Here, one by one, they all gather. The woman, the old man, and the soldier look on as the gambler fishes an enormous bunch of keys out of his coat pocket, unlocks the padlock on the hut, throws the door wide open, unlocks the glass-and-metal compartment inside it, and, after turning a last key, drives out in a car that gets longer and longer: a camper. Birch branches — camouflage and ornament in one — slide off the top.
He pushes open the back door, sets up a folding table on the grass, and spreads a white tablecloth over it. The soldier hastens to help him and brings four chairs from inside the vehicle. But for the time being no one sits down. The old man vanishes purposefully through the trees, the gambler goes into his camper, and the woman, again with her silver suitcase, signals the soldier to follow her to the boat dock. Standing behind him with scissors and comb that she has taken out of her suitcase, she changes his hairstyle. Then with a quick gesture she bids him take off his uniform and, repeatedly stepping back to scrutinize not so much the soldier as her handiwork, dresses him in civilian clothes, likewise out of her suitcase. She keeps tugging and pulling and plucking at the soldier, who doesn’t seem to mind; his transformation from a chubby-cheeked bumpkin to a smooth, ageless cosmopolitan, dressed for summer and ready for anything, seems perfectly natural; only his eyes, when he turns back toward the woman, are as grave as ever; behind the happily smiling woman, ever so pleased with herself, they see the old man, who has just stepped bareheaded out of the woods, his hat full of mushrooms. While the woman takes an awl — she has everything she needs in the suitcase — and makes an extra hole in the soldier’s belt, the old man, sitting beside them on the bank, cleans his varicolored mushrooms.
By then the table has been set for all. The gambler in the camper also seems changed, not only because he is officiating at the stove in his shirtsleeves and wearing a flowered apron, but also because for cooking he has put on a pair of half-moon glasses. It is only when he suddenly looks over the edges that his glance seems as cold and dangerous as it used to. In the cramped galley he moves with the grace of a born cook — carefully wiping the glasses, putting the plates in the oven to warm, reaching for the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling — and shuffles in and out of the camper as though he had been running a restaurant for years.
Meanwhile, the woman and the soldier are at the table waiting. The old man is sitting on a mossy bank with his canvas-covered notebook, inscribing his columns as though in accompaniment or response to the kitchen sounds. Then he too sits motionless, though without expectation, his strikingly upright posture attributable solely to the place or the light; there is no wind, but his cape is puffed out. A bottle of wine is cooling in the spring at his feet.
Now all four are at the table and the meal is over. The glasses are still there, but only the old man is drinking wine; the gambler and the woman are smoking; the soldier has moved a short distance away; resting one heel on the knee of the other leg, he is twanging a Jew’s harp rendered invisible by the hand he is holding over it — isolated chords with such long pauses between them that in the end we stop expecting a tune. As though in response to the music, the old man puts his wineglass down after every swallow, or waits with the glass in midair. Under his gaze the open back door of the camper turns into a cave, while the shingle roof of the boathouse becomes vaulted and shimmers like the scales of the fish that dart to the surface of the pool after scraps of food. Now the entire clearing has the aspect of a garden where time no longer matters. The only sounds to be heard are garden sounds, the fluttering of the tablecloth, the splashing of a fish, the brief whirring and chirping of a bird among the ferns at the edge of the forest. The clouds drift across a sky which becomes so high that space seems to form a palpable arch overhead. The blue between the clouds twists and turns and is reflected down below in the water, in the grass, and even in the dark bog soil.
The woman and the old man, who have taken their clothes off behind the camper, run down to the lake without a trace of embarrassment; the old man starts his run with a jump — like a child — and his way of running is equally childlike; the woman waits a moment, as though to give him a head start, and overtakes him at the brink of the water. The gambler and the soldier, each with a toothpick in his mouth, watch as the two swim out into the pond. The water is warm. The woman turns to the aged swimmer beside her and, speaking as though they were strolling down a path together, says: “I wish I could just stay here. Any other place I can think of would be too hot or too cold, too light or too dark, too quiet or too noisy, too crowded or too empty. I’m afraid of any new place and I hate all the old ones. In the places I know, dirt and ugliness are waiting for me; in the unknown ones, loneliness and bewilderment. I need this place. Yes, I know: it’s only on the move that I feel completely at home. But then I need a place where I can spread out. Tell me of one woman who lives entirely out of suitcases and I’ll tell you about all the little things you can’t help noticing the moment she arrives — a framed photograph here, a toothbrush there. I need my place, and that takes time. I wish I could stay here forever.”
Her swimming companion dives under; when he comes up, he has the face of a wrinkled infant. He answers in a voice made deep by the water, which resounds over the surface of the lake: “That wish cannot be fulfilled. And if it could be, it would bring no fulfillment in the long run. Whenever in my life I have thought I arrived, at the summit, in the center, there, it has been clear to me that I couldn’t stay. I can only pause for a little while; then I have to keep going until the day when it may be possible to be there somewhere else for a little while. Existence for me has never been more than a little while. There is no permanence in fulfillment, here or anywhere else. Places of fulfillment have hurt me more than any others; I have come to dread them. It’s no good getting used to staying in one place; wherever it is, fulfillment can’t last. It loses its magic before you know it, and so does the place. It is not here. We are not there. So let’s get going. Away from here. Onward. It’s time.”
The garden has undergone a transformation while the swimmer was speaking. Though the light is unchanged, the lake has taken on a late-afternoon look. The spring has almost dried up and the water level has fallen, uncovering the usual junk — tires, metal rods, whole bicycles — along with bleached, barkless tree trunks. The skeleton of some animal appears in the underbrush at the edge of the forest, and elsewhere a collapsed shooting bench comes to light; prematurely fallen leaves are blown over the springtime lake, and those soot-gray spots in the hollows are deposits of old snow. The clouds grow longer and are joined together by vapor trails of the same color; the faded scrap of newspaper in the bushes shows a distinct date; and that importunate noise is the persistent blowing of horns on an expressway.
The clearing is deserted, the boathouse sealed. The swimmers have left no trace in the wind-ruffled lake. Only the mud bank reveals the prints of bare feet and of the camper’s tires, vanishing in the gravel path as it mounts the moraine.