She, the listener, remained glued to the spot and at the same time moved along with the caravan outside. What she heard from these neighborhood children was the sound of abandonment. This sound could be uttered at the same pitch by an adult — any adult? yes, any adult. (Except that in a grown-up it might be so piercing that the adult would be drawn and quartered by his own cry of woe?) In the past, long ago, one had gone around with just such a sound of abandonment inside one. And it stayed there for good. To be sure, it had receded into the remotest corner in the body’s labyrinth. But sooner or later, from one moment to the next, it would resume its place in the midst of things, with the force of an explosion. She had seen a film one time at the end of which a woman did nothing but weep for a quarter of an hour. She was sitting in a deserted stadium or park or an unfinished building, and suddenly she was weeping, without tears, like the children here, and she wept and wept. From time to time she paused. Then she resumed her weeping, fell silent again, but the weeping would well up in her once more, and so it went, with the weeping eventually becoming like that of thousands, the mother of all weeping, till the end. (The author, to whom she mentioned this, told her that in his youth he had written a play that consisted of a single sentence or stage direction: “Someone sits on the bare stage and weeps, for an hour.”) She herself had not wept in a long time. But occasionally she still heard her own weeping from ages ago.
Of late more and more such sounds of utter abandonment or rejection had reached her from the out-of-sight children of the neighborhood. And then she actually got to see one of these children at least. It was a spring evening, the starry sky already clear over the forest and outskirts. The child was passing the playing fields on its way home, alone. The lights around the field were just going out. Along the road a row of ornamental cherry trees. The child beneath them, seen from behind, almost big, long since of school age. As it walked along, again and again at regular intervals there was a shuddering of the shoulders under the flowering trees, their color particularly rich in the glow of the streetlights against the surrounding darkness. The constant shoulder-shuddering is weeping, the sound accompanying it hardly audible, despite the nocturnal stillness, yet, once one’s hearing has adjusted to it, not to be drowned out by any airplane’s droning or any railroad cars’ clanking. And thus the rearview-image child trudged along with that shuddering of the shoulders until it had passed the row of trees and the athletic field. Who would tell of that sound of abandonment someday?
One had neighborly feelings precisely for these strangers, these barely visible people. From far away one could often not make out their profiles or silhouettes, only small white — no, pale — blotches amid the general gloom: their heads, their faces, their hands; their professions also formed pale gray blotches like this; where all the new residents worked remained a secret (concealed by them on purpose?); how a person earned a living no longer mattered; and their clothing revealed nothing: and all this simply reinforced the sense of neighborliness. What was clear was only that none of these people numbered among her clients. Or perhaps they did. Weren’t they full of surprises?
On the other hand, the fact that they could not form a complete image of her brought the new residents even closer to her. True, her property, the former stagecoach station, occupied a significant location, at the point where the road leading out of the city began a steep climb (in earlier times, at least one team of horses had been added at this point). True, the house was striking simply by virtue of its age, its size, its construction, its form, its distance from the other houses. But no one, not even her tenants in the carriage house, knew any particulars about the occupant. And people did not want to know anything about her.
Once, however, at an Indian restaurant around the corner, she was asked by the proprietor whether she was a movie actress. And another time, in the nearby Chinese fruit and vegetable shop, the ancient greengrocer, who had just moved there and rented the place, asked, “Weren’t you in Macao as a child?”—“When?”—“Fifty years ago.” Fifty years ago! In Macao! It was as if the Chinese man were transferring some of his years to her and as a result instantly became younger. Or was this a manifestation of the famous Asian inquisitiveness? Which was usually more an act than genuine? At any rate, the others around here did not even pretend to be inquisitive. And that meant, to borrow a favorite expression of the stagecoach relay — owner and financial expert (instead of “I don’t want to,” or “You’re not allowed to,” she always said, “It is out of the question”): it was out of the question that anyone here should know any particulars or intimate details about anyone else.
Altogether, this area seemed to her to exemplify a new way of living. That people kept their distance from one another to such a degree (although it was by no means an upscale area) did not signify the end of neighborliness. Without showing off, people paid attention to one another, respected one another. When the moment came, and only then, they would be there to lend a hand; and then promptly keep their distance again, staying anonymous, and, after greeting each other for a little while, silent again.
In one respect she even seemed out of step with the times by comparison with the new neighbors (and it was out of the question, that she, the banker, should be out of step): the majority of the new people did not move into houses of their own but into housing acquired for people like this — who would be moving on in a couple of years; in the period covered by this story almost everyone was like this — by the companies, firms, corporations, research institutes, laboratories for which they worked (this housing could include old structures bought up by company headquarters). A growing number of her neighbors were not homeowners, in contrast to her. The cars, too, were company cars, or leased. The same held true for their household goods, including televisions and chain saws. Nothing, or certainly nothing large, heavy, or entailing responsibility, belonged to them.
And by now she almost envied them for this; or rather, she was jealous of them, just as it was not out of the question to be jealous, as an involved observer, of a game in which one would like to participate. For wasn’t the pleasure she had so long taken in ownership pretty well exhausted? Above all, owning land had once given her a very special sense of space, a feeling of having broad shoulders. To buy a piece of land to add to her own, then another: pure joy. (She actually used the word “joy” in the author’s presence.) To beat the bounds of one’s property with head held high (not to say “ride the bounds”). But by now one tended to beat the bounds with lowered head or searching gaze: What needed to be done? What tasks were pressing? What had to be repaired? cleaned? replaced?
Free through property? In her case, at least, it was becoming a threat to her freedom. One’s perceptions were no longer free. Only parts, and particles, nothing whole anymore. And oneself, as a property owner, no longer whole. Strangely enough, one way out, a form of liberation, was managing money, other people’s money, but also her own — as if money, being a moveable asset, had nothing to do with “possessions” and provided an opportunity for free play, like that of the others in the neighborhood. Hadn’t this free play turned into something particularly uncontrollable by now, hardly subject to rules anymore, dangerous, threatening, and not only to her?
Some of the new ways of living also had to do with the location of her city. After a period of decline for riverports, they were flourishing again. There had been a time without any shipping at all; the rivers on the entire continent deserted. But now the waterways were serving as the most modern traffic and transportation arteries, and the cities located on them were becoming hubs as never before in history, even during the Roman Empire. And her own city, at the confluence of two rivers, formed something like the hub of hubs. A financial center like Augsburg in the Fuggers’ day, especially in the time of the family patriarch, Jakob — but less because of its wealth than because of the sheer volume of wheeling and dealing. A life like this, on and between two world-famous and commercially significant rivers, imbued the inhabitants, and the new arrivals more powerfully than the longtime residents, with a particular sense of place: stamped with self-confidence or even pride, quite different from that of the residents of New York or some other great metropolis by the sea, an inlander’s pride, so to speak.