certainty, a sense of being in harmony with herself, that spilled over in all kinds of small
ways. It was as if the rhythm of her breathing had changed, had grown calmer and deeper. She
realized too, perhaps because she no longer felt tired, that she moved more quickly, that she
could walk effortlessly now, at twice her usual speed. Her legs were agile, her feet nimble.
Everything about her was lighter, quicker; her back, shoulders, and limbs all moved more
easily.
It must be all the keep-fit I‘ve been doing, she thought, because for some reason she
had started taking regular exercise. For a few months now she had been spending two hours a
week running at the track. But what she liked most was to go running in the forest, on the
outskirts of the city, feeling the sand crunch beneath her feet, learning to place her feet on the
ground in a different way – in direct, perfect, intimate contact with the earth. She was
intensely aware of her body; she was more alive now, more alert. All her senses were keener
too, she could hear, even from some distance away, infinitesimal sounds which, before, would
have gone unnoticed: a lizard scurrying through the leaves, an invisible mouse making a twig
crack, an acorn falling, a bird landing on a bush; she could sense atmospheric changes long
before they happened: the wind turning, a rise in humidity, an increase in air pressure that
would culminate in rain. And another aspect of all the things to which she had now become
sensitized was the discovery of smells, a whole world of smells; she could find paths and
trails purely by smell; it was strange how she had never before noticed that everything has a
smell: the earth, the bark of trees, plants, leaves, and that every animal can be distinguished
by its own peculiar smell, a whole spectrum of smells that came to her on waves through the
air, and which she could draw together or separate out, sniffing the wind, imperceptibly lifting
her head. She suddenly became very interested in animals and found herself leafing through
encyclopedias, looking at the pictures – the hedgehog‘s pale, soft, tender underbelly; the swift
hare, of uncertain hue, leaping; she pored over the bodies of birds, fascinated, pondering the