Scene 11

Aral had presumably hidden the shekel-note with his message somewhere in the Wailing Wall – and so Maille was certainly the only person on the earth who, instead of leaving a message at this spot, picked up one. As he trailed his hand over the Wall, he experienced something peculiarly characteristic – it seemed to him as though his entire mission flashed by in a few seconds before his mind's eye: the tinkle of his telephone in his garden in Senpuav, the rescue of the Senegalese President in Dakar, the hunger on the Red Square in Moskow, the battle on the Great Wall in Beijing, the swim in the forest lake on the Schaeren-island of Möja, the Kimchi restaurant in the market in Gwangju, the finding of the watch in the Sharjah desert, the boatride through Bangkok, the hunt in the temples of Angkor Wat, the cherryblossom in the gardens of Tokyo, the dream at the foot of the Ayers Rock in the heart of Australia, the brass-band on the terrace in Syrian Homs, the journey in the rubber dinghy over the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego, the ice of the Antarctic and last, but not least, the sweetness of the passion fruits in Kinshasa.

The Wall appeared to be a vast collection of connection points with the past as well as overall in the world – whereby the time lag of the emotion that touching these stones provoked was far more important than the space difference. He remembered a line from Anatole A. Sonavi which proclaimed that travel was, undoubtedly, not a matter of space but a matter of time.

It was clear that a wall on which millions of people have projected their entire religious energy for hundreds of years would not leave even a man like Hektor Maille unmoved. Certain things manage to affect you even if you are convinced that this wall, too, is built of just a few fat stones.

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