will have spread everywhere. The Indians won’t be exploited and oppressed anymore then. No one will have to sacrifice himself. Only of course there’ll still be rattlesnakes. And scorpions getting into your shoes, but he knows what to do about those: you shake out your shoes first thing in the morning—it’s a simple trick. Granny told him about it.
It’s Sunday. Alexander is going down the street with his parents. The street is Thälmannstrasse. The trees have brightly colored leaves. The air smells of smoke. People are raking up the leaves into little heaps and burning them. You can throw sweet chestnuts into the embers, and after a while they go pop.
They’re walking down the middle of the street, hand in hand: Mama on the left, Papa on the right, and Alexander is explaining how he sees things.
“I’ll get big, then you two will get little again. And then you’ll get big again and I’ll get little again. And so on.”
“No,” says his father. “It’s not exactly like that. We’ll get rather smaller as time goes on, but we won’t get any younger. We’ll get older, and one day we’ll die.”
“Does everyone die?”
“Yes, Sasha.”
“Will I die, too?”
“Yes, you will die someday, too, but that time is still far, far, far away—so infinitely far away that you don’t have to think about it yet.”
Another of those amazing discoveries.
Infinity: over there, where everything was lost in smoke, where the trees were gradually getting smaller, that’s where it must be. That’s where they’re going, he and his parents. The cool air caressed his cheeks. They walked and walked, with such alarmingly light steps, yet almost without moving from the spot.
If he was smiling, it was out of embarrassment, because his ideas of getting big and getting small had turned out to be silly.
2001
The airport looked like an overnight hostel for the homeless. Sleeping bags, people standing in line at the check-in counter. The announcement boards were teeming with canceled flights. All the passengers seemed to be reading the same newspaper, with a picture on the front page of an airplane flying into a skyscraper. Or was it a cruise missile? A rocket?
The flight to Mexico was one of those delayed.
Alexander bought a travel guide (one of the famous Backpackers’ Guide series, tourism lite), a German-Spanish dictionary, an inflatable neck support pillow, and—for the sake of atmosphere—a Spanish newspaper. One word in it he could understand even without a dictionary: terrorista.
Then, at long last, he did reach the check-in. On the way to boarding he went through the security ballet performed by the flight attendants. Those young women smiled unwaveringly, if you could call it smiling. He tried to imagine their faces at the moment of a crash.
A thought as they took off: there were still quite a number of alternative ways for him to lose his life. Oddly enough, that was reassuring.
He settled into his seat as well as he could, wedged between an overweight man sporting gold chains and a wan-faced mother trying to keep her cola-swigging child under control. He didn’t read, at first didn’t try to sleep. Followed the course of the plane on the little screen in front of his nose, as the aircraft gained height and the temperature outside dropped.
He accepted everything he was offered: coffee, headphones, sleep mask. Ate everything served for lunch, even the mysterious dessert in its plastic pot.
After two or three hours the film began. Some run-of-the-mill action movie. People hit and kicked each other to the accompaniment of sounds that he could hear even from his neighbours’ headphones. Nothing particular, really, except that suddenly he couldn’t stand it. Why did they show something like this? Human beings hurting one another?
He put on the sleep mask and his headphones, and ran through the audio programs.
Handel. One of those famous arias, restrained, dangerously melancholy. He listened
It’s Sunday. Alexander is going down the street with his parents. The street is Thälmannstrasse. The trees have brightly colored leaves. The air smells of smoke. People are raking up the leaves into little heaps and burning them. You can throw sweet chestnuts into the embers, and after a while they go pop.
They’re walking down the middle of the street, hand in hand: Mama on the left, Papa on the right, and Alexander is explaining how he sees things.
“I’ll get big, then you two will get little again. And then you’ll get big again and I’ll get little again. And so on.”
“No,” says his father. “It’s not exactly like that. We’ll get rather smaller as time goes on, but we won’t get any younger. We’ll get older, and one day we’ll die.”
“Does everyone die?”
“Yes, Sasha.”
“Will I die, too?”
“Yes, you will die someday, too, but that time is still far, far, far away—so infinitely far away that you don’t have to think about it yet.”
Another of those amazing discoveries.
Infinity: over there, where everything was lost in smoke, where the trees were gradually getting smaller, that’s where it must be. That’s where they’re going, he and his parents. The cool air caressed his cheeks. They walked and walked, with such alarmingly light steps, yet almost without moving from the spot.
If he was smiling, it was out of embarrassment, because his ideas of getting big and getting small had turned out to be silly.
2001
The airport looked like an overnight hostel for the homeless. Sleeping bags, people standing in line at the check-in counter. The announcement boards were teeming with canceled flights. All the passengers seemed to be reading the same newspaper, with a picture on the front page of an airplane flying into a skyscraper. Or was it a cruise missile? A rocket?
The flight to Mexico was one of those delayed.
Alexander bought a travel guide (one of the famous Backpackers’ Guide series, tourism lite), a German-Spanish dictionary, an inflatable neck support pillow, and—for the sake of atmosphere—a Spanish newspaper. One word in it he could understand even without a dictionary: terrorista.
Then, at long last, he did reach the check-in. On the way to boarding he went through the security ballet performed by the flight attendants. Those young women smiled unwaveringly, if you could call it smiling. He tried to imagine their faces at the moment of a crash.
A thought as they took off: there were still quite a number of alternative ways for him to lose his life. Oddly enough, that was reassuring.
He settled into his seat as well as he could, wedged between an overweight man sporting gold chains and a wan-faced mother trying to keep her cola-swigging child under control. He didn’t read, at first didn’t try to sleep. Followed the course of the plane on the little screen in front of his nose, as the aircraft gained height and the temperature outside dropped.
He accepted everything he was offered: coffee, headphones, sleep mask. Ate everything served for lunch, even the mysterious dessert in its plastic pot.
After two or three hours the film began. Some run-of-the-mill action movie. People hit and kicked each other to the accompaniment of sounds that he could hear even from his neighbours’ headphones. Nothing particular, really, except that suddenly he couldn’t stand it. Why did they show something like this? Human beings hurting one another?
He put on the sleep mask and his headphones, and ran through the audio programs.
Handel. One of those famous arias, restrained, dangerously melancholy. He listened
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