The child in the seat next to her unbuttoned his shirt. Curled up on his naked chest was a dormouse, squirrel-like but smaller, its tail shorter but all the bushier. The animal was breathing; it was alive; it was sleeping; its sharp claws partially extended, harmlessly touching the child’s skin; its soft fur ruffled by the air from the vent above them.
The child gazed unblinking at the woman next to him and said, “You will never go home. You are lost. But perhaps you are not yet lost, not completely. Why are you so alone? Not even in a dream have I met anyone so alone. And perhaps you will die and be even more alone in dying. Without anyone. La-Ahad. Ahada, another of your assumed names. And what beautiful and tender hands you have. And what gentle eyes — like those of people who doubt they will return home.”
And while the unknown child continued to speak, softly yet distinctly, she noticed that for the first time, since when? yes, since when? she was close to tears. And she was utterly amazed; and just this once she wanted to be seen this way on film, in a full-screen close-up. The author: “Should this go in the book? May it?”—She: “Yes.”
While the child was speaking, sentence after sentence, a strip of light traveled beneath the plane, which was flying at a perceptibly lower altitude now, moved across the plateau, and caused a band of asphalt to shimmer, a reservoir to glitter, an irrigation canal to flash. A topsy-turvy new world on the first day of the journey (but hadn’t several days passed already?): the sky above the glass roof almost black as night, with a hint of the first stars, and down below the sunlit earth. In similar fashion, on the way to the airport, an ancient crone, without her dentures, had come toward her, driving a factory-new race car, as if trying to set a new record, the car’s number emblazoned from stem to stern. And similarly, that morning the outskirts’ troop of drunks had been hauling cases of beverages from the supermarket to their lairs in the woods — without exception bottles of mineral water. And was it possible?: a flock of wild geese, flying past the plane window in a long, jagged V, from right to left: “Arabic writing,” the boy commented. And could there be such a thing?: in the same fashion a swarm of leaves swept by the window, holm oak leaves typical of the plateau? And where and since when did this exist?: and next, a pale-pink drift of snowflake-like blossoms, as if the almonds were in bloom and almost finished blooming, now in late February, early March.
The child had moved on to another subject some time ago. He was talking about money. — The author: “Didn’t you stipulate that this topic should be kept out of your book, at most implied, through not being mentioned?” —She: “At a few points it belongs in the story. And this was just such an exception.” The monologue of the child in the seat next to her began with his taking a packet of banknotes from the purse hanging around his neck. Leafing through them, he exclaimed, “Oh, money of mine!” The author, interrupting, to her: “And what would be your equivalent exclamation?” —She: “Oh, dear, money. Ja, an-nuqud. And yours?”—The author: “Ah, money!”
The child said more or less the following: “My money is nice to look at. And it has such a friendly feel to it, my money does. And it does me so much good, my money, my cash money. It is my first money. And it is money I earned myself. I did not find my money. I did not steal my money. And my money was not given to me, either. For my first money they wanted to open an account for me and deposit my money in it. If my money had been a gift, I would have said yes at once. But because I worked for my money, giving lessons in math, Russian, and Spanish, shoveling snow, helping with the potato harvest, herding cows in the pasture, mucking out the barn, I wanted to see my money, each bill and even the smallest coin. And I insisted that my cash be given to me in person each time, on the spot, right after the completion of every job, without involving anyone else. When I saw other people going up to the counter in the bank with their money in bundles and briefcases, to get rid of their banknotes in exchange for a teller’s receipt, in my eyes that meant it was not money they had earned themselves but dirty money. Every one of them, I thought, was bringing to the bank money that had been either found or stolen or extorted — at any rate it was not theirs, and they converted it into mere numbers, to launder it, by the numbers. But my money, even if it looked a bit soiled on the surface, was clean money. And even if a bill had really and truly been dirty in the hands of a previous owner, as my banknote it was washed clean in the twinkling of an eye, and, unlike at the bank, the whole thing was on the up and up. When I exchange my money, it is only from coins to bills. I know that you are one of the few people who no longer touch money, in the form of either coins or banknotes; who no longer even carry credit cards; and whose fingerprints are accepted all over the world as a form of payment. But how beautiful my money is. And you do me so much good, money of mine, my cash money.”
She closed her eyes and promptly opened them again. A gull, white as ocean spray, flew past her porthole, and this in the middle of the plateau, far inland. But of course there were reservoirs even here, and not all the rivers had dried up. If they had ever been aloft, now the passengers were no longer flying. Without having noticeably touched down, the aircraft was taxiing along a rather narrow landing strip far from the city, at first speeding like a race car, then, on rather bumpy ground, bouncing along evenly as it slowed and circled the terminal, as if they were on an old bus with ruined springs or in a carriage, an impression that was reinforced when, as the propeller vanes became visible — prop planes were in style again — they appeared to be turning backward, like wagon wheels in Westerns. It was a small airport by today’s standards, when even midsize cities had runways stretching from one horizon to the other, unusually small, surrounded on all sides by empty steppe, with at most a couple of rusty tin shacks and automobile carcasses, a few stalks of steppe grass so high they almost grazed the window. And this prop plane was that low to the ground, although it was the largest thing on the broad field, with nothing else around but a few one- or two-seaters.
And yet this was the airport of Valladolid, formerly the capital of the plateau region, the city of princes and kings, and today a city of half a million?! For almost every crossing of the Sierra de Gredos she had landed here rather than in Madrid. But the last time was now several years in the past. And as if in keeping with the topsy-turvy new world: the Valladolid airport had not been expanded but instead been reduced considerably in size — just as the local soccer team (of which she was fond, for no particular reason, and whose fortunes she followed on the Internet) had meanwhile slipped from the top league to the third, and any local princes and kings one approached would have been transformed instantly into frogs if one had kissed them.
Ceremonial taxiing around the steppe airport, as if to salute every side. Meanwhile the child next to her was reading a comic book. He had already read these pictorial stories at the beginning of the trip, and now he was rereading them. He flipped the pages rapidly, yet it was clear that he was absorbing each frame completely. He swallowed image after image with his eyes, blinking after each narrated event. Only toward the end of each story did he slow down. And once the story was finished, the child did not go right on to the next, as one might have expected, but paused for a while, motionless, his eyeballs protruding as if made of glass, even holding his breath, which he released late, audibly even, amid the plane’s taxiing roar, a prolonged sigh. (And she noticed that she involuntarily sighed with him, almost silently.) Before the child reader finished the last story, the aircraft came to a stop and the signal for deplaning sounded. Out on the airfield, there were hares and foxes in the high grass, a sight that had vanished from airfields everywhere else.