It was a clear, cloudless day in the early fall, with a breeze such as one might imagine on an atoll in the South Seas. The whole plateau unfolded before us; in our normal state of mind every rise and fall in our journey would have come alive for us; with a sense of being young that we would never have had without our journey, we would have seen ourselves as human clouds, advancing from station to station, resting, sleeping, indestructible. We would have delighted in the glittering streak of mist at the foot of the pedestal — or was it a field with a sheet of plastic over it? No, it was actually the sea. The one giant cedar tree in the garden, deep-dark, bushy, covered with candle-shaped cones, was the façade of a grave-countenanced cathedral which, had it been offered us at eye level without our having to look up, would have impressed us as the natural goal of our journey.
But here where we had arrived we felt we had gone astray. The light was too much for us and its beauties were not only meaningless but offensive. The pillar-framed view from our arbor seemed a mockery. The vines blowing from shadow to sunlight wounded the soul. Never would we have dreamed that the birds of heaven-except, perhaps, for crows — could have become repugnant to us; but now we heard the same mocking screams from each of the many varieties in the cedar bower, and when the wood pigeons fluttered in place as though about to land on empty air, their slender throats had swollen to bull necks.
There was also our sense of guilt. Everywhere people were doing something, working or studying — here in the park, for instance, the gardeners with their apprentices; and down in the city those masons who had been working for years, faithfully rebuilding the cathedral with the original stones. What better occupation could there be in this day and age? And weren’t those men, without being in a hurry, more than usually absorbed in their work? The lamb on the façade was already looking over its shoulder into space. The relief of the dove faced the morning sun with falcon’s eyes. The three stone kings in their niches, all deep in blissful sleep, were once again following the star in their dream. Only the tip of the steeple still lay where it had been hurled, far away, in the midst of a thicket that had grown up around it. To us idle onlookers on the terrace, who had only to turn our heads to be served like kings, the repeated piping of the cash register in the background sounded like the distress signal of a rudderless space capsule that was carrying us away from our earth. So this was what came of trying to get rid of history, individual as well as universal, and escaping into so-called geography?
We were terribly at odds, and there was nothing to pull us together again. If the old man had reappeared and made a proposal to all of us, we would have laughed, not only at his proposal, but at his person as well.
Finally, after an hour or a month of silence, the youngest among us, hardly more than a child — the soldier — began to speak. Before he had even uttered the first word, his Adam’s apple gave a violent jerk, the veins in his throat and forehead swelled, and he pressed his fist against his mouth. When he took it away, the whole lower half of his face was darkened as by a birthmark. When at last he began to speak, we saw no lip movements and might almost have looked around in bafflement, as if he had been a ventriloquist. His muscles tensed with exertion, literally making wrinkles in his clothes. He spoke softly but clearly, bent over his book as though reading from it, with the deliberateness of a stutterer who cannot be stopped once he has started speaking fluently. Like everything he did, his speaking was involuntary and unpremeditated; also quite casual, a kind of soliloquy, halfway between speech and silence. Was he, alone of us three, in command of that calm impersonal voice with which, even amid the confusion of innumerable other voices, a man can encourage himself? And yet under his crew-cut hair there glowered a darkness as of some suffering that demanded to erupt. All the time he was talking he passed what was left of the cave stones, along with the buttons he had ripped off during our journey, from hand to hand, and kept jumping up from his seat.
“Maybe my departed made false promises to the world. He entered into a pact and didn’t abide by it. He called himself a suitor, but found no words in which to press his suit. He lifted me out of my depths and dropped me all the lower. He promised me a great country, and here I am alone in it among enemies. He made me think that the barren wilderness would be my fruitful orchard just because he had given it form. He was a false prince; he lured me away from home, from the barracks, from my people, to a country where there is not a breath of air, except perhaps for him. He was not a prince of a world empire for all; he was an illusionist; he made me betray my native village, he turned me into a deserter. My supposed prince turned my head, tore me out of my natural surroundings, brought me face to face with the void. And even as my scout, he deceived me. He had seen all sorts of places, but hadn’t stayed in any of them. He was not a geographer, because he hadn’t enough patience to bear witness as a historian. All he cared about was reading traces here and there, instead of writing the story of a famine, for instance, or of the building of a motor highway or merely some railroad worker’s lopsided garden. As a result, he didn’t guide me straight into the distance but led me around in a circle with his magic signs, deeper and deeper into a labyrinth. And just as he was a false prince in the open, he was a false scout in the labyrinth; for as a scout he should have been surefooted, should have found his way in country where he had never been before; with his steps alone he should have been the trailblazer.
“But last night I had these dreams: the first was about this book. It was ten times bigger and thicker than in reality, a folio volume. And I had a child that I carried around with me, hidden in the hollowed-out folio. But when I came to a safe corner and looked, the child wasn’t there anymore; it had disappeared along with its cave, my thick India-paper folio. After that I only dreamed words and spelled them out at the same time: ‘How quick you have been to betray your childhood. That old man was not wicked, he was only an eternal child. The substance of childhood must not be misused.’ My last dream concerned the future, and the sentences that went with it were in the future tense: We shall look for the man who has vanished. The search will take a whole year, and we shall search separately. You, woman, will remain here and wait; you, gambler, will drive your car from city to city, each day a different city — and I, soldier, starting from here, shall walk in wider and wider circles through the open country. We shall communicate every evening by phoning the hotel. Because the searching and waiting will slow us down and sharpen our senses, they will have a quality of always imminent finding. In the late spring, in drizzling rain, you will discover the old man’s footprints on a dirty pedestrian crossing. At the summer solstice you on your terrace will see wheels of fire crisscrossing over the highlands all night long. After an autumn storm has died away I, in a dream, shall literally pluck the one scrub oak still growing on a heath and bring it to you as evidence. At the onset of winter, we shall meet in the seaport town at the end of a railroad track; the buffer will be the last hurdle before a dune and the sea. The station platform will be surfaced with tar, and stamped into it we shall find tickets, matches, and newspaper clippings, forming a trail leading to the dune. There in the tall grass beside a chain-link fence, the old man’s notebook will be lying open, visible from a distance, seemingly unharmed. But the entries will have been bleached and blurred by the year under the open sky, and the pencil will be weather-worn. Nevertheless, it will write and we shall be able to trace the lines that have been printed on the paper. Even if only individual, disconnected words and outlines with no great significance come to light, the deciphering in itself, our bending over the notebook together, will be the most exciting, most magnificent adventure of the present era; and when at last we look up, the dune — I’m quoting my dream word for word — will be our brother’s tomb, glittering far and wide. I refuse to be talked out of my old man. We must not let ourselves be talked out of our old man. His rediscovered writing has flowered in my dream.”