Seer

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published in The Globe review and Leere Mitte

Five hundred and one steps separate my house from a well inhabited by a solitary, forgotten cobra. Step thirty-three is where I tend to encounter my health-freak neighbour, sitting on his bench and slurping green gunge concocted for him by his wife. My neighbour has absolutely no nose. Or rather, he has a semblance of nose, well-nigh indiscernible on his doughy face. When taking step one hundred and eighteen I almost bump into a pauper mumbling lines from the Book of Prophets—lines he has learned by heart. I am the possessor of unsophisticated knowledge about the Earth. I know that it is but a minuscule, imperceptible grain of sand amidst an infinite Cosmos, and that I, one of its denizens, scarcely exist at all. At step two hundred and thirty there juts from the ground an immense bald palm tree. But its zenith is home to a family of bats that rustle in the nocturnal silence. Their wordless rustling tells me nothing. Perhaps they are clamouring for help; perhaps they are readying themselves for an attack. It is easy to mistake one for the other. Why does a palm grow here, rather than a baobab or a millennium-old sequoia? I have ceased to wonder at such things. There is no predicting anything that happens. I spent long years in the ravenous pursuit of knowledge—as much as I could amass; I lived in the vain hope that a surfeit of impressions would shed light on some secret link between them. Only lately, with so many decades under my belt, have I come to realise that no such link exists. Or at least not for me. I am fated to understand nothing whatever. And there is nothing I can predict. At step four hundred and twenty there lies a stone which time and again trips up wayfarers who have strayed into these parts. As yet no one has thought to remove it from the road. I do not believe myself entitled to do so either. Step five hundred. Death looms close at hand.