I died. I have searched long and hard for the right words to describe what happened, and, convinced that none of the usual, familiar terms will do, have finally settled on one associated with what seems the least imprecise of realms: death. I died in the month of June, at night, during one of my first years abroad. This, however, was far less remarkable than my being the only person to know of this death, the only one to have witnessed it. I saw myself in the mountains; with that absurd invariable sense of urgency characteristic of events in which personal considerations for some reason cease to play any part, I found myself having to scale a high cliff with a sheer drop. Here and there little thorn-bushes somehow managed to cut through the brownish-grey rock surface; in places there were even dead tree trunks and roots creeping along rugged perpendicular clefts. Below, where I had begun my ascent, there was a low stone ledge skirting around the cliff, and lower still, in the dark abyss, was the distant muffled rumble of a mountain river. At length I climbed up, carefully groping for cavities in the stone and clinging now to a bush, now to the root of a tree, now to a jagged rock jutting out of the cliff face. I was slowly nearing a small shelf that had been obscured from below, but from which I somehow knew a narrow path led away; I couldn't shake off the oppressive and incomprehensible—like everything else that was going on—presentiment that I was destined nevermore to see it or to follow those narrow bends as it spiralled up unevenly, strewn with pine needles. Later, I remembered that I had sensed someone waiting for me up there, someone's keen, impatient desire to see me. I had at last almost reached the top; with my right hand I grabbed onto a pronounced stone ledge and in another few seconds I might have managed to pull myself up, when suddenly the solid granite crumbled beneath my fingers and I began to fall headlong, my body hitting the cliff face as the latter seemed to be soaring upwards before my eyes. Then came a sharp, almighty jolt that winded me and made the muscles in my arms ache—I was suspended in mid-air, my numb fingers clinging convulsively to the dried-out branch of a dead tree that had once nestled in a horizontal crevice in the rock. Below me was a void. I dangled there, my wide eyes transfixed by the patch of granite in my field of vision, as I sensed the branch steadily yielding beneath my weight. A small transparent lizard flashed for an instant a little above my fingers, and I distinctly saw its head, its flanks rising and falling rapidly, and its deathly gaze, cold and unmoving—a reptile's gaze. Then in one agile, elusive movement it darted upwards, vanishing. Shortly thereafter I heard the intense buzzing of a bumblebee, rising and falling in pitch, although not without a certain insistent melodiousness in some way resembling a vague acoustic memory, which I expected to crystallize at any moment. But the branch gave more and more under my fingers, and the terror penetrated deeper and deeper inside me. Least of all did this terror lend itself to description; what prevailed was an understanding that these were the final moments of my life, that no power on earth could save me, that I was alone, utterly alone, and that beneath me in those abysmal depths, which I could sense with every sinew of my body, death awaited me, and I was powerless against it. Never before had it occurred to me that these feelings—loneliness and terror—could be experienced not only mentally, but literally with every fibre of one's being. And although I was still alive and there was not a single scratch on my body, I was, at a phenomenal speed which nothing could halt or even slow, undergoing such mental agony, such chilling languor and insurmountable anguish. Only at the very last second, or even fraction of a second, did I feel something like sweet sacrilegious exhaustion, curiously inseparable from the languor and anguish. It seemed to me that if I were to combine into a single entity every sensation I had experienced over the course of my life, the collective power of these would still pale in comparison with what I had experienced in these past few minutes. But this was my final thought: there was a snap, the branch broke, and around me the rocks, bushes and ledges began spinning with such unbearable speed, until finally, after an eternity, amid the humid air there came the heavy crunch of my plummeting body hitting the rocks on the riverbank. A moment later I watched helplessly as the image of the sheer cliff and the mountain river disappeared before my eyes; then it was gone, and nothing remained.

Such was my recollection of death, after which I mysteriously continued to survive, if I am to assume that I did in fact remain myself. Prior to this, as with the majority of people, I had often dreamt that I was falling, but each time I had awoken during the fall. Yet as I made this arduous ascent to the top of the cliff, and when I met the cold gaze of the lizard, and when the branch broke beneath my fingers, I was aware that I was not asleep. I have to say that throughout this vivid and frankly banal incident, devoid as it was entirely of any romantic or chimeric nuances, there were two people present—a witness and a victim. This duality, however, was barely noticeable, at times imperceptible. And so, having returned from oblivion, I once again found myself in the world where until now I had led such a notional existence; it was not that the world around me had changed all of a sudden, but rather that I couldn't tell, amid the disorderly and random chaos of memories, unfounded concerns, contradictory emotions, sensations, odours and sights, what it was that demarcated my own existence, what belonged to me and what to others, and what was the illusive significance of that unstable compound of various elements, the absurd amalgam of which was theoretically supposed to constitute my being, imparting to me my name, nationality, date and place of birth, my personal history, which is to say that long sequence of failures, accidents and transformations. I felt as though I were slowly re-emerging, in the very place where I was never supposed to return—having forgotten everything that had taken place before now. But this wasn't amnesia in the literal sense of the word: I had just forgotten irrevocably what one was supposed to consider important, and what insignificant.

I could now sense the strange illusoriness of my own life everywhere—an illusoriness that was many-layered and inescapable, irrespective of whether it had to do with projects, plans or the immediate material conditions of life, all of which had the ability to change entirely over the course of a few days or a few hours. In any case, I had been acquainted with this state for some time; it was one of the things I hadn't forgotten. For me, the world consisted of objects and sensations that I recognized—as if I had experienced them long ago and only now were they coming back to me, like a dream lost in time. This had even been the case when I encountered them probably for the very first time in my life. It seemed as if, amid an enormous, chaotic combination of vastly disparate things, I had blindly sought the path I had trod before, without knowing how or where. Perhaps this is why the majority of events left me entirely indifferent and only a rare few moments containing—or seeming to contain—some sort of coincidence arrested...