Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

9

As she did almost every night, she awoke after a couple of hours of deep sleep. She groped for the light switch, noticing only then that she was not sleeping in her own bed; that she was not at home. The initial discomfiture gave way to astonishment, and the astonishment energized her.

She sat up and fished the Arabic book from the citadel room’s uneven floor — fished: that was how high the bed was, and how far below the book. The child on the plane to Valladolid had spoken the truth: the book did not smell of her. It smelled of her vanished daughter. The girl had been reading it, lesson after lesson, example after example, quotation after quotation (the fragments of classical Arabic poetry with which every lesson ended). The book had been systematically studied and mined by her, word for word; traced; copied; glossed; threaded with marginal notes that eventually came to mean as much as, and then clearly more than, the print on the page, and referred only vaguely or not at all, or not obviously, to the text. The book — a mere brochure, actually — looked even from the outside as if it had been carded, kneaded, pulled lengthwise and widthwise and licked, as it were; rained on and snowed on.

And inside the covers things were even more exciting: the impression of an athletic contest continuing page after page, a wrestling match to the bitter end, which also had something joyful about it, not only because of the constantly changing pencil colors and the changing script, from Roman to Arabic, from Greek to shorthand.

And again from the outside, from the side, one could see where the reading had stopped, even before the book’s midpoint: the part that had been read or explored was gray — no, not “dirty gray”—, the pages curved, bent, thickened, crisscrossed, and sprinkled with little strokes or dots — traces of the marginal glosses inside, which often wanted to spill over the edges; then a white borderline, and after that nothing but the unread white layers; the gray next to this white like a different rock stratum; a different one? no, the same material in both layers of the brochure, with one layer simply transformed and corrugated by chemistry and warmth, the chemistry of sweat from the reading finger lingering for hours on a single pair of pages, the warmth of the writing hand.

And the mother took up the reading where her child had left off. She, however, never added anything to what she read. No underlining. She even opened the book carefully, her fingers moving as if she were wearing gloves. Reading the book from a distance, looking into it as into a remote niche. Anything not to leave traces. Nonetheless, a reading second to none: spelling out, with lips moving silently, bursting out with a word-sound here and there, and then again, and again, pausing, her eyes raised from the book as she mulled over the section she had just read, in its context, the more immediate and the wider one.

And this hour in the depths of the night seemed particularly favorable to her reading. These days one read to get away from the world even less than was perhaps usual; indeed, exactly the opposite was the case. Here stood the chair, with its woodworm holes. Over there the door latch curved downward. Over there was a ladder, leaning as only a ladder can — what an invention, the ladder! On the highway the milk truck loaded with filled milk cans, stacked one on top of the other, clicking as they jostled each other, and among the cans a refugee family, including the author as a child (here sneaking into her book and her story again — but for the last time, please!). Way off, on the farthest horizon, the train rattling by — already in motion for a long, long time, but audible only now as a result of her reading; in one compartment her lover, her missing life companion, without a ticket, without identification, suffering from a high fever, heading in a direction in which he did not want to go, the direction opposite from hers — but at least he was not dead, he was alive, he existed. And impaled on one thick thorn in the acacia avenue outside the window, a very small bird? a cicada? a dragonfly? — The door to the chamber where she lay reading was pushed open, and in streamed human body warmth.

No comfort in her reading-herself-out-into-the-world? Fortunately? Reading to find comfort was not real reading? Another pause at an Arabic word and then the word-sound bursting out: as if precisely these words demanded to be heard. And this explosive voicing of the sound provided additional illumination to the field of vision: each foreign word a sort of flashbulb that gave whatever was in the field of vision (and beyond it) contours, surging with life; as if with the ex-pression, the chair, the ladder, the latch, the thorn, were instantly created anew.

And the nocturnal reader soon fell asleep again, as if after a great expenditure of energy, and slept deeply, deeply. And after her reading she had an image of the bed on which she was lying as a map of the world. But the thorns now, longer and fatter than swords? They belong to an old wooden statue in the church of the Sorbian village, where they pierce, at all different angles, the bodies of martyrs — in the thigh, belly, thorax, neck. Perhaps her reading of Arabic was a mere backdrop. But sometimes this backdrop meant everything.

While she took a shower the next morning (a long, long one), got dressed (slowly, one article at a time), gazed out the open window on the south side (her eyes moving from her fingertips out over the entire plateau, which grew hilly again as it disappeared in the distance), more and more additional images zoomed into her, or merely brushed past her; no more images of martyrdom and menace. These new images were the kind of which she was convinced that one was sufficient to arm her — and not only her, but everyone (see her sense of mission) — for getting through even the most oppressive day.

And again she contemplated the conditions or laws that allowed such an image to seek a person out. The genesis, the origin, the source of these images must be explored at last; a necessity that made one all the freer; as, indeed, every time she said, “I must,” “one must,” a little smile seemed to float around her. At any rate, to be receptive to images one had to remain focused on the matter at hand, whatever it was (see showering, see gazing out the window). And no special slowing-down or even acceleration of the current activity was needed: whether one moved deliberately or rapidly — the decisive factor was to be fully engaged.

Likewise irrelevant were distance and proximity; only the proper interval yielded, or oscillated, the image, and a proper interval could be that of the thread to the needle, hardly a hand’s breadth from the eye: for instance, a bend in the Bidassoa, the river marking the border to the Basque country, appeared — image, a jolt into the world, a jolt, all the more necessary for everyone, into reality.

Another law of sorts that determined the generation of images: they arrived — and again she was sure this was true for everyone — primarily in the morning, in the hour after waking. Though for her, something about the images had changed of late, in the last few years. The images still came as if without reason, unbidden; primarily at the beginning of the day; and so forth. Yet more and more the images originated in one particular part of the world, and those that flashed in from all over the earth — now a tree root in northern Japan, now a rain puddle from a Spanish enclave in North Africa, now a hole in a frozen Finnish lake — were becoming increasingly rare.

She regretted that. It made her uneasy. For the images she had previously received from the world were all linked, as if obedient to a law, with places where, when she had actually been there, she had experienced unity or harmony — of which she had not been aware at the moment — that, too, such a law? Even if these areas were “beautiful,” “lovely,” or even “picturesque” (that in itself already constituting a sort of image of an area), that did not contribute to their subsequent image-worthiness; rather, they had to have left an imprint on you, without your knowledge, from which later a world at peace, an entire world in a still possible peace, or perhaps precisely that “enclosure of the grander time,” will have taken shape, unexpected and unhoped for.

In the meantime now, the images, specifically those morning-fresh ones, were increasingly limited to an area, which, every time she was there, had shown her a peaceful face for only brief moments, but more usually a hostile, menacing one, yes, more than once a cannibalistic face, the face of death.

And this region was the Sierra de Gredos. On some days she reminded herself that she was a survivor; that if she belonged to any people or tribe, it was the tribe of survivors; and that the awareness of having survived, and of surviving along with one unknown survivor or another, far off or nearby, had to be the thought that forged the strongest bonds. And she had become this kind of survivor through her crossings of the Sierra de Gredos.

When she made a point of calling the Sierra to mind, the massif presented primarily memories of adversities, major ones or merely small ones, such as the absence of air in the dense, light-blocking conifer forests, and the wood-roads, where one had felt cheerful only moments earlier, narrowing over the course of a few steps into impassable mud slides. In the images, in the unsummoned image, however: the Sierra de Gredos and peace, or peaceableness, were one and the same; and it could be no other way with these images, this kind of image — a fundamental law of the image: make peace, and hop to it! Take action. Become active. But how? As the image dictates!

“Doesn’t that deserve a serious research project?” she challenged the author. “To find out why, in recent times, most of the images, and not only mine but also everyone else’s, originate in regions where in reality one has experienced hardly anything good but rather the very worst; and, with me as the experimental subject, to study as well why the images from the Sierra de Gredos keep nudging one almost constantly, as insistently and as gently as the wooly heads of a thousand times a thousand sheep, ever since it has been rumored that war is about to break out there?”

The shadows of water-skaters on a riverbed: Where was that? — By a stone bridge, known as the “Roman” bridge, over the río Tormes, which rises in the Sierra and, although in some stretches as wide as a river, remains a rushing brook all the way to the end of the central massif in Barco de Ávila, overflowing into innumerable still pools. — A fawn, separated from its mother, its coat soaked in a downpour, standing a hand’s breadth from her, likewise drenched, the animal too weak to flee, or merely curious: Where was that? — On a stone-paved road. A stone-paved road; in the mountains? yes, right below Puerto del Pico, the main pass through the Sierra de Gredos; the flagstones cracked in many places, some missing, truly the only remnant in the Sierra of the Roman colonial era, a Roman road winding down the southern flank in lasso-like S-curves, the “calzada romana,” and, unlike the modern road over the pass, clearly part of the mountain range even two thousand years ago, less built there than simply laid along the slopes, following what was already present, sketched out beforehand by nature. — On a wall above an outdoor sink, a broken mirror, reflecting the crowns of the fir trees in the sun, and behind them, multiplied by the cracks, the pyramid-shaped summit of Pico de Almanzor: Where was that? — Back by the main river of the Sierra de Gredos, the río Tormes, at a children’s summer camp, deserted long since when she hiked past it, or closed down, and not only because it is autumn (no, it is not “autumn”; no specific season ever appears in the images), the faucets either unscrewed or without water, the mirror shards opposite her at hip level, so that she must bend over (“I must”—she smiles), to look at herself; above her head the Almanzor forming a tricorn hat.

Hop to it! Do something. Help. Reach out. Serve. Serve? Yes, serve. Do good? No, be good. Lend a hand. Mediate? No, we know about you mediators and intermediaries rushing blindly to serve as go-betweens and thereby merely hastening a truly disastrous disaster. For heaven’s sake, do not mediate! Participate and be there — and in this way mediate after all, or rather facilitate something, even if only with your eyes, what? The image? No, that is not possible: not the image but an intuition of it; that is sufficient.

And thus, for instance, the financial powerhouse, the adventurer, the former film actress, or whatever she is, sews on a button early that morning near Tordesillas, or wherever, for the toy manufacturer, or whatever he is, in the citadel, or dive. And the man takes it for granted and does not even object, sitting next to her again at the same small table by the window hardly the size of a loophole. And she also darns a glove for him: for it is bitter cold on the southern plateau, colder than in the northwestern riverport city, according to the radio. And for their departure she then fetches his suitcase from his room. And the suitcase weighs her down, even her, this inconspicuously strong woman with the large hands; that is how heavy toys are these days. A toy market in the vicinity of an impending war?

With that the woman has finished serving him. From now on he must make his way alone, and if perhaps not alone, then at least without her. With the help of her images she has given him a push, and that must be sufficient. But why does he look at her in the hostel courtyard as if he still lacked something?

And so the two of them fall into another dialogue like the one they conducted the previous night in the car. She: “Did you find the light switch in your room?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Was the bed wide enough?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Did you see the lightning after midnight?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Will you stay in Tordesillas?”—He: “No. Today I am heading west already, along the río Duero. And without the suitcase.”—She: “On the old pilgrims’ route, to Santiago de Compostela?”—He: “Heaven forbid. Not on any pilgrims’ route, and certainly not an old one.”

And if the man still lacks something, now he is resigned to lacking it; even strengthened by it? Their voices seem to be amplified by the walls of the various little sheds built in a circle around the main structure. And just as she placed her hand on his shoulder in parting the night before, now, for this morning’s parting, she strikes him in the throat, making him stagger backward. And so he goes, looking over his shoulder at her, as if a third parting were still in the offing, not right away — the culmination of their partings. And then, already on the carretera, the highway, the cesta, the tariq hamm, he pauses briefly, sets down the suitcase, and tosses a handful of pebbles in her direction, so violently that several skitter all the way to her feet. She has retained the almost unblinking gaze of her childhood. Except that it has nothing childlike about it. Perhaps it did not have that even long ago.

The man heading toward the Atlantic. And the woman toward the Mediterranean? On this morning the sky above the meseta was blue. The highland plain of grass, stone, and sand extending in all directions from the hostel was green, brown, red, and silvery gray (the silvery color from the flecks of argentine mica in the weathered granite sand). By daylight, the hostel, with its gaping chimney, its roof sprouting thistles, its crumbling stucco, and its empty window frames, where black jackdaws with yellow beaks constantly flew in and out, uttering their hoarse cries, now had only the silhouette of a castillo, or castle, and was almost as black as the jackdaws, black without the sheen of their feathers. Then the jet contrails — it was an era of black jet contrails — even a shade blacker than a black background as they passed in front of the sun, at which moments it became palpably colder, as during a total eclipse.

All colors seemed to be gathered here, and the objects also revealed a new color — which had existed nowhere in the world until this morning — which had never before been seen by a human eye — and for which there was also no name and never would be — and rightly so. Was the unknown new color purely a wish? A wish awakened at the sight of the slowly wandering line separating sun and shadow, between the area of rigid white hoarfrost and the glistening, seemingly windblown thawing area in the steppe-grass-filled courtyard of the hostel? At the sight of the thawing grass, whose tips stirred not from the wind but rather from the steady melting of the layers of hoarfrost, which accumulated in droplets, causing one stalk after another to sway?

Yes, a wish — a wish that sprang up at the sight of that one dewdrop in the sun which, in contrast to the myriad glass-clear, transparent, white-flashing droplets, stood out from the dewdrop field as a bronze sphere, not glistening and flashing but glowing, shimmering, shining; no mere glittering dot but a sphere, a dome, challenging one to discover — not some unknown planet but the old familiar one, the earth here, challenging one to engage in unceasing daily discovery that led to no specific outcome, nothing that could be exploited, unless perhaps for keeping possibilities open — discovery as a way of keeping possibilities open?

A wish for a new color on, in, with the earth, a wish that became even more intense with the discovery that simply by looking, and without stirring from the spot, without stretching out one’s hand, one could generate and also multiply this one bronze-colored — no, nameless-colored dew-globe — how monumental it appeared among all the other merely glittering droplets: with nothing but a slight movement of one’s head, back and forth, up and down, with one’s eyes as wide open as possible: suddenly in the thawing field an entire aisle or loop of new shades scintillating between bronze, ruby, crystal, turquoise, amber, siena, lapis lazuli, and especially the unnamed color.

Why was there no legend, like the legend of the ancient giant whose strength drained away as soon as he lost contact with the earth and returned the moment he touched the earth again, of someone who found his strength, an entirely different kind of gigantic strength, to be sure, by simply looking down at the ground? Wish-color, wish-strength. But didn’t a letter from her brother, the enemy of mankind, contain the diametrically opposite wish?: “Were it not for the children, I would wish that the final world war might break out and that those of us here now would be wiped out, one and all.”

No one must know that she wanted to make her way through the Sierra de Gredos. Neither the people at her bank, her banks, nor the author, nor anyone else, not even her old acquaintance here, the hostel-owner and chef. (Only with her daughter would she of course have shared her intention at once—) Were anyone to learn of her plan, it would be — so she thought—“as if my secret came to light, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches.”

Where was he, the chef? The chef was out in a corner of the courtyard, busy with his morning preparations for the day’s cooking. And without a word she deposited the whole bunch of shelled chestnuts from the forests outside the riverport city among the other ingredients on his work counter. On this morning-between-frost-and-thaw, the chestnuts, too, appeared not merely “light or quince yellow,” but gave hints of that new color.

For that afternoon a wedding party was expected. By then she would be far away, and at the same time she would be present. If the previous evening the hostel had seemed about to close its doors forever, today it was filled with activity, as if this were its usual state and yesterday’s deserted atmosphere an illusion. One delivery man after another appeared, and not only from the nearby yet invisible Tordesillas, but also from Madrid, and from the Galician fishing ports. In between even a refrigerated truck from a distant foreign country, with river crayfish, perch, and pike; where could they possibly come from? and then a little hand-drawn cart with rather wizened mountain apples and potatoes, which had come a long way, from the Sierra de Gredos. At the same time, arriving from all points of the compass, crews of masons, carpenters, and roofers, who promptly went to work.

She would not be there to see the outcome, and yet she would be: by the time the wedding party arrived, the dive would look more or less like a castle again. In the midst of all this a postman appeared with a stack of mail, for the innkeeper, for the guests, but also for her, a letter from her brother, written while he was still in prison. Almost at the same moment an itinerant knife sharpener turned up and sharpened the innkeeper’s knives on his grindstone, driven by a foot pedal, and her scissors, at no charge. And then at one point a soldier came by, in uniform and armed, but without a cap — hair flying and face flushed—, bummed a cigarette and rushed on, searching for his lost unit?

With the change in circumstances on his property, the innkeeper had also become a different person. He had risen at the crack of dawn, while the others were still sleeping, to get to work on his cooking. He felt as if he were doing these things for his many children. Standing on one leg, shifting, while cooking, from one leg to the other. Chefs, the race of one-leg-standers. Even throwing his whole body into it when washing up. His pleasure at the heat rising from the stove. Applying final touches, to the nonedibles as well. Letting the seasonings fly to him — his elegance an additional seasoning. The chef, a different kind of embodiment. His cooking performance as a performance of the world.

Now it stimulated him to have someone watching. While peeling, grating, slicing, dicing, and turning, he repeatedly stood up and strode back and forth in his courtyard work corner, constantly busy, less a chef than an athlete, gathering strength for the competition. She assisted him, or rather: she was allowed to assist him, if only peripherally, by bringing a bucket of water, for instance, and collecting the trash. In between, the moment arrived when she was finally allowed to hand him her present; he took it matter-of-factly and ran one hand over it, while with the other, his left hand — a left-handed chef — he continued with the preparations for the wedding feast. This was a period in which women were more likely to give men presents, and what presents, too, and — at least where this woman was concerned — without ulterior motives. And meanwhile he was also cooking up a stew, on the side, for a mortally ill neighbor on the meseta. The man’s child then carried the heavy ceramic pot home to his father.

And worthy of describing was also the particular corner of the courtyard where the ventero (= innkeeper) was working that morning. There were remnants of the former park surrounding the castle, such as a box hedge and a small almond tree. But the ground already showed less of the gravel spread there long ago than of the reappearing sandy-stony-grassy subsoil of the steppe, yes, desert, along with the polygonal pattern of cracks caused by the dryness. It was indeed “bel et bien,” a corner or nook formed not by the castillo but by two sheds standing at an angle to one another, nowhere near a right angle, one shed half-finished, evidently left that way for centuries, the other half in ruins.

Next to the chef’s work counter in this corner, not hidden but clearly visible from the drive, the following items lay about: an old window frame, leaning against a door jamb; a pile of half-broken roof tiles; a rusty wheelbarrow; several large and small balls that had long since deflated; a rabbit coop without rabbits (only tufts of fur caught in the wire); a cement mixer, missing its cord, its drum full of hardened concrete; a stone-lined well with a pulley but no rope; an empty refrigerator missing its door; a child’s swing attached to a broken beam, with the seat’s single slat sticking up at an angle; a bathtub (the only object that was partly hidden, in the box hedge); a pyramid of animal bones — seemingly washed clean. A small open fire of knobby broom roots was burning in a pit, and roasting on a spit above it was a lamb, and she was allowed to turn the spit from time to time.

As was usual on the southern plateau, away from the mountains, the biting winter morning air yielded from one moment to the next — a leap that could be felt in body and soul — to a nonseasonal mild warmth. The chef on his work stool gazed at the woman through an opening in a knife handle, as she had gazed yesterday through the key bow, and said, “I have left the corner like this on purpose, and even arranged it this way. My nickname for it is ‘the Balkan courtyard,’ and if it were not so bad for business, I would also use that name publicly for the entire complex, with a neon sign up on the roof ridge: El corte balcánico. If the name scares off my guests, that’s not true of the thing itself, this place, this spot. On the contrary: you will see — even if you are not around to see it — that along with my cuisine and the name of my venta, El merendero en el desierto, The Snack Shack in the Desert, it is above all this courtyard that accounts for my popularity. Thanks to it, I was able to pay off the loan you gave me, ahead of schedule. All the tables in the three dining rooms have a view of my Balkan or Lithuanian or Lapp courtyard with its broken ladders, empty cable spools, and sideless baby carriages. Unlike the usual views of a park or the ocean, the nook offers a sense of reality, if perhaps a mournful or painful one, and helps the guests focus, while eating, on the thing at hand, on the important things, and thus makes them value eating here as something out of the ordinary and at the same time enjoy the food both heartily and lightheartedly. The people who seek me out need the view of this courtyard, even if they are not aware of that.

“And—” (a transition that was a specialty of the innkeeper’s?) “—you have, so I hear, commissioned someone to write the book about you. You did not want to write it yourself, and not only to avoid the first person. And the author was not to be a woman but a man, absolutely had to be a man, but why this one in particular? And now you want to, no, you must, head farther south, and, worse still, to the almost treeless Mancha, and are counting every hour, even this one here, until you are back home again, or at least over the roof-tile border, away from the curved southern tiles and back with your flat northern tiles! And at the expression ‘you must,’ you still have that smile.

“Yes, you must continue heading south, for the sake of your book and for something else. And you have never turned back in the face of anything. Ah, and you do not allow anyone to touch you. For you have a plan. And you have almost always had a plan. And at times you have the eyes of a madwoman. Nowadays it is almost only in women that one sees these crazy eyes.

“Why don’t you let me write a chapter for your book, too. Or at least a paragraph? Albanil, meaning mason, is a word from the time of the Arabs here. Look at the albaniles’ cigarette butts here in the Balkan courtyard: only masons smoke this way, down to the butt of the butt! And listen to the loud voices of the roofers; they constantly have to shout, from the roof to the ground, and vice versa. And listen to the carpenters: so quiet, almost silent. And when they do speak now and then, while fitting beams and hammering laths in place, it is of something entirely different — whatever comes to mind, more like talking to themselves. And are there really any carpinteros left? These here, at least, come from abroad, as do the masons, as do the roofers, all from different countries, and no work crew understands the other. During the last war here, the well shaft was used by the resistance for a radio transmitter. Today the radio operators would be tracked down immediately.”

On the little almond tree a few blossoms were already opening: from the closed bud a single feathery petal stuck out. She involuntarily began to count: three, four, five … She closed her eyes. She opened her eyes. In the air in front of her floated the afterimage of the trees at home near the northwestern riverport city that had been felled by the storm, along with their upended root masses, the image of a vast shipwreck from olden times, an entire Viking fleet. Was that possible, an afterimage with one’s eyes open, and a day and a night later? She closed her eyes, opened them. And above the flat Iberian high plateau floated the jagged peaks and pinnacles, the knife-sharp points and wind gaps of the Sierra de Gredos, along with the sun-bathed fields along the ridges and the pools of shadow in the hundred and twelve gorges. Was that possible, an anticipatory image of something that still lay beyond seven horizons?

Her principle, her ideal, her project: having time. Yes, as almost always in her life up to now, she had time. She had time and stood up to take her leave. It was up to her now to go forth into the land, the embodiment of that old German expression, now fallen into disuse, according to which the days went forth into the land; she would go forth into the land, just as, in another age, one that had never been graspable and countable or counting and valid, the days went forth into the land; had gone; will have gone.

Yet now a sort of dialogue sprang up between the innkeeper and the adventurer, as they stood facing one another in the Balkan courtyard in the middle of the meseta, and this, too, running counter to what was called dialogue in the era that is to be bypassed by her story, yet owing the energy for that bypassing to the era and, in the process of bypassing it, circumscribing the era all the more powerfully and making it recognizable, leaving it as a gray zone, untouched (similar to our heroine’s arcane banking knowledge): the gray zone of a present day—“which does not deserve this name!” (so who was it who said that?) — left gray; hence nothing of the gray current era in my, your, our story, unless as a negative image, in which the gray may grow lighter or for moments begin to flicker and vibrate. And the scraps and fragments of many languages in the speech of the masons, roofers, and carpenters, Slavic, Berber, but also some native, as it were, Castilian, a suitable accompaniment to the conversation between the two of them, which was not at all contemporary.

It was she who began, with a question: “What is your guilt?” (It remained unclear: emphasis on “your”? Emphasis on “guilt”?) — He, after a pause: laughs. — She: laughs, too. — He: “Explain high finance to me.” —She: “I find it uncanny, too, and increasingly so. — Will there be war?” —He: “I do not believe in war. A war is an impossibility in our story. — When will we taste the morning again together this way?”—She: “When the dog rose forms an arch at sunrise.”—He: “Look in a different direction with your crazy eyes; I do not want to cut off another fingertip.”—She: “Perhaps I will encounter my greatest male enemy today, and my greatest female enemy. That would be nice.”—He: “On the border between La Mancha and Andalusia they’re still mining mercury, to separate gold and silver for coins from the lifeless rock.”—She: “That was once upon a time. And besides, there are no coins any longer. Look, a bird’s nest in the drum of the cement mixer.”—He: “And do you remember what causes the sound down there in the gorge?”—She: “The pounding? It sounds like a giant hammer beating on a hard pad, but with something soft inserted between the hammer and the pad? The blows landing at regular intervals, four or five times a minute, and all night long, and all day long?” —He: “The drumming, the thumping, the stamping, the giant water-driven wooden hammer on a flywheel, the as-yet-undestroyed remnants of the long-gone tannery that used to exist at the bottom of the gorge, abandoned hundreds of years ago and hammering in the void when your predecessors, traveling on money business, passed through here on their way to the kings and the one and only emperor, whose realms without your loans would have fallen apart like grown-ups’ playthings, which is what they really were behind the shield of gold and money, and correspondingly childish and deadly, and for you, their successor in the world of finance, equally or differently powerful, the tanning hammers, drive wheels, and fulling pads have continued working, without raw materials and without any product — except that in the meantime the pads sound as if they were the hides themselves — and as long as this rhythmic knocking and banging continues, I, too, would like to continue with my dicing, slicing, turning, shaking, and sprinkling from morn till night.”

And then, already on the way to the car, she looked back along the line formed by her shoulder (no one could sight along the shoulder as she could, into the near and far distance at once), and said: “Listen, the footsteps in the gravel of the plateau. How the ground of every landscape one walks through produces its own unique sound — as here, in this old, drowsy, silently weathering residual area, the ever-thickening layers of soft, coarse-grained sand consisting of granite and mica, mixed with bits of rotted wood and plant stalks: a crunching so different from the gravel in any garden or cemetery you might think of; crunching? a sound without a name, new, like a new color.”—And here one of the roofers chimed in loudly from the almost completely repaired roof, understandable despite his foreign tongue: “Yes! Walking in the Berbers’ sand makes a different sound. Absolutely not to be compared with the sound here. Not a sound — a tone!”—A mason spoke up, already dismantling the scaffold: “Yes, and walking through the mountain pastures below the Gran Sasso d’Italia: every blade of grass a taut guitar string, and every step — ah!”

And finally the carpenters, usually so silent, spoke up. Since their profession was seldom called upon, in this period they had become specialists in all sorts of auxiliary trades, and here at the hostel, after quickly accomplishing their main business, had also pruned the acacias for the innkeeper, repaired the rickshaw-like shopping tricycle, had ironed the tablecloths and napkins, and installed a satellite dish, with which their employer could bring in all the local stations from Alaska, the land of his persistent longing. And at the moment they were sitting in the back of their pickup truck, ready to depart, their legs dangling over the tailgate, and they said, “Back in the Balkans we walked only on limestone. And the limestone was porous and hardly made a sound. And certainly no tone. We hardly heard ourselves walking on the limestone there. Our steps were swallowed up by the lime subsoil. But our walking did become audible in the mud of the lowlands, from Voyvodina to the plain of Thessaloniki. One half of our Balkan lands consisted of this mud, the other of limestone. And back in the days when there was still work in the Balkans, we went from the limestone to the mud, and vice versa, and vice versa again.”

Finally — all the workmen were gone, but a brigade of sous-chefs and waiters was arriving, and the woman had just turned the key of the rough-terrain vehicle — the chef came running toward her, knife in hand, the point aimed at the ground, handed her a bundle of provisions, wrapped in white linen, through the window, and said (this, too, belonged to the dialogue): “Do not start eating this too soon. One’s first hunger is not real hunger. — In the books it used to say that one could not set out on an adventure without clean shirts and money and, in case of need, salves for the healing of wounds. And a long time ago you said you wished you could walk somewhere with me, out there — not for a hike, simply walking. And then you walked so fast that soon I could not keep up.”—And she: “Look—” What was it she said: “a wood pigeon”? “a flash of lightning”? “a polecat”? it was no longer audible; she was already driving away.