And this hour in the depths of the night seemed particularly favorable to her reading. These days one read to get away from the world even less than was perhaps usual; indeed, exactly the opposite was the case. Here stood the chair, with its woodworm holes. Over there the door latch curved downward. Over there was a ladder, leaning as only a ladder can — what an invention, the ladder! On the highway the milk truck loaded with filled milk cans, stacked one on top of the other, clicking as they jostled each other, and among the cans a refugee family, including the author as a child (here sneaking into her book and her story again — but for the last time, please!). Way off, on the farthest horizon, the train rattling by — already in motion for a long, long time, but audible only now as a result of her reading; in one compartment her lover, her missing life companion, without a ticket, without identification, suffering from a high fever, heading in a direction in which he did not want to go, the direction opposite from hers — but at least he was not dead, he was alive, he existed. And impaled on one thick thorn in the acacia avenue outside the window, a very small bird? a cicada? a dragonfly? — The door to the chamber where she lay reading was pushed open, and in streamed human body warmth.
No comfort in her reading-herself-out-into-the-world? Fortunately? Reading to find comfort was not real reading? Another pause at an Arabic word and then the word-sound bursting out: as if precisely these words demanded to be heard. And this explosive voicing of the sound provided additional illumination to the field of vision: each foreign word a sort of flashbulb that gave whatever was in the field of vision (and beyond it) contours, surging with life; as if with the ex-pression, the chair, the ladder, the latch, the thorn, were instantly created anew.
And the nocturnal reader soon fell asleep again, as if after a great expenditure of energy, and slept deeply, deeply. And after her reading she had an image of the bed on which she was lying as a map of the world. But the thorns now, longer and fatter than swords? They belong to an old wooden statue in the church of the Sorbian village, where they pierce, at all different angles, the bodies of martyrs — in the thigh, belly, thorax, neck. Perhaps her reading of Arabic was a mere backdrop. But sometimes this backdrop meant everything.
While she took a shower the next morning (a long, long one), got dressed (slowly, one article at a time), gazed out the open window on the south side (her eyes moving from her fingertips out over the entire plateau, which grew hilly again as it disappeared in the distance), more and more additional images zoomed into her, or merely brushed past her; no more images of martyrdom and menace. These new images were the kind of which she was convinced that one was sufficient to arm her — and not only her, but everyone (see her sense of mission) — for getting through even the most oppressive day.
And again she contemplated the conditions or laws that allowed such an image to seek a person out. The genesis, the origin, the source of these images must be explored at last; a necessity that made one all the freer; as, indeed, every time she said, “I must,” “one must,” a little smile seemed to float around her. At any rate, to be receptive to images one had to remain focused on the matter at hand, whatever it was (see showering, see gazing out the window). And no special slowing-down or even acceleration of the current activity was needed: whether one moved deliberately or rapidly — the decisive factor was to be fully engaged.
Likewise irrelevant were distance and proximity; only the proper interval yielded, or oscillated, the image, and a proper interval could be that of the thread to the needle, hardly a hand’s breadth from the eye: for instance, a bend in the Bidassoa, the river marking the border to the Basque country, appeared — image, a jolt into the world, a jolt, all the more necessary for everyone, into reality.
Another law of sorts that determined the generation of images: they arrived — and again she was sure this was true for everyone — primarily in the morning, in the hour after waking. Though for her, something about the images had changed of late, in the last few years. The images still came as if without reason, unbidden; primarily at the beginning of the day; and so forth. Yet more and more the images originated in one particular part of the world, and those that flashed in from all over the earth — now a tree root in northern Japan, now a rain puddle from a Spanish enclave in North Africa, now a hole in a frozen Finnish lake — were becoming increasingly rare.
She regretted that. It made her uneasy. For the images she had previously received from the world were all linked, as if obedient to a law, with places where, when she had actually been there, she had experienced unity or harmony — of which she had not been aware at the moment — that, too, such a law? Even if these areas were “beautiful,” “lovely,” or even “picturesque” (that in itself already constituting a sort of image of an area), that did not contribute to their subsequent image-worthiness; rather, they had to have left an imprint on you, without your knowledge, from which later a world at peace, an entire world in a still possible peace, or perhaps precisely that “enclosure of the grander time,” will have taken shape, unexpected and unhoped for.
In the meantime now, the images, specifically those morning-fresh ones, were increasingly limited to an area, which, every time she was there, had shown her a peaceful face for only brief moments, but more usually a hostile, menacing one, yes, more than once a cannibalistic face, the face of death.
And this region was the Sierra de Gredos. On some days she reminded herself that she was a survivor; that if she belonged to any people or tribe, it was the tribe of survivors; and that the awareness of having survived, and of surviving along with one unknown survivor or another, far off or nearby, had to be the thought that forged the strongest bonds. And she had become this kind of survivor through her crossings of the Sierra de Gredos.
When she made a point of calling the Sierra to mind, the massif presented primarily memories of adversities, major ones or merely small ones, such as the absence of air in the dense, light-blocking conifer forests, and the wood-roads, where one had felt cheerful only moments earlier, narrowing over the course of a few steps into impassable mud slides. In the images, in the unsummoned image, however: the Sierra de Gredos and peace, or peaceableness, were one and the same; and it could be no other way with these images, this kind of image — a fundamental law of the image: make peace, and hop to it! Take action. Become active. But how? As the image dictates!
“Doesn’t that deserve a serious research project?” she challenged the author. “To find out why, in recent times, most of the images, and not only mine but also everyone else’s, originate in regions where in reality one has experienced hardly anything good but rather the very worst; and, with me as the experimental subject, to study as well why the images from the Sierra de Gredos keep nudging one almost constantly, as insistently and as gently as the wooly heads of a thousand times a thousand sheep, ever since it has been rumored that war is about to break out there?”
The shadows of water-skaters on a riverbed: Where was that? — By a stone bridge, known as the “Roman” bridge, over the río Tormes, which rises in the Sierra and, although in some stretches as wide as a river, remains a rushing brook all the way to the end of the central massif in Barco de Ávila, overflowing into innumerable still pools. — A fawn, separated from its mother, its coat soaked in a downpour, standing a hand’s breadth from her, likewise drenched, the animal too weak to flee, or merely curious: Where was that? — On a stone-paved road. A stone-paved road; in the mountains? yes, right below Puerto del Pico, the main pass through the Sierra de Gredos; the flagstones cracked in many places, some missing, truly the only remnant in the Sierra of the Roman colonial era, a Roman road winding down the southern flank in lasso-like S-curves, the “calzada romana,” and, unlike the modern road over the pass, clearly part of the mountain range even two thousand years ago, less built there than simply laid along the slopes, following what was already present, sketched out beforehand by nature. — On a wall above an outdoor sink, a broken mirror, reflecting the crowns of the fir trees in the sun, and behind them, multiplied by the cracks, the pyramid-shaped summit of Pico de Almanzor: Where was that? — Back by the main river of the Sierra de Gredos, the río Tormes, at a children’s summer camp, deserted long since when she hiked past it, or closed down, and not only because it is autumn (no, it is not “autumn”; no specific season ever appears in the images), the faucets either unscrewed or without water, the mirror shards opposite her at hip level, so that she must bend over (“I must”—she smiles), to look at herself; above her head the Almanzor forming a tricorn hat.