554
PAlUISAN REVIEW
Still floating away from that flour mill, and who could say when it would
reach its furthest point and start its return journey? It might take another
ten years. Or seventy. Or a hundred and seven. Where was that blue shutter
when my mother told me about it, more than twenty years after she threw
it in? Where exactly were its remains, its crumbled fragments, its rotting
debris? Surely there must have been something left then. And there must
be something left even now, the evening I am writing this, some seventy
years since the sununer morning when my mother tossed it into the stream.
The day the shutter finally returns to the point where my mother threw
it in the water, beside the flour mill, it will not be seen by our eyes, for they
will no longer exist, but by other eyes. The eyes of a man or woman who
will be unable even to imagine that the object floating on the stream carne
from here and has now returned. What a pity, Mother said: if anyone sees
my sign floating past the mill again, if they even notice it, how will they
know that it is a sign, a proof that everything goes around in circles? In fact,
it is possible that the person who happens to be there on the very day and
at the very moment when the shutter returns may also decide to make it a
sign, to test whether or not the stream is circular. But by the time it comes
full circle again that new person too will no longer exist. Another stranger
will stand there and again won't have any idea. Hence the urge to tell.
