The countryside is utterly silent. The cave dwelling takes on steel edges in the dawning light. The mounds of bat droppings on the floor of the bunker are shaped like sleeping bags. No more smoke above the chimney hole; no dew in the grass; certain stones have holes in them like animal skulls, the sky enclosed in them is a grayer, more ancient stone. The old man with the canvas-covered book has stepped out into the open; wet as though newly washed, his hair shows its length. He combs it without a mirror, looking inward. Instead of his cape, he is wearing a wide shirt; hanging down over his belt and buttoned askew, it is well suited to his clown’s trousers; but the creases are sharp, as though he were wearing it for the first time.
He walks quickly, at first swinging his notebook like a discus, then tucking it into his trousers and drumming on it to the rhythm of his steps. The drumming sounds hollow and soon fills the wilderness; little by little the details of the landscape emerge from the gloom and take on contours.
Later, when, glancing over his shoulder, he sees the cave dwelling as nothing more than a rock among many others, the old man begins to sing. He has long since changed direction — what started out as an open plateau has acquired steep walls on all sides. Now he is roaming through a jungle almost all of whose trees are dead — roaming happily, as though triumphing every time he stumbles. He has kept on writing, but now he does it while walking, no longer in his book but in the air, drawing big letters. In a hoarse falsetto voice he sings:
Into the silence.
Alone into silence.
Silence alone.
Where are you, silence?
You’ve always been good to me, silence.
I’ve always been happy in you, silence.
Time and again, I’ve become a child with you, silence;
through you I came into the world, silence;
in you I learned to hear, silence;
from you I acquired a soul, silence;
by you alone have I let myself be taught, silence;
from you alone have I gone as a man among men, silence.
Be to me again what you were, silence.
Embrace me, silence.
Take me under the armpits, silence.
Make me silent, silence;
and make me receptive, silence—
only receptive, silence.
I cry out to you, silence.
You above all, silence.
Silence, source of images.
Silence, great image.
Silence, imagination’s mother.
In the first stage of his wanderings, the old man had seemed to be deliberately leaving a trail, bending branches to the left and right of his path, letting thorns pluck threads from his shirt and fluff from his trousers, and making an oblique scratch on every boulder with his steel comb. But then, falling silent, he not only stopped blazing a trail but at a certain point retraced his steps and erased his last scratch, which thus became a natural crack in the stone.
At first he had followed animal tracks through the prairie grass; now he avoided them. It was through a kind of maquis with increasingly narrow passages between bushes that he twined his way without hesitation.
He kept going until his shoelace came loose. He bent over to tie it and then sat down, as though he had been waiting for just this. He had come to a place where the thicket opened up into an almost circular clearing, a patch of sandy desert in the middle of the high plateau; the more than ankle-deep sand had long ago been blown into hard ridges, but below the surface it was soft and warm from the sun of the day before. The old man took off his shoes and buried his bare feet in it.
This desert, no larger than a children’s playground, was not old; a single plant was growing in it, tall, shaggy, half tree, half bush, threaded with dead plants of various kinds that made it hard to identify. There were signs of fruitfulness in the thornbushes around it — blackberries and thirst-quenching anise stems.
With these the old man rounded out his breakfast — a crust of bread taken from his trouser pocket. In the morning sunlight the tip of the withered tree over his head seemed to have put on fresh green. Deep within the cagelike network of branches, the black silhouette of a bird, also of indeterminate species, motionless, but with head and tail upraised. Nor was the sky entirely empty. A plane was crossing it, so high, so soundless, so slow, and so white that it could be seen literally as an airship.
The old man reached for his notebook, which lay beside him in the sand, hesitated, and said in a voice from which the last assurance, born of his wandering, had vanished: “Heart, now you are alone with me. At least, as I have always wished, this is happening to me in a foreign country. How long is it since someone put his arm over my shoulder and said: You can’t just write all year long; and how long since someone else said about me: Always reading. From the start I have been incapable of applying the great fundamental law that I read in nature to my life and transmitting it to my fellow men — I have succeeded in applying it only to my writing and only when alone. Only when I was alone did things take on meaning for me, and only the signs I discovered when alone have been communicated to others. And now my writing time is over. My longing is dead. I know it, I know its place in my heart; it’s there, but dead. So where can I go now? And where am I? Do places exist no longer? Have I burned up all the light inside me? Can’t I look forward to beauty any longer? Am I then lost? Is it all up with me? Or am I, in my weakness, at my goal?”
He arose from the sand and walked back and forth in the patch of desert; suddenly his legs became short and at each turn his shoulders grew broader. He described wider and wider loops around the dead tree with the almost invisible bird in it. Now and then it gave forth a rustling sound. Otherwise there was no sign of life nearby; even the one ant trail was deserted, and the holes in the ground were empty.
He sat down again with his book, and rested his forehead on it. His eyes narrowed, taking on the shape of two dugout canoes. The silhouette of the bird, still motionless, beak and tail upraised, suggested a fairy tale. Suddenly, as though of its own accord, the familiar sound of the pencil set in, followed by a persistent scraping. The hand with the brownish liver spots wrote in the notebook on the old man’s knees. The writer did not look at the paper but kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Then the movements of his hand slowed down as though for fear of frightening the bird away, and in the end he seemed to be drawing rather than writing.
The silhouette is gone from the thicket. In place of the bird a cloud of sand blows down, making the dry wood crackle. And of the old man nothing remains but the imprint of his behind. In his absence the blackberries glisten and whitish-yellow umbels blossom at the edge of the desert. The parched soil in which they are rooted shows a polygonal pattern of finger’s-breadth cracks. An airplane in the summer sky sounds as if it were hovering motionless.