At first he was out walking. A dreary march over a never-ending, barren plain. A desolate landscape with no villages, no trees, no watercourses. Nothing but this dried-out, cracked earth. Apart from the little greenish black lizards darting back and forth between stones and fissures, he was the only living being. He was alone, lugging a shapeless rucksack, its straps chafing against his shoulders and digging into his waist. He had little idea of his destination or purpose, only knew that it was important. Perhaps he’d known more at the beginning, but it had fallen by the wayside.
But he must not give up, must not pause, must not sit down; only keep plodding on, yard after yard, step after step.
And the wind was getting stronger, forcing him to lean forward into it; it was blowing more and more strongly at him, hurling sand and dry twigs into his face, and he leaned farther and farther forward, closing his eyes in order to protect them.
And then he was there, in front of that house, large and battered, so alien and yet at the same time so familiar. And people were standing in long rows to welcome him, pressed against the walls in the corridors; all kinds of people imagina-ble, but he knew them all and nobody escaped his memory.
Many of his friends, Bendiksen and Weiss and Jurg, his own son, but others as well; people from the great wide world, and from history: the Dalai Lama and Winston Churchill and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev read a poem in fluent Latin about the transience of all things, and shook him by the hand.
Everybody shook him by the hand and passed him on to the next one; led him gently but firmly further into the house, up winding staircases and through long, dimly lit corridors.
He finally came to a room, darker than any of the others, and he realized he had reached his destination. The man sitting on the other side of the low table. . he recognized the table, it was his own. . and it was definitely a man, it was. .
it must have been. . it was surely?
The light hanging down from the ceiling had a flat shade made of tinplate, and it was hanging at such a ridiculously low level that all he could see was lower arms and hands resting on the table, but he thought he recognized them. They were, they were. . were they?
And on the table was Eva’s kimono; his first impulse was to grab hold of it and put it in the washing machine, but something held him back; he didn’t know what it was, because the man in there, in the darkness, was more scared than he was himself; that was why he couldn’t show his face, but it was surely. . And then he felt a sudden aversion, an irresistible urge, a horrific force compelling him to get out of that room before it was too late, and he woke up.
He woke up.
Yes, now that he looked back, he was certain that it wasn’t anything external that had dragged him out of his dream. It was the room itself that had thrown him out. Nothing else.
He was awake. Wide awake. His breath was heavy with the sleeping tablets Ruger had made him take. Perhaps he would have had the strength to remain in that room just a little longer but for the effect of those tablets. Long enough to get an inkling, at least?
The kimono on the table was not just a dream, he knew that; it was a memory, a fragment of that night. It wasn’t a real kimono, of course. Only an imitation. She had found it in one of the narrow alleys in Levkes last summer, and he’d bought it for her. One of those evenings when they’d sat outside the tavernas until closing time and then wandered back to their lodgings along the beach. Made love in the sand in the warm, black darkness, and then walked the rest of the way naked, and there had been people here and there, quite close to them, but the darkness had been so incredibly dense, they needed no other covering. Even so, the sky had teemed with stars, myriad stars, and shooting star after shooting star after shooting star.
They had stopped counting once they had wished for everything they could possibly want. .
This was, he reckoned, less than three months ago. It could just as well have been three million years ago. The irrevocable nature of the passage of time struck him with full force; the irrevocable and unalterable sequence of every second, every moment. The desperate inevitability of it all. We are closer to the end of the world than to that minute that has just passed by, because that is lost forever. There is no way Levkes will ever come back; nor will the retsina and the beggar with the blue eyes; they will never come back.
But there again, nor will all the rest.
Did it really matter?
Did life really matter?
Difficult to find the right balance now.
You will find out who you are when the difficult moment comes.
I am nobody, he thought. So I am nobody.
I find it more meaningful to lie here on my bed and observe a small patch of wall. Observe it and scrutinize it close up, pick out a stain, as big as a postage stamp, or a fingernail.
Concentrate on it with all my senses, smell it, feel it with my tongue, with my fingers, over and over again, listen to it, until I know it inside out. . more meaningful than to go back and remember what was, and what happened.
Those were his thoughts as he woke up out of that dream, and they were not new thoughts or thoughts he could banish.
Now the breakfast carts were getting closer. The hatch in his door opened and the breakfast tray was slid inside. The hatch closed again. It was seven o’clock; he had slept for nearly eight hours; for the first time in three weeks he had slept for a whole night. And today. .
What day was it today?
It took him several seconds to work it out.
His trial would begin today.
He took a bite of bread and contemplated his thoughts.
What were his feelings?
A sort of apathetic expectation?
Get it over with?
Or perhaps simply. . nothing at all.
10
The courtroom was almost Gothic. A high, vertical style of architecture that reminded him of the anatomy lecture theater in Oosterbrugge. Steep galleries of seats on three sides; on the fourth side perched the judge and other court officials behind brownish black bars. The small amount of natural light allowed in came from a circle of stained-glass windows high up in the pointed roof, and without doubt reinforced the impression of a vertical, descending hierarchy, a vision of the world order that must have hovered in the mind’s eye of the building’s creator in the middle of the previous century.
This courtroom was crammed full, with not a single seat vacant.
The majority, getting on for two hundred people, was naturally seated in the public galleries. And the majority of those were pupils of Bunge High School. Mitter gathered that he was the direct cause of this year’s top-of-the-league score for truancy.
There were also journalists in the public galleries. They sat without exception in the front row, their legs crossed and with notebooks on their knees. Or sketchbooks-taking photographs was not permitted in court, he now remembered. He was surprised by the large number; there must have been a dozen of them. That surely had to indicate that this case was of national interest, not just a provincial happening.
Mitter’s place was below the galleries, in the arena itself.
There also sat Ruger, whose cold seemed to be getting better; Havel, the judge; prosecuting attorney Ferrati and his assistants; and a small number of other lawyers and ushers.
Plus a jury. This was comprised of four men and two women, sitting behind a partition to the right of the judge, all of them looking sympathetic. Apart from the one second from the right, who was an erect gentleman with
