588
PARTISAN REVIEW
year; the rounded surface toward the runway and the control tower was
bare as usual.
The local soothsayer-you always seem to find one in such places–
had predicted at the beginning of the year that the region to the south
of Taxham would experience a summer earthquake, and in fact this had
just occurred, near Kapstadt. And according to the soothsayer, before
summer's end a war would break out to the west of T., a three-day war,
but with never-ending consequences!
HE
GOT UP
EARLY, as usual, "with the first raven cries." His wife was
still asleep, in the other part of the house. They lived together, yet had
been separated for more than a decade, each in his or her own realm;
they always knocked before entering, and even in the shared spaces–
vestibule, cellar, garden-there were invisible and visible partitions, and
where that wasn't possible, as in the kitchen, they occupied the space in
shifts, as indeed they had experienced all of everyday life in shifted time
ever since they'd broken up and in a sense gone their separate ways, so
although it would have been natural earlier on for his wife to get up at
the same time as he did, perhaps now she had to force herself to stay in
bed? And force herself to stay in the house when he went out to the gar–
den? And to go out to the garden when he stayed in the house? And to
go away tomorrow on the solitary holiday she'd planned for herself,
because he wanted to have the house and garden to himself all summer,
as had been the case every year for a long time now?
"No," the pharmacist said. "We don't have any problems with each
other. Only now is our life perfectly peaceful. The arrangement devel–
oped spontaneously, and we don't even notice it, or at most as a kind of
harmony we never enjoyed before, which allows us to share things for
a few minutes, in passing, to have something in common ."
"Yes, in passing," his wife said. "In the wink of an eye. On the
doorstep. Between window and lawn chair. Between treetop and cellar
window."
"What, for instance?" I asked.
The answer, once from her, once from him: "Always in silence. -
When we're both listening to what the neighbors are saying. - Or to peo–
ple walking along the dike on the other side of the fence. - Especially
when a child's crying somewhere. - When an ambulance siren wails. -
When we're in our own rooms at night and see through the window the
emergency flare flashing up in the mountains over on the other side of the
