At five in the morning it started raining again. The first drops hit the rocks with the soft sound of bursting flesh. The glare of dawn was still glowing over the black rim of the mountain and the downpour was filled with silvery light. But it only lasted a moment. The covering of cloud moved along soundlessly, its woolly edge could be seen from below, then things went back to normal. For weeks now we’d been in a strange world where light had no strength. It lurked in corners, tried to detach itself from the surface of things, but it was as if objects were magnetized. They’d not only absorbed the glare; they themselves were also slowly disappearing, shrinking, collapsing in on themselves. In the middle of the day you had to light a lamp in order to find them.
We watched the gray comb of the drizzle grooming the bushes. The tall grasses lay down on their sides, while the water seeped between the blades into spongy earth, murmuring in the tunnels of insects and mice, finding its way to underground lakes that swelled and rose with every day. Dark mirrors began to shine on the flat meadows. But they reflected nothing. Every last shard of glow had gone from the air. True, the landscape was still in place, but its colors had all grown more alike, and the whole world was now somewhere between black and leaden green.
We were slowly disappearing too. Cigarettes, one coffee after another—nothing did any good. Our blood had been thinned. It flowed ever more slowly. One day I cut my finger, and what came out was a transparent liquid like the sap of a plant. After all, people are made up mostly of water, and two weeks of rain are enough for their bodies to turn back into what they used to be at the beginning. Watery dust, mist, and drizzle had soaked through the skin and remained inside. Even vodka, usually volatile and hot, now burned up in the veins with a sorry hiss: the glass was like a damp match, and that was that.
In the short moments at dawn or before sunset when the sky brightened, the light took on a sickly intensity. At these times it expanded abruptly and sought release. A rumbling and whistling could be heard, and the tattered edges of the clouds glowed orange. But it only ever lasted a moment, then the murmuring, sodden gloom set in once again.
One day the mailman came in a waterproof overcoat. The envelopes were limp as wet handkerchiefs. “Everything’s damp,” he said. “It’s wet when it gets to us.” Nothing was legible. The words must have melted away even before they were written. At that point we lost whatever hope we still had.