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thing was that the people were the same colors as the landscape.I was the color of the meadow, then that of the sky, then the color of a tree, and finally I was the color of the mountains. And I was always all of the colors. My laughter caused a great commotion in the landscape, I don’t know why. This pretty irregular landscape, you know, it was as animated as any I’ve ever seen. A landscape of people. Because the people took on the colors of the landscape as I did myself, the only way of recognizing them was by their voices, and it was only by my voice that they knew me. Such differentiated voices, you know, incredibly differentiated voices! Suddenly something horrible happened: my head swelled up, to such a degree that the landscape grew darker, and the people broke out in wailing, such terrible wailing as I have never heard. Wailing that was somehow commensurate with the landscape. I can’t say why. Since my head was suddenly so big and heavy, it started rolling down from the hill where I had been standing, down across the white pastures, the black snow—all the seasons here seemed to be simultaneous!—and crushed many of the blue trees and the people. I could hear that. Suddenly I noticed that everything in my wake was dead. Withered, crushed, dead. My big head lay in a dead wasteland. In darkness. It lay in that darkness until I awoke. How is it that my dream took such a horrible turn?” he asked me. The painter took his Pascal out of his left jacket pocket, and stowed it in his right. “It’s uncanny,” he said.
    We went to the distiller’s. The way was along the whole of the forest path and beyond, where I hadn’t yet been. My companion kept on stopping to exclaim: “Look, look at the silence of nature! Look, look!” He hobbled along like the hunchback I once saw in Floridsdorf. Our feet were like ballsof ice. He kept on stopping to say: “Nature’s resigning!” “Look, nature’s silent now!” Yes, it’s silent. “It doesn’t stop, it stops, it doesn’t stop … Do you understand?” Thoughts, he said, went simultaneously up and down. He pointed out animal tracks: “A stag, look! Rabbit, there! Here, a deer! There’s a fox! Aren’t those wolves?” He regularly sank into the snow, and was embarrassed because I had to take the end of his stick and pull him out. “I’m pitiful,” he would say. He listed constellations, said: “Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Orion.” He would disappear and then re-emerge. If I dropped back, he would command me to go on ahead. “Always deeps and surfaces,” he said, “deeps and surfaces.” Tree trunks he described as resembling “famous judges.” He said: “They pass great judgments! Extraordinary judgments!” The distiller’s was a favorite port of call for him. He always claimed he wouldn’t survive another year, “not another winter, and each time I come, I find him.” He described the distiller as the most taciturn man he had ever met. He really didn’t say one word. The painter kept pressing us to walk faster, even though he was responsible for our slow progress. And then the distiller’s house was in front of us. That was where he lived, with his two daughters, as in a cave. “He sits on them, and is afraid they might abandon him, they’re afraid of him. Before long, they won’t be marriageable anymore.” He would keep staring at them, and giving them orders like: “Bacon! Bread! Soup! Milk!” Apart from that, he wouldn’t speak all day. They obey, the way children obey. “If he’s disgusted by his own daughters, he shuts them up in the attic, where they have to spin linen. When they’ve finished, they’re allowed down. Not before that.” The two were handcuffed, “not so as you could see, but unbreakable.”
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    The painter knocked on the door, and there stood a man, long and lean and somehow wooden. “Well,” he said, nothing more. Led us inside. His daughters pulled up a couple of chairs, ran down into the