He is apprehensive about the moment the younger man will begin this conversation, but he is even more apprehensive that the younger man will not start the conversation at all because the questions have never crossed his mind. Perhaps the old lies, the coup d'états, the wrongs, the controversies, the illusions, the torturing, the artifice and the crimes no longer interest him, just like the war, even further in the past. Perhaps the younger man thinks the grey cloud that has hung over his head all his life is the natural colour of the sky, if he ever looks up at it at all.
One day, the two men lose their way in the woods and start walking back down a hill in the wrong direction. The younger man, of course, has his spirit-level and his stopwatch, the older man his wire-brush, his machete and his box of paints and brushes, but none of these is any use in finding their way.
The younger man becomes upset. He is responsible for the work they are doing and for the car they have left in a field. He suggests they retrace their steps, but the older man is not enthusiastic about the idea. He doesn't feel like going back up the hill. Wandering through the woods makes far more sense to him than digging holes in the ground and burying slabs of concrete. He suggests they keep on
walking; they will certainly get somewhere eventually.
But what if that takes us further from the car? the younger man objects.
Don't think about the car.
This answer surprises the younger man, but then he says: I understand, but what do you expect to find?
He has a point. What is there to expect? What surprises? What unsurveyed countryside? What hope?
The younger man is waiting for an answer. He has not met many people in his life from whom he might expect a meaningful answer. He has been educated, of course: they handed him a lot of formulae, practical information and also many superstitions and half-truths about the world he lives in. At home, they raised him to be honest and diligent. One must work to live. But why he should live, that they didn't tell him, or didn't know.
Perhaps the older man has experience or knowledge that he could relate to his young friend — perhaps this is the reason for his being here.
But the younger man does not receive an answer; so he shrugs his shoulders and says, 'Whatever you think.'
So they continue on their way, not knowing where it will lead. The woods thin out, the air begins to smell strangely of cinders, smoke, even of sulphur, as though they were not walking through a wood, but the scene of some conflagration.
It's a good sign that he's come this way with me, the older man thinks. He says: 'Don't you think it's interesting that the act of measuring inevitably leads to a descent?'
The younger man does not understand what he means.
'We are constantly becoming more precise,' the older man explains, 'as we try to describe the Earth or the organization
of matter. We are forever finding smaller particles, but we can't seem to shift in the other direction.'
'But,' the younger man objects. 'We're always discovering new galaxies.'
'I'm not thinking of galaxies, I'm thinking of what's above us, I mean above man.'
The younger man nods.
'I was brought up to believe there was nothing above me,' says the older man. 'When the war came, they locked us up, and they murdered almost everyone in our family. Back then, the killing was going on all over the world. My father saw in that a confirmation of his beliefs: if God existed, he would never have allowed such cruel, unjust and pointless bloodshed. But others saw it as God's punishment for the sins of men. After all, the slaughter of children is presented in the Bible as one of the punishments for denying God.'
They are coming to a crossroads; it's not the right time to get involved in a discussion of abstract ideas. The younger man silently chooses one of the paths and continues walking.
'After the war,' the older man recalls, 'I knew other people who were locked up just as absurdly and arbitrarily as we were. This happened to our landlord's daughter, who was seventeen at the time.' The older man doesn't say out loud that in his imagination he had longed to make love to the girl. He only says that when she came back many years later and told him about her miserable internment in the camp, she mentioned that one thing had become clear to her there: it was simply not possible that man was the highest form of life in the universe.
'That's an interesting idea,' the younger man says.
'Sometimes people really can be worse than animals. Not long ago, I don't know if you read about it, some guy in England murdered a woman, a total stranger, right in front of her kids, then he went home, shot his mother and then went on the rampage and killed fourteen more people — just for fun. '
For a while they talk about insane gunmen, both the kind that wear stocking masks over their faces and the kind that wear a uniform. The younger man, it seems, is interested in this problem of gunmen. He plays chess, and finds it pleasant to talk about distant violence. The older man, for his part, is sorry that their conversation is losing its point.
They finally emerge from the woods. Below them a dirty river winds through the countryside. The bank is riddled with ditches full of stagnant rainbow-tinged water. The earth here is bare; only the steep piles of rubble are overgrown with weeds. There are no murderers lying in wait, but across the river tall, ash-covered smokestacks vomit thick billowy grey smoke into the air. The smoke kills slowly and invisibly.
The younger man asks: 'Don't you think that what you were talking about — some higher wisdom or whatever it was — moves in a completely different space or in different dimensions from ours?'
The older man admits it is possible.
The path leads down to the river. A tug-boat is approaching, drawing a barge loaded with coal. The boat is black, the coal is dark brown, and the clay banks of the river are ochre, like the muddy river water. There is no colour here, except for some bright clothes drying on a rope strung across the stern of the tug.
Both men look at this unexpected display, and as the tug
draws level with them, a girl in a colourful dress emerges from below, her long hair cascading over her bare shoulders. The younger man waves. The girl leans back against the wall of the wheelhouse and she stares at both men, motionless.
The younger man puts his hands to his mouth and calls out: 'Take us with you!'
'Come aboard!' the young woman replies. They can distinguish a smile on her face.
'But what about the water between us?' the younger man shouts. The river is wide here and the boat is almost on the other side.
'So, get a little wet!' The girl disappears below.
'Let's go and meet her when the boat docks. After all, she's invited us,' suggests the younger man. The older man wonders if, hidden in this encounter, in the few words he has heard, there isn't some deeper meaning, or even something like a sign.
As we were driving around, we talked mostly about work, sometimes about sports. I also tried to understand something of what we were doing, and the surveyor willingly gave me lectures on azimuths, geodetic lines and the co-ordinates of terminal points.
To get his degree, he'd had to live away from home since he was fourteen. He had been taught how to adapt to the conditions of the surveyor's life in the field. During the day, his teachers were strict and demanded precision. In the evenings, they played cards, drank beer and told stories from their bachelor days, and thus helped prepare the students for the isolation to come. A real surveyor spends most of his life far from the home he has often had no time to establish.