Chapter Six

He introduced himself as ‘Chevauchet, diplomat.’ The card he handed me, folded in half as if in confidence, gave his position as ‘Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica,’ a state, he promptly offered, virtually unknown because lacking international recognition.

        In my peripheral vision, grown sharper, I thought I saw a silhouette on standby in the rushes. In the old days, in another era, a passeur ferried children to the rocky island over the water.

        ‘As you well know,’ said the Ambassador, interrupting my nascent reverie, ‘there are many sovereign entities to whom status has historically been refused. Our republic is the last of them. It is the most foreign and the most unrecognized.’

        The idea of such a scorned, outlying place resonated with me. Although I had grown up being told that I lived in the world’s very centre, I always suspected its true navel to be elsewhere.

        ‘You might not have any official and diplomatic relations with it now. But records show that most people still visit Onirica regularly and compulsively, if increasingly on the sly, keeping quiet about your travels, which, fortunately for you, require neither visas nor passports.

        ‘You might think this would be bad for business. But for Onirica, a little outside trade with the so-called real world goes a long way. And its economy does not rely on foreign tourism. Better yet, what you leave behind and what treasures or memorabilia you bring back from your trip are yours alone. Somehow this always feels like smuggling, doesn’t it? When there is really nothing to declare!

        ‘My mission is twofold,’ he resumed after a brief pause. ‘To have our special statehood recognized at the highest level and as soon as possible. Then, having achieved this, and in the longer term, to work with all nations, all peoples, toward the final dissolution of the state form.’

        His overture intrigued me not a little. Not only had I personally never travelled to the country he spoke of; I could not recall ever having heard of the place. And when I admitted my ignorance as to which part of the world Onirica was in, his reply was as enigmatic as the one he gave to my first question.

Chapter Seven

‘Too close,’ he again said with emphasis, more to himself this time. And, taking his hand out of his coat pocket, he cast into the lake something dark whose nature or even shape I could not make out but which, judging by the sound it had made, was a small stone or a large pebble. I made nothing of this inexplicable act, content rather in having provoked something in my bench-fellow. As starlings in flight, my thoughts swerved from him to the metaphors I knew for disappearance, remembering the expression to vanish into thin air having, in another language, its equivalent in Ia stone being lost in water, and how water closes around a sinking object like an eyelid. So Onirica lay a stone’s throw away, did it? Not even across the pond? ‘Then let it stay there,’ I murmured spitefully to myself. ‘Let it rot at the bottom of a lake.’

        Casting about for something to say in return, I soon appreciated the eloquence of his wordless gesture. Though I had neither the courage nor the interest to launch into more questions, the idea of responding in kind suddenly seemed appealing. I waited for an appropriate rejoinder to come to me, wallowing as I did so in another thought, this one about the ephemeral and somewhat unreal character of conversations. The few words I had exchanged with Ambassador Chevauchet were already fading from my memory. All that kept me from pronouncing them imaginary, besides his stubborn presence next to me and the cloud of his breath, was their warmth. They seemed significant upon being spoken but carried less weight than the stone providing punctuation and brought less clarity than the snow, which fell only to be swept away by his hand. Next to this, my confirmed inertia transformed me, in my own mind, into a fossil, so that I started when his tongue again took up the thread I had wrongly supposed broken.

        ‘Onirica is a beautiful place, and you seem right at home in it.’