With this grimace still on my face, I quickly dragged the body out of the road and up the embankment. At this point the edge of the cliff is near, and I let the dead man fall. I was pulled after him, and for a moment I fell with him.
Sometimes the suicides who jump off this mountain fall through the roofs of houses down below or tear the overhead wires of the bus line. But this side of the mountain did not overlook the city; it surmounted seldom frequented terraces and obscure patches of woods. This incident — I knew while the body was falling — would never be cleared up. My freedom was not threatened. The body would quietly rot. And nevertheless, since I had thrown that stone (of this, too, I was certain), action against me was underway — not a legal proceeding, not an inquest; not a demand for extradition; but — at last I found the word which restored my lucidity — a “challenge.”
Back in the gully, I picked up my projectile, which was still lying there, and with it scraped the unfinished rune off the rock. The stone grew hot in my hand from the friction and smelled like a flint just before the sparks fly. I sat down on a tree root protruding, at the height of a folding chair, from the opposite wall, close to the scene of the crime. At this point, there is a double bend in the road; this gave me a view of a separate section of the rock face, shaped like a truncated pyramid and topped like a ruin with grass and saplings. Here for the moment lay the ruins of a temple in the jungles of Central America. Then in the lamplight the cliff took on the gray coloration of a wasp’s nest, riddled with black cells which seemed abandoned yet alive. The layer of foliage at the foot of the cliff blew back and forth in the storm wind, with eddies, waterspouts, and breakers, and the nest with its black holes changed into a chalk-white oyster bed (the oysters being the shell-shaped stones protruding from the cliff). At the center of the oyster bed, the symbol I had scraped away marked an empty space which, as I saw it, belonged to the cranes, the gulls, and the kingfishers of the silent world. And I experienced a sense of triumph at having killed. I even smacked my lips aloud. This is my history now, I thought. My history will sustain me. Justice had been done, and I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated.
It was a big mountain. No blood would flow from the city fountains. No animal would talk. “Everybody off this mountain!” (I shouted that.) Only then did it come to me that I had cursed the dying man in his last moment and hurled the same curse after the corpse as it fell off the cliff. And my obituary was as follows: “At last, you have lost your right to exist!”
At the far end of the gully, a female jogger appeared, not detracting from the emptiness but enhancing it. She was embodied beauty, with blond hair and a jogging suit that glowed fire-hydrant blue in the darkness. In hurrying past, she smiled at the figure sitting on the tree root, and I smiled back. “Marvelous evening, isn’t it?” “Yes, today this gully is eternal.” As she ran, she played with the fingers of her striped gloves as with puppets. Punch and Judy teetered, jumped up, collapsed, flailed out at each other, and hugged, keeping up a dialogue all the while. A spotted cat came running after the jogger, pursued by a single tiny beech leaf scurrying over the ground.
When I stood up, I was so unexpectedly tired that I could hardly move. It wasn’t far to my card game (wasn’t I hours late already?), but I’d never get there. Something drew me off the road, into a nook to sleep in. When at last I moved, it was blindly, with my eyes shut. I didn’t even look when something came panting up behind me (a group of joggers). Blindly I groped my way over the meandering road, as though following the canal down below. When my eyes finally opened, what they saw, looking extraordinarily substantial, were a street sweeper’s twig broom leaning against a gravel box and, as though lit by the brightest sun, the white, granular wall with its lighted windows. “Here I am.” Who said that to whom?
The other card players were a priest, a young politician, a painter, and the master of the house. They were sitting in the library, a room almost bare except for books. The knotholes in the wide floorboards seemed at first sight to move in the cigar smoke. The legs of the light maplewood table, as the priest explained in the pause produced by my arrival, formed a St. Andrew’s cross, so called after the apostle Andrew, who had suffered martyrdom on an X-shaped cross. The name Andreas — which happens to be mine — aroused laughter and led quite naturally to my joining in the game. As if I hadn’t been late at all, I sat at the table, fanning out my cards.
Before that, I had stood a while on the threshold of the house. This threshold consisted of round stakes of varying thicknesses, each with its specific annual rings, pounded up to their heads into the ground, the whole giving the impression of interlocking wheels, or rather, because of the radial cracks in the wood, of juxtaposed sun disks, framed on the right and left by the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes. Threshold and oleander were lit by a spotlight affixed to the lintel, as an indication that this was the scene of the card game. “Threshold, play on,” read the old-fashioned writing on the door. And: “Card game, lead us.”
A few of the painter’s pictures hung on the window-side wall, where there were no books. Unframed and unglassed, they seemed to be emanations of the wall itself. A rust-brown, a saltpeter-gray, a mold-silver, a brick-red, a resin-yellow. Unlike other pictures, they did not draw the eye to a point but merely reflected colors. These, said the painter, “should be as luminous as the colors in a stained-glass window; that is my ideal.” Though he had lived in the city a long time, he was the stranger to the group. His eyes were invisible, so deeply embedded that their sockets rather resembled the eye-holes in a mask. Sometimes his voice was like that of a child, soft and matter-of-fact; and he never had to clear his throat before starting to speak. He kept holding up the game by discovering in each card dealt him a certain color providing the basis for a lengthy discussion. (Or he would bend down to the carpet and appear to be rubbing its wine red and cobalt blue into his face as a kind of war paint.) He was so short that his head barely rose above the edge of the table. He always stood up to deal. His tricks had to be pushed over to him.
The stairwell had smelled of apples, as strongly as a fruit cellar. The aroma was lost in the room where we were playing but became all the more pungent if one stepped outside. At times, moreover, one caught a whiff, though through a barrier of baffling admixtures, of spices from the food simmering in the kitchen below, to which our host turned his attention whenever he was out of the game: thyme? savory? cinnamon? Once, when the window was opened for a moment, someone was heard to say: “You can smell the snow he predicted.” “He” was the weather broadcaster.
The house was not quiet. Time and again, steps were heard on the winding stairs which led not only to the library but also to the various bedrooms; among them a swift, light scurrying as of an animal’s paws. Then there was a scratching at the outside door, and someone admitted a cat, which lay under the table during the rest of the game. It had a dark head, with yellow eyes; when the eyes were closed, the whole head was black.