Quarter after six in the morning. Blue-gray light and flashes of sunrise among the eastern clouds. A light morning breeze brings a smell of burning thistles from far away. And there are two pear trees and two apple trees whose leaves have started to turn brown with the tiredness of summer's end. Yoel is standing behind the house, in a white undershirt and running shorts, barefoot, holding the newspaper still rolled up in its wrapper. Once again he has failed to catch the delivery boy. His neck is stretched backward, his head toward the sky. He is watching flocks of birds migrating southward in arrowhead formation. Storks? Cranes? They are flying now over the tiled roofs of neat houses, over gardens and woods and citrus groves, absorbed eventually among the feathery clouds brightening in the southeast. After the orchards and fields will come rocky slopes and stone villages, valleys and ravines, and then at last the silence of deserts and the gloom of the eastern mountain ranges veiled in dull mist and, beyond more desert, plains of shifting sands, and beyond them the last mountains. In fact, he was intending to go to the garden shed to feed the cat and her kittens and to find a wrench to mend or change the dripping faucet beside the carport. He was only waiting for a moment for the newspaper boy to finish the street and turn around, and then he'd catch him on his way back. But how do they find their way? And how do they know that the time has come? Suppose that at some remote spot in the heart of the African jungle there is a sort of base, a sort of hidden control tower, which day and night transmits a regular, fine, high-pitched sound, too high for any human ear to catch, too sharp to be intercepted by even the most delicate, sensitive, and sophisticated sensors. The sound extends like an invisible beam from the equator to the far north, and the birds fly along it toward light and warmth. Yoel, like a man who has almost experienced a small illumination, alone in the garden whose branches had begun to turn gold in the glow of sunrise, instantly imagined that he could receive—not receive, sense—between two vertebrae in the base of his spine, the birds' African orientation sound. If only he had wings he would respond and go. The feeling that a woman's warm finger was touching or almost touching him a little above the coccyx was almost like a physical thrill. At that moment, for the space of a breath or two, the choice between living and dying seemed to be an insignificant one. A deep calm surrounded and filled him, as though his skin had ceased to divide the inner calm and the calm of the outside world, as though they had become a single calm. During the twenty-three years he had been in the service, he had perfected the art of small talk with strangers, chatting about the exchange rate or the advantages of Swissair or about French versus Italian women, while simultaneously studying the other party. Figuring out how he could crack the safe where the other kept his secrets. Like starting to solve a crossword puzzle with the easiest clues so as to get a purchase here and there on the harder parts. Now, at half past six in the morning in his own garden, a widower, unattached in almost every sense of the word, he felt the stirrings of a suspicion that nothing at all could be understood. That the obvious, simple, everyday things—the chill of dawn, the smell of burned thistles, a small bird among the apple leaves rusting from the touch of autumn, the feverish touch of the breeze on his bare shoulders, the scent of watered soil, and the taste of the light, the yellowing of the lawn, the tiredness of his eyes, the thrill he had briefly felt in the small of his back, the shame in the attic, the kittens and their mother in the shed, the guitar that had started to sound like a cello at night, a new pile of round pebbles on the other side of the hedge at the end of the Vermonts' porch, the yellow sprayer he had borrowed and ought to return to Krantz, his mother's and daughter's underwear hanging on the clothesline at the other end of the garden and billowing in the morning breeze, the sky that was clear now of migrating birds—everything held a secret.
And everything you have deciphered you have only deciphered for an instant. As though you were forcing your way through thick ferns in a tropical forest that closes in behind you as soon as you have passed, leaving no trace of your passage. As soon as you have managed to define something in words, it has already slipped—crawled—away into blurred shadowy twilight. Yoel recalled what his neighbor Itamar Vitkin had said to him once on the stairs that the Hebrew word shebeshiflenu in Psalm 136 could easily be a Polish word, whereas the word namogu at the end of chapter 2 of the Book of Joshua has an indubitably Russian sound to it. Yoel compared in his memory the neighbor's voice as he had pronounced namogu with a Russian accent and shebeshiflenu in mock-Polish. Was he really trying to be funny? Perhaps he was trying to say something to me, something that existed only in the space between the two words he was using? And I missed it because I wasn't paying attention? Yoel pondered for a moment the word "indubitably" that, to his surprise, he had suddenly whispered to himself.
In the meantime he had yet again missed the paper boy, who had apparently turned around at the end of the street and passed the house on his way back. To Yoel's astonishment and contrary to what he had imagined, it transpired that the boy, or the man, did not ride a bicycle but drove a shabby old Susita car, and threw the papers through the window into the garden paths as he went past. Perhaps he never even saw the note that Yoel had attached to the mailbox, and now it was too late to chase after him. A faint anger stirred within him at the thought that everything held a secret. But in fact secret was not the right word. It was not like a sealed book, but, rather, like an open book in which one could freely read clear, everyday things, indubitable things, morning, garden, bird, newspaper, but where one could also read in other ways. Combining, for example, every seventh word in reverse order. Or the fourth word of every other sentence. Or substituting certain letters. Or circling every letter that is preceded by a c. There is no limit to the number of possibilities, and each of them may indicate a different interpretation. An alternative meaning. Not necessarily a deeper, or more fascinating, or more obscure interpretation: just a totally different one. Without any resemblance to the obvious explanation. Or perhaps not? Yoel felt angry at the faint rage that stirred within him at these thoughts, because he always wanted to see himself as a calm, self-controlled man. How can you know which is the right access code? How can you discover, among the infinite combinations, the correct prefix? The key to the inner order of things? Moreover, how could you tell whether the code was universal, or whether it was personal, like a credit card, or unique, like a lottery ticket? How could you be sure that it didn't change every seven years, for example? Or every morning? Or every time somebody died? Especially when your eyes are tired and almost weeping from the effort, especially when the sky has cleared: the storks have flown away. Unless they were cranes.
And what if you never do decipher it? Surely you are being treated to special grace. You have been permitted to sense for an instant, in the moments before the dawn, that there really is a code. Through a half-felt touch on your spine. Now you know two things that you didn't know when you strained to make out the design of the elusive shapes on the wallpaper in the hotel room in Frankfurt: that there is an order, and that you will not decipher it. And what if there is not one code, but many? Suppose each person has his own code? You, who amazed the entire service when you managed to discover what it was that really made the blind millionaire coffee tycoon from Colombia seek out the Jewish secret service on his own initiative and volunteer an up-to-date mailing list of Nazis in hiding, from Acapulco to Valparaiso, how is it you are unable to distinguish between a guitar and a cello? Between a short circuit and a power outage. Between illness and longing. Between a panther and a Byzantine icon. Between Bangkok and Manila. And where the hell is that confounded wrench hiding? Let's go and fix the faucet, and then we'll turn the sprinklers on. Soon there'll be coffee too. That's it. Off you go. Forward march.