This time the old man was the cook. Deftly he prepared the evening meal from the provisions which the gambler as usual had in his knapsack, seasoning and freshening them with the herbs — the kernels of corn, the mountain figs and juniper berries he had gathered on the way — which made even canned goods tasty. The rest of us were too tired to go out again. At first we were not even willing to get up from the bench; while our cook washed up — that evening left us forever with the unique image of an old, old man, an aged innkeeper, standing high over the stove in his world-famous kitchen, with an invisible brigade of apprentices gathering round him — we looked out at the entrance to the cave, where more and more leaves were blowing around the bend leading to the bunker and coming to rest in the quiet, or up at the window holes that had long since turned night-black. It was a warm, wakeful weariness, in which all of us not only heard and saw the same things but in addition were all of the same age and sex, and had no story but the fatigue we all had in common.
Our host hung an oil lamp on the wall and sat down with us. The circle of light wavered at first and barely extended to our hands, which lay heavy and motionless on the table, still swollen from our exertion; between thumb and forefinger, as though forgotten, a last piece of bread, a bouillon cube, a pea, a cigarette; our fingertips still shriveled and drained of color from our hour in the rain, as though our hands had been under water the whole time. Then the wick was turned up and the light shone evenly through the room, darkening the spaces between the stalactites on the walls and so accentuating their shapes. A limestone surface showed the regular folds of a window curtain drawn for the night, and the divers stalagmites rising from the floor provided a row of sturdy but graceful household articles — jugs, bottles, cups, and bread molds.
The gambler switched on a transistor radio, so small that it was almost invisible in his hand. We heard a fragment of the news; the speaker’s voice was soft and clear, shaping the words with excessive precision, as though addressing children or foreigners. And indeed the message was intended for a particular group. The fragment was as follows: “ … have been, to the best of our knowledge, no casualties. Nor has any property damage been reported. Trains, planes, and ships are operating normally. All the mountain passes are open. The search parties have returned safely. Those last reported missing are also safe and sound. The chief cities are calm, and there have been no reports from any part of the country of power or telephone failures. There is no food shortage and no threat of epidemics. The steps taken have proved effective. Since a recurrence is unlikely for the present, no special measures are under consideration. There has been a marked improvement in the weather …”
From then on the wind, which was still blowing against the cave dwelling, and the dripping from the limestone roof were a part of the silence. From out of this silence the voice of our host in a tone of rising amazement: “How far we have come today! We have traveled halfway around the world: this morning a bone-chilling showerbath under the waterfall; in the noonday heat the crackling bronze tablets of the war cemetery; this afternoon battling the desert rain, without stopping for breath, attacked from behind by the Tibetan north wind; at last, toward evening, this cave behind a cave, this kitchen-bedroom-living room around the corner from a bunker … How many days have elapsed for me in this one day! It took me a whole day to watch you playing cards; a second to go down the river; a third to climb up to the high plateau; a fourth to get my bearings there; then a whole week to decipher the road markings, to lead you through rain and wind to my stalactite grotto, and to make it seem as bright and hospitable to you as a mountain villa.”
After a long pause, the gambler spoke: “My parents have long been dead. But each imprinted an unmistakable image on my memory. Though I probably saw them many a time afterward, I feel as though those images were their last. I see my mother weighed down with shopping bags, climbing a steep hill on her way home. She is alone — there’s no one in sight far and wide — dragging herself laboriously up the hill, and it’s not just because of her bags. She doesn’t notice me at first; her face is strange, a man’s face. For the first time I see her as she is. As she is? Forsaken, cast out of the human community, aching with loneliness; before her eyes, unblinking in spite of the sun, death. And her expression.doesn’t change when she sees me; she shows neither surprise nor pleasure; she doesn’t want to dissemble now, that’s her strength. With the strength of her despair, she aims a short contemptuous glance at the person who, for all she cares, can come to meet her until the end of time but still won’t be her child. Already she has passed him without a word. My father is sitting in a small clearing, deep in the woods, where the two of us have gone to pick blueberries. He is sitting in the grass at the junction of several paths, leaning with outstretched legs against a wooden cross. Though he is a practiced walker and still relatively young, he is suddenly too tired to go on. He doesn’t want me to stay with him, he tells me to go picking alone. Lying there with his hands on his belly, he really seems to be pleading when he says: Please go; and the look in his eyes expresses not only pain but acquittal and release. I may be dead tired — but never mind, leave me, my boy; I, your father, will stay here awhile and wait for you. In these two images, my parents are still alive for me. Whenever I come to that steep path, in reality or in my thoughts, my mother comes plodding along, looking through me in her saintly despair, and whenever I pass that grass triangle in the middle of the woods, I see my exhausted father watching me over his shoulder. But today I need neither that particular path nor that particular clearing; wherever I’ve been, my mother or my father has been there, too. Detaching themselves from those two memories, they come to me in the air, figments of light, consisting solely of glances. In today’s desert world, more than ever before, I have felt myself seen and observed by my parents. And the glances did not come only from my parents — all my forebears were there, watching me as I passed through the empty country; a whole far-flung clan, totally unknown to me before, has been looking at me. I too have the feeling that in this one day I have experienced several different days, so varied have been their looks, looks of horror turning to amazement, turning to indulgence, turning to approval, turning to understanding, turning to solidarity — until at the end of the long day the glance of my forebears was one with mine and fused into something else, a voice which at last has made it possible for me to mourn my father and mother, and also, for the first time in the fifty years of my life, bade me welcome on earth, while at the same time calling out to me, bidding me think about someone else, care for him, do something for him, do everything for him, this minute. Now! I would like to be on the move like this as long as I live.”
While the gambler was speaking, the soldier had picked up a handful of alabaster-white stones no larger than peas, which in times gone by had been pebbles at the bottom of a brook and in other bygone times had fallen from aerial tree roots. He passed them rhythmically from hand to hand; the sound was now as of marbles, now as of a distant hailstorm, now as of shots, and now as of old coins. Though he hadn’t said a word all day, he had no need to clear his throat before speaking: “When I was a child, I could see a plain from our window. It was a large plain, all fields and meadows. I wished it were full of houses all the way to the horizon, white, modern houses with flat roofs. I wanted our village to become a big city. Day after day, I looked out impatiently, to see if they hadn’t started building somewhere; the few wooden farm shacks didn’t count. When at last would the name of our village be known throughout the world like Buenos Aires or Hokkaido or Vladivostok or Santa Fe? My wish has almost come true. The village has not become a city, but the plain is covered with housing developments named after the former owners of the land, and all look equally suburban. ‘North,’ ‘South,’ ‘East,’ or ‘West’ has been added to the name of the village and that makes the scattered developments sound like sections of a city; there’s even a peripheral highway and a feeder road leading to the expressway, where the traffic roars just as it did in my childhood visions. A toolshed has become a telephone booth, still roofed over by the same arching elder bush. Beside the roadside shrine stands the kiosk I longed for, with stationery, newspapers, and even a few books for sale. Only in the pictures my father paints is the plain as empty as in my childhood. He says he works from nature; every morning he sets up his easel in front of some new building, but what appears on his canvas is always the empty landscape. He says all he needs is a little space here and there between the houses; in those small gaps the old open spaces burgeon, and he has only to transfer them to his canvas; he says the paint he uses is like that bacillus which dissolves otherwise indestructible things into air. Which reminds me of another, very different idea I had in my childhood: when I walked across country in those days, I was convinced that the stones in the fields were growing just like the grass and the grain, and that in time they’d get to be as big as houses. I didn’t think of them as having roots; I endowed them with an inner force and regarded them, unlike the plants, as living beings. I was sure that if I measured them, they would become appreciably larger from measurement to measurement. All day today I’ve been thinking through my father’s pictures, step by step and degree by degree, as in a circle: the cliffs in this country have taken the place of my big-city houses. It’s only my father that I miss. I’ve never missed him as much as here. Father, I miss you. I’ve always missed you, I’ll miss you until I die: I miss you because you despised my suffering; I miss you as my authority, my storyteller, my withholder; I miss you as a home, as the hand on my head in dreams, as a smell, as my soul; I miss you to the point of blindness, enough to make me pull a knife, to make me scream. Father, appear!”