Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

6

She had never spoken of the fact that she had another brother. In all the articles and brochures featuring her, the only brothers mentioned were the alleged microchip — half brother and the one who had died as a small child in an automobile accident, along with her parents. She was the eldest of the three siblings; the unmentioned brother was the youngest, born just before the parents’ death, and plucked unscathed from the wreck.

On the very day in January on which she set out on her portentous journey, her brother was released from the prison, or “detention center.” For several years he had been locked up there as a “terrorist,” not merely over the hills and far away but in another country. She to the author: in the accounts of herself and her business prowess her brother had obviously had no place. But now he was to appear in her book. She had not withheld information about him because she was ashamed of him. (On the contrary? Also not on the contrary.) And she wished, she wanted her brother not to be merely mentioned in the current book, “my definitive book,” but rather to figure as one of the main characters, “of course along with me and also various others.”

What should be told about him? The events leading from his childhood up to his crime, from the trial to the completion of his sentence? Primarily his story from the current morning on, when he steps through the narrow discharge gate of the “Institution for Implementation of Justice” a free man, his hands now free like hers, over the hills and far away and even beyond the dunes. Unlike the visitors’ gate, which is as wide as a barn door and opens onto the beltway, this gate lets out into a cemetery, the size of about ten stadiums, with light-colored smoke eddying at that moment from the crematorium there, in which flakes of rust mingle with snowflakes, the smoke now intersected abruptly by a flight of wild doves, shimmering in exactly the same color, as if the birds had just been given birth to by the smoke or had slipped out of their shells there.

“Along with my adventurous journey I want you to tell my brother’s as well,” she directed the author, “describing how he will have made his way from the prison gate across very different lands, during the prewar period and later in the middle of war, to the country he had chosen in his youth as his future home — but he is still young, of course!”—The author: “But how? Should I invent a story?”—She: “Don’t pretend to be dense! And stop making yourself out again to be more insignificant than you are! If I picked you to be the author, you may be sure I had my reasons.”—“And what were they?”—“Although you may have invented a detail or two in your books from time to time, and perhaps even everything (I have not the slightest interest in knowing that): all in all, your long tales have always been accurate, and in particular will remain accurate for the foreseeable future, infinitely more accurate or real than any conceivable factual accounts, and they were, and are, also infinitely more real than the alleged reality that people boast one can touch and smell.”

The author: “But I do want to capture something you can touch and smell.”—She: “You’re splitting hairs again. Fortunately you do this only in conversation, not in your writing! Enough! There is a kind of touching and smelling that is different from grabbing and sniffing out. And besides, you are famous for being able to take a gesture, a hint of movement, a voice — that has come to you from afar, for only an instant, often only from hearsay — especially the gesture, movement, or voice of a stranger, and transform yourself completely into the other person. Someone down at the other end of the street limps ever so slightly, and you embody him here until he has disappeared around the corner, and long after he is gone. That is how my brother, just released from prison, stepped out of the cemetery that morning—”—The author: “—which lay beyond the Baltic dunes, and in heavy snow pressed the access code on the hand telephone given him as a going-away present by one of the guards.”—She: “You fool!”—The author: “But that is what happened, is it not?”—She: “Yes, that is what happened.”

She had visited her brother often during his years of incarceration. Each time it had been a long and momentous journey; and she wanted from now on to undertake only this kind of journey, if any at all, not necessarily to some legendary foreign prison or other, but certainly journeys with an undercurrent of uncertainty, fear, sorrow, pain, and the threat of no return.

She had stolen time for these visits to her brother from her busy schedule at the big bank. Flying in the morning into the city where the prison was located and returning, at the latest, on the evening flight. One time she arrived at the visitors’ gate after two hours on the plane and a two-hour taxi ride and did not see the usual long line. She was the first one there that day, and felt exultant. It turned out to be the only day of the week without visiting hours. And she had to go back that same evening. No admittance, no exception, even for her. She walked around the entire facility, the size of a small town and heavily guarded, sat on a bench in the cemetery, where she ate an apple and dozed off briefly; not a sound from behind the walls, and yet the sense of being close to her imprisoned brother as hardly ever before; in her one-minute dream on the cemetery bench he was bending over her and breathing on her.

Another time, as a participant in the annual conference of the World or Universal Bank, being held in the prison city, she was able to stay overnight, and took a penthouse suite in a hotel in the dunes offering a view of both the sea and the compound, with its electrified fence, searchlights, and watchtowers. At sunrise the rolling North and Baltic seas in the distance, and the momentary reflection of the prisoners taking their morning exercise — they themselves not visible — in the tilted sight-blocking screens mounted atop the far side of the wall over there, where for short stretches they consisted not of concrete but of smoked glass. Allowed in then, after hours taken up with the usual security checks and backups — one stalled line after the other, in the course of which the visitors at a standstill there eventually developed a kind of tribal solidarity, not only with the prisoners they were waiting to visit but also among themselves — allowed in and escorted to the so-called visitation room in groups of five or six at a time; in actuality it is a windowless shed, divided by a row of tables and chairs, and down the middle of the tables a glass panel, without an opening for speaking through; in the case of short prisoners or visitors, the top above the level of their heads; and this shed suddenly full to bursting with the five or six visitors on one side and the five or six prisoners on the other side of the panel (to which had to be added two guards on the right and left flanks); these dozen people all talking at once, in pairs, with a hug hardly possible because of the high panel separating them, at most a quick brushing over the hair or a stroking of the forehead with outstretched fingertips; no talking, just a din, increasing steadily during the brief visiting period, almost always cut short because of the noise; each visitor had to drown out the others to be heard at least somewhat by his imprisoned family member, or vice versa; but given the general necessity for shouting and yelling, with more and more words becoming incomprehensible, and even lip movements impossible to decipher after a while, because the mouths were opened so wide; at the same time the entire clan pretending to understand and make sense of what was being said amid the racket in the shed; and yet at the same time, even though they were now standing and speaking over the glass panel, on tiptoe, with one ear long since within spitting distance of the speaker-shouter, not making out a single word; and not even hearing their own words as they uttered a response at random, not a single word — and then “Time’s up!” and the next instant the prisoners, without being able to exchange even a last glance, already out of the room and on their way back to their cells; now deafening silence, in which each visitor separately, no longer part of a family or a clan, will have departed in a daze, making for the outside, for freedom.

Even discounting the pandemonium, she could follow little of what her brother said, and less with each visit. For one thing, he expressed himself more and more in the language of his chosen country (just as in the letters he wrote her, which she had to have translated — a problem: because outside that country hardly anyone knew the language, and anyone who did kept the knowledge to himself like a guilty or shameful secret). And then, with the passing years in the distant penitentiary, her brother expressed himself more and more exclusively in riddles and incomprehensible images — yet spoke and wrote in the same quiet rhythm as before (not falling silent or becoming frenetic).

Just moments ago his glowing eyes and his almost elegant, collarless white shirt, not at all prison-like, in the shed steaming with sweat and spittle, and a few heartbeats later she was in the parking lot outside the visitors’ entrance, facing the flags of all nations displayed outside the luxury hotel diagonally across the way (from the outside, the prison, built far below street level, was unobtrusive and easily overlooked); the chauffeur of a hired limousine waiting for her, and a few breaths later opening the door for her by the seaside conference center, where she would deliver her keynote address on riddles so unlike her brother’s: “The Riddle of Money”; the hands of brother and sister clutching each other above the dividing panel, the leathery softness of the limousine, with classical music (immediately turned off on her command), the flashbulbs going off around her, the star of the conference, and all as if in the same moment.

In the meantime, however, the chauffeur had unexpectedly revealed that he was intimately acquainted with the penitentiary, as a former guard, also with the visitors’ shed, known to all as the “port of good fortune.”

On the morning of his release, her brother probably did step through the special discharge gate into the cemetery by the sea. But he was not alone. Two plainclothes policemen and a staffer from the attorney general’s office of the country that had incarcerated him escorted him. He did not walk through the cemetery to the highway, but was led straight from the gate to a car just then parking along the first row of graves. The car was not a hearse, and he was driven by the shortest route to the main airport. (The bird that had come flying out of the smoke from the crematorium, as if having just slipped out of its shell there, had not been a dove.)

At the airport ticket counter her brother was handed a passport from the country he had chosen as his home. That country no longer existed as an independent entity. During his imprisonment it had been annexed to another, newly created, country. His passport was no longer valid. The country to which he was to be deported now, bordering his homeland, was the only one on the continent where his passport would still be accepted temporarily as identification (though it was still valid in an island republic near the South Pole and in two dwarf states, one in the Himalayas and one that had been an Indian reservation and had declared its independence from the United States).

The official from the attorney general’s office read her brother the deportation order. Henceforth he was forbidden to set foot on the soil of this country. If he ever again created the situation that had led to the years of incarceration, it was not merely not out of the question but a likelihood bordering on certainty that he would forthwith be convicted of a criminal offense, just as before. Away to his homeland with him — wherever that might be; to his family, wherever some of them might still be found: after landing he would make his way to them, somehow or other. And thus her brother was deported that morning by air, in downright princely fashion, with a free ticket, and, also in princely fashion, alone, without any possibility of return? without any necessity to return; free, freer than he had ever been.

And no one had given him a hand telephone as a going-away present, certainly no cell-unlocker. He could have used the phone to call his girlfriend of many years, down below in the prison city on the northeastern sea, whose houses now, from the plane, which had immediately climbed very high into the clear sky (no, it was not snowing that day), had blurred with the ocean foam.

But telephoning was forbidden on board, and a hand telephone like that would have been no good for a call from the other country, either. His sister did not know who his girlfriend was, or whether she even existed. As she flew high over the Iberian plateau — with the tracery of its arid valleys so clear from certain angles, as were their likewise arid, lichen-white side branches, that one could have the impression of being very close to the ground, with these patterns almost near enough to touch, in the form of what had been a primeval forest, never cut but long since turned skeletal, from which clouds of wood dust swirled, stirred up by the airstream—, her brother was sitting, like her, at a porthole, perhaps above a similar, and why not the same? barren residual landscape. His skin was slightly tanned as always, despite the winter and his life in confinement, not merely from the outdoor work of the last few weeks, and he was wearing his eternal white collarless shirt of heavy fustian, which was never even slightly dirty, at most a bit frayed (and therefore all the more elegant), and today, in celebration of his journey into the unknown, he had on over it a claret jacket and a long, black, fur-trimmed coat, the personification of elegance, not only compared to her, who today as always, and at least in this respect similar to him, has some unusual feature, more noticeable than their grandfather’s checkered handkerchief, a seemingly conscious and intentional clownlike touch or even something comical, in the present case, for instance, the partial wing of a bird of prey that she stuck into her belt that morning in the hurricane forest and later into her bosom.

“Write that I, she, this woman, suddenly felt a hand touching the feathers and my breast, and then actually saw it, too,” she told the author. It was a child’s hand. The child was sitting next to her. This hand, small though it was, was unusually warm. “And I noticed that my own hands, whose warmth others immediately remark upon, were unusually cold. They had become so cold during the flight that they ached down to the bones. And the unknown child now took my fingers without more ado and warmed them between his own.”

Yet she felt almost as though nothing had touched her, and indeed the touching of her breast had been gentler than the brush of a veil. She closed her eyes and opened them almost at once, wide, to look at the child in the seat next to hers. He was evidently traveling alone, without the usual unaccompanied-minor card around his neck (but hadn’t these been abolished long ago?). What he had instead was something like a purse, which looked unusually heavy around his frail neck.

Suddenly she felt as though she and the boy were about to be filmed; as though the camera were diagonally above them, quite close, and the command “Action!” or “Movement!” or merely an almost inaudible “Please!” that could be read from unidentified lips had already been given. Ever since she had acted in that film set in the Middle Ages, such notions had repeatedly inserted themselves into her days and her everyday life (although in her case, one could hardly speak of “everyday life,” whether from an internal or an external perspective). True, that had been her only role, albeit a major one. Yet even now, almost twenty years later, in certain situations, always different, she still felt the camera focused on her, one far, far larger than the actual one. There was no pattern to the situations, and generally there were one or two other people present (it never happened when they were more than three — perhaps a pattern after all?).

For the most part, however, she was performing in this film alone. And for the most part it was not daytime. She was sitting one evening in an easy chair by the window, holding a book, and once she reached a particular line she felt the camera at her back. She herself a blurry profile in the image; only the print in the book in sharp focus, and her finger following the sentences; the turning of the page almost a ceremony, before which she paused for an appropriate interval and then finally, if possible without the slightest sound, turned the page (if there was rustling, the scene was repeated, and if the paper crackled, like a newspaper page being turned, the shooting would be called off for the evening — an end to the reading).

Or she was lying in bed at night, half- or already sound asleep, and suddenly she became aware of the camera above her on the ceiling. All she had to do now was go on sleeping — not pretending to sleep, as in other films, but rather sleeping soundly and peacefully while also portraying sound, peaceful sleeping, for the benefit of the whole world; for the “public at large.” And having the camera running even helped her: in portraying someone sleeping, she “really and truly” slept (the expression used by children in her Sorbian village), and more soundly and peacefully than at any other time.

But she had never had to do a take with a child this way. She looked up at the invisible camera to see whether there might be lines for her to read: nothing but the blank sky, almost blackish-blue (it was the period when airplanes, like buses and high-speed ferries, as well as the coaches that had come back into circulation here and there, were more and more equipped with glass roofs). Instead she heard the boy next to her. Speaking softly, yet as clearly and audibly as the first birdcalls before dawn — despite the almost deafening roar of the engines—, he said, “I must see what you have in your backpack.” She said nothing. She had no need to say anything. She had no script—“fortunately,” she thought.

The child was already busy loosening the pack, the many knots posing no difficulty: a few tweaks, and he had one after the other undone. “What a smell!” he said, delving into her personal effects not only with his fingers but also headfirst, and it remained unclear whether he meant a stench, a lovely fragrance, or simply a smell. And already some of her possessions were laid out on the tray table in front of him. “Chestnuts, freshly peeled!” he said, letting them roll out of both hands again and again. “The size of blackbirds’ eggs. The color and form of a plucked and scalded chicken’s hindquarters. In other words: cream-colored. A smell like new potatoes, dug only yesterday, the first of the year, the best, the famous ones from the island in the Atlantic. Taste [already he was taking a bite out of one] of nuts? of almonds? of peach pits? No, unlike anything else: of pure, raw chestnuts. Number [he counted them all at a single glance]: forty-eight!”

And on to the next thing, but without haste, carefully, as if it were something precious: a travel guide, an unusual one, in fact with the title “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos.” The child leafing through it, cautiously, section by section, reading out some of the titles: Mountain Brooks and Floods; Thunderstorms; Free-Range Mountain Cattle; Snakes; Wildlife; Dangerous Plants; Forest Fires; Getting Lost (the longest chapter); Snow- and Icestorms; Avalanches; Razor Cliffs; Poisonous Waterfalls.

— Author: Aruba del Río—“That’s you, isn’t it, under a pseudonym, you’ve taken along your own book as a guide for the trip!”

Now a third object picked up with both hands by the child: another book, the Arabic reader belonging to her vanished daughter. The boy was small but must have been of school age already, for he read, and fluently, too: “Bab, gate. Djabal, mountain range. Sahra, desert. Firaula, strawberry. Tariq hamm, highway. Bank, bank. Harb, war. Maut, death. Bint, daughter.” He hesitated over one word: “Huduh, silence. Silence, that’s a word I do not know. I do not know what it means. I do not need to know that, either. I do not want to know, either. Huduh, silence.” And he read on: “Haduv, enemy. Chatar, danger. Djikra, memory. Zeit, oil. Hubb, love. (I do not know that word, either.) Batata, potato. Nuqud, money. Asad, lion. Fassulja, bean. Hassan, the handsome and good. Thaltz, snow. Bir, well. Chajat, tailor. Banna, stonemason. Ja, oh dear, and oh.”

He stowed the book carefully in the knapsack and suddenly struck her on the thorax, with a tiny fist, a single blow, but one that really hurt. She felt not only struck but also injured — wounded. She would die of the wound, now, during the flight, during the journey. Meanwhile the child continued rummaging through her things. “A snake skin. A mountain thistle. A fan. A veil — how strange that it is wet, as if it had just been pulled out of the water — strange, something wet among the dry things. A chef ’s tocque. A chef ’s neckerchief. A chef’s tunic. Cooking mitts. A chef’s belt. A chef’s apron. A chef’s knee pads. Chef’s clogs made of linden wood. Everything but the clogs linen-white.”

Finally the boy’s hand dug carefully to the very bottom of the bag and emerged at last holding a bookmark: a present from her daughter, made during her first year in school, a photographic self-portrait, glued onto a strip of cardboard, with a colorful design painted around it: she thought she had lost it years before, during a walk with a book through the woods of the riverport city: she had missed it for a long time, had hunted for it in vain, on wood-roads, under the deepest layers of fallen leaves, also the following year, and even the one after that: and now here it was, as intensely as anything can be. She closed her eyes; opened her eyes.

The child in the seat next to her unbuttoned his shirt. Curled up on his naked chest was a dormouse, squirrel-like but smaller, its tail shorter but all the bushier. The animal was breathing; it was alive; it was sleeping; its sharp claws partially extended, harmlessly touching the child’s skin; its soft fur ruffled by the air from the vent above them.

The child gazed unblinking at the woman next to him and said, “You will never go home. You are lost. But perhaps you are not yet lost, not completely. Why are you so alone? Not even in a dream have I met anyone so alone. And perhaps you will die and be even more alone in dying. Without anyone. La-Ahad. Ahada, another of your assumed names. And what beautiful and tender hands you have. And what gentle eyes — like those of people who doubt they will return home.”

And while the unknown child continued to speak, softly yet distinctly, she noticed that for the first time, since when? yes, since when? she was close to tears. And she was utterly amazed; and just this once she wanted to be seen this way on film, in a full-screen close-up. The author: “Should this go in the book? May it?”—She: “Yes.”

While the child was speaking, sentence after sentence, a strip of light traveled beneath the plane, which was flying at a perceptibly lower altitude now, moved across the plateau, and caused a band of asphalt to shimmer, a reservoir to glitter, an irrigation canal to flash. A topsy-turvy new world on the first day of the journey (but hadn’t several days passed already?): the sky above the glass roof almost black as night, with a hint of the first stars, and down below the sunlit earth. In similar fashion, on the way to the airport, an ancient crone, without her dentures, had come toward her, driving a factory-new race car, as if trying to set a new record, the car’s number emblazoned from stem to stern. And similarly, that morning the outskirts’ troop of drunks had been hauling cases of beverages from the supermarket to their lairs in the woods — without exception bottles of mineral water. And was it possible?: a flock of wild geese, flying past the plane window in a long, jagged V, from right to left: “Arabic writing,” the boy commented. And could there be such a thing?: in the same fashion a swarm of leaves swept by the window, holm oak leaves typical of the plateau? And where and since when did this exist?: and next, a pale-pink drift of snowflake-like blossoms, as if the almonds were in bloom and almost finished blooming, now in late February, early March.

The child had moved on to another subject some time ago. He was talking about money. — The author: “Didn’t you stipulate that this topic should be kept out of your book, at most implied, through not being mentioned?” —She: “At a few points it belongs in the story. And this was just such an exception.” The monologue of the child in the seat next to her began with his taking a packet of banknotes from the purse hanging around his neck. Leafing through them, he exclaimed, “Oh, money of mine!” The author, interrupting, to her: “And what would be your equivalent exclamation?” —She: “Oh, dear, money. Ja, an-nuqud. And yours?”—The author: “Ah, money!”

The child said more or less the following: “My money is nice to look at. And it has such a friendly feel to it, my money does. And it does me so much good, my money, my cash money. It is my first money. And it is money I earned myself. I did not find my money. I did not steal my money. And my money was not given to me, either. For my first money they wanted to open an account for me and deposit my money in it. If my money had been a gift, I would have said yes at once. But because I worked for my money, giving lessons in math, Russian, and Spanish, shoveling snow, helping with the potato harvest, herding cows in the pasture, mucking out the barn, I wanted to see my money, each bill and even the smallest coin. And I insisted that my cash be given to me in person each time, on the spot, right after the completion of every job, without involving anyone else. When I saw other people going up to the counter in the bank with their money in bundles and briefcases, to get rid of their banknotes in exchange for a teller’s receipt, in my eyes that meant it was not money they had earned themselves but dirty money. Every one of them, I thought, was bringing to the bank money that had been either found or stolen or extorted — at any rate it was not theirs, and they converted it into mere numbers, to launder it, by the numbers. But my money, even if it looked a bit soiled on the surface, was clean money. And even if a bill had really and truly been dirty in the hands of a previous owner, as my banknote it was washed clean in the twinkling of an eye, and, unlike at the bank, the whole thing was on the up and up. When I exchange my money, it is only from coins to bills. I know that you are one of the few people who no longer touch money, in the form of either coins or banknotes; who no longer even carry credit cards; and whose fingerprints are accepted all over the world as a form of payment. But how beautiful my money is. And you do me so much good, money of mine, my cash money.”

She closed her eyes and promptly opened them again. A gull, white as ocean spray, flew past her porthole, and this in the middle of the plateau, far inland. But of course there were reservoirs even here, and not all the rivers had dried up. If they had ever been aloft, now the passengers were no longer flying. Without having noticeably touched down, the aircraft was taxiing along a rather narrow landing strip far from the city, at first speeding like a race car, then, on rather bumpy ground, bouncing along evenly as it slowed and circled the terminal, as if they were on an old bus with ruined springs or in a carriage, an impression that was reinforced when, as the propeller vanes became visible — prop planes were in style again — they appeared to be turning backward, like wagon wheels in Westerns. It was a small airport by today’s standards, when even midsize cities had runways stretching from one horizon to the other, unusually small, surrounded on all sides by empty steppe, with at most a couple of rusty tin shacks and automobile carcasses, a few stalks of steppe grass so high they almost grazed the window. And this prop plane was that low to the ground, although it was the largest thing on the broad field, with nothing else around but a few one- or two-seaters.

And yet this was the airport of Valladolid, formerly the capital of the plateau region, the city of princes and kings, and today a city of half a million?! For almost every crossing of the Sierra de Gredos she had landed here rather than in Madrid. But the last time was now several years in the past. And as if in keeping with the topsy-turvy new world: the Valladolid airport had not been expanded but instead been reduced considerably in size — just as the local soccer team (of which she was fond, for no particular reason, and whose fortunes she followed on the Internet) had meanwhile slipped from the top league to the third, and any local princes and kings one approached would have been transformed instantly into frogs if one had kissed them.

Ceremonial taxiing around the steppe airport, as if to salute every side. Meanwhile the child next to her was reading a comic book. He had already read these pictorial stories at the beginning of the trip, and now he was rereading them. He flipped the pages rapidly, yet it was clear that he was absorbing each frame completely. He swallowed image after image with his eyes, blinking after each narrated event. Only toward the end of each story did he slow down. And once the story was finished, the child did not go right on to the next, as one might have expected, but paused for a while, motionless, his eyeballs protruding as if made of glass, even holding his breath, which he released late, audibly even, amid the plane’s taxiing roar, a prolonged sigh. (And she noticed that she involuntarily sighed with him, almost silently.) Before the child reader finished the last story, the aircraft came to a stop and the signal for deplaning sounded. Out on the airfield, there were hares and foxes in the high grass, a sight that had vanished from airfields everywhere else.

Along with the few other passengers, the child stood up, having promptly closed the comic book. But in the moment immediately before that, he had glanced from the page he had just read to the next and read it, skimmed it, as if he wanted to soak it up like a map showing the direction in which he was to strike out.

“Vladimir!” she said, and that indeed turned out to be one of his several names, as Ablaha, Aruba, and Ahada were hers. And suddenly a dream from the previous night came to her, in which she had set fire to a child, first hesitantly, then mechanically, carrying out an order—“It is the law”—until the child and its little animal were in flames. How violent her dreams had become of late, and not only hers? With other people, was it not merely their dreams? And now at least this child here was as unharmed and healthy as a child can be, and as only a child can look. And they were seeing each other at this moment for the last time. I, on the other hand, have seen them forever.