Fear for her brother: for in the end he had taken to signing his letters to her with an expression that had been popular long ago, used to brand history’s notorious evildoers: “an enemy of mankind.” And since the contents of these letters seemed to fit this expression more and more — though in a sort of code; the two of them had had a secret language since childhood — his sister finally could not help believing it, not completely, but almost: yes, her brother, the one with the litany of apple varieties, the one who had sat next to her for years in the dark of night, had really and truly become an enemy of mankind. And he would not be satisfied to leave it at that colorful epithet. Yes, wasn’t her brother aware that, at the time of this book, fighting against anything or for anything was no longer possible? And that if he died in such a fight, his death would move no one — except her: as a man without parents, he was no victim, was a desperado from the outset; the death of a man without parents held no significance and did not count.
But for now he was traveling through the night with the impertinence of a newly released prisoner. It was as if there were no differences or transitions between the airplane ride at the beginning, then the trip in a car with a chauffeur, then walking, then riding again. He seemed to be swept along in a single, expansive, gravity-free movement. As he rode, sitting by the window on the night bus, for instance, where the passengers all became people like him, whatever they might be otherwise, he was also striding along with airborne hundred-yard steps, which ran through his head like a sort of counting song, from one into the thousands. And in walking down the dark roads he was constantly rolling on the balls of his feet. And it could also happen that, as he continued along the shoulder of a nocturnal highway, he might suddenly hop on one leg, as if a game of hopscotch were marked out in chalk on the asphalt.
Even when he walked backward for a stretch — a habit he shared with his sister — it was less for the purpose of flagging down a car than out of high spirits. During his repeated sprints he would also run backward, often for an entire nocturnal mile, with his back to the next border he would have to cross. Borders were his element, just as the night was. The more notorious a border, the more it attracted him. Where most others disguised themselves before reaching the border, cloaked themselves or hid (for example, under a tarpaulin on a truck, as the author had done as a child, or in some other way), he presented himself if possible even more elegantly than usual, and moved with the openness of one who feels at home at borders, and during this first night’s journey also with challenging bravado: “Nothing can happen to me. No one will stop me. I have nothing to lose.”
While it was one of the aging author’s nightmares to be forced to cross that forbidden and dangerous border of his childhood again, and this time in the middle of the night, on foot and alone, in a suit, shirt, and tie (but where, for God’s sake, are his shoes and socks? — doubly nightmarish!), the newly released prisoner approached such a border like the fulfillment of a wish-dream, and in this dream he then crossed the bridge over the border-marking river like a man without a care in the world, barefoot, his shoes in his hand, and no one stopped him — it was night, after all, and nocturnal borders could only be his accomplices; and besides, he had a passport that was still valid, if just barely, and besides, he had served his time, and besides, he had been convicted in a different country altogether.
Not a soul, also no vehicle, during the first seven nocturnal miles after the border crossing. Moonset. Deepest, most silent night. Sporadic glitter of mica in the tar for a short distance around, accompanying the pedestrian. No sound but that of his still-bare feet; not even that of a night plane high in the sky — no airplane flew over this country, had not for a long time now, not even by day.
Then a cry, of alarm? of joy?: someone was walking along the nocturnal road, ten paces ahead of him, and as he caught up with the figure in a single stride, she turned toward him, her face glowing in the pitch darkness, and he recognized, no, it struck him: a girl, no longer a child, but as young as a person can possibly be, a human being — his sister’s child. The cry — if it was a cry at all — had come neither from her nor from him.
“The history of the world is a mess,” he had written to his sister from prison one time, using no code for a change. “The race of man is an evil apparition and deserves to be wiped out.” In this nocturnal moment, however, he saw his own dictum as inoperative, and how. The face before him signified: he would not kill, not yet. A major act of violence was not for him, not yet. First he would sit down with his sister’s child, at the “Night-Travelers’ Lodge” up ahead.
9
As she did almost every night, she awoke after a couple of hours of deep sleep. She groped for the light switch, noticing only then that she was not sleeping in her own bed; that she was not at home. The initial discomfiture gave way to astonishment, and the astonishment energized her.
She sat up and fished the Arabic book from the citadel room’s uneven floor — fished: that was how high the bed was, and how far below the book. The child on the plane to Valladolid had spoken the truth: the book did not smell of her. It smelled of her vanished daughter. The girl had been reading it, lesson after lesson, example after example, quotation after quotation (the fragments of classical Arabic poetry with which every lesson ended). The book had been systematically studied and mined by her, word for word; traced; copied; glossed; threaded with marginal notes that eventually came to mean as much as, and then clearly more than, the print on the page, and referred only vaguely or not at all, or not obviously, to the text. The book — a mere brochure, actually — looked even from the outside as if it had been carded, kneaded, pulled lengthwise and widthwise and licked, as it were; rained on and snowed on.
And inside the covers things were even more exciting: the impression of an athletic contest continuing page after page, a wrestling match to the bitter end, which also had something joyful about it, not only because of the constantly changing pencil colors and the changing script, from Roman to Arabic, from Greek to shorthand.
And again from the outside, from the side, one could see where the reading had stopped, even before the book’s midpoint: the part that had been read or explored was gray — no, not “dirty gray”—, the pages curved, bent, thickened, crisscrossed, and sprinkled with little strokes or dots — traces of the marginal glosses inside, which often wanted to spill over the edges; then a white borderline, and after that nothing but the unread white layers; the gray next to this white like a different rock stratum; a different one? no, the same material in both layers of the brochure, with one layer simply transformed and corrugated by chemistry and warmth, the chemistry of sweat from the reading finger lingering for hours on a single pair of pages, the warmth of the writing hand.
And the mother took up the reading where her child had left off. She, however, never added anything to what she read. No underlining. She even opened the book carefully, her fingers moving as if she were wearing gloves. Reading the book from a distance, looking into it as into a remote niche. Anything not to leave traces. Nonetheless, a reading second to none: spelling out, with lips moving silently, bursting out with a word-sound here and there, and then again, and again, pausing, her eyes raised from the book as she mulled over the section she had just read, in its context, the more immediate and the wider one.