“Mensch, was ist denn los jetzt?” Tjak murmured.
The purpose of the visit of the observed group wasn’t clear except that it contained no promise of good for us, and we therefore thought it wiser to take certain precautions because they were numerous — far more so than us. We entrusted Tjak with our pistol and with the instruction that he must make himself scarce: our intention, in so doing, was to safeguard our only weapon and property of value. Within a few hours evening would fall and under the cloak of the night, for there was no moon, Tjak would have had a chance to reach a safe haven with the pistol, or at least the protection of distance. In the meantime we would attempt to occupy the unwelcome intruders and to hold them back.
Our uneasiness had good grounds, our fears were realized. It turned out to be Albert and his gang, and faced with their superior numbers we were soon powerless. Without too much bother they took over everything and held us captive in the living room while they searched the house from floor to loft. For us time no longer mattered. But gradually it became night and, as was often the case at that hour, an evening breeze started blowing; the grey curtains fluttered slightly. The wind — experience had taught me this — would become stronger towards midnight, a veritable sighing, and the tarrying heat would as always make way for the pure-skinned lucidity of the night and then for the merciless cold of the small hours, for the sharp reflection of starlight on stones, like ice pellets. Albert apparently surmised — or did he know? — that one of us had eluded him, that our firearm had slipped through his fingers: he delegated members of his gang to go over the surroundings within a radius of one and a half kilometres with a fine-tooth comb. It became dark.
When the gloom had settled in completely we all heard the crack of three pistol shots in the distance, two near together and after a pause of what must have been three seconds a single last one. Afterwards nothing. All lifted their heads and listened to the silence with ears pricked up. Nothing more. Nobody talked. No one referred to the strange detonations. Later too, as far as I remember, no explanation was offered and it was never discussed. In the course of the first quarter of the night the search parties returned — whether all or just some of them wasn’t clear and neither do I know whether they reported on their doings. We became drowsy. Now and then you could hear someone groaning in his sleep. Albert sat in one corner on a chair, his heavy head bowed, chin on chest; it was no foregone conclusion that his eyes were still open or, on the other hand, closed. In any event, he asked no questions, gave not a single order, didn’t try to start any conversation; just hunched there without budging, peering down into his private night.
When it was already quite late I got up to go and smoke a cigar outside under the naked heavens. It was an old habit of mine to do so, even under otherwise normal circumstances: to slowly contemplate the fantastic pageant of the galaxy, all those beasts and formations and images and petrified ice fields and remote fluttering fires and to see how they rock by, to see how blanched they are; I know of no better solution for oppressive thoughts: the I is liquidated. The wind came from far away, noiseless, and encountered no resistance until it came pushing against the house with a soft, burbling sound. The wind smelled of unknown mosses and contused moulds, of crystals and of dust. The wind was also with a rustling in the loose leaves of the tree. The clatter was so muffled that one could presume, had you not known any better, that it wasn’t caused by the wind’s goings-on but perhaps by the slight and gradual fall-go of the stars overhead. It passed through my mind that the leaves will not be on the tree for much longer, that they will come loose as they’ve always done before and that the trunk and branches will be parched and grey, without sap of vegetative faculty. I also absorbed the notion that all come to nothing and fall away in this way, so, just like the grey ash of my cigar; and I furthermore thought of the white eyes in the bottomless abyss above my head, of the little clumps of bones, the white almond blossoms on invisible branches, the fluttering of pale wings. When I looked around me I was, alas, once again brought to the realization that our “yard” would never be transformed into a “garden”.
And all at once, under the rather deeper blackness of the leaves’ whispering, I became aware of something, or someone — of a presence, a barely noticeable change of position. I never moved an inch. From under the cover of dying or already dead leaves he stepped forward, laughing softly with shimmering teeth. Tjak. Or really — this too I immediately and intuitively sensed although he uttered not a word with reference to himself — actually not Tjak the way you and I would normally mean when talking about Tjak, or about Murphy or Giovanni or C — — or Glassface or Tuchverderber or Nefesh or Fremdkörper, but his. . what? His spirit? His memory? His momentary mirroring in the grey matter? His remains? The power field of words around him? Very close to me he came and softly he enquired whether he may finish off my cigar. I handed it to him, the smoke-flowing little grey stump notched by my fingernail at the one end, and deeply he sucked on it and for an instant the smoke lingered blueish grey between us before being carried away by the wind. When the cigar tip glowed clearer at short intervals, I could observe the large dark and wet stain on his chest: nearly as a shield protecting the body very intimately it was, or the ever-spreading blood puddle in the sand under the young doe giving birth whilst dying, or like a submerged rose it was of colour and to the touch — and it had an odd odour, the dank and yet distant smell of a wing. “Aber weisst du, ich habe mich damals so unauslegbar viel gefreut. . Wenn ich das unbedingt mal erklären könnte. . ” he still whispered nearly inaudibly soft with the wind among his words and starshine on his teeth, and then he was gone. Gone, irrevocably gone before my eyes. With my fingertips I stroked the paper sheet over this afternoon’s target and felt that it was sticky.
Many years went by. I don’t believe I ever again visited the house of grey planks and certainly it no longer exists, but became — as others before it? — one with the grey, the brownish and the purplish environment, just like the trees in exile and the exotic scorched flowering shrubs and little bushes one by one. Or does this house in reality still exist? I use the stirrup-word “reality” — knowing that it contains no conception — with aversion and reluctant lips. Is it not true, friend, that nothing finally gets lost in us? That the house, now that we discussed it, still lies somewhere in a huge grey landscape, a landscape alternatively becoming more sombre or brighter without shadows or boundaries being cast over it? I don’t believe I ever again penetrated the upland as deeply; steep-climbing gorges and canyons in the passes coiling higher along slopes where tons of gravel had come sliding down, at times cutting the route or burying it — but certainly no further. Occasionally I did visit the coast. The coastal strip itself, the fence running down into the sea was an area we were not allowed to enter. I knew — I no longer know how — that an ultra-modern camp had been constructed beyond that frontier on the slightly greenish hills and the yellow dunes, with the very best facilities: cinema halls, restaurants, drugstores, even a landing strip with a well-equipped control tower. Once I tried to explain it all to my mother. She was with me on holiday there — outside the fence — or she had come to visit me while I was holidaying there by myself, and we decided to go swimming. My mother was then already very old but her face and her body were fat and without wrinkles; with the hair tucked under a bathing cap and without her glasses she was quite white and blind. We watched a child — a little girl with red flames at the throat — playing in the water, and I tried to interpret to my mother the fugitive images on her retina. It was low tide, although stormy, and the girl clearly had the intention to obviate the barrier and to get, from the sea, to the enclosed zone. Despite the low tide the coast of that forbidden area was most dangerous with edged rocks, pools where the waves frothed, and a sea bottom descending rapidly and sharply. My mother was worried about the little girl and couldn’t understand why she insisted upon reaching that particularly treacherous beach; even from afar we saw the blood on her feet and legs, we noticed the water at her feet being coloured and foaming like a crocodile, and still she continued laughing with a shrill, hysterical voice while stubbornly attempting to reach the side. I explained to my mother that that camp, out of bounds to the little girl, was a veritable heaven on earth for children, and I described the wonderful luxuries to her in detail. But, when I wanted to point these out to her, there was nothing to be seen beyond the fence except for a few grey buildings, very low and smooth like bunkers just about entirely buried in the sand. Just seams; only bumps and reefs. I had to point out to my mother — though I was now blindly entering an unknown terrain — that the much vaunted wealth was probably installed in a subterranean way, yes, even the landing strip of the airfield. But that it had to be there, of that I was sure!