The Name
I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under
the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For
how long? Hours. Darkness has fallen.
Suddenly I’m awake and don’t know where I am. Wide-awake,
but it doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that wakens in a
backseat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?
At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel.
Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora Overture) and the
rescuing footsteps come smartly down the overlong stairway. It is I! It is I!
But impossible to forget the fifteen-second struggle in the
hell of oblivion, a few meters from the main road, where the traffic glides
past with its lights on.
(Translated by Robin Fulton)
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