Oneiron

was utterly invisible but could stop every business in a country when necessary. That was how God was. God radiated his liturgical light on holidays, on evenings when even the non-God-fearing but sufficiently tradition-reverencing portion of the Austrian citizenry made its way to Mass because that was the way. There was some sort of God there, or at least a picture of the Son of God and the Virgin Mary, and if there is a mother and a child, there must also be a father, even if he is an absentee. At Mass you could kneel (it was good for the soul!), so long as your knees weren’t too bad (then you could stand in good conscience), you could sing and shake hands with your neighbors and then finally take communion. But no one ever required belief.

God did not exist in persona for Ulrike and her family. In some distant branch of the family tree was one aunt who prayed earnestly, went to church, and regretted all the sins she committed and the sins she hadn’t committed but which she made the mistake of thinking of, because her God saw all, every thought, and every possible thought behind the thought, and every association lurking at the root of every thought. In the end that aunt landed in the loony bin.

But now, out of nowhere, this claim pops into Ulrike’s mind: DYING IS GOD’S REVENGE. Suddenly everything is oppressive, impending thunder, heaviness, terrible heaviness. Or maybe: a brain jam. This was the term Ulrike used for her state of mind after a test, the minutes that started when she returned the math exam to the front of the room and placed it in the teacher’s hand, walked out the door into the hall and maybe all the way to the schoolyard: it wasn’t a mood of relief, even though she had no doubt a good grade was on its way, presumably the best in the class. Numbers and vectors continued to zoom around maliciously in her consciousness until at least her third cigarette. Her head really wasn’t a normal head. She had a tendency to think thoughts that made her sick.

Ulrike strains to pull her mind together: there is no God to take revenge by dying. God does not exist. Ulrike squeezes her eyes shut tight and strains some more: click says the Colt lighter. A flame emerges (this is the best moment) to suck into the Lucky Strike cigarette. Lungs fill, her whole body tingles, a gust of wind blows through her head, and God disappears. There!

Ulrike opens her eyes and decides to focus on movement so she can keep up with Shlomith, who has already moved away. Shlomith has clearly become smaller than the others (not thinner, thank goodness, just smaller—this is called perspective, a phenomenon that even the congenitally blind know, so it isn’t just a convention; Picasso was wrong: perspective is more real than any god or goddess).

So Ulrike takes her first step.

If someone were to describe that step, say by comparing it to Neil Armstrong’s great (for the human race) small (for himself) bounce on the surface of the moon, they would be lying. Ulrike does not bounce. And Ulrike’s step also does not resemble the first, tentative, sideways thrust of a foot by a ten-month-old baby (which is usually followed by a fall, then crying, then another attempt), because Ulrike steps right after Shlomith without faltering. But it is also not a normal step. Because although Ulrike’s right foot moves sixty centimeters away from her left foot (which is a perfectly common “now I need to hurry” stride for her 159-centimeter frame) and although Ulrike pulls her left foot after the right (or, rather, in front of the right, as is the way in walking), she does not progress. She does not move away from the others. Dumbfounded, she turns her gaze to Maimuna, who has risen and is now standing again. But Maimuna only smiles mischievously and starts walking after her leader, without offering a single gesture of instruction to the helpless newcomer.

Nina and Polina are the ones to come to her aid. Purposefully they take Ulrike by the arms, one on either side. First step in place. Think about a swamp. Polina suggests this, but she soon realizes that Ulrike probably doesn’t have any experience with swamps, unlike her. She recently read a long, stunningly illustrated article about the peat bogs of Western Siberia. And she has no time to ask Ulrike about possible excursions she might have taken on the banks of the Danube before Ulrike is slogging away almost perfectly. She mimicks Nina and Polina’s walking extremely skillfully. It is like kneading dough with one’s legs—you have to think more weight into them, you have to think the resistance. Ulrike will soon hear that each woman has her very own resistance: Polina has swamp, Wlibgis has snow, Rosa Imaculada has a slightly waterlogged feather pillow, Nina has swimming floats (the orange arm floats for children sold in every discount store, la bouée pour les enfants à partir de 12 mois) placed on her feet in the deep end of a pool, and Maimuna has one thousand and one thoughts. She can do all manner of bizarre tricks in this white material, Ulrike has already noticed, and it is a result (although neither Ulrike nor anyone else knows it) of her not thinking of any resistance at all when she moves. Shlomith, on the contrary, thinks of food. Ultimately for her the hardest thing to bear is that she can’t even abstain from food. She is accustomed to abstinence, which triggers deep feelings of joy in her with near Pavlovian consistency. This is why at one moment in her mind she might be treading a square kilometer carpet of roasted marshmallows, in the next stomping sugary potato pudding, or then (if for one reason or another she wants to spur herself to especially quick movement) wading in her favorite food, a vat