The Sentinel of the Lake

Translated by Reilly Costigan-Hughes; Published in Ta Adesa

I hate fishing. Not because I feel sorry for the fish. I don’t have anything in common with them.

My father was a fisherman. He sat without stirring for hours, wrapped in a wide, knitted cardigan. The fish didn’t like him. Not one of them, no matter how he tried to entice them, answered his call. I think that no one derived pleasure from that—neither the fish nor him.

Father was a hopeless fisherman. It would have been better had he never taken it up. It would have been better had he been a postman. He would have delivered letters. And people would have been grateful to him.

Yet he sat and sat on the shore of the lake, gazing off into the distance. As if he were the sentinel of an unknown state. What enemies was he attempting to discern way out there? What thoughts roamed in his disheveled head… Perhaps he imagined that he was the sentinel of this lake.

Nothing presaged his desertion. Nobody knows what he thought about for hours on end. Was he thinking at all, or was he contemplating space, emptying his mind like a Tibetan monk? A monk standing guard over Being. But what happened then? Why did he abandon his post? What was the last drop that made the burden of his doubts overflow? Had Being actually appeared as merely the Possible? Merely one possibility among others.

Nothing foretold his death, apart from his own private musings. He drowned, quietly dissolving into the utter silence of the lake. As if he had never existed at all. As if it wasn’t him who, sitting in the hush of evening not too long ago, had hopelessly attempted to catch a fish that had strayed by chance.

It would have been better had he been a postman…

But no. I think he could not have been one. Then who would have sat for hours on end, staring off into nowhere? For someone had to be on watch at the lake.