There was an old poor town that stood on top of a hill in the middle of a vast plain. A plain, a dusty road, a deep ravine behind the town—quays and crows in the sky. An old but meaningless town. There lived two kinds of people—one within the other, one separated from the other, which later counted itself as the ordinary and normal humanity. But the ordinary in their part of the town—which was the larger of the two—and the other separated in theirs, the confined quarter up against the town’s northern wall—they saw the same constellations.

For both, those same stars composed a Hunter.

Two gray peoples, one within the other. One turned itself towards death with hands ready to strangle—the other waited, with naked faces and unbuttoned shirts, to die. One was an extinguisher, another was what would be extinguished. One lived as if blind, ate and drank—another was born to see into darkness. One could sit down to eat and drink—another had nothing to eat or drink.

This gray people. The roots of their being were embedded in non-being. Their faces betrayed a revelation: their bodies were the borderland. Their bodies were distended into columns. They hallucinated from hunger—light that lingered motionless on the walls, gestalts of the dead that disappeared behind a corner, animal faces that emerged from deep within the dark but vanished when one tried to fix one’s gaze on them.  Their children were born with the night vision of a cat.

One of them was a boy—hopelessly hungry. By some miracle he became a baker’s apprentice and got to feast on bread scraps.

For the baker’s apprentice, life was such that, in the middle of the night while the entire town was asleep around him, he would stir from his slumber and fire up the baker’s oven. He heaved himself out of sleep and lit a candle and got dressed:  he caught a glimpse of his own face in the part of the mirror touched by candlelight—gray, a lump of dough, a nothing—before he blew out the candle and bolted out the door. Behind him his parents and siblings slept. Half asleep he stumbled forward through the silent dark sleeping human-saturated town. The night wind pushed through the streets: a foreign damp gust of air from outside, from away, the smell of clay, the smell of wet stones, perhaps the whisper of the wellspring far below. Had a rock fallen down through the ravine? The night world, another world: the reflecting world of nightfall.

And once he had lit up the oven. The hours tumbled on like a landslide. Once and a while he tossed in fresh wood. The baker’s face in the mightily illuminated glow from the oven’s mouth, his arms in the tray—the nocturnal human.

The apprentice sat on the edge of the oven, whether awake or asleep. But awake or asleep he always saw the town before him, the entire town, the separated and the other—under every roof lay slumbering wriggled in under the covers, entwined across and over each other in the most bizarre positions. As if uprooted—as if felled. As if dropped. Those gray unformed faces. They could be both newly born or newly dead.

The baker was someone who had power. What happened in the dough where they in all silence lifted themselves up under their covers?

And one night when the boy woke up, he noticed that the house was empty. But out on the street, the pattering sounds of many running feet scurrying past, shivering light scurrying past, voices.

But when he came out onto the street, everything was extinguished and dark. There was only a peculiar voice dispersing in the darkness, one after another people passed by him running in the dark up towards the mighty northern wall.

Already in the stairwell leading up inside the wall—he heard familiar voices, his father’s and his uncle’s—he noticed that it wasn’t yet as dark as he’d thought when he first went out onto the street. Shadows of light fluttered and sunk into the darkness. And the farther up they went—an excited mass of people thronging up from below—the more clearly the patches of reddish light fell from the embrasures, as if cut out from the wall, onto the anxious tense faces as they hastily surged upwards, a sharply upward-flowing river of bodies and excited voices up the narrow steep staircase and out onto the terrace behind the parapet where during the day one had a view of the area that stretched for miles—yes, where in clear weather you had the feeling that it was the whole land, not to say the whole world, that here lay beneath you.

And now in the middle of the night, one could also see everything.

Against the herd of humans pressing out of the tower door and spilling out onto the terrace, in the middle of the winter night, the air struck heavy and hot as if out of the oven. The entire plain, and all the way to the forests in the northeast, every single tree, every wheel track, every rock, appeared illuminated in a copper-billowing unearthly large light. It stretched from horizon to horizon without changing or weakening: invariably as deep and hot and clear throughout. They stood with open mouths—aimless—against the battlements. But no one leaned out of the now entirely immobile darkly dressed flock of people who were already sweating in their heavy winter jackets.

Yes, it was as if they were going to wither down like leaves.

Then one of the uncles pointed with a long trembling index finger to the south –

          – yes, it was true, there was something to be seen. It was where the neighboring town had been. It was not there anymore.

It was unspeakable. It was as if they, in unison, were falling and falling – a patient whirlwind filled their clothes and pulled them with it over the battlement, swirling slowly they fell and fell like leaves out over the plain. The deep silence surrounding. How it deepened and deepened. The entire plain and every rock and wheel track in the copper-glowing consummate light. If it was something that had already been or something that would come: or if it was how it actually is.