The four have been on the road a long time. As they sit in their camper with legs outstretched, it’s plain that they feel at home on the move. The gambler is at the wheel, the woman beside him is watching him; the old man and the soldier sit facing each other on the back benches, as in a minibus or cab. It’s not only the raised seats that give them the impression that they have been climbing; the light as well is an upland light, clear and spacious. And instead of a landscape, the naked sky appears in the side windows, yellow with sunset, hazy as though from smoke but in reality from dust. The bright gravel road, which the camper has all to itself, is bordered by a forest of diminutive trees, scarcely larger than bushes. In the fading light a dark tent city seems to extend to the distant horizon, where, as though on top of a barrier, the built-up center with its domes and towers and radio transmitters is situated. So tempting are the manifold forms of uninhabitedness that the four are determined to go there at once.
The area is not entirely deserted. A figure is standing by the roadside, signaling for a lift. The driver stops, and the hitchhiker, as nonchalantly as though getting into a bus, sits down in the back with the soldier and the old man. It is a woman swathed in a woolen headscarf, young, to judge by her eyes. The basket she props on her knees is empty, evidently she is returning home from a nearby market, where she has sold all her wares. (The only strange part of it is that she seems to have shot out of the bush, for there was no path at the place where she was standing.) Her presence underlines the feeling that this is a foreign country, but in what part of the world it is impossible to say. It could equally well be the far north or the deep south or somewhere in the interior; only the light of the particular moment lends any novelty. No attempt is made at conversation with the hitchhiker, communication seems inconceivable and undesired on either side. Only the two women have given each other appraising looks, then both turned away. The old man switches on a little overhead lamp — the light it throws on his notebook is very much like that on his lectern in the old people’s home — and tries to carry on with his signs, which the bumpy ride only makes more striking and picturesque. Before each of his strokes, always consisting of a single movement, he pauses for quite some time; shut off in his immersion, he looks at nothing else. Only the soldier, sitting across from him, manages to distract his attention. He too has a book in hand; it is still closed, and he makes elaborate preparations to open it. First he holds it out, eyes it as though to determine the right distance. What he does then is not so much to open it as cautiously to unfold it. He clamps a tiny, battery-operated reading lamp to the book cover and picks up the battery in his right hand, while with his left he places over the first line of text a semi-cylindrical glass rod, which magnifies the letters and lights up the spaces between them. The lamp sheds a tent-shaped light that makes the book appear transparent. For a moment it seems as though something is happening even without the reader. But the reader, sitting there so quietly, has his hands full, moving the magnifying glass from line to line and holding the heavy battery, which he hefts like a stone. He doesn’t even get around to turning the pages, the first page keeps him busy enough; each sentence takes time, and after each sentence he has to take a deep breath in preparation for the next. The reader reveals himself as a craftsman, and his dress, which only a short while before had seemed awkward on one who had long been in uniform, turns out to be right, a costume that leaves room for reading. Under the reading jacket his chest rises, his shoulders broaden, the mother-of-pearl button on his reader’s shirt shimmers, and the veins in his throat swell. The reader’s eyes are narrow and curve at the corners, widening at the temples as though the letters and words, though only a few inches away, form a distant horizon. These eyes show that it is not he who is digesting the book but the book that is digesting him; little by little, he is passing into the book, until — his ears have visibly flattened — he vanishes into it and becomes all book. In the book it is broad daylight and a horseman is about to ford the Rio Grande. As he watches the reader, the old man’s face copies his expression. He too has become all book, almost transparent.
The mute hitchhiker has long been gone; the wrinkles in her seat have smoothed out; it is black night in the moving vehicle. Now the woman is driving, with an expression at once vigilant and faraway; beside her the gambler, sitting upright but dozing off now and then.
The old man leans forward and motions the driver to turn off. The side road, almost entirely straight, descends steeply. The bushes are so close that they lash the roof and windows. Time and again the headlights pick a torrent, with frequent foaming rapids, out of the darkness. Just once the car comes to an almost level stretch, at the beginning of which there is a wrecked sluice gate with a chain still dangling from it, and at the end — indicated by a rotting wooden wheel with a few last stumps of spokes — an abandoned mill, its windows overgrown with hazel bushes, its loading ramp heaped with torn sacks and smashed bricks, and in the shed behind it an old handcart with upraised shafts, as though ready to be pulled.
They camp for the night at the spot where the torrent flows into a river which, in moonlight of a brightness seen only in old black-and-white Westerns, appears to be deep rather than wide. A wooden bridge leads across it, and on the other side a dark slope rises abruptly. This bridge was once an important crossing, perhaps even a disputed border, for at one end of it there is still a crank for a now-vanished barrier, and the plaster around the rusted flagpole sockets is riddled with bullet holes. But at the moment the place is almost completely forsaken, especially now at night; it’s not even a way station anymore; there has been only one late traveler, who was in such a hurry that he didn’t even stop to look at the camper.
Now it is parked on the stubbly grass between the road and a ruined building. Nimbly, the gambler and the soldier have made up the two bunk beds without once colliding in the cramped quarters. The interior is feebly lit by invisible lamps. From a radio in one corner, which seemed at first to be turned off, a voice is heard at intervals, rattling off frequencies and place-names, many of them overseas, in international radio English. The sound can also be heard outside — where the woman and the old man are sitting by a fire. She has slipped under his cape and is resting her head on his shoulder. But here the radio is almost drowned out by the murmur of the little waterfall at the spot where the torrent flows into the river. The river itself, by comparison, seems soundless, as though it had ceased to flow.
Now all is still in the camper, and the lights are out. The fire in the grass has burned down. The woman is still sitting by the ashes, but now the gambler is there instead of the old man, at some distance from her. The woman is warming her feet in the ashes and she no longer needs a cloak. At length the gambler breaks the silence: “That battered washtub over there on the bank, big enough for a whole family, has never been a household article. During the war the partisans used it as a ferry. They would paddle it across the river at night, not here, farther up. It often capsized, and a lot of them drowned — most of them were peasants who couldn’t swim; they had a secret workshop that turned out quantities of these washtubs. There’s no war memorial here. Nobody even knows that this ruin was the only electrical power station for miles around; the irregular current sparked and flickered in the region’s few houses, even in the farm at the tree line. The place is known only from a folk song which makes no mention of all that. It’s only about the name and a love that began here.” The woman has listened reluctantly, as though afraid of being lectured to; it took the key word at the end to relieve her fears; she wants no stories about places, only stories about love. The gambler takes his time, twists his ring, and says in a changed tone: “I didn’t respect you then, when you were brought before us in the amphitheater; I desired you. I wanted you. Your hopelessness was so complete, your brow gave off such a radiance, that I fell in love with you. Your despair aroused me. Then, when in your calm, friendly voice you told about your way of wandering around — the professor thought it was pathological — it came to me: I’ve found the woman of my life, something I had only dreamed of up until then; now it had happened. A decision was possible — actually, once you appeared, the decision had been made. In your hopelessness you struck me as immaculate, pure, holy, divine, and yet you were all woman, all flesh, all body, a perfect vessel. From my seat high up in the last row, I fell on you, I penetrated you with such force and to such depth that our ecstasy rose to the point of annihilation. And in your features, though I was sitting far away, I saw no difference between the face of extreme misery, the mask of inviolable feminine beatitude, and the grimace of utter lewdness. That day we loved each other before the eyes of all, I you in your forlornness, you me in my pure compassion. Since then I have had no feeling for anyone or anything. Since that day I have had no encounter with that rarest of all things, a beautiful human being. In that hour we, you and I, publicly engendered a unique child.” Whereupon the woman might have asked: “What sort of child?” And the gambler might have answered: “A child unborn to this day, perhaps already dead, perhaps unviable — a faint image, faint and becoming fainter.”