In her eyes, a connection existed between those local time measurements, which eschewed any kind of precision, and the fact, “yes, the fact,” that the inhabitants of the Hondareda colony, in another regression? preferred to have their money, to the extent that any was in circulation among them, in the most archaic forms or incarnations possible, or in seemingly impossible shapes, such as lumps of rock crystal, or, preferably, sheets of mica, or, better still, clumps of droppings from the Sierra chamois, or, absolutely the best, hazelnuts — anyone who paid with empty shells was a counterfeiter! — and dried chestnuts, and the further fact that in the colony the units of weights and measures recognized the world over, the gram, hundredweight, ounce, pud, and ton, had not merely been eliminated but were also frowned upon, and this although the new settlers had arrived only recently and amid the confusion were busy setting up temporary housekeeping arrangements.
Anyone who slipped up and said that “in two hours” he had collected “ten liters of cranberries” or “twenty pounds of bovists in half an hour” or shot a “wild boar weighing half a ton” or had already harvested from his greenhouse “two hundredweight of potatoes, four bushels of barley, an ounce of tobacco, and eight grams of saffron” was punished with scorn.
In the depression, the only measures of quantity that counted — according to a law, unwritten, like all the others there (see “atavism”) — were ones such as “a handful,” “two palmsful,” “a bent armful,” “all pockets full,” “a back full,” and the like; although founded only a short time ago, the colony was already well stocked with customs and a sort of common law.
And the observer called this “simple and childish”; see currency transactions, see units of measure. He also asserted that Hondareda was less a “colony” than a “camp,” self-imposed and voluntary, an arrogant one. She understood the man (without particularly acknowledging that he was right — which he also did not expect, for he assumed in any case that he was).
How strange at least the inmates of that high-altitude depression could appear when looked at in a certain way and from a certain angle. Weren’t they in fact prisoners, of themselves or whomever, or refugees who had not adjusted to their refugee existence in the slightest; still acutely in flight with every step they took up here, where they were seemingly safe, or maybe not? So in contrast to their descendants, those young people up on the bright, rocky slopes, who had perhaps not been old enough to remember much of the flight, and crossed paths with the strange woman without suspicion, enjoying complete peace of mind, as she made her way to the settlement at the bottom, passing through the chaos boulders, the members of the older generations, who seemed to be in detention there, almost all shied away in alarm.
What had looked from a distance, from the valley’s upper rim, like people waving to her: wasn’t it rather a communal shooing-away, in unison, so to speak, of the intruder? The people of Hondareda recoiled, each in his own place, at the appearance of this unknown person among the inhabited blocks of stone, as from an enemy, who, having pursued them here from the place they had fled, was threatening their lives; the people of Hondareda existed in a permanent state of war, if not in their conscious minds or their unconscious, at least on the surface of their bodies, in their nerves, their skin, and their hair; and the enemy, even in the singular, like this woman now, had a crushing power advantage over them, just like the enemy from an earlier time and a great distance away; even when armed, all they could do when face-to-face with this enemy was cringe defenselessly and squeeze their eyes shut — pretend to be blind, as they had done from time immemorial, as if that made them invisible.
This is how the new arrival encountered the population of the hollow, though only at first, and briefly. A while later, a few eagles’ circles, mountain jackdaw flocks’ caws, under-ice chords from the half-frozen lake later, it became clear to her that a general and persistent recoiling, cringing, and shying away was typical of this place; not merely at the sight of her, or of outsiders (in the twinkling of an eye she was no longer viewed as such) but also at mere nothings — if the sudden shadow of a bird or a cloud overhead and an equally unexpected sound were nothings.
The noises in particular, also the most distant and tiny ones, which took on a ghostly, oversized presence down there in the huge stone amphitheater, leaping from cliff to cliff, exploding now on the left, now on the right, now in front, now in back of me, made me and the person next to me, my fellow hermit right around the corner, my neighbor in the next chaos-alley over, duck involuntarily or even throw myself flat on the ground or to one side.
The reporter commented that these behaviors stemmed from typical hearing damage, which affected not only the people in the Hondareda enclave but by now almost the entire earth’s population: this phenomenon could be observed nowadays wherever civilization’s noise no longer physically assailed people at its source but instead took on other forms, like phantom sounds, beyond the ordinary sounds, tones, and signals characteristic of civilization, and in these phantom forms jumped us from behind in precisely those places assumed to be isolated: in nature, in places without machines and devices and crowds, assaulting our organism more ruthlessly than the original racket in the inhabited hubs of our civilized planet.
“Take, for example, the solitary hiker, who thinks he has put behind him all the so-called curses of civilization, tramping, say, through a semidesert in Arizona or a full-fledged desert in Mongolia: a hissing of wind behind him, and he, his ears deceiving him, jumps to one side in confusion to avoid what he thinks is a horde of bicyclists descending on him — while at home on the city outskirts he would have calmly let real ones pedal past him. Then a chirping of crickets is heard all across the silent steppe, and he perceives it as the ticking of thousands of office clocks, more piercingly tormenting there than they ever were in his actual office. The softest bird’s peeping in a briar bush — and he hears it as a telephone ringing, so harsh, so deadly to daydreams, and so hostile that he has hardly ever heard its like in reality.
“So we can observe precisely in the — admittedly peaceable — sectarians of Hondareda that there is no escaping our civilization — and why would there be? That it catches up with anyone who flees it — and only then, in catching up with him, as a phantom, becomes the actual evil that he earlier merely imagined!”
She, on the other hand, saw in the Hondarederos neither refugees from the world nor victims of civilization. Both as far as they were concerned personally, and in the name of the story to be told here: they were survivors. They — with the exception of the young ones — had all, each alone and in his own way, crossed the valley of the shadow of death. They were all equally timid and tremulous, also those for whom the crossing had taken place quite long ago.
It was true that in their confrontations with strangers or even those with whom they had no connection, these people seemed reduced almost entirely to reactions or even naked reflexes. Yet in such reactions and reflexes, only the first and entirely superficial layer of the body or being of these survivors found expression. Below — behind? — beside? in the middle of? everywhere else, in body and soul, she, the interloper, sensed, as only in certain survivors, an enthusiasm, a joy in existence, and gratitude, if still concealed and not (yet) capable of being expressed freely.
How she sensed that? She herself was a survivor. And when their turn came, it took only a brief exchange of glances, after the initial head-tossing, for the “handful” of people down at the bottom of the valley, the core of the new settlers there, to recognize that she was one, too. And then they opened up to her, without further ado, though not collectively — Hondareda also lacked anything resembling a village square or any other sort of communal gathering place — but each one individually; each in his hideaway, which appeared to turn its back on his neighbor’s, and was also seemingly as different from it as possible, on purpose.