This story began on one of those midsummer days when you take off your shoes to walk barefoot in the grass and get stung by a bee for the first time in the year. At least that has been my experience for as long as I can remember. And by now I know that these days marked by the first—and often the only—bee sting of the year usually coincide with the opening of the ground-hugging clover’s white blossoms, among which the bees cavort, half hidden from view.
It was also—this, too, as usual—a sunny day at the beginning of August, still coolish, at least in late morning, with persistent bluing high and ever higher in the sky. Hardly a cloud to be seen—and if one appeared, dissolved in an instant. A gentle, bracing breeze was blowing, coming from the west, as it usually does in summertime, in my imagination whisking from the Atlantic into the no-man’s-bay. No dew for it to dry. As had been the case for at least a week, not a hint of moisture on my bare soles as I strolled through the yard, let alone between my toes.
They say that because bees, unlike wasps, lose their stinger when they sting, they must die as a result. In all the years before, whenever I had been stung—almost always on my bare foot—I had not seldom witnessed this process myself, or at least caught sight of the teeny-tiny, immensely powerful three-pronged harpoon from which something flaky and viscous bulged, the insect’s innards, and then, before my eyes, the creature’s convulsing, trembling, shivering, wing paralysis.
But on the day when the die was cast and the fruit thief’s story began to take form, the bee that stung me on my bare foot did not die. Although it was no bigger than a pea, fuzzy and woolly, with the classic bee coloration and stripes, it did not lose any sort of stinger, and, after administering the sting, a perfect bee sting if ever there was one, at once sudden and powerful, it buzzed away as energetically as if nothing had happened, as if, in fact, its action had actually increased its strength.
Being stung was fine with me, and not merely because the bee survived. I had other reasons. First of all, they say that bees’ stings, again allegedly in contrast to those of wasps or hornets, are good for your health, good against rheumatism, good for your circulation, or whatever, and a sting like this—another of my imaginings—would perk up my toes, losing circulation and sensation more and more every year, going numb; a similar fantasy or imagined benefit led me to grab bunches of nettles with my bare hands, either in my yard in the no-man’s-bay or on the terraces of the property in far-off Picardy, yanking them out of the loess here, the chalky soil there.
I welcomed the bee sting for another reason, too. I took it as a sign. A good one or a bad one? Neither good nor bad or even evil—simply as a sign. The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Tear yourself away from the yard and the whole area. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived.
So did I need such a sign? On that particular day, yes, even if again only in my imagination or a summer day’s dream.
In the house and yard I tidied up whatever needed tidying up, also leaving various things as they were on purpose, ironed my two or three favorite old shirts—only partially dried on the grass—packed, and pocketed the keys for the place in the country, so much heavier than the keys for my house on the outskirts. And, not for the first time when I was about to set out, a shoelace broke as I was tying my ankle boots; I could not find matching socks; I found three dozen local road maps—but not the one I was looking for, and this time both shoelaces broke, and in the quarter of an hour it took to knot them together my thumbnail cracked; and in the end I balled up the unmatched socks into pairs; and suddenly I felt fine about setting out without any map at all.
Suddenly, too, I shook off the sense of time pressure into which I had worked myself needlessly, as I always did, and not only when I was about to leave home, though it proved especially debilitating then, and downright deadly during the hour before the actual departure. Not an hour more. The book of life? A blank book. The dream at an end. Game over.
But now, unexpectedly: the time pressure gone, immaterial. Now I had all the time in the world. Old though I was: more time than ever. And the book of life: open, yet a sure thing, the pages, especially the blank ones, glowing in the wind of the world, this earth, the here and now. Yes, at last I would lay eyes on my fruit thief, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, very soon, as a person, the whole person, not just the phantom fragments my aging eyes had glimpsed in all the years before, usually in the middle of a crowd, and always at a distance, and those glimpses had never failed to get me moving again. One last time?
So have you already forgotten that it is not proper to talk about “one last time,” any more than about “just one last glass of wine”? Or if you must, it should be like that child who has been allowed to have “one more turn” (on a swing or a seesaw) and then cries, “Just one more!” Cries? Whoops! —But haven’t you used that phrase several times already? —Yes, but in a different country. And so what if I have?
On the summer day in question I did not pack a single book, even removing from the table the one I had been reading that morning, the medieval tale of a young woman who hacked off both hands to disfigure herself and make herself unattractive to the men pursuing her. (How could a person hack off both of her own hands? Was that kind of thing possible only in medieval stories?) I also left my notebooks and notepads at home, locked them up, as if hiding them from myself—at the risk of not finding them again—forbidding myself to make use of them, at least for the time being.
Before setting out, I sat down in the yard, with my bundle at my feet, on the only chair, actually more like a stool, at a distance from the trees, and staying away from the tables, the one under the elderberry bush, the one under the linden, the one under the apple trees, the largest, or at least most inviting one. As I sat there idle, my back straight, one leg crossed over the other, my straw hat clapped on my head, in my imagination I was embodying that gardener called Vallier (or something similar) whom Paul Cézanne often painted and drew toward the end of his life, especially in 1906, the year the painter died. In all these pictures, “The Gardener Vallier” hardly has a face, and not only because of the hat shading his brow, or a face, I imagine, without eyes, and with the nose and mouth as if brushed away. All I see in my mind’s eye now is the outline of the man’s face as he sits there. But what an outline. Contours that make the almost empty surface of the face they surround embody, express, project something that surpasses anything a realistic rendering of a physiognomy could ever convey—or at least that face looks different and transmits something fundamentally different—an entirely different modality. Wouldn’t a possible translation of my altered form of the gardener’s name from “Vallier” to “Vaillant” be not “watcher,” no, “observer,” “watchman,” or simply “the vigilant,” and that, together with the half-vanished sense organs—ears, nose, mouth, and above all eyes—as if wiped away, be appropriate for all the renderings of the gardener Vallier?
Sitting there awake, but at the same time in a kind of sleep, not the ordinary kind, I was suddenly reached by a voice, so close that it could not be closer—in my ear. It was the voice of the fruit thief, asking me something, as delicately as determinedly—impossible to be more delicate and determined. And what did she ask me? If I recall correctly (after all, our story took place long ago), nothing specific; something, for instance, like “How are you?” “When are you leaving?” (Or no, it has come back to me, the memory.) She asked, “What’s wrong, sir? What worries you so? Qu’est-ce qu’il vous manque, monsieur? C’est quoi, souci?” And that would be the only time in the story that the fruit thief addressed me in person. (And what, by the way, made me imagine at first that she was using the informal mode of address this one and only time?) What made this utterance special was her voice, a voice such as you seldom hear nowadays, or perhaps never heard all that often, a voice full of empathy yet free of exaggeration, and above all a voice, the voice, of patience, patience both as a character trait and even more as a form of action, unremitting activity, in the sense of waiting and also awaiting. “I wait and I await you, him, her—I await whomever or whatever, without distinction and, yes, without cessation.” Never would a voice like that take on a different modulation, let alone suddenly take on a terrifyingly different tone—as seems to be the case with most people’s voices (including my own), and even more strikingly women’s voices. This voice, however, was in constant danger of falling silent, perhaps once and for all—heaven forbid! Come to the aid of my fruit thief, O ye powers! With that voice still in my ear years later, I am reminded of what an actor once said, when an interviewer asked how his voice helped him act the story in a particular film: that he could sense, and not only for himself, when a scene, or the entire story, had “the right tonality,” and he measured the veracity of a scene or a film not by what he saw but by what he heard. Then the actor laughed and added something that let me identify with him for a moment: “And besides, my hearing is excellent—I have that from my mother.”
It was high noon, high noon as it perhaps can be only in the first week of August. All my nearby neighbors seemed to have vanished, and not just since yesterday. It felt as though they had not merely moved to their vacation homes or chalets in the French countryside or elsewhere for the summer. I imagined they had moved away for good, farther than far, leaving France to return to their ancestral homelands—Greece, over the mountains in Portugal, the Argentine Pampas, the Japanese Pacific, Spain’s Meseta, and above all the Russian steppes. All their houses and cottages in the no-man’s-bay stood empty, and, unlike in previous summers, during the days and nights before my departure no alarm systems had gone off, not even in the few cars left parked on the street a good while ago, motorless.
All that morning, as on previous mornings, a silence had prevailed that with the passing hours spread beyond the borders or edges of the bay, less disturbed by the ravens’ occasional cries, usually three caws, than extended even farther, if possible. But now, at midday, with everything wrapped in an inaudible windless wafting, more an intangible extra stream of air without an actual current, not visible in the summer foliage or perceptible externally on one’s skin, either on one’s arms or one’s temples—not a single leaf, even the lightest one, that of the linden, stirred—all of a sudden the silence that had spread over the area descended onto the landscape, with a jolt as gentle as it was powerful, and, in a remarkable process, occurring for only that one moment in the entire summer: the landscape, already in the grip of silence, sank or subsided, with help from the silence descending abruptly from on high, yet remained the familiar buckled, bulging, sturdy earth’s surface. That took place out of earshot, sight, and sensation. And yet it was evident.
To subside into the landscape had always been a daydream of mine. And up to now it had come to pass every time during that one and only summer moment, at least for the more than twenty-five years of my being in that one location.
On that day, too, during the hour before I set out for the Oise département, the long-awaited moment of even more intense silence had descended on the general stillness. It had come as usual. And yet several things were not as usual, not at all.
As usual, when I looked up at the sky, I saw the eagle—with its wingspread curved like a sickle—circling, and forming part, as it always had before, of the living image of that one moment, silently swooping in upon its conclusion. In my imagination it was the same bird of prey year after year that had taken off from the preserve it shared with falcons, buzzards, vultures, and owls in the forest of Rambouillet to the west, and was now tracing spirals over the silent bay as it made its way east to the Paris suburbs and back. As usual I saw the bird circling over my head, in circles seemingly meant specifically for this particular area, as an eagle, although perhaps it was only—why “only”?—a buzzard or a kite. “Hello, there, eagle! Hey, you! How are things? Qu’est-ce que du deviens?”
Not usual this time was that the eagle flew so low. Never had I seen it circle so close to the treetops and roofs. In all the years before, even the swallows, so high in the blue sky, had glided several space-units below the eagle. But this time the swallows were tracing their trajectories above him, and I saw them—another unusual feature—less tracing their trajectories than whizzing back and forth, less high in the blue sky than usual, darting hither and thither just a bit above the eagle.
To be sure, the surrounding area subsided as it had always done in the many years before. But this time the ground and the underground did not remain firm and bulging. For several seconds, instead of the familiar lovely hollow or basin into which I subsided, I experienced the area as collapsing, threatening to cave in, and not only on me.
On that particular day my dreamed-of silence actually crashed over me like the shock wave of a worldwide catastrophe, if only for that one second. And for a second the reasons also became clear to me, not something imaginary but graspable, tangible, unmistakable: this subsiding of the surrounding area, this silence, instead of sparking action, was menacing and mournful, a menacing silence, and at the same time terrified and deathly: silent and paralyzed with terror.
This silence expressed what the history of the last few months and years, murderously intensified, had inflicted on human beings during this second decade of what I don’t mind calling our third millennium, not in France alone, though in an acute form there, and also not audible, visible, or tangible in that one moment. Yet apparent, apparent in other ways. All the white moths crisscrossing the silent yard, each by itself, seemed to me to be crashing. And then, behind the privet hedge, in the next yard over, something suddenly cried out, striking me as a death cry.
But no: enough about death. Death has no place here. The cry came from the young woman next door, who had been sitting in a wicker chair with her embroidery, quiet as a mouse. A few weeks earlier—the privet was still in bloom, giving off that distinctive privet smell—I had glimpsed her through the foliage sitting in the same place, more a vague impression than a clear image, wearing a light-colored ankle-length dress, stretched tight over her very pregnant belly. Since then not another trace of her until that cry just now, followed by laughter, as if the young woman were laughing at her own reaction to a bit of pain.
And now the cry was followed by squalling, or rather squawking, the kind of squawking only a newborn could make, startled out of his infant sleep by his mother’s cry of pain. Good news! I liked the squawking. Unfortunately it did not last long. The young mother gave the baby her breast, or something else. Silence on the other side of the hedge. I would have enjoyed listening to that crying for a long time, weak though it was, as if coming from inside a grotto. Here’s to the next finger-prick, jeune brodeuse, at this same time tomorrow! Except that by then I would be somewhere else entirely.
Nothing was the same as usual on that summer day? Nonsense: it was the same as usual. Everything? Everything. Everything was as usual. Who said that? I did. I decreed that it be so. I settled the question. It was the same as usual. Exclamation point? Period. When I peeked through the hedge again, my gaze encountered a single eye, the infant’s, which stared back at me, unblinking, and I tried to do the same.
Just as it was always a day like this on which a bee stung me for the first time, similarly, simili modo, there appeared as always, instead of the occasional large whitish butterfly hurtling down as if from high in the sky, the butterfly couple I called the “Balkan butterflies.” I had given the two of them this name because I had been hiking through the Balkan countryside long, long ago when I first encountered the phenomenon they created as a couple. But perhaps the inconspicuousness of these little creatures when they fluttered around or just quietly rested in the scraggly grass, almost invisible there, also made this name fitting.
Yes, as usual, I saw a Balkan butterfly couple dancing around each other for the first time in the year. And as usual the dance displayed a special feature that I, at least, had never noticed in any other butterfly couple. They danced up and down and back and forth, yet spent a while each time in much the same location (before they moved their dance to another spot), until the two, constantly swirling around each other, formed a threesome. You could strain your eyes, trying to keep them apart and to see what you knew were two butterflies dancing around each other; but the image of the inseparable threesome would persist. And nothing changed when I got up from my stool, as I did now, and with the pair at eye level struggled to catch the threesome in the act. Right in front of me, hardly a handspan’s distance from my eyes, the two swirled around and around each other, impossible to disentangle, as three, perhaps allowing a wave of my hand to separate them for an instant, but in the next moment twirling through the air as three again.
Yet why this desire to part them, to see them as they actually were, as two? Oh, my, time, time in abundance.
I sat down and went on watching the butterfly couple. Ah, how their transformation into three in the course of the dance sparked a glow. Dobar dan, balkanci. Hey there, you two. What’s going to become of you? Srećan put. Whereupon it first dawned on me how much the little couple in its lightning-fast place-changing during the dance resembled the beloved hat game you could see being played on sidewalks all through the Balkans. Deception? Delusion? And again: so what? Sve dobro. All the best.
Time to go! But first the usual farewell turn about the house, about the yard, with occasional walking backward. Usual? This time nothing about my rounds was usual. Or rather: I made my way around the house as I often had before an absence I expected to last a while. Yet this time I felt different: pain, at the prospect of leaving, such as had never befallen me before, or rather quite often, but now intensified to a sense of leaving for good.
Not a tree, or at least not a fruit tree, that I had not planted with my own hands. (Rather amateurishly—in fact “bumbler” was the name I had most often applied to myself, more or less from my time immemorial, and not only with respect to my attempts at manual labor.) As usual I counted the few nuts on the crooked walnut tree, in the inextinguishable hope that the four I had spied among the leaves would have been joined by a fifth nut that had previously escaped my notice. No such luck. Even the fourth had gone into hiding. At least the little pear tree, thanks also to its scant foliage, prematurely withered, boasted its original six pears; they even seemed to have grown noticeably bigger overnight, fattening into the standard commercial pear form, while the quince, on the other hand, le cognassier, dunja, which the year before had won the fruit-bearing championship, this year stood there bare, its leaves rust-mottled. No booty there for the fruit thief, even though every morning after the blindingly white blossoms fell I had posted myself by the quince with something more than mere hope: determined to discover, hidden in the foliage, at least one of those yellow fruits, pear-shaped yet so very different, the smallest of dunjas.
On the day in question that determination—“Now I’m going to find it, that one fruit, overlooked until now, on the seemingly bare tree!”—became even more fervent. Circling the quince, one step at a time, pausing, looking up, around, down, going back and forth, and so on, my determination meanwhile swelling to a raging act of will to conjure, using nothing but my own eyes, the missing fruit into the void above me, to spy, in a gap, no matter how tiny, amid all the pointy leaves, “the one and only” emerging into the light and now, now swelling and growing round. And for a fraction of a second the magic seemed to be working: there it hung, the fruit, as heavy as it was fragrant. But then … Still—as I told myself—in the act of peering up and peering up again I had strengthened my neck, and that would prove useful for what was to come. And furthermore: time to stop counting. “The Counter,” “The One Who Counts”: one of your god’s ninety-nine epithets? Strike “The Counter,” indeed all of those ninety-nine names, especially “The Merciful” and the allegedly even more comprehensive “All-Merciful.” Away with “The Almighty”! Or rather leave the god one epithet: “The Storyteller.” And perhaps one more: “The Witness,” or “The Testifier.” And perhaps also that other one, number ninety-nine on your list: “The Patient One.” So keep the numbers after all? No, no: one name, and another, and one more. Hadn’t the apples on the trees in the yard as well as others been countless, innumerable?
As I walked toward the garden gate, I turned back to the house and made my way down the stairs to the cellar. For a long time I stood there, looking at the sacks of potatoes, the pruning saws, shovels, rakes—remembering how the rakes made sparks fly from the pebbles—the soccer table, now wobbly, the child’s bed frame without a mattress, the crate containing family papers and photos, and I could not remember why I had come down there. One thing was clear: I had meant to do, take care of, attend to, fetch something, something I needed, or that was needed in general, and urgently. Not for the first time I found myself standing and staring at something, whether in kitchens, hallways, entire houses, asking myself what in the world I was doing there. And as had happened to me time and again, I was at a complete loss, and whatever it was, the thing that needed to be done simply refused to come to mind. On the other hand: something had or ought to be done. There, in the cellar, I had to act—but do what, and how? And at the same time, as I gazed at all those objects, it came to me that this situation resembled my setting out from the outskirts of Paris for Picardy, a quintessential interior, where something special had to be done, taken care of, fetched, attended to. On the way to the garden gate I had known what it was. But at this moment it escaped me. And at the same time something depended on it—if not everything, then without a doubt various things. What had been certain just now had suddenly become uncertain—which did not make it any less urgent. It was more urgent than ever. And in particular it made me uneasy, just as standing in the cellar made me uneasy. Welcome, uncertainty? Welcome, uneasiness?
One last glance, over my shoulder, at the wide-open garden gate, the entire property, mine. Mine? Revulsion, along with weariness, overcame me in view of all those possessions. Possessions: fundamentally different from what I could call my own. Or put it this way: what I called my own had nothing to do with all the stuff—this was my thought—that belonged to me, over which I had property rights. I could not assert a right to what I called my own, nor could I count on it, rely on it. And nonetheless, in some cases, it could be obtained, though differently from possessions, and likewise sustained, maintained, retained.
Similarly I had always averted my eyes from what are commonly called “works,” at least from those supposed to be “mine.” Even words like study or workshop rubbed me the wrong way. Over the decades I had done my thing in every room in the house—in the kitchen, and also out in the yard. But I avoided even the most fleeting glance at anything that might confront me with evidence of my activity, let alone the actual product. It did happen, however, that I occasionally, and against my better judgment, found myself drawn to a “piece of work” and briefly(!) looked it over, weighed it in my hand, and so forth. That much I could tolerate, and it did no lasting harm; indeed, sniffing at the thing could even cheer me up, if not at the same time move me, yes, grip and strengthen me. But as soon as I immersed myself in anything I had made and literally sank into it, it lost its value, and not just for the moment, and above all its fragrance. Whatever had been accomplished went poof! and I found myself trailing in its dry-as-dust wake, enervated, unimaginably enfeebled. So I made a point of avoiding earlier sites of work in the house and yard—even those in the woods by the “nameless pond,” in the “new clearing,” along the “absence path”—or tiptoed past them as if something indecent had happened there. Only when I knew these rooms and spots to be empty, without a trace or evidence of what I had created there, could I pass them without being surreptitious. On the contrary, I could slow down to take them in. True, I would still be overcome with weakness. But that enervation was not the malign, incapacitating kind. It came over me as a sort of yearning, and of all the various and contradictory yearnings of old age, it was the last, and, I sensed, most durable yearning that remained, and it was linked, and sometimes also inextricably tied, to anxiety. Yearning and trepidation.
Copyright © 2017 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
Copyright © 2022 by Krishna Winston