Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

2

Now, as the book’s time frame opened, a sound reverberated through the predawn garden in the wooded hills of the northwestern port city, at once moonlit and all the darker in some spots. (There were nights, especially in winter, that seemed endless; never again would day come on earth.) The sound had been that of a sigh, almost identical to the sigh that had escaped the aging author at the meeting in her office.

What, a sigh? reverberated? A sigh that reverberated? Yes. And it had come from her. And it had resembled a sound in Arabic, borne on the gusts of air, mimicking and amplifying them, consisting of nothing but a, v, u, h; and now it became clear to her why the sound brought such thoughts to the surface: in the Arabic text that her daughter had left behind when she disappeared, or fled the house, and which she was now studying every day, the introduction made particular mention of this sound as an example of how in Arabic often a simple aspiration, or a small exclamation, or a vibration of the larynx, or even the simple articulating of a word through transcription could become the basis or origin of a sound. And avuh was just such a self-descriptive word. According to the commentary, it was the most innate human sound.

Had the sound really come from her, this person here? Never had such a sigh been wrested from her. And now something like a response issued from the darkness. It came from one of the trees onto which the early ravens had already descended. Up to this moment, they had done nothing but caw and chatter. But now they fell silent for a while. And out of the silence one of them uttered a wondrous cry of yearning. Or was it all the ravens together? This yearning represented such a break with the ravens’ usual shrieks that she almost laughed out loud. This yearning was so tender that she, who was never afraid of anything, almost took fright. And she called out a name. No, she almost shouted it. She did not even know whether such a name or such a word existed, and what or whom it described. But describe it did! From the hill came an echo, and in the house a shadow stirred. Another predawn bird, always quiet, became part of the pattern in the garden gate.

Today was not the first time she had noticed, but now, before her departure, it became strikingly clear how much the spacious, plantation-like grounds had changed during her time here. The ground especially, the form and consistency of the subsoil, had been greatly reshaped in these years, not so very many after all. (The trees, on the other hand, had remained largely the same.) The grounds had already had some slope to them. But when she moved in, they had still presented a level surface, intentionally leveled. Now, however, this plain appeared transformed into a veritable miniature landscape of mountains and valleys. The thick white coating of hoarfrost on the grass brought out with particular distinctness the rhythmic pattern of hillocks and hollows. A new, young earthscape, formed in only a few years, primarily by the rain and the winds from the west. On the crest of some of the hillocks there already stood, seeded by the wind and no taller than a thumb, a bristly little conifer. The hollows deepened “abruptly,” and some of them had little swampy patches at their bottom, with the vegetation to match. There were even stretches of moor, also tiny natural ponds (with frogs and dragonflies in warm weather). The water in them could come up over one’s ankles. Except that now it was frozen solid. No heel could break this ice. Not only on the ice but also on the leaves and needles of the trees the hoarfrost took the form of small, raised, prickly rings.

The only trees that had joined the others during her time there: a mulberry and a quince. The mulberry was grafted; a trunk without limbs — the dense branches grew straight out of the top of the trunk and curved uniformly downward and inward, layer upon layer, so that now, with the leaves gone, the tree looked something like an outsized beehive. At the same time, the trunk was pitted, with deep, branching cavities that served as a refuge for bats. At the moment they were hibernating there.

Now something darted out and fluttered on a zigzag course across the sky. So one of the creatures had slept its fill for the time being? Did that mean that the freeze was breaking? She, however, was wishing for more days of frost — the frost-clear air was one of the things that made her not want to leave. Or did this bat’s flapping, closer and closer to her ear, mean: Run along, we’ll keep an eye on things!?

Strange, the way she always picked up signs and portents before a departure. But she had never actually turned her head this way to follow the signs. Stepping a few paces to one side, she gained an overview of the bat’s flight pattern, so confused and erratic from close up but consistent and marked by regular repetition as a whole. And then it became clear that one figure in this pattern pertained specifically to her. As the bat flew back and forth, up and down, it was tracing with great precision the silhouette of the mistress of this property, in the very spot where she had been standing a few minutes earlier.

All her life she had been surrounded by animals this way. Especially those generally considered timid came up to her; used her as a zone of refuge or repose. The story went that as a young girl she had traveled home from Africa with a snake under her shirt, crossing several borders and traveling on ships and buses. She herself preferred to tell anecdotes about less ticklish contacts and encounters — for instance about the muskrat that came so close in a large forest, advancing and retreating in a rapid rhythm, all the while snuffling, and staring at her out of little black eyes, eventually coming so close that its whiskers and pelt brushed her toes: at times she could still feel a bit of that sensation on her skin. Or the dragonfly above the miniature puddle here the previous summer: she, the large human being, stood there, had been standing there motionless for some time, and then the small flying creature, the dragonfly, was hovering there in the air, directly opposite her, quite high up for a dragonfly, an insect that usually stayed close to the water’s surface, both pairs of wings whirring so rapidly that they remained invisible and it looked as though only the spindly body were floating there, with the oversized head in front, blue-black, a yellow circle in the middle, filling the dragonfly face, and eyeing her, the human being, even though this yellow did not actually mark its eyes: deep yellow, coming closer to her from minute to minute and ultimately drawing her into the dragonfly planet with this alien gaze. So was this something to fear? No.

She would suggest to the author in his village in La Mancha that the stories linking her with various animals also had something to do with receptivity to images. The most timid animals were precisely the ones that recognized (yes, “recognized”) when someone was “in the picture,” got the picture, registered the image. With such a person they forgot their timidity, and not only that. They pulled the person into their own existence, even if only for a moment, but what a moment! It was not only that they had no fear of the person; they all wished the person well, each in its own way.

Unlike the grafted mulberry, the quince tree in the former orchard on the outskirts of the riverport city was like all the quinces, or kwite, she remembered from her Sorbian village. Today as long ago, here as there, the trunk of the national tree in her former village grew slim and straight, branching at stepladder-height into a tangle of limbs, and in the crown, always low, the chaos of branches twisted without trunk or limbs, and here as there one could count on a few blackened fruit, from last year and previous years, to hang on through the winter. And the blackbird’s profile had also formed part of the image forever and ever, as had the third traditional element, again in close proximity, the empty, ragged nest. Around the nest now, piercing laments from the father and mother bird, robbed of their young, while in the grass below the marauding cat trotted off, twitching feathers in his mouth. No, that had been the previous summer, or several summers ago. And it will happen again next summer.

And — what was this now? — the hedgehog running toward her from the underbrush (which surrounded her garden), qunfuth! as she involuntarily called to it, “hedgehog,” in Arabic. Was this the baby born the previous fall? It was. And it had not only survived the intervening months, orphaned, all alone, but also, sleeping under the warm, fermenting leaf mold, had grown large, was almost a giant hedgehog. Upon being spoken to, it paused, then trotted toward her even faster, singlemindedly, poked her with its hard, rather cold, blackish rubbery nose, and said, “Don’t go away. The grounds are so desolate without you. I like hearing your footsteps in my sleep.” The hedgehog had roused itself just to give her that message, and now promptly burrowed into its leaf pile again.

The previous summer, during an entire week, its mother, or was it the father? had done something odd for a hedgehog: it had circled the entire property in broad daylight, without showing fear, at first merely squeaking softly but on the last day whistling more and more shrilly. In the end the hedgehog had halted its rounds at a flagstone path. The animal lay down on this spot, warmed by the July sun, but instead of falling silent whistled even more insistently, its head poking far out of its prickly armor. The whistling became trilling, more piercing than any alarm or police siren. The trilling became blaring. The hedgehog’s pointed mouth as wide open as it would go, and despite her, the woman’s, hand on its face, no hint of a retreat. The blaring escalated to the wail of an air-raid siren — from such a small body, such a tiny face! Finally the screaming animal’s leap into the air, with all four legs more than a hand’s breadth above the ground, and now another leap, diagonally into the air, at least as high again. Then the hedgehog’s stretching out on the sun-warmed flagstones as if to sleep. Its legs extended backward, its nose pointing forward on the stone. And hardly a moment later the prickly oval studded with iridescent blue flies, of which a few had been buzzing around the twitching nose earlier; in this sudden death the spines no longer in neat rows but pointing every which way, all in a jumble. And at almost the same instant the baby hedgehog groping its way out of the underbrush, hardly as big as an apple, briefly sniffing at its dead father or mother, and then already gone in the tall grass. And now that screaming of the father or mother also said to her, “Don’t go away. Protect my young one.”

During her travels in Asia, she had repeatedly come upon images of the death of the Buddha. Almost invariably he had been surrounded by animals. And in the images each of these animals represented a particular species; in the crowd around the corpse there was almost always only a single exemplar of a given kind: one horse, one cock, one water buffalo. Almost innumerable individual animals of this sort wept for the dead Buddha, who in each case was their own deceased, their relative, their dearest beloved. And they mourned him, as one could sense from the depiction, out loud, each with its mouth, its snout, its beak open, according to its kind. And all the animals there, the elephant, the tiger, the hyena, the goat, the ox, the crow, the wolf, wept real tears. Their lamentations could not merely be sensed; they also became audible, and not merely to the so-called inner ear. And those most audible were precisely the animals otherwise thought to be mute. The rain worm wailed its sorrow. The fish stuck its head out of the nearby Pacific and/or Indian Ocean and roared. A sobbing as if from a deep chasm issued from the wild pigeon, usually hardly capable of even a peep. And she, the observer, was in the picture. She was deciphering the images.

As for her neighbors, on the other hand, was there nothing to decipher? Did she even have neighbors? Yes, but their houses were so far from hers, originally a stagecoach relay station and inn, later surrounded by one of the large orchards once numerous on the slopes above the river, so that the inhabitants at most glimpsed its outlines through the trees now and then, on the far side of the road leading out of town. As time went by, she had worked at home more and more. Only now even fewer of her neighbors showed their faces than before.

And that was not her fault. She inhabited not only her own house and grounds, but also the immediate surrounding area. At night especially she roamed the densely settled outlying area, combed through the wooded hills. And increasingly she found herself drawn to places where people were. Yet she hardly ever caught sight of them, and not merely in the dark of night. Although she had the ability, without really disguising herself, to be disguised to the point of inconspicuousness or even invisibility, did her population avoid her? No, they closed themselves off from the outset, from one another as well. Every house formed a multiply gated and buffered precinct. Those who had recently moved there (of whom there were more and more), at first loud and uninhibited, with their windows open — having escaped at last from rented apartments, now living within their own four walls — soon hushed their voices and their noisy machines, until by now hardly anyone far and wide let out a peep. Only the idiot of the outskirts, differing from the traditional village idiot in that he was brash and tactless, shouted, sang, and whistled on the streets, which were almost deserted, and not only at night.

It was only in the past few years that it had become so quiet in these parts (except for one hour in the morning and one at the end of the day during the work week). Sometimes the silence resembled the calm just before or after a war. But usually the silent yet well-lit landscape of the outskirts radiated a breath of peace. Credit was due to various longtime inhabitants. Often they were tradesmen, and often they were still practicing their trades long past retirement age — a shoemaker of seventy, a mason of seventy-five, a gardener of eighty. Younger, more up-to-date practitioners of these trades advertised in all the papers. But because their companies were almost always located elsewhere, the old folks just kept on working here, especially on small jobs. They also did better work, and they were more reliable — not because they were older and more experienced but because they had their shops and houses here in the area, one street away or around the corner from the job or the client; they could not allow themselves to mess up or do shoddy work.

Whether tradesmen or others: these older residents, even when they did not open their mouths, were walking tales of adventure, or tales that had almost merged with the fruit trees’ interlaced branches, the shoe leather, the shovels yellow with caked-on clay. Once they began to speak, the whole world became the topic. Nothing wrong with collecting the dream narratives and ghost stories of Tibet or the desert Tuaregs’ nomadic songs: But why did no one pay any heed to the epics and chanted tales of these old-time residents of the outskirts, or those who had once migrated or fled here from other lands with their parents? Camera, film, video, microphones for them, too. For their numbers were visibly dwindling: the hand that closed the shutters there last week will have closed them for the last time; lost legend, lost lament, lost song of love; even the loss of a mere intimation — what a loss.

As time passed, she also picked up some information on the newer residents, no matter how they barricaded themselves in their houses. It always happened inadvertently, in passing. And it was precisely their shadowy outward existence that provided the background. These people were bound and determined not to betray themselves. There should be no hint of who they were, what they did, what their names were, where they came from. With them a new era began. If a piano could be heard once from behind closed windows, it always broke off immediately. No laundry was hung out to dry anywhere, or if it was, then only behind dense hedges, out of sight. Even the vehicles disappeared deep underground, into garages located beneath the basements.

And yet their stories did not remain entirely hidden. From time to time, and always without warning, fragments or particles of them would pierce the walls of silence. A single elementary particle, whizzing in from an often indefinable distance, was enough for a situation to leave a scorch mark. A situation? An entire story, more distinct and convincing than if it had been narrated from A to Z.

Such things occurred more at night and most often in the depths of the night, in the hours after midnight. One might be awakened by terrible wailing. Or what sounded at first like angry shouting, someone ranting and raving out on the street, turned to wailing. It was a woman’s voice, with a brief response now and then from a man’s voice, soothing or trying to be soothing. And something more serious than an ordinary quarrel was taking place. Something was drawing to an end; these were, or gradually became, sounds of dying. Eventually the wailing, impossible to resolve into individual words, became positively tender. Nowhere, not even in an opera, had she ever heard such an intense lament. The man’s voice, still quiet and controlled, was no longer answering but providing a soft accompaniment to parts of the song; and finally it vanished altogether from the tonal image. A pause. A car door slamming. An engine starting up. Silence. And the lament resuming, at the same time fading away, as if coming from someone slowly walking backward. Then the force of the nocturnal stillness, equaling the force of the now silenced lament. And she was not the only person nearby who listened, and listened, and listened. But then no ambulance siren either. And the following morning no hearse; only a raw emptiness in the street, and in the house over there, or had it been the one behind it? And not one neighbor who said a word about it.

And lying awake again in the hours after midnight. Sometimes she liked staying awake when she had some problem connected with her work to resolve. And again a voice. But this time from very close by. And she recognized the voice, too, although it sounded so different from usual. And besides, she could make out every word of what was being said. The voice was that of an adolescent, the son of the people to whom she had rented the former gatekeeper’s lodge, a remodeled carriage house at the entrance to her property. Although the contract called for the tenants to perform some gatekeeper’s duties in their spare time, she had learned hardly anything about the little family. She knew nothing about the man’s or the woman’s job, or where the boy went to school, if in fact he did. He did not greet her; looked away when he saw her. Unlike his parents, he did not respect the property lines, either the visible or the invisible ones. The second gate, which marked the entry to her own private realm but which she left unlocked, he used without hesitation for his shortcuts, skirting her house on his way to a gap in the hedge that led to a side street that was apparently important to him. One time she had even found him in her kitchen (she usually left the house unlocked as well), where he was sitting at the table reading the paper; at the sight of her, his leisurely loping away through the former servants’ entrance.

The gatekeeper’s lodge was not near her house, not at all, and yet that night she had the son’s voice in her ear as close as in a dream, and also just as clear. It was no dream, however. And the neighbor’s son said the following: “The two of you want me dead. Thanks for the bones you tossed in my cage. You will not be seeing me again. My bed will stay empty. Thanks for the flowers on my grave. But at least let me play one more cassette. Why do you not want me? Why did you not abort me? Why did you not stick me in the oven? Or into the false-bottomed crate? Burning desert sands. Your loving …” And then silence, here, too. The next morning a void. And the morning after that the adolescent just as before, but now riding a scooter instead of a bicycle.

And another such night, this time not so late. Her return from the bank’s headquarters down by the river, before midnight, in her Spanish Landrover, a sort of camouflaged vehicle (how fitting if she had been driving it in a veil). On the already deserted highway leading out of the city, by the turnoff close to her property, a lone figure flagging her down. She stopped. A very young woman, still a girl, really, about the same age as her daughter, with a face that seemed separate from her body, in the dim streetlights: “Don’t you know a house abroad where I can go, preferably in North Africa? I have heard so much about the light there. I must get away. I am older than I look. I know you. You paint, don’t you? How can one paint around here, in this country? A house where I can paint, in Tipasa or Casablanca, right now!” And without waiting for her reply, the girl disappeared into the darkness on the side of the road. And she, too, became visible again: sitting by a distant skylight, reading, as though nothing had happened.

Even the children of the newcomers arriving here in ever-increasing numbers during the last few years — on their front doors at most their initials, and then often of the sort that could belong to a Greek, Cyrillic, or even Arabic or Armenian alphabet — remained in the shadows. Bundled up and silent, they climbed with their bundled-up and silent parents or caretakers out of their outsize automobiles, and it was easy to mistake them for the supersize shopping bags being hauled into the houses from the supermarkets after work (the small shops, still numerous, and the local markets were patronized only by old people and longtime residents: hardly ever an unfamiliar face there, and certainly not that of a child).

Coming home from school almost every child walked alone, eyes on the ground, as if to remain unrecognizable. And in spite of that they made an impression on her, too, sooner or later, more vivid than that of the neighbor children in her village back home — had she also been a child keeping her eyes to the ground in those days? And this impression always formed when she heard crying. No matter how far away the crying was, every time it seemed to her to come from the immediate environs. And she heard it during the day just as clearly as in the silent depths of the night, even at times when the road leading out of town was at its noisiest. Not all crying came this close, affected her this strongly: the crying of infants hardly, no matter how plaintive, also not the crying that followed a fall or some other physical mishap. It was the crying, usually without tears, brought on by a first major disappointment, already definitive: even sounds, not bursting spasmodically from the breast but closed up inside it, quiet sounds, actually, almost silent already, pitched somewhere halfway between sobbing, howling, wheezing, snuffling, with a deep, unidentifiable bass underneath, and all this continuing in an infinite loop, behind the closed shutters of a house, behind a tree in a garden, or somewhere on a street, in an alley, gradually receding, a one-person caravan.

She, the listener, remained glued to the spot and at the same time moved along with the caravan outside. What she heard from these neighborhood children was the sound of abandonment. This sound could be uttered at the same pitch by an adult — any adult? yes, any adult. (Except that in a grown-up it might be so piercing that the adult would be drawn and quartered by his own cry of woe?) In the past, long ago, one had gone around with just such a sound of abandonment inside one. And it stayed there for good. To be sure, it had receded into the remotest corner in the body’s labyrinth. But sooner or later, from one moment to the next, it would resume its place in the midst of things, with the force of an explosion. She had seen a film one time at the end of which a woman did nothing but weep for a quarter of an hour. She was sitting in a deserted stadium or park or an unfinished building, and suddenly she was weeping, without tears, like the children here, and she wept and wept. From time to time she paused. Then she resumed her weeping, fell silent again, but the weeping would well up in her once more, and so it went, with the weeping eventually becoming like that of thousands, the mother of all weeping, till the end. (The author, to whom she mentioned this, told her that in his youth he had written a play that consisted of a single sentence or stage direction: “Someone sits on the bare stage and weeps, for an hour.”) She herself had not wept in a long time. But occasionally she still heard her own weeping from ages ago.

Of late more and more such sounds of utter abandonment or rejection had reached her from the out-of-sight children of the neighborhood. And then she actually got to see one of these children at least. It was a spring evening, the starry sky already clear over the forest and outskirts. The child was passing the playing fields on its way home, alone. The lights around the field were just going out. Along the road a row of ornamental cherry trees. The child beneath them, seen from behind, almost big, long since of school age. As it walked along, again and again at regular intervals there was a shuddering of the shoulders under the flowering trees, their color particularly rich in the glow of the streetlights against the surrounding darkness. The constant shoulder-shuddering is weeping, the sound accompanying it hardly audible, despite the nocturnal stillness, yet, once one’s hearing has adjusted to it, not to be drowned out by any airplane’s droning or any railroad cars’ clanking. And thus the rearview-image child trudged along with that shuddering of the shoulders until it had passed the row of trees and the athletic field. Who would tell of that sound of abandonment someday?

One had neighborly feelings precisely for these strangers, these barely visible people. From far away one could often not make out their profiles or silhouettes, only small white — no, pale — blotches amid the general gloom: their heads, their faces, their hands; their professions also formed pale gray blotches like this; where all the new residents worked remained a secret (concealed by them on purpose?); how a person earned a living no longer mattered; and their clothing revealed nothing: and all this simply reinforced the sense of neighborliness. What was clear was only that none of these people numbered among her clients. Or perhaps they did. Weren’t they full of surprises?

On the other hand, the fact that they could not form a complete image of her brought the new residents even closer to her. True, her property, the former stagecoach station, occupied a significant location, at the point where the road leading out of the city began a steep climb (in earlier times, at least one team of horses had been added at this point). True, the house was striking simply by virtue of its age, its size, its construction, its form, its distance from the other houses. But no one, not even her tenants in the carriage house, knew any particulars about the occupant. And people did not want to know anything about her.

Once, however, at an Indian restaurant around the corner, she was asked by the proprietor whether she was a movie actress. And another time, in the nearby Chinese fruit and vegetable shop, the ancient greengrocer, who had just moved there and rented the place, asked, “Weren’t you in Macao as a child?”—“When?”—“Fifty years ago.” Fifty years ago! In Macao! It was as if the Chinese man were transferring some of his years to her and as a result instantly became younger. Or was this a manifestation of the famous Asian inquisitiveness? Which was usually more an act than genuine? At any rate, the others around here did not even pretend to be inquisitive. And that meant, to borrow a favorite expression of the stagecoach relay — owner and financial expert (instead of “I don’t want to,” or “You’re not allowed to,” she always said, “It is out of the question”): it was out of the question that anyone here should know any particulars or intimate details about anyone else.

Altogether, this area seemed to her to exemplify a new way of living. That people kept their distance from one another to such a degree (although it was by no means an upscale area) did not signify the end of neighborliness. Without showing off, people paid attention to one another, respected one another. When the moment came, and only then, they would be there to lend a hand; and then promptly keep their distance again, staying anonymous, and, after greeting each other for a little while, silent again.

In one respect she even seemed out of step with the times by comparison with the new neighbors (and it was out of the question, that she, the banker, should be out of step): the majority of the new people did not move into houses of their own but into housing acquired for people like this — who would be moving on in a couple of years; in the period covered by this story almost everyone was like this — by the companies, firms, corporations, research institutes, laboratories for which they worked (this housing could include old structures bought up by company headquarters). A growing number of her neighbors were not homeowners, in contrast to her. The cars, too, were company cars, or leased. The same held true for their household goods, including televisions and chain saws. Nothing, or certainly nothing large, heavy, or entailing responsibility, belonged to them.

And by now she almost envied them for this; or rather, she was jealous of them, just as it was not out of the question to be jealous, as an involved observer, of a game in which one would like to participate. For wasn’t the pleasure she had so long taken in ownership pretty well exhausted? Above all, owning land had once given her a very special sense of space, a feeling of having broad shoulders. To buy a piece of land to add to her own, then another: pure joy. (She actually used the word “joy” in the author’s presence.) To beat the bounds of one’s property with head held high (not to say “ride the bounds”). But by now one tended to beat the bounds with lowered head or searching gaze: What needed to be done? What tasks were pressing? What had to be repaired? cleaned? replaced?

Free through property? In her case, at least, it was becoming a threat to her freedom. One’s perceptions were no longer free. Only parts, and particles, nothing whole anymore. And oneself, as a property owner, no longer whole. Strangely enough, one way out, a form of liberation, was managing money, other people’s money, but also her own — as if money, being a moveable asset, had nothing to do with “possessions” and provided an opportunity for free play, like that of the others in the neighborhood. Hadn’t this free play turned into something particularly uncontrollable by now, hardly subject to rules anymore, dangerous, threatening, and not only to her?

Some of the new ways of living also had to do with the location of her city. After a period of decline for riverports, they were flourishing again. There had been a time without any shipping at all; the rivers on the entire continent deserted. But now the waterways were serving as the most modern traffic and transportation arteries, and the cities located on them were becoming hubs as never before in history, even during the Roman Empire. And her own city, at the confluence of two rivers, formed something like the hub of hubs. A financial center like Augsburg in the Fuggers’ day, especially in the time of the family patriarch, Jakob — but less because of its wealth than because of the sheer volume of wheeling and dealing. A life like this, on and between two world-famous and commercially significant rivers, imbued the inhabitants, and the new arrivals more powerfully than the longtime residents, with a particular sense of place: stamped with self-confidence or even pride, quite different from that of the residents of New York or some other great metropolis by the sea, an inlander’s pride, so to speak.

Part of it was that the rivers and their characteristic surroundings were increasingly shaping everyday life, were gradually permeating it almost to the exclusion of everything else. In the market stalls you could still see all the varieties of saltwater fish laid out. But the point was that these were “laid out,” dead or half-dead, whereas the freshwater fish “cavorted” in glass tanks nearby; even if there were not quite so many varieties, each individual exemplar was almost a species unto itself, and not only because it was so palpably alive, leaping about amid the throng of other fishes. For many years out of style, they were now increasingly prized, purchased, and prepared according to the old recipes, and even more according to new ones, were a component of the daily regional cuisine (“regional” having become no less important than “national”).

Similarly the old orchards and the vegetable gardens or fields or terraces along both rivers, which had long been left fallow, now, wherever they had not been turned into building lots, were experiencing a second spring — summer — fall. The varieties once planted there were being supplemented and enriched by imported varieties or varieties moving on their own into the area as a result of the abrupt warming of the climate all over the continent. Of course exotic fruits, as well as olives, wine grapes, pistachios, and such, continued to be imported into this northwestern region. But in the meantime it had become customary — this, too, part of the new way of living — that once the locally grown crops had been sold, used up, consumed, no substitutes were flown in from another hemisphere. No more fresh cherries or blueberries from Chile in the winter. No more early fall apples from New Zealand in the spring. No more cepes from South Africa with lamb at Eastertime. And in her two-river city, the ripening of the local fruits, rather than being accelerated, was actually held back.

And soon hardly anyone missed such luxuries. Now the very absence of a familiar vegetable, an accustomed fruit, imposed a rhythm on the year; this periodic absence could add a kind of zest. New ways of living? The return or recovery of the old ways? (Though without folk costumes, customs, songs and dances.) What a historian had characterized as the phenomenon of “cultural continuity,” the most reliable rhythmic recurrence in history, indestructible (or was it really, over time)? Be that as it might: how the old varieties of apples, now brought back, stood out from the interlopers, on the trees, in the orchards, but also under the artificial lights of the huge warehouse-style supermarkets. How they gleamed, how fragrant they were, and this was no humbug. Or was she the only one who noticed, with her eyes and nose from childhood, from her Sorbian village?

On the other hand, it was not she who created the demand, and with it the return of the continuity phenomenon, but rather her odd, evasive neighborhood. And equally odd her sense of being at home there. She knew, after all (had experienced), that it took only a tiny jolt, a phrase picked up in passing, and one would tip from presumed continuity into an isolated moment, not historical in the slightest but torn out of any temporal sequence, into a unique instant of complete isolation.