'What happened? What did he say to you?'
'Nothing. He granted me clemency.'
'Come on, tell me what happened.'
'Nothing,' he says. 'Nothing happened. He didn't know who I was. Maybe he doesn't even know who he is.'
'That's impossible! What do you mean, he granted you clemency?'
'Everything is possible. That's the only thing I learned. That's the only thing I understood. Anything can happen.'
He hangs up and rips the cord out of the wall. Then he goes to the cupboard, pulls out a box and riffles through the photographs until he finds Alina's picture. Her wistful face, her faint smile, looks at him lovingly as though trying to tell him something. But she will not grant him clemency.
Soon he's racing his sports car through the empty streets, and then along country roads. In a small town he pulls up in front of a snack bar, has a coffee, buys a sandwich and takes it back to the car. He's in a hurry. He drives out of the town, past a baroque manor house transformed into a refuge for elderly men and women abandoned by their families, past a park, a hospital, a brewery. He turns off the main road and stops at the corner of a street. He gets out, goes into a block of flats, checks the names until he finds the one he's looking for. The lift isn't working, so he runs up the stairs to the third floor and stops in front of the door to Alina's flat. He's just about to ring the bell when he notices the seal around the door. He stares at it in shock and then rings the bell of the neighbouring flat. The door is opened at once by a woman wearing a dressing-gown. She has obviously been watching him through the peep-hole.
'You've come to see her?' she asks him.
He nods.
Are you a friend of hers?'
'What's happened to her?'
'You don't know? You're not from around here?'
'No. What happened to her?'
'That monster, the one who tried to shoot all those children in the bus at the border… he killed her.' The woman's voice catches. 'It happened last night. I saw her when they carried her out. No one knows why he did it or how he got inside. But they were after him, with dogs.
There was a lot of commotion, and then he jumped out of the window. Didn't kill himself. They took him off in an ambulance.'
'Is she really dead?' But he doesn't wait to hear her answer. He wants to preserve a fragment of hope. He thanks her and goes down the stairs.
By now it is daylight, and children are leaving for school.
He gets into his car, starts the engine, then turns it off again and lays his head on the steering-wheel. His shoulders begin to shake spasmodically.
Then he's driving again but he doesn't know where he's going. Perhaps he's not even driving, perhaps the car is driving itself. He has become a shadow. If the wind were to blow now, it would blow right through him the way it blows through a flat in which the doors and the windows have been left open, but the wind can't blow here. There's nothing here. He's driving through emptiness, utter emptiness, through nothing, through a white screen bisected by the taut black line of the horizon.
A red light begins blinking on the dashboard, the horizon wavers, the screen turns yellow and dissolves into long grass reflected in water.
He drives to the edge of a pond and stops.
The sun is high in the sky and billows of white fog roll over the mountain peaks.
He leaves everything in the car, his documents, his camera bag, his camera. He takes off the formal jacket he's still wearing from last night and pulls on the old black sweater he takes with him wherever he goes. He carefully locks the doors of the car and tosses the keys into the pond. A narrow pathway winds among the high brownish grass, which may be stalks of sargasso.
In front of him several bare, jagged cliffs rise abruptly to the sky. It is another country.
The sun beats down.
A flock of black ravens rises out of the grass and takes to the air. They look like black crosses floating in the sky.
The cliffs still seem far away, but it doesn't matter, he's in no hurry to get there, no hurry to get anywhere. He
wipes sweat from his forehead. He feels thirsty, so he tears off a few stalks of grass and slowly chews them. They taste bitter, and he makes a face.
He comes to a stream. The water is shallow and transparent and seems clean. He takes a drink and continues walking up the path beside its bed. As the path rises more steeply the stream gets narrower, and the water roars and plunges into the depths.
He finds the source of the stream just below a stony peak. He takes another drink, then finds a wide flat stone, takes off his sweater, rolls it into a ball, lies down and places it under his head.
On the other side of the mountains, down below, he can pick out the rooftops of a distant village, and he sees smoke rising from a fire somewhere quite close, although he doesn't know where; he's in a completely alien place.
The sky is a deep mountain blue, with pure white clouds sailing across it. He'd once taken pictures of them. Hands and clouds.
He looks up to the emptiness above him.
The sun is still beating down. The water beside him ripples over the stones, and the wind whistles loudly among the rocks. Among those sounds, which intensify the silence, he suddenly hears a distant voice calling his name. He jumps up, leans over and looks down.
'Is that you, Ali?' Then he sees her, running up the narrow path. She stops, and looks up towards him.
'Should I come to you?' he asks, so quietly that surely she cannot hear him, but she does because she nods and spreads her arms wide, and he stands above the abyss and imagines that he is a bird, a black raven or a large bird of prey, a condor. He steps lightly over the edge of the cliff and glides in great circles into the depths.
EPILOGUE
Work was over for the day. Lights were turned off. The slightly drunk model who had performed a sex act with an assigned partner put her clothes back on. She had a nice figure and, her well-proportioned face was even pretty, as long as you weren't looking for evidence of intelligence in it. As she finished dressing, Pavel felt aroused by the sight of her.
'Would you like a ride home?' he asked her.
'That would be very kind of you, Mr Fuka.'
'You can call me Pavel.'
His new sports car was parked outside. He opened the door for her.
'My God, I've never been in one like this before.'
'Do you want to have supper?'
'If you're inviting me.'
He drove off. There was still some time left before evening, and he felt like going for a drive.
'Do you mind if we go out of town?'
'Why not! I'm free now, since we've finished.'
'Have you got your passport with you?'
'Passport? What do I need a passport for?'
'It's not that far to the border, and in this thing we'll bethere in a little while.'
'You want to drive that far?'
'Maybe. We'll see.'
'I'd have to go home for it.'
'When I was your age,' he said, as they left the city, 'I desperately wanted to go abroad.'
'Of course, doesn't everyone?' Apparently she didn't understand why he was telling her this.
'But in those days it was impossible.'
'I just love shopping there. When I have the wherewithal.'
'If we stay there till tomorrow, you'll have the wherewithal.'
She half turned her head and then leaned over to him and kissed him. Warm air rushed through the open window. The countryside flashed by so quickly that individual objects became smudges.
She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed blissfully. After a while she said, 'I hope you don't think badly of me. I just took the job because they promised me a better part next time. What I really want to do is act.'
'Maybe it'll work out for you.'
'I wanted to go to drama school, but they wouldn't take me. I didn't have any contacts. Not even someone's father.'