couple of obdurate travelers who were stuffing their sleepy faces. My eyes were searching for signs of the new life when a sign on the wall warned: âDo not tamper with the light,â and another announced: âThere is a charge for using the facilities,â and yet a third proclaimed in stern and deliberate lettering: âNo alcoholic beverages allowed.â I had an impression that dark crows were taking wing across the windows of my mind; then I seemed to have a presentiment that my death would follow from this point of departure. I wish I could describe to you, Angel, the grief in that restaurant slowly closing in upon itself, but I was so terribly tired; I heard the whine of the centuries resonating in my ears like the sleepless woods; I loved the turbulent spirit gurgling in the engines of dauntless buses that each took off to another clime; I heard Janan call out to me from a place far away where she was searching for the access point that would take her to the threshold. Yet I was silent, a passive spectator who was willing, due to a technical difficulty, to watch a film without the sound because my head had dropped on the table and I had fallen asleep.
I slept on I donât know for how long. When I woke up I was still in the same restaurant but in the presence of a different clientele, yet I felt I was now capable of communicating to the angel the point of departure for the great journey that would take me to unique experiences. Across from me were three young men who were boisterously settling their money and bus fare accounts. A thoroughly forlorn old man had placed his coat and his plastic bag on the table next to his soup bowl in which he was stirring and smelling his own grievous life; and a waiter read the paper, yawning in the dimly lit area where the tables were lined up. Next to me the frosted glass wall extended all the way from the ceiling down to the dirty floor tiles, behind it was the dark blue night, and in the dark were the revving bus engines that invited me to another realm.
I boarded one randomly at an indeterminate hour. It wasnât yet morning but the day broke as we progressed, the sun rose, and my eyes were filled with light and sleep. Then, it seems, I dozed off.
I got on buses, I got off buses; I loitered in bus terminals only to board more buses, sleeping in my seat, turning my days into nights, embarking and disembarking in small towns, traveling for days in the dark, and I said to myself: the young traveler was so determined to find the unknown realm, he let himself be transported without respite on roads that would take him to the threshold.
4
It was a cold winterâs night, O Angel, and I had been traveling for days; I was on one of the several buses I took each day, not knowing where I departed from, where I was destined, or how fast I was going. I was sitting on the tired and noisy bus, somewhere back on the right-hand side in the darkened interior, half asleep and half awake, more dreaming than sleeping, and closer to the ghosts in the darkness outside than to my own dreams. I could see through my half-closed eyelids a single puny tree on the interminable steppe lit by the cross-eyed headlights on high beam, the boulder with a cologne ad painted on it, the power poles, the threatening headlights of the trucks that we encountered sporadically, but I was also watching the movie on the video screen placed high above the driverâs seat. Whenever the female lead spoke, the screen took on a purplish hue like Jananâs winter coat, and when the fast-talking, impetuous male actor came back with his rejoinder, the screen turned that dull blue which had at some time or other penetrated somehow into my very marrow. As it often happens, I was thinking of you, and remembering you, when that purple and that dull blue came together in the same frame; and yet, alas, they did not kiss.
It was at that very moment, in the third week of my journey as I was watching the
I slept on I donât know for how long. When I woke up I was still in the same restaurant but in the presence of a different clientele, yet I felt I was now capable of communicating to the angel the point of departure for the great journey that would take me to unique experiences. Across from me were three young men who were boisterously settling their money and bus fare accounts. A thoroughly forlorn old man had placed his coat and his plastic bag on the table next to his soup bowl in which he was stirring and smelling his own grievous life; and a waiter read the paper, yawning in the dimly lit area where the tables were lined up. Next to me the frosted glass wall extended all the way from the ceiling down to the dirty floor tiles, behind it was the dark blue night, and in the dark were the revving bus engines that invited me to another realm.
I boarded one randomly at an indeterminate hour. It wasnât yet morning but the day broke as we progressed, the sun rose, and my eyes were filled with light and sleep. Then, it seems, I dozed off.
I got on buses, I got off buses; I loitered in bus terminals only to board more buses, sleeping in my seat, turning my days into nights, embarking and disembarking in small towns, traveling for days in the dark, and I said to myself: the young traveler was so determined to find the unknown realm, he let himself be transported without respite on roads that would take him to the threshold.
4
It was a cold winterâs night, O Angel, and I had been traveling for days; I was on one of the several buses I took each day, not knowing where I departed from, where I was destined, or how fast I was going. I was sitting on the tired and noisy bus, somewhere back on the right-hand side in the darkened interior, half asleep and half awake, more dreaming than sleeping, and closer to the ghosts in the darkness outside than to my own dreams. I could see through my half-closed eyelids a single puny tree on the interminable steppe lit by the cross-eyed headlights on high beam, the boulder with a cologne ad painted on it, the power poles, the threatening headlights of the trucks that we encountered sporadically, but I was also watching the movie on the video screen placed high above the driverâs seat. Whenever the female lead spoke, the screen took on a purplish hue like Jananâs winter coat, and when the fast-talking, impetuous male actor came back with his rejoinder, the screen turned that dull blue which had at some time or other penetrated somehow into my very marrow. As it often happens, I was thinking of you, and remembering you, when that purple and that dull blue came together in the same frame; and yet, alas, they did not kiss.
It was at that very moment, in the third week of my journey as I was watching the
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