The author of one of the earlier articles, who had been allowed to shadow her during a workday at the bank and then also accompany her through her riverport city in the evening, had noticed this ability she had, and had ascribed it to a special feature of her office: she sat there alone, inaccessible, closed off, visible to no one, behind a door that could be opened only by a button on her desk; and at the same time she had before her, in the same wall as the door, a pane as large as a shop window that provided a view, not of the outdoors but of the office space, with the cubicles where the bank officers sat and received their clients or whomever; through this pane she could keep her eye on everything happening out there, while those on the other side saw only their own reflections in the matte, silvery, foil-like surface.
The author of another feature on her, who had also written a soccer novel, explained the phenomenon of her not being seen (or the
non-phenomenon) by saying that her way of looking past others toward something in the distance, a vanishing point or goal, and of tracing with her eyes a possible passage between the people around her, was reminiscent of the “divinely talented Libero,” who, with the ball on his foot, having glimpsed an opening among the opposing players, would distract and mesmerize them into position, thereby preserving the gaps his eyes had detected, after which he, Libero, now invisible to those who had been thus magnetized and blinded, would kick the ball as he wished, past the other team's players, or over them, and usually score.
Whatever the case: that evening she did not want to be seen, and no one saw her. Everybody looked away from her; at most someone might follow her gaze: for the way she focused on the horizon suggested that something remarkable must be going on there. But there was nothing to see, not even a horizon.
Suddenly, after stopping, starting, then stopping again, one was in Nuevo Bazar and surrounded by buildings, tall ones, as if already in the center of town. No actual center: every street corner could be central, also a side street, a passageway, a stone staircase with four or five steps. Because the town was located in a hollow, which unexpectedly dropped off even more and at the same time formed a curve, perhaps following the meanders of one of the rivers that had at one time been numerous on the mesa, it remained hidden up to the last moment, until one turned onto the steeply descending curve, where, instead of the barren, wide steppe, one was instantly surrounded by façades close enough to touch, and instead of the uninterrupted highland sky saw narrow ribbons of sky following the configuration of the streets below.
And after a long day on the road, often fraught with uncertainty, that could be a blessing. It could be pleasantly stimulating; stimulating and calming at the same time; welcoming without a welcome sign. And like an evening
corso
in a southern city, the sidewalks, earlier completely unpopulated, once one reached the first cornerstone of a building, were black, white, colorful with pushing, crowding, or merely standing and leaning pedestrians (as in a
corso
), the unwritten law being that they could not venture one step beyond the boundary of the prescribed evening promenade, in this case the edge of the settlement, and if an individual by mistake violated this law, he had to turn around immediately.
As a result of this welcome, a surge of appetite: a desire to taste this town for an evening. And what had the author of that travel guide meant
by that reference to daily tons of blood-soaked sawdust in Nuevo Bazar? Certainly it was not to be taken literally, but there was also not the slightest indication that the image was supposed to be interpreted metaphorically. The pedestrians, and likewise the people in cars, driving by very slowly, had nothing evil in mind and simply wanted to enjoy the moment. As a group, they even made an unusually carefree impression; and that had to do with the convertible tops, open in spite of the January evening at this altitude, the rolled-up sleeves and sleeveless blouses: an innovative feature was the streetlamps, which not only produced light but also heated the air. The streets, including the side streets, were as bright as day, and that, too, in marked contrast to the area before the entrance to the town, already shrouded in night: light coming from the many floodlights on poles towering above the town, whose gleam, even when one looked straight up, remained mild instead of blinding; reminiscent of a veiled sun on a morning just before the onset of spring.
And listen: even a few cicadas could be heard, as loud as in summertime, a grating and warbling, though not from actual live insects but rather from deceptively good imitations of them, dear little machines in the shape of cicadas, attached way up on the streetlamps here and there, even programmed to make artful pauses, so that no chorus of shrill sounds resulted; just sporadic bursts of sound, which then continued in a casual, even rhythm. And look: olive trees in cask-sized pots, and feel: genuine, proper, olive-green fans of leaves that one could break off, and even ripe, genuinely bitter fruit.
Should she make her way to her bank's branch in Nuevo Bazar, where, as at each of the branches throughout the world, above the lobby a visitor's apartment was maintained for her use, to be accessed by means of a series of codes, stored in her hand telephone, for the four or five doors? This time that was out of the question. After all, this journey had to do with something other than an article or a feature: with a, the, her, our, book. Spending the night in such a comfortable, and, what is more, familiar apartment did not belong in the book; and besides, she was not traveling on business. The story forbade that, and consequently she forbade it to herself.
She did not even have to make a point of forbidding herself. It went without saying that she must hunt down a place for the night. (Smile.) The bank apartment “did not count.” And besides, for a while, “or for good?” she thought, she was more than merely “not in service”; for the
book she had to be someone other than her everyday roleânot necessarily someone different: someone in addition, who could, to be sure, provide service if necessary. The book, the adventure, required that she be a stranger here, a nobody. And at this thought a hand was placed on her shoulder.
Katib
was Arabic for shoulder, and
kitab
was the book.
Searching for a bed for the night provided a foretaste of the pending adventure. The many hotels, at least three times as many as the last time she had been here, were all full, or, conversely, were empty: “Waiting for the Refugees,” as the vacancy sign outside announced. But at first she did not even inquire about a room. That was as it should be. Parking the car on what was apparently the only lot in the entire settlement not yet built up, and setting out on foot. A sort of happy anticipation of a night without a bed, among the glass shards in the car, or elsewhere. Easy does it: in the course of events that will not fail to come about.
Eventually she found a room in a place that was neither a pension nor a private home, and, in spite of the first impression, also not a shelter for the homeless. Crammed in among dozens of identical buildings, it called itself a
venta
, even though it was in the middle of the town (as everything in Nuevo Bazar suggested the middle),
venta
like a hostel out along the highway, standing alone, the only building far and wide, at a crossroads that had been important centuries ago, but in the meantime was no longer important, and perhaps not even a crossroads anymore.
A
venta
without rooms: the floors above the ground level, where the taproom and dining room were located, consisting simply of four corridors that met at right angles, opening onto an inner courtyard, actually more like a shaft, at the bottom of which was an empty square of concrete, hardly as big as a Ping-Pong table, called the “patio.” Nothing but corridors, without doors to any roomsâso where to sleep? In the sleeping compartments along all the walls of the corridors or galleries: an unbroken succession of wooden sleeping cupboards or boxes or cabinets (the ceiling so low); looking very narrow from the outside, but inside halfway roomy, even if one's head or feet bumped against the adjacent bed-cupboard; a heavy, dark curtain to close off the compartment; and these berths, suitable only for sleeping alone, like litters, stacked as in a litter storage shed, lined up around the four corridors, and almost all of them already booked for the night.
She (does the
ventero
even notice that she is a woman?) is given one of the last berths, one with a wall lamp, so that with the curtain closed
she can do her usual after-midnight reading. And also, as usual for travelers, a key, in spite of the unlockable litter, in case she comes in late. And how small this key is in comparison to the one she had the other night, how light and inconspicuous, like the key to a mailbox or a bicycle.
After the evening meal in the
venta
I saw her outside, mingling with the passersby, whose numbers had at least doubled in the meantime. The drivers from earlier are among them; hardly anyone is driving now. And no one notices her; as if she were still invisible, orâthis, too, a trait she displays occasionallyâutterly nondescript.
As part of such casual strolling in a crowd, there is a common phenomenon, or natural occurrence: time and again, a face, a voice, even a mere gesture, reminds one of an acquaintance; usually someone from earlier in one's life, a person one lost sight of long ago, often someone already dead. But here not one such an encounter. Instead the pedestrians all resemble each other, probably as a result of the artificial lighting from high above, like people hurrying, some in one direction, to a stadium for a game, and others in the opposite direction, toward a bullfighting arena or an open-air concert.
Many children in the crowd, as usual, and they, too, resemble one another, and not only one child resembling the other, but the children resembling the adults, and not as children resemble their parents, but rather as adults resemble adults; children with grown-up faces. No excessively loud voices; any talking is steady, subdued, as on the way to, or on the way back from, a so-called communal experience.
Gradually one was able to see that these masses, instead of forming a uniform procession, were moving back and forth in innumerable little groups, troops, clusters, and units, with gaps between one team (even as few as two could form a “team”) and the next, at first almost imperceptible, but after a while distinct. At the same time, from one group to the next, a great variety of languages, all spoken in the same subdued tones; not entirely different languages, as becomes clear when one listens carefully, in fact almost always from the same source, from the same language family, but pronounced, accented, aspirated, in entirely different ways, apparently intentionally, by the squads strolling by; and this most noticeably and emphatically in the case of mere dialects and patois, where each of the hundreds of little troops is showing off its own particular variant (of the written language shared by all of them) with the most extensive possible display of unique features; distinguishing itself in this manner
from the next little unit, as if that group's members spoke an incomprehensible Chinese or Siberian mumbo-jumbo, and only here, among us, could pure Castilian or Bazaranian be heard; and thus planting each entity like a standard, announcing, as it marches past, a newly declared language, as a challenge; which matches that image from earlier, during the evening drive, of the line of cars into Nuevo Bazar: the banners, flags, and pennants being frenetically waved from every car, with the windows and tops open, and each cloth bearing different colors and coats of arms.
And among these individual squadsâhardly any impression of a
corso
and evening stroll anymoreânone who have eyes for another person, behind them, in front of them, coming toward them, or indeed for any individual. People intentionally look away from one another; not out of scorn or hatred, but rather out of a new kind of reticence (in this respect, too, Nuevo Bazar has changed since the last time); these people have become timid toward and foreign to each other, and above all toward themselves. All of them have become afraid of strangers, even in their own country (perhaps it would be different in another country?). And tomorrow they will also turn their head away with a jerk when they are alone and encounter someone from the smaller or larger clan in whose company they are today.
And it is not only the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine faces that resemble each otherâalmost all of them wear their hair the same way, for instance the old and young men, who have one long, bleached strand of hair tucked into their belt in the back. And all these mortally shy, orphaned, abandoned, and/or widowed men are dressed in the same style, and their shoes or high heels have the same little metal plates tapping a chorus into the night. Night? And many push and bump into each other, unintentionally, in this crowd, so uniform and apparently timid, where no one any longer knows the fine art of stepping aside; and the response to the bumping is an expletive or a hastily drawn weapon here and there; the words and gesture initially not a hostile act but rather an expression of the irritability common to all in Nuevo Bazar, or even more of nervousnessâas indeed one peal of a church or temple bell, actually melodious, now leaps out at one as a cold, dry clang, something between a threat and a warning tone, a sort of dog substitute, and makes oneâone? manyârecoil in alarm.
At some temporal distance from the events outlined here, a historian later provided an exhaustive account of the Nuevo Bazar of that period. Let his ramblingsâfor that is what they areâbe introduced here by a few excerpts, on the suggestion of our protagonist, who sees it as an essential feature of the book devoted to her, first of all, that she disappear occasionally from its pages (though with her presence still felt, for instance as its reader) and, second, that in this book, albeit not too often, a problem of rhythm!, some passages occur that are not exactly filthy, but certainly grubby, bordering on the tasteless and abstruse, to be sure only bordering, and playing fast and loose with realityâinstead of, as is otherwise a basic principle of her story, seeking and exploring reality in a sort of quest.
Let this point also be made to preface the historian's passages: he appointed himself the representative of the profession and furthermore a “specialist, respected throughout Europe, on the Nuevo Bazar Zone”; his statements, despite their carefully cultivated tone of historical objectivity, are dictated by overzealousness and ill will (the author of that tendentious travel guide could have been one of his predecessors); and finally, it would be plain to a blind man that he had spent his entire life or half-life as a private historian in a zone very similar to Nuevo Bazar, perhaps even identical with it.
It begins with the historian's wanting to see each of the many peoples in the Zone as manifesting only the worst, most evil, or ugly of its “historically conditioned peculiarities and characteristics.” The good, better, attractive, likable traits of any people in the Zone were long ago eradicated, precisely by the elimination of borders and barriers between the individual peoples: the elimination of historical ones “rightfully and indubitably” to be viewed as progress and liberation, but with them went the “natural”
ones as well, which, along with threshold anxiety, also drove out of the people on either side any of the “threshold awareness” that had functioned as a “basis for national education,” as an “instrument of national refinement”: leaving no ability to distinguish between here and there.
“One people, in the territory of any other people, behaved more and more as though it were in its own territory, in the sense of behaving all the more badlyâuniquely and exclusively badlyâfor over there, beyond the former borders, it is of course not our people, but since the elimination of the borders it is our territory. Our territory? our free range, our space for wallowing and mucking around, our surrogate battleground. If the individual peoples in the Zone would simply regard the entire area as their own, at least now and then one of their good qualities would manifest itself.
“Thus as far as the Zone is concerned, the comforting concept formulated by one of my historiographical predecessors, that of
cultural continuity
, meaning the indestructible qualities of the peoples, which includes those legendary ties to a place and to a historical mission that persist even in the face of near extinction, exile, destruction of traditions, of economic systems, of compilations of legal precedentsâthis comforting concept, when applied to the Zone [one of those typical private-historian utterances, so complicated that the beginning has to be reiterated at the end!] is actually tinged with mockery.
“The only cultural continuity maintained among one of the peoples there is the coarseness and obscenity for which it has been known since the Thirty Years' War (not a trace left of its love of celebrations or its hospitality); among another people nothing remains but the habit, for which it has been known since the early Middle Ages, of yelling and elbowing others out of the wayâits newspapers are even so large that when they flip them open anyone sitting nearby has to moveâand at the same time a penchant for pussyfooting around (without their once famous ability to turn inward and suddenly step elegantly out of the way); and the cultural continuity of the third or other Zone people, praised in antiquity and earlier still, even by foreign chroniclers, for their love of children, knowledge of the stars, expertise in fruit growing, and skill as mariners, now expresses itself exclusively in two characteristics mentioned previously only in passing by hostile historians: gluttony and a passion for foul language and negative attitudes (not a single statement without a tacked-on opinion, always a bad one, or a profanity, never intended humorouslyâan honest-to-goodness curse). Thus only negative characteristics as cultural
continuity among the peoples of the Zone? Only those characteristics that lash out.”
And that is by no means all. This would-be historian has even worse things to say. He works himself up to describing the people of Nuevo Bazar in terms that bear not the slightest relation to any visible reality, less descriptions than figments of his imagination.
Thus he mentions, as a custom shared by all the different ethnic groups in his day, that they do not clip their mobile phones onto their belts or elsewhere but drag them along, in the settled areas, on a line or a leash, almost as long as for a dog, “on a rail specially installed for this purpose by the Zone administration.” Furthermore, according to him, all the inhabitants, without exception, including any children who know how to count, are required to have such a device with them at all times, and to keep it switched on.
“On the other hand there was a regulation stipulating that if one received a call one had to put on a special helmet, which concealed the speaker's or listener's face, along with its expressions, from the eyes of others on the street, and muffled his voice, at the same time distorting it to the point of incomprehensibility. Time and again it happened in the Zone in those days that a person telecommunicating out on the street without the prescribed facial shield would have his hand knocked from his ear by one of the specially appointed enforcers, with a stick designed just for that purpose (and not a few civilians played policeman, using their bare fists), and time and again mistakes were made, when a presumed violator was merely holding his hand to his ear as he walkedâmistakes that did not always simply end with an apology and the apology's being accepted.
“Altogether, the entire Zone was notable for being a source of mistakes and mix-ups. The residents of the Zone did not even become aware of most of them, or if they did, fortunately there were no serious consequences. To mention (for the last time!) those long-distance-calling minis that everyone had to carry: especially in the spring, which still occurred in the Zone, though very inconspicuously, quite often one of those out on the street would mistake the sudden squawking of birds, whether close by or high up in the air, for his telephone's ringing, and would promptly press the little button, after obediently popping on the helmet. And one never saw anyone in Nuevo Bazar doing actual work; certainly there were people slaving away, but they were kept out of sight or were so far off that they no
longer had any significance. And all the wares from the wide world seemed to be available, but when one really needed something, it was nowhere, but nowhere, to be found. And while all the alleged monuments glowed and glittered, the hordes of pedestrians below waited in vain for the simple headlights of buses and other means of transportation.
“And since each of the approximately nine hundred ninety-nine ethnic groups in the Zone had its own ring tone, when a titmouse squeaked, only the Galicians would answer; when a blackbird chirped, the Valencians; when a falcon screeched, the Andalusians; when a lark trilled, the Carinthians; when a woodpecker rapped, the New Spartans; when a jackdaw squawked, the Chumadians. But no one in the throng would react to the clattering, or rather rattling, of the storks, which periodically drowned out all the other sounds or noises. Here, as everywhere on the mesaâin spite of everything, the Zone continued to be a part of itâthe storks built their basket-like nests atop the church towers, but their sound not only did not match any of the different rings; it was not even heard by the people of the Zone, or if it was heard, it was mistaken for a stick caught in a vehicle's wheel. No one knew that there was life up there among the presumably dried-out twigs atop the tower; not even the children looked up to see the dagger-like beaks poking out of the nests, or the fighter planes overhead.
“Among the innumerable mix-ups occurring daily in the Zone at that time, others were less innocuous: the mere sound of the wind had become so unfamiliar that a person hearing a rushing behind him would take it for a truck bearing down on him, and would involuntarily jump out of the way, and precisely thereby ⦠Another person might hear the crunching of footsteps growing louder and louder on all sides, and, assuming that he was surrounded by enemies, would fire blindly in all directionsâmany adults in the Zone were armed, and not only adultsâyet the crunching was actually the croaking of frogs, which continued to have their moist places, though hidden from view.”
And the height of the Zone's self-appointed historian's ridiculous imaginings, an example of his utter disregard for the principle articulated long before him by a narrator of an entirely different sortâ“to present this and that to the reader without drawing any conclusions!”âcould be found in his conclusions, which he prefaced with a few final aspersions, cast not only on the people of the Zone but also on the animals, plants, and objects there.
“To be sure, there were still a few original inhabitants in the Zone who referred to themselves as being âof the old school.' But they were dying out. All the others had moved there from elsewhere, most of them already two or three generations back, without displaying any trace of the regions and countries from which their ancestors came, indeed without any knowledge of those ancestors. Each person stalked around as his own hero; there was bragging even in the eyes of the infants: âWhatever you people are, I've been for a long time already. In a pinch, I'd be a better singer than Orpheus or Bob Dylan. If I wrote a book, Cervantes and Tolstoy would be rank amateurs by comparison. If I had to direct movies, they would make
Birth of a Nation
and
Viridiana
look like home videos. If I were asked to paint a picture ⦠,' and so on. Admiration and enthusiasm for the actions and accomplishments of anyone else was considered old-fashioned and embarrassing, or was merely feigned, and in such a way as to be intentionally transparent. Yet in the Zone and on the street, as well as on the Zone TV and the Zone Internet (which was limited to the Zone!), one of the most frequently used words was âlove.' âI love this salt shaker, I love this purple, we (couples always spoke in the first person plural) love New Zealand wines, we loved the latest work by â¦' (even the booksellers used nothing but the first person plural, whether they were several or only one) â¦
“In truth, what had once been love had long since disappeared from the Zone. And that revealed itself above all in the fact that each person had his own way of measuring time; in fact, all the digital watches beeped to mark the hours at completely different intervals. And each person followed his own clock, lording it over everyone else with his personal time. Not only the credit cards but also the paper currency displayed their owner's picture almost immediately after coming into his possession. While on one street veritable hordes of judges paraded in full regalia, on a nearby parallel street the daily procession of felons took place. Even the worst criminals (often former statesmen and their ilk) moved about freely in the Zone, openly and as a matter of course, aware that they would never ever be punished.
“As far as I am concerned, perhaps here and there a hint of that extinct love may have revived. But the person in whom it revived remained hopelessly alone with it. Only the haters still formed a community. Even the children in the Zone were handicapped by bad qualities, at first imposed on and instilled in them, soon innate. If one of the last two or three
original inhabitants happened to speak to such a child from the heart, saying, âBe yourself!' (this might be an old photographer, setting up a school photo), the child would promptly, at a complete loss, make a whole succession of faces, not one of which was anywhere near âthe right one.'
“Another thing was that any child in the Zone, if asked about the points of the compass, would be incapable of pointing out south, north, west, and east (and most of the adults could not do so either). Bees were called wasps, or vice versa. Chestnuts, although people enjoyed eating them roasted, on a plate, were not recognized when they were lying under their tree (in spite of everything, there was still the occasional chestnut tree on the edge of the Zone). An apple, if it was not arranged in a basket in front of a store, but was hanging from a tree, among the leaves (in spite of everything, there were still â¦), was not recognized as a fruit, and was left there to rot.
“Of course one also from time to time saw the Zone, which, by the way, was not in a world of its own, dotted with the colorful neckerchiefs of all sorts of scout troops. But instead of exploring nature, these troops behaved more like militias, with casually worn daggers (whose forms could be ascribed to the many ethnic groups that had moved into the area), under the motto âDo one bad deed every day,' even if that consisted merely of pushing someone from another ethnic group off the sidewalk. In the Zone, even gardeners, who are favorably looked upon everywhere else, were likewise no longer considered âgood folk': even they, the good gardeners of yore, went all out to make life miserable for their neighbors, perhaps by deploying all their equipment, enough for ten fire departments, against every individual blade of grass, and with blaring sirens to match, and preferably on Sundays; or else these battalions of gardeners, the most avid patrons of taverns after work, would move in like an eviction squad and beat up a person standing alone at the bar, preferably a former hunter from the steppes, a remnant of the original population, quietly sipping his drink by himself.