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and on his shoulders.
    After vanishing into the shed beside the rainbow-colored beehouse, he reappears without his blue apron. His tie and the cape over his shoulders suggest that he is going on a trip. He bends down to the rivulet that runs through the garden and washes his hands in it. Without a stick he makes his way to the gate; the members of the staff greet him when they see him coming. The director, whose car door has just been opened by a subordinate, takes his hat off to the old man and wishes him a pleasant and profitable day in town, speaking as one might to a person of importance, but also, with mock respect, to an old crackpot. It seems likely that they will all exchange smiles behind his back.
    Out on the square he turns back to look at the chapel that occupies the central part of the block-long building. One of its double doors is ajar; in the cleft there is nothing but black. While he jots down something in his breviary-like notebook, an elderly couple hobbles past behind him. In the same loud, hard-of-hearing voice, they both say at once: “He’s writing again.”
    On a busy street in the center of town the old man stops and squats down over a cracked paving stone. He blows the dust off it and spreads one of the thin, still-empty pages of his notebook over it and starts rubbing with a lead pencil. Little by little the outlines of a letter, then of two more letters, appear on the paper: AVT, a fragment of a Roman
inscription, meaning uncertain—“or?”; “but?”; “autumn?” He is oblivious of the onlookers, more and more of whom gather around him, as if he were a famous sidewalk painter; not even the hissing and sparkling of a hot-air balloon hovering over the street distracts their attention.
    Alone again, the old man is standing on a carless square, at the foot of a statue. It is a woman with her head thrown back as though in a scream; the line of the throat catches the eye; seen from below, sparkling with particles of mica, her breast against the sky becomes a mountain pass which draws the eye into the distance and in which light becomes substance. Sheltered by his cape, the decipherer draws a quick stroke in his notebook and beside it sets the word “exit.” As he does so, red blotches sprout on his cheeks and his face takes on a look of excitement surprising in a man his age, an excitement that reminds one of a messenger boy sent on an errand for the first time. In the next moment he will stammer out his news, an event which he himself has brought about. But then, looking straight ahead, he lets himself be diverted. Escorted by two normal persons, a group of idiot children is crossing the square, making incomprehensible gurgling, trilling, cheering sounds; their way of walking, with knees strangely bent, gives their procession, at first sight, the appearance of a sack race. Some of them are wearing head guards like hockey players. The old man looks straight at them; amazement, delight, or idiocy is reflected in his face. He and the group belong together; all of a sudden he has come across something of whose existence he was not even aware. Openmouthed, he contemplates his tribe and puts his notebook away. While looking at them, he recruits additional members, for somewhere
on the square a second onlooker follows his eyes, and, puzzled at first, then understanding, a third … The old man trails after his tribe. His hobbling gait is like that of the children, but not so laborious.
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    It is a different procession that impels the soldier to start off. He is far out in a suburb, as though in the vicinity of a borderline, guarding an imperiled war memorial. In front of him an expressway, beyond it a wide river, easy to cross at this point, made up of several swift watercourses separated by strips of rubble. Wearing mottled combat fatigues and a steel helmet, he is carrying a rifle with mounted bayonet; at his feet a crackling radiotelephone. His eyes are