You see, the newly discovered species subsisted on the ground and was unable to fly.
The phenomenon of flightlessness is known in the avifauna of both the continental land masses and the oceanic islands, but in the latter instance the explanation is even more obvious. It is more obvious, but leads to a pitfall that, as it turns out, puts off the solution of the posed question toward the infinite.
Given that for island-dwelling birds one great danger is being swept away by a storm, some species attempted to defend against this by simply refraining from taking to the air. The defensive reflex of not flying became hereditary, and especially in the case of larger birds that were poor fliers to begin with, within relatively short periods this resulted in the total loss of the ability to fly. This in turn demanded a stealthy mode of existence, for the ground-dweller is completely at the mercy of predators. This is exactly what must have happened in the case of our Rail, the loss of the ability to fly led to extreme shyness, the two scientists concluded, but in view of the fact that the avian world contains several similar cases, we must note that not one has been as successful as our Rail.
The professor and his co-author did not hide their unbounded admiration for the Okinawa Rail, this great artist of seclusion, on account of its perfect defense mechanism.
I, too, render my tribute to this bird, which is why I told the story, but at the same time I feel myself trapped.
You see, my point of view is different from Professor Yamashina and his fellow researcher’s. In my eyes the Okinawa Rail is simply: a bird that cannot fly.
V
Well, so much for my news, and there is nothing else I can think of at this time.
I have kept my promises, and said all I intended to say.
Will I have the same guards on the way down?
Is that a yes?
In that case, gentlemen, I am ready.
The lecture is over.
Let’s be on our way.
ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE ALL TOLD
It took twenty-five hundred years, by and large twenty-five hundred, that is approximately one hundred generations, for the fact to become obvious and identifiable with indisputable precision, that was how much time it took to get this far, to reach our days, but we could also say that roughly twenty-five hundred years sufficed for the teaching to crumble, to waste away, for its message to become dim and inverted, for the complete and irreparable breakdown of its original meaning via an endless chain of misinterpretation and incomprehension took a hundred generations, we may also say all it took was one hundred people, including the first, who understood it, and bequeathed it to tradition, and the last of the hundred who definitively abandoned the unsurpassable realm of knowledge relating to the fact, that is someone who—from another viewpoint—proved to be capable of constructing a humanly conceivable world based on a distortion of this unfathomably deep knowledge since it was not only impossible to recover the original teaching but it is no longer of any interest to know what was lost, because this is what has happened, a hundred people, a hundred generations, twenty-five hundred years, and we have forgotten what the world’s most original philosopher had thought through and proclaimed between 450 and 380, or between 563 and 483, B.C., in the environs of the Isipathana Deer Park and Kushinagar, it took only a hundred people, so that we of the early twenty-first century no longer have the foggiest notion that the fact simultaneously creates and destroys itself, that words and ideas cannot say anything about the world—about the immense cosmos containing so-called self-evident facts—other than positing nothing; a perfect and sparkling nothing, while on the other hand by the time the way the world works was set down in writing, this had most definitely, once and for all, escaped from our memory, it had escaped with a finality, irretrievably, although not for a lack of facts or reality, but because to procure a primitive spiritual state, to take the most obvious path to obtain control over the humanly conceivable world and thereby establish the security of a being in the realm of nature, this forgetting appeared unavoidable, nothing else was needed, the only indispensable requirement being this renunciation in the cramped entryway to a spacious and slowly disseminating chain of thought, so that, ditching our awareness of an extraordinarily complex universe, we could now spend our lives amidst the barrenly beating waves of an ever more clear-cut, simpleminded, brutal logic, thus giving rise to a reflexive human existence, this via a pathetic misunderstanding of the mechanism of causality, to a bewitchingly crude guiding principle based on the correlative system of fact-reaction-fact, or rather symptom-reaction-fact, which in its own way does not hinder, in fact it assures that the operation of the law is hindered by nothing, least of all by this creature destined for so much although not for everything, who persists under the illusion that he has at last gained intelligence in exchange for the vehicle of seeing the deepest interrelation of things, which he has discarded as faulty while most mysteriously it still keeps its occult functioning; thus self-deprived of the commanding power of true intellect, laid low by this self-inflicted wound, wallowing in the arrogance of a knowledge, that has never been knowledge unless it be the fool’s knowledge insisting on being led back to the fact of the inviolability of his role, that is, of his presence, i.e. his existence, and within this mysterium that is so inconceivable, to become what he in any case must become within the simultaneously existing and dissolving context of trillions of tangential facts.
A mere twenty-five hundred years, and there is no one left who is fully aware of what the second one of the one hundred had heard once upon a time at the Deer Park and at Kushinagar, every single link in the original chain of thought has been turned into the most egregious error, every single item in the texts is erroneous, every single item in the commentaries erroneous, as is every single item in the corrections and alterations, clarifications, and revisions, nothing but errors, errors upon errors, so that only one thing saves us from the insanity of cynicism, only one thing gives rise to an assurance more feeble than the faintest breeze, namely, that in every created and existing phenomenon it is possible to f e e l that the original teaching indeed existed once upon a time, and that the world, the cosmos, the universe, in other words something and everything—somehow, that is to say, in a not communicable manner still exists—is it possible to feel this for a brief moment, regardless of what exactly is world, cosmos, and universe; it is plainly ineradicably embedded within us to feel that everywhere at all times facts exist in all their ungraspability and uncapturability, what’s more, trillions and trillions of facts exist released in the stillness of time, because amidst the ceaseless lightning bolts of doubt, the feeling is indeed indestructible, that for instance where it is spring now, springtime buds burst forth and whatever must turn green is greening—we feel this for a brief moment, regardless of what exactly a bud is, and green, and spring; here we stand now, utterly abandoned, having lost the one who could enlighten—because he had once upon a time understood—and we are slapped down to be here, without the one, simply to be, like springtime and buds and all this greening, here in the profoundest cluelessness about what it means that this must certainly be springtime, with buds and things about to turn green, that therefore there must be direct experience, i.e., occasion for direct confrontation and experience, or more precisely: that is all there is occasion for—to stand there in springtime, where there is spring, and observe buds and everything greening, to stand and stand there when springtime is come, to stand and observe this, amidst the most calamitous immediacy, abandoned to our own devices, nursing a dismal suspicion that someday after all we ought to see how it is possible that simultaneously with all these existences, all these trillions upon trillions of facts, nothing whatsoever exists at all.
Perhaps it was really a hundred people all told, that was how many it took, and there is no hope there will be a hundred and one, because a life based on incomprehension and misinterpretation and erroneous ideas must end just as springtime must end, budding a
nd greening must end, and everything will be just as incomprehensible as it has been since the beginning of time immemorial, with no help whatsoever along the way, and even this end brings no enlightenment, since the one who could have delivered it delivered it already, once upon a time, except that no one grasped what he had declared: away with reasoning and away with meaning, away with the thirst of desire and suffering; there was no one who truly grasped and embraced it, surely that’s what should have been done back then, after 380 or 438, embrace what would be grasped of the words spoken by the ascetic prince of philosophers, and find a form, some brand new form, to embody this heartrending state of being touched, and not hand it over to so-called understanding, not fling it down for so-called interpretation, not leave it at the mercy of the mind that could not help but destroy it immediately, retaining it for itself or relegating it to the realm of religion, it makes no difference which path the mind chose to do away with the princely message, it was blindness in broad daylight, the mind snatching the message from the addressee, so that now somewhere presumably we have a message, while there is this woeful, incurable blindness, and after those one hundred, no one appeared who would at least recognize that what refers to another can never actually touch that other, so that only words are left now, for another twenty-five hundred years, human words that will never be—just as they have never been—good for anything, because not only have they not deciphered what has been and is still inscribed in the unmediated sacredness of trillions and trillions of facts, not only have they detoured us from where they should have directed us, but they haven’t even been suitable, and never will be, for truly consoling us for the loss, for there being no way back to the one, nor can they ever even warn us: we must listen very carefully to what is spoken, if it is spoken at all, because it is said once and only once.
NOT ON THE HERACLITEAN PATH
Memory is the art of forgetting.
It doesn’t deal with reality, reality is not what engages it, it has no substantial relation whatsoever to that inexpressible, infinite complexity that is reality itself, in the same way and to the same extent that we ourselves are unable to reach the point where we can catch even a glimpse of this indescribable, infinite complexity (for reality and glimpsing it are one and the same); so the rememberer covers the same distance to the past about to be evoked as that covered when this past had been present, thereby revealing that there had never been a connection to reality, and this connection had never been desired, since regardless of the horror or beauty that the memory evokes, the rememberer always works starting from the essence of the image about to be evoked, an essence that has no reality, and not even starting from a mistake, for he fails to recall reality not by making a mistake, but because he handles what is complex in the loosest and most arbitrary manner, by infinitely simplifying the infinitely complex to arrive at something relative to which he has a certain distance, and this is how memory is sweet, this is how memory is dazzling, and this is how memory comes to be heartrending and enchanting, for here you stand, in the midst of an infinite and inconceivable complexity, you stand here utterly dumbfounded, helpless, clueless, and lost, holding the infinite simplicity of the memory in your hand—plus of course the devastating tenderness of melancholy, for you sense, as you hold this memory, that its reality lies somewhere in the heartless, sober, ice-cold distance.
II. NARRATES
NINE DRAGON CROSSING
The future, the same old.
He had always planned that some day he would travel to see Angel Falls, then he had planned to visit Victoria Falls, and in the end he had settled for at least Schaffhausen Falls; one day he’d go and see them, he loved waterfalls, it’s not easy to explain, he would begin whenever he was asked what his thing was about waterfalls, waterfalls, he would begin, and would immediately interrupt himself, how can I say this? giving his interlocutor a bewildered glance, as if expecting that person to help him provide an answer, what exactly it was with him and waterfalls, but of course the one who asked the question never rushed to help with the answer, why should he, after all he had asked the question because he didn’t know the answer, so that this usually caused a bit of a confusion that either increased or else immediately ended, because either after some temporizing or else right away, he would somehow manage to close the matter, for at these times when they tried to extract an answer from him he would either gradually or with a sudden movement literally turn away from the interlocutor, he did not intend to be rude, but it made him very nervous that this was what always happened, that he would get embarrassed right away, this whole thing got on his nerves, to be asked, and to become embarrassed because of it, just standing there like one smacked on the head with a frying pan, while his interlocutor obviously didn’t know what was going on, what was this with a frying pan?—so that those among his acquaintances who knew about the thing chose to drop the matter, even though the question would have been justified, everyone around him knew that he liked waterfalls and that he had always planned on traveling to see at least one, as they say, at least once in his life, first and foremost Angel Falls, or Victoria Falls, but at the very least Schaffhausen Falls; whereas things happened quite otherwise, in fact utterly otherwise, for he had arrived at that time of life when one no longer knows how many years remain, possibly many, perhaps five or ten or even as many as twenty, but it is also possible that one might not live to see the day after tomorrow, and so, one day it became clear as day for him that at this time of life he would, as they say, never get to see either the Angel, or the Victoria or even the Schaffhausen Falls, the sound of one of these falls, by the way, was constantly in his ears, after fantasizing about them all these years he had started hearing one of them, but which one it was he couldn’t know of course, so that after a while, around the time he turned sixty, he was no longer sure why he had wanted to see the first or the second or at least the third of these waterfalls, was it so he could at least decide which one it was he had heard all his life, or more accurately the second half of his life, whenever he shut his eyes at night? or because he had actually wanted to see one of them, if not one of the first two, then at least the third, he was now past sixty and this actually terminated the hitherto always open-ended aspect of the matter, what is more, it somehow made it clear that he would never get to see the first or the second or even the last one of these falls, not because it would have been so impossible, why would it have been, he could have easily gone to a travel bureau when he happened to have the money, even now that he was past sixty, and he could make a payment for a trip to the Angel, or to the Victoria, or at least to Schaffhausen; on the other hand, he had always thought that just for this reason, just because there happened to be a waterfall there, he would not make the trip after all, but wait until one of his work assignments would take him somewhere in the vicinity, except this never happened, by a grotesque twist of fate he who in the course of all those years had been sent to just about every corner of the globe had never been sent near a falls, there had never been any interpretation job in the vicinity of the Angel, the Victoria, or even the Schaffhausen Falls, and this is how it happened that he, who all his life had wanted to see the Angel, the Victoria, or at least the Schaffhausen Falls, he of all people, who had this thing with waterfalls, one fine day, and for the umpteenth time, found himself in Shanghai again (the occasion was of no interest, he had to interpret for one of the usual series of business meetings), and he, for whom all his life waterfalls possessed such a special role, now in an utterly astounding manner precisely here in Shanghai had to realize the reason why all his life he had yearned to see the Angel, or the Victoria, or at the very least the Schaffhausen Falls, precisely here in Shanghai where it was common knowledge that there were no waterfalls, for it all began with his finishing up his work for the day, and he was exhausted, he had been a simultaneous interpreter ever since he could remember, and of all things it was precisely simultaneous interpretation that exhausted him the most, especially when it happened to be
for a business meeting in Asia, as was the case now, and especially when, at the obligatory dinner afterward, he was obliged to drink as much as he did this evening, well, what’s done is done, in any case, here he was by eveningtime, a wrung-out dishrag, as they say, drunk as a skunk, a used up dishrag, this dead drunk, here he stood in the middle of the city, on the riverbank, soused, dead drunk, a wrung-out dishrag, speaking sotto voce and not being terribly witty: so this is Shanghai, meaning that here I am once again in Shanghai, he had to admit that, alas, he found the fresh air had not been all that beneficial even though, as they say, he had nourished great hopes for it, since he was aware, if we may speak of awareness in his case now, aware that he had drunk way too much, he had far more than what he could handle, but he had been in no position to refuse, one glass followed another, too many of them, and already in the room he had felt sick, a vague notion churning inside him that he needed fresh air, fresh air, but once outside in the fresh air, the world began to spin around him even more, true, it was still better here outside than indoors, he no longer remembered if he had been dismissed or had simply sneaked outside, it was alas no longer meaningful to speak of memory in his case at this moment as he stood in a peculiar posture near the upper sector of the Bund’s ponderous arc of buildings, he leaned against the railing and eyed the celebrated Pudong on the other side of the river, and by this time the almost disastrously fresh air had come to have enough of an effect for his consciousness to clear up for a single moment and abruptly let him know that all this did not interest him the least little bit, and he was terribly bored in Shanghai, here, standing on the riverbank near the upper sector of the Bund’s ponderous arc of buildings, this was made evident by his posture, and what was he supposed to do now?—after all he couldn’t remain leaning on that railing till the end of time in this increasingly calamitous condition, he was alone, his consciousness blurred once again, his head was swimming, obviously a restaurant was not an option in this instance, he could not bear the thought of eating, in this unsteady state even the thought of moving on and sitting down in a restaurant just to get through the evening appeared unbearable, and anyway he was not in the mood, not in the mood for anything, but then his consciousness drifted back to inquire, what now, was he going to stay here forever? shouldn’t he take in a movie? or some sort of night club, but were there any night clubs around here? he shook his head on the riverbank, but instantly stopped, because shaking his head made his nausea even worse, so he stared strictly straight ahead, as one contemplating the Pudong, although all he saw was the filthy water of the river, and he was getting totally bored with the scene, yet he was free for the entire evening, in fact to be more accurate this was the one and only evening designated as free time for him by the interpretation service that had flown him out here for a total of three days, only one evening; this thought began to revolve in his head, this was his only free evening, and he did not know what to do with it, he kept his stare fixed on the scummy surface of the river, while his conscious mind whispered to him that all right then, he would not do anything on this free evening, quit agonizing here about what to do, he should pick himself up and sober up, go back to his hotel, lie down in his bed and watch TV, back in Europe he had rarely watched Chinese TV programs, his room would be pleasantly cool, he would call room service for a ton of ice and perhaps a bottle of Perrier, yes, a big bottle of real Perrier would be great, the thought electrified him, so that he no longer felt it was so terrible that inexplicably the world continued to spin around him worse than before, and even though he hadn’t succeeded through sheer willpower in sobering up, he somehow managed to find his way to Fuzhou Road, so things seemed to have taken an auspicious turn; however after a few steps, a dreadful nausea overtook him, yet he did not stop to throw up, he kept walking, that is he managed to walk all right, his face had turned red and his hair stood on end, although he was blissfully oblivious of this, it would not have interested him anyway, only walking interested him, and the hope that this nausea would soon start to let up and he would soon be back in his hotel; he envisioned the hotel room, he could feel the cool of the air conditioning, as he walked on up Fuzhou Road, it was out of the question that he squeeze himself into a tight taxi cab, or take the subway, both of which would have been immediately on hand especially here on Fuzhou Road, he had to keep to the surface, the wide-open surface, this thought rumbled within his head, and he kept breathing as deeply as he was able, great gulps of air deep into the lungs, deep into the lungs, this thought kept rattling inside his head, but he did not feel any better, in fact he began to feel worse, even though the weather, now that it was getting near ten p.m., could be said to be almost pleasant, he walked on, had to stop and throw up while alarmed pedestrians gave him a wide berth, then he set out once more, time and again staggering and regaining his balance at the last instant, then staggering and regaining his balance once more, and he kept on marching, marching unstoppably on Fuzhou Road; of course at the time he did not yet think—for the time hadn’t yet arrived for thinking—that this was how he would go on, on foot, far from it, in fact the thought kept bobbing up that he would like to, as they say, seize the next available opportunity, but he did not seize the next available opportunity because he didn’t know what it was, as it happened he just kept walking until he arrived at the corner of the square with that most suggestive name, Peoples’ Square, where all of a sudden, as if he had planned on this all along, without the least hesitation, he turned left, and his movements might have been read as intending to cross the square diagonally, but that was not what happened, because his feet came to a different decision, and even though his upper body had been inclined toward this diagonal crossing, his feet kept him on a course straight ahead, so that there was nothing else to do but advance making a beeline now that his nausea seemed to abate a little, however by now he started to feel rather spent, and began to regret setting out on foot, he scolded himself, you are an idiot to be gadding about in Shanghai, where every distance is ten times and a hundred times the usual, especially when they had given him a coupon for the taxi, and, had he chosen to take public transportation, his ticket would have been free, the firm had a relatively liberal policy in these matters, but by now it made no difference, he waved off the thought, but the broad gesture forced him to halt, whereas he had to be moving on; a conscious voice inside kept reminding him that he had to be on his way now, so he set out once again, and walked on, for on top of everything else he had arrived in a place where a blurry awareness dawned that he hadn’t the faintest notion of how to find the bus, the 72, which was his only chance; he was now falling in love with the 72, he had always been very fond of it, and would always love it, because of the route of this bus, although momentarily unavailable in his head, nor was much else readily available there, only the desire to find the 72 at any cost, because only the 72 could solve his problem, only the 72, repeated the voice of consciousness inside him—for this consciousness knew that ordinarily this bus and its route were quite familiar to him, this was a popular, far-ranging bus line that he had used on countless occasions whenever he sojourned in Shanghai, that is why, thundered a voice inside him, you must find this bus—and so he trudged on, keeping the cardinal points in mind, because even in this condition he was approximately aware of them, he never made a mistake determining which way was north, south, east and west, basically, and he was sufficiently familiar with Shanghai by now not to really get lost anywhere in the city, as long as it was the inner city, the central parts taken in a broader sense, which was the case here, he was walking in the park at Peoples’ Square, although he wasn’t aware of this, and then his feet led him in a southerly direction, walking down the entire length of a smaller side street, and he suddenly found himself in the former French Quarter, in that old French Quarter that had undergone such an incredible rebirth; a reawakening consciousness within him made him gawk, the place had come to life since he had last been here, a little Saint-Germain-des here in Shanghai, he tried to pronounce the
words, a Saint-Germ . . . a Saint-des, or at least it had a slightly similar character, he gave up trying to pronounce it, now this main street here, this Huaihai Road, in contrast to that other one, was exaggeratedly long, and the crowds far too thick, it was Friday evening, the shops were still open, the restaurants and all other imaginable places of entertainment still open, everything was still open, life was never allowed to come to a standstill here, the milling crowds were simply insane, the traffic tremendous, and everything at a speed exactly one size greater than one’s sanity could withstand, this was the opinion beginning to take place in him, one size too big, thought the reviving consciousness inside him, for if you were to label what is bearable a size 3X, then only 4X, and that alone, would fit Shanghai’s size, or how else to put it, he thought as he elbowed his way forward through the crowds in front of the brilliantly lit store windows, this speed was appalling, sweeping him away who knows where, and evidently no one was aware that it was so awful, come on now, his steps slowed down, this time his feet obeyed him, letting him pose the question: come on now, people, where are you off to in such a rush, really, and anyway why is everyone in such a rush here, and he turned his head left and right, but because of the instant vertigo, he quickly stopped doing that, and once again as if his head were propped up, balanced on his neck, he fixed his stare on a single point, it is Friday night here, and furthermore if I pick any one person to look at, for instance this well-dressed woman here, her hands clutching two shopping bags from elegant stores, one cannot claim that she is in such an insane rush, but the moment his gaze returned to take in the entirety of the crowds passing on the sidewalk he once again felt the senseless chaos of this tempo to be unbearable and insane, why couldn’t they just stroll? he stared provocatively at one face after another, all over the world it is Friday night, ten-thirty or eleven, it makes no difference, the air is pleasant and getting more and more so, as if the air had stirred slightly, it was not quite a breeze, no, not quite, after all this was Shanghai in August, an inferno, but it seemed that a breath of air had ever so slightly caressed them all, all of them milling chaotically about on Huaihai Road, for now he felt himself capable of perceiving even this, that it was chaos, and this perception may have been the first sign of his recovery, perceiving that these people, all of these people here, were chaotically and utterly insanely rushing and milling about, forward and back, across and in and up and down, an insanely humongous hurly-burly, this was Shanghai, and elsewhere all over the world about this time, people would be slowing down, it was the end of the week, people—he craned toward the oncoming faces like some prophet struggling to make fools see the light, here you are on Huaihai Road, fine, so you do a bit of shopping, that’s good, then a bit of dining out, or a bit of chitchat, or whatever, okay, but no, these people here acted as if they had gone haywire, the place was truly like a madhouse, so he took an abrupt turn to the right, that is, in a semicircular arc he crossed over to the other side of the street thanks to the successful action of automobiles rushing to his aid with screeching brakes, he managed to just barely fit into the fraction of time that helpful drivers provided for his free passage among their vehicles, across and up and away; that seemed to be his apparently resolute plan, to take Madang Lu toward the north, this had suddenly flashed inside him like some traffic light, because I’ve had enough of this, I’ll go up here, this way, and indeed this maneuver worked, ah, this will mean only a slight detour, here I am in this little street—as it happened it was a narrow little side street, a tiny European-sized passage, one might even say it had tight Parisian dimensions, he said to himself, so that alongside the car traffic the pedestrians only had a narrow sidewalk that was anything but commodious, true, but that frantic rush on Huaihai Road, at least that had been left behind—here he no longer felt the desperate scramble that reigned back there, over here people somehow weren’t in such a hurry, after all this street had a truly European, almost Parisian coziness, this somehow seems to work, he nodded, this Parisian notion, and he marched on, slightly relieved, until he glimpsed the end of the street and saw that there, where the street ended—in fact quite near him up ahead—the grim hulk of a highway spanned across above street level, just like some monster, he thought with a grin, as if some Golem was lying on his back there, his sprawling body inscribing a neat arc between two building blocks, he said to himself on glimpsing it, for from here on he was capable of saying things to himself, such as: oh no, not this; these superhighways in Shanghai assumed such proportions that it was basically impossible to walk over to the other side, and he was just too tired for this, or how to put it, this just wouldn’t work for one so soused, he was too exhausted to struggle with an expressway like this, a pedestrian, he now thought quite lucidly, in the vicinity of an expressway like this simply doesn’t stand a chance; as they say, his fate is sealed, and once more he thought of the bus, what was he doing here wandering around on foot, his feet were burning with weariness, to say no more of the rest of him, he cautioned himself, in a word, the feet have had it, he decided, and instead of quickly looking for a bus stop, for the 72, here he was trudging on, and why was he still on foot? he asked himself, but then he remembered that he was probably in the best location to find a way out, for let’s see now, as his two precious feet put on the brakes, here I am on Madang Lu Road, with Huaihai Road behind me, and in front of me Jinling Xi Lu, therefore it must be right around here, near precisely this expressway, there has to be, there actually was, a bus stop for the 72 around here, he recalled, and the outlines of his whereabouts gradually became more and more familiar—where he stood and where that expressway was and the nearest bus stop—as long as he now stood on Madang Lu, oh yes, and he set out again, he should be advancing right alongside precisely this expressway, the Yan’an Gaojia Lu, so this had been the reason for his not turning back when he glimpsed that grim hulking mass, this was the reason for his walking on, across from the Yan’an, and this was why, when he reached the edge of the sprawling monster—he grinned again, for he hadn’t the slightest notion why but he found this monster amusing—this was why when he reached the edge of this famous superhighway and ascertained that there was no sign of a bus stop, not here, there, or anywhere, that he started to walk on, these dear precious feet, he glanced down at them, as they went, one after the other, and if his eyes were not deceiving him, which could just be possible, he thought—or his memory played him false, which would not be surprising—then his instincts—his vision and his memory—in sum his instincts would find what he was looking for, because it had to be there, he thought, making a wry face, it would have to be there, therefore onward, take a left here and onward along the Yan’an, and he looked at those precious feet down there, his feet, the way one went after the other, and he was certain now that everything would be all right, and if he continued on the Yan’an, straight ahead, persistently, then it was only a few hundred meters, at the most five hundred and there it would be, the longed for, the redeeming, the homeward-bound 72, as he eyed proudly those two feet down there, and he was positive that with them along, all would turn out well.
The World Goes On Page 9
