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refuge, still closed at the moment. A great deal was at stake, but something very different from life and death.
    Warmth spread through his whole body, and he found himself in the hollow of his limp open hand. Contented, he was aware of his male organ, but without excitement; at the same time he felt hunger and greed. The cat jumped up on the bed and lay down at his feet; “an animal in the house.” The narrow cot was just right for him. In the next room Lauffer was laughing in his sleep; or was that he himself? The wind outside became a cloud. Doubled up in her bed, the Indian woman was forgetting him, forgetting everyone, even her children. (And now she, too, was right for him.)
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    During the day, in the “township” (as his chosen terrain, the square of wilderness that had become his “field of operations,” was called), his work made him one with himself and the landscape, but at night, asleep on his iron cot, Sorger remained alive to his remoteness from Europe and his “forebears.” What he perceived then was not the unthinkable distance between himself and another point but himself as a distant one (guilty of being far away). His sleep was disturbed by no image of this other point, only by a constant awareness of not sleeping in his own bed. Conscious in his sleep of being wrenched out of place, he never, though years had passed since his change of continents, enjoyed a quiet, homelike sleep; immediately on closing his eyes (a moment against which he invariably struggled), he began to gravitate, growing steadily heavier and more clodlike, toward a magnetic horizon. And what happened then?

    A group of screeching, drunken Indians were standing around a fire on the riverbank. One reeled back and fell, still clutching a bottle, into the smooth swift current and sank; but instantly the dreamer jumped in after him. He didn’t come up again, and no one paid attention to his disappearance.
    Seen in bird’s-eye view (from a low-flying helicopter, for instance), the river was so transparent at its surface that below it, as though framed in clear, still water, the brownish-yellow clouds of mud became a self-contained image of turbulent power pulsating upward from the riverbed, rolling westward, and filling the whole breadth of the stream.
    Over these clouds, but just below the transparent surface, drifted, unrecognizable from the shore, dark tree trunks, for the most part birches, stripped and blackened by the current, occasionally veiled momentarily by a surge of mud. Clearly visible from the bank were singly drifting dwarf pines, weighed down at one end by their roots, so that the tops would intermittently rise above the surface and dive down again.
    A few tree trunks, diverted to the shallower spots, anchored their roots in the bottom, so that only their spreading crowns could be seen.
    No more cries; in the gray of dawn, the river arched, becoming a quiet bay in an otherwise turbulent ocean. Occasionally, breeze-blown ripples crept darkly in all directions.
    A dead pink salmon had been washed up on the sandy shore, a faint color in the rigid recumbent darkness, over which, strictly separate, lay a pale sky with a colorless moon that seemed to have fallen over backward. The fish, which lay lopsidedly bloated on the sand made muddy by the dew, as though tossed at random into the cold
early-morning landscape, seemed to form a companion piece to the bloated mounds enclosed by white wooden fences in the Indian cemetery on the far side of the huts, whose black and gray walls gave no sign of life except for the humming of generators; the abandoned fire on the riverbank was still smoking.
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    Many of the countless paths that traversed the settlement did not even connect the huts with one another but merely led around clumps of trees or into the woods, where they broke off or led into tunnels that might be fox earths. The village was surrounded by wilderness; and indeed the whole region,