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The remainder of my narrative is not much and can be accounted for in a few sentences. Murphy, with an embittered grimace, took me through the fences to the forbidden territory. We betook ourselves to the terminus for air travellers; we were to take a flight, off and gone. It was a modern structure full of people also sitting there, waiting for their respective flights to be called. Murphy told me a long story which it is not in my power to repeat here. Part of it however concerned the clothes which Albert had stolen — or borrowed — that time, some of Murphy’s also in the lot, and had handed in here at the lost property office where it was kept all these years, and that he, Murphy, come hell or high water, now had the intention of retaking possession of same. We ordered drinks. The cocktails were of a rusty red colour. The waitress wore a black dress with an oval-shaped white apron. Her calves and thighs were most smooth and shiny and well formed and when she bent down over the other tables to serve the passengers-to-be, we could see the white leg as far as the elastic, and a dark shadow higher into the moist folds of the imagination. The other travellers all sat leafing through magazines which they held high in front of their noses so that we could not identify their faces. All the magazines had covers of a bright orange colour. We learnt from the waitress that the lost property office was to be found on the last floor and that a signboard with “Damen und Herren” would indicate it to us. But, she said, we were to wait: at the apposite moment we would be sent for.

The God Eating

Quando fiam uti chelidon.

DANTE

In this way one comes down into the desert. It is grey all around the eye, grey and barren and dry as if from some ancient and unlifted curse. Scattered about dimly observed in the myopia are darker objects. One is not certain whether they are alive or living only in the black stultifying flame of death. The curse is a flame. These perceptions may well be cacti or cactaceous rocks, all clarity damped off, daubed with a minute immobility now and dark with the colour of damson. Dark with the colour of damnation? One is not sure. Yet one senses the heterosis, the hybrid vigour of things unpleasant to the imagination because the eye is too shy to concentrate.

He focuses — that is, he allows his vision to grow on the grey sand. A fly is scribbling minute tracks of immobility where he looks. The fly has a blue metallic weight, fur-powdered legs, two hairy protuberances which must be eyes, two transparent wings folded back. The nun wears a veil over her bearded face. Where the fly has imprinted the earth seems freshly disturbed though frozen. And so he decides to dig, hoping perhaps to uncover a flame. He sifts the sand through his hands. He feels the grittiness under his nails. He has the pattern of walking the excretion of the fly’s tracks under his nails. When he has dug a shallow grave he comes upon something of a lighter colour. It may be a placenta, the interred afterbirth of a long-gone pilgrim. But no, he sees; it is a newspaper still slightly damp. He remembers that he has heard a newspaper referred to as a kite. Over the creased and flamelike surface signs are sutured. Words. Yet one senses the heterosis, the hybrid vigour of things unpleasant to the realization because the eye is too shy to concentrate. He deciphers a sign: “EYEGO”.

Other people have passed through these regions then. Perhaps they understood the way in which one comes to the desert. Perhaps they even lingered on, attempting to stay. Perhaps too all of this was not always as stripped and as captured as it now appears. A little higher up where the skimming eye scans the bulk of a horizon it notices what he understands to be ruins. The humbled leftovers of long-gone inhabitants. These sombre greyish and crumbled walls have become part of the hillside, tracks, an exposed labyrinth of departed life. The hue is that of rocks. Or cacti seen against the sun when one is near-sighted. Spiky words in a lost tongue.

And when he climbs to where that settlement once was he finds that it is not deserted after all. Some nomads must have decided to stop there for the winter. At the highest spot of this former town around what must once have been the central square a few of the buildings still seem intact. There the tribe of travellers has found refuge. It could also be that they simply had a breakdown of transport. He sees their cars and caravans eroded by weather, as colourless as inferior metal, broken down, half hidden in the gullies or deflated upon their axles when out in the open along one side of the square. The whisper of smoke curling out of the airholes of one of the dull forts.

He comes upon the band of runagates and puts a hand on his heart to introduce himself. An old man looks him over with cool fingers. The old man has a long grey beard moved by the wind. Like oily smoke. He wears also a long greyish coat and high boots which are very smooth and polished. All the other members of this group appear to be women. But of that he cannot be sure for there are children too and even though the greybeard with the boots may still be very vigorous it would be unlikely, he thinks, that they are all his offspring. The women are covered by long colourless dresses. Their heads are shadowed by hoods. Deep within the darkness of the hoods the eyes are watching him, shiny and pinpointed flies.

He comes upon the group of vagabonds and introduces himself. “My name is Nefesj” — this he says to the old man — “and I am the foreigner.” The old man laughs at him. The many women and the children look at him with the broken flies of their eyes and some of the children laugh also. They allow him to stay. Rather: they don’t chase him away with stones and songs.

Often now he wanders through the hulk of this long-lost town. Apparently no restrictions are imposed on his movements. He sleeps in the lee of one of the disintegrating walls where the stars aren’t quite as glittering, as hard. At times he imagines insects or tiny animals among the stones, lepidopterous flitting, lizards, leporine shapes leaping away through murk and crack. The labyrinthine walls of alley and outhouse merge with the rocks. The winter has come. He climbs away from the ruins. Out here he is aware of distances, greyish, the cool fingers of the piano — except that all his silences are engulfed by a greater silence. And now he notices patches of snow as if dirty beards had been put out to dry. Bleeding from the soil. Fluttering above ground. Marked in the snow then he observes tracks, coals, immobile passage. A flame may have dribbled. But the signs are left by a horse learning to write these surroundings, ostensibly belonging to the old man with the boots. The grey horse lives around the settlement. In some way it must be inseparable from the fortunes of the stranded travellers. An obbligato.