One of these characters took his morning jog, dressed accordingly, by zigzagging through the valley where the host country’s kings were buried (a photo that later appeared on the dust jacket of his how-to book for joggers). A picture of another leader made the rounds showing him in a bomber flying over a country that had been almost completely wiped out in the last world war by his forefathers. He was laughing uproariously, his feet in tennis shoes propped on the improvised map table at 5,000 meters. A third leader (wasn’t it always the same one) could be seen at a compulsory peace conference jabbing the host in the chest with both hands, one finger on each hand extended like a dagger. And a fourth, while touring a foreign city destroyed in civil unrest, did not go on foot or by car but had himself pulled in a small cart by a couple of natives, so that he towered above the crowd, with an expression on his face as if he were also the camera by which he was having himself filmed for television, along with the city and the victims.
And the fighter-bombers now far below the passenger plane, menacingly close to the plateau: Wasn’t this the long-awaited open war against the legendary people — these days a mere tribe, a mere sect — that had allegedly retreated into the most remote reaches of the Sierra de Gredos?
6
She had never spoken of the fact that she had another brother. In all the articles and brochures featuring her, the only brothers mentioned were the alleged microchip — half brother and the one who had died as a small child in an automobile accident, along with her parents. She was the eldest of the three siblings; the unmentioned brother was the youngest, born just before the parents’ death, and plucked unscathed from the wreck.
On the very day in January on which she set out on her portentous journey, her brother was released from the prison, or “detention center.” For several years he had been locked up there as a “terrorist,” not merely over the hills and far away but in another country. She to the author: in the accounts of herself and her business prowess her brother had obviously had no place. But now he was to appear in her book. She had not withheld information about him because she was ashamed of him. (On the contrary? Also not on the contrary.) And she wished, she wanted her brother not to be merely mentioned in the current book, “my definitive book,” but rather to figure as one of the main characters, “of course along with me and also various others.”
What should be told about him? The events leading from his childhood up to his crime, from the trial to the completion of his sentence? Primarily his story from the current morning on, when he steps through the narrow discharge gate of the “Institution for Implementation of Justice” a free man, his hands now free like hers, over the hills and far away and even beyond the dunes. Unlike the visitors’ gate, which is as wide as a barn door and opens onto the beltway, this gate lets out into a cemetery, the size of about ten stadiums, with light-colored smoke eddying at that moment from the crematorium there, in which flakes of rust mingle with snowflakes, the smoke now intersected abruptly by a flight of wild doves, shimmering in exactly the same color, as if the birds had just been given birth to by the smoke or had slipped out of their shells there.
“Along with my adventurous journey I want you to tell my brother’s as well,” she directed the author, “describing how he will have made his way from the prison gate across very different lands, during the prewar period and later in the middle of war, to the country he had chosen in his youth as his future home — but he is still young, of course!”—The author: “But how? Should I invent a story?”—She: “Don’t pretend to be dense! And stop making yourself out again to be more insignificant than you are! If I picked you to be the author, you may be sure I had my reasons.”—“And what were they?”—“Although you may have invented a detail or two in your books from time to time, and perhaps even everything (I have not the slightest interest in knowing that): all in all, your long tales have always been accurate, and in particular will remain accurate for the foreseeable future, infinitely more accurate or real than any conceivable factual accounts, and they were, and are, also infinitely more real than the alleged reality that people boast one can touch and smell.”
The author: “But I do want to capture something you can touch and smell.”—She: “You’re splitting hairs again. Fortunately you do this only in conversation, not in your writing! Enough! There is a kind of touching and smelling that is different from grabbing and sniffing out. And besides, you are famous for being able to take a gesture, a hint of movement, a voice — that has come to you from afar, for only an instant, often only from hearsay — especially the gesture, movement, or voice of a stranger, and transform yourself completely into the other person. Someone down at the other end of the street limps ever so slightly, and you embody him here until he has disappeared around the corner, and long after he is gone. That is how my brother, just released from prison, stepped out of the cemetery that morning—”—The author: “—which lay beyond the Baltic dunes, and in heavy snow pressed the access code on the hand telephone given him as a going-away present by one of the guards.”—She: “You fool!”—The author: “But that is what happened, is it not?”—She: “Yes, that is what happened.”
She had visited her brother often during his years of incarceration. Each time it had been a long and momentous journey; and she wanted from now on to undertake only this kind of journey, if any at all, not necessarily to some legendary foreign prison or other, but certainly journeys with an undercurrent of uncertainty, fear, sorrow, pain, and the threat of no return.
She had stolen time for these visits to her brother from her busy schedule at the big bank. Flying in the morning into the city where the prison was located and returning, at the latest, on the evening flight. One time she arrived at the visitors’ gate after two hours on the plane and a two-hour taxi ride and did not see the usual long line. She was the first one there that day, and felt exultant. It turned out to be the only day of the week without visiting hours. And she had to go back that same evening. No admittance, no exception, even for her. She walked around the entire facility, the size of a small town and heavily guarded, sat on a bench in the cemetery, where she ate an apple and dozed off briefly; not a sound from behind the walls, and yet the sense of being close to her imprisoned brother as hardly ever before; in her one-minute dream on the cemetery bench he was bending over her and breathing on her.
Another time, as a participant in the annual conference of the World or Universal Bank, being held in the prison city, she was able to stay overnight, and took a penthouse suite in a hotel in the dunes offering a view of both the sea and the compound, with its electrified fence, searchlights, and watchtowers. At sunrise the rolling North and Baltic seas in the distance, and the momentary reflection of the prisoners taking their morning exercise — they themselves not visible — in the tilted sight-blocking screens mounted atop the far side of the wall over there, where for short stretches they consisted not of concrete but of smoked glass. Allowed in then, after hours taken up with the usual security checks and backups — one stalled line after the other, in the course of which the visitors at a standstill there eventually developed a kind of tribal solidarity, not only with the prisoners they were waiting to visit but also among themselves — allowed in and escorted to the so-called visitation room in groups of five or six at a time; in actuality it is a windowless shed, divided by a row of tables and chairs, and down the middle of the tables a glass panel, without an opening for speaking through; in the case of short prisoners or visitors, the top above the level of their heads; and this shed suddenly full to bursting with the five or six visitors on one side and the five or six prisoners on the other side of the panel (to which had to be added two guards on the right and left flanks); these dozen people all talking at once, in pairs, with a hug hardly possible because of the high panel separating them, at most a quick brushing over the hair or a stroking of the forehead with outstretched fingertips; no talking, just a din, increasing steadily during the brief visiting period, almost always cut short because of the noise; each visitor had to drown out the others to be heard at least somewhat by his imprisoned family member, or vice versa; but given the general necessity for shouting and yelling, with more and more words becoming incomprehensible, and even lip movements impossible to decipher after a while, because the mouths were opened so wide; at the same time the entire clan pretending to understand and make sense of what was being said amid the racket in the shed; and yet at the same time, even though they were now standing and speaking over the glass panel, on tiptoe, with one ear long since within spitting distance of the speaker-shouter, not making out a single word; and not even hearing their own words as they uttered a response at random, not a single word — and then “Time’s up!” and the next instant the prisoners, without being able to exchange even a last glance, already out of the room and on their way back to their cells; now deafening silence, in which each visitor separately, no longer part of a family or a clan, will have departed in a daze, making for the outside, for freedom.