The woman’s accusations, lobbed past me on the newspaper page at my mother, had been a different story. I’d never met this person, and that remained the case after what I called “the crime.” Today, however: yes, face-to-face! Though her article had been accompanied by an author’s photograph, I had no mental image of her. Perhaps it was also because I associated her with the swarm of militant feminists—picture the details for yourself—that I had no face in mind, even before reading her piece; and after I’d read it—actually more a question of skimming, in the course of which the entire page leaped out at me—the situation was no different; a jolt of recognition both undefined and indefinable occurred only after I took off my glasses and the features in the author’s portrait went blurry.
On this day, too, she wouldn’t acquire a face, not even in the moment when I’d be standing before her, eye to eye but at a carefully calculated distance, which I worked out in uneven numbers of paces: nine, seven, five, three … —now!
Her address, on the other hand, I’d had for a long time. Years after her atrocity I’d received a letter from her. Almost impossible to say what it was about, and certainly impossible to summarize the contents, if any. Not a word, at any rate, about her attack on me—which in any case meant next to nothing to me, let alone affected me—and above all nothing about the assault she’d perpetrated so casually, as if in passing, on the memory of my blessèd mother (yes, for the second time I use that word, and can’t use it too often). In the attempt, now during the tram ride, to recall that letter, which I’d perhaps been expecting, if in a very different form, it seemed (“it appeared”) that its purpose was to invite me, in polite, noncommittal terms, to a friendly public debate, conducted remotely, in writing, and that she “privately” (or did she use a different word?) now and then (her words?) also “sympathized” with me (the actual word). The only unexpected feature of the woman’s letter was that she hadn’t produced it with a computer or printed it in some other fashion but had written it by hand, in her own handwriting, as a hand writer. And precisely this handwritten character was chiefly responsible for the fact that there was almost nothing in the letter, as little today as when it had originally reached me: for most of the wording or words, especially those toward the ends of sentences, remained illegible. That wasn’t the only thing, obviously (or maybe not), that made it impossible for me to write back. But it counted. And what didn’t count at all: that you couldn’t tell whether it was “a woman’s handwriting or a man’s.” Hardly ever had I laid eyes on such a jumble of letters, a tiny illegible one after an equally illegible giant one staggering in the opposite direction, and vice versa: not in the writing of the sloppiest children or the shakiest oldsters, and certainly not in that of the dying; maybe there was one exception: the writing attempts of people born blind, but even theirs bore no resemblance to this mess.
Now I was on the way, or on one of several possible ways, to her, the one whose name and address were printed, “in boldface” or “light,” on the yellowing envelope in my breast pocket: this woman and I had been living, and for decades, in the same region, the Île-de-France, she merely in a different part, the section called La Grande Couronne, or Outer Ring. Upon leaving my house, and even more as I walked to the tram station, I’d still felt as if I were being watched, and by her, the evildoer; but now, in the interval during which I was traveling to where she lived, with the thing in mind I had in mind, no longer.
That also had to do with the fact that as we progressed from stop to stop, I’d become one of many passengers on the tram, knew I belonged to this community, was one of them, one of us, as we crossed the plateau together, zigging and zagging, taking curves and forging full speed ahead, locals. At the same time I was picturing Tolstoy, no longer the tottering oldster I’d pictured earlier setting out on foot for his last foray, with eyes that had already bid the world adieu, but the one wearing an eyeshade, strong and indomitable, and I wished, without hope of having the wish fulfilled—and a good thing, too!—for just such an eyeshade.
For this hour and beyond, I didn’t need that Tolstoyan eyeshade, not yet. But what was the story with the woman sitting across from me, who suddenly jumped up and moved to a different seat?—Yes, she was annoyed with me, not because I’d been staring at her but because, on the contrary, during the whole trip I’d ignored her presence; not till she flounced away did I register her; and as I then observed, her jumping up and moving to another seat continued; I wasn’t the only passenger blind to her charms.
With all the other plateau-crossing tram passengers, whether getting off or remaining seated like me, I felt I was in good company, however. Incidentally, it was strange, or not so strange, that from the station at the beginning of the line to the one at the end I had almost the same faces around me. Or did I merely imagine that? (No more questions, or at least not this kind.) And one and all we were quietly preoccupied, and not a few were just putting on an act, or they were actually not aware of what they were doing. The man engrossed in the book on his knees, not glancing up once, was holding it upside down, yet he moved his lips as if he were reading. The person over there whispering into his mobile telephone apparently didn’t realize that his device, bandaged from top to bottom with tape, wasn’t working, probably having gone to pieces ages ago. All well and good. Let him be.
Most of the passengers in our car were moving their lips more or less silently in their own ways, each with a different meaning. The thick-lipped man from Africa, pausing from time to time and raising his head to look out the window, then moving his upper and lower lip but without bringing them together, or if they did touch each other, ever so gently; he seemed never to ask questions and never to expect an answer, oblivious to the term or the concept “answer”: he was praying.
The person behind or in front of him, who repeatedly stretched out, then retracted his arms, rather like a rower, to underscore his lip movements, laughed heartily during the similarly rapid rhythmic pauses in his silent tirade, his laughter, too, silent, completely silent, until the time and the moment arrived again for pushing, pulling, for opening his mouth, puckering his lips, pursing them, popping them, pressing them together, all the while shaking his head, nodding, then shaking it more vigorously, in turn: he was cursing someone; he was cursing a woman, his love, his great love.
And the person next to him, as well as the one next to the one next to him, with their almost identical mouth-opening, silent lockjaw, and identical closing, with their silent lip chorus, their mouths opened wide and promptly snapped shut: they were mocking their supervisors and bosses, by whom they’d just recently or had always been humiliated and insulted as no-goods, wimps, layabouts, dysfunctional so-and-sos (and that in times like these), born failures, congenital suckers—the one over there summarily fired only an hour ago: with their silent lip movements they were sneering all through the car, from the front to the middle to way in the back and no doubt into the next car, at those who denied their right to exist; mocking their executioners not only soundlessly but without a syllable or a word, and that would remain so and go on forever. Not once did these lips, compulsively opening and closing, form or utter a single helpful word or sound—even silently, for the sole benefit of one of these Don Quixotes—a peep of life. — “And how do you know that?” — “I know. I knew it, then and there.”
Yet suddenly someone screamed, his cry bouncing off the tram’s ceiling, then eyed all those around him: “I hope no one heard me.” Another new phenomenon: that not only men jiggled one thigh but also women. Not a few, whether women or men, inadvertently swaying and bumping against the person next to them, as it were. (No, not “as it were.”) And one and all, including me, were having a “bad hair day.”
A number of children were on the tram. My own had long since “left home,” as the expression goes, and were also no longer children, yet on this trip I still felt personally responsible for the children; with amplification, so to speak, heard their cries as directed at me; I was the father whom the strange child was calling, and so urgently; it tugged at me every time.
One of the tram children was scrutinizing me from afar. He tried to catch my eye, not out of curiosity or attraction, and quickly looked away the minute he succeeded, before going back to the game of eyeing me. Independently of the child and me, something was at stake, and I felt obliged to play along. Playing a game with children I didn’t know had given me special pleasure in my middle years, for it involved something significant, though of an “undetermined nature.” And in those days I always won. This time I lost. For some reason the child’s gaze became somber and scornful, as happens only with little children who can’t talk yet, and in that moment of sudden somberness and scorn, the child turned away from me and lost interest for good in the likes of me; I could smile till the cows came home—any reconciliation was out of the question. Yes: the child had had his suspicions about me all along, and now one look had proved him right; I was found out, by a one-year-old!
But ah! there was another child, an older one, with a pad of paper on the tray table in front of him; he was drawing, surreptitiously, hiding the drawing with his hand, sketching! me! Up to now no child had ever drawn me! And his scribbling, during which he repeatedly glanced up, showed he was serious about capturing me accurately; apparently the child was discovering something about his model, never mind what.
And then another child, a girl, almost an adolescent, yet still completely childlike. This child, this very young girl, was absorbed in observing another child in the opposite row, a small child, who yesterday, or only that morning, had learned to walk, just two steps, and now, balancing on its father’s knees and facing him, resisting his assistance almost irritably as it tried to add to its repertory, managed to take a third step, and finally, after a long pause, teetering and tottering, took a fourth, tumbling into the man’s outstretched arms. Chortling on the child’s part and clapping from the adult, and not from him alone, a scene not that uncommon, but somewhat less common in a moving streetcar.
As for me, from beginning to end I’d had my eyes on the girl across from me. She wasn’t with anyone in the car, wasn’t related to the man-with-baby pair. She was traveling alone. This was her first time on the new tram line, the one crusading across the Île-de-France plateau. This wasn’t her area, or her country. She was a foreigner. But in the country from which she’d just arrived, yesterday, no, this very morning, she’d lived as a foreigner, foreign from earliest childhood, a foreign element in her own family, and no one and nothing was to blame, neither her mother nor her father, neither the country nor the state—yes, not even the state or its form of government. There was a difference, however: if in that country the girl, this child, had been merely “the foreigner,” and nothing else, here she appeared as a friendly foreigner.
I’d never witnessed a gentler form of foreignness, not even in some of those strangers, old or also not old, who’d lost all hope, and likewise not in some person or other, presumably well known, facing death. But this girl-child, this gentle little foreigner: she beamed—not a spark of hope, also nothing like acceptance of her fate, and certainly no “I’m looking forward to dying”—she was beaming at the sight of the other child, the beaming not emanating from her eyes or her face but from her entire body, her corporeal being: from her shoulders, her stomach, her hands in her lap. My mother, I now recalled, had told me stories from her own childhood about playing “house” in her village, making particular mention of the village-idiot girl with a speech defect, who every time roles were assigned—she wasn’t allowed to join in any other games—could be heard bawling from under the cherry tree in the center of the village, “Mebedemudda!” (“I’m the mother!”)
But no: the way the foreign girl beamed, not openly at the other child, more quietly to herself: there was nothing idiotlike about that. Or yes, there was, too. Long live such idiot girls!
Last stop. The place name doesn’t matter. Somewhere in the Île-de-France. Paris spread out below in the valley of the Seine. Down there I’d continue my journey by Métro or bus. Only buses in thousands of other directions. My dear fellow passengers: almost all of them gone in a flash. I was tempted to follow one man or other, one woman or other, more or less surreptitiously, for no particular reason except maybe to see where the person might go next, riding or walking, homeward or not. Over the years it had become a kind of sport for me to trail a stranger, out of more than mere curiosity, on a hunch, and also—the decisive factor?—a sense of duty, from Métro line to Métro line, on metropolitan buses to the outskirts and then on the regional bus, and each of those sorties had afforded me richly satisfying hours or half-days, free of interactions or confrontations, and had stayed with me as a source of stories, always ready to be explored anew, far more than a mere pastime.
There were many passengers I was inclined to follow, and each of them set out in a different direction on the plateau. I decided to let it go, relieved this time of my daily guilt over dereliction of duty. That was how buoyed up I felt from the tram ride.
And that other duty, the one for whose sake I’d set out from home in the first place, my pressing duty, now even more terribly urgent than before? If I wasn’t exactly heading in a direction opposite to the approximate scene of the dastardly deed committed in words against my mother, which would have been the wrong direction, I was certainly taking a detour. I’d planned, after all, to change at the tram terminal to the number such-and-such bus (a three-figure number), which had a scheduled stop right at my destination. (This thought brought to mind, who knows why, something a farmer back home had said one May morning as he set out to mow the dewy grass along a brook with his scythe; he’d commented that the conditions were “just right.”)
Nonsense: I hadn’t worked out or settled on any plan. I hadn’t left home with a specific route or destination or indeed anything in particular in mind. Something had to happen: that was inscribed on my heart, and had set me in motion. On the other hand, yes, right: a plan did exist. It exists. But it isn’t my plan, worked out by me, and wasn’t, and isn’t, something to be executed by me—not for anything in the world! And only now was I beginning to sense the plan, or guess what it might be. And I also knew this: heading off at first in a wrong direction was a component, a building block of the plan. “Wrong direction”: more nonsense. I, we, would see.
After that I covered a long stretch on foot. — “So what about your resolution, my friend, to stick to public transportation this time, on this particular day? You and your resolutions!” — “Yes, oh my, my resolutions, part of my unfortunate tendency to jump the gun. Because now the plan came into focus, and all resolutions, mine I mean, fell by the wayside.”
For quite a while I wasn’t conscious of walking, and the direction hardly mattered. The only thing that accompanied me in the hour that followed, constantly pounded into me like a piece of worldly wisdom, was a song from childhood, “My hat, it has three corners / Three corners has my hat / And had it not three corners / It would not be my hat,” until summoning up a fragment from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées finally brought relief, a passage in which he comments on the four-cornered hats worn by jurists.
I was walking along roads and streets of various types, passing through several suburban developments (located on the sites of old villages), keeping for the most part to sidewalks but simply walking on the shoulder in areas that lacked them, where one settlement flowed into the next without the usual spaces in between. In my imagination I was staying on the shoulder, not wending my way around houses and the edges of squares, as was actually the case, but cutting straight across open countryside, with habitations only in the distance, following a single road that led from one unspecified locale to another on far-flung waves of asphalt. As long as I kept walking, nothing bad could happen to me and the likewise unspecified beings I cared about, and whatever was supposed to happen for one of them or another would come to pass. I imagined furthermore that with my walking, especially the way I walked, I was exemplifying something to people in the passing cars. My walking along what I imagined as the “highway”—don’t criticize these imaginings—would prove infectious to the four or more people I could glimpse through the glittering car windows, prompting them some fine day, if not here and now, to emulate this intrepid walker, striding along, with or without a destination. How his trousers fluttered and flapped around his legs. How his white shirt billowed and ballooned. “What a pity”— I told myself again—“that my walking outfit isn’t my grandfather’s Sunday go-to-meeting suit or the classic black jacket, vest, trousers, and round hat in which journeyman carpenters once traveled the continent on foot from north to south.”
When I managed to see inside a car now and then, however, I thought I could tell that if the sight of a pedestrian provided any example it was more off-putting than appealing; the glazed eyes showed not a flicker of desire to be tramping along that way. When I glanced down at my feet—“just keep going, no matter what; don’t fall out of character!”—I noticed that I was wearing socks from two altogether different pairs. “So what: that’s part of the game. The avenger with unmatched socks.” And what image did this walker on the shoulder of the grande route present from behind? He made an impression, though apparently one very different from my daydream: a car, a compact model, passed me, then pulled over onto the shoulder, or what I imagined as such, and an elderly man poked his head out of the half-open window, and in the self-amplifying voice of a do-gooder offered me a ride. And my regret afterward, as I remembered the intense disappointment in his eyes, that I’d turned him down; this would be the last time he invited a stranger into his car; for the foreseeable future he wouldn’t do a favor for anyone.
And as for me, enough cross-country walking: “This has to be the last time!” And what was special about what’s now turned out to have been “the last time”: as I was walking, in midstream (but wasn’t it “in midstream” from beginning to end? — Don’t go all pedantic on me! — Who’s being pedantic?), as I was walking, in midstream I was suddenly overcome by hunger, a wild, all-consuming hunger, the very essence of hunger, without any tangible object, let alone an edible one, a hunger that began or ended not in my stomach or in my bowels but in my forehead—away with the Tolstoyan visor—under my skull, as gnawing as any hunger could be, but impossible to assuage and certainly impossible to sate. And step after step, as I strode on and on, this burning yet vague hunger acquired not an object but a direction toward a place, a specific one.
By the next available taxi—in a pinch I would have chartered a helicopter—I was now driven to Port-Royal-des-Champs, the site of the abandoned abbey and the remaining ruins, where, in a narrow side-valley in the southwest of the Île-de-France, wooded and swampy then as now, Blaise Pascal (and, after him, Jean Racine) had spent his schoolboy years. In the past I’d made a point of paying an annual visit to the spot, and always in the month of May.
A long time had passed since I’d been in Port-Royal-in-the-Fields. And now it was May, the first week of May, and this particular day was the right one. Previously it had been especially the surrounding area that spoke to me, but even more so the route one took to get there, which was long, crossing plateaus and valleys carved out by brooks; but most of all I looked forward each time to leaving, walking backward for a few minutes, one more time, “and one more time.” Now, however, I was hungering for Port-Royal-de-Pascal.
The taxi driver cleared off the passenger seat for me, and during the long cross-country ride, as he told me his story, I suddenly thought I recognized his voice and involuntarily called him by name, in a spontaneous exclamation. In his day, or ours, he’d been a singer one often heard on the radio, popular less for his own songs—of which he’d written only two or three, or maybe only one—than for his French versions of blues and ballad songs with English lyrics. His hits, or tubes (Fr.), he owed to a British singer, as young as he was back then, and now—“Que Dieu le protège!”—as old as the two of us, the taxi driver and his passenger, and still our hero, without needing to have died a hero’s death: Eric Burdon. When it came to hits and songs, as well as poems, I usually retained at most one line or half a line (excepting, strangely, the words of the Austrian national anthem, of which I knew an entire stanza by heart). But I knew (and know) the text of Eric Burdon’s ballad “When I Was Young” from the first line to the last, and could even sing it, provided I was alone, though not, of course, in the “blackest blues voice of any white person,” which was what people said Eric Burdon had, but at least, or so I liked to think, in English with a vaguely Slavic accent. But now, on the outskirts of Port-Royal-des-Champs, we launched into “When I Was Young” / “Kad Sam Bio Mlad” / “Quand j’étais jeune” as a duet, in three versions at once, as it were. We sang the line “I believed in fellow man … when I was young” in the original, bawling it in unison.
Then we sat, with a glimpse of the famous roof of the Port-Royal barn shimmering bronze through blooming chestnut trees, on the terrace of the restaurant called Au Chant des Oiseaux (The Birdsong), which had just opened under new management for the umpteenth time—“good luck!”—the taxi driver and I, each of us having offered at the identical moment to treat the other, as the only guests, and not just since that morning; the cigarette butt in a glass on the next table looked to have been there quite a while. The man’s reason for driving a taxi in his golden years was not that he was short of money—money was no problem. He was bored sitting around the house, and even more bored tending his good-sized plot of land. Hadn’t Pascal, way back in the seventeenth century, equated boredom with death, in its most ignominious form: “withering up”? And besides, the former singer loved to drive: even back in the day he, the bandleader or lead singer, had insisted on climbing into the driver’s seat between concerts. And nowadays he had a particular yen to drive the Bentley (or whatever his car was) around his ancestral area, the Île-de-France, by day and even more by night. What a joy to drive, first with, then without, his passenger—who’d got out somewhere to cover the last stretch to his home on foot in that post-midnight hour—to drive, till the sky showed a hint of gray, along the almost deserted streets of the départements of Essonne, Vale-de-Marne, Val-d’Oise, with not a soul in sight, and on from Pointoise to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, from Meaux to Guermantes, from Bièvres to Bourg-la-Reine. In parting, we gave each other a hug.
The grounds of Port-Royal were open. But for quite a while I remained the only visitor. From years of experience I knew that few visitors came; not much was left to see, and in the Rhodon Valley hardly a stone remained of the abbey in which the nuns and their pupils Pascal and Racine had lived. But no: there they were, the centuries-old stone steps leading up the steep slope between the abbey’s grounds down in the meadows and the outbuildings up on the plateau, which were almost entirely intact. As I did every time, I mounted the stairs, counting the steps, and did the same on the way down, and as always happened, I ended up with a different number. Had the hunger, still burning in the middle of my forehead as I stood outside the gates, subsided once I entered? Wasn’t I in danger, right here in Pascal country, of being overcome by the boredom he describes? Oh no: the hunger remained acute, intensified now by perplexity. “I have to make up my mind soon!” I shouted into the deserted memorial park (or did I only imagine myself shouting?). “I need advice!” (True: I couldn’t really have shouted; I would have heard the echo from the Port-Royal slope.)
Where to turn? Where would it reveal itself, the one and only advice- or oracle-station before which I could plant myself, so to speak—no, not “so to speak”! However and wherever I stumbled, slid, tripped, fell (on my behind or some other body part), back and forth, up and down, crisscrossing the so-to-speak sacred precincts of Port-Royal-des-Champs — enough of your damned “so to speak”! — nowhere did the message reach me: It’s here / there! Now! This is it!
Many, many a time in my life, when I’d been searching for something, fervently but not desperately, and was almost at the point (desperate is desperate and means “dead”—and what does “at the point” mean?) of giving up once and for all, I’d come upon what I was looking for, and always unexpectedly; though I couldn’t count on it; no question of trusting the world or existence to come through for me!
But on this particular day it worked. In one of the most out-of-the-way corners of the grounds—not a glimmer or shimmer of “precincts”—trapped in an unending thicket of blackberry canes, after what seemed like interminable attempts to free myself (see above), I unexpectedly, after raising my knee one last time, stumbled out into what had probably been a clearing once but in the meantime had become almost entirely overgrown, with the exception of a silted-up pond and a section of retaining wall. I didn’t take in the whole picture, the entire scene, until a bit later; the first thing my eye lit on was a detail—that, too, a familiar experience. Some words had been scratched into one of the wall-stones, with a nail or some other implement that had come to hand, and no, the inscription wasn’t hundreds of years old, but also not from my, from our, present, though it looked as if it hadn’t been there long. And I promptly read the words off the stone; no need to puzzle them out: TODAY 8 MAY 1945—BELLS PEALING VICTORY (translated from the French).
This was it, the spot. Now I had it, my place, my go-to place! Finally I was back at Port-Royal. “Thank you for coming back.” A raven in the crest of an oak tree squawked out a greeting, and bowed and scraped to accompany it. And a very special rustling passed through the May foliage.
I settled down on the bank of the pond, my gaze fixed on the few bog-black whirlpools, and among them, half buried in the muck and forming a rhythmic line, as if they were remnants of piles, what seemed to be charred tree stumps, likewise bog-black. Unlike the war’s-end inscription, these poked up as if from the depths of centuries, apparently as hard as gravel or flint, reminiscent of the piles in the Venice lagoon that marked the navigable channels, and I decreed that as a schoolboy in Port-Royal young Blaise Pascal had seen them when they were still intact, and not coal-black at all. From where could bells have been heard pealing on that eighth day of May in 1945, announcing to the Rhodon Valley and to the whole Île-de-France plateau the final collapse of the Third Reich? Those could only be the bells—two? three?—of Saint-Lambert, farther downstream in the valley, the church in whose cemetery the nuns accused of heresy, Pascal’s teachers, lay buried in a mass grave.
At my feet, half sunk in the mud, a weathered pencil, and lying next to it—“What in the world is that?”—a darning needle spotted with rust. (Only the obligatory third object was missing—but never mind!) Had pencils even existed in Pascal’s time, or styluses of any kind? I decreed: yes. The stylus worked, and I stowed it away. And the needle? Rusty or not: it pricked. Tucked into a safe place with the pencil.
Without thinking I rooted around in my canvas bag for my small, much abridged version of the fragmentary Pensées. But hadn’t I decided not to take along anything resembling a book on this particular day? And rightly so. I was relieved. Closing my eyes, I felt at that moment as though I could also hardly hear anything, aside from distant wind, not up here on the plateau but down in the valley of the vanished Port-Royal abbey, a valley wind. “Close up the gates of your senses!” — “They’re closed.”
To be considered: without their square hats and robes four times too wide, the magistrates couldn’t put anything over on the world. But the world can’t resist a spectacle. If they truly had justice on their side, the magistrates would have no need to wear those hats. The gravitas conferred by their expertise would be all the authority they needed. But since their expertise is merely imagined, those gentlemen of the law must appeal to the imagination, by means of which they come to actually wield authority. All authorities wear disguises. Only the kings of olden times had no need to disguise themselves. They didn’t don a particular costume to appear mighty, might personified. King Louis, not the fourteenth, and certainly not the fifteenth, but the much earlier Louis—king and crusader—almost always wore a gray-green doublet that rendered him more inconspicuous than the lowliest page, and on his head, if anything, a cloth cap of a nondescript color, easy to mistake for his hair—or was the cap worn by young Louis XI, whose head often ached, made of wool, knitted by his beloved Marguerite de Navarre?
But now the kings of old are dead and gone, and the rest of us need disguises and the trappings of the imagination. And it’s the imagination, not reason, that brings forth the appearance of beauty, of happiness, and of justice. Yes, “imagined justice”: that’s what’s at issue here and now, and what do I care whether the law, justice codified, is on my side or not? In my imagination there’s no justice on earth now without violence, which means the law of the sword, opposed to what is seemingly the highest justice, in essence the highest form of injustice, and not only in the case of “my mother.” Summum jus, summa injuria. The law of the sword: true justice! The perpetrator I’m after is one of those from the other side of the river. If she were from this side, it wouldn’t be just of me to punish her, and I would be the super-perpetrator. But since I imagine her as living on the far side of the water, the highest form of justice is to kill her, one way or the other. If there were still a kingdom that recognized me: ah, its obligation, not mine. But where are they, the kingdoms that recognize me?
Preoccupied with these thoughts, I had long since slid backward off the remnant of wall and was lying in the grass. And I must have fallen asleep. I had a dream. It was a dream such as I hadn’t had since my youth: it felt as real as anything I’d ever experienced when awake, including when I was at my most alert, with the exception, perhaps, of those moments when I was shaken, shaken to the core. What happened in the dream initially recapitulated something that had actually taken place once between my mother and me. But how and in what form that occurrence was repeated in the dream! How … how … incredibly real. Out of the blue—or that’s how it seems to me as I record that mother-son scene in writing—breaching the often peaceful, indeed intimate domestic relationship the two of us enjoyed, the adolescent had asked her—not yet forty and still the village beauty, and, when the occasion called for it, also the beauty in the nearest town—why she hadn’t resisted that criminal regime in any way, no, in her own way. It came out as a question, yet it was a reproach, sudden and fierce, generated in part by sheer obstinacy, I suppose, but chiefly by my inability to comprehend, and the rage I still feel today. I could have challenged someone else in the family, and outside of the family, too. But because I couldn’t think of anyone else, the victim of all of my outbursts, at least in those days, was my poor innocent mother. She didn’t reply, just wrung her hands. And then she wept, without a word, wailed and sobbed, as her would-be judge just stood there. And that sobbing must have gone on forever.
Up to that point my dream reproduced the scene exactly, except that I saw it as if in SuperCinemaScope, without me: my mother alone on the dream screen, in an enormous close-up. But then, after a momentary blackout, my mother’s face again, even more monumental, if possible, planet-sized: my mother’s face in death, no, after death, ageless, and somehow alive as never before. It was she, my mother, and it was a stranger, a terrible one. Or the other way around: a terrible stranger stared at me from a single eye, open wide, the other having seemingly disappeared into a large swelling, and that was my mother. She’d told me once that as a child she’d been stung on the forehead by a hornet, between the eyes, which had left her blind for a whole week. The face I saw now had no background, was surrounded by deep blackness, against which it appeared as white as chalk. In another story from her childhood she’d gone to look for a lost calf and got tangled in a thorn bush, remaining stuck there for a day and a night.
This mother’s dream face was no longer that of the storyteller who, in the middle of the most earnest and heartrending family tales, would dish up a detail that gave the listener something to laugh at, whereupon my mother, in her typical mixture of embarrassment and pride at what she’d pulled off, would giggle along with me. “Storyteller—seed-sower”: that was over, gone for good, the dream said. The face belonged to an avenger. It cried out, even if not a word was spoken during the entire dream: nothing but that eye blazing at me, crying out for revenge.
While she was alive, and long before she sank into depression, I was always afraid for her, without reason, for no reason at all. Now I was afraid of her for the first time. The revenge involved me, her son. Revenge had to be taken, on me, and me alone. And revenge had already been taken. This face, appearing, emerging abruptly, from amid the blackest black, tearless and eternally beyond tears: that already constituted the act of revenge. And the reason? Another of those stupid questions we ask ourselves upon waking up. In the dream it was crystal clear: this avenger didn’t need a reason. It was as it was.
On the other hand, a dream like that in which nothing happened, with nothing but that face expressing silently what it had to say, gave a person no choice but to wake up at once. And then it was urgent that I get away from the place with that message scratched into the wall about bells pealing to mark the war’s end, a message historic, yet more than seven decades later as fresh as if from yesterday—to flee from history into the present, and that also meant, and meant above all, into Blaise Pascal’s present. To his room in the museum? No, scrambling over boulders and through brush toward that intact barn roof.
Up there, under a blooming elderberry bush, I found a bench; the barn—long since used only for performances of plays and concerts—at my back. The spot offered a view down into the valley, but not of the abbey grounds, the chapel, and the dove tower; the May foliage blocked that view, and the hundred-odd stone steps scaling the slope were also out of sight; before my eyes I had only nature. And that was how it was meant to be. I alternated between staring straight ahead at the infinitely delicate creamy elderberry blossoms, almost close enough to touch and swaying in the May afternoon breeze, up and down, back and forth, and gazing over the tip of this natural pagoda into the heavens. Audience time. Waiting quietly. And then the moment had come.
True, my friend: in the century past the world came crashing down, indeed several times. Doomsday. And that was the case in all previous human centuries, with each crash taking a different form.
But enough of doomsdays of one kind or another. Back to one of my key concepts: “imagination.” I would replace this word now with another: “appearances”: a word whose German form—Schein—has a number of meanings, both positive and, above all, negative. But only one interests me, the sole positive meaning, that special one—listen up!—the meaning that adds something essential, a life-enhancing element: appearances as an additive. Possible synonyms: “light”? “glow”? “shimmer”? “halo”? “glory”? “heavenly”? “terrestrial”?—I’m serious, friend, so you should stay serious, too, as serious as you are—you in particular. For the seriousness we both feel should form part of our discussion of appearances as an add-on. So: the appearances I’m talking about are appearances, and no other word will do. Appearances aren’t “imagination,” and are also not produced out of nothing by the “power of the imagination.” Appearances exist for themselves and by themselves, as matter, substance, original substance, the substance of substance. And appearances can’t be analyzed, can’t be studied by any of the sciences, nor can they be quantified, in terms of length, breadth, height, or volume, by means of mathematics, the most luminous of the sciences, and the most false—yet my chosen science, my first … Yes, study what can be studied, and revere in silence that which can’t be studied. — Appearances as the secret of the beautiful? — Leave “the beautiful” out of it! Away with that word, and enough of beauty, whether with or without quotation marks. It’s not beauty that’s the origin of the terrible, as Rilke would have it, but the search for beauty, being on the lookout for it, listening for it, lusting after it, wanting to possess it. There’s no longing more wrongheaded than the longing for beauty! All the misery in the world comes from human beings’ inability to forget the old wives’ tale of beauty. All the deserts and badlands of beauty. By contrast, the springs, brooks, streams, and oceans of appearances! The Pacific of appearances. Without appearances: me and my nothingness. Appearances equal life. We’ve set sail. Nous sommes embarqués! — But since your childhood days here in Port-Royal, didn’t you spare no effort to be “nothing,” “my nothingness,” “the weak one”? — Remember: “As I write down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me recall my weakness, which I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought, for I strive only to know my nothingness.” — Hey, look at that: the white cloud on the horizon, as in the painting by Poussin in which God the Father lies on his stomach while creating Paradise. And on the opposite horizon the other strip of May clouds, which couldn’t be any whiter, a vast field in the heavens, furrowed in a soft pattern as if freshly harrowed. Are harrows still used in farming, whether drawn by oxen, horses, or tractors? — They are.
As it happened I then encountered a second visitor to Port-Royal-des-Champs, someone I’d never have expected to see in this place. Like voices on the railway station’s loudspeaker, but softer and also more personal, I suddenly heard from above and to one side an unfamiliar voice, and, also in contrast to the railway announcements, one that asked, “May I join you?” When I looked up, I saw a familiar figure standing next to me, right there in front of the bench, as motionless as if he’d been standing there for a while. Now he stepped back a pace and let me have a good look at him, and finally I recognized him.
It was someone from my area, though not from the immediate neighborhood. He lived a few side streets away. Nonetheless I saw him often, usually from a distance, when he came out of the railway station in early evening and set out for his house or apartment while I sat on the terrace of the Three Stations, letting the day wind down (or begin to wind up). As if blind to anyone or anything, he would strut straight across the square, and every time I thought, “another bigwig.” From the bar’s owner, who knew everyone in the area, I learned that he was a judge, a judge of the court in nearby Versailles, though for minor cases; earlier he would probably have been called a “rocket-docket judge” or “police magistrate.” It also happened that our paths crossed once, or rather I intentionally crossed his path, passing too close to him for a moment, which meant he couldn’t avoid registering my presence and swept me with the quick glance that expresses, “So what does he want?”, just as my brother, when I confronted him one time, with my mother’s backing, brushed me off with a scornful “What do you want?”
No question about it: the person who now matter-of-factly took a seat beside me under the blooming elderberry was the same one I’d felt like giving a good kick when I saw him in our neighborhood. He was astonished to run into me in the solitude of Port-Royal-des-Champs, and I felt the same about him. Astonished and pleased, as was he.
After that he did all the talking. He’d come on his bicycle, as he did almost every weekend, the trip here and back taking all day. The way he was dressed helped explain in part why I hadn’t recognized him at first: rather than cycling gear, he was wearing an old suit, with a bicycle clip still clinging to one of the pant legs. The judge was especially enamored of the tiles on the roof of the Port-Royal barn; he could never get enough of their yellowish orange glow, he said; as a child he’d squatted for hours on the rim of an enormous clay pit, and the sight he’d had into the depths was recapitulated, inverted, in the Port-Royal roof. For his retirement he’d bought a cottage in Buloyer, the next village over, and from its highest window he had an unobstructed view westward to the barn roof of Port-Royal. Besides, this was one of the best mushrooming areas in the entire Île-de-France, though today he hadn’t had much luck; it was probably too late for morels, and too early for the unique St. George’s mushrooms, which don’t taste like ordinary mushrooms but are simply “delectable,” and also, as studies have shown, good for one’s coronary arteries. Whereupon he showed me his almost empty cap, whereupon I reciprocated by pointing out a dazzlingly white, many-headed army of those very May knights he’d just praised so highly—with my wholehearted agreement; they were peeping out of the light shade cast by a maple tree. I’d spotted them immediately, but picking them would have violated the pledge I’d made to myself to refrain on this particular day from my usual follies.
With a precious harvest safely stashed in his hat, the judge rejoined me on the bench, but after that he spoke mostly to himself. It was as if I didn’t exist for him, though not in the same way as when our paths had crossed on the good old square outside the station: “How I hate imposing sentences. Judge: what an impossible profession. Pure presumption. On the other hand, Lucifer was actually the light bringer. Being a judge: never again. A special hell reserved for us judges. But there’s one penalty, a single one among all those the law allows, that I would impose with conviction, would recognize as necessary, as particularly urgent right now, as a form of deterrence. And that’s the penalty for malicious litigation or abuse of the legal process, an offense for which nowadays hardly any perpetrator is forced to accept responsibility, let alone penalized. Yet as I see it, people who abuse their legal rights aren’t just the majority among all the lawbreakers and scofflaws; they also inflict one injustice after another on those whom they constantly, day after day, flog with their rights, and against whom they assert those rights—and this is the essence of process abuse!—needlessly, groundlessly, senselessly, simply out of malice, thereby causing their victims one misfortune after another, harm upon harm. Rights abuse has become its own religion, a form of idolatry, perhaps the very last one: exercising and exaggerating one’s own rights vis-à-vis someone else as proof of one’s existence. I beat everyone over the head with my rights, therefore I am. Only that guarantees my existence. That’s all that guarantees their existence and allows them to feel like themselves, these people who violate with impunity the prohibition on malicious prosecution or abuse of process. Violators of the law? Killers of the law! And killers of more than just those particular legal principles. We should establish special prisons for these modern evildoers. And then wait and see what happens when the inmates play poker from cell to cell with their marked rights. Ahoy!—rights abuse, the only offense for which there’s no statute of limitations, and also not a single extenuating circumstance! But these aren’t the only cases that reveal that there’s no such thing as a sense of community anymore. There’s no general consensus, and certainly no volonté générale. Maybe there never was, but the word became flesh and prevailed among us and over us. No more community. But perhaps that will bring about the great liberation.”
The judge gradually returned to his senses, though the movements of his lips suggested that in his head his lecture on the law was continuing. Finally he brought the edge of his hand down on the bench, as if he were a symphonic conductor marking the beat in a rehearsal, and as he looked at me and laughed, his whole face lit up: because the entire thing had been a private joke, or because he’d got something off his chest? Hard to tell. Whatever the case, we sat there side by side for a while longer, he leaning back so he could gaze at the barn roof, I captivated by the steady stream of elderberry blossoms drifting down before me. Not another word exchanged. And yet we now had a bond by virtue of having met in that place, unexpectedly, and that bond would endure.
My momentary thought: Might something similar have taken place with the woman who’d slandered my mother if she’d crossed my path in this remote spot? A mutual rapprochement, a reconciliation? No way! Any such thing was out of the question, no matter where, no matter when. But no revenge would have been enacted here either, not here: the place was off limits, a place of refuge, and not because this Port-Royal-des-Champs was special (which it was) but because the woman and I would have found ourselves face-to-face without a plan.
In parting and as an “au revoir!” I wanted to surprise the judge with a trick we children had learned back in the village: blowing into the hollow stem of a dandelion to produce a prolonged deep drone, or more of a buzz. But he turned out to be the one to surprise me. He picked several such stems at once, of differing thicknesses, bunched them together, stuck them between his judge’s lips, and look! no, listen! a sound issued forth like a many-voiced fanfare, mixed with the notes of a bagpipe, no, not that word, a cornemuse, with undertones of a bullhorn: a few moments of music such as I, and, as I again decreed, the whole world had never heard before.
In the end the judge proclaimed, in a voice softened by his music making, “And yet: long live the law! Yes, the law as a source of delight, a very special delight, to be found, for instance, in the eyes of children. They don’t judge—they decide. The fourth power. Yet who wields this power?” And after a pause: “Look at that: the pattern of the roof tiles on the old barn suggests an alternative map of the world!” And after another pause, with a glance at me as if he were in the know: “You have something serious ahead of you. May my good wishes go with you.”
At the very end the judge even began to stammer, which only reinforced my trust in him, as had always happened to me with stammerers. And then one of the few utterances I could make out: “I’m an orphan!” (“Je suis un orphelin!”)
As I departed from Port-Royal—doing some walking backward again—I felt the urge to pledge something to the light shining through the trees—except that I didn’t know what to pledge.
Heading east toward the bus stop on the path that ran along the edge of the woods, out of the more or less clear blue sky I suddenly felt pressed for time. That sensation could come over me any day of the week, and always without a particular reason, sneaking up on me. Usually the sensation just grazed me, then released me, banished by the counterspell of reason. On this day, too, I tried appealing to reason, reminding myself, “There’s still plenty of time till evening, and in May it doesn’t get dark till late,” but the time crunch kept me in its grip, especially in my throat. The time crunch made it hard to breathe, and it didn’t help when reason tried to calm me by suggesting that my agony resulted from a hallucination that had me imagining I was heading east and toward darkness.
This kind of time crunch—manifesting itself today, as always, on the verge of late afternoon, which suddenly seemed impossible to reach—usually ushered in a stretch of time and distance, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, during which I yearned for nothing more fervently than to be spared the company of other humans. And so it was this time. Except that on my way to the bus stop, when I needlessly found myself from one step to the next in a tearing hurry, my literally chronic, i.e., ephemeral, “temporary” aversion to others turned into full-blown misanthropy, taking the form of mortal enmity, and reason—mine, that is—proved helpless against it, even though it whispered to me after every few hectic steps that the minute I encountered even a single person in flesh and blood, no matter what flesh and blood, even evil in person, my murderous rage would promptly revert to my ordinary late-afternoon avoidance of others, which made me lower or turn my head so as not to look at the other person. “Just wait for the next person sharing this path: you’ll silently beg his forgiveness for the hatred you’re feeling, even if he’s walking three pit bulls.”
Not another soul turned up as I hurtled along in the grip of my time crunch. And that was fine with me. I actually reveled in my rage and my hostility toward my fellow humans. Also, and most importantly, the time crunch itself disappeared. A shooting range must have been located in the woods along which I was walking, for at intervals I could hear the dull thud of bullets. Arrows whirred through the air and vibrated sonorously as they struck the target, or less sonorously if they missed. I eard the buzzing and banging of crossbows. And every time the shooter was me; me, me, and me again. And the child’s slingshot lying beside the path, its bands badly frayed: that was mine. So restring it! But what a pity, an eternal pity, that this misanthrope’s path was so short, hardly a dozen bowshots or at most two dozen stone’s throws long.
On the other hand, the more I relished being the sworn enemy of all mankind, the more queasy I felt. How disturbing that I had no idea what was going on in the world at the moment. The fact was, I didn’t merely have a bad conscience about being out of touch since that morning and by now almost the whole day; I saw my habit of ignoring information, no matter what, as utterly irresponsible and a form of guilt, an acute form. Why had I taken no interest in the latest disasters, mass shootings, assassinations? What if the world was no longer standing and all this merely a dying glow? And look: the billboards erected along the turnoff to the bus stop and halfway through the village in preparation for the European elections: not a single face on a poster, all the surfaces bare!—But there: a May bug under the cherry tree by the sidewalk, almost as big as my thumb, with the bright saw-blade pattern on the sides of its shell: dead, frozen in the May night, and there: another, and that one is scrabbling along, is alive! So contrary to what you hear, May bugs haven’t gone extinct. Information! Good news!
Waiting for the bus in a windowless concrete shelter on the side of yet another Île-de-France highway, just outside the village. A young couple were standing there, silent, the man’s arms drooping, his wife a small step away from him, their bodies not touching except that she repeatedly brushed her hand down his back from top to bottom. That gesture was new to me, at any rate not recognizable as a caress. Or perhaps it was one after all, and this caress had become customary in the world, and not merely the western world, while I was sleeping and dreaming in Pascalian seclusion. And it felt as though I’d spent years in Port-Royal during this one day.
The couple left without wasting a glance on me. Or thus: from the beginning they hadn’t registered my presence. That suggested they hadn’t been waiting for a bus at all. So was this stop no longer in use, and the bus line I’d used in years past no longer in operation? But no: on the wall I saw the current bus schedule, and it included weekend service.
I, who’d only recently been suffering from an intense time crunch, now found time dragging. I imagined it came from my still going unnoticed. That typically happened when I encountered highway bicyclists, especially those riding in groups, arrayed in their cycling gear, complete with helmets, and preoccupied with their conversations—they had to shout over the hum of their wheels. From the cars, too, their numbers barely increasing now in late afternoon, not a single gaze rested on or brushed me; if the occupants had eyes for anything, it was the road, or, if there were several of them, each other. Yet I pictured myself as a striking figure, in my three-part, grayish-black Dior suit, my wide-brimmed Borsalino with a buzzard feather stuck in the band, and my dark glasses, as I sat there alone on the moldering bench in the bus shelter.
I stepped out of the shelter and posted myself by the road. Not that I wished a bolt of lightning would strike me from on high. But for one long moment I was actually ready for that, so intensely did I long for a proof of my existence. I squatted on a curbstone, choosing one much larger and thicker than the others in the row, also out of alignment and almost overgrown with May nettles, which have a piercing sting all their own. When I pulled up a couple of the plants with my bare hands, stinging myself on purpose (it felt good at first), I noticed on the stone—which was not concrete like the rest but granite—an incised crown, clearly not from today or yesterday. I carefully traced its mossy outlines, first with my fingernails and then with the miniature Saracen dagger, hardly the length of my middle finger, that I’d slipped into my pocket as usual. Then I scratched my legs several times to call any observer’s attention to what I’d found, as if by pulling back a curtain: “Just look at this, will you: a curbstone from royal times, and the idiot for the day squatting on it, as if it were reserved for him, and see the mad fellow on his royal stone performing a dance without raising his buttocks so much as an inch; see him dancing a seat dance, long out of fashion, by the side of our former royal road, and on the sharp edges of his throne cliff, too!”
But no one paid attention, to me or to anyone or anything else. Better to be convicted and consigned to the dust heap than to be ignored. Every man for himself, and that applied not only to the vehicles and their occupants but also to the one group of hikers, an individual group, so to speak, old folks and young, with or without hiking sticks, who passed by, shouting cheerfully to each other without wasting a glance on me, the curbstone sitter, and likewise to the two or three solo hikers, engrossed in their trail maps as they trudged along.
Yet I had a responsibility toward them. It was urgent that I see them all, those in vehicles as much as those on foot, driving and walking beneath the sky of the Île-de-France, and not only the Île-de-France—a responsibility I didn’t manage to fulfill, not in the slightest. A very young man, seemingly coming from afar, from the bright west, hauling an enormous suitcase, one without wheels, eventually approached me, with the light shining directly on him, so I couldn’t make out his face until he was passing, almost bumping into me—he, too, overlooking me, not on purpose—for him I didn’t exist—he had a very youthful face, and at the same time a face, what a rarity, from olden times. I turned away from him to look tentatively toward the zenith—and he, meanwhile, the near-child with that face from bygone times, the days of Louis the Crusader or of Percival, walked along as if there were no sky.
But then: in my after-gaze, over my shoulder, at the back of his head and torso: When was the last time someone like him had walked along beneath such a sky? And into the evening and far into the night I was to see not a few people driving, walking, standing, sitting, lying beneath that sky.
During the whole time I waited by the highway for the bus, there had reached me from the village, or from a single house, sounds and voices such as one hears only from a festive gathering, and I’d thought: “Too early for a festival, at least for me. Spare me your May Day celebrations. Let my festivity, a revenge fest, celebrated by revenge light, wait for evening, wait till night!”
Now, however, I wished one of the participants in the festivity would find his way to me on the royal curbstone and invite me to join them—I wished that, even though I’d conceived this day as one when wishing would do no good. In particular, a woman’s voice coming from the site of the gathering made me prick up my ears, especially her laugh: at times cheerful, then dismissive, then even high-spirited, but at the same time like the laugh of my mother, who laughed despairingly at everything and everyone around her, and above all at herself. — A laugh on the verge of despair, yet also a festive laugh? — That’s how it was. That’s how it is—retracing phantoms of my mother over decades past.
The bus at last, flashing its headlights from afar as if for me personally. Earlier in the day most of the buses I’d encountered had been nearly empty, but as I got on, I saw that this one was veritably bursting with passengers, most of them with foreign faces, more foreign both individually and en masse hard to imagine, and at the same time almost alarmingly familiar at first glance. Yes, maybe this was a bus for farmworkers, the kind I knew from Spain, packed with labradores? And at once my nose was filled with the scent of onions, oranges, corn on the cob, and, most prominently, fresh cilantro.
But no, these broad faces, all resembling each other, weren’t those of farmworkers. At most one ancient fellow among them had been that long ago, back home in Andalusia or Romania. Yet from the front to the very back the passengers were the children and grandchildren of labradores, whether Spanish, North African, or Balkan. Except that they no longer worked others’ land, and perhaps hadn’t inherited any notion of land and farming, had lived since birth here on the plateau of the Île-de-France, and had become salesgirls, waiters, household employees, dog trainers, and dry cleaners, and the late-afternoon bus was bringing them home to their apartments in one of the new scattered developments or another.
From station to station more passengers got off, and the image of them that’s stayed with me is that of villagers, especially village women, returning from a holiday outing; they could have come from the village where I grew up. And as the bus emptied out, a few faces revealed themselves as completely different in an indefinable way, also not related to their age. Each of the few passengers still on the bus was reading, though only one was reading a book. Otherwise they were reading—a remarkable but also familiar sight—maps that they’d unfolded, for now they had enough elbow room; not local trail maps but largish maps, showing entire countries; and wasn’t one person reading a map of the world? Yes, and I even saw one passenger studying an astronomical atlas.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the young black woman sitting with a book by the window in the very back. At first all I noticed was her face, which was evenly black from top to bottom, her individual features impossible to make out, almost ghostly, even ominous by contrast with the May landscape passing by outside, greener than green now in this interval between afternoon and evening. What awaited us, aside from my own concerns? (As an adolescent I’d come up with a story once when I was riding home from school on the evening bus: next to the driver a madman suddenly popped up, shouting, “I am God!” and seizing the steering wheel plunged himself “along with all of us” into the abyss.) Only after a while did I notice the African woman’s arm, braced on her raised knee, and her hand holding the book; no, what I was seeing was the opposite of a ghost or a frightening image. And that came from the whiteness of the book’s pages, which flashed as they were turned or whenever the reader’s hand moved in a seemingly involuntary gesture.
It wasn’t unusual for me to see strangers reading this way, and it seemed to happen more often now than before, or perhaps with time I’d developed a particular awareness of various kinds of readers, and every time I saw them I was at the point—which is where I remained—of asking them what, which book, they were reading “so beautifully.” In the case of this reader, however, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder about the title. I didn’t need to know, certain as I was that she was reading the quintessential book, from the series “book of books.” All my life, though always exclusively in the context of nature, I’d experienced three colors that came together to form an image of peace: the sky, a mountain, a river (classic) as “flag colors,” colors of a peace flag: here, in the green outside the bus window, the white of the book’s pages, and the black-on-black of the reader, I realized for the first time that such flag colors didn’t have to come from nature. And I imagined her reading continuing one day in deepest Africa. One hand yielded to the other in turning the page, and likewise one finger to the next.
The final bus stop had once been a railway station, in one of the side valleys in the Île-de-France carved by a tributary of the Seine. But the bus ride, in the end almost a trip, was meant to continue until the conclusion of the story, into the evening and then on into night, if not with buses from the same line then with so-called shuttle buses. The rail network around Paris was being completely rebuilt, and that had ushered in the “shuttle-bus era,” with the buses using the railway stations as their destinations, and between stations, because they couldn’t follow the rails, having to take enormous detours that added greatly to the travel time, looping on secondary roads through areas the passengers would ordinarily never have seen, repeatedly approaching the borders of the Île-de-France and in some places—of which more later—going well beyond them.
That suited me just fine. After the brief time-crunch episode, I now felt I had time in abundance, as if that were also a particular law of spiritual nature; at any rate, I declared it to be that. And in fact I experienced what occurred during that shuttle-bus trip—including the sad and bad occurrences—as time in abundance, time as a benevolent god, without thought for what I had in mind or what awaited me.
Loop after loop, on those enormous detours, transported hither and thither, I felt at the same time as if I were rambling along, one step after the other, from happening to happening, from image to image, with the plateau bouncing underfoot; as if I’d stopped again and again, sat down on a bench, entered an abandoned church that I’d glimpsed as we drove past. A shuttle-bus epic! “Where art thou, Homer of the shuttle buses?” On the other hand: how hard the seats were compared to those of regular buses. What a rumbling over the road compared to the usual purring that lulled one into a doze. What a jolt from even the smallest pothole. But wasn’t that part of the epic?
All the footpaths wending their way among single-family and high-rise apartment houses, the edges dotted with daisies, the only flowers. An older man and a woman of the same age at the entrance to a low-income housing complex, the woman digging around in the man’s deep coat pockets for the key. A boy slapping his mother in the face. All the people rushing back and forth—who was chasing them? And there: me as a child—look at that cowlick, and those chubby cheeks! And what a racket that dog’s making—and in between a sound like the whimpering of a newborn. And lo and behold: there he is, the one we’d all assumed was dead, the village idiot from back home, as casual as you please, as if it were no big deal—except that in the meantime he’s grown a beard—ah, meantime!
Wrangling on the sidewalk: someone’s bumped the person next to him with his computer backpack, and the bumpee is retaliating with his fists.
So many children, who, when you stare at them, especially from a distance, take cover as if they were doing something wrong—yet they’re just playing, like those two over there with the metal box.
See that old lady standing in front of the bench, and standing and standing, saying to herself, “Sit!” and again “Sit!”
And the happenings observed along the hundreds of detour loops: the man on our outward trip squatting at a loss beside his tools, spread out on the side of the road, and on the return trip he’s still squatting there. The man whose entire body quivers holds out his quivering hand to someone trying to give him a light. The man tattooed from head to foot, with paler than pale fingertips that he’s gnawed on. The elderly man bending over repeatedly, hunting for nuts under a hazel bush, not realizing that it’s only May and the whole summer has to pass before they’re ripe. And another child, yelling at a stranger from behind, quite far back—to shout an insult at him? No, to wave to the stranger when he turns around. And not to be forgotten: those people, not just a few, at the end of their strength, leaning, for example, against a tree on the roadside, not only incapable of stirring a single step from the spot but also unable to reach into their own pockets for something desperately needed, their fingers constantly curling, then flailing through the air: a key or an equally essential safety pin: “Help!” these people say to their wayward fingers, longing to recover a once cooperative body: “Help! Save me! Help me, for heaven’s sake!” In reply, more derision than a reply? the rumbling in the air that was already there before, constant, not just a phenomenon of the current day, a steady background roar—radio waves?—which, however, stands out from the usual universe of sounds in the context of this cry for help. And how many no-man’s-lands there continued to be, smaller and smaller but more and more numerous.
Nothing to recount from inside the bus, however, despite the trip’s lasting far into the evening? Not so: I sewed a button onto my shirt cuff: a sense of snugness around my wrist, homeyness away from home. And one of the passengers scolded his mobile telephone, lying in front of him: “Stop flashing at me, you rat!” And when one of the clusters of willow and poplar catkins sailing in through the half-open window landed on the back of my hand, I could see black fly’s wings stirring in the midst of the white fluff, or no: the fluff was actually part of the fly, and it was impossible to blow the “white fluff fly” (as I dubbed it) off my hand, which gave rise to the thought: “This fly will save the human race!” And the one Japanese passenger wearing a mask. And passengers named Hugger and Snuggler or Snuggler-Hugger, of whom there were quite a few. And not to be forgotten: the women in the back of the bus putting on makeup for the evening, different ones from station to station.
And yes, indeed, the abandoned church on one of the bus loops near the border between the Île-de-France and Normandy or Picardy. During a rest stop I went inside. The church was open, transformed into a bridge hall, a quiet one, with players at only one table, all women. At a second table an older woman was seated by herself, her eyes closed. No longer any trace of the church’s fixtures. Yet one trace remained after all: the Eternal Light on a side wall, electrified even back when Mass was still being celebrated, and how it reflected in the glasses propped on the bridge players’ heads. And then another relic: the former confessional, now used by children playing hide-and-go-seek. And outside on the round arch over the entryway the medieval lozenge pattern, one eye connected to the next, as it were, which I imagined as a variation on the computer’s @ symbol. And then look at this! thousand-year-old mason’s marks, one in the form of a pyramid-shaped tree, and standing in front of the marks a jogger, as if following exercise instructions in pictograms along a fitness path. And before leaving I lit two candles there, not inside under the Eternal Light but out in the open, near the lozenges and mason’s marks, one for the living and one for the dead. There I spotted my snake again; having migrated to the border, it lay curled up with another snake, soaking up the last rays of the May sun in the grass behind the former church, and it stayed there, just raising its checkered head for a moment. But another feature of this epic poem was that the shuttle-bus driver kept getting lost and had no idea how to get back on track, and each time the person who helped him out, telling him where to turn, was me. That was what the story called for.
After the ninety-ninth shuttle-bus loop, we arrived at the last stop for the evening: the destination. The inn specified in the plan: a last-stop inn if ever there was one. — How to picture it? — No particular features, except that it evoked, at least for me, the inside of a barn, though it had always, for centuries, served only as a tavern, the floor of tightly joined oak planks more like that of a dining room on an ocean liner. I sat alone for a while at one of the many tables, which were gradually filling up as evening came on, and lost myself in contemplation of those old floor planks, probably also because my head had grown heavy in the course of the day. In the many places where branches had originally grown out of the oak trunk, the earlier knots were now pits in the floor, most of them shallow, though here and there larger, deeper hollows, reminiscent of our floor back in the village, that one spruce rather than oak, where long ago we’d played our special game of marbles, not outdoors but in the house, using similar holes and hollows, and shooting clay balls we’d fashioned ourselves; and without once thinking of later games, I now felt as though that child’s game had been the summum, again taken literally, of all our games. And I wanted a game like that for the night ahead. I “wanted”? I decreed: our decisive game. And the “we” needed no explanation.
The name of the end-of-the-line inn: “Neuf-et-Treize,” Nine-and-Thirteen, and that had been its name for more than a century. Because two railway lines converged there? The dining room was almost full now, but for one table, a small one in the middle, which remained unoccupied and was supposed to stay that way; that, too, was what the story called for.
The festivities could begin. No signal or raised baton was needed. Hanging up of coats, shifting of chairs, taking of seats combined with other movements, gestures, and actions—handshaking, brow-raising—to create a festive atmosphere, even, for some moments, solemnity. One particularly elegant handshake merely added to that effect, involving a great curved gesture from one person’s forehead to the other person’s hand.
Not a few of the people I’d encountered during the day had found their way there, in different guises yet the same: the singer-cum-taxi driver, the judge-cum-shepherd’s pipe player. And the thought came to me, yes, the insight, that in all that time I hadn’t interacted with a single bad or evil person, and not just on this day but in months, in years! Had I ever tangled with a real villain, someone fundamentally evil? Not in person, never in flesh and blood.
I saw only luminous guests around me. Even those with somber faces were bright: what a remarkable, almost (almost) unearthly brightness shone forth whenever their somberness lifted for a moment, however fleeting.
Among the couples in the hall the newcomers stood out, though I used that term not only for those who’d just met by chance, on their way to the inn, and were now trying for the first time to tell almost complete strangers who they were, where they came from, where they worked. “Newcomers” was what I also called this or that old and former couple, separated for years and now conversing again for the first time—and how the dialogue faltered, and faltered again, sustained however by mutual goodwill, and more besides. Among them the one couple from whom, later in the evening, from the man or maybe the woman, a room-filling shout was heard: “I don’t want to see you ever again; get out!” and, almost in the same breath, an if possible even more ghastly howl, “We belong together, and nothing can part us, ever again, don’t leave me, please, please!” and finally just a single wordless wail, which immediately gave way to singing, or an attempt at singing.
The stranger seated next to me—whom I thought of as “my dinner partner”—had placed a mobile telephone on the table and was writing a message to someone, and I couldn’t help looking as it came together, letter by letter, word by word: “As I went down into the Métro, I wished that on the stairs my dress (not all women wear pants) would flutter in the wind and you would see that as you watched from above, but it was too late, and you weren’t there anymore to see it” (my translation). Whereupon I opened my own device, and on the screen were three poems just sent to me by my friend Emmanuel, the auto-body painter, the first of which went as follows: “Rentré à la maison comme d’habitude / Je l’aime” (“Having returned home as usual / I love her”), and the second: “Est-ce qu’elle de mauvaise foi? / Et alors” (“Does she have ulterior motives? / So what?”). And here’s the third: “Il faudrait que je retombe amoureux / Ça fait oublier les points et la virgule” (“Time to fall back in love / Then the periods and commas won’t matter”) (my rough translations).
At intervals I sat at the bar, on one of the high stools, where I had the best view of the whole restaurant. The bartender was carrying on an agitated conversation with a guest; the other man just listened in silence, and only the bartender was agitated, talking and talking. Not a few of the guests at our party kept passing through the swinging door into the kitchen, as if they belonged there as well. In my wine glass a chestnut blossom, displaying the Hogarthian line of beauty and grace. (I chewed and swallowed it.)
Back at the table, I noticed for the first time the giant television screen in a rear corner of the dining area. It was on, with the sound muted. On the screen was a group of pundits, obviously laughing a lot, baring their teeth in what seemed to be a ritual and intermittently whispering behind hands cupped over their mouths, like coaches keeping the next play secret from the opposing team. All of them had their careers as experts behind them and had become fixtures in the worldwide entertainment industry. One of the women I recognized as the perpetrator, the one who’d hurled her clueless cruelty at my mother in the grave. — Was she really the one? — I decreed that she was. She had three pairs of glasses: one perched atop her head, one hiding her eyes, and one dangling from a cord around her neck, and she kept scribbling notes with an extra-long pencil that I wished would break in half (except that, as mentioned previously, this was not a day on which wishing did any good).
And suddenly all the balls, all the marbles rolled in a direction entirely different from the one I’d intended at the beginning of this story. She, the evildoer, she and her kind didn’t belong in the story, either in this one or any other. The story had no room for them. And that was my revenge. And it was revenge enough. It was and is revenge enough. Will have been revenge enough, amen. Not the sword of steel but the other one, the second sword.
She and her kind. And we here, in the dining room, we party guests: Were there others of our “kind”? No, there were no others like us, anywhere in the world. Fortunately for us? Unfortunately for us? Did we deserve to be envied, pitied, mourned? Blessèd muddle.
A sigh rang out in the dining room. — “A sigh,” something “rang”? — That’s how it was.
I asked my dinner partner for a pocket mirror so I could take a look at my face, an avenger’s face. Yes, is that how a person looks when he’s just succeeded in carrying out the revenge he’s been dreaming of for a long time? From the mirror I gazed out at myself, looking merry, merry as I’d hardly ever experienced myself, with pure levity in the corners of my eyes. “Bridegroom! Bridegroom!” I heard a blackbird, past its bedtime, calling, for my sake, in the words of a German children’s song, or was it a nightingale? And whatever it was, the bird wasn’t singing; it was shouting. It was bawling. And as an accompaniment the drumming of Faulkner’s wild palms.
Material for another story: how I groped my way home in the dark, arriving in the gray of dawn at my garden gate without my key and, as I recall, on all fours, while from the woods on the Eternal Hill came the first pops of a hunter’s rifle. But I’ll leave that story for someone else to tell.
—April–May 2019
Île-de-France/Picardy