Only one thing is certain: Julia went to one of the larger cities and visited old friends. But they were not the same. Her own lack of interest, and of love, had failed to sustain these ties in the face of distance and change. They talked past her, and she past them. And besides, Julia needed an income. And so she had to move on, to a place where there was one to be had. So she came to another small city. It was a time when everyone was seeking a new life, like a migration. But Julia was not so enterprising, she didn’t go to America or to Jerusalem. A weaving mill was hiring untrained laborers. She took her place among them. And she stayed in this job for nearly ten years. She was so quiet and undemanding that they began to see her as one of their own. And it was precisely what she lacked that made her so well suited to a factory, for those places are practically made for such soulless or bodiless people — which is what she was, once and for all. And the fact that this woman never stole anything, or kept flawed wares for herself, which was halfway permitted, seemed like a miracle as well. And it was also a sort of relief that she never asked to be moved to the looms where patterns were woven with flowers and vines. She worked at the gray loom, once and for all. And she never took sides in a quarrel, or made any friends. But it wasn’t as if she were sad, no, it would be more accurate to say that she was satisfied, in a primitive way. She had understood that she was not self-reliant, not independent in a certain sense. And if death had chosen to take her away from her little house and garden, then she just had to seek other accommodations. And since she couldn’t hope to find such a good old friend just anywhere she looked — someone who would take not only her, but also her child, into his care and protection — she had to find her own place for the little one, too. This is how things were for her. And it was a miracle that she understood, and an even greater miracle that she acted accordingly. Of course no one disturbed her in this one harmony that she still had. But in her childhood and her early youth, even before she was born, in the restless existence of her forebears, she must have already been broken and brought low and crippled to the point of exhaustion. Wasn’t it an angel that simply folded her hands in this way? And that called her at just the right time, like the fragrance of flowers, called her to follow blindly, with the simple experience of her failings?
Indeed, that urged her to provide for her future? For on her own she never would have managed — on her own she lacked all the energy that another person or an institution might have had for her. On her own she never would have succeeded in raising her child in that little farmhouse, without a master. She hardly would have understood the point of this upbringing; for in her eyes, for her, life was basically empty and hollow. Indeed, it still seemed this way to her when she was with others, but then she bore it patiently, with friendly gratitude, like a precious gift that she really hadn’t needed.
Of course this insight was not the insight of a single day, or of a single disappointed night of love, though even the most trivial incident from her childhood ought to have been enough to tell her who and what she was. But she had not learned this all at once. All the hours of her life, added together, had made it clear as day to her: You are clumsy to the point of foolishness, you are asleep in the deepest sense. You are without love, though you are patient and almost good. For I killed your love in the frost of spring. And a person cannot truly live without love. And yet I, nature, will not let you perish. You shall experience unto the end who you are and what you are, and who others are and what they are. And I will even grant and teach a few things to you. But even that will not enrich you in any true sense. All that will belong to you is poverty: all that you are denied, those intangible things that you never receive. This is my intention, to which you must be faithful. And this faith, if you will, shall be your only victory.
That was what her fate had decided for her. Unspeakably harsh and yet mild, denying and refusing and yet giving, indeed, casting all of this upon her. For such understanding is a great gift. Of course, as her thoughts wandered into the gray cloth she wove, they often turned to the single street of that small market town, and the bench, yes, the bench. And the old man and the house. But she wove without impatience, in the course of the slow growth of time itself, until the street finally became a street, the bench let her pass by unscathed, and her child’s cloister waved to her from this pious embroidery. She had the good fortune that after these years had gone by, the two poor women who had rented her house grew old, and had to find new quarters elsewhere. So she could move in without any trouble. But first she rang the prefect’s bell to claim her child. She knew this girl. It was just as she had imagined. The way that she stood there with her little suitcase, grown and yet still a child. But a pure, uncompromising child, whose weakness had been transformed into her strength. She had no need to bid a formal farewell to the prefect, for at the moment her departure was only a transition from one cloister to another. And there was no kiss for the reunited mother and daughter, in its place was a mutual reverence. A kiss is something that belongs at the end of life.