Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

3

She had many enemies. And she had made almost all her enemies through her work. And they were far away. But one enemy was stirring things up in her vicinity; nearby. It had begun as love. At least this was the word the man used, the moment they met, or the second moment. They ran into each other in a clearing deep in the woods. She entered the clearing on a corduroy road whose logs were already half-rotted. Without warning, the image of a deserted beer garden, shaded by chestnut trees, in the hills above Trieste on a midsummer morning came to her, and she spread her arms. Just then the man slipped out of the dense underbrush on the edge of the clearing and was right next to her. She did not start. Perhaps she would have jumped under any other circumstances, but with the image present nothing could harm her. It was out of the question that anything should affect her. So she stood there, arms still spread, and even smiled at the stranger. It was a spring evening, long before dark.

It was the man who uttered the word. Was he a foreigner? For he spoke the word with an accent. The majority of those living in the area were foreigners. Or did his excitement act as an accent-generator and tongue-twister? His outfit resembled that of an escaped prisoner, not because of the fabric or the cut, but because of all the rips (along with his disheveled hair), probably from his running through the woods. And he did not say, “I love you,” and so on, but rather, “You must love me. You are going to love me.” And continued at once, stammering, “You need me. You have been waiting a long time for me. Without me, you are done for. I will save you. You will not have loved me in vain.”

She kept silent. Only her eyes gleamed, thanks to the persisting image, which it was up to her to intensify. In the center of the chestnut-shaded garden stood a limestone column, damp from the night’s rain, a stalagmite. Water spewed from an iron pipe. An espresso machine hissed. And in the darkening clearing a gentle wind now sprang up. The man resumed: “Listen to me! Listen, I say. In the end, God, too, for whom the prophet Elijah, or which prophet was it? waited so long in the desert, did not come either in lightning or thunder or in the whirlwind, but in the softest, barely audible rustling.” He advanced a step toward her, but then, on the recoil, dove back into the bushes. His nose had been bleeding, and the white handkerchief he had dropped in the grass of the clearing revealed a red, many-eyed, checkered pattern.

Next to that tavern in the hills — not a single guest — the Paris — Moscow express stood waiting; the place was a border-crossing point. The windows of the sleeping car were open; empty berths; through the windows on the other side the bare white limestone cliffs were visible. Didn’t the stranger know that the god who had made himself heard in the rustling breeze was an Old Testament god? That his voice in that gentle whirring was not whispering about love but was filled with wrath? That that god wanted vengeance, vengeance, and more vengeance?

After such a beginning, it came as no surprise that the man soon found out where she lived; and that his voice was heard over the intercom around midnight: “In all these years here I never set foot in that clearing — and then to find you there. It was a sign: you love me. And although I had never met you in the flesh, I recognized you instantly. If that isn’t a sign, what is? And the third sign: whenever I come to an unfamiliar place, I look straight ahead and pass through it without looking to right or left — but this time I looked to the side at once, to where you were standing, waiting for me. Unlock the door. You must let me in.”

She did not unlock the door. For all the doors were already unlocked. But he did not press a single latch, did not turn a single knob; just rang and rang outside the garden gate, all night long. Eventually she turned off all the lights and lay down on a sofa in the dark parlor, her sword, a relic from one of her earlier lives, at her side. The ringing went on and on. But in time that was precisely what calmed her and finally caused her to doze off. And the next morning, after an almost restful sleep on the sofa, the bloody-nose handkerchief again, on the driveway, like a playing card.

Next a letter: “How easy it was to penetrate you. Your cunt was panting for me. Your sex instruments drummed on me, plucked me and rubbed me, danced around me. Your vaginal membranes rattled and fluttered, swelled and swirled, sailing from firm land over an ink-dark sea as a storm raged. No doubt about it, I was made for you. And I promise never to leave you!”

Now the time had come to sit down with the man, in broad daylight, for a sober hour in late morning. But where? Even the choice of a meeting place was critical. It was out of the question to meet in one of the many little eateries in her area: she had never been seen there with a man, and that was how it was to remain. The bars on the outskirts were also out of the question. The patrons there almost always stood or sat alone (she, too, was sometimes there among the guests, so briefly that she seemed like an apparition). And when people happened to come in as a twosome, it was to be assumed they belonged together, and in a slightly unsavory way; these couples usually spoke in lowered voices and huddled far from the others, in the darkest corner, behind a screen, if possible, where, one sensed, one of them would reach for the other’s hand now and then. And she? She was clearly without a lover. And yet looked as though she were constantly and intensely loved, glowing from being loved, from having been loved, just moments earlier.

She chose a playground near the main rail line. In accordance with an odd principle, here, as throughout the river city, two benches stood facing each other, as if for two pairs of knees. An even crazier principle governed the chairs placed around the benches, each at a different angle, as if they had been shoved together or apart, like furniture in an outdoor display — yet when one wanted to straighten them: the chairs refused to budge, cemented in, bolted down, anchored.

So one day, before noon, they turned up, on two such chairs, almost close enough to touch each other, and yet, because the chairs’ axes were askew, at an unbridgeable distance, while to the left and right of them the playground equipment creaked under the hordes of children, and the express trains roared by, with shreds of paper and white river gulls in their wake, their flight quite different from that behind the keels of ships.

She began, unconsciously imitating him, with “You listen to me!” and then said something like this: “It is not that I am against you. But for a long time I have had a sweetheart, a partner, someone who belongs to me. And the man I love is infinitely handsomer than you. You are nothing by comparison with my man. I will never abandon him. Only in his arms do I feel arms. His hips are the only ones for me. Only his arousal arouses me. His smell is the only one for me. And he is not merely my lover, but also my co-conspirator and squire. He is my up-hill and down-dale companion, my rope, steppe, and desert partner. He is my bodyguard, as I am his. He is my slave, as I am his. He is my judge — unfortunately not strict enough. He is my attorney, who wins all my cases. But above all this man is my chef. He is a chef such as you will find nowhere else on earth. Not a swindler like the others, not one of those phony magicians, conjuring up an illusion of ultramodernity with their overly clever dishes, a tart seemingly straight out of the oven, fish on the platter as if just reeled in, colors and forms as if shaken out of their sleeves just that minute — creating the illusion of a present that in reality almost always originated yesterday, the night before, or even the previous week, and thus tasting of anything possible, or rather of anything unreal, anything but the current moment, the present. My beloved, on the other hand, cooks mainly with leftovers. He neither throws leftovers away nor tries to disguise them in the dishes he serves me. He has a masterful way of combining leftovers with fresh ingredients, and the leftovers are the main part of what he prepares for us. On our plates it is the leftovers that create a full sense of the present. Combining what was there earlier with what we have now is his and our secret. You are the wrong man for me. And you are not the only wrong man.”

“What was your man’s name?” the unknown neighbor asked after a while. — “Labbayka,” she responded after a while. “That is Arabic, and it means something like ‘I am here for you.’ But why do you say, ‘What was his name?’ instead of, ‘What is his name?’?”—The unknown neighbor: “I ask, ‘What was his name?’ because I think your lover must have disappeared long ago, or is dead, or is imaginary. And if none of those, his name is something else entirely. And I think you, too, actually have a different name. You are living under an assumed name. You have changed your name several times in your life. I know all your fake names. I am on to you. I can smell your guilt. When that comes out, it will be the end of you. Look at the red dress of that girl on the swing!”—She: “The child in the red dress went home ages ago, and besides, her dress was not red.” —The unknown neighbor: “Do you want to know my name?”—She, already getting up to leave: “No.”

For a long time after that the suitor kept his distance. Nonetheless she constantly sensed his alien presence. She felt not only observed and spied-on but also recorded and registered. With her special perceptiveness, which in an instant could capture everything between the tips of her toes and the most distant horizon, she searched the surrounding area, without her stalker’s ever showing up — or only as in a puzzle picture, where body parts belonging to the person you are supposed to find might be inscribed in the foliage of a tree, or in the pattern formed by cracked stucco on a house.

At the same time, it seemed as though she were holding him at bay with this capacity for perception. He apparently did not dare to venture closer, not yet. But then she began to catch sight of him with increasing frequency, always from behind: when she stopped at a traffic light, he would suddenly be there in one of the cars up ahead, or he would be on the overpass above the highway leading out of the city, visible from head to foot, but again only from the rear.

At last one morning, as she stepped out through the gate, there he stood in the flesh (she actually thought: “At last!”) facing her, so close that he looked as if he were cut out of cardboard or plywood, a figure in a tunnel of horrors. What preoccupied her later was less the fact that he drew back to strike her than that he had both hands full of flowers that he had pulled up, roots and all, from the border along the drive, and that the unknown neighbor was dressed up, wearing a tuxedo that called to mind, as she later told the author, a dance on the upper deck of a luxury liner, complete with brass band and the Southern Cross. “Did he throw himself at you?” (the author). — “Do not ask! I cannot tell the story if I am asked questions” (she). Besides, the author should know by now that so long as she was under the protection of one of her images no one could harm her.

A path through the Montana Rockies wedged itself between her and the attacker, leaving the latter flailing his arms behind the spruces over yonder, scraping his knuckles raw on their Rocky bark. Unripe cranberries growing along the edge of the path formed little whitish ovals, with the occasional riper ones among them looking all the more red. Were those bear droppings beside them? Wasn’t what she said next expressed in an Indian language, meaning in translation “Out of my way, stranger. This is my territory”? And in fact he did beat a retreat, backing away slowly, as she, too, slowly walked backward, he taking one step, then she taking one, until they were out of each other’s sight. Never again would the nameless neighbor raise a hand against her. Finally, before their reciprocal disappearance, they even laughed. As she told it, she had also laughed earlier, from inside the image.

Instead he tried to get at her with words again, both spoken and written. And she let him try. And since the oral modality suited them both better, she also agreed to a meeting occasionally; by now it did not matter to her where — so long as it was not in her house — sometimes for dinner, and also at her office.

At such times she was the one who ordered food or picked up the tab (he accepted it as a matter of course). And that was not the only factor that would have led an observer to conclude that their relationship must be based on some collaborative project, with her making all the decisions and him merely taking orders from her. Some thought they were witnessing a medical consultation, or saw the man, sitting there with the woman, as her research subject. At such moments, the idiot of the outskirts — at the time of this story the idiots lived on the outskirts, where they belonged — would be crouching nearby, as her protector, and indeed everyone’s, listening in silence, eyes wide open, and thus assisting her.

Only the suitor spoke. And onlookers would never have guessed that every time he spoke exclusively of her. Viewed from the street or from the kitchen pass-through, he sat there looking like someone who was revealing his innermost feelings to a chance acquaintance. And she seemed to be all ears, saying nothing, as could hardly be otherwise in such a case. His many gestures, flowing one into the other, seemed to refer only to him. They underlined what he was saying. Would the woman listening have followed them so attentively otherwise, even the smallest of them, her attentiveness concentrated in the corners of her eyes, as she read his words from his lips?

From the outside, a passerby one time could see him talking and talking at her, making an expansive gesture, pointing outward and upward to the outdoors. He swung his arm so vigorously that his sleeve slipped back. And she followed his index finger without specifically focusing on it, simply by widening her eyes and face somewhat. And in fact there was something to see in the direction in which he was pointing: it was summer, a thunderstorm broke out, from one minute to the next, and over there, on the far side of the plaza outside the restaurant, a mighty old cedar suddenly toppled over, coming to rest at an angle, then a jerk, and another; and then, as its roots were ripped from the ground, it came crashing down on the plaza, just missing a family running to take cover; the two children laughed out loud at the fallen tree, while the parents …

But the man talking and talking in the window had not noticed the tree coming down, and had gone on talking without a moment’s pause, his apparent pointing giving way to a plucking and tearing at his own hair, while the woman took in the tree’s fall but at the same time maintained her listener’s pose — as if that were the way to bring the stranger to his senses? to placate him?

For his gesticulating directly contradicted what he was saying. Every time they met, she was his exclusive topic. Yet he never pointed at or indicated the woman he was wooing; he even avoided looking at her as his eloquence poured forth. He squeezed his own throat with both hands and said, “Everything about you is ugly. Your house is ugly. Your car is ugly. Your toes are ugly.” He poked his fingers in his eyes and said, “The one who will be the loser is you. You have already lost. Just as your parents were losers and your daughter is a loser, you must become a loser, too.”

Each of his meetings with her ended with his reviling her; predicting or asserting the worst possible outcomes for her. Sometimes he began with compliments or pleasantries: “This morning the wind carried your name to me …”—“Today I would like to intone a gentle psalm …” —“Only you know your secret, evasive companion …”—“It was on a morning in April, O woman with the warlike eyes …” But after a few such sentences he invariably began to scold her, which just as invariably gave way to swearing and cursing, during which he might box his own ears, strike his chest, or bite off his fingertips. Yet the scolding and cursing was never completely devoid of meaning. Among the empty phrases he stammered out, there was always one combination that hit home, revealing unsuspected acts and omissions, committed, she had thought until then, only in a dream. An act of cruelty, of forgetting, of malicious desertion — had actually occurred.

In the period just before her departure, the suitor/neighbor’s vilification of her had applied exclusively to the future. Not that he threatened her — threats were out of the question with her — he spat out imprecations. What began like a poetic traveler’s blessing (“Thou shalt find flower-strewn paths …”; “The dark and lowering sky will enrapture thee one night”) unfailingly ended with an unvarnished curse. She would lose what was most precious to her. She would never return. She would be done in. Let mountain lions devour her, her still quaking flesh! — When the author asked why she wanted to have this tale of confusion included in her book, she said only, “The more confused the tale, the clearer the pain.”

Where was her rejected suitor now, on the morning of her departure? Where was he standing, recording her final rounds? And what if this were indeed her last journey — something less to be wished for than to be feared? And at what moment had the owls stopped hooting amid the crescendo of morning sounds? And at what moment had the moon ceased to shine — casting light and shadow — as its disk sank silently into the sky, pale and without reflection? And at what moment did the last of the stars become invisible, leaving not the faintest flickering at the spot where it had just been shining on the horizon, already bright with day? And at what moment had the weather changed, the crisp, silent frost that had held the area in its grip for weeks now giving way, from one instant to the next, to a mild breeze?

How exciting to experience, with disarmed senses, without instruments and machines, all these transitions occurring in a speck of time, and yet, even if one seemingly succeeded in doing so—“Look! Venus is still there, no, now, no, now, now, yes! all gone!”—the awareness afterward of having missed the critical moment again, and that it had always been that way, and would be that way to the end? Having missed even that modest moment when, after stepping into a forest, one grew conscious of oneself as a complete being, surrounded by forest?

Unexpectedly, so the story goes, the “world champion of global finance” (as she had been dubbed in a magazine article) found herself whisked to the midst of the wooded slopes on the outskirts of the riverport city, borne through the morning air as if on the wings of the portion of the story that had already been told, and especially the portion that was yet to be told. And it was as if her journey had already begun; as if she were moving, as previously in the orchard on her property, in widening spirals, gathering impetus for setting out. No one but her in the forest that early, tremendously alone. And why was she alone? Where was her suitor? Was he asleep? He could not be sleeping through this, could he, missing her and this morning?

As she mounted the slope, she repeatedly wound up to throw one of the chestnuts she had gathered along the way and stuffed into her pockets. (Maroni! Wouldn’t they give away her geographical location? No, by now these nuts grew almost everywhere, they were practically ubiquitous on the continent.) She wound up without throwing. “Just the act of winding up and setting one’s sights on a target,” she told the author, “brings this target into view — a hole in a tree, a crack in a cliff — as an image, together with its surroundings. Winding up without throwing: another way of generating images from one’s own stock. But what is the point of such an image? With my target images I defend myself without defending myself — I attack without attacking — I wage war without having to wage war.”

Marvelous walking: beneath her feet the hoarfrost, still sole-deep, crunching and crackling as no snow could ever crunch and crackle (not only much quieter but also much farther away, or more dreamlike) — and overhead in the crowns a new pliability and a transformation from hoarfrost-white to trickling-water-black in the gentle thawing breeze. And in the bare chestnut trees the spiky fruit husks, long since split open, but now and then releasing a chestnut that had been held there for months by the husk, a lighter brown than those strewn over the forest floor, and not soft or rotting like them but firm and healthy, with fresh, pale-yellow flesh. What, edible chestnuts in January? Yes. She to the author: “What is time? I am still as puzzled by it as long ago in the village.” The magical emptiness of a Monday, the emptiness of the week’s onset in the forest.

But remarkable walking, too, because the forest had been destroyed a few weeks earlier by a December hurricane such as even this northwestern region, accustomed to powerful storms, had never experienced. The hurricane came in the night, and although it raged for hours, she slept on, slept and slept, more soundly than ever. As had happened quite often in her life, she missed the event. After that, going into the forest was prohibited. “But of course I went in.” The first time, the destruction looked to her far less extensive than what was shown in the newspapers and on television, and not only because around the small section depicted she could see the rest of the wooded area. But each time she returned, the destruction seemed more drastic. Did trees continue to hurtle to the ground after the storm was over? On the other hand, didn’t the long period of frost that followed the hurricane anchor the loosened roots in the soil? And yet each time there were more trees, limbs, crowns that had apparently fallen overnight. Or had her eyes merely shied away from taking them in all at once?

Not a wood-road that was not blocked by trees or scattered debris. One had to scramble over, or slip under, or take a tedious detour — which brought one smack up against the next obstacle, and then another, with the result that one might inadvertently end up outside the forest. So she decided in favor of scrambling and crawling. Decided? No, it went without saying that she would court obstacles and danger, as she always had. Danger? Some of the trees she dove under were not yet resting completely on the ground, but were still hung up on splintered limbs sticking in the earth, often only one support, and not a sturdy one.

But what was there to look at amid this devastation? There is no secret to devastation, she thought on her first sortie into the forest after the millennial storm. Only with repetition were her eyes opened. Where the trees had been uprooted, huge masses of soil had been heaved up. These were almost perfect half-spheres or else pyramids of sand, clay, and scree, cross sections tipped up perpendicularly, from whose midsection the lateral roots stuck out like rays, their ends sheared off and shredded, while the middle consisted of a much thicker fragment of root that projected toward the viewer, the mother root, so to speak. The trees torn out of the ground by the hurricane had thrust thousands of such former root balls up into the air.

The cleanup had not yet begun; it would require a ten-year plan, an entire army: but even if all the tree corpses were to be sawn up over the course of ten or twenty years and turned into neatly stacked woodpiles, it would be out of the question to level the densely scattered halved balls, pyramids, and earth cones that now reared up before one throughout the forest, like primeval yurts; all the layers of subsoil dragged out of the depths into the light with the roots, from the horizontal to the vertical, would probably remain this way forever.

That would create a new landscape, an area such as had never been seen before, with new, crazy-quilt horizons here, there, and everywhere. And because the wood of the roots was particularly durable, it would continue to portray the spokes of a wheel, with the hub in the middle becoming even more unmistakable later on, when sculpted by wind and weather. She had little curiosity, a trait she shared with most of the inhabitants of her native region: but she was curious to see how the transformed landscape would look.

And then the craters in all the places where trees had stood before the hurricane, most of them massive old oaks: now one could see, layer upon layer, the material deposited by previous millennia. The snail shells at the bottom of the craters had not rolled into them recently, but seemed to have been there from time immemorial. And similarly the oyster shells were not left over from a picnic in the woods, were not trash tossed into the root cavities after a tour of the damage, but were stuck there, removable only with hammer and chisel, as if baked, a thousand years earlier, to their prehistoric oyster bed, lifted by the catastrophe from what had once been the sea. And the black basalt there in the next soil layer down came from a vulcanic vein. Where am I? When did that take place? And was that now? And when is “now”?

None of the other trees had such spreading crowns as the giant oaks, or oak giants. At the same time, the branches in the crowns were interwoven, forming a dense mass. And nothing made a more powerful impression of devastation than all the oak crowns lying smashed on the forest floor. Yet even these almost countless heaps of broken limbs offered something to observe. On its way down, one of these giant trees had fallen on its equally large, equally broad, giant neighbor, which in turn had fallen on the oak in front of it, and now they lay there as a single trunk, forming a sort of transcontinental line, all pointing toward a common vanishing point at the very end of the continent.

This line was rhythmically punctuated by the ruined crowns, or crown ruins, which had the appearance, lying on the ground, of enormous cages, cages intended for games, for they were wide open in all directions, with remains of tangled branches. And never, in fact, had so many birds cavorted way up in the crowns while the trees were alive as did now down there amid the deadwood. Behind and between the bars of the pseudo-cages, birds eyed each other and whirred about, especially the smallest birds, the titmice, the sparrows, the robins, eating their fill of food that was otherwise out of range of their usual low flight orbit. They pecked and swallowed, and to the outsider seemed to be playing jailbird.

Now and then there were also fallen trees in parallel lines, and inside the parallel zones almost inaccessible patches of forest had formed, which, in the meantime, had begun to serve as new habitats (and not merely refuges) for a number of species that in recent years had almost disappeared from the forests, driven away or seemingly extinct: although they did not show themselves this morning, foxes had obviously recently dug themselves new lairs in these enclaves, and all the uprooted moss, scattered around in clumps, was their doing; wild hares openly darted back and forth between their holes, without fear, now returned to daylight after a period of keeping hidden (where?), and merely hidden, so not killed off; and squirrels now zigzagged horizontally through the protected area, as before up and down the trunks, while among them peacocks stalked majestically in purple and blue.

Only the flocks of wild pigeons had become homeless as a result of the shattering of the forest, and even now, weeks after the night of the hurricane, they kept fluttering (a great rattling from hundreds of pairs of wings) away from one of the few treetops still standing and described their usual one-quarter or one-half loop to the next treetop — but it was no longer there, so they were left treading the empty air like figures in an animated cartoon, before they circled on to the next tree of refuge — but it, too, was missing, and so on and so on, day in, day out.

Here and there creatures new to the forest had moved into the small ponds formed by groundwater that had pooled in the many root craters: tiny fish and frogs now beginning to stir under the visibly melting ice — how ever had they got in there? For instance the osprey, missing the part of a wing that she saw lying next to one of the craters, it having fallen out of the bird’s beak as the osprey was tossed by the hurricane into the wooded hills from the river valley and, less flying than flipping over and over, crashed into one of the trees? (She stuck the piece of wing into her belt.) Also strangers here were the moles, which had long since become a rarity in the gardens down below — but here in these in-between zones formed entire new peoples, having emigrated underground from all parts of the city upon hearing of the storm, finding the resulting spandrels of safety, and above all the loosened earth, easy to excavate for tunnels and more tunnels: note the mole hills, tent-city-like, between the downed trees, and one mole or another would burrow fearlessly, like the rabbits, right up to the surface. A damned shame that she had to leave just now!

Many trees, too, instead of knocking down the tree next to them, had been caught by the more robust younger tree. Often the uprooted giants hung with their crowns tangled in the branches of the still upright neighboring tree, usually actually two such upright trees, one on the right and one on the left, suggesting the inescapable image of a warrior fallen to his knees in a Homeric — or at least not present-day — battle.

Added to this the sounds, as a gentle wind sprang up, of the living and dead limbs scraping against each other overhead: a whispering and chirping. This sound, however, drowned out more and more by a splitting and crashing clear across the forest: as the subsoil thawed with lightning rapidity, many of the trees lost their last foothold, one after the other, trees that the hurricane had battered down to their very roots but which until now had been merely cracked. Although the wind now came only in mild gusts, there began, all around, out of the clear blue sky, a paroxysm of falling, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but cumulatively massive. One giant began to tip, almost gently, a jerk at a time, until all that remained, without any sound of its hitting the ground, was the space where it had stood, with a shimmering phantom image of its branches; on another tree the heavy crown suddenly split off; a third had the ground pulled out from under it in an instant; and amid all the bursting and crashing sounds, seeming to answer each other from every corner of the forest, suddenly complete stillness would set in; not even a whisper from the wind. She did not stir from the spot. Was she so sure of being out of danger? Or might a single step of hers trigger a succession of falls around her?

Then, as the wind picked up, the falling suddenly ceased; not a single tree coming down. A glance at the sky: the majority of the trees that had not fallen were leaning steeply, and almost at an identical angle, which made it look as though those still more or less standing upright, clearly the minority, were leaning. Was one leaning oneself, about to tip out of the picture? And again: Was this now? And wasn’t it something other than, and more than, today’s date?

A glance at the ground: in the thawing mud, and all the more distinct, the marks of paws, hooves, bird feet, shoe treads, crowded together, as if on a path, imprinted there as if from long ago; and someone with bare feet had also joined this procession; is joining it; will have joined it. And now, at forehead level in the more than merely thinned-out forest, at sunrise, the glow of the luxuriant wild rhododendrons typical of the northwest, hardly any solitary bushes, but dense colonies girdling the hill, as tall as a full-grown man, picked out of the gloom and barrenness, at the moment of the wind’s breaking through and of the first rays of sun, as the only bright spot in the battered forest, a swaying radiance emanating from these earth-hugging creatures; from head to foot and, from the vanguard to the rear guard, a violent yet also even, small-caliber blinking, gleaming, flashing from the rhododendrons’ evergreen foliage, in the same sunlit moment representing a sort of procession, caravan, or, most persistently, work detail or squad, marching in place and at the same time advancing and passing by, lingering while also constantly setting out, and the glinting comes from belt buckles, from headbands, from the braid on sleeves, but above all from the tools they are carrying, pocket calculators as well as sonar devices, hand telephones with a screen as well as the apparently long since obsolete handsaws, masons’ spatulas (in a strange, streamlined form), kerosene lanterns. Involuntarily she broke into a run, unaccustomed though she was from her native village and in general to running: an obstacle course, which seemed most appropriate for her.

No, it was now after all; with the wind in the branches, it was the present, though with an admixture of other time periods; the present as it had always been. In the thumping of trains over the railroad ties could also be heard the booming of cannon firing a hundred years earlier and the creaking and screeching of wheels as horse-drawn conveyances mounted the steepest stretch of road through the forest, where they always slid back a bit, a backsliding that occurred despite the extra team hitched on at the relay station at the base of the hill. And the root craters from the hurricane would soon merge with the nearby bomb craters from the previous century, in this very forest.

This grander present, this grander time: “Behind the hubbub of the storm, behind the trunks and limbs fallen helter-skelter and lying on top of one another,” she told the author, “one glimpsed the present, the unadulterated present, as a park? as a garden? — as a clearing — as an enclosure. What just a moment ago had been a hurricane-blasted forest now revealed itself as an enclosure, and so these words came to mind: The enclosure of the grander time, and one thought: When will this kind of time finally prevail? When will it finally determine everything else?”

The author’s response: Was this thought part of her mission, like her belief in images? Her only reply: “No questions!” and she went on speaking as though she had not heard him. “What a delight time can be. No, what a delicacy it is. One would like to bite into it and eat it, nourish oneself with it. And it is nourishing in a way. When my daughter was a child, she would express her sense of time like this: ‘It has been a long time since I have eaten an apple!’ And now, when I came out of the forest, it occurred to me that I, who am famous for having time—‘She has so much time, and in a position like hers!’—had to set out at once.”

To stay here. To stay here? Now she clearly heard a cuckoo calling, in the middle of January, an echo from a dream. Did she jingle the change in her pocket? She hardly ever carried cash, and certainly not coins. Yet shortly before her departure she gave herself permission to be superstitious. Clinging to her hiking shoes was a mountain thistle, a kind that did not grow anywhere in the woods here. She ran into a neighbor whose obituary had been posted for days in all the local shops. So he was alive? And who had died in his stead? Long ago, in the Sorbian village, more than one person had greeted her grandfather, when he came into town after a longish absence, with the question, “What, you’re not dead? Everyone was saying you died the day before yesterday!”

The enclosure of the grander time: what powerful gusts! And what phantom gusts now. At last she was sure about her journey. One way or the other she would learn something from it. And she would find a treasure, though not the kind one could seize possession of. Yes, was she a treasure-seeker, then? She had always been seeking a treasure, and always for others.