Across Read Online Free PDF Page B

with his fingertips, as though trying to feel her heartbeat there. From under motionless eyelids, she stared into his eyes, while at the same time, in a quick exchange, one spoke softly and urgently to the other. After that, they sat motionless, face to face, no longer recognizable, for an eternity, like the sun and moon in old engravings. Just for this man, this woman must have been the most beautiful woman in the world! For another eternity, red colored both their cheeks until —in simultaneous movement—he bent over her and she leaned not only her head but her whole body to one side, like a woman getting ready, in self-abandon, to rip the bearskin off the wall to cover herself and her lover with. “And the greatest of all things happened”—a paraphrase for bodily union occurring in shepherds’ tales. But did those two at the table in the Canal Tavern need to be bodily united? Weren’t they already one flesh? A small yellow pencil sped almost inaudibly downward, like a bird’s beak.
    Afterward I lingered for a while outside on the em. bankment road, my back to the tavern with the drawn curtains. The couple’s voices were in the whirring of the
ventilator: not a whispering or a murmuring, not really voices, just sounds, now higher, now lower, unintelligible yet penetrating; punctuated distinctly by the landlord’s voice: “Table 10.”
    The patch of meadow on the other side of the canal was white with fog in spots, while the rest of it was quite open. The fog didn’t lift, but lay impenetrably dense on the ground, barely cloaking the tips of the grass. Two triangular ears were all that showed of a cat that was lurking there. However, a movement was discernible in the mist, not a steady flow of swaths, but a to-and-fro, a reaching out and a pulling back, a sudden surging up and flattening out, as though the fog were not fog at all but smoke from the peat smoldering under the grass. Sometimes the creeping whiteness seemed to boil up above eye level, as though from the subterranean bubbling of a geyser. Above it, the night was clear; the houses at the far end of the meadow rose out of their steamy foundations with contours all the sharper, and seemed more houselike than usual; and in my mind there was no longer a national boundary between me and the pyramid of the Staufen, now pointed in the moonlight.
    The fog accompanied me on my way home. The way leads upstream, always along the canal; just once, it crosses a bridge to the other bank, and then crosses back again by the next bridge. At first, there’s a tarred road on the embankment, then a street belonging to the Colony, and finally, as far as the turnaround, a path for pedestrians and bicycles. Strangely enough, the fog never crossed the canal; the layers to the left and the
right didn’t mingle, the water formed a sort of fog shed (each patch of meadow, pasture, or bog generated its own fog, differing from others in color and shape); on the watercourse itself, there were only transparent clouds of vapor. Suddenly a patch of woods, which only a moment before had been an island in the pond of mist, stood free in the black country, as though the underbrush had swallowed the whiteness. The fog piled up behind a fence as though stopped by an obstacle or a threshold. In an orchard, its meandering flow connected a tumbledown bakehouse with a beehive, whose wooden squares, despite the dark night all around, gleamed in every color above the milky whiteness. Once, when I stood still and looked down, the fog was knee-high and I couldn’t see my own feet; yet at the same time I clearly saw the pattern of the kitchen wall tiles in the lighted windows of a house nearby: roses. With all the many continuing sounds, bicycle dynamos, television sets, home carpentry, the silence was so great that a cow with its long-drawn-out mooing seemed to be blowing into a picture-book horn; pictures of an autumn fire, a rainstorm, another