In front of the car a whirl of chopped cornstalks, long since withered, blew along the carretera, whipped together by a wind spout into a sort of leafy column that spun past a few feet above the asphalt; and at the same time she, the driver, felt the brook flash through her, the brook called Satkula that circled the Sorbian village, more than a thousand miles away, in a great arc.
She put her finger to her forehead, which meant: be mindful. The image of the brook, the glittering of the water oppressive? First of all because she viewed any recollection of her childhood and its setting as over and done with. And then, that village signified to her falling prey to death. In her memory, the villagers there had been obsessed with death, day in, day out, including the children, or perhaps them above all, the children? Yes, the children’s awareness, above all, at least there and at that time, had been riddled with village tales of people’s dying, almost always gruesome, never peaceful, never? no, never. A neighbor had been tied up and his head stuck in an anthill, where the ants had eaten him alive (although it happened during the war, before her time, she had experienced it, as a child, as happening in the present). Another man broke his neck simply by falling to the ground while picking apples, and not even from high up on a ladder but simply from a chair (that could happen to them, the children, just as well). A neighbor woman choked to death simply because a horse whose smell she could not stand passed by. Another woman, so one heard, young and healthy, simply did not wake up one morning, and died, according to the priest at her open grave, in a state of sin, unmarried, with an unborn child in her womb. The miller — for a couple of years there was such a person there — lost the third and last of his children when the little one drowned in the brook, which was especially rapid below the dam, where the millrace joined it.
Perhaps it was less these accumulated deaths themselves than the tales of them circulating from dawn till dusk that populated the entire village for her, even in broad daylight, with terrifying ghosts; for all that was left of her own parents, of whose accidental death the villagers did not speak, at least not to her, the child, was trails of light, primarily due, no doubt, to her grandparents, who dwelt exclusively and insistently on stages of the parents’ lives — and wasn’t that characteristic of old folks? And any death in the village that she witnessed with her own eyes affected her very differently from one described by a third party or, worse still, overheard in passing: the person, the neighbor, whose death, even the most wretched one, she experienced with her own eyes, present until the final breath, would never crouch on her chest at night or pluck out her heart and then jump out at her the next morning as she was on her way to school or in the afternoon as she drove the cows to pasture — for a while this was still done in the village, by some little girl or other, outfitted with a whip and rubber boots — from behind a barn, from the slippery rocks where one forded the brook, from an empty root cellar stinking of rotting turnips.
Yes, the innumerable tales of death and dying, or, more precisely, anecdotes, at times made her village seem toxic. Never again a village, or at least not that one. And in retrospect it seemed to her as if it had been chiefly that sense of being pursued by the villagers’ obsession with corpses that had awakened her interest in money, when she was still a child. In money, simply the concept of it, she saw something that suggested an escape from the grim cycle of cadaver-worship, the hereafter, and apparitions. Money circulated toward life, embodied the living world, and meant now! (and now, and now …). And in the beginning it was just a healthy distraction. The thought of money gradually banished all the ghoulish stories.
And even then her urge to deal with money, to handle it on behalf of others, was far more powerful than the urge to have it for herself, to possess it; even then she had the idea (yes) not so much to multiply money as to let it be fruitful; to manage it — which then became the focus of her university studies — to use money to open new avenues, and still more new avenues, consistent with one of her later guiding principles: “He who steps into the same river has ever different waters flowing past him.” Setting things in motion with money: thus she became the first person from her death-obsessed village to go into the money business. (That she was a woman doing this was no longer particularly remarkable even then.)
And now she said, talking to herself sotto voce, as usuaclass="underline" “‘Thou shalt manage money!’ is a commandment like ‘Thou shalt not steal!’; its positive counterpart, like ‘Thou shalt make it be fruitful and multiply!’ And who knows, perhaps I accomplished as much as I did in this business because the thought of money enabled me to shake off those village death-and-doom stories? That thought gave me the energy to immerse myself completely, to my own and everyone’s benefit, in the world of the here-and-now, of life? But why are the village images coming to me now? Flow on without me, village brook!”
Another image flash: it pertained to the adolescent in the gatekeeper’s lodge at the entrance to her estate. Like all the images that flew to her so unexpectedly, this, too, was thoroughly peaceful; was set in peacetime; generated peace — the image was peace itself. And at the same time the image-spark that lit up the boy, Vladimir, for her appeared, like that of the village brook, accompanied by, or primed or shot through with, a lack — something was missing, if not from the image itself, then all the more tangibly from the subject of the image, the person in the image, and dreadfully missing!
The boy was sitting, just as he had one time in reality, at the kitchen table in her house, not as an intruder but instead very matter-of-factly, as someone who belonged there. He was reading. The kitchen was clean, sunlit, and warm. The large wooden table was bare except for a bowl of quinces, yellow as only quinces can be. Peace? Silent contentment. And nevertheless she sensed, at the very moment the image passed through her, empathy, no, pity, for the actual distant figure there in the, in his and her, in their northwestern riverport city. It — it? a surge — drove her to him; or he was supposed to be here with her in this instant. That he was so distant — from her? from what might it be? — simply far away, separated, isolated — was her responsibility, struck her as her own omission, her (unspecified) guilt.
The image, along with its powerful calm, meant: she should be close to the boy, this other person. Contrary to appearances, this burly Vladimir, who passed her in her own space as if she were not there, was as much at risk of going under as any human being could be; the very personification of a need for attention. He was in danger of falling out of the picture, and she had to rush to his aid. (“I must,” and that smile of hers.) His parents alone would never be equal to the task, ever, and for anyone. (Her “sense of mission.”)
And this lightning image, too, was also followed after a few moments’ hesitation by an audible conversation with herself: “If I ever return from this journey, I shall open an account for you at my bank, Vladimir. For a boy, that kind of thing can be as important as his first bicycle or motorbike. And for you it will be something else besides. And for your sake I regret that I cannot turn back: if this is not my last journey, at least it is the decisive one. And I would like to bring something back for you. What that will be, I do not know yet. But it will be right for you. And you will continue to look right through me, though perhaps in a different way.” As she said this, she turned her head, still driving in a southerly direction, and, accelerating now, she glanced as usual along the axis formed by her shoulder, and blew into the air with a breath that would have extinguished a candle from a great distance or would have made a small branch sway.