He noticed that he had an odd compulsion to find out the price of everything. He was actually relieved to see the prices of newly arrived goods marked on the window of a grocery store. On a fruit display in front of the store a price tag had fallen over. He set it right. The movement was enough to bring somebody out to ask if he wanted to buy something. At another store a rocking chair had been covered by a long dress. A tag with a pin stuck through it lay on the chair next to the dress. Bloch was long undecided whether the price was for the chair or for the dress; one or the other must not be for sale. He stood so long in front of them that, again, somebody came out and questioned him. He questioned back. He was told that the price tag with the pin must have fallen off the dress; it was clear, wasn’t it, that the tag couldn’t have anything to do with the chair; naturally, that was private property. He had just wanted to ask, said Bloch, moving on. The other person called after him to tell him where he could buy that kind of rocking chair. In the café Bloch asked the price of the juke box. It didn’t belong to him, said the owner, he just leased it. That’s not what he meant, Bloch answered, he just wanted to know the price. Not until the owner had told him the price was Bloch satisfied. But he wasn’t sure, the owner said. Bloch now began to ask about other things in the café that the owner had to know the prices of because they were his. The owner then talked about the public swimming pool, which had cost much more than the original estimate. “How much more?” Bloch asked. The owner didn’t know. Bloch became impatient. “And what was the estimate?” asked Bloch. Again the owner didn’t have the answer. Anyway, last spring a corpse had been found in one of the changing booths; it must have been lying there all winter. The head was stuck in a plastic shopping bag. The dead man had been a gypsy. Some gypsies had settled in this region; they’d built themselves little huts at the edge of the woods with the reparation money they’d received for being confined in the concentration camps. “It’s supposed to be very clean inside,” the owner said. The policemen who had questioned the inhabitants during their search for the missing boy had been surprised by the freshly scrubbed floors and the general neatness of the rooms everywhere. But it was just that neatness, the owner went on, that actually fed their suspicions, for the gypsies certainly wouldn’t have scrubbed the floors without good reason. Bloch didn’t let up and asked whether the reparations had been enough to cover the costs of building the huts. The owner couldn’t say what the reparations had amounted to. “Building materials and labor were still cheap in those days,” the owner said. Curiously, Bloch turned over the sales slip that was stuck to the bottom of the beer glass. “Is this worth anything?” he asked, reaching into his pocket and setting a stone on the table. Without picking up the stone, the owner answered that you could find stones like that at every step around here. Bloch said nothing. Then the owner picked up the stone, let it roll around the hollow of his hand, and set it back on the table. Finished! Bloch promptly put the stone away.

  In the doorway he met the two girls from the barbershop. He invited them to go with him to the other café. The second girl said that the juke box there didn’t have any records. Bloch asked what she meant. She told him that the records in the juke box were no good. Bloch went ahead and they followed after him. They ordered something to drink and unwrapped their sandwiches. Bloch leaned forward and talked with them. They showed him their I.D. cards. When he touched the plastic covers, his hands immediately began to sweat. They asked him if he was a soldier. The second one had a date that night with a traveling salesman; but they’d make it a foursome because there was nothing to talk about when there were only two of you. “When there are four of you, somebody will say something, then somebody else. You can tell each other jokes.” Bloch did not know what to answer. In the next room a baby was crawling on the floor. A dog was bounding around the child and licking its face. The telephone on the counter rang; as long as it was ringing, Bloch stopped listening to the conversation. Soldiers mostly didn’t have any money, one of the girls said. Bloch did not answer. When he looked at their hands, they explained that their fingernails were so black because of the hairsetting lotion. “It doesn’t help to polish them, the rims always stay black.” Bloch looked up. “We buy all our dresses ready-made.” “We do each other’s hair.” “In the summer it’s usually getting light by the time we finally get home.” “I prefer the slow dances.” “On the trip home we don’t joke around as much any more, then we forget about talking.” She took everything too seriously, the first girl said. Yesterday on the way to the train station she had even looked in the orchard for the missing schoolboy. Instead of handing back their I.D. cards, Bloch just put them down on the table, as if it hadn’t been right for him to look at them. He watched the dampness of his fingerprints evaporate from the plastic. When they asked him what he did, he told them that he had been a soccer goalie. He explained that goalkeepers could keep on playing longer than fielders. “Zamora was already quite old,” said Bloch. In answer, they talked about the soccer players they had known personally. When there was a game in their town, they stood behind the visiting team’s goal and heckled the goalie to make him nervous. Most goalies were bowlegged.

  Bloch noticed that each time he mentioned something and talked about it, the two of them countered with a story about their own experiences with the same or a similar thing or with a story they had heard about it. For instance, if Bloch talked about the ribs he had broken while playing, they told him that a few days ago one of the workers at the sawmill had fallen off a lumber pile and broken his ribs; and if Bloch then mentioned that his lips had had to be stitched more than once, they answered by talking about a fight on TV in which a boxer’s eyebrows had been split open; and when Bloch told how once he had slammed into a goalpost during a lunge and split his tongue, they immediately replied that the schoolboy also had a cleft tongue.

  Besides, they talked about things and especially about people he couldn’t possibly know as though he did know them, was one of their group. Maria had hit Otto over the head with her alligator bag. Uncle had come down in the cellar, chased Alfred into the yard, and beaten the Italian kitchen maid with a birch rod. Edward had let her out at the intersection, so that she had to walk the rest of the way in the middle of the night; she had to go through the Child Murderer’s Forest, so that Walter and Karl wouldn’t see her on the Foreigners’ Path, and she’d finally taken off the dancing slippers Herr Friedrich had given her. Bloch, on the other hand, explained, whenever he mentioned a name, whom he was talking about. Even when he mentioned an object, he used a description to identify it.

  When the name Victor came up, Bloch added, “a friend of mine,” and when he talked about an indirect free kick, he not only described what an indirect free kick was but explained, while the girls waited for the story to go on, the general rules about free kicks. When he mentioned a corner kick that had been awarded by a referee, he even felt he owed them the explanation that he was not talking about the corner of a room. The longer he talked, the less natural what he said seemed to Bloch. Gradually it began to seem that every word needed an explanation. He had to watch himself so that he didn’t get stuck in the middle of a sentence. A couple of times when he thought out a sentence even while he said it, he made a slip of the tongue; when what the girls were saying ended exactly as he thought it would, he couldn’t answer at first. As long as they had gone on with this familiar talk, he had also forgotten the surroundings more and more; he had even stopped noticing the child and the dog in the next room; but when he began to hesitate and did not know how to go on and finally searched for sentences he might still say, the surroundings became conspicuous again, and he noticed details everywhere. Finally he asked whether Alfred was her boyfriend; whether the birch rod was always kept on top of the wardrobe; whether Herr Friedrich was a traveling salesman; and whether perhaps the Foreigners’ Path was called that because it led past a settlement of foreigners. They answered readily; and gradually, instead of bleached hair with dark roots, instead of the single pin at the neck, instead of a black-rimmed fingernail, instead of the single pimple on the shaved eyebrow, instead of the split lining of the empty café chair, Bloch once again became aware of contours, movements, voices, exclamations, and figures all together. And with a single sure rapid movement he also caught the purse that had suddenly slipped off the table. The first girl offered him a bite of her sandwich, and when she held it toward him he bit into it as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

  Outside, he heard that the schoolchildren had been given the day off so that they could all look for the boy. But all they found were a couple of things that, except for a broken pocket mirror, had nothing to do with the missing boy. The plastic cover of the mirror had identified it as the property of the mute. Even though the area where the mirror was discovered had been carefully searched, no other clues were found. The policeman who was telling Bloch all this added that the whereabouts of one of the gypsies had remained unknown since the day of the disappearance. Bloch was surprised that the policeman bothered to stop across the street to shout all this information over to him. He called back to ask if the public pool had been searched yet. The policeman answered that the pool was locked; nobody could get in there, not even a gypsy.

  Outside town, Bloch noticed that the cornfields had been almost completely trampled down, so that yellow pumpkin blossoms were visible between the bent stalks; in the middle of the cornfield, always in the shade, the pumpkins had only now begun to blossom. Broken corncobs, partially peeled and gnawed by the schoolchildren, were scattered all over the street; the black silk that had been torn off the cobs lay next to them. Even in town Bloch had watched the children throwing balls of the black fibers at each other while they waited for the bus. The cornsilk was so wet that every time Bloch stepped on it, it squished as though he were walking across marshy ground. He almost fell over a weasel that had been run over; its tongue had been driven quite far out of its mouth. Bloch stopped and touched the long slim tongue, black with blood, with the tip of his shoe; it was hard and rigid. He shoved the weasel to the curb with his foot and walked on.

  At the bridge he left the street and walked along the brook in the direction of the border. Gradually, the brook seemed to become deeper; anyway, the water flowed more and more slowly. The hazelnut bushes on both sides hung so far over the brook that the surface was barely visible. Quite far away, a scythe was swishing as it mowed. The slower the water flowed, the muddier it seemed to become. Approaching a bend, the brook stopped flowing altogether, and the water became completely opaque. From far away there was the sound of a tractor clattering as though it had nothing to do with any of this. Black bunches of overripe blackberries hung in the thicket. Tiny oil flecks floated on the still surface of the water.

  Bubbles could be seen rising from the bottom of the water every so often. The tips of the hazelnut bushes hung into the brook. Now there was no outside sound to distract attention. The bubbles had scarcely reached the surface when they disappeared again. Something leaped out so quickly that you couldn’t tell if it had been a fish.

  When after a while Bloch moved suddenly, a gurgling sound ran through the water. He stepped onto a footbridge that led across the brook and, motionless, looked down at the water. The water was so still that the tops of the leaves floating on it stayed completely dry.

  Water bugs were dashing back and forth, and above them one could see, without lifting one’s head, a swarm of gnats. At one spot the water rippled ever so slightly. There was another splash as a fish leaped out of the water. At the edge, you could see one toad sitting on top of another. A clump of earth came loose from the shore, and there was another bubbling under the water. The minute events on the water’s surface seemed so important that when they recurred they could be seen and remembered simultaneously. And the leaves moved so slowly on the water that you felt like watching them without blinking, until your eyes hurt, for fear that you might mistake the movement of your eyelids for the movement of the leaves. Not even the branches almost dipping into the muddy water were reflected in it.

  Outside his field of vision something began to bother Bloch, who was staring fixedly at the water. He blinked as if it was his eyes’ fault but did not look around. Gradually it came into his field of vision. For a while he saw it without really taking it in; his whole consciousness seemed to be a blind spot. Then, as when in a movie comedy somebody casually opens a crate and goes right on talking, then does a double-take and rushes back to the crate, he saw below him in the water the corpse of a child.

  He had then gone back to the street. Along the curve with the last houses before the border a policeman on a motorbike came toward him. Bloch had already seen him in the mirror that stood beside the curve. Then he really appeared, sitting up straight on his bike, wearing white gloves, one hand on the handlebars, the other on his stomach; the tires were spattered with mud. The policeman’s face revealed nothing. The longer Bloch looked after the figure of the policeman on the bike, the more it seemed to him that he was slowly looking up from a newspaper and through a window out into the open: the policeman moved farther and farther away and mattered less and less to him. At the same time, it struck Bloch that what he saw while looking after the policeman looked for a moment like a simile for something else. The policeman disappeared from the picture, and Bloch’s attention grew completely superficial. In the tavern by the border, where he went next, he found no one at first, though the door to the barroom was open.

  He stood there for a while, then opened the door again and closed it carefully from the inside. He sat down at a table in the corner and passed the time by pushing the little balls used for keeping score in card games back and forth. Finally he shuffled the deck of cards that had been stuck between the rows of balls and played by himself. He became obsessed with playing; a card fell under the table. He bent down and saw the landlady’s little girl squatting under another table, between the chairs that had been set all around it. Bloch straightened up and went on playing; the cards were so worn that each single card seemed swollen to him. He looked into the room of the neighbor’s house, where the trestle table was now empty; the casement windows stood wide open. Children were shouting on the street outside, and the girl under the table quickly pushed away the chairs and ran out.

  The waitress came in from the yard. As if she were answering his sitting there, she said the landlady had gone to the castle to have the lease renewed. The waitress had been followed by a young man dragging two crates of beer bottles, one in each hand; even so, his mouth was not closed. Bloch spoke to him, but the waitress said he shouldn’t, the guy couldn’t talk when he was pulling such heavy loads. The young man, who, it seemed, was slightly feebleminded, had stacked the crates behind the bar. The waitress said to him: “Is he pouring the ashes on the bed again instead of into the brook? Has he stopped jumping the goats? Has he started cutting open pumpkins again and smearing the stuff all over his face?” She stood next to the door, holding a beer bottle, but he did not answer. When she showed him the bottle, he came toward her. She gave him the bottle and let him out. A cat dashed in, leaped at a fly in the air, and gulped down the fly at once. The waitress had closed the door. While the door had been open, Bloch had heard the phone ringing in the customs shed next door.

  Following close behind the young man, Bloch then went up to the castle. He walked slowly because he did not want to catch up with him; he watched him as he pointed excitedly up into a pear tree and heard him say, “Swarm of bees,” and at first believed that he saw a swarm of bees hanging there, until he realized, after looking at the other trees, that it was just that the trunks had thickened at some points. He saw the young man hurl the beer bottle up into the tree, as if to prove that it was bees that he saw. The dregs of the beer sprayed against the trunk, the bottle fell onto a heap of rotting pears in the grass; flies and wasps immediately swarmed up out of the pears. While Bloch walked alongside the young man, he heard him talking about the “bathing nut” he’d seen swimming in the brook yesterday; his fingers had been all shriveled up, and there was a big bubble of foam in front of his mouth. Bloch asked him if he himself knew how to swim. He saw the young man force his mouth open wide and nod emphatically, but then he heard him say, “No.” Bloch walked ahead and could hear that he was still talking but did not look back again.

  Outside the castle, he knocked on the window of the gatekeeper’s cottage. He went up so close to the pane that he could see inside. There was a tub full of plums on the table. The gatekeeper, who was lying on the sofa, had just wakened; he made signs that Bloch did not know how to answer. He nodded. The gatekeeper came out with a key and opened the gate but immediately turned around again and walked ahead. “A gatekeeper with a key!” thought Bloch; again it seemed as if he should be seeing all this only in a figurative sense. He realized that the gatekeeper planned to show him through the building. He decided to clear up the confusion but, even though the gatekeeper did not say much, he never had the chance. There were fishheads nailed all over the entrance door. Bloch had started to explain, but he must have missed the right moment again. They were inside already.

  In the library the gatekeeper read to him from the estate books how many shares of the harvest the peasants used to have to turn over to the lord of the manor as rent. Bloch had no chance to interrupt him then, because the gatekeeper was just translating a Latin entry dealing with an insubordinate peasant. “‘He had to depart from the estate,’” the gatekeeper read, “‘and some time later he was discovered in the forest, hanging by his feet from a branch, his head in an anthill.’” The estate book was so thick that the gatekeeper had to use both hands to shut it. Bloch asked if the house was inhabited. The gatekeeper answered that visitors were not allowed into the private quarters. Bloch heard a clicking sound, but it was just the gatekeeper locking the estate book back up. “‘The darkness in the fir forests,’” the gatekeeper recited from memory, “‘had caused him to take leave of his senses.’” Outside the window there was a sound like a heavy apple coming loose from a branch. But nothing hit the ground. Bloch looked out the window and saw the estate owner’s son in the garden carrying a long pole; at the tip of the pole hung a sack with metal prongs that he used to yank apples off the tree and into the sack, while the landlady stood on the grass below with her apron spread out.

 

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