Somewhere a crack is always left open for a glance out into the night. Hardly anything is going on out there; all the roads in the settlement are access roads and end at the base of the chain of hills, or, if they continue into the woods, then only as wood roads, with white-painted barriers where the forest begins. As a rule they merge with a route that makes a loop around the remotest corner of the suburb. This ring road somewhat resembles a breakwater, and the section enclosed by it a harbor, for instance the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula, where thirty-five years ago I first sat by the sea, as a student, after a major examination, and, there among the limestone blocks, for hours on end, knew nothing at all of myself and my origins, of jurisprudence, of limestone; I was refreshingly oblivious, and appearances were quite enough; I did not want to know what lay behind anything, a state to which I sometimes long from the bottom of my heart to return.
Part of this civilized surface carved out of the woods actually is water, the water of a pond that has been here for centuries. When you glance out of one of the bars at night through the remaining crack, the black water gleams, now and then ruffled by a gust of wind, and the headlights of the infrequently passing cars dart across the water like those of speedboats. But in the second bar, too, outside of which only the empty pavement gleams, when you look out at night you can sense the presence of water right around the corner, not only of this pond but also of the couple of others in this corner of the world, most of them already in the forest.
Those standing in the bar at night appear at first stranded, and in my imagination they have already been there a long time. Not a few of them, as I gather from scraps of conversation, without specifically listening for the information, have lived in their region here since childhood. Although the bars are not dives but rather the only public places in these outlying towns, serving also as tobacco shops, where you can buy newspapers and postage stamps, and in the summer, when the bakery is closed, as bread depots, I have never met a single one of my neighbors there. The citizenry is not included among the guests at the local cafés, at least not in the evening.
But it was premature to describe the last holdouts in the bar as stranded. For among them I recognize one tradesman or another who has done work on my house. Or the older ones, in the minority, seem in the way they silently follow the smallest happenings anything but failures: calm retirees, solemn anglers, dignified widowers (as the older woman sitting by herself always has the air of a not so dignified widow).
And nevertheless it was there at night that the whole area appeared to me for the first time as a bay, with us as driftwood. At the same time that was one of the rare occasions when I saw this isolated suburb as a part of the large city of Paris beyond the chain of hills, to be precise as the most remote, hidden, least accessible bay of the metropolitan ocean, separated from it by the barrier formed all along the horizon by the hills of the Seine, with the road between Versailles and Paris that cut across them forming the only link with the open spaces. And we, too, came from the turbulent sea, swept in, washed in, rocked in the tides that rolled in and out for years or decades on end, now calm, now more hectic, past thousands of capes and cliffs, through the straits of Meudon, through the narrows of Sevres, through the first inlet, called the “Puits sans Vin,” fountain without wine, and a second inlet, called the “Carrefour de la Fausse Porte,” crossroads of the false portal, into the narrowest, most twisting and turning, remotest metropolitan bay, all the more fathomable for me in its namelessness, we, the driftwood that had come the greatest distance, and thus also rarer than in the mouths of the bay, yet for that very reason amazingly distinct.
At the same time, those in the bar, since they all stand alone, somewhat resemble an ancient tribe on the only remaining reservation, and in reality I encounter them, when they are going about among the local passersby out on the street, as the remnant that hardly counts anymore, the remnant of the remnant of the original inhabitants of this region. They seem fundamentally misshapen, as if smashed out of their child’s and youth’s forms by a single blow from a fist, a moment’s impact, which I sometimes, in a different sense, wish on the other passersby, who have apparently remained unharmed, and likewise on myself.
No such sense of expulsion in the few minutes of the night of storytelling. There are simply some standing — I do not know who they are — there — I do not know how. If any outside lights were still on previously, they have gone off in the meantime, for instance the barbershop’s, in front of which could be a sign: “Last Chance for a Haircut Before the Big Woods,” and by eight at the latest that of the bakery, which in fact already has the woods in its name, and whose reversed 
in BOULAGERIE suggests Cyrillic script to me, as if I were looking out the window of a bar on Lake Ohrid. Only the outskirtishly pale light of the streetlights, leading to the wooded ridge and breaking off just before it, remains. The pinball machine and the video game inside have been turned off, their flashing lights extinguished, the seductive mechanical melodies and voices silenced. The cards or dice on the tables way in the back stay as they are. No one is doing anything more. At the very most the tradesman among us is casually repairing something for the proprietor, moving back and forth between the counter and the kitchen, as if he were at home. Otherwise there are no distinctions among those present, no barriers anymore. Even when the patron is not standing among the others, he could be just anyone behind the bar. No one is smoking now. The day’s debris on the floor has already been swept up. No one is loud or especially quiet. Everyone who speaks has the same intonation, and it matches the peaceful atmosphere in the dim café.
In the sense in which people use the term “intake personnel,” during such nights of storytelling I experienced those who were standing around as a sort of “uptake personnel,” whether one of them happened to be talking, listening, or listening to something else. Now a sort of game was in progress, one without rival players and sides, the opposite of all the games that I, at least, had witnessed over the years, which were accompanied by both hotheadedness and coldness, of which in the end only the coldness remained, most rigidly in the so-called game of kings, chess.
What we are playing here comes closest to a team’s warm-up before a match — except that the match itself is already there. In the brief interval, a transformation has occurred in those remaining behind together, stranded or not, even if the next day on the street one will look right through the other.
It may be that I will never see humanity this way again. Yet it existed in those nights there. It exists. I do not need any image as a continuation; it has been told to me.
Or was that just my imagination? Did I fail to consider that one of the people standing there no sooner got back to his room over the garage than he beat up the woman he lived with, perhaps that very woman sitting over to one side, his mother, who was just waiting for him to come home; that the second took a detour through the woods, where, on one of the banks of the pond, he injected himself with dope, that the third, I myself, with each such night was drifting farther from those who were his real kin?