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By Root 588 0

into the night, the city was empty. Only children were out under the balconies of the small squares, playing breathlessly, noisily, and nonsensically. They put small balloons to their lips and filled them with air, in order to transform themselves into red and crowing cockerels, colored autumnal masks, fantastic and absurd. It seemed that thus swollen and crowing, they would begin to float in the air in long colored chains and fly over,the city like migrating birds—fantastic flotillas of tissue paper and autumn weather. Or else they pushed one another on small clattering carts, which played tunes with their little rattling wheels, axles and shafts. Filled with their happy cries the carts rolled down the street to the broadly spreading, evening-yellow river where they disintegrated into a jumble of disks, pegs, and sticks.

And while the children's games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city's flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads. Their faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight. Then a black, rotting bark began to cover everything in large putrid scabs of darkness. And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in that silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together into the enormous silvery infinite. Then suddenly night came—a vast night, growing vaster from the pressure of great gusts of wind. In its multiple labyrinths nests of brightness were hewn: the shops—large colored lanterns—filled with goods and the bustle of customers. Through the bright glass of these lanterns the noisy and strangely ceremonial rites of autumn shopping could be observed.

The great, undulating autumn night, with the shadows rising in it and the winds broadening it, hid in its folds pockets of brightness, the motley wares of street traders —chocolates, biscuits, exotic sweets. Their kiosks and barrows, made from empty boxes, papered with advertisements, full of soap, of gay trash, of gilded nothings, of tinfoil, trumpets, wafers and colored mints, were stations of lightheartedness, outposts of gaiety, scattered on the hangings of the enormous, labyrinthine, wind-shaken night.

The dense crowd sailed in darkness, in loud confusion, with the shuffle of a thousand feet, in the chatter of a thousand mouths—a disorderly, entangled migration proceeding along the arteries of the autumnal city. Thus flowed that river, full of noise, of dark looks, of sly winks, intersected by conversations, chopped up by laughter, an enormous babel of gossip, tumult, and chatter.

It seemed as if a mob of dry poppy-heads, scattering their seeds—rattleheads—was on the march.

My father, his cheeks flushed, his eyes shining, walked up and down his festively lit shop; excited, listening intently.

Through the glass panes of the shop window and of the door, the distant hubbub of the city, the drone of wandering crowds could be heard. Above the stillness of the shop, an oil lamp hung from the high ceiling, expelling the shadows from all the remote nooks and crannies. The empty floor cracked in the silence and added up in the light, crosswise and lengthwise, its shining parquet squares. The large tiles of this chessboard talked to each other in tiny dry crackles, and answered here and there with a louder knock. The pieces of cloth lay quiet and still in their felty fluffiness and exchanged