rude, unpleasant sounds rubbed his nerves the wrong way, needlessly reviving evil memories like a coin dropped into a tin dish. And who was that crossing the unlit room? Mira had arrived. She had opened the unlocked door and come in, made herself something to drink—paying no attention to the sleeping Yang—and had just now emerged from the kitchen. This was a moment he had imagined time and time again, suffocating inside every time that he did, but now, seeing the shape it was actually taking, he was convinced that reality was no rare thing, was in fact nothing more than a poor imitation, dull and run-of-the-mill, of that imagination that anticipates everything. He was in no hurry to get up, and given that his body was deaf to his commands, leaving him unable to so much as turn his head, shackled to the air as is common in fever dreams, he could do nothing but continue to lie down as he was, watching Mira get some bread out of the cupboard, slice it, and spread it with margarine. Even in the dark Yang could see that Mira had grown yet more emaciated, as though a gust of wind might blow her away, and that her long hair was hanging down behind her back in a very ordinary way, tied in a ponytail. She was wearing a pale-colored wool dress, belted at the waist, and though her clothes didn’t seem all that big, the material looked baggy on her hips. The fact that she had dwindled away like an aged, withering woman triggered surprise in Yang. Seemingly famished, she scarfed the bread down in the near dark, the only light from the moon shining in through the window. The sound of her swallowing was incredibly loud. And then she coughed for quite a long time. Ages ago, they’d been in line to buy train tickets when they first set eyes on each other; struck by an immediate attraction, they stood there hesitating behind the door to their respective destinations, pressing their ears up against it to hear whoever was on the other side; the bell rang to announce the train’s departure. Doors opened and closed, and people appeared and disappeared quiet and courteous as funeral-goers, and the pianist struck up Chopin’s Funeral March as if in response. (The music shakes Yang to the core. If not for that music, sadness would just be sadness; that was the kind of music it was.) The candle that had been placed in a corner of the room made the couple’s shadows dance on the opposite wall, so tall it seemed they would touch the ceiling, and the wind that slid in through the door to the veranda flipped the pages of the book. On the wall where the shadows were undulating, Yang transcribed the sentences that so suddenly appeared, that were in a language he could not understand, that were all the more beautiful because of that. The snow was piling up on the rooftops; the stars shone mysteriously in the sky. A skinny black figure, broom in hand, was sitting next to the solitary outline of a chimney, and Yang gasped in surprise at the realization that he himself was the sole observer of this scene. The snow looked to be getting gradually thicker. “I’m the chimney sweep of sadness, I cry, cry, cry . . .” Yang grazed the pencil hesitantly against the wall. “I cry, cry, cry . . .” Taking care to get the spelling correct, he wrote it out again and again. “Cry, cry, cry . . .” Behind Yang, the shadow of the tall man was whispering, his words whisking out through the door: “But clearing snow is no easy thing. No, it’s not easy at all.” The voice receded, wavering with what seemed like regret, disappearing like a candle’s last smolder. The woman took the man’s hand and they passed over the threshold together. Yang brought his lips to the wall, close as a shadow, found the sentences he had written and read in a small voice: “For twenty years I searched for such a place, where no one lives nearby, where the landscape is wide and rolling with meadows, hollows, swamps, solitude, forests, and the sky. Not even a village, just a tiny hamlet without a church. –Botho Strauß.”
Mira got up from her seat and approached Yang.
And Yang knew that now, finally, it was time to let the tears fall.
There was an ambulance parked in front of the house. A pallid stillness lay over the whole scene, nothing moved, and the air was like a warm, transparent wall. A regular ticking sound pierced the silence of 33 degrees Celsius—as indicated by the wavering gradations of the rooftop thermometer. The lazy beat of a mechanical heart. Or else, was it the metronomic footsteps of someone running down a corridor in rubber-soled shoes, or the ticking of an unusually large wristwatch hanging from my ear? Perhaps the person living on the ground floor had turned on the washing machine, or maybe the sound was coming from a broken electrocardiograph. A man was being brought out on a stretcher to the ambulance. His shoes stuck out from under the blanket. Water was dripping from them. The house was a wrecked ship. I know that old man, with the huge green oxygen mask jutting from his head like a green dragon on a ship’s prow, or I think I know him. I try to approach him but the nurses hold me back, their speech incomprehensible. When I turn the page of the picture book a toad and a red orchid are melting to a pulp in a flowerpot. The ruins of a castle appear as I keep walking, and a narrow stony road that rises at a steep gradient. There is the scent of hot grass and dry sunlight. Just then, soaked in sweat, I look back over my shoulder and see a large damp reptile soundlessly following me. I can’t recall its physical form. This is all a scene from a dream. I could only sense the warmth of its long black tail, which it held erect; warmth like that from stone steps burning in the heat of the midday sun. Someone took my hand. And suddenly the scene changed.
The old bookshop, which had no ventilation system other than its windows and door, was full of cigarette smoke. I sat at a table with an espresso cup on it; a corner of the square was visible through the open door, and I could see people sitting around tables by the side of the road in spite of the hot weather. I got the feeling that I was being watched intently by the countless books that lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling, and by the stories within them. Strangely overwhelmed, I overcame my shyness and got up from my seat, looking up at the higher shelves as I wandered among them. It was the second time we’d visited this bookshop. The first time we’d arrived too late, after the bookshop had already closed for the day, and so could only stand outside for a while and peer in at the display stands. We talked as I examined the books laid out in the window display, pointing at the titles I recognized, but also at those I didn’t. It was winter. The wind shook the awnings of the open-air cafes, and after midnight the snowflakes began to fly. But it was summer now, and we went inside the shop. They brought out small cups of an espresso that was thick as tar. A calm yet persistent scent eddied around us, made up of trees and stale dust, paper and the wooden floor, and cigarette smoke. You were talking with the owner about the difficulties facing small bookshops, about the pessimistic outlook; I finished walking among the shelves, and stepped outside the shop. The shop immediately next door was a florist’s, with a single chair outside. I sat down and put on my sunglasses. Happily, I’d been given a book from the shop as a present. The first story in the book was about five cities, and very short. The title, Invisible Cities. I began to read aloud from the beginning of the book. Time went by. Reptiles surrounded me, listening to the sound of my reading. They were curled up quietly, barely moving; only their raised black tails swayed slowly in the air, as a huge butterfly might, in that sunlight of late summer sliding into autumn. Heat radiated from their skin, which had been warmed in the sunlight and from the square’s asphalt. This afternoon subsiding by degrees like a swamp. Asleep, I heard the sound of sleeping breath. Of one sleeping breath fumbling for another. They must be tangled with you, my breathing, my sleep, and my dreams. And I wanted to keep dreaming. Tears and sweat were flowing from me, wetting my face and watch and pillow. Sleep drifted about over lukewarm waves, like an anesthetic leaching in through veins, seized by sleep’s phantoms . . . held within sleep, one eye makes a simultaneous record of what the other sees. Sleep, the soul’s gelatinous component, the made-visible half-form of that which is unseen. Dreams and the embrace of dreams, which always stir up such sluggish, stunned sensations. This thing that stimulates my sleep, the respiration and waves of dreams, waves of breath and waves of water, that chord and note. And a silent song-cum-selfless-aria spun out on the keyboard. I passed back into the dream, back into the bookshop.
But you’d left, they told me. You were alarmed to find I’d disappeared and hurried outside to look for me, they said. And that it had already been over half an hour since you’d left. He left? While they were speaking I suddenly became alien to the dream, quite at a loss. All the books turned away with cold, sad faces, all the writers
