The Black Envelope

~ ~ ~

MRS. VETURIA GAFTON WAS not very audible, or visible: it was not easy for her to be seen by neighbor Vancea. But she existed without a doubt, in everything, all the time.

The absence of the tiny lady became like a permanent feature, coded and mysterious. But when she finally appeared, she seemed to contradict the magic through which she had taken on flesh and blood. An absolutely concrete and perfectly ordinary apparition: Mrs. Doctor Gafton. Not only did the banality of her presence not contradict, it actually heightened the insidious power of her absence. That power suffused the vibrating silence and the sound rhythms of domestic messages; it imperceptibly radiated through the whole household, strangely and constantly migrating — there was no way of confronting it. A vast, faint pulsation — until it suddenly burst forth in the gurgling of the tap or the shaking of the window in a storm, in the leavened madness of long summer afternoons of blazing heat, in the languor of red wine in glasses, in the diaphanous invasion of dandelion fluff spinning sweet whirlpools of nothingness in front of a suddenly opening door, amid an unheard sighing of hysterical walls.

Morning movements of the Gafton couple in the bathroom? It did not necessarily mean that Dominic had actually heard a brooch dropping in the washbasin or the xylophone of slippers striking the tiled floor. Was it a sound that clearly belonged to the realm of the immaterial? Not at all! Just the diffident steps of a skinny pensioner, the rustle of towels being changed, grunts, comb and brush and shaving implements, and the clinking of a razor against the mirror. Which did not mean that his spouse was not beside him or had not been or would not be.

His wife communicated her existence in a quite unconventional manner. Dominic picked it up in the long fizzling of the curtains, the buzzing of a fly newly stirred, the shiver of a sudden breeze — they all seemed to lay bare her indistinct breathing in every corner, from where a stimulus or subterfuge warning would issue cyclically, like a heavy blinking of the eyelashes of nothingness … Perhaps indeed, on that sunny Tuesday morning, Mrs. Veturia really had asked as usual: “Did the professor shut the door?” Or: “I think I heard the key. Has the professor left?” Or anyway, something similar.

But the words had remained in the swollen air of silence. They had not managed to become sounds: they kept gathering energy, deferred in potentialities. Until Thursday, until Friday …

Yes, only on Friday morning, when Dominic returned to pick up his umbrella. It had started to rain in large thick drops, and he came back from the door to take his umbrella. Only on Friday morning, when he turned the key in the lock and came back to take his umbrella — only then were heard the grinding words that had started up a few days before.

The customary words of Mrs. Veturia reached Mr. Dominic only on Friday, in the barely felt interval between the two turnings of the key. The lock stammered, as if tired of so much complicity: “He’s left. I think the professor has left.”

The words persisted for a long time, multiplying through mutual attraction in new associations. “Did he take the letter? I think the professor has taken the letter.” If you wanted to at all costs, you could even make out such couplets. A murmur. Far away, close by, hard to tell.

Judging by his distressed state, the professor was already in possession of the letter on Friday. He thought he could make out the whining of the rusty lock; he read the gray shadows of the wet sky, where silences became stuck and expectation unraveled. He picked up the fixed, phosphorescent gaze of the mouth of the waste pipe at the corner of the building, the refuge of the street’s roaming tomcat. All that was left of the feline bundle, screwed like a cork into the bend of sheet metal, was its electric eyes: the gleam of a searching melancholy, a greenish blood-red pulsation in which neighbor Veturia was concentrated for a brief moment of contact. Simulacra all around, heads of cardboard and ashes! Ambiguous intersection of the moment’s relays, poisoned boredom, deferred hysteria, masks— the masks ready to deliver you up, apparently through inattention, to the fangs of a meat grinder. At the professor’s desk and in the pulpit, in barracks and offices and alcoves and residences and stadiums, on rostrums and at desks and in the cells of evasion, the masks were lying in wait: to find out, to pass on, to play the compulsory game.

But fear not, Brother Dominic: what more could be discovered about you than is known anyway? The bulky file is not much thicker nor so catastrophic, compared with so many like it that appear more innocent. The spies are themselves spied upon: suspicion and fear generate themselves, but distort their emission at the same time.

The complications seemed much smaller in the case of the Gafton family. If you know all there is to know about those living around you, the fear somehow diminishes, doesn’t it? Shy Matei, the dreamer of universal harmony, sacrificing himself in the interests of social hygiene, writing petitions to set the administration on the right path and historical studies for the younger generation, which ought to be thirsty for truth if it were not thirsty for more pressing daily needs. The vessel called Veturia, a plump and smiling woman who looked as if she had always been gray-haired, limping gently on her left side, had grown used to forgetting times of old by giving lessons in French English German piano and embroidery. Resigned to her modest job as laboratory assistant, she had used it with discreet tenacity to find out everything happening around her, so that in the end people began to call her doctor. And not mockingly, but with the highest regard.

What more could Mr. and Mrs. Gafton have discovered that they did not already know about scatterbrained Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov, whom they called Tolea, when their spare room became vacant and they took him in as a lodger? Nothing. They knew for certain the minutest details of his daily existence, the tenant said smilingly to himself in front of the receptionist’s desk on which he had — who knows when? — thrown the cosmopolitan envelope that he pretended not to notice.

His colleague Gina watched closely the professor’s impassive face and the panel holding the keys to the rooms of sin, a panel to which he turned from time to time, as if he had not even seen the spectacular object on the table. She would have loved to guess whether the rogue lost in reverie was actually thinking about the message in that important envelope decorated with so many stamps and postage marks, or whether he had no idea of what he had imprudently left in sight of all and sundry. Reverie, strategy, drowsiness — who knows? The confusion of a rheumatic morning, the tomcat screwed into the waste pipe muttering confused warnings, the key turning rusty words in the rusty lock … His watch moved on with short ticks, like the scratching of a needle. Eleven, exactly eleven, four five six seconds, the seconds perish, look, eighteen sec seconds, scattered to the winds. Look, time scattered to the winds, thirty, thirty-one and — two and — nine, scat-tered, finished, the minute has melted away.

Eleven o’clock and two three four minutes. At this time which has now passed, at this time, eleven o’clock and six minutes and one three four fourteen seconds, Mr. Matei will have finished his first period in the line for daily bread. Was he already at the library? Perhaps immersed there in the last world war, slowly advancing with a determination to avoid the haste and subjectivity of which he had been guilty in his years of combative youth.

And his goodly spouse? Probably ready to receive her first students of the day. Since her retirement, virtuous Veturia had found a profitable way of hibernating. Former colleagues had given her the necessary contacts to teach Arab students some summary notions of grammar, the usual patterns of conversation, the language of medicine. A kind of recompense for the years when she had served, in silence and resignation, people obsessed with their career and money and promotion up the ladder. On leaving, she had offered the collective the chance to square the account in an acceptable manner. They had been pleasantly surprised at her initiative. They thought she was at peace with herself, dozing between lingerie drawer and jars of pickles. They had used her ruthlessly for so many years, more and more forgetting any sense of guilt. Good old Veturia: it was she, too, who now offered them the occasion for belated generosity, a kind of rapid forgiveness of sin. A brief and convenient gesture which disturbed no one and was of benefit to all. It was like permitting a retired janitor to see his lodge again, even, if he wished, to be on guard there on Sundays when the institution was closed and the real janitors had a day off. They had immediately agreed: how could they refuse shy Auntie Veturia?

So the doctors at the university sent their retired colleague a flow of Arab students who were having difficulties with the Romanian language or with some of their examination subjects. They advised her to be careful, of course — advice which sounded like a joke in the mouth of finaglers whose affairs she knew only too well. Caution was necessary, as overcautious Veturia knew best of all.

She had decided not to accept any money for the lessons, but even so, she felt the dangers of a lightning popularity which, as events would prove, was likely to be inevitable anyway. Patient and old-fashioned, reviving for newcomers the image of some anachronistic aunt from their homeland over the seas, prepared to overlook impudence and laziness and boorish behavior, always carefully dressed, with hair, hands, and round face scrupulously looked after, the plump yet still vigorous old lady had rapidly won both renown and a sizable clientele. The name Veturia, mangled in the most amazing phonetic inventions, was quickly popular among the Arab students. Nervous, suddenly breaking out of a kind of gentle torpor, they eventually came under the control of that calm domestic power. Initially taken aback, exasperated and mocking, they became ever more attentive, submissive, ready to confess to that imperturbably functioning household oracle — in loose, fragmentary avowals that displayed an abrupt intimacy. At such moments Auntie found things to do in the sideboard, limping carelessly between chairs, as if she would never have guessed that a student was still lingering in the room. But after a few weeks the hostess would herself steer the discussion back to that confused subject about which no one thought she had the least idea — and this in the middle of a lesson on anatomy or verb conjugations.

Oh, how many postcards and letters of thanks did Mrs. Veturia receive from the four corners of the earth!

She did not accept money, nor did she reject kindnesses. Convertible trinkets, exchange values facilitating survival. More than once in childhood Veturia had witnessed the philanthropic exercises of exalted society ladies. And having reached retirement along a path of humiliating accidents, the so-called madam doctor was not at all immune from those reveries of high society which, stimulated by a still alert memory, themselves activated a chain of recollections now that everything had turned upside down and grown ugly, as accepted criteria had become inverted and feelings brutalized. To be offered philanthropically, from a dirty pocket, a crumpled cigarette which (to cap it all) you actually need; or a wretched tablet, wrapped like babies’ sweets in colored cellophane paper, without which you really cannot last out the day! She had been habitually polite with the arrogant salespersons in stores where nothing was to be found, or indulgent with a lazy and churlish typist, or impassive in the face of cursing bus drivers ready at any moment to leave you in the street, or diffident in the presence of a snotty little boy using his father’s card, or even his own, to obtain special privileges. So she had accepted the sly philanthropy, caricatured in hurried and condescending gestures on the part of future doctors from distant and unfamiliar regions. Their transit-lounge trophies — cigarettes, transistor radios, drinks, stockings, cassettes, chocolate — were only a cosmopolitan confirmation of the inevitable: of the fiddling practiced throughout the world; the outrage that disfigured the present and deserved only the skeptical smile of indifference. Surrogates and perishable mass-produced goods from the planetary fair! How will Mrs. Veturia put the cigarette in her mouth … As for the drinks, she got dizzy even from the rum mixed drop by drop into the cream filling of her cakes. But she could not have denied the pleasure of arranging the cartons, the bottles, the spectacular jars. Her eyes shone guiltily, as if those colored objects were a shield against everyday banality. Fortified, ennobled — as if they made her a real person again, defended by such puerile enrichment; as happens to children when they receive gifts beyond the reach of their social class and cannot contain their wonderment.

Veturia could not have identified the moment when some student threw a gleaming carton of cigarettes or a potbellied jar of coffee onto the table. Even after she remained alone in the room, she managed not to notice the object for a long time. Again and again she passed near the temptation — until she was no longer able to hold off the poison blindness doom of a base pleasure that she did not wish to know but could not struggle against. Then the inevitable shiver passed down her: the devilry took over and she threw it into the back of the cupboard.

Several days went by. The door of the weapons safe opened wide, grinning, creaking, swinging, pinging, and sneering. The culprit blinked with excitement, paralyzed in front of the toys. An idiotic smile twisted her already creased mouth, her lips parched by impatience. She went right inside the guilty cupboard for a thorough classification and arrangement: the shelf with the Kents, the shelf with the olive oil, the cosmetics, the chocolate and coffee and chewing gum, the bottles, jars, and boxes. She did not need to hear steps behind her to feel that her Matei was already standing in the door.

He would watch her, of course, silently, and damp with perspiration. Veturia continued with her business of selecting and ordering. Then, finally drawing herself up straight, she would turn to her husband — who would be standing dazed in the same position — and offer him the most serene face, with smooth forehead and a smile carefully planted on her round and placid cheeks. “We really need all these little knickknacks, Matei. Oh dear, they do come in so handy! Otherwise who would glance at us anymore, old as we are! If you give Old Nick a pack of Kents, you’ve got him on your side for a good year. And Jezebel, too — a bit of face powder will solve a lot of things. She even brings me detergent, as you see.”

Each time the words rushed over Matei with the same effrontery, so that the petition he had just come to read to his wife shook in his hands. As if his text had suddenly been superseded by an oral version arguing the exact opposite. What of the lofty principles that he repeated every day in his rhetorical battles? “We really need all these little knickknacks, Matei. We’re old people: we haven’t any children. What if we fell ill — heaven forbid? At our age those great humanists of yours wouldn’t even let us through the hospital doors. You’ve seen how things work at that whore of a chemist’s. And what if our shower broke down? We’d still end up going to Stringpuller Satan. With one packet of Kents we’ve got ourselves some peace of mind. Nowadays that foreign trash can help with any of our troubles.”

Dear Matei rolled up the sleeves of his pajama jacket. No, he was no longer a hero, no longer the young man defiantly taking — he of all people — the ostracized name of his wife. The name of a family of reactionaries and Fascists and exploiters! He, the one eternally persecuted, had refused the vengeful persecution of others and even assumed that blacklisted name. And he had paid dearly for that rush of pride. No, he was no longer the foolhardy man of old, even if he still kept his ideals alive with all his failing strength. So he was determined, absolutely determined, to take his old-fashioned ideals and withdraw into his workroom.

After an hour or so, when she had finished her labor of classification, Veturia appeared in Mr. Gafton’s study. She bent over the sheets of paper lying scattered on the table. “After a brief period in which the quality of matches improved, reasons for dissatisfaction have again appeared. The phosphorus-tipped sticks are acceptable, but the strip on the box which makes it possible to light them is too thin and tears at the first strike. I have written before about this problem. It is astonishing how little time the effects of the criticism lasted. The match factory should take a more responsible attitude to the quality problem and respect the undertakings it has made.” A few blank lines followed, and then the draft of another letter, apparently more important, since the opening had several times been crossed out and started again. “We refer to the report in your paper in March of this year. Let us, then, recapitulate the facts about the ill treatment of the woman who looked after animals in her apartment.”

It was hard to tell whether he had or had not heard her come in. Dominic could imagine at such moments that Matei would not move from his position in front of the window, moments no different from those in which they met for a chat, each preserving his own strategy.

Dominic gave no sign of knowing what happened on the pedagogical mornings of Veturia the invisible. And Mr. Gafton resumed his narratives of the Second World War, without making any allusion to the tragedy of the Vancea family or to his own revolutionary conversion in those days of wrath, even though they were implicit in the subject. “There’d be no point in asking me to focus on everyday life. What was a betrothal, or a funeral, like in those hard times? How did the authoritarian language of distrust permeate ordinary speech? It’s hard for me to remember such details. But the events I’m concerned with played a decisive role, and this can be imagined in the existence of the man in the street. So let us recall those few days before the invasion of Poland.”

Given such familiar notice, you could not for long continue soaring through the clouds. You were forced to cast a look at the terrestrial wilderness; to observe, somewhere amid the bustle of drunken ants, a copper needle with a rusty head; to recognize the figure of a man — our freckled, skinny friend Matei himself — swaying in time with his own sentences, just a few steps from the apathetic listener.

“You know the scenario. Two-stage operations. An internal reform was proposed to Austria, then it was claimed that she did not respect it. The Sudeten Germans placed demands on Czechoslovakia; then a decision was made to support the Slovaks, supposedly oppressed by the Czechs. Finally: an ultimatum. That was the Führer’s technique of making gradual headway!”

In vain did the listener try to close his ears and leave the ground again; he always came crashing down like a fly, right in front of the Atlantic liner of Gafton’s imposing foot, size 46.

“Let’s go over it once again, Professor. Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador, is summoned by the clownish corporal on the evening of August 29. The Germans demand Danzig, but also the Corridor, until Wednesday, August 30. The ambassador’s telegram reaches London on August 29, at 22:25. It has to be decoded, then another telegram is coded to the British ambassador in Warsaw.”

Matei knew it all. But it was about something else that Comrade Gafton really wanted to speak. Not about Sir Neville Henderson. He would have liked to prove his perfect honesty when he had joined the struggle against the Nazi butchers: that would be his excuse for having agreed to do what he did even after they were defeated; it would be the explanation and the excuse, frater, dulcissime …

“Toward midnight on the evening of August 30, Sir Neville Henderson proposes to Ribbentrop that the German plan be delivered to the Polish ambassador. To no purpose. What happens next, on August 31, 1939, you probably know. At 9:50 Sir Neville makes a telephone call to Coulondre, the French ambassador in Berlin, and warns him of the gravity of the situation. At ten o’clock the reply is received from Paris: the Polish government accepts and will confirm in writing that it is prepared to hold direct talks with the German government, and undertakes not to deploy troops during the negotiations if it receives the same guarantee on the part of the Germans. At 21:00 Radio Berlin broadcasts proposals which, as a matter of fact, are quite reasonable. The plan, states the German communiqué, has been rejected by the Poles. Yet the Poles had not even seen these proposals.”

The speaker’s attempts to gauge a reaction were of no avail, any more than were the efforts of colleague Gina at the Hotel Tranzit reception to read the professor’s mask, at eleven o’clock on Friday, when Tolea, looking at the keyboard in front of him, was deep in thought about images from his last meeting with neighbor Gafton. Absolutely nothing did Matei detect; nothing were the persistent green eyes of Gina the cop able to make out. “You know what followed. But perhaps you don’t know how the first of the accelerated conversations at the end of August actually proceeded. On August 25 Hitler was calm, haunted by melancholy, at his meeting with Henderson. He regretted that Germany had become a barracks. That’s what he said. He did not want to go down in history as a warmonger. He was an artist. That’s what he had been and that was what he wanted to become again! He was dying to withdraw from political life.”

“Herr Adolf an artist? Absolutely not. Zilch! The artist was priestly Dzhugashvili, not painterly Adolf. The Georgian understood the power of ambiguity, its quite limitless power. And he encouraged people to measure up to it: to become anything, with no limits as to race, sex, belief, or other such nonsense. He understood that the victim can become a butcher if he doesn’t actually want to, and that it’s a game which has no limits. If that cretin of yours had really been an artist, he would have understood that. And if he’d understood it, the game would have been different. What a dilemma the chosen people would have had then.”

Had Tolea actually spoken those words? Had he interrupted his neighbor Gafton’s speech, or was he merely interrupting it now, mentally, as he recalled the scene?

“What if your old deadbeat Adolf had offered limitless scope for changing one’s skin? Then you’d have seen dilemmas, conversions, overzealousness, sudden turnarounds in the situation. Then you’d have seen what a noble wild beast is that humanist fellow creature of ours as he scurries to save his hide. Maybe Adolf would have won the game — who knows? — if he’d been an artist. But no, he didn’t understand his great chance, the great experiment. He was no artist, really he wasn’t. There’s no comparison between him and the priest from Georgia. No comparison, Matei, believe me. That one was an artist, all right! He even knew how to make use of the other one’s tricks, of anything he could turn to advantage: nationalism, internationalism, atheism, religion, anything at all. Look around you, Matei, old man. What a fantastic combination! Look around at the mind-boggling work that’s been done. Just open your eyes and look around.”

But Tolea had remained silent, probably. He was not in the habit of interrupting the rhetorical pleasures of neighbor Gafton; he usually preferred to doze with his mind elsewhere. Neighbor Matei measured his speech without any haste, leaning from time to time toward his apathetic listener. He knew that Tolea would not interrupt him. And he was used to his bored smile; for a long time now there had been nothing new in that arrogant hotel receptionist’s smile, and in fact, it did not bother him at all. As he took aim at some imaginary audience or other, Mr. Gafton sometimes gave the impression — for anyone disposed to notice the fine accents and devices of his score — that he thought of himself not only as the narrator of the events he kept reading about in the library but as an actual protagonist, maybe even Henderson. Yes, Sir Neville, Sir Neville Henderson, that was it, no?

“Do you think I’d be too subjective to study those years properly? Well, you’re wrong, Tolea, quite wrong.”

The hesitant pause did not last long; it was merely a rhetorical effect, of course.

“Why can’t we discuss openly what happened? Why is the subject covered up in this country? Why here? Why is it impossible to talk about the genocide, the victims — you know what I’m referring to. Is it that I wouldn’t be objective if I were allowed to speak? Well, I would, I can tell you!” All that remained was to force out every proof and more of his absolute objectivity. “I can understand some of the justifications which— Yes, I understand, and I’m not just thinking of the fact that at first the madman exploited a certain resentment at the humiliating peace treaty of 1919. The same kind of thing was there even at Nuremberg. Do you remember Jodl, eh? The duty to the people and the fatherland is higher than any other! And he added: Would that in a happier future it can be replaced by a duty toward humanity. Has it been replaced? Has the happy future come, as the textbooks and speeches proclaim?” Suddenly a new and surprising idea carried him away. “Did Herr Hitler describe himself as an artist? Then why didn’t he allow Jews to become Nazis? It would have been an interesting experience, no? How would the play have developed in that case? Remember Italy and Mussolini before the racial laws: who was backing Mussolini then? No, it wasn’t our artist Herr Hitler! In fact, he couldn’t agree to try out something like that! He’d have felt wasted, cheapened. No, he wasn’t curious enough, nor playful enough.”

So finally the idea got through Mr. Matei’s skull, too. He quickly became worked up; he could hardly wait to get carried away: “Do you remember Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at the trials who said that they had no precedent in history? Why? What was his reason for saying that? The judgment on a war and an ideology had to show not only that the guilty were receiving their punishment but that good was vanquishing evil. It had to give voice to the simple man of our times. Do you hear that: the simple man of our times! You might think you’re at a course in Marxism-Leninism!

Well, you’re not. It’s a sir who’s speaking, consider that. The simple man of our times, and I make no distinction between friend and enemy, that’s what Sir Hartley Shawcross said. The simple man of our times! To show that he’s determined to place the individual above the state. Well, did the simple man prove it? Can he place the individual above the state — is that what he wants? Tell me, tell me what you think. Is that why we’re not allowed to discuss History openly?” Neighbor Vancea did not reply, of course; he did not even hear the challenging question.

Does talkative Matei mean to suggest that he has always fought for a just cause, and that even now he has not lost his courage? That his passion for History extends to the present, covering the fate of all those struck down by History, both yesterday and today? He spared no effort to achieve a sign of interest or approval, even after he had convinced himself that the chances for the future did not lie with Tolea Voinov. “Do you remember the so-called system technician who was acquitted at Nuremberg? He it was who called Hitlerite totalitarianism the first dictatorship of modern times. In fact, Speer also gave explanations for it, as you know. The dictator, he argued, no longer needs people with great qualities to work for him. Information technology offers ways of mechanizing the activity of subordinates, so that they do nothing but docilely carry out orders.”

But Tolea was silently dreaming, sleeping: he did not take the trouble to give any sign of being there. He was convinced that neighbor Gafton’s logorrhea would eventually sweep him on toward the taboo subject.

“You were right, Mr. Vancea. Among the paintings that Carol II took out of the country there was also a Titian. Of course, this was not directly connected to the events that were to follow.”

Oh yes, it was. How could it have been otherwise, since you are no longer talking about Sir Neville and Sir Hartley and Jodl and Speer but about our own unlikely parts, with their ultracoded laughter and tears, which are missing from the map of the world.

“The year 1940, as you know, was one of the preliminaries. Moral degradation, corruption, demagogy. There’s something attractive about a playboy on the throne, isn’t there? At least from the perspective of the tragedy to come. There were forty-one paintings according to Leo Bachelin’s catalogue: a lot of El Grecos, but also Veronese, Caravaggio, Van Dyck, Rembrandt. There’s also one small Titian, you were right. Saint Jerome, the Bachelin catalogue, location 66. Saint Jerome kneeling before a crucifix suspended on the rocks. Beside him a cardinal’s hat and a holy book. Cloudy sky, steep slopes, blue sea in the distance. The moment appears to precede the torture of the body. It is a replica of the painting in the Balbi Gallery in Genoa, of which there is another copy in the Louvre … Theft, royal theft, of course. The masquerading, the falsification that precedes barbarism. But it really cannot be compared with what followed; it just paved the way for it. Paved the way for the cancer that can no longer be checked. If only there had been a code of behavior; if only we had lived in a different world which— By the way, you’ve received an envelope …”

Yes, that was it. He had to get there in the end, to confirm that not by chance had the letter been handed to its addressee by the Chronicler of History himself, neighbor Gafton.

Dominic usually found his letters slipped beneath the door of his cell, either by the postman or by neighbors. This time the envelope had appeared on view, on the table in the hall. And Mr. Gafton made sure he drew his attention to it: “You’ve got a letter from a long way away, Mr. Vancea.” He was not embarrassed, then, to show that he had examined the envelope, which had remained for several days on the hall table without being collected by Dominic Vancea. The considerate neighbor had therefore slipped it under his door. And now he remembered again that the incident had not been forgotten. He had tried to act as if he didn’t care, to avoid looking at the envelope for days. But it had been no use in the end: such strategies had broken down, dulcissime frater. In the whole tangle of facts brought to the Gafton Resuscitation Chamber, there is also your life, Old Scatty; it’s shown by this envelope from afar, all the way from Argentina, from your brother, who hoped to escape the History of our balloon flattened at the poles and in its feelings. In those days a lot of people changed not only their name, like neighbor Gafton, but also their soul. Times long gone? Present times, frater. Without a past, no present, yet we are only present. As for the present past — we can’t get away from it. It’s shown by this elegant envelope covered with stamps and postage marks, coming from afar and long ago. Present, here, now, inevitable. Quack! Windbag! He tried to hypnotize the keys on the board in the Hotel Tranzit. Time: 11:51 and 13 seconds. Impenetrable before the elegant wrapping from Argentina. As if he were not looking at it, as if he had not been the one who left the envelope on view, on the desk. In vain does his slippery colleague Gina keep twisting and turning, accidentally touching the registers, sorry, accidentally touching the clown — electric touch, excuse me, oh dear, what a fragile, glassy elbow, oh excuse me. Mistake, futile contact. Her provocative, crafty eyes: surely they will find something out, anything. Not a chance, dear hunters! Your prey knows the game and he quite enjoys it. Not a chance, not a chance: the buffoon is wearing armor and lives on the moon.