The day seemed reluctant to brighten, the morning gloaming lingered, a stony gray conglomerate of façades and low fog burdened me with breathless weight; my awakening remained doubtful even as that city loomed upon my chest. Despite the grotesque foreshortening of my legs and lower body, I could barely see my frigid feet, had to strain my aching neck to lift my gaze from the horizontal, and in that moment there was revealed to me the vision of an alarmingly close, yellow-brown massif that I instantly seemed to identify as egg-shaped, it was a mountain shaped like a colossal egg, like an egg’s pointed half, rearing up into the clouds, there was no way to take in the whole of the monstrosity that I could only hope was dead; it was like a film of the near side of a planet that had come too close to the earth and was now retreating with infinite slowness; however high I aimed my gaze, like a camera, it failed to reach the top, and however far I lowered it, until my neck muscles cramped painfully, the underside, the bottom, the base of the object was not to be seen. Its curve could only be guessed at; whatever distance the object gained, there was no way to encompass the oval shape of its bulk, which seemed hostile to humanity. All the same, if I allowed my bewildered eyes to linger for a second, its front seemed to vibrate with mysterious life. Yet life was hardly the word for the movement detectable on that vertiginous precipice. Some of those stirrings faded so quickly that I perceived them, as it were, only in hindsight, conceiving them as the ineffable, fickle existence of light reflexes, unexpected gleams like roaming sunbeams flung back by glass panes, and sometimes the barely perceptible glimmer of wispy blue-white smoke dissolving in a moment of sun.
The lofty wall that loomed before my face—seeming all the loftier since I was lying on my back with my feet stretched out toward it—was covered with semioval huts, tiny in proportion, that I recognized as dwellings only by the black entryways; the entire wall seemed to consist of huts, fused together, nested under and over each other, the base of one always resting on two or three huts that adhered beneath it, and so on, with no apparent paths or stairs in between; the entire wall was a hive composed of these abodes, superficially resembling a gargantuan leprous eruption—fissured, discolored, but unquestionably sculpted—through which the substrate, the rock of the mountain peak that had to be holding the whole thing together, was nowhere visible. Had there not been signs of fire and smoke, presumably also metal and glass, had it not been for the rational, thoroughly geometrical imbrication and interlocking whereby each hut kept the others from plunging to immeasurable depths—so that ultimately everything was buttressed and upheld by its own power—I would have taken the whole thing for a prodigious bird colony, even more so because everything had an indefinite, vegetative hue and the huts resembled inverted nests built from the dung of herbivores.
There may have been no real proof, but I was gazing at the abodes of intelligent beings, a people utterly free of vertigo that had defied gravity to find its natural habitat on the sheer face—only gradually inclining toward an oval’s curve—of a mountain that reached the heavens. The Asiatic aspect of those myriad huts, the corresponding vastness of that settlement whose bounds I could not descry, the Tibetan quality of those heights—whose atmosphere was finally suffused by the mild red light of a sun rising in invisible reaches—seemed manifest to me; I believed it imperative, bizarre yet natural, to connect the vision to the Himalayas, for that artificial scab, now yellow-brown, actually the color of excrement, at last truly teeming with life, posed an enigma whose existence seemed utterly natural, just as it still seems natural for the Asiatic and the enigmatic to be linked.
Now that I had seen the enigma clearly, yet actually failed to make out a thing, it sank into the barely perceptible haze, the high mountain haze of sun-flooded clouds, so its image threatened to slip from my grasp, to blur in the distance, even before I craned my neck to cast my eyes downward and finally saw the water. Beneath me, on a plane far remote from mine, I saw the mirror-smooth lake that surrounded the mountain’s foot in an arc, so divorced, so detached from the civilization of huts that began with the mountain’s rise from the water, that that civilization, like something utterly unreal, immediately assailed me by lapsing into oblivion. A sheer mirage, soon the pale blue waters would close over it once more in unbroken splendor, and over the surface, bent away from the already fading shore, a few slender, crescent-shaped sails would recede, their movement barely perceptible.
I wept, in a sudden clouding of my consciousness—as a second, cherished person dissolved out of me, or else a second, unlooked-for person entered my body to suddenly complete me—on the morning after my hard-won but ultimately unexpected release from prison, while listening to a Hebrew chant transmitted amid crackling interference by the old radio set in the filthy kitchen, grasping at last that it was my own self who’d been sent back to be present in a peace that left me cold. The psychological preparations for my release, which for more than two weeks had occupied me almost constantly, might have done me some good if they’d lasted a shorter time—
but the security officials who’d hinted at my release in vague, open-ended statements had either misplanned, or lacked the authority for such statements, which evinced a nearly unlimited power and the capacity to follow up with a reality barely hoped-for and hence all the more astonishing (I had to reckon with the statements’ ambiguity; my potential discharge was announced on the proviso that I make my peace with the authorities, a peace stipulated as essential for my release; at the same time, however, I had to heed the subtext of the statements, which denied my release because my peace with the relevant authorities was a necessary condition inside the institution, namely for as long as it would take them to get an adequate grasp of the case, unimpeded by any attempts on my, the arrestee’s, part to dictate terms by agreeing to cooperate in the clarification of my case only on condition of that release whose prospect they held out…that seemed more imperative than making my peace with the authorities outside the institution…furthermore, I had to assume that the security officials divined my awareness of the subtext, indeed, that they presupposed it…so as to keep their calculations in step with the arrestee’s deductions, to continue to presuppose his conclusions and so on…when in fact his sole conclusion should have been reached long ago: it’s clear that I can no longer be justifiably detained, but that’s a conclusion of which the prisoner is soon incapable, in just a short time imprisonment forever relativizes one’s trust in power, imprisonment is irrefutable proof that power places not the slightest value on trust), or the security officials’ hints had some other purpose unknown to me, some new and unexpected tactic intended to mislead me (when the release did come, it was a Pyrrhic victory; now startling, like an ambush, it proved to the arrestee, once again and utterly, the total, well-nigh despotic—for now despotism alone was manifest—dominion of grammar over his brain, which had failed him in the effort to calculate the implications of a mysterious verdict…and he’d have to go in peace, which would not have been possible had he been released into a true freedom)
—but those fourteen days were too long, and so my preparations self-destructed, all the calculations I’d based on the grammar of meanings self-destructed, the peace I’d resolved upon, when my sole aim was that release, turned into its opposite, into a war against all inward and outward causalities; now, following my release, I saw that that grammar’s purpose had been fulfilled, I grasped the inevitability with which that purpose had occupied my mind, despite all the calculations and counter-calculations I’d employed to hunt it down and destroy it…oh, I’d hunted it to the point where my power to think abandoned me, where I grew weary, where the beginning of my reflections, the point of my exertions had long since slipped from view…it wasn’t yet the end of the possibility of thought, but the end of my circumscribed ability to trace connections; in the middle of a grammatical crossroads I’d move on in one direction, hastily, but merely reaching a new crossroads, from which I’d keep on reaching crossroads, and so on, and all the while tormented by the suspicion that I’d taken the wrong turn at the very start of this galaxy…I’d walked those paths sitting on the stool in my cell, had walked them in no one’s company but my own, and because I couldn’t really verify the paths’ value, the stretches I’d covered crumbled behind me, dissolving, swimming in an ever-redder fog of rage; I began to see my own figure, but as though divested of mind, on many paths at once, all leading astray…I came to believe that the destruction of that grammar’s apparent purpose—whose power grew in my skull like a painful, consciousness-altering tumor—was identical to the destruction of my will to peace, ergo, I could be released, criminalized at last by the destroyed peace that could now fill the void of my body; my release, my going free, would inevitably make me guilty, so that my release would be unjustified, and this would happen in some moment of my awareness of myself; my release would be reversable with my own consent, consent to the law whose text could now be used against me…and hence consent to my stay in prison; the war drummed into me, the war against myself would be won, won by my foe even before I’d called him my foe, and without his having aimed a single blow against me…and once I was released, I was surrounded by the fractious peace of the persons into whom I had split.
The weather over the roofs was a cold, damp peace; it was a frosty gray July, said to be the coldest in half a century; my tiled stove, long unused, clogged with ash, soot, and crumpled paper, its top rubbed to a shine with margarine wrappers, failed to warm the kitchen; smoke, together with the grease fizzling on the stovetop, filled the room with rancid blue fumes; I went out and climbed the stairs to the next floor to look out over the roofs of the back buildings and see if the countryside really had turned green. Far off, light fell from a low sky, enough to lend a yellow sheen to the gathering cloud banks; amid the shattered landscape of the ravaged strip-mines, the black-gray of slender, tattered strips of woods, threatened by the foam of the trash heaps from which, as from the surf of filthy seas, white tatters wafted into the trees, and stretching past the spits of land jutting into the strip mines, atop which ancient mine buildings or defunct briquette factories, brick red and caked with grime, seemed to defy the decay of their roofs—akin to the ruins of heathen citadels whose architecture, no longer intelligible, casts doubt on the utility of past intentions that have lapsed into oblivion—amid this vast wasteland, washed with a yellow-green anti-vegetation, wound the curves, paradoxically defined by no longer extant obstacles, of a passenger railway that I knew had gone bankrupt long ago and along which a freight train now crept, its locomotive spewing white clouds that were immediately forced down by the atmosphere and boiled away in the flayed landscape’s hollows.
On that otherworldly plane above dark, staggered cloud layers closing over the earth’s delineated face: the braziers beginning to burn.
If I were to shut myself up in my cold apartment again, I’d have to ignore the relentless anticipation of those papers lying on the table; I could do that only by fleeing into the expanses of a different time or accepting the fragmentation of my I, by being the one to whom those papers did not pertain—I’d gained experience in that while in prison—rather than the person on whom society’s law had been imposed, a mindless law that, untethered from reality yet aping a law of nature, dictated the inseparability of body and mind and was bent on reintegrating the fraudulent wholeness of my I into the cold peace of the world, the cold peace that, like a low, horizontal sky, had gone gray over the freedom that was possible here, the freedom to shut myself away…I’d been summoned to take these papers and go with them to the district capital to reregister with the authorities, not knowing whether I’d be allowed to return unhindered, with the official stamps confirming my registration, or whether some more subtle restriction to my freedom of residence was in store or some new accusation drawn from an inexhaustible pool of possibilities would immediately result in my rearrest…if, then, in the apartment whose suddenly palpable size offered means of escape, in the scant hour left before the train departed, I could fraudulently disregard these papers, looking asquint, covering my eyes with the splayed fingers of one hand…a breath of light in my brain would suffice, and already these were no longer the fingers that belonged to me, and soon these were no longer the walls, the roof, there was a great singing of flames sensed above the cloud-roofs, a real singing banished from the earth, and once again Atlantis, the idea effervescing up from degradation…and it’s possible for me to transform back, in one imponderable second in the twilight beneath my fingers, in the shadow of the bars, the landscape of memory spreads out before me. In the early noons in which that rain-light died, while starting to shine in the distant unknown, and leaving warm mists of brightness like water flowing down from newborn hills, there was the green clemency of new oxygen suspended over the crossroads. As my male body’s secrets opened wide, and I suddenly seemed able to see in all life’s different directions, either back to earlier woods sealed by the mist of the rain that had passed, or, as I desired, to the Mediterranean light of the solstice…and I was forced to choose between perfect ignorance and the overwhelming surfeit of knowledge inherent to a world that is ending…I felt something step up behind me, and I knew that a free act was near, an act for which I could not be punished, and that it was youth.
Struggling to raise my eyelids to form a crack of light for my pupils, I waged a hopeless battle with gravity; only if I conquered it would I become a different person; the pressure at my nape that locked my chin to my chest mercilessly shackled my senses, gravity was a sickness that had dwelled within me as long as I could remember, but that I forgot for long stretches until, in some unexpected moment, something reminded me, and the ensuing plunge into a bottomless abyss could be halted only by radically abolishing the I that I was in that instant.
Strangely, I was still standing at the window at the top of the stairwell, merely seeming to look out; as though to deceive myself, I persisted in the same stooped posture—but now with a foot propped on the windowsill—in which I’d held my ear to my front door to listen before stepping out into the stairwell. That was it, I was still listening for sounds in the halls of the building, silent in the morning hours, by no means did I want to encounter another person. With alarm I’d heard the street door open, it was the postwoman, busying herself with the mailboxes; I tried to recall which tinny or wooden rattle would signal that something had been dropped into mine, but I couldn’t say; with relief I heard the postwoman leave the building without climbing the stairs.
Perhaps I’d been standing here for far too long, and people had already walked past behind me. Though I was trying to avoid any kind of encounter, it was they who slipped down the stairs behind me without a greeting, who didn’t dare address me, as though I were the building’s terrible new despot. Now came the revenge for the prurient curiosity with which they’d watched—poorly concealed behind the curtains, perfectly visible to me—failing to block the officers’ path even for a second to ask about my plight (much less to say the slightest thing in solidarity), as, with the cuffs around my wrists, I was led to the van across a sidewalk that, in that moment, completely derealized. Their scrutiny from behind the curtains conveyed that there had to be some legitimate reason why I was being taken away so openly.
The derealized sidewalk…the ghastliness of that moment, which I sought so long to put a name to, precisely matched what I felt when the gravity of all things momentarily dissolved…I knew that yesterday, when I’d crossed the same sidewalk on my way back, everything ought to have repeated itself, perhaps unintelligibly, in reverse, thus enabling me to return for real. The fact that this hadn’t occurred meant that the imprisonment that began at the moment of my arrest, when all urban geometries seemed to collapse in upon me and engulf me…I suddenly beheld a strange figure, delivered up to the chaos of rubble uprooted from all contexts, and that figure was myself, I beheld myself as though a possible subsequent memory of that moment had become one with the actual occurrence…that the culpability and disfranchisement of my person, transparently exemplified in the sudden dissolution of all that was solid, could not yet have come to an end…that I hadn’t managed to transform back into a reputable person.
From the stairwell window he saw the six-foot-tall, all-too-familiar wall crowned with cemented shards of glass enclosing the rectangular, black, cinder-covered yard behind the anachronistic, Bauhaus-style barrack-like structure that housed the elementary school. That yard was referred to as the school garden (for cultivating children’s budding bodies, he concluded, and he knew of no one who’d left that yard eight years later other than as a slave), and he saw himself, overseen and directed by loathed or unrequitedly loved female Young Pioneer leaders, amid the marching formations, three abreast, as they made their slow circuits of the cinder yard between lessons. In front of this wall, at the edge of an unpaved, perpetually muddy street, the nightshade tree was still standing, growing with undiminished vigor though its trunk had been split by shrapnel in the war, and it was now in late bloom, glowing gray-pink. The wall had gone unscathed by the war…you’re still the one who’s made to stand with his face to the wall, the wall of the schoolyard, the wall of the building, remember that, your face turned to the red-brown fired glaze of the neatly grouted bricks that the war left unscathed…inmate, you know you’ve got to stand with your face to the wall, what goes on in this building is none of your concern…remember that that injunction means you won’t be in this building forever. — The school’s large, rectangular structure had presented an obvious target in the air raids, but it had been spared, in stark contrast to the bombed-out Korean schools in the news, and peace—which, when you came late to school in the waxing heat of a summer morning, was already echoing in psalmodic tones from all the classroom windows—daily thwarted the dreams of the pupils who hoped to arrive one day to find a smoking heap of rubble. The peace was filled with the literature of war; history was taught without textbooks, the one-armed teachers, free to extemporize, spoke with unconcealed enthusiasm of the initial German gains on the Eastern front and the extraordinary discipline that had made them possible, and in the afternoons in the movie theaters showing Storm over Asia, the crowd scenes elicited frenetic yelling from the young audience; the mustachioed Stalin portraits had already vanished from the walls, the pictures of the man who’d put an end to the Blitzkriegs, who’d brought the peace; peace was prose, but war was an ancient form of poetry that lay beyond all borders, in unseen lands, in the distance. — In the prose of that existence all the one-armed teachers had just one goal, one sacrament, knew just one religion, which they championed with all the means at their disposal, persuasion and seduction, testimony and censorship: peace education; at last, for the first time ever, all the teachers’ aggression against their pupils’ budding autonomy was animated by a righteous goal, it served the cause of peace; the violence of demagogy, the culture of denunciation, all the subjugation inflicted on the next generation at last had a humanistic ethos. But what an effect this had; deluged with proclamations of peace, the kids banded together in the schoolyards to wage new, childish wars; the especially hollow-cheeked, especially scruffy children from families repatriated from the east, who lived in the barracks of the former prison camp behind the gutted HASAG munitions factories, were the foreigners who had to be battled; plans for these campaigns were forged during recess in the cinder yard, and there were heaps of volunteers; the identity of the enemy was constantly updated; initially, a word picked up from the grown-ups, the repatriates had the look of Buchenwald, but soon they were Korea; in the afternoons veritable wars were fought with slung stones in the ruins of the HASAG, entrenched battles over empty, still-standing factory halls lasted until darkness fell, and in the underground system of sprawling, complex tunnels that honeycombed the terrain, bitter skirmishes raged over every branch of the passageways, for to control this system—a labyrinth from which several slingshot-armed schoolboys never returned—was to rule the ruins’ entire expanse.
The peculiar thing was that this generation born in the war—the generation whose first three or four years the war had bound up and surrounded with the texture of maternal warmth…the generation that, years after the war’s end, was still conspiring to perpetuate the state of war in its games (the unparalleled extreme of maternal protectiveness in the years of actual war had left the generation with an instinctive, unconscious tenderness for that very state)—seemed, in the subsequent decades of peace, to vanish into an indecipherable meaning, into the stillness of peace, into the fractures of peace. — Where have they gone, those whose names escape me no matter how I rack my brain, how many faces, vanished in the crowd, have I already passed by without a reunion. — I recall my alarm at nearly recognizing a face during the process of admission into prison, between property room, showers, crab lice, and haircuts, when—about to get my obligatory shots from the doctor, the dark-uniformed, booted Frau Major—amid the general cattle-to-the-slaughter anxiety, I was stricken by panic because one of the old cons acting as a medic had addressed me: Hey, haven’t we met somewhere. — I recognized the ironically smiling, young-seeming face, but I didn’t know where from, and instantly I felt that he was a former classmate of mine. — Up to ’59 you were an apprentice at the training workshop in M., he explained, and I was an instructor there. — So it wasn’t just the schoolboys who’d vanished from the scene. — Peace had descended on the world with a massive, irreversibly advancing rift, and the schoolboys had sought a life on the side of the riven world proclaimed to be that of the robbers; the attributes that this side ascribed to the other, chaos, gangsterism, lust for war, exerted a magical attraction over the generation whose backbone had been broken for the sake of peace. — I never saw them again, the boys of my cohort; for all the songs sung at each morning’s flag ceremony, none of them had been born to be fighters for peace…they had vanished into the state’s institutions, faceless, their genius utterly lost. And had those who’d crossed the border also vanished without a trace, or was there a storehouse of memories that I hadn’t yet discovered…I was left behind, with a brain palpably burdened by the leaden weight of embedded meanings…I’d spent the first few days in prison afraid of running into one of them, and then it seemed incredible that I hadn’t run into any of them, until finally I hit on the idea that I alone had been left behind in order to end up here…in the long sleepless nights in the cell the word camp had lodged itself in my mind, it had seemed possible to grasp the word in all its awful meanings…now it was possible no longer…I recalled how during my arrest, during the entire, endless-seeming drive to the prison, I’d been filled to bursting with screams that couldn’t escape, that couldn’t be shaped into words, that stayed inside me, an undeniable madness that I held back only by storing it away inside…when, later on, countless times, I replayed in my mind the path that took me from the house to the van and that marked the onset of mental darkness, I found the words of that scream, and I screamed once again, silent screams whose meaning I failed to grasp, yet as fierce as though they could name all the reasons for my possible salvation, it’s clear to see, I screamed, it’s more than clear, and it’s enough, I was born in the camp of peace, as one of the few of the many…and in another part of my mind was the lurid memory of the sidewalk outside my house rearing up, torn from its bed, and covering the entire street with its debris; at the same time, from all over town, the bomb hits stood out audibly against the general infernal din into which the atmosphere was transformed; at the same time the water of the burst mains boomed, shooting up from the rupturing streets, fountains blindingly white amid inextricably merging conflagrations.
He saw that where the branches of the riven nightshade tree reached over the wall into the schoolyard, they had lost their leaves and withered as though in revulsion. — In those nights in prison, how could he have forgotten that safest point of departure for the escape maneuvers of his early youth, in the shadow of the wall. From here those in the know could vanish from the school grounds during recess, here the wall had an unused, forbidden door, hidden by the proliferating underbrush beneath the nightshade tree and seemingly impassable. It was chained and padlocked, but one of the older boys had a secret key, and sometimes, unnoticed by the school staff, the padlock was found open, as though by magic. If his prison fantasies had taken him to that spot beyond the wall, maybe he would have seen his comrades again, have rediscovered their faces, unrecognizably smeared with the juice of the nightshade, and they wouldn’t have slipped from his mind…he’d have found help for his escape; from here a quiet, overgrown path led to the nearby forest. But no, he always passed by the ruins, which by the end of his time at school were already strangely depopulated, and each day closed with a chastened return, inconceivable derealizations lurked everywhere, the language of his thoughts proved helpless against them, utterly inadequate, only in those wanderings did it happen that a person suppressed within him, his truth-person, he suspected, gained the upper hand with the paralyzing refusal to acknowledge that the objects he encountered were the world; more and more he felt the urge to seek out that truth-person within him, but bitterly he grasped that that person—though seeming to divest the derealized world of its substance and revealing it as porous, threadbare, transparent—kept secret the truth that ought to have appeared behind it.
He left town, heading southeast, and roamed dense woods, climbing the hill behind the former HASAG prison camp; the reinforced concrete pillars of the camp’s erstwhile fence, angled inward at the top, had been linked anew with wire mesh, marking one side of the sports and parade ground for the school’s summer games (which he’d refused to take part in last time); from here he could see the black ruins of the Progress lignite mine, which, though undamaged in the war, had soon afterwards been shut down and half demolished due to dwindling deposits; now craggy, menacing building fragments loomed between the fields, seeming at the point of collapsing entirely; part of the mine, the former workshop, now functioned as the training facility and the plant’s vocational school; also surrounded by a wire fence, it was the place he’d be banished to after graduation. — My development was already predetermined; a pole rose from the middle of the fenced-in yard, and from it dangled the same unmoving blue flag as from the pole in the center of the school’s cinder yard.
A haze hung above it, and the road that connected the town to several nearby villages and intersected the path at this point—up here on the hill it was worn to a gravel track with mere islands of asphalt—descended in wide curves into a haze in which the meadows, the blue-green potato fields, and the sky seemed to converge. But even now the disenchantments wrought by sharper sunlight refused to loosen their grip on his memory; the receding planes of the croplands, the sky drawing close to the meadows, seemed to lack the southerly atmosphere he’d hoped for, and it seemed to be too late. In truth, though, when he wasn’t too weary, when he could believe in the figure he’d rediscovered inside himself, when he didn’t regard it as annihilated along with reality…for instance in the moment of his transformation into a Greek god, the tracts of the sky could be trodden; when he set foot there, the sky rose to immense heights behind him, over the ruins’ black upward-pointing fingers. There lay the azure of memory; when the schoolboy managed to return to the youth of German Hellenism, he’d been close to that lofty remoteness…azure; as though to save him from falling, it descended again, flooding the receding valleys far and wide, on the way to Bordeaux, filled with fire, the fiery gates open to stride through. But already he’d gone on too long, continued too far along the old way; ahead of him, at the end of the road, in front of the dark strip of woodland, when his gaze briefly penetrated the haze of the enfolded sky that mingled with the blue-green light of the potato fields, the clearest image on the evening plain was an all-too-familiar, hostile village where the medieval steeple of a Catholic church loomed.
Each of the schoolboy’s forays ended at the crest of that knoll where the world seemed to divide: into youth and old age, genius and barbarism, a past that had an existence and a future in which existence vanished in the absence of place. Behind all the derealizations, the future could not be discerned, and I wandered homeward through woods plowed by gigantic bomb craters, eerie in the onset of twilight; the student of the world returned perturbed to the town whose seams every stone filled, unshakably set in its peace, without a single gap.
The infallible instinct for identifying voices and noises (the only way to discern the value, the stability of the peace) was something he’d quickly learned in those nights in the detention cell. Only once, toward the end of his term, did he seem to mistake a cry; a commotion that broke out just outside the cell door, at dusk with a curfew already in effect, presented the precise image of a scene in which every sound, placed in relation to the prison’s corridors, instantly visualized the matching detail with perfect transparency.
After minutes of unintelligible cries echoing from the disorienting remoteness of a distant cell, I heard rapid steps, several people rushing down the corridors; near our cell the steps escalated to a loud, furious run, and I heard the slapping blows of rubber truncheons clenched in several fists raining down on a person, a prisoner who responded by bursting into shrieks that echoed through the building, so loud and shrill that the inmates in my cell started up out of their sleep; what unmistakably followed, clearly indicated by a few intelligible words amid the yells, was the rumble and clatter as a person was pushed down the steep stairs to the ground floor; then the steps of the others rushing down the stairs, and again voices giving commands mixed with obscenities (the identity of the guards’ voices obscured by their bellowing); then, after a moment’s silence, feet dragging and shuffling, a cell door unlocking with a rattle on the ground floor where the solitary cells were, a body being dumped into a room, the crash of the door as it was closed and locked, the agitated murmur of the guards moving off.
Either following that scene or in an intense dream that night he thought he recognized the victim’s face from his screams (rather than curses or cries for help, the prisoner had uttered words that vividly evoked his appearance); he must have heard that man’s screams at some earlier point (after a short time in prison, before habituation has its leveling effect, one learns that even screams can have an individual note), those screams had a face that he clearly remembered; if he wasn’t mistaken, he knew it, blood-smeared though it was; he knew the parted lips’ pain-twisted shape, the opening between the rows of teeth, hung with red strands of saliva, but it was impossible to recall the person with that familiar face…toward morning he thought he realized his mistake; what stained that face wasn’t blood, it was the dark red juice of the nightshade berries pilfered at recess.
The vanished figures, the great horde of all those I knew, whom I had in my head, in whose heads I was, were left in limbo; here, too, they were nowhere to be found. If it was I, still in the process of learning the world, if it was I alone who embodied what I’d claimed about everyone: that peace seemed unlearnable for our generation…then it was I who’d been left behind, and my generation had entered into peace, I alone had vanished, my face beyond recall for the peace-dwellers.
He had an intuition that, in the world he beheld riven by errors and schisms, erring was an essential form of existence, that his barely solid I, moving from aberration to aberration, must face the world’s derealizations by not lending them mental reality…even his imprisoned body, which experienced prison as the most intense bond to a system whose aim was the safeguarding of peace, could be apprehended only by means of the papers waiting on the kitchen table, but those papers pertained to someone else, a hollow body that gravity had ensnared in the system’s safeguards, that body, that mere shell that their predictable methods had taken as a reference point—it amazed him that fingerprinting and olfactory samples, photos, roll calls, and cell lights switched on in the night had even been able to establish his presence—that body had lost something in the shattering sounds of its latest sensory impression, its mental visage had vanished behind veils the color of blood.
Where are you, he cried, and for all his effort it was a soundless cry, the voice of a sleeper at the end of his sleep, where are you, irretrievable ones… in the exhausted sleep following a collapse, while listening to a sacred chant in which he discovered the Hebrew word for peace; he’d heard it was the everyday greeting of the people who, one historical moment ago, had nearly perished in his country’s camps… where are you, comrades of my youth, a cry emerging from a sleep that had made him miss the midday train to the district capital, delaying by one dangerous day the registration with the authorities set for today; the inevitable, rapidly escalating conclusions the authorities would draw could not be allowed into his brain, lest total paralysis ensue. — When he bolted down the stairs, papers hidden in his pocket, passing the staring neighbors without a word in theatrical haste—in the hope of making himself visible—intent on reaching the train station, though he knew he’d never make the train to the district capital…the midday light was gone, only certain glimmers here and there in the sky, beneath which the heavy smudges of the next rain hung, gave a hint of the flames roaring over the rims of braziers, one last time, the tattered gray cloud cover was already closing over them…poetic symbols had to serve as evidence for the renewed loss of reality.
Or are you the ones who vanished there, you who are blind to my body’s empty shell…are you vanishing into the mists, abducted by a gigantic mountain, are you the beings dwelling in that massif’s civilization of huts, are you the ones living in the semicircular structures made from animal dung…and what do you live on, are you living well in your immeasurable realm of the dead…your realm is dead and lost to the world.
I’d been mistaken; there was no precipice the huts adhered to, the whole thing was one single mountain of dwellings, the shape of that world had been erected in the image of the first hut built on Asiatic soil once upon a time. But when those huts had densely covered the whole land, all the way to its shores, they started building upward, a third layer atop the second, and so on, until that prodigious oval peak took form, a gigantic building in the same necessary shape as each of its component parts. A path taken from the ground to a dwelling in the middle of, let’s say, the 150th floor would inevitably pass through all the occupied interiors of the stacked and nested huts; it was hard to grasp the advanced culture of coexistence those circumstances dictated; in that world a single injustice could become the epicenter of a quake, spreading in all directions and bringing down the entire realm…each individual in that world had to possess a single, open I, nothing was hidden, and nothing could be allowed to be hidden…the light’s harsh rays in the high mountains’ thin air had slowly dried the building material and fused all details into one whole; it must have taken eons for that world to achieve perfection. Mild red mists enveloped the whole thing, and gradually it vanished, soon all I saw was the yellow-green silhouette of the egg-shaped tip looming from the clouds, seemingly borne off by invisible wings.
My final recollection—as vivid as though my remote mind were receiving proof of a reality—was of the warm, vegetative vapors that flowed from all the building’s openings, so warm and strong that the air currents over the ice-blue water of the shorelessly sprawling mountain lake were set in motion, propelling the sailing ships away in all directions; no one reached that legendary culture that took in prisoners no longer.
(On my way to the train station it occurred to me that in passing I’d actually glimpsed a white piece of paper behind the grille of my mailbox. I went back and retrieved it; it was a summons from the police.)