Even discounting the pandemonium, she could follow little of what her brother said, and less with each visit. For one thing, he expressed himself more and more in the language of his chosen country (just as in the letters he wrote her, which she had to have translated — a problem: because outside that country hardly anyone knew the language, and anyone who did kept the knowledge to himself like a guilty or shameful secret). And then, with the passing years in the distant penitentiary, her brother expressed himself more and more exclusively in riddles and incomprehensible images — yet spoke and wrote in the same quiet rhythm as before (not falling silent or becoming frenetic).
Just moments ago his glowing eyes and his almost elegant, collarless white shirt, not at all prison-like, in the shed steaming with sweat and spittle, and a few heartbeats later she was in the parking lot outside the visitors’ entrance, facing the flags of all nations displayed outside the luxury hotel diagonally across the way (from the outside, the prison, built far below street level, was unobtrusive and easily overlooked); the chauffeur of a hired limousine waiting for her, and a few breaths later opening the door for her by the seaside conference center, where she would deliver her keynote address on riddles so unlike her brother’s: “The Riddle of Money”; the hands of brother and sister clutching each other above the dividing panel, the leathery softness of the limousine, with classical music (immediately turned off on her command), the flashbulbs going off around her, the star of the conference, and all as if in the same moment.
In the meantime, however, the chauffeur had unexpectedly revealed that he was intimately acquainted with the penitentiary, as a former guard, also with the visitors’ shed, known to all as the “port of good fortune.”
On the morning of his release, her brother probably did step through the special discharge gate into the cemetery by the sea. But he was not alone. Two plainclothes policemen and a staffer from the attorney general’s office of the country that had incarcerated him escorted him. He did not walk through the cemetery to the highway, but was led straight from the gate to a car just then parking along the first row of graves. The car was not a hearse, and he was driven by the shortest route to the main airport. (The bird that had come flying out of the smoke from the crematorium, as if having just slipped out of its shell there, had not been a dove.)
At the airport ticket counter her brother was handed a passport from the country he had chosen as his home. That country no longer existed as an independent entity. During his imprisonment it had been annexed to another, newly created, country. His passport was no longer valid. The country to which he was to be deported now, bordering his homeland, was the only one on the continent where his passport would still be accepted temporarily as identification (though it was still valid in an island republic near the South Pole and in two dwarf states, one in the Himalayas and one that had been an Indian reservation and had declared its independence from the United States).
The official from the attorney general’s office read her brother the deportation order. Henceforth he was forbidden to set foot on the soil of this country. If he ever again created the situation that had led to the years of incarceration, it was not merely not out of the question but a likelihood bordering on certainty that he would forthwith be convicted of a criminal offense, just as before. Away to his homeland with him — wherever that might be; to his family, wherever some of them might still be found: after landing he would make his way to them, somehow or other. And thus her brother was deported that morning by air, in downright princely fashion, with a free ticket, and, also in princely fashion, alone, without any possibility of return? without any necessity to return; free, freer than he had ever been.
And no one had given him a hand telephone as a going-away present, certainly no cell-unlocker. He could have used the phone to call his girlfriend of many years, down below in the prison city on the northeastern sea, whose houses now, from the plane, which had immediately climbed very high into the clear sky (no, it was not snowing that day), had blurred with the ocean foam.
But telephoning was forbidden on board, and a hand telephone like that would have been no good for a call from the other country, either. His sister did not know who his girlfriend was, or whether she even existed. As she flew high over the Iberian plateau — with the tracery of its arid valleys so clear from certain angles, as were their likewise arid, lichen-white side branches, that one could have the impression of being very close to the ground, with these patterns almost near enough to touch, in the form of what had been a primeval forest, never cut but long since turned skeletal, from which clouds of wood dust swirled, stirred up by the airstream—, her brother was sitting, like her, at a porthole, perhaps above a similar, and why not the same? barren residual landscape. His skin was slightly tanned as always, despite the winter and his life in confinement, not merely from the outdoor work of the last few weeks, and he was wearing his eternal white collarless shirt of heavy fustian, which was never even slightly dirty, at most a bit frayed (and therefore all the more elegant), and today, in celebration of his journey into the unknown, he had on over it a claret jacket and a long, black, fur-trimmed coat, the personification of elegance, not only compared to her, who today as always, and at least in this respect similar to him, has some unusual feature, more noticeable than their grandfather’s checkered handkerchief, a seemingly conscious and intentional clownlike touch or even something comical, in the present case, for instance, the partial wing of a bird of prey that she stuck into her belt that morning in the hurricane forest and later into her bosom.
“Write that I, she, this woman, suddenly felt a hand touching the feathers and my breast, and then actually saw it, too,” she told the author. It was a child’s hand. The child was sitting next to her. This hand, small though it was, was unusually warm. “And I noticed that my own hands, whose warmth others immediately remark upon, were unusually cold. They had become so cold during the flight that they ached down to the bones. And the unknown child now took my fingers without more ado and warmed them between his own.”