O glide of eye and sizzle of tongue! And Rathenau found me a job in German Samoa. And he was shot, like a mad dog, because, as his assassin Oberleutnant Kern explained, he was the finest man of our age, combining all that is most valuable of thought, honor, and spirit, and I couldn’t bear it. I told this to the doctor here, in an unguarded moment, and he asked me why I was obsessed by such violence. Cruelty, I replied, is sentimentality carried to its logical conclusion.
— Ah! he said.
The psychiatric ah.
— We can never talk, I said, for all my ideas are symptoms for you to diagnose. Your science is suspicion dressed in a tacky dignity.
— Herr Walser, Herr Walser! You promised me you would not be hostile.
They are interested in nothing, these doctors. They walk in their sleep, looking with the curiosity of cows at those of us who are awake even in our dreams.
A moth slept flat on my wall. I watched its feelers, speckled feathers as remote from my world as I from the stars, sheepsilver wings eyed with apricot and flecked with tin. It had dashed at the bulb of my lamp. Its fury was like a banker’s after money. And now it was weary and utterly still. Did it dream? The Englander Haldane had written of its enzymes without killing a single moth, and wore bedbugs in a celluloid pod on his leg to drink his blood.
It is in Das Evangelium the brother of rust and thieves. Surely its sleep is like that of fish, an alert sloth.
Now it has fluttered onto the map above my desk, an old woodcut map from a book, the river Euphrates running up through it in a dark fullness of rich veins, the Garden of Eden below, the stout mountains of Armenia sprinkled along the top, a great tower and swallow-tailed pennon to mark Babylon, trees as formal as pine cones at the terrestrial paradise, with Adam and Eve as naked as light bulbs except for Akkadian skirts of tobacco sheaves, Greek and Hebrew names among Latin like flowers among leaves, a lion to the northwest sitting in Armenia and bigger than a mountain, a beast rich in horns and hair stepping west from the Caspian Sea, a route pompous with Alexander’s cities, brick walls and fig groves of Scripture, Caiphat up from the Gulf of Persia, which Sindbad gazed upon and where bdellium is to be had, Bahrim Insula a pearl fishery, Eden with its four rivers green and as straight as canals, a grove of cypress that was felled to build the Ark, purple Mousal, Babylon a city of brick and a hundred temples to gods with wings like aeroplanes, with Picassoid eyes and Leonardonian beards, Ur of the Chaldees with its porched and gabled house of Abraham, Noah’s city Chome Thamanon, Omar’s Island, with mosque, the Naarda of Ptolemy where is a famous school of the Jews, Ararat’s cone, Colchis with its fleece of gold, Phasis the country of pheasants, Cappadocia, Assyria, Damascus under an umbrella of date palms.
And then I saw that the moth was inside the light bulb.
BECAUSE, I said when asked why I am here, the world was in defiance of its own laws.
At the foot of Herr Rufzeichen’s grand stairs stood a cast-iron Siegfried braced with a boar-sticker and buckler outsinging a surge of Wagnerian wind that tilted his horns, butted his beard, and froze his knees. Did he have to be dusted? Thoroughly, thoroughly. Beyond him, in steep gloom, rose the stairs in a curve of crimson and oak.
On a stepladder, flipping the face of iron Siegfried with a turkey duster, I, remembering that if you stare through a window into a snowfall the room will rise and the snow stand still, as when down front close to a theater curtain, the audience sinks grandly, to trumpets, discovering below a red Tannhäuser kneeling beside an embroidered Venus singing Zu viel, Zu viel, O dass ich nun erwachte! saw Count Rufzeichen gliding from the library with his nose in a book and Claribel the cook backing toward him, the mock orange in her arms. The precision with which they would collide was inevitable and perverse.
— Zu viel! I cried.
Rammed from behind, Claribel screamed, heaved the mock orange upward, and sat.
I tottered, embraced Siegfried, and lost the ladder under my dancing toes.
The mock orange fell upside down on Count Rufzeichen, filling his lap with earth and roots. It was as if an allegory of Horticulture, with Donor, had fallen out of a picture onto the museum floor.
The ladder completed its fall across Rufzeichen’s shins, inciting him into a jumping-jack flip over Claribel, transferring the mock orange’s empty bucket from his head to hers, which made her screams now sound hollow, as if from the depths of a well.
GLIDING OVER the firelit carpet with velvet steps, placing the tureen before my lord, who touches his napkin to his moustache, I can savor again the condition of my well-being, along with the aroma of leek and broth that steams up when I remove the lid with a gesture worthy of the dancers of Bali, namely that Rufzeichen has put me back together, suave foot, accurate hand, impeccable diction.
Genius is time.
There was, I knew, and remembered with fondness, a professor at the Sorbonne who electrocuted himself while lecturing, or electrocuted himself so nearly that he found that he was suddenly in a corner just under the ceiling, light as a Chagall bridegroom full of champagne. And yet he could see himself still lecturing below, calmly, giving no indication that an ox’s weight of lightning had crashed through his body.
Then he realized that his feet, shod and gaitered, were on opposite sills. His torso was in
