How can you be so sure?
Because I know how long it takes me to think up a sentence before it more or less satisfies me.
That’s because you’re tense, she explains to me. You try to master everything by your intellect and your strength. You don’t know how to submit to life.
She doesn’t force herself to do anything. What she needs most is a sense that she is free. If she doesn’t feel like work she’ll go out with a girlfriend and they’ll get drunk, or else she comes here, she sits down, she doesn’t want anything, she isn’t driven anywhere by her thoughts or her imagination, she just gazes as if she were gazing at the clear sky, into pure water, into emptiness. She realises that nothing need happen, and that’s also all right by her. Or else some shape suddenly appears before her, a face, a likeness, maybe just a coloured blotch which may take on form or else dissolve. She can’t tell where they come from, these shapes don’t seem to come from within her, she feels she’s only a mediator, the executor of some higher will. She then executes whatever she has to, and she feels good while doing it. She doesn’t reflect on what it will turn into. That, she feels, is not her concern but the concern of whoever put that vision into her. If I could write like that, without torturing myself beforehand about the outcome, without seeing some mission before me, I’d also feel good.
But I can’t work the way you do, I’m different.
You don’t know what you’re like, she says with assurance.
And who does?
I do, because I love you.
So what am I like?
You’re more passionate than rational.
I don’t know whether I am passionate. I know that she is. Her passion will destroy us both one day.
Next time I found her in tears amidst fragments of clay. The stand was empty.
What happened?
Nothing. What should have happened? Better leave again, I’m out of sorts today!
Has anybody hurt you?
Everybody’s hurting me, but that’s not the point.
So what is?
How could I ask? Didn’t I understand, couldn’t I see? All we were doing was pointless, nothing but a self- important and vain playing at art. Nothing but desperate caricaturing and endless repetition of what had already been repeated a thousand times. And if she’d now and then managed to catch something more, to realise some higher clue, who’d detect it, who’d notice it? Why did she have to choose this particular occupation, such a useless, joyless and exhausting drudgery? She hated all art! She didn’t want to exhibit anywhere, she didn’t want to show anyone her fumblings. There was no sense in it!
What about Barlach’s angel?
Yes, Barlach’s angel – but they’d had it removed, hadn’t they? He survived only because angels are immortal. She’s laughing through her tears. If you’d sit for me I’d make you a pair of wings and maybe you’d be immortal too.
I’ll sit for you.
Better lie down with me!
We embrace and she forgets all her sorrow. She looks forward to our love-making on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Three days later the organisation, or rather agency whose task it is to organise, in other words authorise, exhibitions abroad informed her that it would not handle her exhibition.
I want to know why she’s been refused but she only shrugs.
I suspect that it might have been because of me.
It’s possible, darling, they’re envious of me because I have you, they know that nobody loves them so much.
However, we composed a letter of protest to the authorities; she’ll probably not send it off. She then went out to see her fortune-teller friend to discover what the cards had to say about the chances of her appeal. Told that they weren’t too good, she decided to hold an exhibition in Kutna Hora instead of Geneva.
We were still walking in the direction where I expected the depot to be. The trees all round were more and more heavily festooned with tattered pieces of plastic. At the base of the miserable little tree-trunks dirty crumpled bags were tumbling about, and whenever there was a gust of wind the yellowed pages of some jerkish newspaper rose up from the ground like monstrous emaciated birds and weakly flapped their mutilated wings.
Franz Kafka became a sacrificial victim by his own decision. It does not seem as if those around him were as anxious to sacrifice him as he was himself. Time and again he recorded the state of mind experienced by the victim. With few exceptions the victim resists, and even thinks up elaborate means of self-defence, but his tragic end is unalterable. In this respect Kafka certainly anticipated the fate of the Jews in our age of upheaval. His youngest sister met her end in a gas chamber. That is where he would probably have met his end too if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die young.
Jewish authors, such as Kafka’s contemporary Werfel, or later Bellow and Heller, keep returning to the theme of the sacrificial lamb with an obsession that is possibly subconscious and possibly prophetic. The theme of the victim of sacrifice and the person staging sacrifices, of an increasingly random victim and of the victimiser prepared to drag to the altar of his god any number of human beings, if not indeed the whole of mankind, is increasingly becoming the theme of the present-day world, of a mankind that once believed in an earthly paradise and in the beneficial effect of revolutions in leading it there.
At last we emerged from the forest. Before us, behind a high wire fence, we saw a mountain with many ridges, crevices and humps. Its slopes glistened here and there as the fragments of plastic reflected the sun’s rays. Along its long crest a yellow bulldozer was moving, its scoop pushing a multicoloured mass before it. From one side a road led up to the mountain. Access, however, was barred by a red-and-white striped barrier. Just then an orange dumpster came hurtling out of the forest, an invisible guard raised the barrier, and the vehicle entered the enclosure. As it slowly climbed up the slope of the artificial mountain some fat crows rose up from both sides of the path, beating their massive wings. On the crest the garbage truck stopped, its body bright in the sunlight. Then it began to evacuate its entrails. No sooner had it begun to move off than a group of little figures rushed out from some invisible hiding place. I counted thirteen of them – if Daria had been here she’d have said an unlucky number! – men, women and children. The grown-ups had rakes in their hands, and pitchforks and poles fitted with hooks, or else they were pushing discarded prams. They all pounced on the fresh rubbish and began to dig around in it as if in a race; they flung items from one pile onto another, a few items they picked out and put aside for themselves, and others, which were evidently still useful for something or other, i.e. for sale, they flung straight into handcarts or prams.
I was reminded of the woman whose things I’d moved. Disease was eating up her soul, she believed in Armageddon, and she took delight in things she’d saved from the dustbins. Here she’d be in her element. She wouldn’t have sold any of the items she found here, she’d have piled them into a heap which would have grown ever higher and wider. She’d have laboured till she dropped, not until nightfall would she have sat down by the base of her own mountain and anxiously rested in its shelter for a while. Like Sisyphus, that woman would never have completed her work, not only because the supply of new garbage will never stop, but also because an inner emptiness cannot be filled even with all the objects in the world.
We soon became aware that nothing that was happening before us was happening without a plan, and that all the running around and exploratory digging was directed by a massive bald-headed fatty in a black suit. Unlike all the rest, he never once bent down to pick up anything, but merely strolled about as their supervisor. And just then his name came to me and I surprised Lida with the information that, to the best of my knowledge, that fellow was called Demeter, and that he’d had to pay a good deal of money for the right to mine the treasures in this mountain, though I didn’t know to whom. Now and again the searchers might dig up a pewter plate, an antique coffee grinder, a discarded television set, or a banknote thrown out by mistake.
When the Kampuchean victim-makers, known as the Khmer Rouge, occupied Phnom Penh they broke into the abandoned bank buildings, burst open the safes, carried out armfuls of banknotes and flung them out of the windows – not only rials but also American dollars, Swiss francs and Japanese yen, the banknotes of every country in the world sailed out of the windows, but none of those who were still alive in the city dared pick any of them up. The coloured pieces of printed paper were gently scattered by the wind. They rose into the air alongside scraps of
