Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

5

The day of her departure fell in the middle of the week. At any rate, Sunday was still far off; she already knew where she wanted to be by then, and was looking forward to it. The sudden change in the weather, the break in the cold, also swept away the last obstacle to her wanderlust: perhaps in compensation she would experience the frost, the continuation of pure winter weather that she had wanted to last as long as possible, as all the more persistent on her expedition, even if this expedition would be taking place far down in the south, which, with a view from the Pico de Almanzor, was almost all the way to Africa (didn’t al-manzar mean “the view” in Arabic? or did the name come from al-mansûr, “the victor”? hadn’t a victorious Arab general and king during the Middle Ages borne that name?).

In the Sierra de Gredos, the summit plain, extending from the eastern massif across the particularly high central massif and all the way to the western massif, a distance of almost two hundred kilometers along the ridge, would certainly (or “without a doubt,” one of the phrases in common use at the time of our story) be snow-covered, with the snow extending down into the highland valleys, and would no doubt remain so well into springtime. And when the January sun, so consistent during all the weeks leading up to her setting-out, veiled itself and then disappeared behind cloud banks moving in quickly from the west, that only contributed to her old, new, returning high spirits. The inky gleam of the asphalt, the clear, dark horizons, so far, far off, and the blue of the olives, covering the ground in a circle under the trees on the Sierra’s southern slopes, where the time for shaking them to the ground and harvesting them would just have arrived! Even now, a thousand miles from there, up here in the northwest, she jogged a few steps toward that blue-shrouded world.

From the beginning she had been one of the pioneers of new ways of life (which in turn might represent the return of ways of life that had been forgotten or seemingly rejected for good). But ways of life did not mean sensational carryings-on, a whole new terminology, ear-shattering parties, dreamlike couplings, futuristic organizations; did not mean anything generally considered future-oriented, but rather present-oriented or present-enhancing practices; did not mean anything public or officially sponsored, either, but arose only from her and for her, without any reference to society or even to a community, and it became a way of life only through example and suggestion, and because it was perhaps already in the air; nor did it lead to anything more than having something in common with this person or that, without any sense of belonging to a clique, an avant-garde, an elite; such nonconspiratorial and sporadic sharing with people who were otherwise strangers, who could go back to being strangers after an amused or timidly deferential meeting of the eyes, such sharing represented to her during that period not exactly the most lofty but just about the most truthful feelings; at any rate, people like her, she thought, did not need — at least for a transitional period — a sense of community, let alone a sense of society; what she was aiming for was a sense of life independent of society and all systems (except, of course, in her profession, but for now that was to appear in her story only as a blank, unwritten, white space, making the adjacent passages — everything was adjacent to it, after all! — appear all the more vivid and colorful). And from such a sense of life the new or revived old ways of life usually took shape on their own, and in turn preserved the sense of life and kept it vibrant.

What ways of life? Neither climbing trees nor plunging into holes chopped in the ice. Neither running marathons nor retracing old pilgrimage routes. Neither mushroom hunting nor sleeping in caves. Neither spiritual exercises on Mount Athos nor journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Neither love-ins nor joining the Peace Corps. One example (which, truth be told, is no example at all): as a child in the Sorbian village, when it was raining, she had often dashed from her grandparents’ house across the courtyard to the woodshed, because there, behind the slats that let in every wind gust, with her head almost bumping against the thin tin roof, she was so much closer to the action, the experience of “rain,” and it surprised her that she was always alone there, standing among the stacks of firewood, within earshot of and facing the rain: a way of life! — but no one followed her and shared it with her. No, it did not merely surprise her but after a while actually infuriated her that she did not get anyone to share the experience with her: so even as a child she had the sense of mission that later appreciated in value with each article written about her.

A further example (which again is not an example): as a schoolgirl, and then as a university student, too, on all official occasions and at all public or political speeches, she made herself scarce as soon as possible, yet without leaving the hall: she would stay there, but would render herself invisible by going to sit or stand behind a curtain. And at such times there was always a curtain suitable for hiding behind — she would spot it immediately, and if it was not a curtain, then a blackboard, a screen, a map rack, or a wardrobe would serve the purpose. But it worked best, was most full of life, behind a real curtain, if possible a stage curtain, in front of which, at a lectern or such, the solemnities or whatever were taking place. Through the years, the schoolchild and later student of economics crouched in the dim light behind just such a stage curtain at every “event” (though in those days they did not yet use the English term), and felt surrounded by a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm, felt that an entirely different time was in effect — but why did no one ever join her here, either? for wouldn’t even her enemies — from childhood on she already had a large flock of enemies — if they had only stepped behind the curtain where she was hiding, have promptly if not forgotten their enmity, at least put it aside for a few moments — decisive moments?! Where are you, you fellows? Why do you not come out and admit it: This is the right way!? What do you expect to accomplish out there in that phony light; have you forgotten the rest of the world? Was she a Cassandra? No, to people like that she would not have pointed out impending disaster. No catastrophe-early-warning mission. No treason. No messing with destruction. But all the same, a child, a girl, a woman with a mission?

Not until much later did she find here and there some who shared her little idiosyncrasies when it came to ways of life. But that was in a period when she had long since ceased to be surprised and annoyed that no one cared to imitate her. That, for example, she kept the identity of her child’s father a secret: in those days quite a few women did the same; and, like her, these women managed to live without a man. Another, rather small, example, more a feature of everyday life than of the larger arc of life: among a minority (though not a statistically relevant one, and not merely in her region but throughout the world), it had become the custom not to listen to music anymore, either at home or at concerts; merely the custom or a deliberately chosen way of life? A way of life. And a further, even more insignificant, example: another tiny minority had taken to turning off the lights in their houses and simply sitting quietly in the dark, at a window or in front of a screen: a mere habit or a way of life? A way of life.

Another such new or old way of life could be seen in the way she set out for the airport now. She walked to the airport, which lay almost half a day’s journey on foot from her city in the northwest; she hiked to her plane. She had started undertaking such hikes long before this, whenever she had time, and as we know, she always had plenty of time.

She had undertaken the first such hike in Berlin, when she walked from a street off the Kurfürstendamm all the way to the entrance to Tegel Airport. Although it was a weekday, in her memory it became a Sunday. She followed Schloss-Strasse, looped around Charlottenburg Palace, first taking a slight detour into the Egyptian Museum, followed Tegeler Weg along the perimeter of the palace grounds, unexpectedly found herself walking along the Spree — which she remembered from her childhood in the Sorbian village as a rivulet, unprepossessing yet deep — almost close enough for dipping one’s hand into and at the same time fast-moving, winding, meandering, alternating between river-breadth and brook-narrowness, then, before the branching-off of the West Harbor Canal, even coming up with a real island, the water pulsing westward in wide, rhythmic curves, following the drainage bed of the ancient river valley, with a hint of long ago in the wind currents and the shimmering at the bends, which detracted not at all from its presentness. And onward, then as now, turning north, away from the Spree, on the shoulder of the city autobahn, with the Jungfernheide on the left and Plötzensee on the right — was she still in Berlin? — scrambling half-illegally through allotment gardens and over fences, pinching fruit from the trees, slipping under barbed wire, dodging ferocious dogs (although after their first, feigned lunging they backed off even faster, into the farthest corner), shouting at fleeing rabbits, whereupon these halted just before their bramble bush and pricked up their ears, and a few moments later came the automatic doors of the terminal, with its monitors and loudspeaker announcements like “Moscow,” “Teneriffe,” “Faro,” “Antalya,” “Baghdad” (as she was still crawling through the brambles onto the tarmac, the destinations were being called out, sounding as though they were coming from the airplane engines just being started above her head).

Later she almost preferred walking home after a landing in her area, often hiking from the runway over hill and dale straight to her house. And in this practice, too, she was not alone. By now quite a few people made their way home in this fashion, especially after long trips; hiked the last stretch, which could sometimes take longer than the whole flight. Besides, when going in this direction one had no need to fear arriving in a crowd, as could happen at the airport: initially one might be more or less accompanied by others, in a fairly large (though usually rather small) group, but then one person after another would peel off, and one would reach one’s destination alone.

Now homecomers of this sort could also be recognized even at a distance by their (deceptively) light luggage, which nonetheless was clearly luggage, well traveled (without stickers), and by a certain self-assurance, almost arrogance, in their gait that allowed them to walk along the shoulder without wasting so much as a sideways glance at the vehicles rushing by them, often passing perilously close on purpose and honking senselessly. Among themselves, too, they acknowledged each other at most with a once-over out of the corner of the eye: such an acknowledgment providing a sort of sustenance to keep them going.

Nevertheless she then wanted to persuade the author of her story to come up with a different beginning for her journey: hadn’t too much been revealed already, less about her — she perhaps had something entirely different to reveal — than about the circumstances prevailing at the time, which, as previously mentioned, were supposed to be portrayed more “ex negativo,” through things that did not make up the foreground? The author: “But isn’t that what has just been described?”—She: “Why not let me take a boat down the river? or: ‘She walked to the large new bus station on the very edge of the city, where buses depart several times a week for all the other riverport cities on the continent: for Belgrade, for Vienna, for Düsseldorf, for Budapest, for Saragossa, for Seville, and across to Tangiers by ferry, each of these modern buses more fantastical or dreamlike than the one before, hardly recognizable as buses anymore, interplanetary transport modules — only the clock in the bus station still the same as when I moved here a decade and a half ago, still showing the wrong time, five hours fast, or seven hours slow.’”

The author: “But what will happen to the message of your book?” —She: “What message?”—The author: “For instance the one about the new or recaptured ways of life.”—She: “Well, have you ever had a message?” —The author: “Yes, messages and more messages. But only the kind my book unexpectedly presented to me.”—She: “Happy messages?” —The author: “Up to now, almost exclusively happy ones.”

With scratched forehead and muddy boots, her, and our, arrival at the terminal. So much fresh air earlier, and now, from one step to the next, in a different element. Element? Almost exclusively revolving doors now, holding back the world outside. But even where an old-style door stood open for a bit, no breath of air made its way into the hall. On the gleaming floor no footprints but hers. Nothing but scrape marks from suitcase wheels and luggage carts. Not a speck of free space; every inch of the airport floor occupied by people walking, standing, queueing up, running — each sticking to the beeline to which he or she had laid claim. Many talking loudly to themselves — no, they were shouting at people who were not there. But not every one with a hand to one ear was holding a so-called mobile telephone: here and there amid the racket a person simply cupped his hand over his ear and kept silent.

In one place there were drops of what looked like a nosebleed, in a dice pattern: one of the passengers, of whom there were not a few, had walked into an interior glass wall, perhaps seeing a reflection of the outside and thinking he was outdoors? On all sides, illuminated maps of the world and globes rotating as if four-dimensionally — was this the atlas of distant places from her childhood? Or is the atlas of distant places instead the view from my window here? Where are you all trying to get to, with destinations you have been talked into or forced to choose, at times, on days, and for a length of time over which you also have no control, that you must allow others to determine, and all of which — destination, departure and arrival time, duration — have nothing to do with your former and perhaps persisting love of travel, as well as your still possible spontaneous longing to set out, rendered impossible, however, by this dictatorship of money and the computer? Didn’t the current restrictions on travel conflict with the right to freedom of choice, one of the fundamental rights enumerated in democratic constitutions, and the need for spontaneity — the pleasure of surprising oneself and others? (“End of message”)

Wild dove feathers on a conveyor belt, and one person or another also picked them up and pocketed them. Some people dressed in black, about to take off to attend a village funeral. A family sleeping on a bench off to one side, even the parents barefoot. An army of deep, gleaming reflections that catch our eye and make us turn our heads, but nowhere an image, a live one? A child, staring straight ahead, ignoring the motley scene, and thus also ignoring it for me.

Single raindrops on the dusty road. Walking up a creosoted plank, as wide and thick as a door, from the wharf to the ship. Where had she seen this plank before? In the maritime museum in Madrid, in a display of the equipment with which the sailors of the Spanish-Austrian empire had sailed across the seas, especially the western ones, to “West India,” Venezuela, Mexico. The board was so thick, and it was seated so firmly on both ends, that it did not sway or bounce once under her feet, all the way to the railing. So when was that? In the sixteenth century, around 1556, to be precise, shortly after the abdication of the emperador, the emperor Charles the Fifth, and at the time of his crossing, in a litter because of his gout, of the Sierra de Gredos, on the way to his retirement in the cloister of (San) Yuste, in the southern foothills. And where was that? In the largest Spanish international port of the time, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, also a kind of riverport, on the río Guadalquivir, below Seville, where they hauled in the Indian gold from afar. The gangplank was not yet positioned vertically, fastened to a wall with ropes, as later in the museum, and it was also not creosoted, but scoured white by salt (from the famous salt mines of Sanlúcar, with their “salt unequaled for drying cod”), and she had walked up it barefoot, like the sleeping family from overseas today, or whenever, on another morning of departure here, or wherever, in the airport terminal.

She was famous in a way that allowed her pretty much to decide for herself whether people would recognize her or not. And thus she usually went unrecognized, even though someone always stopped short in front of her and involuntarily traced her face and her outlines in the air — and was then at a loss as to what to do with her: the drawing erased.

Becoming blurry and interchangeable in this way was difficult to sustain in airports, however. That was where she was always most likely to be recognized, for better or worse. Usually for worse. It never happened immediately upon her being recognized that people wished her ill. At the first sight of her, many eyes even expressed surprise and pleasure. Someone or other seemed almost happy to run into her. Even those who had some prejudice against her were at first taken aback and barely refrained from greeting the woman warmly. She looked completely different from the impression people would have formed from yet another report, article, photograph, news item, portraying this devious string-puller and puppeteer.

First of all, in real life she was infinitely more beautiful. And then, in contrast to her occasional staged appearances on television, where she displayed a grimly noncommittal expression, she was open and accessible. The very way she moved revealed that from everything and everyone she passed she absorbed some feature and took it with her, in her swinging shoulders, at her temples, behind her ears, in the curve of her hips, in her wide knees, and it was precisely that feature that stood for one as an entire person — the feature discovered by her in a flashing glance and scanned into memory, that reminded one of oneself as a figure that bore no resemblance to a type or to one’s role in the current situation.

A jolt, and just as quickly it was over. The attentiveness and empathy shown by that person were all an act. Didn’t everyone know that in her youth, before she took up her few previous professions — before her present one — she had starred in a film (a film, by the way, that was still shown, not only in certain movie theaters in Europe but also in clips during her television appearances: a tale from the Middle Ages in which she, one lay performer among others, had played Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur and at the same time the mysterious beloved — was she or wasn’t she? — of the knight Lancelot).

This era, the time in which her present story was taking place, was one of distrust, by now unprecedented. No one believed anyone anymore. Or at least people did not believe others’ displays of affection or friendliness, compassion or desire, let alone love, of no matter what kind. If a person beamed and expressed joy, others did not accept his assertion of happiness — even when the person in question was a child. A person might scream in pain — but after a moment of hesitation and concern, all too brief, the person he was with would look at him askance: not just with distrust but also with disdain.

None of the true or perhaps primal emotions were taken at face value for long, with the exception of hate, disgust, contempt. Were those primal emotions? The primal emotions from the dawn of time? At any rate, this was an era of spectators who were not simply malicious but actually evil-minded. Perhaps not at first or second sight, but later, and then relentlessly, they wished those who crossed their paths ill. This woman’s beauty now: ah, yes! But as they turned away, the spark of pleasure and reflectiveness changed abruptly to thoughts of violence: of hurting her for her beauty; humiliating her for it; punishing her for it. Was there such a thing as primal hate, primal rage, primal disgust, initially undirected, then seeming to find redemption in taking aim at beauty, this most rare phenomenon? I, the spectator, as judge and hangman? Redeemed in this manner from the hate inside me?

Airports seemed in those/nowadays to have become the breeding grounds for the spoilsport activities of the millions of malevolent spectators. At least in these surroundings their hostility was not subject to any soothing influences (which, on the other hand, were hoped for? after all, didn’t I myself suffer from this blind rage?). Was it the stale air and the ubiquitous artificial lighting — even in places where the natural light, coming in from outside, would have been adequate — that made us all the more irritable? Or the impatience, unavoidable in such a place, that also provoked ill will? Airports, especially the large ones — and there were almost nothing but large ones, or enormous ones, now — irritated people into hostility. And a person who had already been a sort of enemy was almost always transformed, when we bumped into each other there, into a definite, definitive enemy (without words — precisely because we did not exchange a word).

Thus she now ran into one of her enemies from work, who was clearly on his way to some other place entirely, but crossed her path again and again in the labyrinthine complex, or was walking in front of, behind, or even next to her. Finally he turned white as a sheet, and she heard him grind his teeth with hate as he lit a cigarette, clicking his lighter fiercely and making it flare up as if he were about to burn someone at the stake, while at the same time he punched the airless air with his metal attaché case. And countless strangers, at the sight of her well-known face, were ready to hurl insults at her. The insults could come unexpectedly, from a side corridor, or when someone passed her on the moving walkway, or from behind her, hissed by someone she could not see — who remained out of sight, either because after launching the sneak attack he promptly disappeared or because as a matter of principle she never turned to look at such people.

Now, in the hour before her flight, a voice became audible, close to her ear, the voice of a woman, not soft, just shaking, with rage? with age?: “You should be ashamed of yourself. You have brought shame on your father and your mother and your country. Shame on you!” Beauty as provocation? It seemed that in this transitional era it had become a wicked provocation — her kind of beauty made people turn wicked? And how did the woman react to this contempt? On the one hand, it left her unscathed, this woman who was happy to have no parents and no home. But on the other hand, as a mere rebuke, it awakened and deepened her awareness of guilt — no hour passed when that did not suddenly intervene in her life, between one step and the next. And yet on the other hand: an ants’ trail there beside the moving walkway! The dead pigeon, skeletal, way up on top of the glass dome, where it had lain for years. The rustling of the palms of Jericho. Or are, and were, those the equally towering palms of Nablus? She had sat, was sitting, is sitting, will have sat, all alone in the sun on a deserted terrace with a view of the desert. The dog half rolled in the sand; next to his stomach, the much smaller cat, likewise.

With these images she did more than keep her attackers at bay. She struck back at them. The image of the moment served not only as armor but also, whenever more was called for than peaceable disarming, as a weapon. With the images she had the power literally to do the other person in and “eliminate” him. Without his knowing what had hit him, and without his registering the image, it struck him, launched from her eyebrows or shoulder blades, catching him with the force of an electric shock that darted through him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

So now the metal attaché case belonging to her enemy from work was knocked out of his hand and went flying across the terminal, and he staggered after it. Now the old woman’s voice that kept hissing at her from behind became a choking sound, and a moment later the ghostly figure was swept from the scene by one of the needle-sharp palm fronds from Nablus or Jericho. At any rate she wanted the author to slip these incidents into her story. The author: “So they are invented?”—She: “No. Actually happened, for the retelling.”

During takeoff, it seemed as if it were no longer early January, as it had been just that morning; as if the onset of winter were long since behind one, and as if, with dark clouds overhead threatening rain, one were somewhere in the middle of the year, or the action were being resumed at least a month later. A thistle poked out of the concrete runway. Then the bunches of fox grapes down below along the edge of the runway had faded; no more silvery sheen in the gray; and their wintry garlands hanging there limp. And as the plane gathered speed, one of these withered garlands swirling up toward her window, beating against the glass with an otherworldly sound, as on the door of a stagecoach. And moments before, the rumbling of the landing gear like the rumbling of a bus on a potholed road through the Pyrenees. And outside on the tarmac, bouncing and tumbling along, the burrs ripped from the prairie thornbushes, in clouds of desert dust, the image precisely prefiguring a sequence, an hour later, or how much later? in the film playing above the passengers’ heads, obviously shot against the bare brown of the Iberian plateau, seemingly final and unchanging, to which the green of the northwest will long since have given way.

“Love quest!” she had thought, with one eye on the film above her head, the other on the landscape far below, feeling simultaneously stared at from the air, from the film, quietly, fixedly, from a distance, unapproachably, from as close as anyone or anything could possibly be. Desire set in, or intensified, took center stage. For her desire was always present, was constant. “Not a moment in which I do not feel desire,” she told the author, and she said it matter-of-factly, as if it were something to take for granted. “Desire or longing?” (the author). — “Desire and longing.”

Except that her desire was such that hardly any person in her presence could recognize it (and presumably it was not directed at him in any case?). Anyone who did perceive it was more likely to be filled with alarm. Never mind whether I am the object or not: Get me out of here! She has gone mad. What a rough voice she has. What faces she makes. She will tear my head off. She will plunge her sword into my heart. Or she will simply spit on me and show me her nine tongues. Or she will wring the neck of the child in the seat next to her. Or she will hurl the child and herself out the emergency exit, above the río Ebro now, over the río Duero now, onto the cathedral coming into sight down below, no bigger than a child’s block, dedicated to “Our Lady of the Pillar,” of Saragossa, not the northwestern but the southwestern riverport city already: without exception, men as well as women, even children, even animals, we promptly turn tail and flee from this wild woman’s longing, desire, fulfillment, helplessness — all in one. On the kitchen table in her deserted house the passion fruit, or pomegranate? or lemon? and laid out next to it the knife, clouded by the exhalations of fruit flesh forcing their way through the peel.

A love quest? Love? At the time the word “love” was all the rage. (She had urged the author to use tasteless or clichéd expressions like “all the rage” now and then in her story so as to “muddy” and wrinkle it a bit.) Not only was there no longer any hesitation to utter the word “love,” and then why not several times a day. It also blared constantly from microphones and loudspeakers, in churches as well as in railroad stations, in concert halls, stadiums, courtrooms, even at press conferences; you could see it, red on white, and not in fine print, either, on every other election and advertising poster, see it flashing in every third neon sign.

“Loving punctuality” was a slogan for the railways: which meant that instead of departing late, the trains departed early, so that one was always missing them. At the executions now being carried out daily, in Texas or elsewhere, as the convict lay there with the lethal injection already dripping into his vein, there was routinely a reading from the Epistle to the Corinthians, “ … but the greatest of these is love.” Nothing but love songs, broadcast by Radio “Longing” or “Seventh Heaven” Channel, echoed through the subway and suburban railroad stations, where, likewise day and night, heavily armed soldiers patrolled, and the towering metal barriers, long since far too high to be jumped, and not only for children and old people (who in any case were banned from the premises), clanged shut on the heels of the lucky holders of luckily valid tickets who had slipped through in the nick of time, shut behind the “beloved passengers” with a thunderous crash that echoed through all the subway and suburban tunnels, repeated and amplified a thousandfold, to the accompaniment of Elvis singing “Love Me Tender” and Connie Francis singing in German “Die Liebe ist ein seltsames Spiel,” on Radio Paradiso or Radio Nostalgia.

After an era of peace, not phony but healthy, robust, confident peace, when many of us felt happy about their era, “our era,” the present, the darkness of a prewar period had closed in again. But this was a prewar era such as had perhaps never been experienced before. Peace continued to dominate the picture, the word “peace” written everywhere in the sky by planes, traced in the night by torchbearers, just like “love.”

And at the same time war had already started, the old kind that pitted peoples against one another, as well as a new kind, pitting every individual against every other, the second kind more ruthlessly bent on annihilation than the first. Not only did she, as a lady banker, or whatever, have many enemies: by now anyone could be surrounded by enemies, and was their archenemy in turn, their enemy to the death, and that included the participant in a friendship banquet or lovefest just as much as Delegate No. 248 to the International Peace Conference, No. 2 in the Council of the Twelve Wise Men of the World, as well as Dying Man No. 3 in the ward of the House of Death, and us idiots, hiking through the woods with our fellow idiots (who said this, who was narrating this story? — the Council of Idiots).

This war of each against each — often most cruel against those most like me, against those closest to me — was never formally declared. In the past, if someone said, “From today on, we are at war!” or “I will destroy you!” or “Your hearse has been ordered!” or merely “Die!” that was more like a joke; at least one could ignore it. The current war was waged without a formal declaration. It took place wordlessly, behind the façade of the streaming images, sounds, and pictographs of “peace,” not limited to a dove with an olive branch in its beak. Instead of “War!” as a threat, one was now more likely to hear “I love you, and I will always love you!”; instead of “From today on, I am your enemy, and you will find out soon enough what I can do to you!” it was “As your friend, I …”; and a threat that meant almost certain death was “We will never ever abandon you folks!”

Do the minutes of the meeting of the Council of Idiots end here? No, they continue a bit, something along these lines: in the current era, ancient enmities between peoples, usually going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, had flared up again. After a period in which we thought we had finally and definitively been saved from them, at least on our continent (what deserved the name of salvation here, if not that?), all the hereditary enmities had bubbled to the surface in Europe, in their most naked form. Long ago, very long ago, even among the prejudices peoples had against one another, there had been a few affectionate ones and many that were at least ambivalent: if the X were lazy, at least they were jolly; if brutal, at least reliable; if bad cooks, at least good musicians; if bandits, at least not sociopaths; if reeking of garlic, at least the best beekeepers. But now all that mattered between peoples were the terrible memories, the most terrible ones, which completely dominated the present. Where did people today get these memories, when they had grown up with history books from which any trace of antagonistic allusions to other countries had been expunged?

Grotesque memories in our part of the world, meanwhile unified as a legal and economic entity and thus almost a single state, as once before in time immemorial; all intracontinental borders eliminated meanwhile, so that one could travel by reindeer sled from Lapland to Thessaloniki, on water skis from the Wörthersee to St. Petersburg: “You Spaniards stabbed my brother with a spear in Cambrai in July 1532”; “The Liechtensteiners betrayed us to the Turks back in the Middle Ages”; “The British are mining the English Channel as they did under Henry VIII”; “The Swiss are swearing fealty just as they did long ago to a land where the sun never rises”; “There’s not a single Frenchman who does not bear collective guilt and will not have to make amends for the beheading of Marie Antoinette …”; “Your goalkeeper killed our defender.” End of the Council of Idiots executive summary?

By now every people detested every other — and detested completely — detested each other as never before in human history. Declarations of friendship between peoples and celebrations of eternal reconciliation held official significance only, and were merely temporary, not for the long haul: soon evil thoughts emerged among the official representatives, too, among them especially (what the population as a whole thought was not expressed openly, as had always been the case? and only a god could have articulated it?).

The “people’s representatives” on the one hand and the “political educators” on the other were the first to drop all restraint toward the opposing country and appoint themselves leaders in the war of words. This phenomenon, too, was no novelty in history. What was new and unheard-of in this transitional period — or will it turn out to have been the end of time? — is that the “leading statesmen” and the “opinion-molders” were saying precisely those things, which they then put into action, for which in previous historical eras the mob had been known, or which had at any rate been ascribed to it.

There were no longer any borders? Yet restrictions and prohibitions as perhaps never before. When a current leader of one sort or another found his prohibitions colliding with the many recent restrictions, something coalesced in his person that we had thought consigned to the distant past, long buried in the obscurity of legend: in him, things that played a role only in historical-recreation films, and were increasingly fading from human memory, all the malice, murderous impulses, lynching fantasies, and bestialities buried in the ancient rubbish heap of his country’s mob, found their new mouthpiece and third rail. Everywhere the perhaps overrated mob of formerly existing countries, reduced long since to dust and bone fragments, was reembodied in the current leaders; and each of these revenants rivaled his predecessors in defiance of the law, blind rage, and homicidal hatred.

But strangely enough: the old mob now became visible to us only and exclusively in the person of the revenant — no mass of people presented itself as the new mob, only those who in each other’s company styled themselves the “leaders.” Our memory preserves from earlier times a specific image of the traditional mob: how after a speech in a hall or a stadium by the leader of the day, in the surrounding streets and squares, up to then deserted or peaceful, the manhole covers begin to pop up, and his followers, who have been lurking underground, are catapulted into the light, an instant majority, for the moment just grinning palely like ghosts and shoving a bit, not yet pouncing and crushing — but wait, just you wait.

And almost the same image fits the modern mob: it, too, in the guise of the so-called leaders, suddenly hoists itself out of a sewer opening, one over here, another over there, ready to pounce and strike — except that they remain isolated, without a trace of a following or a people behind them — and why do they not wage their wars in single combat, as used to happen in the Middle Ages or in legend, man-to-man, woman-to-woman, etc., stabbing, shooting, bombing each other out of existence — instead of their respective peoples — after posing for a photo opportunity for posterity, for all I care?

The prewar gloom: the wars between the countries of the continent, outwardly united and border-free, had not yet broken out; would perhaps not even break out in the true sense; would not be declared and would also no longer be called “war” but, for instance, “peace operation” or “love action” (see above). Yet one of the new leaders, from the former cornflowers-in-the-gun-barrel movement, made a revealing slip of the tongue when his favorite slogan—“Not war — love!”—reversed itself in his mouth into “War and love!”; and in fact, during his last “Operation Outstretched Hand” (against another country), his wife, barren for many years, finally got pregnant (his caressing of her belly in public).

And at any rate, the incidents preliminary to war were piling up, and again it was indicative that they were always mob actions committed by the leading personages, and that these mob actions were directed against what was probably one of the first basic laws of primitive, still stateless, societies — that more and more leaders, invited to visit another country, trampled the ancient law of hospitality underfoot, worse than any old-time mob.

One of these characters took his morning jog, dressed accordingly, by zigzagging through the valley where the host country’s kings were buried (a photo that later appeared on the dust jacket of his how-to book for joggers). A picture of another leader made the rounds showing him in a bomber flying over a country that had been almost completely wiped out in the last world war by his forefathers. He was laughing uproariously, his feet in tennis shoes propped on the improvised map table at 5,000 meters. A third leader (wasn’t it always the same one) could be seen at a compulsory peace conference jabbing the host in the chest with both hands, one finger on each hand extended like a dagger. And a fourth, while touring a foreign city destroyed in civil unrest, did not go on foot or by car but had himself pulled in a small cart by a couple of natives, so that he towered above the crowd, with an expression on his face as if he were also the camera by which he was having himself filmed for television, along with the city and the victims.

And the fighter-bombers now far below the passenger plane, menacingly close to the plateau: Wasn’t this the long-awaited open war against the legendary people — these days a mere tribe, a mere sect — that had allegedly retreated into the most remote reaches of the Sierra de Gredos?