When his eyes grew accustomed to the pale light that fell over the back of the room from the small windows and the chinks in the stone, he saw that the hut was divided into two rooms by a thin wooden wall. To his left, in the larger room, he made out a table, a cupboard, some chairs, a bed, and on the far wall a framed photograph of the country’s leader in military dress. To his right was a small room, doorless. He could see the end of a narrow cot, and nothing else. The woman, standing close beside him, pushed on his shoulder.
“Ehh, ehh,” she said, and nodded. He went into the little room and dropped his bag by the bed. He was so tired that he could hardly bear the weight of his clothes. He wanted to lie down, but he was embarrassed by the woman behind him.
He looked out the window and then turned around. The woman had left. He lay down and closed his eyes tightly. He could not even remember why he was here. He began dreaming before he was fully asleep. He dreamt of the train ride through France, though that was already several days behind him. His wife, her hair slipping from its pins with the motion of the train, was reading aloud to him from a newspaper, like a child in her outmoded glasses and ill fitting dress. Yet in the dream he felt that he was the one in the wrong place.
Less than two hours later, waking from his sleep, he saw his brother’s tape recorder on a shelf in the corner of the room. He waited for this vision to fade.
It often happened, now, that his memory failed or that he recreated things he remembered and placed them where they did not actually exist.
The tape recorder remained, however, and beside it he now saw a neat pile of notebooks, some clothing, a sewing box, a pair of slippers, a pair of boots, and a knife. Was it possible that his brother had lived in this room? Magin did not move, for fear his brother’s possessions would vanish.
After fifteen minutes or so, Magin was fully awake. He got up and went over to the shelf. Touching his brother’s possessions, he felt reassured. This was his brother’s room: he had often been in his brother’s room when his brother was absent, though this was a different room from any of the others. Yet this was his brother’s room, and that meant that though his brother was now gone from the room, he would return to it.
And yet why, in that case, had the woman allowed him to lie down and go to sleep here? Perhaps she had merely been showing him the room, and did not intend him to sleep here. Or perhaps she thought he would wait for his brother here. And, after all, that was what he was actually doing, now.
But there was a musty, disused smell about the clothes. And the notebooks stuck together, so that when Magin touched one, they all moved in a block. Perhaps his brother had been gone for a long time. He could not be dead, because in that case the woman would have put his possessions away somewhere. Unless this was where she had put them.
When he went out of the room, the woman was setting a meal on the table. Magin took her arm and led her into the small room. He pointed to his brother’s possession and asked her, “Where is the man who owns these things?”
She answered him only by gesturing toward the objects on the shelf in a way which Magin could not understand. She said one or two words only, and these he could not identify in any way with Trsk. Though this disappointed him, it did not surprise him. His brother had come here in order to record the language, after all. He had said it was on the point of dying out.
Magin gave up, not knowing what move to make, and followed the woman back to the table. Out the window, there were long violet shadows under the trees. He sat down, very hungry. He looked at the food. A cube of dry meat stood next to a heel of bread. He could see that the meat was too tough for his old teeth. He picked up the bread and ate it little by little, letting it soften before he chewed it. His hunger faded.
As the woman cleared the table, Magin lit a thin, cheap cigar and immediately started to cough. He felt a certain satisfaction in having come this far. However, he did not see how he was going to find out where his brother was: he was rather helpless, it turned out, because of the language. He stubbed his cigar and slipped what remained of it back in its box.
The woman put on her overcoat and gestured toward the door. Magin thought, with sudden hope, that now she was going to show him how to find Michael. In his excitement, he forgot where his room was, and stood still until the woman pushed him in the right direction. He put on his coat and followed her.
Outside the hut, the birds were now quiet; there was almost no light left in the sky, and the air was sharp. Magin, hurrying, stumbled over hidden roots. The dogs were gone from the doorways of the huts, which he and the woman passed quickly. When Magin thought they were still far away from the clearing, the sky widened. The windows of the largest hut glowed with orange firelight. Magin’s mouth was dry. He swallowed and walked after the woman into the hut.
Before he could steady himself, the woman disappeared from his side. At first the firelight dazzled him. He looked down. A dog was snaking toward him with its belly to the ground. The room was dense with people. In perfect silence they watched him: near the fire, men squatted on low stools and benches digging rhythmically into the thick socks that covered their ankles and scratching their scalps and ears; farther away, in a disordered group, the women sat together hissing over their needlework, shrugging fitfully, and sucking their teeth.
The dog began snarling, and the silence exploded: a tall man with a hooked nose rushed toward the dog, who was crouching at Magin’s feet with its teeth bared. A bench tumbled to the floor. The man kicked the dog in the ribs. The dog yelped and slipped away through legs and under stools. The men by the fire roared, and the women cried out strangely, themselves like animals. The dog squirmed into a corner. The man looked at Magin.
In Trsk, Magin said, “I came up here to look for my brother Michael, a scholar. My brother Michael came here to study your language.” He stopped because the man obviously did not understand him and was turning away. The man looked among the women for the one who had brought Magin here, and pointed at her, pronouncing what to Magin was only a guttural noise. The woman rose and spoke long enough to explain everything she knew. The man took Magin by the sleeve and sat him down on a bench near the fire. He spoke to an old man who was bent over a checkerboard in one corner of the room, and then went away. The man had not responded.
Magin lit the butt of his cigar and sat still for some time, wondering what was going to happen. The women sewed placidly, murmuring to one another. The men passed a jug around. For Magin, they poured the liquor into an earthenware cup. They scratched and talked, smiling and nodding at Magin every so often. Occasionally a man would come to him and recite a few words in English, which startled Magin extremely. “No, no. Sky,” one would say. Or another would say, “No, yes, here. Tape two.”
Magin threw the end of his cigar into the fire and kept an eye on the old man in the corner. The game was nearing its end. The long white hair of the old man grazed the scabbed pate of his opponent whenever they leaned over the board. Every time the white-haired one moved a piece, the other screwed up his nut-like face in anger. Magin lit another cigar and coughed. He was so tired that he could hardly sit straight. Suddenly the bald old man was on his feet, his skull gleaming in the firelight.
“Ruckuck,” he cried and brought his fist down on the checkerboard. The pieces — red and black discs and a few fragments of stone and wood — flew through the air and fell on the floor like a shower of hail. The white-haired man smiled calmly, his nose nearly touching his chin.