I followed the hare and came to a bar. Up until then I’d known it only from hearsay as a meeting place for drunks. At that bar I came across members of the philistine procession. Sitting among the derelicts and misfits, they were transformed. As if they had finally changed to civvies, they radiated friendliness and trust. They were burning to tell stories, and not only about war. In my memory I hear them give vent to a strangely gentle lament and song of thanksgiving about the sweetness of childhood and their stolen youth, and I see them as isolated fugitives and exiles. They had suffered at being involved with the philistines; they dreamed of being accepted, not by some high-class club, but by this noisy gathering. Noisy? Maybe they all talked at once, but it seemed to me that I understood every word. My dominant impression of this smoky cavern was one of transparent order, regulated by the interaction between individual exuberance and an urgent collective seriousness. When the waitress appeared, a path was made for her, and the cook’s hand with a plate in it would pop out of the mist as from a cloud. The sound of cards being shuffled suggested the flapping of dogs’ ears and the whirring of birds’ wings, and rolling dice supplied the music. Whenever the telephone rang, everyone looked up, hoping it was for him. The proprietress behind the bar had eyes that nothing could surprise. A peasant woman came in, incongruous in those surroundings, put a bundle down beside her son, who had slumped over the table — his washing that she had just done — ordered a glass of schnapps for herself, and proceeded to drink it very slowly. The man beside me asked me who I was and I told him. We were standing shoulder to shoulder. At the back, one looked out on a vegetable garden, and in front on the street. Cars sped by and a dark bus overtook a lighted one as in a free and nameless metropolis.
Homeward across the deserted plain, under a starry, moonless sky. As always when I approached my village after being absent for any length of time, I was excited. My mood was positively festive. I was drawn to my village as by a magnet, but I commanded my heart to beat slowly. The night was unusually mild for that part of the country, and the only sound was the barking of dogs here and there, which put me in mind of a big estate, though big estates were a thing of the past. There were so many stars (even the spiral galaxies were clearly visible) that the constellations merged, suggesting a cosmic city girdling the earth. The Milky Way was its main thoroughfare, and the stars on the edge of the city bordered the runway of its airport; the whole city was getting ready for a reception. I thought of the mountain on Mars, almost twice as high as Mount Everest, with the suburbs of the heavenly city on its slopes.
Back to earth. In the distance, the few lighted windows of the village of Rinkenberg seemed embedded in Rinken Hill, as though the hill were a prehistoric formation converted into a modern housing complex. At the crossroads with the milk stand, which marked the village boundary, I was glad to be weighed down by my sea bag with the heavy books in it, for without it I might have flown away. The roofs of the houses, especially those made of weather-beaten shingles, had a silvery sheen that made them look like pagodas. The roadmender was a silhouette standing in the doorway of his porter’s lodge; his greeting to me, in a quavering voice that seemed to come from a great distance and didn’t wait for an answer, had the liturgical sound of a muezzin’s exhortations high up on his minaret. Outside a house at the end of an avenue of fruit trees far from the road, a whole family of villagers were sitting on a bench, knee to knee, plunged in a consensual silence, as though the essence of a summer night had been translated into human terms. I made a detour to the graveyard: no fresh graves (until my subsequent homecomings, but then more and more of them). On the way to our house, a neighbor woman passed me, mute, with arms half upraised; a poignant sign of helplessness. I couldn’t tell whether the buzzing in my ears came from the ventilator at the inn or from my blood.
There was light in our house, in every room. My sister was sitting by herself on the bench outside. Her eyes recognized me but gave me no greeting. In her face I saw a sorrow so pure that at first I mistook it for sublime happiness. But it came to me later on that she was sorrowing not so much for her dying mother as for her lost love, decades old, undying. “Grieving dancer.” Never had I seen a more beautiful woman. I wanted to kiss the sorrow away from my sister’s face, and — overwhelming event! — I was aroused by compassion; but she was untouchable.
Under the espaliered tree, the pears were lying in piles, unharvested, rotting. I went to the window and saw my parents lying on the bed. Side by side, holding each other tight; his leg on her hip. They rolled this way and that; I kept seeing first one face, then the other. For once, I saw my hard father softened by weakness, at last holding his wife in his arms. Over his shoulders he was wearing the purple robe beneath which he had stretched out on the church floor during those Easter vigils; my mother’s eyes were wide with the fear of death; she wanted her husband’s embrace to keep her alive. — Years later, where the bed had been, I found a thriving rubber plant in the warm sunlight; it was then that I remembered that scene of suffering most keenly and foresaw a time when the rubber plant would again give way to a human being in pain.
A hundred times I walked back and forth in the night outside the house before I was able to go in to those two people whom, grateful to have been born, I loved. And to this day I have no image of what followed, but only something hot and huge — my empty hands in which to gather, now and forever, the looks of my parents’ eyes.
I have often mentioned numbers in this story, numbers of years, kilometers, people and things, and it has cost me a struggle every time, as though numbers were incompatible with the spirit of my story. For this reason I shall speak once again of my fairy-tale-writing teacher. He is now retired and I go to see him now and then. He has set up a garden outside the town with a hut in it, where he sometimes spends the night. The pale historian’s face has again become the sunburned face of the geographer. His mother is still living, but she is very old and, as often as I’ve been there, I’ve never once laid eyes on her; I hear her talking to her only son through some doors, no longer in words as before, but with tapped signals, which he interprets by counting them. He has given up writing fairy tales; their place has been taken by counting. Even in childhood, he was always counting to himself, often unconsciously. In those days he had thought it an ailment. But then, on his solitary expeditions in the jungle of the Yucatán, he had discovered that counting, now consciously, his steps and breaths could be a means of survival; it had often helped him in danger, a more powerful “medicine” than any fairy tale, and more effective than any prayer. Now in his old age he felt increasingly allergic to the public notices and posters that were taking over, and more at ease with numbers, even price tags and the luminous figures in gas stations. Hadn’t the archaic poet said that number was more powerful than any ruse. Counting, he said, moderated him, slowed him down, regulated him, and cared for him; in counting he recovered from the world of headlines. His sacred numbers were those of the Maya: 9 and 13. Nine times he scraped his shoes before coming into the house; he would not start work until thirteen birds had flown across the garden; now and then he needed a nine-minute breather; and he walked around in a circle nine times thirteen times before going to bed.