To get home from the station I didn’t use the sidewalk, choosing instead the double line that marked the median of the highway heading south, the road I sometimes called the carretera, sometimes the magistrala. The median strip, marked by day in dull white but phosphorescent by night, began past the underpass wide enough for a four-wheeled vehicle, gradually narrowing to a point on its way out of town, arrowlike, until near the turnoff to my house it had shrunk to the width usual for a median. I trotted along without paying attention to the few cars still on the road, which swerved to avoid me without honking or flashing their headlights, as if median joggers were a common occurrence.

  Once in bed I fell asleep immediately. Dreamless sleep. All of a sudden I found myself awake, more poked than startled, abruptly yet gently. No sensation of time’s having passed or of any interval. Yet the illuminated clock across the room showed that I’d slept for more than two hours. No matter how I woke up, during the day but also at night, I usually knew exactly what time it was, often down to the minute—even as a child I’d amazed my whole clan in the village—but this time my guess as to how much time had passed would have been wildly inaccurate, either far more or far less. Was the moonlight to blame? After all, I’d fallen asleep so fast that I’d neglected to close the blinds. But there was no moon, let alone a full moon. Or was it the hooting of owls, reverberating through the house from the Eternal Hill? No, not that either: owl calls as wake-up calls: impossible; the long, drawn-out sounds of those post-midnight birds had always deepened the silence and lulled me into the most peaceful sleep imaginable.

  I lay there wide awake, the epitome of calm. Under ordinary circumstances, when a seemingly firm decision or unshakable certainty came to me during the first half of the night, waking up, whether in daylight or, far more often, in the second half of the night, would cast everything into doubt. And not that alone: what I’d thought through earlier, seen clearly, been sure of, decided upon irrevocably, would be revealed to me, when I was inevitably shocked out of my sleep by a blow administered by a gigantic fist, as utter nonsense, untethered from reality and presumptuous to boot, outrageous, the “mortal sin of pride.” And that abrupt transformation occurring in the last hour of the night, by the gray light of dawn, was the norm, a law of nature as I saw it (which I’d lost track of during the night).

  But these were no ordinary circumstances. Late night and early morning be damned: the previous evening’s decision remained firm. Taking revenge for the insult inflicted on my mother was no pipe dream. Time to get a move on, and no rest till the deed was done! All those years of just toying with the idea, though in earnest, deadly earnest: that was over now. But hadn’t the statute of limitations run out? — Nonsense: a crime like that was subject to no statute of limitations.

  But I mustn’t act precipitously, a usual failing of mine in word and deed. Though I was itching to get out of bed, I forced myself to lie there, with both window casements wide open. The whooshing on the expressways crossing the plateau beyond the woods sounded quieter than during the Easter week just past, with the newly unfurled foliage acting as a damper; it was almost a rustling in comparison to the roar of traffic in wintertime. No wind, yet a current wafted in through the window as if the air itself were blowing on me.

  In the early light I polished my oldest, trustiest shoes, in which, though they weren’t hiking boots, I’d crossed the Spanish Pyrenees, then continued south through the Sierra de Guadarrama and finally the Sierra de Gredos. For my morning coffee I treated myself to beans I ground myself, beans from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica that weren’t merely delicious but also, in my eyes, possessed of healing powers found in no other coffee in the world, and not only on this particular morning. Remarkable how in this hour before my departure tasting and smelling took precedence over the seeing and hearing, looking and listening that normally mattered more to me. The smell of the shoe polish, like that of the Blue Mountain coffee beans, pierced me through and through, while the morning sights and sounds, even the most delightful ones, today meant little or nothing; they existed, but they didn’t count; an image of any kind, a sound of any kind made no difference. And remarkable how, apparently in exchange for my lost sense of time, I seemed to have gained a sense for weights: I found myself weighing in my hand each of the few objects I packed to take along, passing it from one hand to the other and experiencing a previously unknown pleasure in “just the right weight” for my purposes or, now, the “ideal” lightness. And finally I, who usually couldn’t bring myself to eat so much as a bite from early in the day until late morning or even early afternoon, actually felt hungry, and under the linden out in the yard consumed an apple, with intense enjoyment, an Ontario, as well as a piece of toasted pain festif from the local bakery, with each smack of my lips (that was how tasty this breakfast was) throwing my head back to gaze into the sky, as if I were enjoying the food of the gods. I ate the apple as you sometimes eat pears, core and all.

  Not a day without reading a book, picking out and deciphering the words. Which of the books I was reading just then should I pack for the expedition? Hesiod’s Works and Days? The Gospel according to Luke? The Window Over the Way by Georges Simenon (not one of his detective novels—this was no time for crime or detective stories!—and certainly not on this particular day!)? Not Hesiod: after celebrating the Golden Age and the less delightful Silver Age, he bemoaned the fifth and last, the Age of Iron, I believe, as the worst imaginable, and that was how the poet viewed his own age, twenty-five hundred years ago. No, Works and Days wouldn’t be coming along. Nor would Luke’s glad tidings, including the Resurrection and the Ascension, and the ultimate promise of salvation to the worst sinners; “to day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”—some other time, yes, the day after tomorrow for all I cared, but today: no! And Simenon would distract me in that masterful, sly way of his from accomplishing my mission—though I had no objection to certain distractions and in some situations considered them essential—but that kind of distraction for the day ahead: no, no! It was to be a day without reading, or only accidental reading, reading in passing, words chiseled into a wall-stone, for instance. Yet I already found myself missing the sound of pages being turned, especially the rustling of India paper, a music like no other. No book today, my love is far away.

  In contrast to all previous departures from my house and grounds, and the town, this time I didn’t keep an eye out for signs and portents of any kind (or wasn’t it the case that in the past they’d veritably jumped out at me?). When my shoelace broke, it didn’t mean that I’d do better to stay put or that acting precipitously would prove my undoing—it meant nothing, nothing at all. I calmly inserted a pair of new laces; the old ones had been hanging by a thread for a while. And the coal-black cat that crossed my path? Bring on another! And wasn’t the travel bag slung over my shoulder reminiscent of the cloth bundle that Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy took with him a hundred years ago when he left his Yasnaya Polyana estate to die in the small back room of the railway station in—what was the name?—what difference does it make? And up there in the sky, that plane following another so closely, would it shoot down the first one any minute now, and that would mean war? Once upon a time it might have.

  Nothing could deter me from setting out. But neither did I need particular encouragement. Some other time I might have read all sorts of things into the robin’s flying back and forth across the garden, swooping close to the ground, right in front of me, as I made my way to the gate. This time I saw its game of diving toward me, then speeding away into the bushes and back, as a bonus, also as assurance that I was part of everything going on in the rest of nature, confirming me and including me in the action.

  But what was the puffy little bird with the brick-red bib acting out for me? It was performing the role of “revenge trainer.” Yes, a role like that existed, or if not, at least it did for the duration of this scene, in my imagination. And my imagination wasn’t the only source; this performance recalled, memorialized, and recapitulated another, very different one, in the Old Testament, when the prophet Elijah or someone is in the desert or somewhere, and after a long wait finally hears the voice of God, but not in the initial roar of the storm, in lightning cracking or thunder rumbling, but rather, if I’m not mistaken, in the long stillness that sets in after the storm, and the voice of God emerges from that stillness as the softest rustling or whispering (I wonder what the Hebrew word was), or, as I imagine it, chirping.

  This scene in the Bible is generally thought to demonstrate and symbolize that God makes himself heard not through the forces of nature and in a voice of thunder but rather … (dot dot dot). In Holy Writ the story continues in the following convenient manner: the whispering of God from amid the silence, in a voice that couldn’t possibly be any gentler, gives the prophet in the craggy desert an imperious and urgent command: Revenge! Avenge me! Avenge my people!

  I experienced something similar upon setting out that morning when I served as the audience for Robin Redbreast’s performance. All around ravens were squawking, crows were crowing, chickadees were sharpening knives, Asian parrots were screeching, blackbirds were piping, jays were grousing, doves were purring, yes, purring, magpies were scolding, chickadees were hissing, who-knows-whats were drumming, but not a peep out of the robin as it elegantly looped around me, close enough to touch, whirring about me, ahead of me: no sound but the almost inaudible swish of its wings. And eventually the bird settled on a bare acanthus branch in front of me, at eye level, and fixed its beady eyes in that puffy head on me, without a single sound’s issuing from its beak. One sound, then an unbroken succession of sounds, short, identical, rhythmic, coming from its rocking on the branch, from its urgent nodding with its whole body, not just its head, a nodding with all its might, finally audible as a delicate rasping, conveying the stern command, “Do it! Do it!” And the performance continued for a good while longer until the redbreast took flight in a flash, silently swooping off to the ivy hedge, where it had been building a nest for the last three days, and in its beak, as I noticed only now, loosely linked coils of pencil shavings; the abandoned branch left bobbing in midair.

  Over the years it had become second nature to me, every time I set out, to glance over my shoulder at the garden gate and back at the house, glimpsed through the trees. Between glances I would take several steps backward, counting them: sometimes nine, sometimes thirteen, borrowing freely from the numbers supposedly sacred to the Mayas in the Yucatán. On this morning, however, I dispensed with looking back and walking backward. Full speed ahead! Taking unusually large strides, almost like a speaker emerging from the wings and making his way to the lectern.

  At the moment I felt completely in control of myself in a way I’d felt only at the rarest of times. So was a rare time like that about to begin? We would see. (We? All of you, and me.) I also had the sensation that every fiber or cell or whatever of my body was taut, a sensation I experienced less and less these days, by comparison to my youth—taut, and vibrating with a presence of mind that also signified readiness. My spells of absentmindedness, on the other hand, which had come over me even in childhood, had grown more frequent with age, an “age-related” phenomenon, or so I’d thought until recently, assuming an acute form in the forgetfulness that seemed to get worse from day to day, in my inability to lay my hands on so-called use-objects and recall their what, how, and above all where—until I came up with the explanation, or excuse, if you will, that it had less to do with me and my advancing age than with the sameness, uniformity, mediocrity, and, perhaps easier to get a handle on—or not that easy to get a handle on—pointlessness or uselessness of almost all use-objects nowadays, with the exception of a very few vintage items or classic implements; in short, it was the fault of all the stuff produced these days, and in conjunction with that the pointlessness of most actions, both domestic and public, and as a result, last and horribly least, the appalling tendency to lose track and lose sight once and for all of old and young alike.

  Explanation? Excuse? Whatever. With my departure, now, at this very moment, from house and home: my old presence of mind revived, but in an entirely new form: on the one hand preparedness, “prepared for the worst,” as if anticipating a possible catastrophe, perhaps even war, which would be the last (also prepared to intervene)—on the other hand presence of mind as becoming instantly aware, in a repeating loop, yes, simultaneous awareness, of what? of nothing, nothing at all—at peace—impossible to be more at peace (on earth)—the embodiment of peace, an alternative incarnation. “Uncontested peacefulness”: that’s how I experienced it at any rate, with peace assured in advance, and the struggle, or whatever challenge lay ahead, seemingly left behind somewhere: altogether a solemn peacefulness, and I, setting out in the freshness of morning, initially headed who knows where, as part of it. A passage from Moritz’s novel Anton Reiser came to mind, about a warm but overcast morning, “the weather perfect for travel, the sky hovering so low over the earth, the objects round about so dark, as if one’s attention ought to be fixed exclusively on the road.”

  But how to explain now, before I stepped from the lane onto the carretera, the terrified reaction of the young woman up ahead, mincing along in high heels on the sidewalk leading toward the station, when she caught sight of me, who pictured myself as so peaceably solemn, and cringed, uttering a scream that couldn’t possibly have been more shrill?

  True enough: even as a child I’d had fantasies of violence, and they weren’t anything like imaginings, to say nothing of those involving my stepfather, in which, after the nights when he’d chased my mother around the house, hitting her again and again—I can still hear his laugh—in the morning I would fetch the ax from the woodshed, and, as he slept off his drunken stupor on the floor by their marriage bed, bash in his head. And in the last few years in this different country I, the foreigner, the stranger, upon hearing the often incessant barking and yapping of the local, unmistakably local, dogs in nearby yards, couldn’t shake off the fantasy, which, by the way, gave me no pleasure, of striking the offending local house with a bazooka—though I must admit I haven’t the faintest idea what a bazooka is or how it works—and blowing it sky-high; flattening it, turning it into a blazing inferno, accompanied by the howls of animal and human alike. And one of these days I actually will commit an act of violence (or not): smash the window of the yoga studio around the corner with one of the many chunks of curbstones left over from the days of the monarchy: as punishment for the shameless borrowing of lines from poems about trees—hubris—and spiritual equanimity, jumbled with Indian and Tibetan sayings intended to help one accept “all situations, all emotions, all actions, all beings,” and interspersed with admonitions such as “Please arrive ten minutes early” and “Kindly remove your shoes before entering.”

  “I’m going to kill you (him, her)!” That curse I’d often had on the tip of my tongue in unguarded moments. But never had I voiced the thought, let alone spoken it out loud in the presence of others. If that ever happened, the curse would turn against me—of that I had little doubt—and I’d be forced sooner or later to commit murder or homicide for real. The recurrent dreams I’d once had about belonging to a family of murderers about to be found out—a multigenerational clan—had long since ceased, to my amazement, and almost regret.

  I felt certain, who knows why, that I was born to be a murderer, whether the dreams had given rise to that certainty or resulted from it. But definitely not an avenger. Though a distinction should be made between avenging “myself” and “someone else.” I can recall only one time when I avenged myself, and this memory can’t be false because I remember nothing, absolutely nothing, about that revenge other than that it was a miserable failure, met with mockery by the one—no, by the girl—on whom I wanted to take revenge, and that happened with my very first gambit, my first ill-chosen word, which she summarily brushed aside, and me with it: a pathetic imitation, which couldn’t have been more clumsy, of what a child (I) pictured as “revenge”; the child or garden variety of revenge.

  Yet more than once, in later years, the impulse to take revenge for something that had been done to others. And those others, strange though it may seem, or perhaps not, were one and all members of the family, my mother’s, or actually only her two brothers, drafted by the German half-the-world-spanning Reich and shipped off to Russia—“may the foreign soil rest lightly upon you!”—where they became cannon fodder, those brothers about whom she, their sister, told me story after story as I was growing up, speaking so lovingly that I, the listener, could almost see the two of them standing in the doorway. And she told stories and more stories. She told stories in the morning, she told stories in the evening, she told stories at night. And I was filled more and more intensely with the thought: revenge! But on whom? Whom could I attack, with those responsible all out of reach long since, if not from the very beginning? And yet: revenge! And again: but how? In what way? With what means, and how to obtain them? Whom to force to make amends, and how? And wasn’t that a matter for the authorities? Leave the authorities and the bureaucracy out of it! But one kind of agency was certainly needed: the revenge agency, and that agency belonged to me. And again: ever more powerful motivation, and ever more powerful hesitation.

  Never had I expected that someday this agency would be called upon to act in earnest. And when the call came—that’s how I experienced it—it happened under auspices completely opposite to those I’d pictured. Something comparable (no, nothing’s “comparable”) had happened to me once long ago, only once: I’d received an anonymous letter containing a threat to kill my child if I didn’t manage to bring back to life the six million Jews murdered by my ancestors (that last part only between the lines). I’ve written about that already, but let it be repeated here, like various other things in this story: because of the different place value. As I held that letter in my hand, I guessed right away who’d sent it, and set out with a jackknife in my trouser pocket or somewhere, but that had nothing to do with revenge, unlike on the morning in question. But why not? I didn’t know at the time, and I don’t know today. What I do know: there was nothing, and there is nothing, to know. No why. Or: what took place was mechanical, though not meaningless, and it gave way to relief when I found myself standing face-to-face with the letter writer in his open doorway, where he grinned at me without a word while my fist clenching the knife in my pocket relaxed into five, or five hundred, casually interlaced fingers. No accusations, please, and above all no reproaches, and, for heaven’s sake, no punishment. Punishment: that was never, ever for me. Taking revenge, however—something altogether different—was burned into me, probably by my mother’s stories about her brothers. But in this case, what needed to be avenged?

 

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