as it was solid. “For those of our tribe, it is more fitting to keep watch than to sleep.” Calling to mind the few people who were the point of her story. But for that she had to read first. Immerse herself in the Arabic booklet belonging to her faraway daughter. “Time to read!” Upon her opening the book, a sound as if of lips parting, very soft and gentle.

She pronounced the individual words and phrases over and over under her breath. The Arabic script looked to her like the tracks of wild animals running through a field of grain: loops, leaps, circles, and, at the end, in the middle of the wheat field, a large rest-circle. Intermittently she switched on her hand telephone and spoke to the answering machine in the office of her temporary replacement, back home in the banking citadel in the riverport city; made suggestions, gave instructions; analyzed and predicted. In one breath she recited an ancient Arabic sentence from the fifth or the sixth, the Christian eleventh or twelfth, century, in the translation written in the margin by her daughter. “I departed from the paved ground, away from the teeming throng, and strolled in the sand.” And in the next breath she murmured into the speaking device that fit into the palm of her hand phrases like “clear strategy,” “aggressively implement the new technologies,” “warning on profits,” “additional earnings impetus,” “stagnant employment picture,” “remain on the road to growth,” “bull market.” And turning in the twinkling of an eye back to the book, she deciphered and spelled out, “I turned my cheek to the dust and felt nothing more than affection.” And then, again switching on the telephone nestled in her fist: “The inflation horizon will certainly brighten soon,” “gratifying market trends,” “a very attractive investment — shows imagination!” “In the coming months the growth rate could explode in a war of ‘fundamentals versus growth,’ and certain fundamentals will have to be given a timely burial.” And continuing in the other text: “Love possessed me in such a fashion that I neglected myself as well as my beloved … my innermost heart was burning to know what path he took through the mountains … when in the year 532 I stood on the inland dune outside Fez … said the bird on the edge of the desert, the lovers spoke a language used otherwise only by madmen … the word for ‘tears’ had the same root as the word for ‘to cross’ … and the breath of mercy came from Yemen (or from ‘the right’—‘Yemen’ was the word for ‘right’) …”

And so on, turning from one of these locutions to the others and back again, back and forth, back and forth. Was this really possible? Could it be done? Yes, it could be done. And as time passed, the dictating came to resemble the murmured reading, as if all the banking formulas and stock-market clichés were part of the desert tales from bygone times. “The earnings potential of the traditional blue-chip stocks when I disappeared amid the stirring tamarisk branches close by the main tent before the ascent into the mountains, where we tugged at the camels’ nose rings in the shadow of the world financial markets and trade deficits.” Her professional language eventually interwoven with the other language and recited by her in the same soft incantatory tone, yet also with a peculiar urgency, as if she were using it here and in the present hour for the last time, for now or for good.

And then in the booklet a word in Arabic script, which, without any effort on her part, spelled itself out, deciphered itself, illuminated itself — read itself, lent itself to reading; the first word she recognized without needing to focus on it or follow it with her eyes from right to left. It was no longer “she” reading the foreign script; “it” read, and this “it read” surpassed for that one word-moment all the previous instances of “she (or I) read.” Such reading-recognition was accompanied by something different from the writing on the wall by an invisible hand that prophesied my, the despot’s, demise, the handwriting that could not be deciphered by me and would be interpreted only by one versed in such things, a third party.

And although the unexpectedly legible word — and then another, and then a few more — might simply mean “wood,” chasch(a)b, or “hornet,” zunbur, “mustard,” chardal, a window now opened up, or a prospect. To the reader, curled up in her narrow sleeping berth with the book resting on her raised knees, the characters began to resemble monumental writing outdoors in a landscape, painted on a mountainside or formed of stones. Except that they did not express anything monumental, anything resembling propaganda or advertising. Rather the signs inched along like a small, exceptionally delicate caravan on the most distant horizon, beneath a sky that they rendered material and tangible; to the sound of an inaudible music, snatches of which she sang along with, with the recurring word she knew by heart, murranim, singer.

And she drew back the compartment’s fleece-thick curtain, just a crack; but that was enough to allow the postmidnight air to waft in, and with it a cry issuing from one of the dozens of other sleeping berths in this hostel of the dispersed, a hollow gurgling from the bottom of a well shaft going way down into the bowels of the earth. From the neighboring berth the clicking of chess pieces battling each other.

It had not been the first time that her daughter, her child, vanished. As an adolescent she had already left the house several years earlier; also the riverport city; also the country. And even then she had gone without news of her child. Now, with the book meanwhile laid aside, she began to talk to herself. (Author’s observation: that at the time of this story, more and more people, especially the most beautiful women, carried on conversations with themselves.) A person standing outside would not have believed that the speaker was alone: she must be sitting or lying there with someone else; a man or a woman who kept as still as a mouse, all ears, as the woman’s soft yet clearly audible voice addressed itself to him or her, calmly, quietly, with many a pause, borne on the nocturnal stillness.

She spoke of herself there and then in the third person; almost in the tone of a chronicle. At intervals she addressed a “you”; and that, too, gave the impression that she had company. And the adventurer could be heard saying the following: “You know, her love for her child expressed itself from the beginning in her always wanting to rescue her. Merely to be there and to protect her was not enough. The mother had to be prepared at any moment to provide first aid and rescue. And thus the lives of the two women, with the father absent, teetered constantly on the edge of drama. And listen, she often rescued her child when there was hardly a need for rescue. She jumped forward and snatched her out of the path of a car that had long since turned off in another direction. She pulled her back from an abyss that was either miles away or only two feet deep.” If this were a film, her daughter would have got hooked on drugs, and she, the mother, would have been jealous of her youth. But this was no film plot.

“And let me tell you: at the school gate, this mother knocked a man to the ground who was actually another girl’s father, not a kidnapper. And time and again she rescued her child from bad company, male and female. And one day she pried her out of the embrace of a boy she had never seen before. And then one day the adolescent girl disappeared without a trace.

“And the mother promptly set out to find her child and rescue her, to fetch her home from hell, or from the land behind the looking glass, or from the bottom of an enchanted lake. For months and months she searched, from country to country, continent to continent, from new moon to full moon to new moon. And when she found her child at last, it was indeed not in a hellhole, but behind an invisible looking glass or in a second reality at the bottom of a lake. I tell you: after four or five months she came upon her vanished daughter on an island in the southern Atlantic — you need not know its name, let’s say beyond Lanzarote. The girl was living on the western coast in a shepherd’s hut — with nothing but ocean between there and Brazil — several miles from a town whose name I do want to mention to you, Los Llanos de Aridane (not Ariadne).

“This time the mother undertook the rescue operation differently from the previous times. She did not rush to the spot and come storming into the situation, but sneaked up on the rescuee, crept on all fours across rocky pastureland toward the cliff with the hut, crawling from bush to bush. From afar she then saw the girl with her back turned toward her, standing tall — she was no longer half-grown — in the flower border she had planted herself. The woman sneaked around her child in an arc; she did not want to call out to her, not from behind. Having reached the bluff, she had to scramble down the cliff a bit and work her way back up in a zigzag. And look: when she was only a few steps away from her lost daughter, she stood up straight behind the last shrubbery before the Atlantic Ocean, one of those briar bushes that send clouds of loose seedpods rolling in balls across the high plateaus.

“Can you explain to me why I seem to recall that all this happened at Eastertime? Because of the white cloths hung up to dry in the sun in front of the stone hut? Because of the little garden so glowingly, so intensely green in the rolling landscape? Because of the barefootedness, those very white feet of hers (they, too, seemed to have grown in the meantime)? And would you believe it: even though her daughter again had no need of being rescued — mother and child were both overjoyed to see each other; and this one time, an exception in their relationship, they were happy in each other’s presence at the same moment. And as they then celebrated this moment, without any special extras, you can really speak of a festive occasion. And the woman subsequently stayed on the island for a while, in the hut, close to the town. (During the first night the daughter put her mother to bed, in her own bed, and exhausted though the woman was from the search, when she awoke, she had recovered completely.) And in the end mother and daughter did not leave the island together; the girl did not rejoin the mother in the northwestern riverport city until a month later.

“In the years that followed, together again in the house, they found their relationship reversed, just imagine! Now it was the child, long since grown up, who wanted to be rescued by her mother, only by her. And if perhaps not rescued, at least constantly cared for, hovered over, spoken to, interrogated, advised by her; not simply mothered but rather challenged, and indeed as sternly as possible; evaluated, judged, and without maternal indulgence, please.

“The mother, on the other hand, now no longer saw the grown woman as a child or even as her own daughter, her flesh and blood, but only as a family member, and that even in her dreams; as one who, despite their life together, was increasingly pulling away. That fundamental lack of synchrony, which, except for that moment of reunion on the Atlantic island, had always existed between mother and child, persisted between the woman and her grown daughter, but now with the signs reversed.

“Imagine, the woman would never have guessed that her big, beautiful, strong, self-reliant housemate would seriously have expected; needed; wanted anything of her. And imagine: whatever the daughter undertook or chose not to undertake during those last years was done with complete seriousness in reference to her mother: What will my mother say to that? What will she think? And whatever is wrong with her? Why is she not there for me anymore? Why does she not help me? Why does she not rescue me? Why does my mother not love me anymore? Why is suggesting games the only thing that ever occurs to her to do with me (although she still does not know how to play)?

“And you should know that one day the daughter, the child, the woman, let out a whimper in the middle of a conversation between the two adults; a whimper as if coming from all the lost children in the universe at once; the leap between the down-to-earth discussion and the misery that suddenly broke through was again a reversal of the earlier state of affairs, when the little child, if she had a bad fall or was hit by another child, would sob so hard that she could not say a word, even to her own mother — and then suddenly, after drawing a deep breath, would begin to speak in a perfectly calm voice, picking up where she had left off. And do you believe me when I say that on one of the following days this child again disappeared from her mother’s house, and has remained gone to this very night?”

Finally pain; pain: finally! And while she cowered in the berth, her shoulders slightly hunched beneath the low ceiling, she was swept out into the open by it, this final and seemingly infinite pain. And at last she could fall silent, stop talking to herself; no longer had to open her mouth to tell her story: the story continued on without her; with the help of pain, her story moved forward, beneath a not only open but also vast sky. Before that only one last little question: “What happened between her and her child: Was it connected somehow with her ‘secret guilt,’ or what she herself referred to as her ‘delicious secret, guilt only if it came to light’?” And the answer was?: “No.”

And now, as if a weight were being lifted from all those sleeping and more or less suffering nightmares in those berths extending to the edges of the hostel’s roof, there and there, and down there and up there, the oppressed sighs and near-death cries gradually fell silent, also the simple coughing and sneezing, until suddenly complete silence descended, not only over the venta but far beyond it as well, disembodied, overflowing, rushing in through every opening and pore — transforming the bodies themselves into openings and pores — pushing into the distant refuges of the nocturnal animals and the woodworms’ last holes, and filling these, too, with silence; that entire part of the world a bowl filled with silence, followed, accompanied, and undercoated by expectation. Preceding this, two or three final sounds: in her berth the switching-off of the wall light; in the neighboring berth the falling-down or rather laying-down of a fairly heavy chess piece, the king: checkmate; and finally, from outside, a single owl’s hoot, unexpectedly not repeated — how so? in the middle of the settlement of Nuevo Bazar? yes—, and precisely the same blowing into cupped hands as — when had that been? — back home in the riverport city.

She threw off the blanket. Despite the curtain’s being open a crack to the winter sky, it had become almost hot in her niche. The wood panels, surrounding her on all sides in the short, narrow bed, felt sun-warm. And her skin adapted to this solar collector and expanded. In contrast to the Spartan decor of the hostel, the bedclothes were of a luxurious splendor. The linens were not merely old but from a rich and glorious time, and had acquired their splendid sheen only as they aged. “Luxurious” referred not to the number of pieces, colors, or layers, but to their weight. The two top sheets, pure white like the bottom sheet, lay heavily upon her, more heavily than the rather ordinary cotton blanket earlier, and yet, unlike the latter, did not weigh her down in the slightest. And although they were tucked in up to her neck and hardly left a hand’s breadth of space between themselves and her body anywhere, as she lay there the woman did not feel at all confined by the sheets. She would sleep lightly under them as seldom before.

And at the same time she, or a part of her, no, something that went beyond the usual, everyday, mundane “she,” remained awake. Under these bedclothes there was a sense that weight and floating, warmth and cooling, were in equilibrium; and she felt as though she could taste that. Hadn’t she once reached out her hand to someone under just such sheets? Or, on the contrary, hadn’t someone reached out to her? Pain and desire? Desire and pain?

And had that actually been her? Or hadn’t it rather been the young woman from the Middle Ages whom she had portrayed long ago in her first and only film? The story goes that in that scene in the film, which has been lost in the meantime (not a single copy to be found?), she was covered with the same white linen up to her shoulders, first seen from the front in a full shot, the camera high above the bed; then a torso shot, again from the front, with the camera closer; and then finally a long shot, but this time with her profile in sharp focus, her facial expression unchanged, with an additional turning-away at the end to what is allegedly known in technical terms (author’s research) as a “lost profile” shot.

And the story goes that in that final long shot, her face, which in any case was already very white, along with her shoulders, which were also already very white, became whiter and whiter, and imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens. And the story goes furthermore that during this night in the hostel berth, without a camera present, without opening of the shutter or any other cinematographic tricks, this blending into the white of the bedding was repeated, for heaven’s — or hell’s — sake. In the Australian desert the hot wind swept from one solitary bush to the next, a few dunes away. On the planet Mars an avalanche of ice came cascading down the sky-high mountain there, the Olympus Rex? In Nuevo Bazar, in the middle of the smoothly paved diagonal artery, a rock ledge broke through. Hazelnuts and chestnuts bounced off the belly of a woman, a different one? (Which suitor said that? Or wanted that? Or wanted to imagine that?)

That same night her brother, released from prison, crossed the last of several borders since his departure from the country of his imprisonment and arrived in the country he had chosen as his new home. It was snowing there, as almost always in wintertime. By now he was driving a car, lent to him by the woman with whom he had stayed all day until an hour after the early nightfall. At a signal from him, she would follow him to a place yet to be determined. There was no woman who would not have done everything for her brother, after spending at most an hour with this almost silent man, who alternated constantly between monumental weariness and flashes of alertness.

It is said that even to her, his sister or somewhat older sibling, the brother meant more than any man, suitor, wooer, especially in their early youth. Yet that supposedly had nothing to do with their personal relationship, also not with the fact that they were orphaned early, but was a tradition with this Slavic Sorbian or half-Arab population, small and becoming smaller with each day that passed — the last villages almost completely absorbed into the German ones around them, and these long since incorporated into cities—: the love between brother and sister, as the author’s research discovered, had remained a prime characteristic of this people (see also cultural continuity); “the attitude peculiarly characteristic of all the women there consists in the exceptionally lively friendship they bring to their brothers; the latter sometimes seem to have greater worth in their eyes than their husbands. Their most sacred oath invokes the name of their brothers. And one of the most common formulas goes thus: ‘By the life of my brother!’” (historian from a previous century). And on each of the rare occasions when she, the sister, had seen her brother again, the terrorist and enemy of mankind, after she had kissed him on both cheeks she had also kissed him on his brow and shoulder, that, too, part of this tradition — or did she merely think she had done so, in retrospect?

Yet her brother despised his Slavic people. (He refused to believe in any Arab ancestors.) He despised them because they had not merely affiliated themselves with the infinitely larger, all-powerful state majority, for the sake of money, positions, the right to participate in decisions and live under the flag of a world power, but had also sold out to this people, body and soul, heart and mind, language and “customs” (? yes!). Her brother hated his people because they had given up their identity as a people, without war, without mounting even the slightest resistance.

And he hated them even more because they nonetheless continued to call themselves a “people,” or rather allowed themselves to be characterized as a “minority”; while in reality they had long since been reduced to appearing as a merely tolerated folkloric ensemble, one of twenty or thirty song-and-dance numbers trotted out for a festival produced by the national tourism office or in a promotional video, and beyond that? — nothing, nothing at all. Did this imply that her brother, in contrast to her, the sister, still believed in something like a people? Yes. And such a thing was even a necessity to him.

“I am lost without a people,” he had told her once, close to tears (and at the same time had jabbed a knife into the table). And since he was convinced that his maternal and paternal people was now no more than a “national propaganda lie,” and was “worth nothing and good for nothing” as a people, a minority, a population, or whatever, he had chosen another people for himself, “the only one far and wide,” as he was also convinced, “that still deserves the name”; whereas his sister was careful, and not only lately, not to take sides for or against anything, or even to get worked up over a sports team, for or against it — if for no other reason than that the few times when she had committed herself to a cause, a movement, or a group, after a very short while that same cause, movement, or group had dissolved, fallen apart, with such regularity that she had come to believe that this had occurred precisely because of her advocacy and support, as that soccer team she had rooted for as a girl whenever it played, merely on account of a certain player or even just the appealing sound of its name, had promptly begun to slide farther and farther down in the standings.

And now her brother was driving on this snowy night through his chosen country, with the window open, heading for his chosen people, which was at war with almost all the neighboring states, out-and-out war (not merely an undeclared or rumored one like the war in the nearby Sierra). And among other things, his chosen country and his chosen people would be saved, thanks to him; would emerge victorious; and would show the world. Thanks to knights errant such as him, a new era would dawn, or an old one, the forgotten one, the legendary one that still existed only as an object of ridicule, would be reinstated as never before. But wasn’t the country of his choice hopelessly lost? A defeated people, defeated once and for all, which had long since given up on itself and yet behaved as though life went on — precisely the sign of being defeated? And wouldn’t heroes like him actually help administer the coup de grâce?

And now, in the depths of night, in a heavy snowfall, he took the secret route through the mountains with which he had long been familiar. All the roads across the valley were blocked off. The country was blacked out. He drove without headlights, no faster than a walk, except when he accelerated as the road climbed. A woman was sitting next to him; not the one from earlier in the day. A little light came from the trees laden with snow, enough to make the shadows, or rather shapeless specters, of the snowflakes outside dart across the faces of the two people in the car. The knight Feirefiz, Parsifal’s half brother, had had just such a body with dark and light speckles. “Feirefiz”—that would have been a good name for her brother.

Somewhere halfway into the mountains he had come upon the young woman standing by the road, with a basket on her arm. Her brother had started: a seemingly congenital jumpiness, which had nothing to do with fear — constituted, as he had always appeared to be, of fearlessness, sheer courage, and excessive, ridiculous jumpiness; sensitivity to anything abrupt, whether a sound or something visual — and yet he himself was an abrupt person, given to sudden anger, sudden friendliness, sudden displays of goodness, sudden violent impulses (although directed only toward things, for the time being).

Driving at the speed of a walk up the mountainside, the new pair will now consume their middle-of-the-night meal. Until now they have not exchanged a single word, and from one rotation of the wheels to the next, they are more and more in agreement that until they touch each other for the first time, and altogether until the end, they will remain wordless like this; leaving it to their bodies to act, stretching toward, tensing against, arching over each other; or merely leaving it to the snow, sporadically blowing into the car, or to the spruce branches, likewise sporadically brushing against the sides of the car.

They will have helped themselves from the basket between them to slices of cold leg of lamb and corn bread. But while the young woman drinks wine diluted with water, the brother will drink milk — not that he always has, but as he has done since the time when he came to believe that he could rinse away all the darkness, blackness, blind rage inside him by drinking that white liquid. And again there were not a few people who, seeing him constantly drinking milk, sniffed his glass for disguised whiskey or vodka.

And in the most silent hour of the night, the one before the predawn graying of the sky, still at the speed of a walk, the two of them will have neared, by way of the secret route, the crossing point, recognizable only to her brother, devoted to even the smallest feature in his elective country, and thus to the alpine-hut-like shelter of his new lover. In the meantime, that moment when the brother will have become aware that he has just shaken off the last breath or scent of the years in prison, the mustiness swept away and out of the world by a clump of stones under a snow tire: a powerful push from deep, deep inside, which is followed as a matter of course by his free hand’s groping for the hip of the strange woman.