As time passed, she also picked up some information on the newer residents, no matter how they barricaded themselves in their houses. It always happened inadvertently, in passing. And it was precisely their shadowy outward existence that provided the background. These people were bound and determined not to betray themselves. There should be no hint of who they were, what they did, what their names were, where they came from. With them a new era began. If a piano could be heard once from behind closed windows, it always broke off immediately. No laundry was hung out to dry anywhere, or if it was, then only behind dense hedges, out of sight. Even the vehicles disappeared deep underground, into garages located beneath the basements.
And yet their stories did not remain entirely hidden. From time to time, and always without warning, fragments or particles of them would pierce the walls of silence. A single elementary particle, whizzing in from an often indefinable distance, was enough for a situation to leave a scorch mark. A situation? An entire story, more distinct and convincing than if it had been narrated from A to Z.
Such things occurred more at night and most often in the depths of the night, in the hours after midnight. One might be awakened by terrible wailing. Or what sounded at first like angry shouting, someone ranting and raving out on the street, turned to wailing. It was a woman’s voice, with a brief response now and then from a man’s voice, soothing or trying to be soothing. And something more serious than an ordinary quarrel was taking place. Something was drawing to an end; these were, or gradually became, sounds of dying. Eventually the wailing, impossible to resolve into individual words, became positively tender. Nowhere, not even in an opera, had she ever heard such an intense lament. The man’s voice, still quiet and controlled, was no longer answering but providing a soft accompaniment to parts of the song; and finally it vanished altogether from the tonal image. A pause. A car door slamming. An engine starting up. Silence. And the lament resuming, at the same time fading away, as if coming from someone slowly walking backward. Then the force of the nocturnal stillness, equaling the force of the now silenced lament. And she was not the only person nearby who listened, and listened, and listened. But then no ambulance siren either. And the following morning no hearse; only a raw emptiness in the street, and in the house over there, or had it been the one behind it? And not one neighbor who said a word about it.
And lying awake again in the hours after midnight. Sometimes she liked staying awake when she had some problem connected with her work to resolve. And again a voice. But this time from very close by. And she recognized the voice, too, although it sounded so different from usual. And besides, she could make out every word of what was being said. The voice was that of an adolescent, the son of the people to whom she had rented the former gatekeeper’s lodge, a remodeled carriage house at the entrance to her property. Although the contract called for the tenants to perform some gatekeeper’s duties in their spare time, she had learned hardly anything about the little family. She knew nothing about the man’s or the woman’s job, or where the boy went to school, if in fact he did. He did not greet her; looked away when he saw her. Unlike his parents, he did not respect the property lines, either the visible or the invisible ones. The second gate, which marked the entry to her own private realm but which she left unlocked, he used without hesitation for his shortcuts, skirting her house on his way to a gap in the hedge that led to a side street that was apparently important to him. One time she had even found him in her kitchen (she usually left the house unlocked as well), where he was sitting at the table reading the paper; at the sight of her, his leisurely loping away through the former servants’ entrance.
The gatekeeper’s lodge was not near her house, not at all, and yet that night she had the son’s voice in her ear as close as in a dream, and also just as clear. It was no dream, however. And the neighbor’s son said the following: “The two of you want me dead. Thanks for the bones you tossed in my cage. You will not be seeing me again. My bed will stay empty. Thanks for the flowers on my grave. But at least let me play one more cassette. Why do you not want me? Why did you not abort me? Why did you not stick me in the oven? Or into the false-bottomed crate? Burning desert sands. Your loving …” And then silence, here, too. The next morning a void. And the morning after that the adolescent just as before, but now riding a scooter instead of a bicycle.
And another such night, this time not so late. Her return from the bank’s headquarters down by the river, before midnight, in her Spanish Landrover, a sort of camouflaged vehicle (how fitting if she had been driving it in a veil). On the already deserted highway leading out of the city, by the turnoff close to her property, a lone figure flagging her down. She stopped. A very young woman, still a girl, really, about the same age as her daughter, with a face that seemed separate from her body, in the dim streetlights: “Don’t you know a house abroad where I can go, preferably in North Africa? I have heard so much about the light there. I must get away. I am older than I look. I know you. You paint, don’t you? How can one paint around here, in this country? A house where I can paint, in Tipasa or Casablanca, right now!” And without waiting for her reply, the girl disappeared into the darkness on the side of the road. And she, too, became visible again: sitting by a distant skylight, reading, as though nothing had happened.
Even the children of the newcomers arriving here in ever-increasing numbers during the last few years — on their front doors at most their initials, and then often of the sort that could belong to a Greek, Cyrillic, or even Arabic or Armenian alphabet — remained in the shadows. Bundled up and silent, they climbed with their bundled-up and silent parents or caretakers out of their outsize automobiles, and it was easy to mistake them for the supersize shopping bags being hauled into the houses from the supermarkets after work (the small shops, still numerous, and the local markets were patronized only by old people and longtime residents: hardly ever an unfamiliar face there, and certainly not that of a child).
Coming home from school almost every child walked alone, eyes on the ground, as if to remain unrecognizable. And in spite of that they made an impression on her, too, sooner or later, more vivid than that of the neighbor children in her village back home — had she also been a child keeping her eyes to the ground in those days? And this impression always formed when she heard crying. No matter how far away the crying was, every time it seemed to her to come from the immediate environs. And she heard it during the day just as clearly as in the silent depths of the night, even at times when the road leading out of town was at its noisiest. Not all crying came this close, affected her this strongly: the crying of infants hardly, no matter how plaintive, also not the crying that followed a fall or some other physical mishap. It was the crying, usually without tears, brought on by a first major disappointment, already definitive: even sounds, not bursting spasmodically from the breast but closed up inside it, quiet sounds, actually, almost silent already, pitched somewhere halfway between sobbing, howling, wheezing, snuffling, with a deep, unidentifiable bass underneath, and all this continuing in an infinite loop, behind the closed shutters of a house, behind a tree in a garden, or somewhere on a street, in an alley, gradually receding, a one-person caravan.