On the other hand she wished and wanted her story and ours to be set in a transitional period — a transitional period when there were still, and once again, surprises. “As you know, in the earthshaking periods, those in which this story is not to take place,” she explained, “there are no more lovely surprises.”
2
Now, as the book’s time frame opened, a sound reverberated through the predawn garden in the wooded hills of the northwestern port city, at once moonlit and all the darker in some spots. (There were nights, especially in winter, that seemed endless; never again would day come on earth.) The sound had been that of a sigh, almost identical to the sigh that had escaped the aging author at the meeting in her office.
What, a sigh? reverberated? A sigh that reverberated? Yes. And it had come from her. And it had resembled a sound in Arabic, borne on the gusts of air, mimicking and amplifying them, consisting of nothing but a, v, u, h; and now it became clear to her why the sound brought such thoughts to the surface: in the Arabic text that her daughter had left behind when she disappeared, or fled the house, and which she was now studying every day, the introduction made particular mention of this sound as an example of how in Arabic often a simple aspiration, or a small exclamation, or a vibration of the larynx, or even the simple articulating of a word through transcription could become the basis or origin of a sound. And avuh was just such a self-descriptive word. According to the commentary, it was the most innate human sound.
Had the sound really come from her, this person here? Never had such a sigh been wrested from her. And now something like a response issued from the darkness. It came from one of the trees onto which the early ravens had already descended. Up to this moment, they had done nothing but caw and chatter. But now they fell silent for a while. And out of the silence one of them uttered a wondrous cry of yearning. Or was it all the ravens together? This yearning represented such a break with the ravens’ usual shrieks that she almost laughed out loud. This yearning was so tender that she, who was never afraid of anything, almost took fright. And she called out a name. No, she almost shouted it. She did not even know whether such a name or such a word existed, and what or whom it described. But describe it did! From the hill came an echo, and in the house a shadow stirred. Another predawn bird, always quiet, became part of the pattern in the garden gate.
Today was not the first time she had noticed, but now, before her departure, it became strikingly clear how much the spacious, plantation-like grounds had changed during her time here. The ground especially, the form and consistency of the subsoil, had been greatly reshaped in these years, not so very many after all. (The trees, on the other hand, had remained largely the same.) The grounds had already had some slope to them. But when she moved in, they had still presented a level surface, intentionally leveled. Now, however, this plain appeared transformed into a veritable miniature landscape of mountains and valleys. The thick white coating of hoarfrost on the grass brought out with particular distinctness the rhythmic pattern of hillocks and hollows. A new, young earthscape, formed in only a few years, primarily by the rain and the winds from the west. On the crest of some of the hillocks there already stood, seeded by the wind and no taller than a thumb, a bristly little conifer. The hollows deepened “abruptly,” and some of them had little swampy patches at their bottom, with the vegetation to match. There were even stretches of moor, also tiny natural ponds (with frogs and dragonflies in warm weather). The water in them could come up over one’s ankles. Except that now it was frozen solid. No heel could break this ice. Not only on the ice but also on the leaves and needles of the trees the hoarfrost took the form of small, raised, prickly rings.
The only trees that had joined the others during her time there: a mulberry and a quince. The mulberry was grafted; a trunk without limbs — the dense branches grew straight out of the top of the trunk and curved uniformly downward and inward, layer upon layer, so that now, with the leaves gone, the tree looked something like an outsized beehive. At the same time, the trunk was pitted, with deep, branching cavities that served as a refuge for bats. At the moment they were hibernating there.
Now something darted out and fluttered on a zigzag course across the sky. So one of the creatures had slept its fill for the time being? Did that mean that the freeze was breaking? She, however, was wishing for more days of frost — the frost-clear air was one of the things that made her not want to leave. Or did this bat’s flapping, closer and closer to her ear, mean: Run along, we’ll keep an eye on things!?
Strange, the way she always picked up signs and portents before a departure. But she had never actually turned her head this way to follow the signs. Stepping a few paces to one side, she gained an overview of the bat’s flight pattern, so confused and erratic from close up but consistent and marked by regular repetition as a whole. And then it became clear that one figure in this pattern pertained specifically to her. As the bat flew back and forth, up and down, it was tracing with great precision the silhouette of the mistress of this property, in the very spot where she had been standing a few minutes earlier.
All her life she had been surrounded by animals this way. Especially those generally considered timid came up to her; used her as a zone of refuge or repose. The story went that as a young girl she had traveled home from Africa with a snake under her shirt, crossing several borders and traveling on ships and buses. She herself preferred to tell anecdotes about less ticklish contacts and encounters — for instance about the muskrat that came so close in a large forest, advancing and retreating in a rapid rhythm, all the while snuffling, and staring at her out of little black eyes, eventually coming so close that its whiskers and pelt brushed her toes: at times she could still feel a bit of that sensation on her skin. Or the dragonfly above the miniature puddle here the previous summer: she, the large human being, stood there, had been standing there motionless for some time, and then the small flying creature, the dragonfly, was hovering there in the air, directly opposite her, quite high up for a dragonfly, an insect that usually stayed close to the water’s surface, both pairs of wings whirring so rapidly that they remained invisible and it looked as though only the spindly body were floating there, with the oversized head in front, blue-black, a yellow circle in the middle, filling the dragonfly face, and eyeing her, the human being, even though this yellow did not actually mark its eyes: deep yellow, coming closer to her from minute to minute and ultimately drawing her into the dragonfly planet with this alien gaze. So was this something to fear? No.
She would suggest to the author in his village in La Mancha that the stories linking her with various animals also had something to do with receptivity to images. The most timid animals were precisely the ones that recognized (yes, “recognized”) when someone was “in the picture,” got the picture, registered the image. With such a person they forgot their timidity, and not only that. They pulled the person into their own existence, even if only for a moment, but what a moment! It was not only that they had no fear of the person; they all wished the person well, each in its own way.