Along with the few other passengers, the child stood up, having promptly closed the comic book. But in the moment immediately before that, he had glanced from the page he had just read to the next and read it, skimmed it, as if he wanted to soak it up like a map showing the direction in which he was to strike out.
“Vladimir!” she said, and that indeed turned out to be one of his several names, as Ablaha, Aruba, and Ahada were hers. And suddenly a dream from the previous night came to her, in which she had set fire to a child, first hesitantly, then mechanically, carrying out an order—“It is the law”—until the child and its little animal were in flames. How violent her dreams had become of late, and not only hers? With other people, was it not merely their dreams? And now at least this child here was as unharmed and healthy as a child can be, and as only a child can look. And they were seeing each other at this moment for the last time. I, on the other hand, have seen them forever.
7
It was almost night on the great plain of Valladolid. In the airport, the conveyor belt had clattered like a mill wheel. Next to the airfield a bonfire was burning. Tree roots from the steppe were being burned. The flames were small, whitish blue, and very hot. This fire had been going for several days. Soldiers were standing nearby, warming themselves. It was winter on the plateau, too. Valladolid: seven hundred meters above sea level. Other soldiers were standing in the small arrival lounge, which was also the departure lounge, keeping in the background, half in the shadows, and unarmed. She was the first to set foot outside the terminal; all the other passengers were still waiting for their luggage. There was no wind. A single bush, shudjaira in Arabic, was swaying violently next to several other bushes that were not moving at all. A very large, heavy bird had flown out of it just moments before. And the bush is still shaking and quaking.
And the stranger did not strike out in the direction of Valladolid. She is walking along the highway, tariq hamm, which branches off just past the airport into the desert, sahra, no, the steppe, into the grassland. And then someone ran after her, a man with a suitcase, one of the people from the plane. And she turned and smiled, but the smile was not meant for him. And she unlocked a vehicle parked, or standing, in the tall grass among a hundred and twelve wrecks, apparently ready to drive, a Landrover built in the year such-and-such, from the Santana Works in Linares, mud-colored like a military vehicle, but without any lettering.
And she had the man climb in next to her with his suitcase and drove off, heading almost due southwest, in the direction of Salamanca, Piedrahita, Milesevo, Sopochana, Nuevo Bazar, Sierra de Gredos. Above her the first stars were out. And next to her flowed the río Pisuerga, which soon merged with the great río Duero. And the road was increasingly free of traffic, because of a war? harb in Arabic, don’t know, don’t know what that is, either, a “war.” And the Arabic book in her knapsack did not smell of her, the stranger, not in the slightest.
All during the flight the heroine had expected that when she left the plane she would suddenly see her brother behind her. In her mind’s eye she pictured him initially striking out in the same direction as she had taken and sitting in the same aircraft, after changing planes. This image was so powerful that she assumed the shouting behind her was part of it, and only much later, when the shout was repeated over and over, did she turn to look. No, it did not come from her brother.
But the man who was calling to her was also no stranger. It was one of her former clients, once a major entrepreneur who had then gone bankrupt. (In the meantime there were hardly any entrepreneurs left, at most manufacturers and vendors of toys of all kinds — with almost every item, every product, the main selling point was no longer its usefulness or nutritional or some other value, but its value as a plaything, or as a brand, or as a pastime — and swarming around the leaders in the toy business were the hordes of game players and speculators.)
From a certain moment on, she had refused to extend him credit. And besides, he was already so deeply in debt to her bank that the bank seized all his company’s assets and then almost all his personal property. He viewed her, the head of the bank, as responsible for his failure. Against the background of all his faceless competitors, who had in fact collapsed even before he did, and more wretchedly, the victims of impersonal market forces, of an economic situation to which one could not attribute blame or malice, this woman was the only person, the only individual who now, embodying these incomprehensible forces, but also as a particular being, or beast, of flesh and blood, represented something he could identify as his adversary, his destroyer, his executioner. He hounded her for years, and not only with letters. He had to get revenge, but did not know exactly how. Revenge, that was almost his only thought during that entire time.
But no action to match the thought occurred to him. With this woman, there could be no question of killing or beating or rape, of setting her house on fire or — the only thing he had briefly considered — kidnapping her child. All that remained was to wait for her punishment to be carried out by someone else, someone who had also been plunged into misery, or perhaps by the gods, or, best of all, by her herself, for with the passage of time her guilt vis-à-vis him had to become unbearable; at the thought of the injustice she had done him, one day, and he hoped it would be soon, she would throw herself off the roof of her office building into the confluence of the two rivers or, an even more delicious prospect, go stark, raving mad.
For the time being he took satisfaction in seeing her — this woman who could sometimes be remarkably clumsy — stumble, lose a shoe, bump into a door frame, try to open a door by pulling it instead of pushing, or, conversely, pushing instead of pulling; he witnessed such incidents from time to time, if only from a distance, or even only on television. Village bumpkin! A village bumpkin has me on her conscience! And upon hearing the news of her (almost grown-up) daughter’s going missing and then disappearing altogether, he had had no thought at all, or at least none that he put in words. Everything had gone very still inside him, and from that moment on had remained so, as far as that “evil woman” was concerned. No more letters. Once, in the company of a former competitor, who had also been dropped by her and then began to spew hate and threats, the silence in which he listened to the other man was such that the latter felt compelled to interrupt his tirade and say, “But let us speak of something more pleasant!” In the meantime, however, he had finally launched a new company, producing toys for all ages, from the youngest to the most doddering.
Outside the Valladolid airport, the once and future business leader called after her, not because he was sure of having recognized her but because he was not sure it was she. Just as she was probably preoccupied at the moment with her recently released brother, he was preoccupied with her, and not only at that moment, but so much so that if she were to be suddenly standing before him, he would most likely assume she was a look-alike or a mere apparition. And indeed, each time one saw her, she looked so different that at first one took her for someone else altogether, someone completely unfamiliar; and each time, her appearance of the moment made such a deep impression that the next time, one again could not (and did not) associate her appearance with the earlier one.
She, however, had recognized him at once. And he identified her from the uncomplicated way she behaved toward him after that glance of recognition: as if he were still her client, and a good one, an important one actually. The friendly manner in which she invited him into the Landrover was not that of a powerful person or one of higher station but of one who was at his service; as if she still cared about managing his money, and, as his money manager, famous banker or not, were of course at his service as no one else was; as if this service were second nature to her by now, or had always been.