life.
I was still looking for myself among the sculptures, but I didn’t see my own face: there was only a tall pillar, as if hewn from stone, but I couldn’t see its top through the window. I remembered, and I wondered if it might have a smile at the top. But I knew that I wouldn’t find a smile – I’d have to be at peace with myself first.
The figures were now slowly beginning to dissolve before my eyes, and I was surprised to find myself in the grip of nostalgia. A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn’t totally extinct in a person. My father, in a dying flash of consciousness, suffered from the thought that a strange woman could be more wicked than he’d thought possible.
Long ago, in my childhood, he had convinced me that paradise was a human invention. And yet he yearned for it, he yearned for human contact and he yearned for eternity. He wanted to cut himself adrift from the earth and to rise to the sky, to get to the edge of the mystery. Did he realise what he was turning down?
Coming along the opposite pavement was the uniformed patrol. The foppish one, however, was accompanied this time by a policeman I hadn’t seen before. I was prepared to pass them without acknowledging them when the fop suddenly changed direction and made straight for me.
I stiffened, as always. Why had my presence in the world annoyed them this time?
The fop carelessly raised his hand to his cap. ‘Day off today?’ he asked.
‘Sort of,’ I answered evasively.
‘What about the one in the high-water trousers then?’
I said I’d heard the captain had been taken to psychiatry.
‘What else could we do, we didn’t really want to,’ the fop explained. ‘We said to him, stop this nonsense, grandad, in the middle of the night. But instead of pissing off he lit that bottle of his. Would have killed him if we hadn’t nabbed him, his fuse was only one metre!’ he added with professional outrage. ‘Anyway, they’ll let him go, everybody’ll testify that he’s screwy, that he walked about in those ridiculous trousers even in the snow – I ask you!’ He turned to his companion, but he had walked on out of earshot. ‘But d’you know that he put on long trousers that evening, real baggy ones, perfect pantaloons, and a tie as well!’ The fop shrugged his shoulders in amazement and raised two fingers to his cap. ‘He was touched all right,’ he said, tapping his forehead, and walked away.
Sitting behind the desk at the office really was the little idiot, and he didn’t know the youngster’s address, or more correctly refused to know it – he might have had to get up from his chair and look up some file. A smile spread over his fleshy lips – the self-assured smile of a man who had been given power. Power over those who swept up garbage, and hence also over the garbage itself, and hence over the world of things. He explained something to me in his jerkish language but I didn’t understand, we lacked an interpreter.
No matter, I thought to myself in an upsurge of spite, I’ll find the youngster without him! I got on a tram which took me to the Little Quarter.
The spot which Mrs Venus had described was well known to me. It was on the other side of the place at the windows of which I used to look from the little attic I’d visited so often.
I’d frequently had to walk round the building but I’d never taken any notice of it. The walls were thick and the staircase dark. I thought I sniffed the familiar smell of gas.
I was lucky at least that the youngster’s lady friend had a split shift and was therefore at home at this hour. She asked me into the hall. I didn’t know if she was on her own, all other sounds were drowned by a noisy military band, and from somewhere came the rattle of a washing machine.
‘But he’s not here,’ she informed me when I’d explained who I was looking for. She was a bulky, powerful woman of mature years. I couldn’t picture her in the youngster’s embrace. ‘And he won’t come again,’ she declared.
I said I’d got him the drug he’d been waiting for. Perhaps I could leave it with her for when he dropped in.
‘But he won’t be dropping in,’ she said with the finality one uses in talking about the dead. ‘I told him not to come again.’
I asked her where I could find him.
‘I’ve no idea where he could be, he never said where he came from.’ Suddenly she remembered: ‘Didn’t he play somewhere? Maybe those musicians of his could tell you.’
I thanked her. I’d got to the door when she added: ‘He was such a poor little thing, if you ever met him. He’d sit down and just look. Couldn’t even eat anything proper, and as for drink only juice. Once he came in from somewhere, all wet through, I made him a grog, he didn’t tell me he wasn’t allowed to, and he nearly died on me.’
The youngster had gone and the waters had closed over him. I didn’t know what to do with his medicine. Maybe the woman who used to sit in the office might help, might at least remember the name of the street or the town he’d come from. But I was in no mood to search for her. I began to suspect that by the time I tracked down the youngster the medicine might have become superfluous.
I left the house. It was midday, the low sun lit up the side of the palace, on the window ledge the pigeons were warming themselves as in the past. They were probably different pigeons, but who can tell them apart?
It suddenly occurred to me that I had nowhere to go, no one to see. Except that I had to arrange for a funeral oration. They’d be having their midday break at the Academy, and what then, what afterwards? Here I was with a medicine I had no use for, all round me people were hurrying whom I had no use for either. My net was suddenly swinging, a few threads snapped, and below me I saw darkness.
My daughter told me about her dream of the end of the world. She was walking through a landscape with her husband, it seemed a vast expanse, bordered only by the horizon. It was clear day. Suddenly the light began to turn yellow, until it was sulphurous, and at that moment the left part of the horizon began to move towards the right part, and as the two parts approached one another the light: faded, it was getting dark, and the earth started trembling. The two of them lay down side by side, closed their eyes and began to pray: Shema Yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai ekhad. When they opened their eyes again she saw above her the entire universe and in it our sun with its planets, including our earth and the moon. Whoever had seen this, she realised, could no longer be alive. She also realised that no life was left on earth. The horizons collided, the land masses burst and the waters flooded everything. Just then she noticed that among the planets a large fiery-red sharp-edged gambler’s die was orbiting, and also revolving, so she could watch the white dots on its sides, and she wondered who had cast the die, whether it had been the humans themselves or the Eternal Holy One, blessed be his name!
I walked round the palace and entered the little square. I walked over the familiar uneven pavement and pushed the heavy door open. In the hallway I was surrounded by a familiar smell. I climbed the wooden stairs. Waving on a line were nappies, the nappies of some new child. Anyway, I never even saw the child, I had no eyes for her. But the roof of the monastery rose up as before, in so far as it is possible to say that anything can be the same at two different moments in time, and I climbed on towards the attic. The door was adorned on the outside by a poster which used to be there, but the smell of oil and gas still came through all the cracks. The name by the bell-push meant nothing to me.
I didn’t ring. There was no point in it. Even if I’d been able to ring a bell into the past, and she really appeared at the door, what would I say to her? I didn’t have a single sentence prepared, not a single new sentence.
In front of the building stood a small group of tourists, gazing with appropriate interest at the wall of the palace. What can they see there, what can they feel? These walls do not speak to them, they don’t remind them of a single breath, of a single cry or a shed tear. After all, I had something that they didn’t.
Slowly I drifted along the little streets, roughly by the same route that the author I am writing about at the moment would take to the Castle.
What used to fascinate me most about literature at one time was that fantasy knows no frontiers, that it is as infinite as the universe into which we may fall. I used to think that this was what fascinated and attracted me in Kafka. For him a human would be transformed into an animal and an animal into a human, dream seemed to be reality for him and, simultaneously, reality was a dream. From his books there spoke a mystery which excited me.
Later I was to understand that there is nothing more mysterious, nothing more fantastic, than life itself. Whoever exalts himself above it, whoever isn’t content with horrors already reached and passions already experienced, must sooner or later reveal himself as a false diver who, out of fear of what he might discover in the
