The Game for Real

THE GAME OF QUARTERING

He boarded the metro at La Trinité. — It was after midnight. After midnight on an empty, ordinary night at the start of the week. In the first class car, no one but us two.

He boarded at La Trinité. I won’t say that he merely reminded me of someone, because I put my finger on it faster than that. He was just as alluringly unhandsome as the Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, which struck me immediately. Who knows; maybe it even was Vicente Escudero. — Vicente Escudero, at his ease, looks like a man betrayed, standing over the body of the woman who’s betrayed him (and in whose death he’s played a part) and with his gaze, which is like a lead line, measuring how deep his hatred must plunge into vengeance to be appeased. And which determines that the lead line is too short for something as deep as this.

And Vicente Escudero is, when dancing, like an assassin amused by the thought that one can do just fine without a lead line, that one can plunge headlong into a bottomless hatred, and that this bath can be refreshing, if we only plunge into it without thought of return.

He was unhandsome. Broad Spanish feet, almost fake. And maybe they were. . Words, which he would not have uttered for anything in the world, withdrew into the steep wrinkles that fell from the downturned corners of his mouth, and which were rather like perfectly conjoined scars. Vicente Escudero knows many, many words of this kind.

I don’t know what prayer is. But, having seen him, I was quick to compose one. An ardent one. I prayed that Vicente Escudero would not assume the empty seat opposite me. (He had twenty-five to choose from.) I prayed, knowing that he would sit exactly where I was afraid he would: opposite me. I knew this with such certainty that my plea inadvertently became more ardent just as he was moving in the other direction, for I was praying with the certainty that I was praying in vain. And indeed, after two steps he turned around and sat down there, opposite me. Opposite me.

From his pocket he drew a program from L’Apollo and started reading it intently. He read with the unsettling interest of a spy. He paid no attention to me. He wasn’t not paying attention in a provocative way, but with the kind of strained impassivity by which a misfortune is placed before us, a misfortune that is already at our doorstep, though not yet set in motion. I countered with an unspoken question. A question? Only from a twitch of one of those two scars, so perfectly conjoined, did I realize that I may have actually asked him something. It was a distinctly responsive twitch, if an inadvertent one. It was an answer to the question: “Are you following me?” — He replied (through that twitch of his scar-wrinkle) without looking up; he immersed himself in reading his program, maybe even more deeply than before. And suddenly there came a certainty that he would not get off at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, that he wouldn’t even be getting off at Saint-Georges.

At each stop he leaned out and read the station name, which he happened to know by heart. This he demonstrated I no longer know how. He was reading the names of the stations, but it was directed at me. After Saint-Georges is Pigalle. That’s a transfer station. So how did it sound — How do you think it sounded? — that unspoken question I posed to him as I was pretending to inspect my (trembling) hands? Perhaps it sounded like: “Get off at Pigalle!” — No, not like that, it sounded like: “Aren’t you getting off at Pigalle?!”

The interest with which he was reading his program from L’Apollo now attested so cynically to its own phoniness that a chill ran through me. A chill, plus the certitude that he had understood (not raising his head) what I had been silently asking him to do. And, of course, he didn’t get out. — After Pigalle is Abbesses. But the question “Aren’t you getting off at Abbesses?” was so pointless that it fell away automatically.

After Abbesses is Lamarck. That’s my stop. It’s not the last stop. Vicente Escudero could still go three more! — But shortly before we came to the station the certainty that we would both be getting off at Lamarck took on an air of necessity to his will or my own, already so self-asserting that my considerate gesture—“We’ll be arriving presently, see that you don’t miss it, sir” (for he was reading) — broke off of its own accord. He looked at me. With a look as though in generous confirmation that, yes, this was no fantasy: of course he’d been sent, of course he’d been handed a mission.

“And sent by whom, and a mission to do what?” I said with a benumbed smile. And he replied with a smile as well. An exceedingly solicitous smile at that.

He got up. We got out. He walked beside me. The flamboyance (but was it flamboyance?) with which he didn’t let me out of his sight from that moment on was equal to the flamboyance with which he had ignored me until then. When we stepped into the elevator (for there’s an elevator) he paid me the same polite attention I had shown him in the car, stepping aside humbly and affably so that I might be the first to enter. — The building where I live is not far from the station. He walked beside me the whole way. He looked into my eyes as though they (these eyes) had been stolen from him. He matched my step. He did so with a kind of naïve and deferential ardor.

A woman was standing at the door to our building. She was wearing a checkered loden dress and green silk stockings. She was heavily made-up. She had even applied carmine to her nostrils, and with such senseless brazenness that it occurred to me that she might have wanted to say something particular by it, for example, that she had fallen into despair while making herself up, or that makeup is one of the guises of her desperation. She was leaning against the doorframe. He leaned against the opposite doorframe, waiting for the door to open. They did not converse, not with a look, not with a smile. But how to put this? They were from the same team. They were from some sort of team. Not only was this certain, it could not have been any other way. They were from the same team — not like spouses, not like lovers, not like friends, not like acquaintances, not like castaways on a raft, but they went with each other. — I know the building’s residents. Neither he nor she lived there. Nevertheless, they were waiting at the door, just like me. The door finally allowed us in.

I stepped aside so that she could go first. I followed her, and once inside I swung around; no, not to check whether he, too, might have been coming up behind me, but merely to be sure to shut the door behind him. And now I see I am walking along with him on one side, her on the other. I don’t know how this happened, but they’d gotten me between them. I say that they’d gotten me there, for it reeked of utter violence, without my being able to recall how they’d moved me into this position. Their walk, their gestures, their glances (which crossed like the arms of adults rock-a-bying babies) were synchronically symmetrical, as if these two were posable puppets mounted on a single shaft. But what naturalness, what ease! Could these really just be people, nothing more? I felt no fear, no alarm. Perhaps I was a bit curious, but with a curiosity that was disinterested, confident.

I called my name out in front of the porter’s door, as usual. The sound of my voice was like a veil that had suddenly fallen from something. And it was only then that things took on the air of “something’s not quite right.” Panic weighed down so sharply and unexpectedly that my lower back completely buckled, my torso heaved. The word “help” started prying at my lips like a crowbar. Here, however, both of them gave me an admonitory wag of the finger, though they did so without withdrawing their eyes’ and mouths’ strict, if cheerful, watch. Needlessly: the panic had already settled down in the meantime, flat and unbleached, like a thread of jute. Yes, I strode past a panic already tamed. The admonitory fingers had done their work; now their symmetrically summoning hands expressed a mute and gracious “This way, please.” I slowed a little and replied with a similar gesture. Thus, for a moment, we were playing a très magnifique scene of gracious and unpretentiously worldly gentlemen. We played it carefully, conscientiously, like in the theater, and it popped into my head that maybe that’s what we were here for. They yielded at last to my gracious insistence: they took a small step before me, languorously hunched over, as though from embarrassment and an acquiescent desire to please. — When we’d gotten to my door, they stood again like they had at the building’s entrance, one to each side of the frame. But it was no longer as it had been — out of the blue they were wearing a severe, hard look. Their mute appeal for me to open up was overbearing and threatening. I dug into my back pocket for the key, looking from one to the other. And still there was that confident curiosity within me. Their gestures, always so peculiarly simultaneous and symmetrical, became impatient and curt: now a finger pointing toward the keyhole; now a derisive and contemptuous jerk of the head; now an exaggerated collapse against the doorframe, like that of people who are waiting before a still-closed theater and affectedly pretending that they will surely never live to see the day; now tapping their feet angrily, if quietly.

A grotesque thought suddenly popped into my head. In the form of an absolute mathematical certainty, that is, that they wouldn’t bear it if I, shoving the key into the lock, were to look them both in the eye, but at the same time. Sure, I knew this was absurd. Nonetheless, the comforting sense that this was somehow just possible did not abandon me. I found the key, I ram it into the lock, my gaze fixed before me, and now I’m faced with four eyes, each of them individually and all of them at the same time, as if mutually: two of them brown, two blue; one curious, one timid, and one sweet; the fourth said nothing.

The key turned.

I came home around one in the morning, went up to my door, slid the key in. –

How’s that? What about those four eyes? The man? The woman?

How impatient you are! How impatient! Just let me get the door open.

You see: I came back around one in the morning, I went up to my door, slid the key in. I unlocked the top lock, unlocked the bottom one, leaned in gently. The door didn’t open. Not that it didn’t give at all, but it didn’t open.

That means there must be someone pushing against it from inside.

Which is to say, as we do when things are falling apart like this, “a thought popped into my head.”

A thought popped! And as yet it’s no more than that huge juniper seed when the forward march of the litany of holy logic, recited on a rosary flicking whistlingly along, comes to a screeching halt. As it must: — The door gives, but it doesn’t open. It’s always doing that in spring and summer. The apartment is humid; the door swells and catches on the upper left corner. In summer, yes. But today? What day is it? It’s the fifteenth of November. That means they’ve been running the furnace for fourteen days already. That means the door has already dried out. That means it opens easily. Yesterday it opened easily. Why is it catching today? Because something is blocking it. What’s blocking it? Let’s see. We’re on the ground floor. The porter opens the pneumatic lock with the push of a button. A tenant enters, shuts the door, and, passing the porter’s lodging, he calls out his name. He has to call out his name. And if he doesn’t? Or if he calls out a fake name? The porter knows the voices and names of the tenants. If he has the slightest suspicion, he comes out to check. But the porter is married. Furthermore, his wife is plump. The children are already grown. And yet there are still some wild nights over at the porter’s. The whole building knows this, and we know thanks to the porter, who brags about it. My door is not opening. That means the porter and his wife had a wild night. An hour earlier, two hours earlier, they’d heard the bell. Open up, by all means. But worry oneself over who called out and how they did it? Would you? Love really is the road to perdition. My door isn’t opening. Despite the fact that the furnace has been going for fourteen days already, that the door’s already dried out, that it opened just yesterday. That means. . –

Here’s the huge juniper seed felt along the forward march of the litany of holy logic: “That means someone is leaning against it from inside.”

You have come to this point exhausted, terrorized, no longer remembering, incapable of stopping. A thought? Hardly! It’s the outermost guardrail of composure, of sangfroid. Will that guardrail hold up against our blow? Or will we topple over it? Or will it break? Will it give? It won’t give? A door that doesn’t open? That means someone is leaning against it from inside. I know this beyond sure; I know this spectacularly. My litany of holy logic has prayed me into the certainty that “this makes sense.” This makes so much sense that there’s no miracle to chasten its arrogance. Hasn’t everything conspired to confirm that the door isn’t opening because someone is leaning against it from inside? So where’s the miracle? That he’s cornered? Helpless? So if I unjam it, what then? Me? I’ll unjam it, believing. Believing that, despite everyone and everything, the door is resisting me not because someone is leaning against it from inside, but. . O terrified courage, come to me! Eyes, squint! O shoulder, my ram, come, have at the door. . It’s opened! — — — —

And now look at the guy who’s doing it! — Who? The guy who was just leaning against the door from inside, of course. Let’s take a look at him. Do you see him? He looks so on and so forth, right? But that’s the point. The point is, namely, yes: Does he look the way we’d expected (for, after all, we had been expecting him)? We’ll say it right off the bat: no idea. And let’s tell ourselves presently just what it was we’d expected. Let’s settle into our sangfroid, our composure, and behold: I come home late at night. I unlock the door. The door gives a little, but it doesn’t open. I force it with my shoulder. I’m face-to-face with a stranger — let’s say, for the time being, an intruder. I should be frightened; I should at least be astonished, and so what if I’ve foreseen this, for I did foresee this, after all. But everyone knows what it means to “foresee spooky things”: on one side of the scale, there’s the premonition; on the other, the hope that the premonition is false. The side with the hope is always heavier. By which I mean that premonition is never armor against dread. We always drive like a runaway train into what we dread — through the barrier of premonition. Foresee it or don’t — what you dread, you will dread forevermore. But nay: I wasn’t feeling dread because I encountered a stranger behind my door; I wasn’t even astonished. I merely became conscious of the fact that I should have been astonished. But somehow the astonishment didn’t feel like it. If you look into the mirror, and in the mirror — nothing; if you put a record on the phonograph, and there’s no sound. It’s the same way here: I know that I should be astonished, but astonishment refuses.

And so now we move on to this other person! Now that the miracle has worn off, let’s stop calling him an intruder. The miracle has worn off; therefore, we are justified in calling him not an intruder, but rather a thief. Fine. What can a thief expect in someone else’s apartment but to be caught? And so how does a thief, now caught, normally look? Every which way: he makes a run for it; perplexity, as they say, ensues; he braces himself to resist; he attacks. And yet who among you has ever seen a thief who, having been caught, starts bawling, and that’s all? For this guy was bawling, and that’s all. And so you’re astonished that my astonishment and my shock remained out back. Isn’t that rather like, instead of themselves, they’d only sent some duly authorized replacement, i.e., a dumbstruck question, from whose secret memory drawer an associative recollection leaped from this teary-eyed thief to the domestic fantasy of a boy whom his mother has caught with his finger in the jam jar? Do you know those tears of the jam-thief? They’re not tears from any fear of punishment. They’re tears set up long in advance: this boy — my intruder, my thief — was quaking to the core; he was quaking long before there was any reason to. This smartass, this tough guy was a quaking daredevil. How do we square this? Yes, that’s the question: how do we square it?

So take a look at what he’s doing! Look at the fists shoved into the clenched teeth, from where he’d love to cry out, but he’s afraid. And those eyes, which moan for you right now, right now, to tolerate his tears; otherwise, they’ll well up on their own, they can’t hold back any longer — oh, this weepy thief, whose left hand is reflexively bidding us: “Come closer, don’t be afraid. But don’t beat me, alright?” his boyish anxiety adds, howling. “Don’t beat me!”

What would you say to that?

I said simply, if just a little peevishly:

“What is it you want here? And why are you bawling? It’s ridiculous!” — And I shut the door behind me.

And I go about my business. You know, like he isn’t there. That guy right there! I know very well that he’s behind me. That he’s skulking like an obedient dog. You’d almost say: like a cunning bitch. — Please, just imagine it: a surprised thief, or something of that sort, and instead of the least bark, he’s skulking behind me like a pinscher I’ve whistled for, and which has rushed in, wagging its tail as a sign it knows it’s going to get a beating. And which doesn’t have any idea that I only whistled out of terrible fear, that I was staking everything, everything on that whistling. A dog, shall we say, with fists to its maw, and with terror-stricken, teary eyes, and with that left hand comically bidding me not to be afraid of coming home, like I have nothing to fear. Home! Just imagine: a thief who bids me not to be afraid of coming home! And then, sure enough, something popped into my head. To wit: this guy is unspeakably unthreatening.

Like anybody, I too have a silly weakness for wanting to wedge myself into a spot where someone else is not. It was by chance that this occurred to me right after I’d made that move — I say by chance, for there was no reason why it should have occurred to me after that move in particular — when I had turned around, crowding him. Let’s understand each other: “to crowd” suggests the notion of assault. Just this once, however, it merely indicates that I turned to face him, nothing more. I don’t go after him; I don’t preach; I don’t reprimand. With the possible exception of reiterating with my eyes what my mouth had uttered a moment before, as in: “What is it you want here?” (Sounding neither threatening, nor overly curious!)

But look at him! Just take a look at him! For on my soul, this spectacle was worth it: the elegant pantomime of some deep, some unfathomable loss! The right hand at last pulled away from chattering teeth! The twisted right hand, away from which the cramp is slowly and incessantly drifting, and which is again mindful, which is again cautiously connected, which, under his coaxing eyes’ crazed surveillance, is dragging itself forward, approaching, astir; whereas the left, heretofore so beseechingly outstretched, has suddenly gone slack, so helpless, as if felled. But that right hand on the march and its rebellious fist opening slowly, slowly, grudgingly, out of the superiority of some insidious enmity: you could call it a bud, but one that would admit under pressure that it is no bud at all, but a hard knot of little snakes wrapped in rose petals. — It opens so grudgingly, so shyly. But why? Why? If it doesn’t even hold anything so foul?

O thief, my thief, what will you give me, then, for the key?

He is so afraid of me. Don’t be afraid! But he’s so afraid of me! Why are you afraid of me? You have the key — who gave it to you? You have the key. Thieves pick the lock to get in. This is a key. The real thing. Thieves don’t have a key. They can’t have a key. You have one; perhaps you’re worse than a thief? — Show me. Glory be, the notched key. The lackey’s key. Kept with the porter. It’s no fake. It’s the real thing. From where? How did you get it, whoever you are? Did you pinch it off someone you’d killed? Did you just steal it? Hmm? Nothing to say, whoever you are?

Then, for the first time, something flashed in his eyes, something other than astonishment, other than fright, other than pleading, other than lamentation. But perhaps it was an order above all orders, one regarding not people so much as things. A directive as follows: for it not to matter that I get hold of the key. And I obeyed. I loyally obeyed that it not matter. After protracted confusions, the first certainty. Oh, hardly a comforting certainty, hardly a negotiable certainty. But rather a suspiciously unfair certainty, you might say, kind of like someone sweetly talking you down while readying the straitjacket. It was a tricky, treacherous certainty, but a certainty nonetheless.

“Are we up to something here?” I asked. “Then let’s be up to something, right? A drama, is that what we’re going to have here?”

His eyes got ready to answer, but they changed their mind; suddenly, as though he had replaced them, they were again just the eyes of a frightened and pleading thief. I say: a thief — but who is this stranger behind my door exactly, of whom I should have been terrified but was not terrified, who assumed my terror within himself, and around whose corporeal being — for he is corporeal — I step with such stubborn indifference, as if around my own shadow? Who is this unexpected intruder into my bachelor life’s daily rhythm who, all things considered, does nothing to spoil it? Under whose gaze, watchful yet remote, am I pretending to be disinterestedly inspecting my ground-floor apartment, my abode, where it’s so easy for a stranger to intrude, no different today than any other (when I am invariably alone)? For God’s sake, who is he, paradoxically present, a man so rare that it’s almost like he’s not here, and under whose haunting, haunted supervision I perform an array of passes suited to an inspector, after which I lie down fully aware that I could sleep peacefully, that I am alone, that I am still alone despite the fact that he’s here with me? I’m not bothered, not at all bothered by this someone, whom I see and do not regard.

I throw myself into my rounds, beginning with the dining room. Pedantic, manic passes through the cupboards, the drapes. On my heels, he whom I take for no one. He’s a shadow, more shifting aside than moving — a shadow, a nothing that delights in nothingness; a shadow, an amplified, unfathomed nothing. Can you heed the presence of someone incarnated only as if in confirmation that he’s not there for real?

The hand outstretched with the turning key, the imploring eyes, beseeching me to take it, this, my key, all of it has the accent of an essence so paradoxical that it bothers me. . What is meant by this ataraxia of the nerves, this eerie breakdown of all experience?

“Don’t be afraid. Surely you see I’m not scared, and that I won’t do anything to you.”

He went over to the corner, put his hands behind his back— a petal flutters down, circles in darkness; a memory — rather like the way day laborers used to wait at Klein’s, in the cobbler’s shop, until work came for them. You could see into the workshop through the glass doors from the office, where Mr. Štajer, the Vorarbeiter, would measure us with a brown paper ribbon, which he used to tickle our feet.

The memory circled around, drained of color. It landed softly and, once landed, sobered up, and in so doing unwittingly betrayed where it was supposed to have been going: to the realization that I’d already spent quite some time, as they say, in an impossible situation. Yes, because something really isn’t right here. The passive resistance of dumbness isn’t okay; the boyish fright and impetuous distress of this certain someone are not okay. Everything is like it’s inside-out, and that’s not okay. If it was okay, this thief (or whatever he is) would behave differently. But this disconsolate, this shrinking, this unnaturally withering thief: none of this is okay. And how could it be okay that I can’t manage, I can’t even manage to be struck properly dumb by things I know should strike me dumb, in a position that so urgently demands my dumbness? Which I refuse. No: what refuses is something within me. How dumbfounding it is that I’m not struck dumb. It’s dumbfounding! And behold: dumbfounding, the word, is like nightshade, like a blossom of nightshade, with which something that was supposed to be has also come into bloom; and barely has this flower opened before it flips over, like images painted across vertical blinds that, with a flick of a spring, are hastily and chaotically snuffed out, slat by slat, until, with the turning of the last of them, a new image appears, the image on the reverse. And this image means: fear. Nothing anywhere, and suddenly there’s fear.

And yet again, it’s already like he’s going to snuff it out. Who? With what? From where? Or perhaps it’s just the brightness from the crack under the door to the next room? Someone in there has turned on a light. Who? Why? — He knows for sure, for sure he knows, and I turn around quizzically. Meanwhile, how close my confidence has become with this person so reminiscent of “the fellow from Klein’s.” He’s not the kind who begs the question; he’s someone whom it’s impossible not to ask. So I say, “I would bet. .,” stifling an explosive rage, but placated by the awareness of his having ferreted out my testament, “. . that you’ve gotten yourself into a mess.” For he nods like a boy who’s been caught and reproved, but who has already ascertained that the incubation period for his lashing has already lapsed. — He nods, with gratitude for such magnanimity, and in agreement that he would come to earn it. — Good, good! If that’s the way it has to be, let’s also have a look at the bright crack under the door.

To the door! Let’s get it open! Look sharp! Not the look sharp of distraught impatience, ravenous after a long and cunning play for the irrational hope that a fugitive experience is again lying in wait behind the door, that there at last we will find the key, the only true key. . to the gates, then. . the gates of hell. . And who should open up — it’s me who opens up — don’t think he has the look of the damned, bedeviled by a yearning to “put an end to this.” Instead, imagine someone like. . yes, someone like a happy father returning home from work and impatient for his portrait of the family idyll, which he is already conjuring for himself in advance. Oh, that group of loved ones he hastens toward! He’s bought a baggie of delectables on the way. Standing at the threshold, he is singing happily, jovially, grinning: “Guess what I have!”

I was impatient, too, but not curious. I, too, knew, opening the door, what to expect, though unknowing what I would behold. I, too, already knew that whatever I would see, I would see something from the world now poised, perhaps befuddled, within me: a smooth sheet of paper pulled out of a crumpled, squeezed, twisted — by me, no less — ball. I knew that that inside-out world where I had made my home till now would not end behind the door, and could not end. I knew the door would open and the mystery would remain intact, I was merely aware, and unwittingly, that I would find the mystery — now only tight-lipped, not twisted — and the question of what form the mystery would have no longer upset or irritated me. That’s why it’s not odd that what actually surprised me wasn’t the woman lying on the sofa but her gesture, so peculiarly automatic, like the gesture of a sleepwalker, and at the same time as direct as a greeting: she tugged at the hem of her loden skirt, as if embarrassed about her exposed legs. It was a futile gesture, she had on a skirt short enough that you could see her green silk stockings almost to the knee — it was a gesture so nakedly futile as neither to provoke, nor to repulse. But she also abandoned it so naturally, so easily, and in the same way that she would abandon it every time that, in the naked silence that presently seemed to encircle the three of us, it announced itself anew. I say it announced itself, for this gesture was talkative.

I shrugged my shoulders and smacked my lips; not surprised, merely annoyed, and annoyed by the thought that the taciturn “fellow from Klein’s” might have come in behind me. Might he be so indiscreet? I turned my head, and it was indeed a wonder that I didn’t brush up against him. He was there, right up behind me, with the same old-woman’s curiosity and excusing himself like a footman: the helpless flinch of the shoulders; the faint upward drift of the otherwise vertical arms; the awkwardly moronic smile. All in all, the sum total of his embarrassed excuse for a bad habit he was attempting in vain to suppress. I looked at him from an oddly skewed perspective, as if on a mound that was sagging; that is, he followed me so close that we were nearly attached.

Trickster! He was concealing the fact that they were acquainted, that they were playing their agreed-upon roles. In vain. I caught on in an instant. Her nostrils, nonsensically blushed to cinnabar; her long, mascara-caked lashes, no different from blinds brought down over a suspiciously demure gaze that transports explicitly outlawed goods! To smuggle them, to smuggle — what she wouldn’t have given! That vision, sweet-and-innocent to the eye, gets at you. But the stereotypical tugging at the skirt testifies that it’s all a ploy, hard-headed as a ram, to fool the guard. A ploy ultimately thwarted again and again. And with each new failure, there was this little display, packed with fierce forbearance — the enraged repose of an ant assuming a burden that will come to naught. Resignation shining with needles of frozen irony. The gentleman-servant, caught with his hand in someone else’s pocket, a pickpocket dutifully admitting that it’s checkmate, and who neither repents nor talks his way out of it, knowing with a comfortingly obdurate certainty that this will not be his last time. .

That slyboots, that intelligent little bitch! She knew immediately that together we were playing, if not at life and death, then at truth and lie (how she recoiled as she came to the certainty that it was worse than life or death); she calculated her odds solely by squinting, and having inferred that she could not win, with feigned indifference she launched an effort to play for stalemate. Three times, five times, seven times she shifted in the hope of turning my attention away from her eyes, which were trying to sneak past to him; seven times, nine times, eleven times I caught her off guard with a sideward glance, and the ploy was thwarted. — She answered each of my displays with the foxiness of a servant coolly faking gentlemanly resignation to his fate, and again she would surreptitiously ready a new round. It was as if two bitter adversaries were butting heads again and again, fully aware that but for the referee’s favor neither one of them would win. Our unbridled hatred melted our grimaces into the affable smiles of knightly adversaries — foul cunning pretended that this was less a matter of success than of playing fair. Her empty gesture of tugging at her skirt was repeated so frequently, steadily, and stereotypically that it eventually took on the character of a sort of secret means of communication. It was, consequently, a talkative gesture and, you would say, a luridly provocative one. It piled up like vile snowdrifts; I was unable to dig out with my eyes; they put up massive resistance. The sense of a peculiar world pointlessly besieged by terror persisted. I came to feel at home there. I was supremely aware that my uninvited guests were here because of some supernatural unrest; everything in this apartment was different from how it usually is, but the shape and form of things had not changed; the change was separate from them, as if it were their distinguishing feature, overlooked until now. Imagine that every day you eat from the same plate with a floral print; you know it so well that it would not escape you were it replaced by a plate with slightly different flowers. But one day you take a closer look and discover a tiny, heretofore overlooked flaw. Go on, try — how should I put this? — try to enthrall it; fix your eyes on it; a moment later, you’re looking at a kind of intimate unreality: the one reality, irrefutable, since it’s quotidian, remains solely this heretofore overlooked flaw; it’s like the only discernible shape in a fog, only you don’t know “where to put it.” Or else try saying your own name over and over again. Suddenly, it’s not that you’re estranged from it; on the contrary, it’s emerged as the last debris of the real — it’s a name that has become a thing while remaining a name, the name of someone you don’t know, though it’s yours.

It was no different with my uninvited guests. They were strangers to me; they were estranged from me all at once, but not as much so as my own apartment, albeit still familiar and unaltered to my eyes. They were somehow more real than it was. They were strangers, unfamiliar, and yet theirs was an assigned unfamiliarity, promised; only I didn’t know “where to put them.”

And that pointless, telling game with the skirt, again and again! It was sort of like the rhythmic incantation of voiceless conversations. It was a measure; but this measure turned into gesture, and in turn the gesture was becoming eternal. This meter was unstable: at the outset, I would say, it was moving toward the key of shabbily artful ploys, then it passed unnoticed to the slower meter of a trapped pickpocket’s indifference, after which it settled into the time of the woman’s embarrassment. This embarrassment: it struck an irritating contrast with her makeup, with her posture and attire, but it was remarkably sincere; indeed, it was gripping. And despite her brazen eyes, which, no, did not cease their efforts to arrive artfully at an understanding with that other fellow. We were each playing a false card, but we didn’t make a show of it, since each of us had caught the other and knew the false cards of his opponents. The alertness of us three, of which two would alternate as two against the third, created a homey atmosphere where one could breathe easy. We were frauds so cynically unashamed that we felt righteous about it. I switched seats— to her feet. I looked at her, to see if I could figure out “where to put her.” I looked into her eyes, she into mine. Both of us so nonchalantly, so unsheepishly, as if we were each just an object to the other. — He would pace; he would stop; then he stepped toward us, smiled shyly, and shrugged his shoulders (“how silly of me to have been frightened by such a thing!”). He shifted boyishly to the side, turned on his heel, started pacing again. That boyish turn I found particularly striking, for he was no longer quite young. A stranger would have taken us for acquaintances who had overstayed, no longer had anything to say, and were sheepishly keeping quiet.

Out of the blue, I felt like doing something as yet undefined (her eyes, without turning from me, flickered under this caprice, as if seeking a balance they’d momentarily lost), and before I know it I’m seeing my own hand reach for her hair and tug at it feebly. He was standing right next to us. He caught sight of the end of that touch and turned to meet my eyes once again. Amiably and tactfully, he gave them an approving, impish, and encouraging smile. Pulling her hair, I heard and felt a weak snap. She smiled. She put her hands under her chin and raised it slightly. It was an obliging gesture that reminded me, I don’t know why, of the gesture of a shopkeeper explaining how to work a toy you’ve purchased. Under that pressure, her head slipped out a little. It revealed on her neck the kind of groove you see on poseable dolls. When she’d shown this, her hands again withdrew, and her head fell with a faint click.

He, seeing this, slapped his hips like a man who’s “having a laugh,” turned my chin so that I’d pay attention, and seized the woman by the arm. She rose up, and when he let her go she fell with a faint click, just as her head had. The woman sighed, but as if she’d done no more than the thing with her skirt.

He doubled over as if seized by impudent laughter, which was bizarre, for his face remained impassive. Or no, it was rather sad. He doubled over like a good prankster who’s pulled off a joke, then he performed a hasty “now watch” gesture and did a tumble like a little clown. His aspect, however, in no way fit this apparently boisterous move: it remained sad the whole time; in fact, now it was quite desolate. This lasted for a while. I watched attentively, stiffly, with interest, but like at a spectacle I’d deliberately come for.

Then he sat down on the sofa as well, at her head. He started to stroke her tenderly. I can’t say how ghostly, yet in no way frightening, was the suddenness by which he passed to those tender displays immediately following that quiet and crazy footwork. So sensuous and chaste were his caresses! I saw him exactly in profile. It was the profile of an impenetrable ascetic. That’s how it struck me. For until then he had always shown me his full face, whereas from that point on he had the look of an eager goody-goody — eager for temptation. Two different people. I was reminded of my friend Fuld, whom I hadn’t seen for several months. Fuld’s head, too, was a sort of Janus head (we ascribed this to the peculiar configuration of his upper lip). This one here was like Fuld, but it was not Fuld — it could not be Fuld. And it was just then, in the thought that it was literally “as if it were Fuld,” though it couldn’t really be Fuld, it was just then that I was chilled, and immediately after, I was chilled again, because that’s when I first realized that the anxiety had arrived precisely with my Fuldian memory. But it was with that double trembling that I’d caught the trail of “where to put them.” It had been so indistinct till then, who could say it was a trail. More like you’d woken up in a strange land, but on a road that suggested an almost overbearing certainty that it led precisely to where you had to go, though you yourself have no idea where that is.

It struck me how great an error it was to think that — as if all journeys end — and I smiled. Fortunately, however, no one would ever see that smile. I then caught sight of it unwittingly, in them, they’d suddenly become like mirrors. And my apartment indulgently resolved to return to the axis from which he had dislodged it.

Not for long. — I left them with a silent “goodnight” and made for bed. It was late, time to go to sleep. Yet, as I was crossing the threshold, everything was again knocked off its axis. — In the frame of the door, a kind of obstruction. I didn’t see it, I didn’t feel it, and still, an obstruction. Nothing to be torn down, nothing to chop through, nothing to vault over, and still, an obstruction. That is, something that demands that it be overcome. Nothing in the bedroom had been touched. In my mind, I repeated to myself: “And yet (I said ‘and yet’), and yet nothing in here has been touched,” and I quickly got stuck. I was stuck on that “and yet,” and suddenly I understood how very ponderous it was. And I knew: I knew that that “and yet” had been dispatched by a heretofore underground impulse that had already revealed, though concealing it from me, that in the bedroom it only appeared that nothing had been touched. It wanted to conceal from me that the order I was seeing with my eyes was a momentary, desperate, slapdash order, the likes of which are thrown together in towns shattered by earthquake, so that the lord who has announced his tour of compassion not encounter devastation — unwashed, unbrushed, unshaven. Here was this bedroom, where it appeared that nothing had been moved. This ambiguous, evil bedroom, this stupid bedroom that wanted to deceive me with its Potemkin order. No change, then? Who are you kidding, you disaster smoothed over with hasty rakes of sham sympathy? You want to confound me! Me!

So there’s this bedroom where nothing appears to have been touched. — Order? By all means! — But not the usual kind. — Order? By all means! But after the revolution that broke out whilst I was sojourning far away, that triumphed, that, in the meantime, settled in and blocks my view of where it was really heading, what it has achieved, what its point had been. This bedroom had been my atelier, where I’d hack away my wasted days. — But this bedroom was changed, albeit without appearing that anything had been touched. Only now I know, now I know what that unfeelable thing is, that invisible obstruction in the doorframe — it is the cumulative resistance of all the wasted days to come: they’ve mutinied against the hack; they’ll no longer allow themselves to be done up; they won’t be a party to masquerades; they’re resolved not to lie and not to be duped. They will strictly be what they will be. In the doorframe, there stood not future time, but future tense — it leaned on a knotty cane, for it was an old man, and asked not to be a party to my hack masquerades. And that resistance of the future tense had the shape and range of a truly immeasurable silence. Which, once I’d recognized it, drew aside, let me in, and I crossed the threshold.

And I entered chambers that whispered to me that nothing is also something. I was willingly convinced. Then it was as though their immeasurability gradually diminished. Slowly, slowly I came back to myself. I was somewhere that resembled my bedroom, at first nearly, then almost, and finally enough that it set the mind aglow. It was actually that a revolution had gone down here, and that it was hiding what it really wanted. — The whole time there was this great silence, though no longer hermetic; the sound of beingness carried in, as if from a far-off passage. More and more distinct. — And then, as if my millstone had been suddenly removed: I turned my head. I determined that yes, I was in my bedroom. It was different from before, but it was still my bedroom. — A bitter relief rippled through me. I started getting undressed.

I started getting undressed. The day, already departing for tomorrow, returned hastily and somewhat reluctantly, as it does daily, somewhat like a chastened child on his way to bed, who in the confusion forgets that he has to say goodnight. He’s returned, the helpless little cripple, and he’s sobbing into his elbow, “Look what you’ve done to me!” What a wretch! Day after day, the same story: I hear out his grievances, but absently; I argue with him, but without interest; I promise that I’ll do right by him tomorrow, but my mind is elsewhere; I warn him to cut it out, but I warn without passion. Because that’s pretty much it, my mind is elsewhere: on the harbor that awaits me. But where you enter, it seems to me, you don’t sail out from again, so I’m making sure I keep to the buoys that lead the way: straight ahead, sleep. A line of buoys leads me there, they’re quietly swaying on a very black, very languorous surface. The pilot plows through the water, which doesn’t so much as splash. As if he were slithering over it. This pilot is silence. — Today, however, he doesn’t quite want to be. In what silence there is, something is whispering. I listen in, attentive, unriled. It’s nearby — those two over there. The kind of whispering before sleep, the whisper of considerate guests who are afraid of disturbing you. You can hear them removing their clothes: the absent punctuation to their whispering. Not long ago I would offer my hospitality to friends, to couples. We’d spend an evening at the theater. Upon returning we would converse for a short time longer, then I would leave them and go get undressed. Like today. Then, too, one could hear the call of things that had been put off: affable dots, accent marks, and semicolons set my guests’ whispering to music — a whispering in no way mysterious, a whispering that told all. It was having a cozy time in the silent womb of my apartment, in the spacious silence. Here and there a distinct word slipped through the slightly open door, as if to assure me that I had a share even in that which I did not discern. Those words spun out like a rosary, dense at first, then less and less frequent. After which nothing but whispers and the chatty punctuation of things. — I pay close, but cool, attention. Yes, it’s entirely like the other day, after the theater. The friendly idyll before sleep. — What am I saying, like back then? What a fool I am! It is the other day after the theater. Next door are my recent guests. That is, today is not so long ago, what with not so long ago having been today. We came back from the theater. We had a bit of conversation. That before retiring we might hit upon something. That we might find some pretext for falling asleep beneath a baldachin of laughter: we’ll chat — chat like tossing a ball, any which way — so, then, what might we chat about? About the waiter, who got a bit tongue-tied; or how we laughed ourselves silly at the usherette who offered us the programs, displaying them like they were tablets of law; at our gesture of refusal she’d shrugged her shoulders as if regretting that we did not want to submit to the law, and worried that we might thus be risking our salvation. We solemnly vow that tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a place, and we go to sleep bursting with laughter, because we have unwittingly revealed to each other that we don’t think it matters. –

Yes, but it was precisely out of this cheerful laughter that my fear prolapsed. It alerted me that they were cowering here somewhere. It alerted through the sweaty shirt sticking to my back. It was a strange fear: I didn’t have it, but I was aware of it. As if it had appeared to me. I knew that it and I were face-to-face, so close I couldn’t see it. So close it wasn’t there to see. A peculiar fear. Unexcited, reflective, and imploring. Imploring me to shelter it within myself, to take it in. It looked so unhappy, it looked particularly unhappy. One evening — I was quite young at the time — an older man had stopped me on the street, and he said to me: “Take me with you.” I looked at him, one would say, as befit the circumstances, well, with revulsion. He broke into tears: “Take me with you, no one wants to take me with him.” I wasn’t afraid, for I clearly saw that he was suffocating on the tenderness with which everyone was thrusting him away. I was certain that he wouldn’t harm me, that he had nothing to harm me with. . I wasn’t afraid, I say, and yet I was seized by horror, and I know precisely where it had come from: it was the horror of being infected with misfortune. With his misfortune, for this man was unhappy the way others fall ill. I took to my heels, but he came after me, quietly calling, “Don’t be afraid, you big ninny, don’t be afraid of being unhappy.” But I fled, I fled, for unfortunates like these pose a greater threat to us than Jack the Ripper. In like manner was the unsightly and piteous fear that was confronting and courting me here not my own fear, it was beyond me, without my having actually beheld it; and yet I knew it was here, and I feared it as I would someone with an infectious disease: i.e., its horror.

I remembered that I had been scared in the very same manner already once today, it was just as I was inspecting the dining room and it occurred to me that I was not particularly astonished at the stranger behind the door, and that it wasn’t okay for me not to be astonished. I recoiled at my not feeling horror. Who knows, maybe that’s just the sort of horror that makes us sweat whenever, out of nowhere, we’ve run into ourselves, as I did today when I ran into my apartment; who knows, maybe there is constantly residing within us this sort of unexpected eternal visitation, from which we recoil only when it occurs to us that it’s like we’d been looking the other way all this time. Only we seldom run into ourselves: we rattle the keys, we cough, we drag our feet across the floor, we do what we might so that the thief will make it out the window in the meantime. There’s no merit in being robbed; the merit is in putting up with the sight of the burglar — putting up with him as if he were an old acquaintance.

At last, silence. Utter. It bumped up against one of those sort-of-fleeting rustles that jacks make when raked together, and then it spilled away, silent as a swamp. I identified it immediately, that rustle — it was her amber necklace tossed onto the marble mantelpiece. It, that rustle, was the threshold of voicelessness, but at the same time it was the wake-up call of her presence. It was like the click in a stereopticon just before the photographs are replaced; the “view” replaced by a “view” just as smoothly, fluidly, and with the same almost violent suppleness as with a “peep box,” and no matter that none of the preceding images had announced this one, no matter that there was no precedent for this one among those past, no matter that it had clicked in as if sent down, here it was like something that could not be — it was here as the sole thing that was, indisputably, and upon which one had to gaze: the imagined “fine acquaintances with whom I had returned from the theater” had withdrawn and been replaced by the image of “these two, so strangely familiar.” And the transcendent, unfortunate, solicitous horror, which I (without actually feeling it) caught wind of by feeling my shirt sweaty against my back, was absorbed by the picture called “these two, so strangely familiar,” and faded markedly. — It might have seemed that the phrase “as a graveyard” should follow “silent,” so deep was the silence that followed. But no. Rather, it resembled the silence that washes through an apartment wherein a harmonious family is at its ease. I was pierced with so powerful a sense of intimacy (with those two) that it formed a sweet knot in my throat. A muted light still shone in the living room. From that I judged that those two were not yet asleep; I got a cheery taste for playing host; I went out to them to see whether they needed anything.

When I entered, it struck me that they were both still dressed. That confused me a bit, and my bliss lost some of its depth. Admittedly, they weren’t asleep yet, but they were already nodding off. He was sitting in the armchair under the lamp. I was turned toward him, which is to say he was giving me that face of a goody-goody gourmand, about which I have already spoken, and which reminded me so much of Fuld. His half-open eyes did dampen this impression somewhat, but it was still distinctly there. His head turned a little, his mouth slightly open, and his hands, which he had raised to his head (where they now remained) as if at the height of despair, aroused the impression that he would have long since cried out had it been physically possible for him to have done so (thus entirely different than if this cry were to have appeased his will). Despite this, however, he did not look like he was desperate; amazingly, he didn’t even seem sorrowful. His features rather reflected, as it were, the animal irritation of people whose slumber is hindered by some physical defect. I understood that what ailed him were his upraised hands. I took them and slowly placed them in his lap. He looked up sleepily, with the grateful expression of a child when we’ve gotten him all nice and snug. All this time, then, she had been tensely watching what I was doing, and seeing how attentive I was being to him she smiled understandingly, you might say conspiratorially — with that indulgent superiority of older sisters who know their little brothers’ weaknesses and urge a strange man not to think poorly of them and to indulge them as well. Against expectation, however, the smile ended by plunging into her mouth’s left corner, which twisted. And it was as if this had thrown her into embarrassment: again, that tugging at the skirt, though this time in the manner of a movingly strange gesture. She sought to extricate herself from this new embarrassment, making as if she were awkwardly positioned and looking for a better spot on the sofa. I approached so as to fluff her pillow. As I bent down, I heard at first a whistling, a kind of admonitory rebuke, and right after that, words.

“Take him off my hands! I hate him. Take him off my hands.”

I straightened up, surprised.

“Who?” I eventually muttered.

Was it because she couldn’t stand my gaze? Was it a sign, her averting her eyes? Toward him, it seemed to me. I followed them, and they indeed came to rest on him. I got the sense that she was eyeing us uncomfortably. When I turned again to settle things with her with my eyes, she had already lowered her eyelids again and resembled a young lady who “knows how to sleep.”

I went back to my bedroom to lie down as well. Once there, with one leg already in bed, I suddenly stood up again: all at once it had struck me that I was forgetting something. I thought about it hard. The sole outcome of which was that I arrived at a tautological semblance of a thought: I won’t remember what it was; that is, the thought that “I’ve forgotten something.” Today I write “tautology,” but then, at first glance, it didn’t seem a tautology. Only after I had constructed a rather subtle logical chain from one half-proposition to the next (a chain I’d hardly be able to follow today) did I succeed in satisfying myself with the conclusion that if I am not able to remember something, I therefore must have forgotten something, and only in this was there some hope that I might still recall that thing which I had forgotten. And, as a result, I immediately remembered that something, while also being aware that this was not yet it. That is, I got a flash of a certain act by Grock, the unforgettable king of clowns. He is aping his partner, who, having readied his fiddle, suddenly can’t remember what it was that he’d wanted to play, so he turns, goes to the piano, and leans his elbow against it (his back to the audience), his fist to his chin, assuming the pose of a man struggling to remember.

But this is where I raised my head, having realized that the thing I couldn’t remember was those astonishing, brief, and rash words of the woman as I was fluffing her pillow; with them, then, was the reason they had vanished — the words, that is.

So now I had remembered both those words and the thing that had overshadowed them in my memory: it was a disproportionately large space suffused with a sense of the incompatibility between the sounds by which I had judged that these two had gotten undressed — sounds that I had heard so clearly, so distinctly, and which were surely not mere reminiscence— and the fact that entering the living room I had found both strangers still quite clothed. But having raised my head with that recollection, I was at the same time confronted with the fact that I was sitting at my writing table, that is, with something quite unexpected. He on one side, she on the other. They were now in their pajamas. They were standing faithfully, the way I was just then imagining Grock’s partner. Or no, they had already given up that posture again; but I inferred — I no longer know why — that they had given it up only just before I’d noticed them. And so it was actually as if I had been sleeping and was awakened only by their having given up that posture. Or else they had their fists to their chins the whole time, yet they contorted their faces symmetrically with mine. The smile that was playing on their lips was remarkable for the light it cast on the recent, albeit already buried, past. In this way it also happened that I again recognized, which is to say I caught up with, what had directly preceded this, that is, that I myself had recently settled into the posture of Grock’s partner, and they had crept quietly in and were aping me good-naturedly, until finally, having readied a smile and turned their heads, they inadvertently induced me to look up.

This, however, is where I gave a start, for he spoke.

“What’s that you’re playing with there?” he said.

Far be it from me to say whether I started out of surprise or because he’d caught me at something I’d prefer to keep to myself. For it was only now that I realized that with my right hand I was massaging one of those pliable puppets they sell in the gallery of the Folies Bergère. If their arms were straight along the body, they’d just be nude, but they have them folded behind the head, which makes them naked; and they are so flexible that they gratify even the most lascivious fantasy. One of those dolls rests upon my writing table. That’s her place. Of the reason behind this whim I can say nothing more than that it’s more or less at the antipode of the reasons why others buy them. However, this time I had taken her into my hand unknowingly.

So I gave a start, and I thrust her away. And something so peculiar happened that my astonishment — if that’s what it was — at the stranger’s unexpected words, or my sheepishness at having been caught in so ambiguous a game (if I indeed regretted it), was all at once as if extinguished. It was oddly discreet; it was imperceptible. All around that modestly amazing phenomenon, however, it was as if everything had been piled up to foster the hope that it would bring about some decisive, universally desired answer that had, so far, been hanging in the background. That from this would come an answer to the questions, events, and matters that had arisen so remarkably this evening, and perhaps even an answer to those two, who surely had to know and, in truth, perhaps did (and thus, perhaps, that smile of theirs); everything, I say, turned toward the sound and listened intently to what would follow. I have said that, having been interrupted by the words “what’s that you’re playing with there,” I thrust the young lady aside. Now, these toys are made of a flexible, very soft, yielding material. Imagine that a ball bouncing off a tabletop were to make a sound like that of a heavy, unyielding body. That’s just what the young lady I’d thrust aside sounded like. I was so surprised that I automatically moved to console her — she weighed no more than before, and she was just as yielding to the touch as usual — but dropped her again. Once more, the same bang, like a Browning going off, you might say. I looked up at the strange woman: she was no longer looking at me; she was staring at the table and stroking her brow embarrassedly. I looked up at the strange man: he did not dodge my gaze. But the impish smile fell from his lips. He was still smiling all right, but in a sort of reproachful way, and he was shaking his head as if at a child who’d done something he shouldn’t have, and it’s a wonder he didn’t get hurt. Without taking his eyes off me, he reached for that young lady himself, picked her up, dropped her, fixing me with his stare. Nothing. Not a sound. She fell the way she should.

“What’s that you’re playing with there?” he asked again.

I looked from one to the other, and suddenly it dawned on me that they resembled someone collectively. It wasn’t like they each resembled a third, and therefore each other. It was as if their combined likenesses gave the likeness of a third, someone I knew. It’s only with difficulty that something like this can be imagined, only barely. I, too, raised this objection, quietly, but in doing so I couldn’t overcome the certainty that their features were merging into those of someone who in fact resembled neither him, nor her. Here it was as if something broke down, and I remembered that if I had been late in coming home today, the blame lay in the episode with Mutig, Giggles, and Fuld.

On that day — it was already dusk — I was playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik on the gramophone. The main theme of the rondo inevitably arouses in me the associative image of a happy, carefree, and obstinate boy who does not appreciate the troubles of the grown-ups, whose experience he regards as a horrid and impenetrable nuisance. The adults advise him, they reason with him. He plays innocent and keeps his schemes to himself. But once they’ve quit their sermon and turned their backs to him, walking away smug and high-mannered, he sticks his tongue out at them and goes back to his prattling. And the theme confesses that this boy has not listened to them; he’d kept quiet as long as they’d encouraged him to, but he’d done so only out of a derisive superiority and because he is impatient — had he talked back, the sermon would never have ended. He is happily, carelessly, and obstinately impatient; he’s racing toward the unknown, the menacing “what’s ahead.” This theme is the master key, with it I get through closed doors; it is the ladder to what cannot be believed; and the difficulty by which it unfurls like a vine loses the name of difficulty, and comes to be called desirability.

When the rondo’s theme had returned for the third time, it whispered to me that if I were to wish to see Fuld today, I would see him, I need only try. For a moment earlier I had, in fact, felt a desire to meet with Fuld. (And thus we see that the rondo’s theme is prescient as well.) I dressed and went to find Fuld at a café in Montparnasse. We had arranged nothing. He never went to that café. That’s precisely why I chose it, for I felt like a meeting with Fuld as though with some unlucky star — I mean that, and not with a lucky star — and why make yourself out to be such a star in a place where such a star cannot be? Meeting someone we wish for like an unlucky star must be unlike any other meeting. Or else it’s better not to do it. Fuld, of course, was not at that café. I was neither surprised, nor annoyed. My failure merely inspired me to look for Fuld at a café by the same name on the Champs Elysées. He didn’t go there, either. But I was driving blindly toward Fuld: that is, I had become dependent upon him; in other words, I was proceeding methodically, and the most methodical of all is to proceed in the absurd. It was absurd to look for him in Montparnasse, even more absurd to look for him on the Champs Elysées for no other reason than that he had not been in Montparnasse. Great, then, was my expectation of finding him. It was a certainty. — I hailed a cab.

The taximan, who was already going who-knows-where, veered suddenly from a remarkably dark and quiet street into some artery, strikingly bright and busy. The shift was so jarring that I unintentionally glanced out the window to orient myself. But the motorcar had already come to a stop, and I got out. I was in front of an enormous house with glaringly bright, yet veiled, ground-floor windows. It was a massive house, but, for whatever reason, from the côté cour it gave the impression of a theatrical backdrop. Besides that, it struck me that the bustle on that lively artery was of a nature entirely its own. There were many carriages driving, many people walking. It’s not that their movement was quiet or spectral. The acoustics were not at such odds with the optics. But immediately past its source the din, while quite distinct, was as if sucked away and carried off elsewhere. I had the impression of a waterfall. Or else, the more I looked at the house, the more powerfully it reminded me of a certain house up on Rue Lamarck, just below the Sacré-Coeur Basilica; the whole time it was reminding me of that house more and more, but not for a moment did it lose the certain optical accentuation that marked it as not being that house at all. There’s a tavern there. Steps plunge long and steep from Rue Lamarck down to Rue Muller. I couldn’t see them, but I had no doubt that they were here somewhere, for how else could one explain the waterfall-like din? It is true, of course, that at its higher end Rue Lamarck is quiet and at that hour of evening entirely empty. There was therefore reason to wonder at the unusual movement, but how could I wonder, when my budding amazement was suddenly deflected to an even more worthy phenomenon?

That is, I spotted a shadow on the curtain of one of those ground-floor windows, and I immediately recognized that shadow as belonging to Fuld. Not only did I recognize it, what’s more is that I ascertained Fuld was listening intently to something being said by the silhouette sitting across from him. That was Mutig.

There was nothing particularly unnatural in this. I recognized both shadows (they were conspicuously sharp), since I know both Fuld and Mutig quite well. It was natural, too, that I was also immediately aware that Fuld was listening to Mutig, and that he was listening to him intently and disapprovingly. Which is to say, I have often tempted Fuld into evil. And this shadow corresponded precisely to the posture Fuld assumed when I was seducing him into evil. Meanwhile, I would usually be sitting like Mutig was now, for evil is comfortable; Fuld would be standing. Standing at the table where we had been talking, and leaning his fingers on the table so heavily that they quite buckled. His head would be bent, and you couldn’t get far beyond the tense, gloomily sad expression on his face: something was cooking in there, but what?

Fuld was un incorruptible. We had long been virtually inseparable, so he knew I was a libertine and a waster— “unselective,” he would say. He didn’t hold it against me, never tried to steer me away. He was disinterested, oblivious, and was equally so toward my debts — debts of every kind — when it came time to pay — never so much as a word of encouragement, reproach, consolation, much less a contribution or aid. Beyond that, I wouldn’t dare say anything specific about our relationship. Once or twice, however, it has seemed to me that he couldn’t get by without me. How happy I would have been had I managed to ascribe that clinginess to the simple attachment of friends; but something got in the way. That is, one day I stood at the very cusp of my undoing. It was within his power to save me. And he did actually save me, too — with a rough, curt, almost brutal, unspoken support. Without reprimand, but also without friendly counsel.

Looking at those two familiar shadows, I was suddenly seized — yes, seized — by the certainty that Mutig was seducing Fuld, as I myself had seduced him, and that Fuld was defending himself, but only feebly. What I will now say in brief occurred so quickly that there are no words for it but those that provide a rough approximation. But it nonetheless occurred in time, and in a continuous sequence. I was seeking out a reason behind this certainty of mine (that is, that he was being seduced and was, but feebly, defending himself). And I came to the realization that if I am seeing them both in profile, then they are facing each other. And it crossed my mind (as if for the first time) that whenever I attempted to overcome his supposed virtue, Fuld would always, and without exception, stand so that I could not see him other than in profile. Did he do this deliberately, or did his genius inspire him toward it unwittingly? Might he, too, have been aware of the peculiar conformity of his face, inlaid — were you to view it head-on — with a kind of provocative irony, something like a pledge of potential complicity, and affixed there as a spur toward increasingly arousing and lurid intimacies? Or else was this an unwitting defense of his purity — oh, it was almost angelic — against the treachery of a Satan who fed on that purity like a parasite? Was this treachery rooted on his lips, on his brow, in that semblance of a double chin? That’s immaterial. What perhaps is material is the fact that he always defended himself against me, to whom he had never succumbed, sideways. Head-on, he enticed; in profile, he disarmed. I see his shadow from the street, and actually, much to my surprise, more than his shadow: not profiles traced broadly, dully upon the curtain, but it looked as if they were motionless, though not expressionless, organdy masks. And for Fuld’s profile, there could hardly be anything more depressingly real: this ironic, wickedly lecherous feature with which he — if I am facing him head-on — invites one so perfidiously — might it be born from that ascetic wrinkle, which I know so well, which has been carved by remorseless and unpersuasive tears and, in profile, disarms my seductions? And that chin — which is as if really his own only when he muses over the unfatherly, severe word he would use to refuse and to shame — he was leaning it on two equally bony fingers; and the nose, too proud even to forebear but a hint of stench; and the brow, so sharp as to be a bulwark!

To seduce him while he turns his side toward his seducer — that is, to attempt to break a resistance so uncompromising that it no longer even tries to defend itself — and I, having foundered before that stronghold so impregnable and God knows how dearly bought, am just stewing in my shame, but I can be rather pleased with my defeat. Such is the sovereign power of purity, that it softens even the non-will of an evil that has been repelled. Here, however, he’s being seduced by Mutig, who is facing him. Mutig is not held back by the hieratic mask so much as spurred on by the face of the disgusted debauchee, who resists only in order to tease and egg his tempter on.

Before the theatrical house, a banal parallel with the twin Janus head: who is Fuld? He who resists me so easily that I am not even worthy of his defense, or he who forgets to resist Mutig as well? Mutig’s shadow is comical, tipped far across the table, his slightly outstretched arms gesticulating immediately above it: it’s the shadow of a haggling merchant. — But the shadow lies. Mutig is not funny, Mutig is dangerous.

The shadow only comes off as funny. Mutig is urging Fuld toward evil, and Fuld is putting up only a feeble defense. If Fuld doesn’t get reinforcements, Mutig will crush him; Mutig knows this. And he knows that I see them, that I’ve found the game out, that I might be dashing in. How will he hold me back? Mutig’s shadow makes itself repugnant, foul, and funny. Mutig tells himself that no one is rushing to the aid of Fuld, who faces a shadow so repugnant, foul, and funny. Fuld takes no guff. With a creature whose shadow is repugnant, foul, and funny, Fuld can manage quite well on his own. A ploy, a mere ploy. Mutig doesn’t know how to be repugnant, foul, and funny. He is wily and dangerous. Mutig resembles a doe, beautiful and evil, his shadow is only aping a nasty little hound dog, and doing so deliberately. Mutig! It’s a shadow. But behind the shadow are your dark, somewhat squinty eyes, whose speech your mouth merely seconds. Mutig, how much fortitude you would otherwise have to have for your name not to be an ironic commentary on what you really are.

“Mutig is tempting him toward murder, and Fuld is succumbing,” I cried out, not letting them out of my sight. Fuld succumbs to everyone he faces. He can only resist sideways.

Fuld’s shadow turned. Now that organdy mask was facing me head-on as well. Behind their almost downcast lids, the eyes looked ashamed, flashing with gluttonous whims. The ironic smile was acceding to vice and now only sought the how and where-to-go to hide its consent, and at the same time it regretted being enslaved to its own hypocrisy. And if I didn’t spot Giggles from outside as well, it was because her shadow broke before it reached the curtain; she was standing aloof. When I entered, however, she was the first to hail me. She was standing as straight as a candle, her arms hung down, her little head with its tousled hair twisted slightly to the side — such was her habit — and on her face that fleeting smile of a sorrow whose principal distress was in how to put on that it was a simple smile and nothing more. She was standing there like a puppet they were bargaining over, who knows she’s being bargained over, but does not know how to express it, or cannot. All she knows is fear, a slightly theatrical fear, for she is a puppet who is counting on the fact that, should the worst happen, her famously powerful queen, Puppenfee, will intervene. Giggles spotted me, recognized me, but didn’t stir. Fine; but she smiled, she smiled as though shorthand for her customary “Well, come closer, don’t be shy!”

Giggles likes me, but Mutig, her man, despises me with a simmering disdain. He expressed this in the coquettish crossing of his leg and his affable smile, whose evil and untimely wrinkle he hastily wiped from his lips; he expressed it by laying his hands on the table, as if they were suddenly overcome with boredom. Fuld also made it clear that he had seen me, but only in that he bent his head ever so slightly lower, and his fingers, braced against the table, buckled. His knuckles collapsed and clattered.

All of this was in greeting. Here they were as if on stage, each with his assignment and in his appointed place. They were acting. A new act had begun with my entrance, they had known about it from their past rehearsals, they’d been expecting me. I understood right away that I, too, was acting, and I settled into it quickly. As if at the instruction of an invisible director I headed without hesitation for the far side of the table, where Mutig was sitting at one end, Fuld at the other. Thus I had my back to the window, with Giggles opposite me. She was standing back, but in such a way that one would know that she, too, belonged to the group. I mention this because the four of us were not alone in the place. From my position I had a perfect view. It was a spacious hall, with a vaulted ceiling, at the same time it called to mind a subterranean chapel (I thought of La Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, Assisi, and the Gypsy church in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer), the beer cellars of Munich, and a knightly hall. It would surely have been echoing were it empty, but now it was full of people. They were sitting at white-clothed tables. You might say they were the spectators at the Théâtre des Variétés, with their obligatory refreshment, yet these spectators had agreed not to order anything. For the tables were bare. This gave a solemn impression and was a bit unsettling. They were mainly men. It was as if our table were the stage they’d come to see, but it was apparent they were paying us no mind at all. They spoke, they clamored — literally, the same kind of din as on the street just a moment ago — as if we weren’t there, though I had no doubt that they were mostly talking about us, that they were like the chorus of the play that the four of us were now acting out; that is, they were gesticulating about our every movement, about our every word, though somehow on the sly. It was discreet, and I found it excruciatingly annoying. Those people had a complexion that was at least olive, though often black, but only a few were of a genuinely Negro sort. As it happens, I don’t know how I even arrived at any certainty as to this circumstance, since most of them had a sort of double-sided hood over their head.

What is just now transpiring, and what is soon to come, is a sort of one-off script.

Having described the “auditorium,” I will depict the general situation on the stage. Each of us was, roughly speaking, as if fixed in the position he was occupying when the curtain went up. I don’t know the cause for the relative motionlessness of my fellow actors, but I well know the cause of my own lethargy, which is to say that as soon as I had arrived at my place at the table (I’ve said that I had retired there as if at the instruction of an invisible director), it was clear to me beyond all doubt that I hadn’t so much wound up somewhere as frozen into something. (And I apologize for that frightful, but unavoidable, turn of phrase, which is the only one that fits.) I knew that I was with the other three in a closed system — as if we had grown into a transparent cube, cut off from the ordinary, phenomenal world. The slightest individual attempt at a turn, a step, a movement was in communication with the entire construct, which would then swing (for it was suspended). In other words: we had not been completely deprived of the ability to move, but whatever any of us undertook, his position relative to the others remained unchanged and was as it had been initially, that is, when “I took up my role.” This is just to explain why, for example, I had no luck in seeing Fuld and Mutig other than in profile, and it follows from this finding that these two were invariably face-to-face. — Giggles is no exception: not for a moment did she cease to be that puppet I’d spotted when I came in, a puppet incapable of expressing whether she was suffering or rejoicing, an awfully timid puppet, yet counting on the power of her queen, Puppenfee. All I want is for the reader to picture it like she was constantly, if almost unnoticeably, swaying, like she was charmingly floating, like she was in the grip of some music that no one else but she could hear, though she might not be able to say who was playing it for her, whether it be the words, the atmosphere, or my own unconscious desire. I would want the reader to picture Giggles a bit like a leaf that submits to the will of waves just a hair before it has circled down upon them, perhaps in the naïve hope that they would have mercy upon it for its having “obliged” them.

The supernumeraries — that is, the guests of this sanctuary, which is both a tavern and a knightly hall — won’t let us out of their sight for a moment, though they’re careful not to make a show of it. I don’t know how it was for the other three, but as far as I was concerned that circumstance contributed decisively to the impression that we were acting before what one calls fate, which also likes to pretend that it’s a disinterested observer.

Once I had assumed the place indicated by the invisible director, Mutig — as if issuing an initial rejoinder — grabbed something from the table and tossed it lightly; it fell like a heavy object, let’s call it a Browning; I looked: it was the rubber girl from the Folies-Bergère; it was as if all holes, patches, and stitches.

Mutig:. . were we then to eliminate duration. .

Fuld: Pardon! Let’s be precise: eliminate, or refute it?

Mutig: Eliminate it. As a concept. Naturally, as a concept. By refuting it we would pose the question of its reality, and the question of its reality doesn’t enter into it, for what matters to us, let’s say, is ethics. After all, you understand what negating the concept of duration would mean in an ethical system! Don’t you?

Fuld: Perhaps an effort to furnish responsibility with an alibi?

Mutig: Responsibility! A nasty word, and less than a word: the utilitarian formula of moralists. A hindrance to emancipation.

Fuld: But a concept that does not rule emancipation out.

Mutig: Naturally, for we are opportunists. How does that strike you? To exclude the notion of emancipation from the ethics that is its foundation? Which is therefore the ethics of the strong. Who then take precedence. . Are you laughing?

Fuld: Pardon. On the contrary. That’s just how I look. .

Mutig (tossing his head carelessly): But someone here is laughing. (Which is to say, I had smiled.) Not only is emancipation my right; it is my duty. It is my duty to come into being. (Pause.) Our adversaries don’t understand a whit of our ethics. To them it’s irresponsibility, self-will, the unleashing of a fundamental evil! But we are not evil, we’re just simple. . — Giggles, am I evil?

Giggles: Oh, you and your evil! You’re merely awful.

Mutig: We’ve eliminated duration. First implication: the act has no genealogy. The act is independent of what precedes it; it is free, alone; thus it does not know; it does not diminish. Only he who pays duration no mind can submit to what he encounters unreservedly, can serve it unreservedly. .

Fuld: Serve at this moment. .

Mutig: Naturally, at this moment. (His beautiful hands flickered over his head like white flames.) At this moment, naturally. How then, I ask you, to submit unreservedly, if not to what things there are in this moment, and nowhere else? Where else, if not in this moment, would you seek that which is? — Giggles, aren’t you happy?

Giggles: Oh!

Fuld: Are you really happy, Giggles? Despite. .

Giggles: Oh! Why ask if I am happy? The verb to be is not an auxiliary verb. I say: I am. Simply: I am. I endure.

Mutig: What are you, Giggles?

Giggles: Oh! What does it matter, when I am through you?

Mutig: Which is to say, Giggles is heroic, Fuld, you see? Giggles knows and doesn’t doubt that at every moment I am really entirely what I appear to be at the moment. What more could she ask for?

Fuld: And if at that moment you are really entirely unfaithfulness, repulsion, contempt, hatred?

Mutig: As if it would come to that!

Giggles: Oh, it won’t come to that!

Fuld: Giggles, if he were to loathe you, he would leave you.

Giggles: Oh Fuld, of course. But I am Mrs. Mutig. I cannot and do not wish to be anything but a Mutig. So then why should I gripe if at a given moment Mutig is an unfaithful Mutig — repulsed by me, contemptuous of me, hating me?

Mutig: In short, entirely Mutig. Unspoiled. Giggles has caught on to something that you haven’t. Giggles gets that those who have died away within us will not be resurrected by our sorrow, nor by our pity. Giggles gets that the sole honor we can pay the dead is not to drag them behind us. To bury them quickly. (A loving glance at Giggles.) You see what it means to apply our ethics practically? Giggles, where is the happiness in being loved by me?

Giggles (like a schoolgirl): The happiness in being loved by you is in the certainty that I make allowances for you, and that I fade away.

Mutig (like a teacher testing a good student): What allowances do you make, Giggles?

Giggles: I allow, and in doing so lighten your burden, that you are not omnipotent.

Mutig: Good, Giggles. And if in one moment, if in one moment the only way to ease my burden were — a mere supposition, you understand — to ease it, that is, to deceive it, were only (his words collapsed with a mournful violence) if you, because it’s what I wanted, were to slit your own throat?

Fuld: Let’s say, “If you were to take your own life.”

Mutig (curtly): If you were to slit your own throat. .

Giggles (with a happy laugh, into which there crept a timid horror): Oh!

Fuld (repentantly): A supposition that. . (Faster and faster.) Your suppositions are bloody. Mutig, my dear, too gory for a supposition, too figurative, my friend (and suddenly, as if he’d signed and, under some kind of unfamiliar pressure, automatically appended his initials): my dear friend.

Mutig (professorially, but with a touching, youthful awkwardness): To abstract from duration — and why else would we exclude the concept of duration, if not to proceed practically, as though everything in the given moment were always complete? For you, Fuld, and for a great many others, to abstract from duration would mean to turn irresponsibility toward your maximum life potential.

Fuld: That objection. .

Mutig: You wanted to say that that objection is no objection at all, my dear friend, true? We do not refuse responsibility for our deeds, of course, naturally. We refuse responsibility merely for what we will be in the next moment. Next time.

Fuld: Only that the thing you do next will be a function of what you will be in the next moment. And in that next moment you might be someone who denies responsibility for the consequences of what you just did, when you were different. Therein lies the catch, in my opinion (he said “in my opinion”): for whatever responsibility is, isn’t it responsibility for consequences?

Mutig: My fine friend, we have settled, have we not, that our ethics and our current morality are two separate things. How, then, even in our dreams, could people such as ourselves, living upright, arrive at the thought that we were answerable to someone other than ourselves? Ethics is not the Napoleonic Code. You are perhaps haunted by the idea — allow me to put it like a “man on the street”—that our ethics would not prevent us from leading — as they say — our fellow man unto misfortune, and to leave him lying peacefully on the roadway like a motorist gone mad? It doesn’t stop it. Naturally. — Our interlocutor, for example, is now surely thinking of Giggles. (He turned sharply toward me and was very beautiful.)

Fuld: Naturally.

Mutig: If I say that we do not refuse responsibility for the things we do, this means simply that in the given moment we would consider it a shame to undertake anything so as to evade the natural repercussions of our action.

Fuld: Naturally.

Mutig: At last, then we are agreed! — The only people who can eliminate their regard for duration are those for whom catching fire and living are synonyms, and such people cannot help but eliminate duration. The raison d’être of flame is the verb: to burn; nay, a substantive: that which burns. Is that clear, sir?

I: Giggles!

Mutig: Leave her out of this! Giggles listens to me alone. Don’t bother yourself! She listens to me alone, and only when I address her directly. Otherwise — to her good fortune — she’s deaf. (Expertly.) But since we are speaking of this subject— subject: Giggles — isn’t our ethics a sign of hope for creatures like Giggles; that is, for creatures called upon solely to make allowances?

Fuld (eagerly): Explain. Please, explain.

Mutig: Gladly. Let’s suppose that they’ve died within us. Let’s suppose that Giggles here is, for example, at this moment, dead. Dead within me, that is, for herself and in general. Giggles, who knows me — who has been allowed to know me — won’t say, “Mutig has repudiated me,” so much as. . What will you say, Giggles?

Giggles: I’ll say, “Mutig still hasn’t come back to me,” “Mutig still despises me.”

Mutig (with triumphant glee): Did you catch the nuance? — And what else, Giggles?

Giggles (reciting): Mutig doesn’t know, but he remembers. He remembers that I have made many allowances for him; that I was making allowances as I faded away; that he endured it, and thus he loved me; that there are many creatures that must allow, because that is the law; that there are few creatures that allow as they are fading away, because that is a rare credit; that is to say, he made me this way; that is, I made myself this way out of love; that it is therefore to my credit; that I may therefore give in to the hope that Mutig has not tired of me as his sla—

Mutig (he waved his hand and snuffed out the last word): You’re golden! That will do! (To Fuld:) And do I recall that it wasn’t so long ago that she wanted to jump out a window because I had cast her off? — What did I teach you when you wanted to jump out the window?

Giggles: You taught me that with you there was hope, because you had repudiated the word “forevermore.”

Mutig (he corrects with playful pedantry): Because, taking no account of duration, I make no distinction between “now” and “forevermore.” Inconsequentiality is a great virtue. Inconsequentiality is the holy name of the act without genealogy. — It’s odd, but doesn’t it seem to you that our allegedly cynical ethics is wondrously similar to caritas?

I: Givers of death and life. Depending on whether you accept or reject your loved one as sacrifice.

Mutig: My dear, that’s rhetoric. Just remember how much stock was put in Yahweh finding the sacrifice pleasing.

I: That was God.

Mutig: And we are the givers of life and death; that’s why we set afire; that is, we burn. –

There was a silence. It had the flavor of a prearranged silence. An entr’acte, you’d say, and we were switching the scenery. All at once, and as if on command, the spectators drew fat cigars from their breast pockets and started to smoke. They whispered, pointing their fingers at us, though their heads were turned away. A moment later the expansive space was filled with smoke. I felt a light breeze. The smoke started to accumulate. Bands started to form, they trailed toward Giggles, they circled around, enveloping her like a mummy’s wrappings. Giggles smiled. Then everything went quiet again, the spectators straightened up in their seats, assuming dignified poses; many of them folded their hands in their laps. Thumbs twiddled.

Mutig: Fundamentally evil, that’s what they call us. But what, in point of fact, is the fundamental evil of moralists? Nothing but divine oblivion. That’s just our point: to become oblivious — like God. We unfortunately have far yet to go. — We have so much further to go that we still — still! — are pleased to manufacture proselytes. Candidates for divine oblivion, meanwhile, have a utilitarian craft: they teach altruism. . –

I: You!

Mutig: Giggles understands me. But what is this understanding? She has the key. But turning it — eh? — that’s something else. Giggles is a teachable pupil. Giggles knows, for example, that the loss of love need not be fatal. Giggles understands why I refute duration.

Fuld: Was that a slip? You don’t refute duration, you exclude its potential. If I’ve heard you right. You exclude, you don’t refute.

Mutig was taken aback, he glanced among the spectators, he greeted them here and there with an actor’s venal smile. Then he scowled like a shamefaced sham-artist, jolted himself, turned to Fuld, and covered his mouth theatrically with his hand the way a simpleton does.

“Did I say that I exclude it?” he posed at last.

His hand shifted slowly from his mouth to his temple; Mutig rested his head and contemplated; when he emerged, a peculiar smile emerged as well; it proceeded impudently across his lips; his hand collapsed inertly on the table. Mutig looked up.

“No! Not exclude. Refute,” he said. (To Giggles, casually:) “And why do I refute?”

Giggles: You refute so as to learn to live without support.

Mutig: That’s it! — And now, please, if you can, square this circle: Giggles gets that one must do away with supports, and Giggles cannot imagine how she could live without holding on to at least one support.

Fuld: Which? Come on, which?

Mutig: It’s all the same which. She needs, let’s say, your respect. Only yesterday she said to me, “Oh, you know, so long as Fuld thinks I’m merely a wretch, and not damned, I haven’t lost everything.”

I glanced over at Fuld, more or less the way Horatio looked at the fratricide gnawing away at Hamlet’s plot. What was I to do! Fuld’s deep wrinkle, I alone could see it from where I was, how it thirsted for sparkly tears, whereas Fuld had forgotten his tears long since. Yet what provocative trigger might Mutig have spotted for him to exclaim so triumphantly:

“But this is what I said to her! This is what I said to her: ‘Is that what you’re counting on?’”

Fuld (in a voice bolstered by his guardian angels, drawing on their last strength): You had no right to that. You lied. — Why did you lie?

Mutig: Because I can’t forget that she was dear to me. Because I want her to be strong — like me. Because I have a duty toward her: you see how little I’m able to forget still. We — myself and those like me — of course we’ll manage to live without support; we rank, however, among the chiefs. But not yet as strict as we’d need to be, not yet as oblivious as our duty would have it. We still — still! — look after even those whose destiny was fulfilled by our having exploited them; we still look down on them later, too, when they’ve served their purpose, when we’ve already cast them away again; we look down on them; we shouldn’t. Imagine it, Fuld: I, for example, would honestly wish that Giggles, too, if only Giggles, could live without support. I’m conducting a dangerous experiment, I know that. But it’s necessary. — Giggles is so very miserable, you know!

Fuld: Have you lost your mind?

Mutig: But I’ve already told you that she doesn’t hear unless I am addressing her directly. . Giggles is so very miserable, you know, and if you were to snatch the very last support from under her. .

Fuld (in a voice that sobbed with a cowardice that had revealed itself as wicked): Come, Mutig, a man of your caliber doesn’t mess around with logomachy, does he? Are you forgetting that there is truth, eternal truth? What would be the point in saying I’ve lost my respect for it when I haven’t?

Mutig (with a slowness so willful that what he was saying was more visible than audible: a boa uncoiling into an entrancing slide): But you have lost your respect for it! And how could you esteem a dame who’d just as well “slit her throat” for me, though she knows that to us she’s lower than a footwrap?

Fuld: To all of you?

Giggles: I hear you, my dear, I hear you. Have you erred, since I hear when I shouldn’t hear? Oh my dear, oh my dear, don’t make such cruel jokes.

Fuld (leaning over the table and speaking as if he were reading an invisible inscription there): Giggles, who shouldn’t hear, hears. Giggles, who shouldn’t suffer, does.

Mutig: But she doesn’t hear, it only seems that she does. — Less than a footwrap — to all of us, to all of us, to us who are the meaning of her life, as she says, you know? (Quieter and quieter, and leaning so far across the table that he touches it with his chest): We are having such a beautiful game with her — an innocent game — for her benefit, you know! Voulez-vous jouer avec moi?

What will come next is con sordino. It’s a potpourri of what I know and what I saw, a potpourri con sordino. — A new and dizzyingly rapid change of scenery. The spectators, all of them together, have quietly stood and are leaving in a slow and orderly fashion. At the exit, spectacular demonstrations of courtesy. The hall has emptied out. The air is suffused with ozone. It is no longer so much a hall as a spacious room. It is empty, and a low stool, like that of a shoemaker, has been brought into the middle. There’s a blackamoor sitting on it. He’s almost squatting, his knees spread wide. His teeth are shining, he’s giggling quietly.

Mutig: For her benefit, you know, however much it may seem otherwise: for this game, one might say, is cruel.

At these words, the black man has stood. He’s picked up the stool, he’s moved over. He’s stood next to Mutig — giggling like that all the while — he’s put the stool down, but he hasn’t sat on it again. Mutig puts his arm around his neck like a buddy, and in a tone of light conversation:

“Giggles! What she really is is a corpse, you know. And I can’t drag a corpse through life. It disgusts me, and she terrifies me. And anyway, there are better things to work at than dragging corpses. I have better things to say, by which I of course mean vanities merely of a more splendid variety. — What, she doesn’t quite strike you as a corpse? Then you still don’t know everything. You couldn’t imagine how we treat her, my friends and I. She doesn’t even react anymore. That is, she reacts in her own way: she interprets our scorn merely as a difficult test she’s being put through. Perhaps it really was just a test at first. Not something she was supposed to suffer, the dummy. She was supposed to hold herself high. A test we’ve consented to — oh, the little lamb! — a test we’ve consented to becomes irrevocable, eternal; it solidifies. It’s the solid eternal (now you understand why I refute eternity?), an eternal that is more and more solid. Giggles had nothing left, nothing. We stripped her of everything. That is. . There was one support, one hope. Just one. — As I told you: ‘As long as Fuld doesn’t think I’m damned. .’ Are you beginning to understand what I need you for?”

Fuld: I’m hardly a professional killer, am I?

Mutig: And who says that it’s therefore inevitably you who’ll do the killing?

Fuld: If she’s crossed you so bad, you’ll knock her off. Knocking someone off! It’s not so hard. (Hastily.) Are you a Christian? It’s not like you’re a Christian, is it? So then why the pussyfooting around the people we’ve put a button on? You’re too noble. She’s dead, so she’s foul. But you, Mutig, are disproving yourself by remembering; you remember that this dead girl was living through you, right? You don’t want her to be foul, or a dead girl, either. Aren’t you looking for a way to provide her with an opening for rehabilitation? Because she’s your dead girl, right? Killed by you, right? You’re not perfect yet, Mutig, you really aren’t.

Mutig: Oh, you’re a sharp one! Yes, it’s a matter of her rehabilitation. I’m not pretending to be better than I am. Maybe I want it out of cynicism — her rehabilitation, that is — so I wouldn’t have to feel ashamed that I ever mistook a woman capable of falling so low as worthy of myself. Take all of her hope, including the last she has left, her hope in you, and she’d gain her freedom — get it? Do you follow me? Then there wouldn’t be anything left to hold her back, there would no longer be anything to use as a pretext for tolerating a scorn so difficult and (in a whisper) eternal! Maybe then she would be rehabilitated again in our eyes; maybe she would be truly happy again. — You see, my friend, it’s actually for her that I’m praying. If only she could react not in her own way, but the way we, her alleged gods, expect her to!

Fuld (a long time before he responds): React. — Sure. . react. — Just what do you mean by that?

“I don’t know exactly,” Mutig answered lazily and somehow affectionately, “I don’t know. Maybe that — seeing how it’s the end of everything, everything — maybe that she’d leave— that she’d retire — move on to greener pastures.”

Fuld (with a focus that, after sort of roaming long and tenderly, suddenly reared its head): To greener pastures? — To greener pastures. (With feigned joy at having solved a tough riddle:) That she would leave you? She, you?!

Mutig (to the blackamoor, to his face): Yes, that she’d leave me.

Fuld: In other words, you want to win, but through defeat. What a stoic!

Mutig: A stoic! — Oh, to greener pastures — but you know.

Fuld (quiet, he looks askance).

Mutig (affably): Naturally. — Giggles is lower than a footwrap. Imagine, for example, that she were killed. She’d be rehabilitated by it.

Fuld (slowly and reflectively): But does Giggles’s death matter. . She can’t hear us, right?

Hardly had Mutig given an offhand “But of course she can’t hear us” when he jumped up: “What now, Giggles, have you lost your mind?”

Giggles’s head had fallen to her chest, an invisible hand had swept the life from her little face, but it forgot to do away with the smile. Giggles collapsed. But Mutig took her and set her on her feet like an ill-supported doll.

Fuld (continuing as he watched with indifferent attention): If Giggles’s death is up to me, then what’s there for you to brag about?

“Pardon me, sir,” Mutig replied with an imperious smile, “but all the same, we who now struggle are but five. My friends and I. We are not so petty as you think. The power over lives is indivisible, a sixth is like the whole. Is that not enough for you?”

“How do you proceed?” Fuld asked, as it were, expertly.

Mutig’s hand pondered for a moment. Then slowly, like a leopard, it started to stalk across the table. It was the genuine stalking of a leopard ready to pounce, and then it did. And once it did, it darted. Mutig’s clenched fist was its maw, and in that maw — a rubber puppet; vertically, terribly. — But Mutig’s mouth, slack, pronounced: “Jettatura.”

“Jettatura,” the Negro repeated, eyeing the puppet closely, as if spying its sclera. He and Mutig turned fully toward each other, embraced like old friends, and the word “Jettatura!” which they spoke to each other’s faces, drained the color from their cheeks and the lips that had pronounced this word, as if in doing so they’d forever lost all memory of what it was to smile.

“Don’t think me crazy, Fuld. We had no wish to enchant by black-magic practices, though there might have been something of black magic there. Our aim was for a pure result, from our non-occult powers. This doll here? A mere record of our achievements, let’s say. A sort of book of work to be done as well: we have committed to demolishing every single part. So let’s get down to work, and no excuses, right? — I’ll explain it to you. — Here, for example, we have the eyes. They’re transfixed. Why are they transfixed? Because there’s no point anymore. Because they’ve lost their power. Giggles’s poor eyes! To think how they once reigned. — At the time of our first love, they were promise-grateful. There’s no other way I can put it: promise-grateful. You would have sworn they couldn’t give enough, and that in their thanksgiving there would forever gleam a spark of agitated regret at not having expressed all there was. They were steadfast in their promises, these eyes, defiant and proud in their gratitude. Already back then, this runaway figurante from the Folies-Bèrgere could see she was heading for disaster, but she saw it with such steady rage that the horror passed her by. — Fine. After our second love, too, they were drowning in iridescent fluid, and they were promising, and they were giving thanks. They were honest in their promises, but like a banker before a no-fault bankruptcy, when he doesn’t know whether he’ll actually be able to keep them. They were recalling the defiant and insane promise from before, they were comparing, they were realizing, they were calculating the possibilities and my insatiable demands. They were trying to look honest, which is why they looked stupid. And they gave thanks. But sometimes one gives thanks because it’s shameful to beg. I might have overlooked that if, after our third, they weren’t just pleading. I didn’t yet suspect that I was already her master, and her pleadingly grateful eyes now gave her away. After the fourth, she disbanded all her armies; but what did she have to begin with? Words are a dame’s reserves, but they can’t manage them. She said — I’m ashamed to repeat it, it was so banal — she said: ‘I can’t live without you.’ And that’s how people dig their own graves! I’ll explain it to you. It had evolved into a game — evil, innocent, I don’t know, but it had dropped right into our lap. People accuse us of hatching a plan to drive her methodically to suicide. A laugh.

“I’ll explain it to you. One day we’re sitting — Andrew, Paul, John, Peter, and I, you know we’re like brothers, which is to say we’re predestined for each other — a quintipartite singularity. We’re sitting one day, it’s getting dark; we blend, so that we’ve already lost the sense of physical distinctness; that’s how it falls when the gloved hand of evening holds the reigns, as it were, of five minds running together; we were quiet for a long time, and in the silence there slowly hatched the thing we’d all been thinking of; I had a good sense that it had to be christened, and I knew its name: The Story of Giggles’s Eyes. I started The Story of Giggles’s Eyes; we got into a rhythm; they kept me going, God knows how, maybe by the way the others stretched, the way they shifted in their seats. When I got to the words ‘I can’t live without you,’ to me they sounded not like they were mine, but rather as if Giggles was saying them, and saying them as if she were pronouncing sentence on herself.

“‘I can’t live without you’: banal words, you hear them a hundred times a day, but you know how it is with banalities, a hundred times they’re nothing, the hundred-and-first will open up suddenly, God knows why, and they’re full of meaning. — Was it the light, or something else? In short, barely had I said ‘I can’t live without you’—we were sitting in a circle — than we caught each other’s gazes; our gazes locked at a single point, and so precisely that it made a spark. — We were a circle, and its center was a spark. Was it perhaps our collective thought? If it was a collective thought, we belonged to it, not it to us. We didn’t make a peep, not then, not any time before, not after. Was it this quintipartite thought that had popped out and made the spark? The center was shining brighter than ideas usually gleam. Was it something else, then? What?”

Fuld: What? (And a jousting of thousands of words rushed into that “What?” and shattered within it.)

Mutig: Hold on. That’s not what’s important. — Andrew was playing with this puppet. This one here. Do you see it? (Mutig lifted it and showed it around.) He sat it prettily on his knees, and just like that: he plucked out its eyes. God knows where he got the nail from.

“It’s blind,” he said.

Mutig leaped up: “Giggles, now what are you doing?”

Which is to say that Giggles had shouted “Jettatura” and toppled over again.

“So then why did you promise that you’d be smart, Giggles? What kind of way is that to behave? As if you’d been listening in the first place. Party-pooper! As if you haven’t known all along that nothing is going to change.”

Giggles now resembled a doll so perfectly that I really couldn’t tell. . Mutig grabbed her — she was as though in two pieces, and sagged across his arm — he sat at the table with her and caressed her.

“I’ll keep you on my lap. Just like at home, when we have our little doll lessons: what does the cross over the mouth mean? what does the dimple in the little forehead mean? etc.”

The Negro was caressing her from the other side. Giggles was tearing up, and she said, “I’m not blind. I see you just fine.” (Giggles was tearing up, yet there were no tears in her voice.)

“But you don’t perceive,” Mutig added gently.

“Oh, I know, I know.”

Mutig continued, “That’s all there was from Andrew, ‘She’ll go blind,’ he plucked out her eyes and passed her to Paul. ‘She’ll go dumb,’ Paul said — the cross over the lips — and passed her to John. ‘She won’t figure things out,’ said John— the dimple in her brow — and ‘she won’t stumble upon things,’ Peter added, slashing the ever-so-beautifully-curved shoulders beneath her little head.”

Mutig adjusted Giggles comfortably on his knees with the lovingly worn-out motion of mothers whose laps have fallen asleep beneath their tike. For a moment he seemed to be looking for something, after which he turned, half-jokingly, half-imploringly, to the blackamoor. “How about we just show him?”

The blackamoor puffed out his chest and bared his teeth. It was a broad, strapping chest, a real cabinet, something like a wire manger that the flame of an oil lamp had given a blondish cast. A canvas banner from edge to edge, and in big letters: GIGGLES: BEGONE. This stage was so exceedingly “like it was real” that it was poking fun at reality. Never before have I seen a more dastardly caricature: imitating slavishly, it exaggerated. The stage cynically represented a sincere salon. In the foreground, on the tall cushion of a pouf, sat Giggles. She was looking in such a way that one glance would tell you she was calling for heavenly aid. She was making an effort at the casual and fetching smiles that bloomed so naturally on the carmine lips of dames who know how to pass by. (For there were a lot of dames in there.) But the smiles she attempted were falling into her lap like tears. She kept producing more and more; they didn’t want to hold. The salon was bustling. The men were standing in groups and debating. There were clean-shaven youths with lacquered hair, their fresh faces betraying what they would be when the time came for their beards to sprout; and there were bearded men with disheveled coifs whose whole dignity lay in their self-righteous whiskers. They all hated each other; thus they all agreed. The dames, with that casual and fetching smile, passed from group to group and stopped briefly at each. They’d stop, their gazes wandering somewhere where they could not see, and having thus trespassed they’d walk away; promises of assignations remained after them, and the group was momentarily enfrothed and without airs; soon, however, the brows furrowed again, the furrows converged into clouds, and the men hated each other again, a bit more grimly, agreeing still more harmoniously than before. — Across from Giggles sat Paul. Giggles was reasoning with him insistently. The talk was flowing, but it wasn’t making a dent on Paul. He walked it dry-shod, like the Jews through the Red Sea. Giggles knew it; Giggles didn’t want to know it. Still, once she’d managed to penetrate Paul’s eyes, she hunted for a place where she could drop anchor, and there she posed some anxious question. But the eyes were not listening. Paul turned to the redhead beside him and spoke with her quite respectfully; behind this respect there cowered an old tryst. Again, Giggles started to speak. Now, Paul didn’t let her out of his sight. His affable smile hissed like a spiteful verdict. Giggles finished her question even more timidly than she’d started. Paul took this question cautiously, but he didn’t answer. He carried it to the redhead next to him; he reshaped Giggles’s anxiety into a gallant ritornello and placed it at his neighbor’s feet. She promised him something with a long look, and Paul returned to Giggles. He returned with an inquisitive look that placed too much emphasis on the lie that his attention and engagement had not wavered, not for a moment. Giggles went on, urging him still, and finished with her hand resting timidly on Paul’s shoulder. Paul endured Giggles’s gaze for a long time. Now — now it seemed he would answer her amiably, but here, with a phosphorescent jibe, he let slip that his was the gaze of an executioner. His eyes, looking somewhere toward Giggles’s horror, were chanting that Giggles saw nothing at all, that Giggles heard nothing at all. Then Paul gently freed himself from Giggles’s hand, rose, and moved away. It was like a tragicomic caricature of a fair judge— lo that he leaves with heart asunder — that his higher sort of fairness always prohibited him from heeding the distress of the condemned man writhing at his feet.

“Because she’d let herself go, because she was staring so,” Mutig stressed mournfully, and the palm of his hand slid down the blackamoor’s chest, in which things went dark. But he immediately brought up the lights again.

He presented the moribund backroom of a suburban tavern. At one table sat Giggles. She sat there mournfully and was smiling indescribably. Across from her, John. They were eating with broken-tined forks and nicked knives; they ate from chipped plates. “Why hasn’t Mutig arrived?” Giggles asked. — She spoke with that light conversational tone that, like a somnambulist, heads straight for the trap of sobs where she will drown. John swallowed a morsel and smiled. The smile of a bearer of bad news who is ashamed at being just that. “Have you seen Mutig?” Giggles asked. “I have,” John said, smiling the whole time. “Is he coming?” “He can’t,” John said, going stern. To himself he was saying: Let’s drop the friendly mask. Giggles leaned in slightly. Warmly: “I don’t know what it is, John, it seems as if my life were drifting away from me on the sly. I feel like it already did a long time ago. What do you say to that?” — John’s gaze transformed into a noose; he took it and tossed it at her anxiously. “Perhaps,” he said. — “You think so? Maybe you didn’t understand?” — “I understood perfectly,” said John. — “What do you think?” — John let it out with a discomfiture that only Giggles believed. — “Nothing. Life is drifting away from us all. . That’s the standard fate of mankind.” — “John,” she pronounced, almost inaudibly, “so what do you think for real, that I’ve gone mad? So why are you steering me away from a truth that I feel?” — “But I’m not steering you away from anything,” John said with strained compassion.

“Why did she let herself go? Why was she staring so?” Mutig spoke with mournful emphasis, and his hand slid down the blackamoor’s chest, whereupon it went dark.

But the lights came right back up.

The stage as in the first image, but with a partition dividing it in two. One could see Mutig, Andrew, Paul, John, Peter, two ladies with unobligatory, fetching smiles. Giggles was there as well. She was standing as if in shame, off to the side. The seven were having a lively discussion. They were speaking as if they were stenographers: each word a chapter heading, and even their most fleeting glances were crammed with as much content as there was in an instant of dreaming. They were a gathering of the enlightened. But behind their mirth, their laughter, their gestures and words, there stretched a sardonic line, like periods at the ends of incomplete sentences. None of these seven was evil, but the sum of their kindnesses came to grudgingness. But who among them minded? I sought it in their eyes. Giggles’s were filled with a skittish, guilty conscience. The group coiled into a knot, hardening so much, by all appearances, that it held their irritation in check; some unwelcome presence was irritating the group, the way a wet diaper irritates a small child; it didn’t know how to acquit itself of this oppression; it tried by exuding a grudging scorn. Thus was the atmosphere poisoned. Giggles was forced to breathe it in. It corrupted her blood; the corrupted blood budded upon her in the form of an unattractive case of ringworm. Giggles was becoming more and more dilapidated because of it, and she was eventually so wretched that even I was disgusted. — Finally, Andrew broke off from the group, crossed the partition, and retired to the rear half of the stage. There he found some kind of album and started turning its pages mechanically. After a moment he called out, “John, this is interesting.” This was a ploy; it reeked like burning sulfur. John went to join him. Now they were looking together, with mournful disinterest; the sulfur burned on. John approached the doorframe. “Renée, have you seen this?” Renée looked up with such nonchalance that it wafted of an unfulfilled contract. She looked up silently, with prearranged surprise. Now there were three in the back half. They formed an embryo of a group, blithe and aggressive. The mass in the front half, dealt a mortal blow, was rotting. It held on, but it was done for. It was waiting for the signal to fall to pieces. The only point of its holding on now was the draw of the embryo expanding in the back. “Paul,” Renée called at last. Paul left, withdrawing as though on guard. The group behind the partition swelled, it swelled with a lively will to harm that alien thing still standing in its way. It was smothering it: Giggles was somehow shrinking the whole time; she was less and less a nuisance; the group sensed it; the group was suffused with a satiated hatred and was rejuvenated by it. In front of the partition there were now only individuals. They were wracked with nostalgia. Their eyes wandered back behind the partition. They stole away, they trailed off: Peter, then Giselle, looking back like thieves. They leaped through the partition’s breach as though from a burning house into a safety net. — In front there were now only Mutig and what was left of Giggles. Mutig picked up some bibelot and was weighing it in his hand. He said, without looking up, “Giggles, if you’d like, today you can sleep with me.” — He served her the word today as if on a golden platter. “Of course,” Giggles said; something jerked her hard; she went to the window; she leaned her head against it. Mutig looked up sadly, and upon noticing that Giggles was not looking, his guilty face brightened; now he’s stealing off on tiptoe toward the others. — Giggles has turned around. — She sees she’s alone; she’s waiting for them to call for her. Nothing. — Past the partition, past the divide, the group is regenerated. It is complete. Is anyone missing? Anything? — Nothing and no one. The group is pleased with Giggles’s regret, it feeds on it, it suits it. The group becomes aware of having a raison d’être: it is; therefore, it is against someone. It is happy. — Here and there, a sidelong glance at Giggles. Giggles waits. Nothing. Nothing. Finally, she is plucking up the courage: two steps forward, one back; again; and about face; again. . Now she, too, is at the partition. She proceeds quickly, like across a blazing line of fire, and stealthily, like a leper. — A moment. The conversation dies down. Andrew has broken off and is moving forward across the partition.

“Enough, that will do,” Mutig announced impatiently, “why did she let herself go, why was she staring so?” And the chest went dark.

But the lights came right back up.

But this time one needed to strain one’s eyes, for it was only a false twilight. There was a sort of torture chamber. Five friends sitting on low stools formed a circle. In the middle: Giggles. No one spoke. Nothing. Nor any movement. And unrest germinated. They turned quizzically toward one another. Their gazes wandered, and they all strayed toward Mutig’s face. There they found the answer to some enigmatic “why,” knowing only that it was because of him that there was this wedge of awkward oppression that had slowly inserted itself among them. There they found the answer, and they immediately cheered up, for they learned that they were headed for something that would be ritually decisive. Mutig consented mutely beneath their convergent eyes. Giggles noticed this, and she attempted a kind of very moving gesture whose purpose I did not ascertain. But an attempt it remained. The five friends stood. All at once. Giggles sat down obediently on one of the now-empty stools, raised her head, turned it back slightly. All of this had an air of carefully contrived ceremony, yet above it there dwelled an accent of tragic improvisation, so much so that there was a chill. It was a comedy that had imprudently crossed a forbidden limit and become something real, somehow, as real as catastrophe. They withdrew, except for Andrew, who came forward. “If you think,” he said. “. . If she wants,” Mutig elaborated. Andrew blinded Giggles.

“Why was she letting herself go? Why was she staring so?” exclaimed Mutig — exclaimed Mutig with mournful emphasis — and this half-light, too, went out in the blackamoor’s chest. But the lights came right back up.

The stage as in the first scene. No one, however, except the five friends. They were dejected.

“How did we ever come to this?” Andrew asked, staring gloomily at the ground.

“Why was she letting herself go? Why was she staring so?” Mutig asked despondently — not this Mutig at the table, but rather the one in the blackamoor’s chest. Peter stood and placed a brotherly hand on his shoulder.

“Let’s be more humane. We’ll let her go. We’ll give her her freedom.”

“She doesn’t want it!” Mutig blurted, almost desperately.

“It’s kind of sad, being someone’s god.” (This was Paul.)

Andrew stood; he took a sure step toward Mutig and, harshly: “And if she did. Now that she’s ours. . How would you set that up?”

“I don’t know. How would you?”

“It’s so seductive, being a god,” they answered as a single voice.

“Enough,” Mutig exclaimed, and the lights went down in the blackamoor’s chest.

“I never told you,” he continued, “that we didn’t ever reach a resolution, did I? Is a game without rules still a game? Isn’t it rather fate? Why was she letting herself go, why was she staring so?”

“And what part of her were you supposed to demolish?” Fuld inquired, eagerly borrowing from Mutig’s naïve terminology and covering for his own servility, of which he was ashamed, with an insincere, ironic tone.

“Actually, there’s nothing left for me. I was merely a place, the burning bush where. .”

I: “. . God gave his orders. .”

Mutig: “So be it. — And if you like, just think that I’m saying this out of foolish pride.”

Fuld: “There’s nothing left for you, but to me, who is only the sixth, you offer a portion anyway?”

Mutig looked up, amazed.

“A misunderstanding,” he said, like someone who has noted that his speech was in vain. “Or do you assume that we would have worked her over so hard—the five of us — if we hadn’t recognized her as damned?”

“Well then, if she’s damned. .”

“Of course she’s damned — but she has to agree to it, she has to consent to it. Only then can she still be helped; for let us not forget, please, that this is actually for her own good. Pay close attention: she can’t not agree to her own blinding, for she looks up to god, that is, to us, in vain; she can’t not agree to her dumbness, for we do not answer her; she can’t come to terms, for how could such an incorrigible simpleton comprehend that the worst outcasts are the outcasts whom no one is driving away! That one might not be driven away, but is still excluded? She won’t get there, for a god’s wrath proceeds without leaving any footprints.”

“God’s wrath?”

“Ours. . —”

“I hear, I hear,” Giggles choked, but she was choking without tears.

“Is she unhappy? Is she ever! But she presumes she’s innocent. One can live a long life that way, and quite tolerably. So then how would she guess that there are hangmen who perform their executions — how to put this? — who perform their executions cleanly? Who have no need to clear their conscience under the pretext that the condemned man deserved it? They don’t execute him because he’s wicked; he’s wicked because they execute him. She won’t figure this out, no way, but if you rub her nose in it — pardon my putting it this way — what choice will she have but to believe that it is so? But this is why she loves me! Gifting evil to our loved ones does not spur them; it doesn’t seem clean; it smacks of denatured vengeance; but she did not, does not, love you with love. Were you to exile her as well. . You, her last hope, I want to say, the last impediment to her rehabilitation. . Look, here’s a little pin. This won’t hurt much. There. . in her left breast. As a sign that Giggles deserved it, because she’s wicked.”

“She doesn’t hear you?” Fuld asked, leaning in.

“But of course she hears me. So what?” And after a brief silence, “It was you who guaranteed that she would, just a moment ago.”

“I’m the one who guaranteed it?”

“Remember, after all, those pastures. That the only thing she really wants is to withdraw to those pastures — liberated.”

“You were saying that she heard us,” Fuld spoke calculatedly.

“Certainly. And so what? Would you boast of being a gentle executioner?”

“That’s not the point. — But if she hears us, she knows you’ve been leading me astray. Let’s assume that I really do think she’s wicked. If she’s heard you leading me astray, she might think that I’m doing it for payment; for example, because I feel like that sixth part. .”

“What sixth part?”

“Of the power over life and death.”

“Giggles,” Mutig said, turning to that almost-puppet (the Negro had not stopped stroking her hair). “Giggles, do you think that Fuld is two-faced?”

“Fuld, two-faced!”

She sat upright, exerting herself fully, and threw her arms around his neck.

“Giggles,” Mutig said to her jovially, “you don’t really believe that you deserved it, if we’ve treated you so poorly? We! Us!”

“I do.”

“If you disgust us, if you look stupid, worthy of our scorn; if we deceive you, make a fool of you; if we no longer want anything to do with you. . Do you think you deserve it?”

“I do. I’ve earned it with my stupidity, my ineptitude, my pride, my prickliness. .”

“With your wickedness, you strumpet, with your wickedness.”

“Oh no, not with wickedness. How could I love you. . despite everything, if I were wicked? Fuld, am I wicked?”

“Um. .”

“Um. . oh, she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get that wicked is not a synonym for bad. She doesn’t get that to be condemned to love the way she loves is a curse. She doesn’t know— Giggles — she doesn’t know that there is also a wickedness free of blame. The basest of all.

“Redeem her,” and he made a show of handing Fuld the doll.

“Unhappiness is demoralizing, a plague. I cannot stand to look at unhappiness,” Fuld said suddenly, he said it very quickly, and his eyes were popping out at Giggles, as if he were trying, albeit in vain, to take her in visually, as if the span of his universe had suddenly become Giggles, and Giggles alone.

He was looking at Giggles; he was looking at her so extortively that he finally wrested a smile out of her; he was like Job, smiling with the hope that showered upon him, though he knew it was in vain; the smile of a child who dreads a blow that has already fallen, but who, even afterwards, doesn’t let go of the naïve hope for the miracle that would divert that blow from its course. It was a smile that burst through dread ten times every second, though it was restored each time.

Fuld’s posture, which hadn’t changed for a moment since my arrival, was only now reminding me of something. It struck me, that is to say, it struck me as a yelp in the darkness. It struck me that Fuld’s posture was the standard posture of an examining magistrate, it was so pure in its curiosity that you didn’t know whether it had turned sadistic or was merely stern. That’s the posture. But the face, which, try as I might, I could not manage to glimpse but precisely in profile — oh, that face, sorrowful, for real, unto death! — when it was then lit up by the words: Giggles, might I shoulder the rest of your burden?

And the hand of that sadistic examining magistrate with the redemptive face slides slowly along the rubber doll that Mutig is languorously proffering. And toward that hand another is sliding, Giggles’s—: it is holding a fancy needle plucked from the little bonnet (she’d fished it out so smoothly, as if merely fixing a mischievous lock of hair), and behind this needle there creeps an untrusting, almost playful, oft-disrupted and reconstituted smile, dragging along three heavy words: “With what, then?”

In the meantime, the auditorium had filled up again, I don’t know how. The members of the audience sprawled comfortably in their seats; there wasn’t a piehole not gnawing a thick twist packed into the corner of the mouth. Before me, in neat rows, hordes of eyes snooped over my head. No! It’s a single eye: the eye of a fly. I see myself in it, multiplied, but is it actually me? It looks like me, I’m that I, yet somehow topsy-turvy. It’s my worry, it’s my regret, I’m buffeted by a “now or never,” and my teeth are chattering, but the answer I get from the fly’s eye is a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen (for the most part me, topsy-turvy), and it convinces me it’s my mistake, that there is no worry, no regret, no caritas, nothing but the curiosity to see multiplied to the point of inhumanity, to see what this almost redemptive profile of Fuld’s would give us were we to see it from the front. This curiosity grows and grows, it’s already too great, I can’t handle it, I see it, it’s sprung forth from me like a finger puppet from a magician’s box, it has the eye of a fly. It sways on a wavering nudge, it sways forward, back. It has the knavish smile of a scoundrel who’s nicked the wire beneath the acrobat and is delightedly awaiting the consequences; the short, splayed paws of a welcoming little devil from limbo, along with his wicked joviality. He knows he’s bewitched me. He knows, and he’s smiling. He sways more and more, he smiles less and less. And having reached full tilt, he has stretched his arms out like a happy little jester getting into a tangle with a gendarme; the smiling was done; in the fly’s eye, now so near, a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen paralyzed by a curiosity that has no name. The nasty biceps of outrageous weightlifters sprouted behind the short paws: curiosity, as burly as a drunken stock-boy, jolted me. Something twanged, crunched, and creaked beneath my feet; I fell on something; for a moment it put up a rough resistance, but all of a sudden it went slack and yielded disgustingly; something awkwardly jagged was left in my arms. The blackamoor vanished; Mutig, livid with furious regret, stood back and carefully examined his lacerated hands; in my arms — Giggles. Facing me head on, however, and, as always, in the posture of a sadistic examining magistrate— Fuld. Fuld? No; something hideous; an expansive, sweet-toothed grimace, like that of someone inexpressibly good trying to polish off everything but his smile, someone as though barely a shadow, who, having realized the pointlessness in due course, has fled, covering his face and bidding me toward this empty disharmony.

“Are you nuts? Who gave you the right?” I tore the rubber puppet away from him and hurled it far, far away.

Fuld dropped his head to the table; a trio of sobs, then silence; tears rolled like peas from Mutig’s eyes; they left an emptiness, and a grief whose way had been barred till now took up residence in that emptiness; hesitantly at first, but soon in an impatient stampede, like a startled herd. In long processions. Giggles’s arms slid from my neck; she snapped and hung down across my own; the glass shards beneath her feet were a fine dust. I dragged myself and Giggles over to Fuld and stuck my free arm under his belt. I hauled them toward the exit, making hard progress. I had to get by Mutig. He feigned an empty gesture of forestalling me.

“You think it’s fun being a god, when all you are is human?”

“A god? All you are is inhuman.”

“You think it’s so easy being human when you’re somebody’s god?”

They hung across my arms; their heads were swinging; they swept the floor with their arms. They were heavy. A café’s Sunday din pecked into the spacious room. And Mutig — and why isn’t he helping me? — was now pulling himself back together, leading us with the ceremonious step of a host. He opened the door for me and stepped aside.

“In spite of everything, thank you,” he said. “But do take care of them, Mr. Successor.”

I put them down at the curb and went to look for a car. The street had gone dark in the meantime. Presently I saw quite distinctly that I was here today for the first time. I didn’t know the place; and not a street sign to be found — that got my goat! The whole time there’s that traffic, as if it were being sucked out just past its source: but now it sounded like nothing more than a weir off in the distance. — I had barely gone a few steps when I spotted a hansom cab moving toward the place where Fuld and Giggles were lying. I recognized it at once as the cab that had brought me here, and I thought this natural— secure, perhaps, in the knowledge that I hadn’t even looked at the driver earlier. The driver smiled; the one before (but how would I know?) also had that smile of the consecrated. But consecrated in what? I jumped onto the footboard, like lobby boys do in the rain when they’re trying to stop a car for their clientele. (I envy them that jump, for they do it as if out of privilege — the privilege of youth, and I, now making the jump myself, am a little embarrassed at having presumed something to which I no longer have a right.)

“It’s as if I’d foreseen it,” said the driver.

“Foreseen what?”

“Sir,” he said, “I’m not saying that I’ve foreseen anything, but that ‘it’s as if I’d foreseen it.’ A sentence where ‘it’ has a conventional function, which is to say none at all, and where all the emphasis is placed on the condition ‘as if I had.’ I don’t know whether you, too, have objectless premonitions. That is, premonitions that we recognize only after the object they were premonitions of has been fulfilled.”

“Naturally,” I said, intending sarcasm, but maybe coming off as just angry.

“Your ‘naturally’ attests to your suspicion. I’m not to blame if, through your own fault, circumstances rouse your suspicion that I’m pointing indiscreetly to your personal affairs. A driver is discreet by his very vocation. Unless I’m asked, I never take any notice of a person’s affairs. I strive solely for so-called ‘general thoughts.’ Take, for example, my ‘as if I’d foreseen it’; all I’d wanted to say was that the aspect assumed by premonitions once the event has come to pass is perhaps not from retroactive suggestion so much as like a lamp behind a banner. That banner is the objectless premonition, and the event itself is the light that shines through that fulfillment — only then do we see that it really was within. The event within the premonition, that is. — So it’s to Rue d’Astorg, is it?”

A question so unexpected that it took a moment before I placed it, and I called out in surprise, “What, do you know this man?” (It happened that Fuld lived on Rue d’Astorg.)

The driver shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m the driver, after all, who chauffeurs gentlemen who’ve been through the wringer. Each of us has his destiny. There are people who float along from start to finish like advertising balloons: future angels have fallen for them, and they happily take them under their wing, so very far, where man is forbidden to go; there they are passed to the next angelic shift. — On the other hand, there are the people who spend their whole lives shambling out of pits. There isn’t a man damned to hell who hasn’t run into those oafs on the way down — it’s like the only reason they were created was so that beggars would feel better, and to guide the way for marked beings. — As I’ve said, gentlemen who’ve been put through the wringer are set aside for me; gentlemen who’ve been put through the wringer are no different than timid gumshoes. They hold out against evil for much the same reason people bury a pheasant: to get it all wormy. And once the evil’s teeming with worms, they have to leave it anyway, for it turns their stomach. Their hunger is eternal. Those are the most dangerous people of all — like people who haven’t eaten their fill.”

“And they all live on Rue d’Astorg. Of course!”

“My dear man, no. They don’t all live on Rue d’Astorg. But they are all mine. I know them. Didn’t I tell you they’ve been set aside for me?”

“Set aside for what?”

“To be carted off — if, after all, it happens that they’ve alighted upon the place they’d been sniffing around, not daring to get all up in there.”

“So you’re Charon.”

“Right — across the Lethe of swill.”

“And what about the lady?”

“It’s not up to the dead.”

“You really think they’ve killed her?”

“In a certain sense, of course. It’s only that sense, however, that decides the misfortune. The little lamb that hands the butcher the knife he’d forgotten is a dead little lamb twice over. — Where should we put it?”

“What?”

“You know, the stiff!”

With great effort, Giggles rose and planted herself on the curb. She was staring at her beautiful legs.

“I hear you,” she said mischievously, “I hear you, but he’s lying. .”

“For now, drive to Rue d’Astorg.”

“No stops?”

“No stops.”

We settled them into the corners, where they more or less stayed. I sat in the middle.

“So they’ll be more secure,” the driver said after taking their arms and placing them around my neck from both sides.

That neighborhood had the malevolent flavor of the Parisian neighborhoods outside the city gates, where majestic and bungled apartment blocks provide useless lessons in hygiene to the hovels, which see right through them. The embittered quarreling of spouses who have decided on divorce and are seeking out pretexts. I didn’t know precisely where we in fact were, but it was easy to anticipate that the closer we got to Rue d’Astorg, which is contained within a single quarter, the more touchy Paris would become in its fixedness. Up till now, the opposite had been true: the farther we had gone, the more plebeian the landscape had become in its rambling. The tidy houses seemed to approach increasingly greater misfortune, and the sheds, flophouses, saloons, and ill-treated pavilions, more scattered than sparse, were becoming an ever-more-stringent rule; they pretended to nothing but an ambition to inspire Utrillos. The farther we went, the more gracelessly were we confronted by yards filled with scrap iron, jealous of its own better days and as prideful as a hidalgo; heaps of lime and charcoal that no one ever starts on; piles of junk that didn’t belong to anybody, that belongs to no one and nevertheless revels in its place in the sun; the brickwork of Minotaurs lowing for liberators to lead them out of the labyrinths where they’d been hardheadedly thrust; and then those sulky and conceited little vegetable gardens, whose sole care is how to get out from behind their neglected palings and give the slip to the gardening equipment, with its efforts on their behalf so fair and so pointless. — In short, I noticed that, instead of getting closer to Rue d’Astorg, we were getting further away. I was, remarkably, of two minds as to whether I should bring this to the driver’s attention, or else to take the detour in its natural course, and it was only when I’d decided that it suddenly occurred to me that Fuld and Giggles, lifeless till now, had come to. Their still-languorous eyes groped around for mine, the same question scurrying around therein. I was aware of it before I even needed to look, whether at him or at her: it arose right in front of me, as distinct as an iceberg in the sun, and I responded with all speed: “No, no, there now. . Mutig’s not here. You’re safe, you’re safe.”

“Too bad,” they answered, as though in a single breath.

The roadway was like a cord. The driver turned and asked, pushing aside the barrier glass, “Rue d’Astorg, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t matter. Wherever the three of us go together, it’ll be deserted anyway.”

“The three of you?”

“The three of us! — Without our seducer.”

“Without your seducer?”

“Without courage.”

We were now in entirely free territory. Like someplace where nothing had yet been decided. A place from back before the waters were separated from the land. Still a dry shore, but already approaching the waters and rushing after their fragrance like a dachshund hot on the trail. The soil was getting spongier. The road, till now like a cord, negotiated the moors’ beginnings, went around them, begging them for passage— moors are jealous and stingy. We were sent down long detours that, on this crude flatness, seemed like foolish and expensive jokes. We drove fast. On sharp turns Fuld would suddenly fall across me, then Giggles. Again and again I was required to right them, put them in their place. Each time they collapsed as if quizzically, with the incoherent, insistent, and uninquisitive questioning of drunkards. They were hideous to the touch: he, limp the whole time like empty packaging in the tentative shape of the object that’s fallen from it; she, like a new, jointed, as-yet unworn doll. But though they were rather lifeless things, I took notice of them from one moment to the next, the way they were conversing behind my back “with their eyes”—asinine and somehow scattered, plotting something, but not yet knowing what. This unsettled me, or, rather, it twisted me out of shape, but so as not to compromise myself I pretended not to see. — Meanwhile, it had gotten late. It was the full moon, but the darkness was getting the better of it. The sky was full of stars; they shone so much it crackled; you’d say they’re shining, knowing why: they communicate with each other across the systems; there is among them a simple, if voluntary, if coercive fellowship of an unfamiliar nature, and they’ve resigned themselves to it. And I felt a bit of shame that the three of us, though pressed so tightly together, have nothing in common but for our polluted secrecy. Perhaps the driver alone knew precisely what had brought us down — his innuendos, his almost irritably indifferent liberty at the steering wheel — but astonishingly, he was just the one I had unwittingly excluded from our depraved fellowship. It struck me, I no longer know how or why, that it might only be through a demon’s incitement that we introduce so many unknowns into our equations, whereas it might suffice to dig out reserves that are long since calculated. Our prides, however, seem too minute for so noble a task, for what are we to do? Would we then want to finish calculating the mystery of life with these largely unfamiliar equations? — I had started to get it: we were driving along the Seine, downstream. I recognized the hillsides near Saint-Cloud, though they weren’t actually hillsides so much as a sort of horizontal projection of them. That must have been the square beyond the Pont de Saint-Cloud, where there is so much dust in summer. But today it’s all turned to mud. The tavern where the artisans’ wedding parties head to was still there, but the background — the city — forfeited perspectival depth, as if it were a poorly painted theater screen. Le Pavillon Bleu, on the river, was, one would say, enticed irresistibly by the water. The path behind it, leading past the barracks to the park fence, commenced with great care, as if it were particular about its authenticity (anyway, it was authentic): it anxiously avoided the theater screen in the background, whose touch would have enchanted it, and ended in a sort of tunnel. Through the tunnel you could see the garden by Le Nôtre, but the gate by which one enters had disappeared; the garden, too, was merely a projection of itself, and incredibly simplified, summarized somehow. We hadn’t encountered anyone this entire time, and yet we were never free from a sense — how should I put this? — a sense of nearby person-ness. Nor was there anything to be afraid of. I don’t think I was even a little taken aback, having already seen from afar that the tunnel was bustling. Here and there I made out campfires whose glare was reflected in the arch, and where — it seemed to me — halberds glimmered. When we drove into this tunnel — for a long while now, besides their giving each other the eye, Fuld and Giggles hadn’t exhibited the slightest sign of life — I was seized by a powerful, really quite powerful sense of something I had seen once before. And with all speed, as if it had long since been readied within me, I had also already identified that memory: that tunnel, it was the long whitewashed tunnel that led from the park in Písek to Heyduk Street, only it wasn’t pure, but rather — if I can put it this way — mixed up with the vestibule of the town hall in Arles that I had read in the evening papers was used as shelter from the rain. (The tunnel in Písek likewise provided shelter from a rain-soaked promenade.) In no way did I marvel at that symbiosis, for I know Arles; it’s just that I was somehow bugged that that wound hadn’t healed sufficiently well, that is, as I have said, that it provided so unkempt a mixture. Only now did I notice that the underpass was not solid; it broadened in the middle into an open rotunda, and it was just in this sort-of-courtyard that these campfires were blazing, with squires bustling among them. Those squires gave the impression of extras in the theater, awaiting the signal to move onstage, and passing the slow time by pretending that it really was their duty to keep order in a crowd of modernly dressed civilians who were giving off an impression that was the complete opposite of theatrical. Those squires surrounded us — I quipped that they’d been expecting us for a long time— and we understood there was no way to go further. The driver, it seemed to me, had already come to an agreement with them. When I asked why we couldn’t just keep going, they didn’t want to say, but what seemed strange to me wasn’t so much that they didn’t want to say, but the definite ostentatiousness with which they refused me an answer! So, I told the driver to turn around. He, however, folded his arms, while the mercenaries and the crowd started shaking their heads no: a quite tolerant no, but a resolute one. All of a sudden it seemed to me that there would be nothing simpler than to carry Fuld and Giggles through the passage and the grillwork, which was closed (now you couldn’t see anything past the grillwork besides the self-assured darkness, which couldn’t be anything but a black curtain), though the only thing that occurred to me to do was to ask why and where. The squires helped me. When we approached the fence, it turned out there wasn’t a curtain there at all, but rather a gate, and quite a heavy one by the looks of it, but one that yielded as easily as the slatted doors to American saloons. We passed through it and found ourselves in a land that was at once garden, flooded polder, and oyster pits. These pits stretched out of sight and, oddly enough, didn’t overflow. Narrow grassy dikes turned them into a kind of chessboard. Despite their being so narrow, trees had taken root in them here and there, and not just little ones, and some remarkable feat of engineering had managed to run a meandering yet negotiable road along the way, without violating the landscape’s chessboard regularity or its aquatic monotony. Those pits didn’t appear deep, and their water was murky. On the whole, the sense they exuded was rather mournful, though by no means inconsolable, and, as far as that enigmatic road was concerned, it beckoned me with its peculiar, gentle power, which surely stemmed from the now-distant bend in the road, beyond which it then stretched again, straight, ascending conspicuously. Conspicuously, because the land’s contours, so it seemed to me, didn’t correspond with that ascent, and as a matter of fact it was as though the road detached from the ground and led its own upward existence. I decided that we would set out along it, and I felt that this decision of mine was a legitimate countermove to the recent refusal of the crowd and the squires, a countermove that was just as tolerant and resolute. The only thing that confounded me was how it happened that these parts seemed to me to be negotiable, let alone passable. It was all the more astonishing that the road had an altogether dreamlike quality, whereas those low dikes stood out for their almost conspicuous realness. I told myself that the only way to get far there was by vehicle, that it would not do to go on foot. The image of my having to trudge with those puppets along the grassy dikes, among waters that weirdly did not overflow, gave me unbearable vertigo; I must have known that the hollows were shallow. But fortunately, just past those saloon doors in the form of heavy gates, there was a bit of dry space, with the distinctive texture of something that has shunned the rest of the aquatic landscape and formed a whole only unwillingly, when compelled. But to lay the lifeless Fuld and Giggles there without getting them wet was a delicate enterprise, and Fuld actually did slip away from us and fall into the water. I saw that he was aware of this involuntary spa treatment, even if he in no way showed it, neither by opening his eyes, nor with a twitch of the limbs, nor with a grimace. This awareness of his, exhibited by nothing, and of which something testified — perhaps a magnetic current from him to me — was even touching. I had to go into the reservoir after him, the water hardly came up to my knees; I felt its chill, yet none of its wetness. At last, Fuld and Giggles were on terra firma.

Two squires stood guard over them, as if at my command (true, no such order had even occurred to me), and I went back to the courtyard. When the gate had once again shut behind me, I hesitated in my response as to whether I would actually go find a wagon or not. That is, I really had gone there for a wagon, already knowing beyond any doubt, however, that I would find neither a wagon, nor the squires, nor the crowd. And, in fact, the courtyard was empty; all that remained were the campfires, smoldering away somehow, as if they ran on the coming dawn. And face-to-face with a prediction so magnificently affirmed, I was forced to search my conscience, knowing that I would have to answer the question of whether I had somehow deliberately deluded myself into going for the wagon, knowing it would not be there. — The courtyard was deserted, but again there was the ineradicable sense of human-ness, nearby and all-embracing, just as when we were driving into Saint-Cloud. I turned back toward the watery landscape, accepting as quite natural that there was no aquatic landscape, nor Fuld, nor Giggles, nor soldiers in armor; in short, that I was walking through a so-called living dream, a quite truthful reality, and thus, as they say, a zone of truth, where there is nothing with which to deceive oneself, that what this is here is an entrance to the Métro, which I, descending the staircase, in fact also quickly recognized by its red lights.

So I was descending the staircase, and I was feeling so embarrassed about the answer as to whether I was still shuffling along the zone of truth, or else had already popped out of it, that I decided to establish what was what, come what may. I paid for my ticket with money that would require the cashier to give me change. I determined not to pick it up. If the cashier alerts me to it, that will be proof that I’m awake; if she doesn’t call after me, I’ll know that I’m dreaming. I conducted the experiment, even if I was aware that it was actually a sham: I knew in advance that the cashier could not not call for me, for such is the custom. And she actually did. And because I made like I hadn’t heard, she went so far as to send an assistant after me. An inspiration passed through me, that the constant confirmation of my prediction simply means there’s no point looking for safety. For where there is only an inch of room for doubt — perhaps in the associative hint of a slight dry spot in an aquatic landscape — certainty is merely a word. . and who knows. — The train arrived, I got on, the train moved on.

He boarded at La Trinité. My first sense was vexation at not having foreseen it. But was this really my only cause for regret? How was I to regret not having foreseen something — that is to say, his boarding at La Trinité—that had so convincing an air of originality? His boarding did not arouse memories of some event in the past. If I foresaw it — despite the fact that things that are being prepared will be a faithful analogy of what has occurred in some “back then”—I foresaw it in no way through some concrete experience, but rather only the way we sort of foresee the da capo in a minuet.

Were I to hold fast to this event, I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise than retrace quite literally the beginning of that very game. But what for, if I can simply refer to it? Very well. –

Nevertheless. .: The stranger, even if he was utterly human at the outset, didn’t, in fact, seem a stranger completely: through the likeness of the Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, or rather beneath it somehow, I just now recognized Fuld. But against expectations this discovery did not excite me in the least. The bizarre reality that Vicente Escudero was Fuld, while nevertheless remaining Vicente Escudero, was a matter of such indifference to me that I undertook nothing to identify him further — with my ears, say — except with my perhaps faulty eyesight. I did nothing to move him to speak, not even a single word. Here I was as though before something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, despite my being utterly secure in knowing that this was Fuld, when a three-note motif suddenly inserted itself between us. Yes, three notes, which you could hear — it might not have been possible to say where from — and which, once they’d subsided, nevertheless carried on, this time somehow objectively. I can’t say it any other way than this: they carried on in the manner of a monkey wrench operating on large threads, a wrench that had been inserted between my fellow traveler and me, and now promptly extended itself, parting us irresistibly, one from the other. I turned in on myself noticeably, enough so that I was, at length, alone in an oppressive, yet light mist. Then the three-note motif rang out again, but this time with an emphasis that announced that something was beginning. At the same time, it sounded like a warning that it would be recorded as an injustice on my part if I were not to recognize it, this motif, but this warning was superfluous, for the very reason I had come was for this passing scrap of rondo from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and to sit at my own table. I would say I recognized that I was still sitting at my own table were it not for the hazy impression that between “before” and “now” a sort of fissure had inserted itself, one that I seemed to have slept through, though I was now back on its trail. I say “slept through,” although I rather recollect something along the lines of a submersion, from which I am surfacing again — more than sleep. Memories of spicy yet thin air, and wafting within it but a hint of some amusing realness (the sort of thing that clings to the variegated decorations of national operas), and with which I am ultimately finding myself again, for within it sinks that now familiar, double, good-naturedly mocking travesty of Grock’s posture recalling his partner, which I am just now caressing with my still-blinking eyes, left right left right, as I surface.

Their sideways smiles say symmetrically, from that side: “We’re indivisible!”

From this: “We’re bound together!”

These smiles, because they’re sidelong, intersect right in front of my face. There they ignite a hotpoint: admittedly, I find it scintillating, but I see past it. Behind it, there’s a strange hand; it is sparingly twisting a doll that some other hand is toying with; I surmise that that playful hand belongs to me. The doll has fallen out of it; there’s a thump, as from under some heavy object, a Browning, let’s say, and just then I also hear: “Are you just going to keep playing forever, then? A person might say you’re dodging the bill that way.”

I rolled a glance across his visage, it wound around to her face and rolled across it as well. And again that peevish unease: Who is this third, this third, from their common likeness? The road leads there, but it’s blocked; in this bare blockade wall, however, there’s a crack, and through this crack dribbles a sort of meager certainty that between those two, Fuld and Giggles, there is a mysterious, yet definite, relationship. Yes, the man-stranger and the woman-stranger are Fuld and Giggles, but they are Fuld and Giggles, as it were, across mountains, across rivers. It’s them, through unheard-of forms. Now there can no longer be any doubt. He, having smiled, twisted his head: this sweet-toothed grimace that someone has inexpressibly, but importunately and quite vainly attempted to finish into an austere smile!

“Escudero!” say I.

He: “Escudero!”

But barely had he said it than he turned to face me and drew up so close that there could be no mistaking his intention to let it be understood that what would now occur would be — as I would say — utterly exceptional, for my sake, for me, as a sort of honor: and it was off with the mask. But with the locution “off with the mask” I’m not capturing the nature of what happened. For the change that came about was not, verily, as though he had tossed aside his mask or put on another; on the contrary, the new face that replaced the preceding one showed up with the same somehow swift accrual by which living-room magicians exchange their various neckties. Actually, it was more complicated: a whole array of visages were exchanged on his face (if one must put it this way), but so swiftly that I couldn’t manage to identify any one of them but the last; they flipped by no differently from pages of a block calendar quickly thumbed through, and in that nimble turning of the pages/faces dwelled, motionless, a pair of fixed, burning, almost inquisitorial eyes, somehow as if they were gradually burning through the top layer of those contemplated pages. But heavy lids suddenly fell upon those eyes, and the hard-braked contemplation blew over into a face that was so calm, so collected. .

But the fact that I was face-to-face with myself was not the eeriest thing; eerier still was the ardor with which my thought was trying to persuade my hesitating senses that this was no delusion; eerier still was the certainty that my senses— at just this moment my sight — had begun to live outside of my thought. What’s with them! They were looking to make a break for it, they were devising a way to explain away, that is to say refute, what was evident. But thought, like a gloomily overjoyed sheepdog, drove them back to the flock, and having discharged the time-honored office of bringer-of-reason, it persuaded them that they were deceiving themselves while believing the deceit, and it increased the panic.

I looked around for the woman, but she was deliberately turning her head away and tapping on the table. And, God knows how, that indifferent bearing of hers expressed a command so definite, so imperious and uncompromising, that my eyes again turned to the place they’d only just cowered from like worn-out, terror-hunched dogs, toward the eyes of that one whose collapsed eyelids were more bewitching and more sighted than the most fevered pupils. We were again facing each other — I and I — so closely that the waves of embarrassment got the better of my fear and led me toward an unwitting, overfamiliar gesture: I passed my hand across my face, but hardly had I done so than I was on my feet. Not my hand’s sense of touch — for it did not remember that touch would have prompted it toward that suspicion — not my hand’s sense of touch, but it was somehow another of its senses that caused alarm.

I was on my feet, a step before the tall mirror over the fireplace — I say before the tall mirror over the fireplace, knowing with sun-like clarity that I’m in front of the mirror— which, however, didn’t respond to me. And again: eerier than this betrayal of me — who, despite an unspoken but age-old pact, did not issue forth from those depths — was my ardent, gloomily high-spirited thought trying to persuade my startled senses not to be afraid, not to run away, that there was nothing to worry about, that this empty mirror was a correct mirror, that this was how it had to be.

Did I cry out? I don’t know, but how else, except as a cry, could that sudden thaw work its way out, as copious and roiling as the fear that preceded it had been miserly and desiccated? I was standing before the mirror, I knew that the mirror I was standing in front of was eerily parched, yet I sank my gaze into its extinct waters just as assuredly as a fisherman, before the appearance of the auspicious full moon, plunges his nets into the teeming waters. All I did was point a plaintive, if unfearful, left hand at the unfaithful mirror, and I said:

“He stole my face; he stole my face.”

“Which one?” she asked with a condescending indulgence that she had prepared to express with a still-smooth gesture when she was suddenly wracked as if by stifled anger, in which the lithe movement snapped. “Which one?” she repeated, having caught hold of the table’s edge, so as to overcome not yet so much her anger as the buoyancy of her rebellious pain. “Which one?” she said for the third time, in a tone whose sloppy, conversational superficiality struck an incredible contrast with its unchecked revolt.

“What, don’t you recognize Giggles?” she continued, laughing as if at a sly joke, but so excessively that I started to catch on to her intent, and in no time I had also actually discovered that this was her attempt to turn my attention away from the empty and, as it were, crumpled spot that was the only thing that testified to what had only just recently been the presence of him who had appropriated my face (and who knows if that’s all). I won’t soon forget her ever-so-splenetic aspect when she ascertained that her gambit had failed; but it was merely a fraction of a second. Like a person who, in the midst of a momentous operation that has been entrusted to him, has let it be known that he’s overheard the flippant rogue, and now regrets it, so too did she shout down her own disgruntlement, and in fact, when she stretched her arms as if to part a curtain that didn’t happen to be there, she allowed herself to depend on the slightly naïve pomp with which she announced her having come to do what she was just now performing. Having thus parted the imaginary curtain, she stepped back as though not to be in the way, and with the admirably fake gesture of criers at the town fair she called upon me to watch.

“You must pay close attention,” I hear just then in a voice that rings a bell somehow, yet is not the voice of this one here, but rather somewhat shaky, sing-song, slightly protracted; a voice that extends no further than absolutely necessary for it to have somewhere to go, with a multitude of fioritura as lightweight as washed watercolor; the kind of voice ground out from a thick shell of time; but again, a voice now refined and domesticated. And I see that it had in fact issued from the woman who had parted the curtain, but who had gone from being the Giggles “from over hill and dale” to Giggles the ur-familiar — intrepidly timid, in the wondrous démarche of her queen, Puppenfee — the trusting Giggles from the tavern up on Rue Lamarck.

“You must pay close attention,” she says after her usual fashion, that is, playfully threatening with her forefinger and hunching over slightly, “because Mutig hasn’t shown you everything.”

“Mutig. .”

“Yes, up on the hill, in the blackamoor’s chest. Mutig is magnanimous, the only one he snitched on was himself. Nothing about anyone else. Look. . do you see?” she cried, pointing with the little finger, which had gone from playfully threatening to autocratically menacing.

And I, perhaps knowing that what I was watching was again just my own apartment, and seeing nothing there besides familiar objects, was nonetheless as though plucked out, as though in spite of everything, and the blinking flaxen light of the wiry nativity scene started up, just as it had up there in the blackamoor’s chest, and just then Giggles was entering, the Giggles of the other evening, an evening already settling down nicely, it leaped fretfully into the luminous rectangle of the door, upon which Giggles was sort of caught. But having leaped for it, it realized its mistake and reeled back, for it had burnt itself on Giggles’s pain, which was so great that it emanated from her soul, creating a bright aura. Like in the monument to Marshal Ney — yes, like in the monument to Marshal Ney — of which it is said that the hand gripping the saber captures the entire action of unsheathing, so too did Giggles’s drooping hand, holding a hat, encompass the action of destruction, and thus in seeing Giggles I was also seeing how — a minute before — she was rushing to my stairs and snatching off that hat. And this, the caught-up-with past of a grotesque drama on a spiral staircase and its still more grotesque shadow, which the gaslights passed from one floor to the next as crudely as a gang passes the hussy they’ve snagged, again contain all those crumpled, dust-covered, shabby, as any-old-as-to-be-unsellable little tragediennes from the blackamoor’s chest, those unmoving, prolonged-unto-jaw-dropping-tedium tragedies, who, when they’d had enough, even treated the tragedian of this community theater like dirt for having taken them literally. Yes, Giggles plays well: it’s to a tee, as it had been the other evening, when Mutig treated her like dirt; when, not knowing up from down, she made a break for me. Yes, so too had she entered, hat in hand and in the aura of the overflowing pain upon which the fretful evening, which had settled down and mistook it for light, had flung itself. Yes, so too had she left the door ajar behind her, so too had she fallen exhausted against the wall — oh, such a good imitation! — and it was in that same spinsterishly gaunt, unsightly grief that I twice heard that “je n’en puis plus, je n’en puis plus,” so too was my heart in my throat, so too did I now. .

. . so too did I now feel bad for thinking, Poor, poor Giggles, she’s standing there like a community theater actress playing Niobe, if only she had a real wall behind her instead of a screen; for being unable to rid myself of these slanderous thoughts, for being her admittedly woeful, yet powerless, yet tense viewer, so too did I now. .

No, so too nothing. There’s no point. This time the foul thought of mine did not arise, it did not arise with the squeamish gesture like unto the disgraced, that I not dare; and this time Giggles did not. .

“But Giggles, no,” I shout at the stage, “what’s gotten into you, have you forgotten your part? That’s not how it went. What are you pointing your finger at me for? And why out of the blue? And the velvet darkness all around you, where’s that from? And the way you’re looking at me? Stay there by the wall, don’t come any closer, drop the raised hand, Giggles, I don’t want. .”

“What’s your problem?” I hear right in front of me, “can’t you see past your nose? Wouldn’t you perhaps be afraid?”

The Giggles from Rue Lamarck was menacing the Giggles on the stage.

“I was scared, Giggles!”

“What about them?” and she pointed back with a bubbly cackle. “You have to forgive her, she’s forgotten her part. Anyway, I’ve just put her on notice. Now she knows.

“Now she knows,” she repeated, and she held out her arms as if closing a curtain, and again it was just the two of us (we were perhaps fewer than two), “now she knows that you double-crossed and deceived her then, like you killed her, and killed her horribly.

“That’s not allowed,” she threatened, and she coaxed me into the seat that stood right beside hers. “No cheating. No hope, either. That wasn’t nice, luring her to hope when you knew there was none. You’re older than she is, more experienced. You must have known there isn’t hope for everything. We unfortunates, sinners, we damned, you know, we’re so gullible, all it takes is for you to smile at us and we already believe someone’s shown us mercy. Providing us hope, that’s a trick, and there will be no trickery.

“Really, none,” she repeated with mock pleading. “Or perhaps you would deny having seen what I was all about when I came in — just now, back behind the curtain (she explained, pointing with her chin)? You didn’t?. . But you’ve been telling yourself in your head the whole time! ‘She looks so sinful you’d sit somewhere else. She looks like an outcast. She’s an outcast.’ But then how could it be any other way, I ask you; after all, didn’t I deify a human being — Mutig?

“Oh, for one person to deify another. .” she sighed comically. “For that matter, you’ve been watching me for a long time already, don’t you see? Oh yes, you’ve been watching! I know everything. . now. For a long time you’ve been eyeing me, to see when I’d fall into my own crime. A dovish crime. But crime is crime. No such thing as a free ride. I was overgrown with such sworn misfortune that you said to yourself, ‘Give her one of those small lady’s revolvers with mother-of-pearl, and at the same time squeeze her hand with silver-tongued warmth: adieu! And that’s it; it’d be a Samaritan act inédit.’ Yes, that’s what you told yourself. . as I was leaning against the wall. . as I was leaning against the wall like Niobe from the community theater. .”

“Giggles!”

“My God. . we’re still having. . a calm discussion. All that is in the past. And I know everything. . now.

“And you were right,” she patted my knee with god-motherly emphasis, “you were dead right. Just be a dear and tell me,” she threw in inquisitorially, “why were you deluding me with hope? That’s not right, you see, that’s not right; it’s not nice. Instead of hastening me out the door, out that door, you were saying. . too bad, after all, we could have just played it out, it would have been more lively. . you were saying: ‘Giggles, it’s not for love, all that suffers is your pride. If you were suffering for love, you wouldn’t be opening up to me. I know you. Isn’t it perhaps out of willfulness that you’ve capitulated to Mutig?’ Pride! Like people would tear their hair out and bang their head against the wall for pride. And as if it were a matter of forsaken love — oh! forsaken love — and not at all of my devastation!

“I’m asking you. . me! A little creature being vivisected. My fear was only waiting for him to say his piece. How could you have missed such an opportunity, you, who are ever so curious?

“Curious, curious, curious,” she started saying stubbornly, “it’s only out of that damned curiosity of yours that you consoled me; out of curiosity over what would come of it. What would come of the furious hope of a little creature being vivisected, what sort of vileness might she be talked into. . yes,” she said, suddenly curt, “without you, sir, I could have passed away in beauty.

“So now we know, without you I could have passed away in beauty. So I am the way I am. . I happened to find myself a god. Now that’s something. That, sir, is worth dying for! A god is a god. A god is according to what we deserve, and not according to his own perfection. But it’s a god every time. I found him, you see. I’m the one who deserved to depart for those pastures. You thwarted me just as things were going good. ‘There are other ways to god,’” she started aping me, “‘than vanishing within him. For example, there’s the dignity of life, and besides: Mutig is not a god.’

“Dignity of life! Mutig is not a god! I deified him, I think that’s enough, huh? Dignity of life. . is that what you traded me to Fuld for? Or was it to find out ‘what would come of it,’ Fuld and me, me and Fuld? We were supposed to shed some light for you, one on the other. We interested you, that’s what. You wanted to test out what kinds of disgusting poses the dead would consent to if they were bought off with hope. O hope, hope,” she caricatured, drawing out the o, “who, then, I ask you, will be taken in by it more than the one for whom there isn’t any left? Why didn’t you send me out to. . to those pastures. ., as befits the dead?”

“Giggles,” I said, “I had it all thought out. I swear to you that in spite of everything I had it all thought out.”

“What are you defending yourself for?” she responded jovially. “I’m not holding anything against you, I’m just telling it like it was. You’re not to blame. I know you had it all thought out. It’s not your fault you think better than you act. It’s not your fault that you, too, are the dead among the living; that you, too, think that enduring is everything. You, like Fuld — you’re no longer a weakling either, nor a coward — you’re nobody, too. Between the abyss and the fire even a weakling will somehow make a decision, but you wouldn’t get killed one way or the other, neither leaping, nor burning — you’d go for some wry ‘I don’t know up from down.’ It’s a good thing you looked into the mirror; wherever you’d find yourselves faces, you and Fuld.

“But I didn’t beg you, you see, and I’m not knowledgeable about what the dead are capable of. — The dignity of life! What could be simpler than loving cads, what could be more pure! They were bad, but cluelessly. Mutig took my glory upon himself, and Mutig took my murder upon himself. With him it was easy to be dignified: to live when there was a reason, and to die when the living was done. You brought me down. To life? Where! To enduring. What for? Maybe so I’d prove something that way? What? I’m asking you. What would it prove?”

“That the one who wins is the one who doesn’t run away.”

“God willing!” she said, and she leaned sculpturally on her chin. “But I have always loved! I loved him. I loved Mutig. Don’t you know that love is a dead end? And one that always leads to glory? No matter where it leads? Why did you hold me back? Why did you, in all your curiosity, ever hand me over to Fuld? Oh, because I was on the street and Fuld wanted me, I know. Those guys were as sharp as cactus needles and as bitter as wormwood. They abused and they tortured. But their scorn had edges and limits. I like things that your eyes can move along. They tormented and humiliated, but it was out of an earthy taste. But Fuld has a double face,” she continued in a trusting whisper. “You know? A double face. Whether he was making an offer or speaking ill, everything that came out of him was the same slime. He’s a glutton for problems. He has coarse tastes. He sets people on divine paths — you know why?” (And in a timid whisper:) “For the spectacle of vice and misfortune. What would he do with people who’d found their path themselves?” She turned toward me slowly, and, giving me a compassionate wink:

“You’ve been seeking each other a long time. You belong together. You’re no good at taking things either, taking people, of weighing them and telling them hopelessly: ‘You’re following your own path.’ You, in your pity, you don’t know, either, that the main thing is to follow your own path. And there’s nothing that can be done about it.” She shrieked hatefully, “You only force them into detours. What you’re running is purely a game!

“Fuld? He doesn’t trust anything that’s simple and positive, just because it’s not confused and negative. Love, virtue, truth? It’s not like he didn’t believe in them, you know? But he’s no good at dressing people in them. No one, no one in the world. He’s a person so dissolutely suspicious that he thinks everything is dissolute if it’s not perfect. Miserable people, miserable people, don’t you know that there’s no way for us to tempt the saints too much? You’re worse and more intolerant than God. Maybe the devil will hold up against you; you’d bring an angel to ruin.

“Let me go, put me out to those pastures,” she said suddenly, with bracing heartiness, “come on, hurry up, don’t you hear me?” And she assumed the position of a kitschy allegory of Echo, winking at me that she knows what she’s doing and how it looks.

And again that three-note motif, which this time I recognized immediately, and which, before blossoming, drew itself out, separating us. But when she was already quite far away, as though behind numerous veils, but always curiously visible, that taut motif suddenly slackened, brightened up, and began to spin off into the helix of a tango, toward which the rondo theme from Eine kleine Nachtmusik ascended like a tendril. And Giggles, her finger on her lips, smiled, and then she declaimed, “The rondo of cheerful lads, the rondo of luminous thieves who rob people who’ve formed from the shadows, so as to serve that beautiful justice, according to which one must take from the poor even what little they have, that it might then be handed over to the rich.

“Do you hear?” she added from far off. “Do you see? Do you remember?”

And I understood that she meant that bar I’d dropped in on several days before. That tango was playing. There was dancing. Mutig danced, too. Quite openly, and with the tilted head of someone calculating distance.

But what Mutig was calculating was the span of time that had been granted to his dance partner. She knew it; why else would she press herself to him so urgently, pointlessly? The tango crept up behind Mutig like a lasso primed for action, but each time it was flung toward him on a heavily stressed beat Mutig’s evil flared up and burned it away. He glittered with guileless cruelty — it suited him like dignity. It was on that day that the words were born on his lips: “You think it’s fun being a god?” They would soon ripen anew, and Mutig, weeping, would revive himself on them, on them and the devastation of today’s dance partner, whose dovish crime grows and grows. May she be more fortunate than Giggles, may she not meet her savior.

Giggles entered the bar and made straight for the bartender: “Have you seen Dédé? He didn’t leave me a message? Dédé?” — The bartender slowly set aside his shaker, folded his arms in a sober and lordly manner, and said with a courtesy behind which skulked a pink slip: “Giggles, you don’t work today. You have the best days: Saturdays and Thursdays. Don’t you think you should scram? Dédé! Of course Dédé was here. But he’s a guest, and you belong to the house: on Thursday and Saturday. Today’s Wednesday.”

Giggles walked away obligingly. — Mutig danced past her. “Hello there, Giggles,” he called. She lowered her eyes, squinting them as though from light, and slipped past like a shadow. — Later, Mutig told me, “You see, I don’t harbor unfriendly feelings toward her. But she died out in such a way that even her suffering brought her shame. If she at least despised me, if she at least couldn’t despise me, but no: she doesn’t dare despise me.”

“Do you see, do you see what you’ve accomplished?”— I could hear it from far away, but such that even if Giggles had already disappeared, I had no doubt as to the smile with which she spoke. Literally as if I was seeing it, that smile of the propitiatory sacrifice: it crossed her lips like a late-arriving guest, without whom things can’t get started, the same smile with which, on Rue Lamarck, she had passed that long needle to me across the table.

And this scene arose before me in such hallucinatory earnestness that I unwittingly called out, “Again, Giggles? Why? Haven’t I already killed you?”

“Yes, but poorly,” I heard, but with such inappropriately sparkling laughter I couldn’t stand it and bolted in her direction on the off chance of catching up with Giggles, for I was beginning to suspect that she had withheld something significant from me, that she’d deceived me. So I ran out — oddly, I don’t remember opening any doors as I was running out — and ended up on a long, straight street, which I ran down with a speed that I myself remarked as the insistence with which that street urged me to err, casting around for why, to such an extent, nothing here rings a bell. Then I oriented myself better; I was running through the same place I’d recently driven through in the cab with Fuld and Giggles, everything was again as it was then, only somehow more cursory. Thus I ran as far as the theatrical Saint-Cloud, this time for the most part abandoned, and sped through that aquatic landscape, relishing how skillfully I plotted my path through those narrow, grassy balks between the waters, for I sought the shortest way: the one toward that bend in the road that had so enticed me the first time, and that now seemed to me a truly imperative goal. When the bend again revealed itself to me on the horizon, I felt at the same time the surfacing of the thought that I had not, in fact, ascertained whether I might have already gotten my face back, it unsettled me a bit that this thought had arisen swiftly upon my spotting that damned bend in the road, but I drove this unsettlement away again relatively easily. I felt around my face, or around where by right and justice it should have been; touch ascertained nothing unusual, but I recalled that back when my face had expired, touch had betrayed nothing then, either, it had been some other sense of the hand that had pulled the alarm, a sense that in no way registered now. So I said to myself: “According to touch, everything’s back to normal. But what does that prove?” — All the more did I put on speed, and I wasn’t the least bit amazed when, having run up to the bend, I ascertained that that’s where Paris began, and that’s just the beginning of Rue d’Astorg; that is, the street where Fuld lived (it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him in several months). Paris begins at Rue d’Astorg, which begins again at Fuld’s building, which is otherwise halfway down the street. This didn’t confuse me, and actually, as I started running to the steps, I recognized it instantly, and thus I recognized that I’d come to the right place. My ring was answered by a swift “who’s there,” and when I said my name it was answered, swiftly again, with “that’ll do, come in,” and they opened for me. I should actually write that “the women” opened for me, since it was mostly women in the apartment, in thick black veils, and it seemed to me that there were far more of them than an altogether small apartment could reasonably accommodate. Altogether small, I say, and still it was a long time before I’d run as far as Fuld’s room; I’d almost say farther than from my place to here, and one of the women, in whom I recognized Fuld’s sister, escorted me along a line of the rest, speeding along with me.

“We’ve already removed him, he’s in his coffin, we’ve been holding the funeral until you came to receive what he’s bequeathed you.”

“So what did he bequeath me?”

“He’s bequeathed you his face.”

“But which one, since he had two?”

“Oh,” she said, slightly offended, “you mustn’t choose. Take the one that’s there. You’ll make do.”

“But how am I supposed to take such a bequest with me?”

“We’ve already inquired about that. All you have to do is kiss him.”

At that very moment we ran into Fuld’s room. He was, in fact, lying in a coffin. It was an amazingly unwistful, unmoving sight. And everything happened so fast, like it was on fire. I leaned over and gave him a sort of kiss, like picking up a parcel forgotten in haste, and returned for in greater haste still.

And I galloped back out again, marveling only at how indifferent I was in my soul, and with a thought to nothing but my running.

I stopped in front of the building, as if this had been arranged, and in fact now the streets and roads, the city, the buildings and landscapes had broken into a canter. I stood there waiting for my building to run by. I already saw it from a distance. But the closer it was, the realer everything somehow became, and the spectacle of the world’s becoming-real — if I can put it that way — was quite thrilling, quite absorbing. Most absorbing of all, however, was the question of where that notion of becoming-real had emerged from within me, to whom everything past already seemed equally real, but I didn’t dwell at all on the question of its reality. “Is there something more real than reality?” I made quite a point of saying “than reality,” as opposed to “than an apparent reality.”

At last our building ran by — and verily, the convincingness of the phenomenal world reached such a level that there was no resisting it: the “it’s true” that I said to myself I said sort of in the way one probes the thing that is most beyond doubt — not to say the only thing beyond doubt — like saying, in certain instances, “I love.” — At last, then, our building ran by, it was morning, the porter’s wife was standing at the front door, she was shaking out the mat. I greeted her and walked past. She called after me:

“And where, may I ask, are you going?”

“How’s that?” I turned.

“I’m asking, where are you going?”

“But Mrs. — ,” and I kept walking.

“Joking aside,” she said after me. “Where are you going?”

So I took up the ironic joke and said with a bow:

“To Mr. — ’s,” and I said my own name.

“Mr. — is not at home,” she replied.

Under such circumstances, life is no plaything.

On top of that, at the last minute we learn that Fuld, whom I have not seen for several months now, has died.

(November 1929–March 1930–March 1931)