He grew tired of walking, and he dropped onto the sand, shook his head, and white sand fell from his hair. He placed the little suitcase under his head. The sand crunched between his teeth and pricked him under his clothes. From somewhere off to the right the dark little vortex twisted upward, wobbled in the distance, and started to move toward him. Longhair felt a fatigued irritation and said under his breath, “Get lost, will you!”
The vortex shuddered and stopped. Then the fellow decided that the vortex was sensitive to his moods and could be driven away by invoking his own inner powers. This was, perhaps, the first positive impression he had had of late. With the palm of his hand he swept a layer of sand off the suitcase and closed his eyes. You couldn’t say he had fallen asleep: rather, he had fallen into a kind of catalepsy. While he was still conscious, he admonished himself: I do not want to come here anymore, no more coming back here . . . Sometimes such self-injunctions helped. He had experience with this sort of thing.
When he opened his eyes, however, nothing had changed except that his neck was stiff from the rigid corner of the bizarre object underneath his head. He wiped his neck and lay there a bit longer, and when he finally opened his eyes, he was encircled by people who sat in silence: they struck him as gloomy and poorly drawn. One of them was a bit more perceptible: he was bald, tall, and stood in profile, bent over a pile of dry stalks. He extended his hand over the tinder, and a thin flame rose up. The fire ignited of its own, without matches or a lighter. This somewhat calmed the young man: he had already visited places like this where water, fire, and wind merely laughed at the ambitions of small creatures who thought that with the flimsy reins of cause and effect they had tamed everything on earth . . .
That Jew playing with fire is the leader here, Longhair guessed.
The Judean approached him, rapped on the little black suitcase, and immediately revealed his perceptiveness:
“You’ll hardly need that thing in these parts.”
“I can’t just throw it out!” Longhair shrugged.
“Naturally . . .”
“What’s inside it?” The question had occurred to Longhair for the first time. “What’s so important inside it that I’m hauling it around?”
“Open it and look,” the Judean advised.
Longhair stared in amazement at his interlocutor: why hadn’t that occurred to him earlier? But it hadn’t . . . In part this too was consoling and reminded him of that stereotypical dream, familiar even to cats, where you want to move, to run, to save yourself, even simply just to get a glass of water, but your body won’t obey you, and you can’t budge a single muscle . . .
The little suitcase was locked with two clasps, and Longhair could not figure out at first how they worked. As he pondered the mechanisms of the intricate locking latches, his hands of their own pressed a bracket along the side and the suitcase opened. It was not a suitcase, but a case for an object of inconceivable beauty. The very sight of it took Longhair’s breath away: it was a metal tube with a flared bell of yellow precious metal—neither warm gold nor cold silver, but soft and luminiferous. The elongated letters engraved in the oval stamp read SELMER, and Longhair deciphered the small letters immediately. He whispered the word, and it was sweet in his mouth . . . Then he touched the wooden mouthpiece with his fingers. The wood was matte and tender as a maiden’s skin. Its curve was so acutely feminine that Longhair was abashed, as if he had inadvertently caught sight of a naked woman.
“What a wonderful . . .” He faltered, looking for a word: toy, machine, thing? Rejecting the inappropriate words, he repeated with a declarative intonation: “How wonderful!”
He had the urge to do something with it, but he did not know what . . . He tore off the tails of his plaid wool shirt, and, breathing warm air on the flared golden surface, he gently stroked it with the red-and-green rag.
Now he was walking with all the others, and the circling that seemed to some senseless or monotonous had acquired sense for him: in his black case he carried a wondrous object whose flowing, lithe outlines the case reiterated; he guarded it from all possible danger, particularly from the impudent black vortex that stretched out behind him in the distance awaiting the moment to attack him with its pathetic yowling and unpleasant touch . . . It seemed as though this vortex was somehow interested in the black case, because it kept trying to touch it. Longhair frowned. “Shoo,” he said to himself, and the vortex leaped to the side in fright. At rest stops Longhair would extract the plaid rag from the back pocket of his jeans and lovingly rub the metal tube all the while they sat.
Sometimes he caught the gaze of the tall lean woman with the black headscarf over her voluminous hair. He would smile to her as he was accustomed to smiling at nice women, his gaze able to convey total happiness, love until the grave, and generally everything you would ever want . . . But her face, for all its loveliness, seemed to him much too distracted . . .
3
THEY MOUNTED THE NEXT LITTLE HILL. THE JUDEAN stopped, looked for a long time at the earth beneath his feet, then sat down and began to rake the sand with his hands. There in the sand lay a human doll, a gray manikin, crudely fashioned and damaged in places. From its punctured chest hung some sort of dark-blue string. The Judean pressed his finger against the doll’s chest, palpated its neck, placed his fingers on its barely distinguishable eyes, then scattered a handful of sand over the doll’s face. All the others also threw handfuls of sand, then silently crowded together in a cluster.
“Perhaps we should try anyway?” Skinhead asked the Judean.
“A waste of time. There’s no way,” the Judean objected.
“We should at least try. There are a lot of us. Maybe we’ll manage,” Skinhead insisted.
“What do you say, Sister?” He addressed the thin old woman hopefully. Sister, not lifting her cowl, shook her head with regret: “It’s not ready yet, I think.”
The Newling wanted very much to take another look at this human manikin, but the sand had already covered its clumsy figure.
“What do you say?” the Judean unexpectedly addressed the Newling.
“I would dig it out,” she said, having remembered how she herself had lain just that way on the top of a cold hill.
“Are you willing to carry it?” He laughed, but his laughter was friendly and not malicious.
“You ought to be ashamed,” Skinhead reproached him. “Your jokes, as always, are idiotic . . .”
“All right, all right. Here, aim your flashlight and take a look.” The Judean sat down and quickly, almost like a dog, began to dig away the dry sand . . . “But keep in mind, if it doesn’t work, it will hang on you.”