At the end the soldier spun around in a circle like a hammer thrower, but then he sat down again as though nothing had happened. He covered his eyes with his hands. Bent forward, the woman thrust her hands between her knees. The gambler picked the pebbles out of the grooves in the soles of his shoes. Without looking at one another’s faces, we were conscious of cheek lines and eye colors, and the three of us formed three couples. Around us all manner of sounds were swallowed up by the dead silence, as though the din of the earthquake were still at work a dozen years later. We sat on the terrace as at the scene of an air crash, each looking in a different direction and into a different space. In the middle of the lawn a stalk of prairie grass trembled when grazed by a bird. At the edge of the bower an ivy leaf beckoned … As we sat there motionless, a waiter put up a sunshade over us; leaves rained from its folds and some of them here and there sprang open on the ground. The drops on the glasses began for a moment to run. Wasn’t the brimstone butterfly that suddenly flew past us a harbinger of spring? But the lone apple tree was bowed down with autumn fruit, which in time, under the influence of our heartbeat, began to swing like the seedpods of a plane tree.
A plane tree actually appeared — felled, cut up, and stacked into a long, splotchy woodpile. Had our water-drawing fairy-tale tree been chopped up? Had its twining branches been sawed into short, straight logs? The soldier spun one of his cave pebbles on the stone table; there was a notch in it which in spinning became a spiral, and when motionless was a crack.
Now at least we were something; at least we were unhappy.
In our grief we acquired the eyes of all human races. As though that gave us a kind of energy, the stump of the plane tree, which the gardener had left in the ground for the time being, emerged from still another direction. The uncovered roots seemed at one point to have grown together to form a hollow, full to the brim with rain or sprinkler water, whose surface quivered slightly. It was shaped like a human ear, and instead of swallowing up sounds it intensified them. The distant thunder of squadrons of airplanes and the howling of serried racing cars — and, intermittently, clear and penetrating, a child’s voice counting slowly and concluding with the words: “I’m coming.”
A jolt passed through all of us at once when we remembered how in childhood we had often hidden from others because we wanted them to look for us. A wind arose as though from within us, and permeated all things: the wind of poetry, the wind of fantasy, the wind of arrival in a very different absence. The park smelled of new-mown hay, and the birds in the cedar tree called as though from field furrows. The bell in the cathedral tower, a motionless black silhouette, hung. The straight stone staircases mounted. The sunshades arched. The chambermaid leaned. We sat. The gardeners stood. The walls stood. The branches of the cedar tree crisscrossed. The roots extended. The magma blazed. The sea surged. The cosmos whirred. The birds in the sky glided wing to wing. The leaves greened. The tree trunk grew rounder. The smoke gave signals.
I could write a whole book about our quest. But first we were granted a brief respite. The soldier stretched his legs; the gambler divided up his money; the woman put on makeup and smiled at someone around the corner. In the end we put our arms around one another’s shoulders. And for a little while all three of us just sat there showing ourselves.