That particle of dirt hidden in the lettuce-like folds of her navel gave you a nasty shock, and while she’s gone (on vacation from school, even though it’s her last and most important year), you’ve wondered if you should have let her know about it; this problem, oddly enough, has occupied your thoughts lately, although you wish you could just forget it now; you forget it this very moment. The tiny, terrifying genetic time bomb, like a microscopic, venomous snake lurking in wait, imperceptible, invisible, ignorant of the fatal role it’s going to play, ignorant, you think, until it divides in all its majesty at conception, thereby determining whether (according to the universal tendency to quantify beauty) you’ll go through life as attractive or unattractive or something in between, some indefinite thing that, according to the more or less chance observer, will either be considered attractive or unattractive or neither (one will, naturally enough, be inclined to believe those who insist on the former, although one can never be entirely sure). And no doubt those people who have been, according to the cosmetic Rassengesetze, classed as definitively, hopelessly unattractive, and who appear to have resigned themselves to their fate, undoubtedly still hope that one day they’ll meet someone who can overturn the verdict by declaring that they are, in fact, attractive, or that they can at least appear attractive in someone else’s eyes (“I think you’re beautiful”), yes, that they can actually, objectively become so.
The faint, steady drumming of unseen horse hooves upon a gravel surface is interspersed with a few other scattered sounds, like droplets of water thrown up by a fountain, seeming to hover for a brief glittering moment above the drumming: the creaking of carts, cracking of whips, whinnies, snorts, drivers’ excited shouts, you’ve heard how those sounds, especially the beating of hooves, slowly rise out of the silence, starting on the long stretch and reaching full pitch where the track curves, though the carts will still be hidden by the high wooden fence, and afterward, as horses and carts come out of the turn and head for a new long stretch, subside and disappear. Everything is silent now. Your ears, however, clearly recall these sounds as you walk.
A light, obviously belonging to an old, rickety bicycle, is getting closer (there’s a squeak each time a pedal grazes the chain stay, though the bike is making steady progress, the motion-powered light grows brighter and whiter with every pedal push, which ends in a slight forward jerk, and then yellower and dimmer until the next push), and a strange thought occurs you, a thought so strange it deserves a place in some wax museum for thoughts, namely, that there are people out there who’d rather spend a day gambling at the track, gambling for money, trying to make a fortune, trying to make themselves happy by making a fortune, or maybe just gambling for the sake of the suspense, the suspense, that is, of winning or losing a fortune, rather than just go to her, the woman you’re on your way to see, or to someone like her, and you laugh out loud at this thought, a liberating laughter at other people’s folly, no, a suppressed laughter, because the laboriously peddling cyclist is slowly passing you, each pedal squeaking as it grazes the chain stay, and as he rides through the pool of light cast by the street lamp, you catch sight of an old gaunt face beneath the shadow of his cap. It reminds you of wooden steps, the kind that have been dented, scuffed, and scratched countless times, which are so old that their knots and rings stand out in near bas-relief, his sunken eyes are nearly obscured by their own darkness, his near lipless mouth gaping, panting, and also somehow chewing, smacking, you hear him hawk and spit when he’s already behind you, as if he’s in the final stages of a terminal lung disease, as if he’s dying, and you forget him the moment he’s out of sight.
Exactly where you’re walking now, just a few weeks ago. The fading light of a late summer’s day seemed to make everything glow gold from within (a grove of trees is struck by a mild, golden-orange light that, as it creeps lower, singles out a tree from a cluster of dark trunks set way back in a forest or a park, sending flecks of light scampering up, until only the topmost leaves retain an orange glow, and they tremble in the wind until darkness overtakes them). You knelt while she supported herself on your shoulder, and after you’d removed her shoe, she tottered a bit, because she was only standing on one leg (it was a gallant scene, pleasantly reminiscent of an old, romantic story you’d once read, a throwback to an era of bustling brocade skirts, scanty décolletage, allonge perruques, false beauty marks, women’s “squeals of delight,” and so on), while you’d emptied her shoe with an energetic shake, like you’d shake a spice container, while you (hand cupped and fingers splayed, as if frozen around an invisible guitar neck) held her bare foot (she didn’t have socks and didn’t want to get dirty). The day was warm and dry, and from where you were kneeling you could see straight into the tall grass, which was green, backlit by a setting sun that seemed to hold the whole of summer, while each individual blade was stirred by a weak breeze, and you could see how this motion affected the play of shadow across the grass, and through your hand you could feel the warmth of her foot, and you’d watched the sunlight on the waving grass, and suddenly you’d felt as if you were a live wire, a relay between her foot’s warmth and the sun’s warmth (or maybe the reverse), but anyway, you were the connection between the reserve of beauty in her and the straightforward, endlessly complex reality around you, beginning with the sunlit grass and ending everywhere and nowhere. Did the landscape’s late summer light come from her or did her foot’s warmth come from the sun? Both.
You can’t make her understand. It’s like she’s on a different wavelength, a more objective, almost mathematical one. Who cares, you think. As you walk, your safety reflector knocks against your thigh, a constant irritation, until you finally break the chain and hurl the prismatic, plastic knickknack toward the burnt ruins; no one, you think, can force you to endure this type of maternal idiocy again. Could they be out looking for you? No way, it’s just been a little over half an hour. Anyway, they’re old and stupid. The TV’s off. They’ve gone to bed. They’ve gone to bed thinking you’re in bed too, while in reality, not in dream, you’re picking your way across the ground, careful not to trip or step in the mud, trying to stay on the small stone path (which, outside the circle of light cast by the street lamp, is nothing more than a darker ribbon silhouetted against dark grass) along the ground, past the half-burnt barn, where, despite the darkness, you can see the outline of the collapsed roof and the dirty white foundation wall, although you’ve come this way so many times before, both by day and by night, that you can picture the sooty bricks littering the ground, and above you the gaping window (a black stain on the wall below, it looks like a negative image of flames jetting out); you’ve seen how the stucco walls remained standing, like a gigantic, empty tool chest, long after the wooden roof had caved in. It’s not empty, though, but is filled with a shapeless tangle of rafters and beams, like a heap of broken bones; while shingles, both shattered and whole, are scattered around in colors ranging from ochre red to scorched black, and metal scraps in colors ranging from blistered white to charred black are also strewn about, as well as mattress feathers, an iron bed frame, barrels, a car body (the last animal had already left the building long before the fire started, only to be replaced by a jumble of furniture and machinery — flesh-and-blood animals driven out, almost literally, by steel ones), twisted, warped, buckled by the heat, and you’ve seen how the burnt crossbeams (or, rather, those parts not already reduced to gray and white ash) have a glistening, bluish-black sheen, like crow feathers or dried tar, and how they’re also knotted, ribbed, and cracked, how they’re splitting along seams in the wood, like they’re disintegrating into eyeless dice or irregular polyhedrons, and as the long, wet grass begins to soak your thin shoes, you think about how the barn might’ve looked before it burned. Of course, you never saw the barn before the fire, and so you resign yourself to the fact that some things, the things that came before you, like a war you have no direct experience of, can only be known by their aftermath, once they’re already in a state of decay; of course, you think, since she’s lived here for years, she could probably tell you what the barn looked like before the fire, but even as you think it, you realize that this is a dumb question, because she’d probably say, Like any old barn, just with a roof, or something along those lines, and in order to imagine what the barn looked like before the fire, you’d have to have seen it with your own eyes, or at the very least seen a good picture of it.