EVERY COUNTRY HAS its Samarkand and its Numancia. That night, both places were here with us on the Morava. Numancia, located in the Iberian highlands, had at one time been the last refuge from and bulwark against the Roman Empire, while Samarkand, whatever it may have represented in history, became and remains legendary, and will still be legendary when history is no more. On the Morava, in place of a fortress we had a boat, to all appearances a rather small one, which styled itself “hotel” but for quite a while now had primarily served the writer, now the former writer, as a dwelling. The HOTEL sign merely provided cover: almost anyone who inquired about a room for the night, a cabin, would be told “No vacancy” and sent packing. Such inquiries, however, hardly ever occurred, and not only because the boat always anchored in places along the river to which no proper roads led. On the rare occasions when someone did find his way there, it was because of the “hotel” sign beckoning at a great distance through the darkness, across the fields bordering the river: MORAVIAN NIGHT.
The boat was not really anchored, merely moored to trees or pilings, and in such a way that the hawsers could be loosened quickly and easily—whether for a quick getaway or simply for pushing off without any fuss, for maneuvering upstream or downstream. (After many years of sand and silt buildup, not entirely the result of war, during the period in question long stretches of the Morava had become quite navigable again, all the way to the sources of its southern and western branches, thanks to a flourishing and—almost—universally recovering economy that was spreading even beyond the borders of our country, previously reduced to the most wretched backwater of Europe.)
On the night when we were summoned to the boat, it was tied up between the village of Porodin and the town of Velika Plana. Although Velika Plana lies closer to the river, the summons came from the riverbank on the Porodin side, far from the bridge linking the two towns, and as a result we zigged and zagged, each of us wending his way separately from the village, turning now left, now right, along cart tracks that switched direction from one field to the next. Since all of us happened to be in Porodin or nearby villages, on various farms, we, the friends, associates, distant neighbors, collaborators of the former writer—each of whom had been his traveling companion on one leg of his journey or another—soon formed a convoy of sorts, in cars, on bicycles, on tractors, and on foot, the latter making as rapid progress cutting across fields as those in vehicles, who had to follow bumpy tracks that kept veering away from the destination on a course to nowhere that soon petered out. Even those on foot, with that glowing MORAVIAN NIGHT sign seemingly just a hop, skip, and jump away, would unexpectedly happen upon a deep canal that forced them to make an abrupt turn, only to find themselves facing an impenetrable thicket that forced them to turn off again.
Why had our boatman chosen to make the Porodin area, of all places, his residence? We could only guess. Some surmised that it had to do with a story told all through the Balkans between the wars—it had always been either wartime there or “between the wars”: apparently a peddler had been killed by a local resident, for which the entire village had done penance ever since on the anniversary of the murder. Others believed that he had moved there because of the Morava, to be able to gaze out at the river, especially its shimmering bends, one just upstream, the other downstream. Still others speculated that it had to do with the many crossroads and forks in the good-sized village, where he simply wanted to sit on the terrace outside one of the little Balkan taverns, watching flocks of sheep grazing as far as the eye could see, a glass of the cloudy, iron-rich local wine in front of him.
It was long past midnight. As if by previous agreement, we had gone to bed unusually early, and were already fast asleep when the summons reached us. Yet instantly we were wide awake. Not a moment of bewilderment or confusion. The wake-up call had come in a number of ways, but mainly by mobile telephone. One or two, however, heard a messenger knock on the barnyard gate or toss a pebble at the window—one little knock or a single little stone was enough. And one of us, opening the door to find the procession assembled outside, told the others that as he had lain in his bed in Porodin with the curtains open as wide as they would go, he had been startled out of his sleep by the seemingly imperious flashing of that neon sign far off in the meadows along the Morava, and the next person claimed to have been jolted awake by a signal sounding more like that from a seagoing vessel than from a houseboat. Jolted? Maybe so. But it had been no ordinary jolt. And however it happened, the rousing had taken place without words. And one way or the other: each of us felt as if the summons had seized him by the scruff of the neck, at once roughly and gently. The telephones had beeped only once. And one of us, who answered a fraction of a second before the ring, with the kind of presence of mind one has only when one has been fast asleep, heard nothing but a very brief, almost inaudible laugh, sounding to him, on the threshold between deep sleep and wide-awakeness, all the clearer, and that meant, without words: “Get up!” The laughter was melodic, and it was not the laugh of our friend on the boat but unmistakably that of a woman, which, however, came as no surprise to the person thus summoned. Nothing surprised him at that moment, nor did anything surprise him as he then made his way across the fields and the fallow stretches—despite the highly fertile land along the river and the all-pervasive new economy, the untilled areas continued to expand—all the way to the MORAVIAN NIGHT. Nothing surprised us, any of us, in that moment of waking long before midnight. And likewise in the hour that followed, as we hobbled and wobbled over sticks and stones: not a flicker of surprise. The prevailing sensation: that of great freshness, coming both from the night air outside and from deep inside us: an all-encompassing freshness.
Copyright © 2008 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main
Translation copyright © 2016 by Krishna Winston
