Not until much later did she find here and there some who shared her little idiosyncrasies when it came to ways of life. But that was in a period when she had long since ceased to be surprised and annoyed that no one cared to imitate her. That, for example, she kept the identity of her child’s father a secret: in those days quite a few women did the same; and, like her, these women managed to live without a man. Another, rather small, example, more a feature of everyday life than of the larger arc of life: among a minority (though not a statistically relevant one, and not merely in her region but throughout the world), it had become the custom not to listen to music anymore, either at home or at concerts; merely the custom or a deliberately chosen way of life? A way of life. And a further, even more insignificant, example: another tiny minority had taken to turning off the lights in their houses and simply sitting quietly in the dark, at a window or in front of a screen: a mere habit or a way of life? A way of life.
Another such new or old way of life could be seen in the way she set out for the airport now. She walked to the airport, which lay almost half a day’s journey on foot from her city in the northwest; she hiked to her plane. She had started undertaking such hikes long before this, whenever she had time, and as we know, she always had plenty of time.
She had undertaken the first such hike in Berlin, when she walked from a street off the Kurfürstendamm all the way to the entrance to Tegel Airport. Although it was a weekday, in her memory it became a Sunday. She followed Schloss-Strasse, looped around Charlottenburg Palace, first taking a slight detour into the Egyptian Museum, followed Tegeler Weg along the perimeter of the palace grounds, unexpectedly found herself walking along the Spree — which she remembered from her childhood in the Sorbian village as a rivulet, unprepossessing yet deep — almost close enough for dipping one’s hand into and at the same time fast-moving, winding, meandering, alternating between river-breadth and brook-narrowness, then, before the branching-off of the West Harbor Canal, even coming up with a real island, the water pulsing westward in wide, rhythmic curves, following the drainage bed of the ancient river valley, with a hint of long ago in the wind currents and the shimmering at the bends, which detracted not at all from its presentness. And onward, then as now, turning north, away from the Spree, on the shoulder of the city autobahn, with the Jungfernheide on the left and Plötzensee on the right — was she still in Berlin? — scrambling half-illegally through allotment gardens and over fences, pinching fruit from the trees, slipping under barbed wire, dodging ferocious dogs (although after their first, feigned lunging they backed off even faster, into the farthest corner), shouting at fleeing rabbits, whereupon these halted just before their bramble bush and pricked up their ears, and a few moments later came the automatic doors of the terminal, with its monitors and loudspeaker announcements like “Moscow,” “Teneriffe,” “Faro,” “Antalya,” “Baghdad” (as she was still crawling through the brambles onto the tarmac, the destinations were being called out, sounding as though they were coming from the airplane engines just being started above her head).
Later she almost preferred walking home after a landing in her area, often hiking from the runway over hill and dale straight to her house. And in this practice, too, she was not alone. By now quite a few people made their way home in this fashion, especially after long trips; hiked the last stretch, which could sometimes take longer than the whole flight. Besides, when going in this direction one had no need to fear arriving in a crowd, as could happen at the airport: initially one might be more or less accompanied by others, in a fairly large (though usually rather small) group, but then one person after another would peel off, and one would reach one’s destination alone.
Now homecomers of this sort could also be recognized even at a distance by their (deceptively) light luggage, which nonetheless was clearly luggage, well traveled (without stickers), and by a certain self-assurance, almost arrogance, in their gait that allowed them to walk along the shoulder without wasting so much as a sideways glance at the vehicles rushing by them, often passing perilously close on purpose and honking senselessly. Among themselves, too, they acknowledged each other at most with a once-over out of the corner of the eye: such an acknowledgment providing a sort of sustenance to keep them going.
Nevertheless she then wanted to persuade the author of her story to come up with a different beginning for her journey: hadn’t too much been revealed already, less about her — she perhaps had something entirely different to reveal — than about the circumstances prevailing at the time, which, as previously mentioned, were supposed to be portrayed more “ex negativo,” through things that did not make up the foreground? The author: “But isn’t that what has just been described?”—She: “Why not let me take a boat down the river? or: ‘She walked to the large new bus station on the very edge of the city, where buses depart several times a week for all the other riverport cities on the continent: for Belgrade, for Vienna, for Düsseldorf, for Budapest, for Saragossa, for Seville, and across to Tangiers by ferry, each of these modern buses more fantastical or dreamlike than the one before, hardly recognizable as buses anymore, interplanetary transport modules — only the clock in the bus station still the same as when I moved here a decade and a half ago, still showing the wrong time, five hours fast, or seven hours slow.’”
The author: “But what will happen to the message of your book?” —She: “What message?”—The author: “For instance the one about the new or recaptured ways of life.”—She: “Well, have you ever had a message?” —The author: “Yes, messages and more messages. But only the kind my book unexpectedly presented to me.”—She: “Happy messages?” —The author: “Up to now, almost exclusively happy ones.”
With scratched forehead and muddy boots, her, and our, arrival at the terminal. So much fresh air earlier, and now, from one step to the next, in a different element. Element? Almost exclusively revolving doors now, holding back the world outside. But even where an old-style door stood open for a bit, no breath of air made its way into the hall. On the gleaming floor no footprints but hers. Nothing but scrape marks from suitcase wheels and luggage carts. Not a speck of free space; every inch of the airport floor occupied by people walking, standing, queueing up, running — each sticking to the beeline to which he or she had laid claim. Many talking loudly to themselves — no, they were shouting at people who were not there. But not every one with a hand to one ear was holding a so-called mobile telephone: here and there amid the racket a person simply cupped his hand over his ear and kept silent.
In one place there were drops of what looked like a nosebleed, in a dice pattern: one of the passengers, of whom there were not a few, had walked into an interior glass wall, perhaps seeing a reflection of the outside and thinking he was outdoors? On all sides, illuminated maps of the world and globes rotating as if four-dimensionally — was this the atlas of distant places from her childhood? Or is the atlas of distant places instead the view from my window here? Where are you all trying to get to, with destinations you have been talked into or forced to choose, at times, on days, and for a length of time over which you also have no control, that you must allow others to determine, and all of which — destination, departure and arrival time, duration — have nothing to do with your former and perhaps persisting love of travel, as well as your still possible spontaneous longing to set out, rendered impossible, however, by this dictatorship of money and the computer? Didn’t the current restrictions on travel conflict with the right to freedom of choice, one of the fundamental rights enumerated in democratic constitutions, and the need for spontaneity — the pleasure of surprising oneself and others? (“End of message”)