War & War

VI OUT OF WHICH HE LEADS THEM

They took the wardrobe down first, the big one they used for clothes in the back room, and it wasn’t clear for some time why they were doing so, who had sent them or at first what they wanted, but they went about it, gripping their caps in their hands, gabbling away in a completely incomprehensible pigeon English, showing the woman a piece of paper with the interpreter’s signature on it then pushing their way into the apartment and getting to work at something that seemed to mean nothing in particular, tramping up and down through the rooms, hemming and hawing, taking the odd measurement, nudging to one side any object that happened to be in their way, in other words clearly taking stock, making lists, arranging the contents of the apartment — from the refrigerator to the dishcloth, the paper lampshade to the blankets used for curtains — into a sort of order, stringing the items together on some invisible thread then classifying them by some specific criterion, but betraying nothing about that criterion, assuming it was known to them, so that, by the end, with an ostentatious look at the clock and a your-obedient-servant look at the inhabitants, all four of them sat down on the kitchen floor and started eating their breakfasts, while both the frightened woman shrinking into the background, and Korin who had been roused from his work at the computer and was now staring this way and that wide-eyed, were too startled to say a word, both remaining in their original states, the first of frightened confusion, the second of idiotically gaping, the interpreter being nowhere to be found and therefore unable to offer an explanation; and nor was he available the next day, so even though they grasped the fact that he must have consented to the process they had not the foggiest idea why the four men, having finished their breakfast, mumbling away in their incomprehensible mother tongue and throwing the odd word at them, began removing all the movable objects in the apartment and loading them onto a truck waiting outside the house: the gas-fire, the kitchen table, the sewing machine, everything down to the last cracked salt cellar, in other words systematically removing every last item from the apartment; nor did they understand the next morning, after the men had ruthlessly taken away the beds they had left the night before, what they wanted when they rang the bell again and threw a huge roll of tape made of some synthetic material down in the corner, and, screwing their caps up in their hands, chorused a brief morning, then continued the previous day’s nightmarish activity, but this time in reverse, removing from the truck parked in front of the block countless numbers of wooden and cardboard boxes, among them certain heavy large items they could only manage between two or even occasionally four of them, using straps, dragging them upstairs for hours on end so that by noon the containers had piled up head high and there was nowhere to lie or sit or even move much, and the interpreter’s lover and Korin stood beside each other, squeezed into a corner of the kitchen, staring at the extraordinary upheaval until, at about four o’clock, the men departed and suddenly there was silence in the apartment, at which point, seeking an explanation, they began tentatively to open the boxes.

They were proceeding along the West Side Elevated Highway, all four in apparently very good spirits, yesterday’s catrafuse, the Romanian for loot, being of immeasurable importance to them, a really big deal, they repeated to each other, slapping each other on the back, regularly breaking into laughter in the driver’s cab, the process of sneaking off with the bozgors’ or that bozo’s gear, and rather than delivering it all to the agreed garbage dump squirreling it away at their pad behind Greenpoint, having gone much smoother than they had imagined it would, since the fake certificate of dumping went unnoticed by everyone, for who the hell would have noticed, since the catrafuse was of the kind that would have been chucked away in any case, and as for Mister Manea, their benefactor as they referred to him, he was unlikely to be interested in such things, or so they told each other, and now they had everything they needed, beds, tables, a wardrobe, chairs, stove and a mass of other little items, enough to furnish a complete apartment, which was nothing to be sneezed at, including coffee cups and shoe brushes, the lot, and all for a single dime that Vasile had thrown out of the cab in superstition as they were leaving, and to throw all this away at the dump, such a wardrobe, such a bed, such a table and chair and stove and coffee cup and shoe brush was out of the question, they had decided, no, they would neatly take it home and no one would have the faintest idea where that was, the point being to spirit the stuff away, and indeed why not do so in Greenpoint for that matter, and fit out the entire apartment of a completely vacant block overlooking Newtown Creek with it, their own apartment, not to put too fine a point on it, the one that, following their arrival in the New World a bare two weeks ago, Mister Manea had offered them for seven hundred and fifty dollars a week, that is to say one hundred and eighty-eight each, on top of the employment, a deal they immediately accepted the day before yesterday when they took stock of the load they were to carry, decided there and then, and began to haul the stuff downstairs, stuff that was to be their own, the tenants of the apartment counting for nothing, not for a moment, Mā bozgoroaicã curvā împutitã, they said with a courteous smile at the woman, and Dāte la o parte bosgor împutit, they said to the man with a sideways glance, and it would have been great to laugh out loud, but they didn’t, just carried on shifting the stuff and left the laughing till later in the evening, when fully loaded up they set off toward Greenpoint, and then again now, when having got over their day of excitement, wondering whether they would be apprehended but weren’t, nobody asking or checking anything, enquiring where they were really taking the catrafuse, no one at all, they could happily drive down the West Side Elevated Highway, leaving behind the horrendous traffic of Twelfth Avenue, in other words after, and only after all this, could they allow themselves to laugh as they sat in the driver’s cab and laughed, after which they left off laughing for a while and stared out of the window, their eyes bright and their mouths wide open with astonishment at the blaze of headlights, their hands in their laps, three pairs of hands with fingers that could not be straightened, thirty terminally crooked fingers from the endless fetching and carrying; three pairs in their laps and one pair, Vasile’s, turning the steering wheel now left, now right, as they cut their way through the unknown, terrifying core of the city that was the frozen center of all their hopes.

They’ve gone, said Korin to the woman on the evening of the first day of the upheaval, and looked terribly sad in the empty apartment, indeed more than sad: broken, defeated, exhausted, and, at the same time, highly tense, continually rubbing his neck, turning his head this way and that, going into his room then coming out again, and repeating this several times, clearly unable to stay in one place, in-out, in-out all the time, and whenever he reached the kitchen he looked through the gap left by the open door into the back room to see the woman sitting immobile on the bed, waiting, then he immediately looked away and moved on, until the evening when he finally plunged in and entered and sat down beside her but carefully so as to reassure her, not frighten her, nor did he talk about the subject he had first thought to talk about, about the discovery in the landing toilet, or about what they should do should they find themselves evicted, since, for his part, he took it for granted that this wasn’t about eviction, so no, he didn’t want to talk about such things, he explained to someone else later, but — and this would be genuinely reassuring — about the three long chapters he would now have to recount in one big go, though he would happily leave them aside or quickly pass over them and not mention them at all, but he couldn’t do this because then it would not be plain, clear, he said, that thing he had promised earlier to explain, and he couldn’t just skip over those three great chapters, three chapters, himself these last few days, nor could he simply say, OK, now everything is absolutely clear, the devil take it, and I won’t write up another line of it, though he might have said it because everything did in fact become absolutely clear, but he still had to finish it and not just abandon it like that, for an archivist does not leave things half done simply because he happens suddenly to have solved the puzzle, the rebus, for what actually happened was that he did in fact suddenly solve the puzzle, only once he had read through the entire material, that was true, but solve it he did and this led him to a comprehensive revaluation of his plans, in other words changed everything, though before he gets on to that, he declared, before he reveals what this is all about, he would say but one word: Corstopitum, that’s it, and just Gibraltar, and just Rome, for whatever happened he had to get back to where he had left off, for it was only the actual sequence of events as always, in every case, that made it possible to understand something, it being a matter solely and exclusively of Continuous Understanding, he said, seeking out the most appropriate phrase in his notebook, which is why he must refer back to Corstopitum and the terrible weather there, for it was truly terrible, this melancholy realm of eternal drizzle, terrible, an enormity, this constantly droning, bone-penetrating zero domain of icy wind, though more terrible still, he added, was the superhuman effort of the manuscript to provide descriptions of Corstopitum, followed by Gibraltar and Rome, for from this point on beyond the fourth chapter it was no longer a matter of the established practice of minutely cataloguing selected facts and circumstances, but of the ever deeper and ever more intensive exploration of selected facts and circumstances, which the young lady should try imagining, he told her, though what she was listening to with such nervous intensity was not him but to noises outside while he was leafing through a black and white notebook on his lap so that, for example, he noted the chapter began with four mentions of Segedunum, that is the say the mouth of the Tyne, and moved west to the fourth (!) manned passing place, then, from there on to the road that led to Corstopitum, four times in a row, four times the same thing (!), only filling it out every so often with an extra clause or so, but usually just with some adjective or adverb to drive the point home, as if somehow it were four distinct acts of breathing he wanted to describe, and with it of course everything concerning the journey through fog and rain that could be contained in four breaths, and thus repeating four times the experience of traveling the army communication route to the Heavenly Vallum, four times the story of how they changed horses at Condercum, of what first impression Kasser and his companions formed of the Vallum fortifications, of the forests and the military posts along the way, and of how they were stopped six miles before Vindolava where it was only the energetic intervention of the commander of the troop and the providing of a pass by the Praefectus Fabrum that persuaded the centurion in charge of the fort to allow them to continue toward Vindolava, though he could say the same of the Gibraltar episode where the repetition of the descriptions took a different form, such that it kept referring back to the extraordinarily precise picture it had drawn, and by continually keeping that picture in front of the reader it etched the image of the whole ineradicably on his mind, for example how, in the fifth section, it preserved the spectacle witnessed by Kasser and the others when, having reached Calpe by the mainland route they arrived at an enormous inn with the name of Albergueria and having settled into their rooms there they went downstairs to exchange some money and looked out of the window to catch a first glimpse of the spectral gathering of galleons, frigates and corvettes, naviguelas, caravelles and a variety of hulks below in the fog-bound bay: craft from Venice, Genoa, Castile, Brittany, Algeria, Florence, Vizcaya, Pisa, Lisbon and who knows how many others kinds of vessels in that absolute graveyard stillness, that immediately declared what happens when you get a spell of calma chicha, the sea becalmed, said Korin, among the dangerously narrow, fatal straits of Gibraltar, and this was what confronted the mind of the reader, such an image and other images like it, drawn in lines of ever greater depth, and confronted him too when, between the writing of the fourth and fifth chapters the beginnings of an understanding burst upon him and he realized that this was how he should express the matter, as regards what still remained to understand.

Usually it took about ten minutes or so to warm himself with his own breath, to lock himself in, undo his buttons, sit down and then just breathe and keep breathing until he felt the room beginning to warm a little, taking up position at about five o’clock or quarter past five when he was sure not to be disturbed, for it was too early for the others and he could relax, and what was more, he added much later one evening, this was the only place he could relax, because he needed this half hour in the morning, this security and silence in the landing toilet, and he did in fact sit there about half an hour waiting for the urge, so he had time to gaze and stare, and did indeed take the opportunity for gazing and staring, this being a time before he could actually begin to think, the sort of time when a man sleepily gazes at things, when he truly soaks up everything that meets his gaze, the world before him, and, as they say, he said, even a crack in the wall or the door or the concrete floor becomes intimately familiar to him, so it was no wonder that one morning he noticed that near the top of the wall on his right, a wall that had been tiled from floor to ceiling, one of the tiles was not quite as it should be, that something about it was different from the day before or the day before that, though he didn’t notice that straightaway for while he was sitting with his trousers around his ankles, propping his head on his hands, he was looking down or ahead, at the bolt on the door, not up, and it was only after he had finished and pulled up his trousers that he happened to glance up and saw the change, which, he decided, consisted of the grouting around the tile having been removed, and it was so obvious that the grouting had gone that he couldn’t help seeing it immediately, so he put down the toilet seat and stood on it so he could reach the tile, tapped it and could hear that it was hollow behind, and by carefully pushing at one corner of it succeeded somehow in extracting the tile, behind which — there! — he could see a deeper space had been created and that the space had been filled with little plastic sachets, full, God forbid, of a white powder much like flour, not that he looked too closely or dared open one because he was a little frightened, his first reaction being that it was bad things in there, though to be perfectly honest, as he confessed later, he didn’t know what precisely bad things was, but he knew somehow, by some means, and it was somehow obvious that it was bad, and he didn’t even begin to guess who might have put it there, for it might have been anyone, and the most likely explanation was that was one of the lodgers in the apartment below, so he put the tile back, finished buttoning his trousers, flushed the toilet and quickly returned to his room.

There is an intense relationship between proximate abjects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as far as the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God, said Korin after a long period of meditation, but suddenly didn’t know whether he had said that aloud or only to himself and cleared his throat a few times, then instead of returning to his interrupted story said nothing for a while, hearing only the shuffling of the newspaper as the interpreter’s lover leafed through its pages.

It was Kasser who suffered most from the cold, he said eventually, breaking his silence, from the moment they disembarked from the enormous decareme on the shores of the Tyne, received their horses, were joined by a body of armed escort that had been ordered for them, and set out on the road along the inner edge of the Vallum, and he was so cold that when they arrived at the first military post, garrison said Korin, he had to be lifted off his horse because he was so stiff, he said, that he could no longer feel his limbs or get them to execute his will, and was carried into the fort, sat in front of the fire and two gypsies were summoned to rub his back, his arms and his legs until they set off again, this time toward Condercum, moving on from there too in the same way, through several stops until, on the afternoon of the third day, they reached Corstopitum, that being their destination as well as their starting point according to the Praetorius Fabrum since they were bound to report some time soon on the condition of the Wall, which was why they made a tour of The Immortal Work of the Most Heavenly Caesar, after a good few days of rest of course which were necessary chiefly to allow the vapors of the brigantine medicinal herbs to take effect and cure Kasser’s aches and pains, a treatment he might have been glad of when they arrived at Calpe following the vicissitudes of the journey from Lisbon, which, once again, caused him the most suffering, and it was in fact the figure of Kasser, said Korin with a distant look, Kasser alone of the four of them, that underwent some subtle yet definite transformation, mutation, in the second half of the manuscript, his sensitivity or over-sensitivity, his vulnerability to injuries of various kinds, becoming ever more marked, a fact he mentioned now only because the attention of the others to Kasser became ever more intense, sometimes it being Bengazza, sometimes Toót asking him if “everything was all right” as they traveled on in the coach under the protection of the Prince of Medina, while at other times, at the Albergueria for instance, it was Toót who secretly tried to find some army surgeon, and succeeded in finding one in the “hope of alleviating the strange distress continually afflicting Señor Casser,” explained Korin, shaking his head, in other words, after the fourth chapter there was an imperceptibly increasing, concentration, a matter of delicate emphasis — or nuance, as Korin put it — on Kasser, and this constant concentration cast an anxious shadow even across the first hours of their arrival — for example when they found a space at a table on the crowded ground floor of the Albergueria, and everyone was keeping a wary eye on whether Kasser was eating the food put before him by the landlady, and later, after supper, when they were trying to guess whether he was listening at all to the conversation around him in which a mass of people, each in his own peculiar language, was analyzing the worrying and somewhat nightmarish state of affairs in the bay with its gently rocking but stranded vessels in the thick fog, the hopeless vacuum of the fatally becalmed sea, and, closer to the shores of Gibraltar, the melancholy shades of drifting schooners from Genoa and Venetian galera da mercato, the joints of whose masts gave an occasional muffled shriek as they shifted slightly in the deaf air.

According to the Mandatum of the Praetorius Fabrum they were commanded to inspect the condition of the Glorious Work so as to be able to form an opinion of the value of all that had been done so far, to offer technical advice on the remarkably continuous development and maintenance of the wall, on the human and other resources required for this maintenance, and to form a management committee of ingeniarii with legally binding powers, able to make decisions regarding the organization of time and space, to be set up in Eburacum where the VI Legio Victrix was stationed, though in actual fact, Korin told the interpreter’s lover on the bed, they were being summoned and dispatched simply so they might admire and adore this unique structure, and so that they should declare their astonishment and rapture at the sight, the idea being that the aforesaid astonishment and rapture should strengthen the position of its creators, reassuring, above all, Aulus Platorius Nepost, the current legatus of Britannia Romana in distant Londinium, that the masterpiece constructed here was genuinely the most advanced, most glorious, most immortal work that could have been created; and it was clear from the chosen style of the Mandatum, from the ceremonial quality of its language, that this was what was expected of them, nor would they have happily undertaken the terrible overland journey and the even more terrible sea-crossing had they not been assured that the purpose of this great plan of the Most High Lord, the Project, was precisely to inspire such astonishment and rapture, and, it must be said, they were not disappointed, for Hadrian’s Wall, as the simple soldiers referred to it, really did astonish everyone, being greater and different from what they had expected on the basis of what they had heard of it in the form of news or gossip before their arrival, chiefly in its physical substance as it snaked over miles and miles of the bare spine of the Caledonian hills toward its western limit at Ituna aestuarium, bewitching the spectator, including the four of them who after recovering from the ardors of the journey, which in the case of Kasser meant covering himself with a selection of furs from pelt of bear, fox, deer and sheep, walked the line of the Vallum for several weeks, so, yes, they were observers, said Korin, not technical advisers, as described in the markedly official document relating to their mission, and observers too they remained as guests of the Albergueria inn nestling, hidden by the sea, at the foot of Gibraltar, in Calpe, where they were registered as emissaries, vicariouses, of the cartographic council of King John II, though in actual fact it was the bay itself they had come to watch from the upper-story windows, in which bay, according to Falke, they were obliged to pay their respects to the limits, the border, as Korin had it, of the world, and therefore also the limits of certainty, of verifiable propositions, of order and clarity, in other words the border between reality and uncertainty with all the compelling attraction of unverifiable propositions, full of the unquenchable desire for darkness, for impenetrable fogs, for incredible outlandish chances, confronting, in brief, that which lay behind the realm of whatever existed, at the point where the human world had drawn the line of demarcation, added Bengazza, joining the conversation on the second evening, beyond which there exists, as they say, nothing, where, as they say: nothing can be, he declared raising his voice, the raising of his voice betraying for the first time the true purpose of their arrival here, the aim, said Korin, that being to wait here for news of the Great Event, the term referring to something Kasser had mentioned back in Lisbon, and at this point, said Korin, the young lady should know that in this fifth chapter all Christendom, but particularly the kingdoms of John and Isabella, was in a fever of hitherto unknown excitement, as were Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót who, as true disciples and servants of the much respected Prince of Medina-Sidonia, Don Enrique de Guzmán, as well as of the Mathematical Junta of the court of Lisbon, believed that the daring expedition, rejected by John but fervently supported by Isabella was of greater, indeed very much greater significance than anyone could imagine, far more than a simple adventure, for, Toót remarked on their way here, if Señor Colombo’s idiotic venture should achieve its aims, Gibraltar, and with Gibraltar the world, and with the world the notion of anything with limits, and with the end of limits the end of everything known, everything, but everything would come to a stop, declared Toót, for the hidden last term of the conceptual realm, the intellectual distinction set between that which exists and that which does not would vanish, he said, and so the definable and therefore correct, if immeasurable, fixed ratio between the divine and the mortal orders would be lost in the dangerous euphoria of discovery, in the hubris of the search for impossible things, in the loss of respect for a state of being that realizes errors and can therefore reject error, or to put it another way, the fever of fate was succeeded by the intoxication of sobriety, said Kasser, yes, if you looked at it like that, the place, Gibraltar, was of enormous importance, and he gazed through the window, saying, Calpe and the Heights of Abila, and the Gates of Heracles, whispering that places offering views of Nothing would henceforth be confronted by Something, then he fell quiet on this second evening, as did everyone else as they sat and gazed silently, a shadow slowly crossing their faces, and thought of all those ships becalmed, trapped in the bay by the much feared calma chicha, the bay down there in the fog, and the faint shrieks occasionally emitted by the masts of the ships drifting off shore.

These two chapters, said Korin, with their increasing focus on Kasser, with their unrestricted use of the devices of repetition and intensification, these fourth and fifth chapters, should have quickly alerted the reader to the probable intentions of the writer and hence to the meaning of the manuscript at large, but he, in his dense, stupid, unhealthy way had managed to grasp nothing, but nothing of it in the last few days, and the mysterious, cloudy origins of the text, its powerful poetic energy, and the way it turned its back in the most decided manner on normal literary conventions governing such works, had deafened and blinded him, in fact as good as blasted him out of existence, like having a cannon fired at you, he said and shook his head, though the answer was right there in front of him all the time and he should have seen it, did in fact see it, and, furthermore, admired it, but had failed to understand it, failed to understand what he was looking at and admiring, meaning that the manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality examined to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition of the matter into the imagination, was, and he meant this literally, Korin explained, as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the text into the paper and into the mind, all the details, repetitions and intensifications making the process of reading more difficult, while the details it gave, the lists it repeated and the material it intensified was etched into the brain forever, so that the effect of all those passages — the same sentences endlessly repeated but always with some modification, now with some filling out, now a little thinner, now simplified, now darker and denser, the technique itself delicate, light as a feather — said Korin, reflectively, the combined effect did not produce impatience, irritation or boredom in the reader but somehow immersed him, Korin continued, glancing at the ceiling, practically drowned him in the world of the text; but, well, we can say more about that later, he interrupted himself, because now we should continue with how the journey from Onnum to Maia and back got properly under way and how anyone who was not in their immediate proximity at their various stopping places or, in the evenings, at their various improvised shelters, might have thought that the journey from Onnum to Maia would be no different from the one from Maia to Onnum, with three decurio before them, four horsemen immediately behind, and the thirty-two soldiers of the turma or detachment on heavily armored horses at the back of the procession, though it wasn’t a straightforward progress, a matter of continually moving ahead, said Korin shaking his head, not a simple journey at all along the serpentine route of the enormous Vallum, nor was it the matter of a single unbroken conversation, of talking after dark as they rested at the warm outposts of Aesica, Magnis or Luguvalium, engaged in seamless never-ending reflection by the fire as they sat on their bearskin rugs, going over and over what they had seen that day, checking that the selection of stones was appropriate for carving, noting the unparalleled skill in accommodating to natural conditions, keeping an eye on the haulage, the marking, the laying of the foundations and the faultless planning of the construction itself and admiring the expertise and invention of the military engineers of the II Legio Augusta; the skill of the execution itself—the art of implementation, said Korin in English — being as nothing compared to the idea of the Vallum, that is to say the Vallum’s spiritual content, since its physical existence, said Bengazza, was the embodiment of the idea of a border and articulated with spellbinding clarity the distinction between all that was Empire and all that was not, a statement, said Falke, of simply staggering force, to show the two distinct realities the Vallum Hadrianum was there to divide, since at the bottom of all human intentionality, Toót took over, on the most fundamental level—in the primary level of human, said Korin — lay the longing for security, an unquenchable thirst for pleasure, a crying need for property and power and the desire to establish freedoms beyond nature; and man, he added, had gone a long way to achieving all this, the loveliest aspect of it being the ability to construct fastidious answers to insoluble problems, to propose the monumental in the face of the miscellaneous, to offer security in the face of defenselessness, to provide shelter against aggression, to develop refinement in the face of crudity and to seek absolute freedom in the face of constraint, in other words things to produce things of high order as opposed to those of a lower order, though you might put it as effectively, said Bengazza, to credit him with the creation of peace instead of war—instead of war the peace, in Korin’s words — for peace was the greatest, the highest, the supreme achievement of man, peace, the magnificent symbol of which, as of the divine Hadrianus and of the permanence of the entire Pax, was the Vallum that stretched for mile after mile beside them, which demonstrated how one great symbol, with all its deep inner significance, might become its own perfect antithesis, for that is what they were talking about there in Gibraltar, at the table in the Albergueria, in the course of those endless unfinished conversations, the most important of them concerning the unquenchable human desire for the taking of ever greater, ever newer risks, the desire for a supreme, unsurpassable and ever new kind of daring that extended the scope of personal courage and curiosity, as well as the human capacity for understanding as they called it in the feverish din of their morning and evening gatherings on the enormous ground floor of the Albergueria, in those long days of enforced inactivity in 1493, while waiting for the most decisive news in human history, the news whether Admiral Colombo had returned in triumph or vanished forever in the immeasurable dusk at the ends of the world.

Go round again, they told the driver from the backseat, turn right at the corner, do a circle and when you get back to 159th Street again take your fucking foot off the gas and cruise very slowly past the houses, because it wasn’t true that they couldn’t find it, it simply couldn’t be true how much these fucking houses resembled each other, for they’d find the motherfucker, they most certainly would, they said, sooner or later it would all click into place, and they’d go round and round all night if need be, because it was somewhere on the right-hand side, either that house, said one of them, or the one next to the Vietnamese, said the other, having gone round three times already, and how the fuck could it have happened that they had really paid so little attention, but really, the driver called back, surely two normal mothers could not have given birth to such a pair of fuckheads, it being the third time they had gone around, then that guy comes out and they lay into him without even looking back and now nobody knows where to look for him, and don’t anyone tell him how to handle the gas ‘cause he’d leave them here to drown in their own shit, let them do the driving and try to find him by themselves, and when it comes to that, they retorted in the back, they’ll just keep going round in circles until that lousy rat shows his stinking face, so let’s stop here, one suggested, but no, the other snapped back, just keep going, and whatthefuck, the driver slammed his hands down on the wheel, is that what they really want, to spend the whole fucking night going around in circles in this filthy, rotten, shithole of a side street? and so they continued at a snail’s pace down 159th Street, moving so slowly that pedestrians passed them by, turning at the next corner and circling the block to return to 159th Street, a Lincoln with three people on board, which was all the Vietnamese grocer saw when, after a while, he went out to see what the devil was going on out there, the car having passed the shop several times, reappearing every few minutes, and repeating this procedure time after time, a light blue Lincoln Continental MK III, he told his wife later, with decorative chrome flashing, with leather upholstery and dazzling rear lights and, naturally, the slow, dignified, hypnotic swaying of the spoiler.

The Albergueria was not exactly an inn, said Korin to the woman on the bed, the sheer extent of it would tell you as much, since people don’t build them of such size, of such astonishing, quite incredible largeness, nor was the Albergueria exactly “built” as such, if by building one meant something planned, for it simply grew, year by year, grew larger, higher, wider, more complete—expansion was the word Korin used — with countless rooms upstairs, ever more staircases, ever more floors full of nooks and hallways, exits and connecting passages, a corridor here, a corridor there in entirely incomprehensible order, while along this or that corridor, you might suddenly come across some vague focus of attention, a kitchen or a laundry with the doors removed, from which steam was continually billowing, or, equally suddenly, on some floor or other, between two guest rooms, you’d see an open bathroom with enormous tubs, the tubs filled with the steaming bodies of men surrounded by the slight running figures of Berber boys with towels covering their private parts, and stairs leading everywhere from inside these rooms, stairs that passed office-like quarters on certain levels, with commercial signs on the door and impatient queues of Provençals, Sardinians, Castilians, Normans, Bretons, Picardians, Gascons, Catalans and countless unclassifiable others, as well as priests, sailors, clerks, dealers, money-changers and interpreters, not forgetting a miscellaneous bunch of whores from Granada and Algiers on the stairs and down the corridors, whores everywhere, everything so enormous, so confusing and so complicated that no one was able to comprehend it all, because there wasn’t one single owner here but infinite numbers of them, each of them keeping an eye only on what was theirs and not caring about the rest and therefore lacking the foggiest notion of the place as a whole, which was in fact true of everyone there, and one should say, said Korin massaging the nape of his neck, that if this was the case on the upper levels, it was even more so on the ground floor, down below, for there chaos and incomprehensibility, the impenetrable situation, said Korin, was the general rule, it being impossible to be certain of anything, of whether, for instance, this space with its marvelously frescoed ceiling supported by roughly fifty columns and below it the vast, all-encompassing gloom constituted a dining hall, a customs house, a surgery, a bar, a financial exchange, a vast confessional, a marine recruitment agency, a brothel, a barber’s shop, or all of these together at the same time; the answer in fact being “everything at the same time,” said Korin, for the ground floor, the downstairs as he called it, was a monstrous Babel of voices morning, noon, evening and night, full of monstrous numbers of people continually coming and going, and what was more, added Korin blinking, it was as if they all existed in a slightly non-historical space, so that there were enemies and fugitives, hunters and pursued, the defeated as well as those about to be defeated; for here you would find the suspicious agent of a bunch of Algerian pirates consorting with the secret emissary of the Inquisition at Aragon, undercover Moroccan dealers in gunpowder in conversation with traveling salesmen from Medina carrying little statuettes of Stella Maris, Capocorsicans en route to Tadjikistan, Misur and Algiers walking shoulder to shoulder with beautiful melancholy homeless Sephardics who just a year ago had been expelled by Isabella, as well as crushed Sicilian Jews exiled by the Sicilians themselves, all of them in a state between genuine hope and despair, revulsion and dream, calculation and waiting for miracles, here, in the empire recovered but two years ago from the migrating Catholic Kings, every one of them living in expectation—another expectancy, said Korin — waiting to see if three frail caravelles would return and if they did so, whether the world would change, a world, which like the Albergueria with its becalmed ships in the bay, itself seemed becalmed, had suspended its activities, yet permitting all this — the chaos and confusion of the ground floor and the floors above ran riot — while outside some missing power, the power of peace, somehow balanced the equation, the peace that Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót were happily enjoying on the journey from Lisbon to Ceuta — that’s the way it was, and that in point of fact, was the state of affairs behind the thick and secure walls of the villa at Corstopitum too, for within them, he said, they felt a kind of inner calm settling on them, a calm that felt like being reborn, as Falke put it, after several weeks of having walked the length of the Vallum and returned — for Corstopitum to them meant security, the guarantee of which was the extraordinary wall constructed some thirty miles away from where they were — for the sensation for example, said Korin, of entering the baths of the villa that had been made available to them by the will of the cursus publicus, the joy of casting a glance at the wonderful mosaic floor and mosaic-covered walls, of sinking into the water of the basin and allowing the flush of hot water to reach every part of one’s frozen limbs, was the kind of feeling, the kind of morale-raising luxury for the protection of which you required at least a proper Vallum or its equivalent, so that the kind of security experienced at Corstopitum, that calm and peace, signified a genuine triumph, a triumph over that which lay beyond the Vallum, the forces of barbaric darkness, of bare necessity, of savage passions and the desire for conquest and possession, triumph over all this, triumph, Korin explained, over what Kasser and his companions had seen in the wild eyes of a Pict rebel hiding in the scrub somewhere behind the tower of the fort at Vercovicium, over the state of permanent danger, triumph over the eternal beast in man.

There was a noise outside the front door and the interpreter’s lover jerked her head to one side and waited in case the door opened, her whole body tense, her eyes full of fear; but there was no further activity at the door so she opened the magazine she was reading and examined it again, gazing at a picture of what happened to be a brooch, a brooch with a sparkling diamond at its center at which she stared and stared until she eventually turned the page.

He arrived in the uniform of a centurion of the Syrian archers and a simple legionary’s helmet with a plumed crest, wearing a short leather tunic, chain mail, neck-scarf, a heavy cloak, with a long-handled gladius at his side and the ring on his thumb that he never forgot to wear, though he would refer to him rather as a master of ceremonies, or, as Korin had it, a master of ritual, who appeared among the staff of the villa in the week following their return from the wall, though no one knew who had sent him, the Praetorius Fabrum or the cursus publicus, though it might have been the high command of the auxiliary cohorts or some unknown officer of the II Legion from Eboracum, but at any rate he turned up one day, flanked by two servants bearing a large tray full of fruits, the last of the original Pons Aelius rations, the three of them entering the central hall of the villa where meals were usually taken, he stepping in to introduce himself as Lucius Sentius Castus, then bowing his head, and with full consciousness of the effect he was having, after a moment of silence, called the attention of Kasser and his companions to his presence and announced that though no one had asked him to do this, no one, he repeated, had asked, it would be a great honor for him, very dignified, in Korin’s words, if with the completion of his mission not only the mission but his very being were to cease, that he was a simple bearer of news who had come with both news and an offer, and with the conveying of these he would prefer to bring his emissary role to an end, or, if they might allow him to put it that way, that with the delivery of the news and the offer he would willingly vanish like the Corax, having said which he fell silent—silence, said Korin — and for a moment it seemed he was searching their faces for traces of understanding, then launched into what Korin considered to be an especially incomprehensible speech consisting almost entirely of signs, hints and references, which must, said Korin, have been in some kind of code, which, according to the manuscript, was perfectly understood by Kasser and the others, but seemed decidedly difficult to him, and he could form no clear picture of its subject since it demanded the establishing and interpretation of connections between objects, names and events that seemed entirely unconnected, not only to his own admittedly defective mind, but to any mind, since expressions such as Sol Invictus, resurrection, the bull, the Phrygian cap, bread, blood, water, Pater, altar and rebirth suggested that it was an adept of some deep mystery such as the cult of Mithras that was speaking, but what it all meant, Korin shook his head, was impossible to guess, for the manuscript merely rendered Castus’s speech but gave no clue or explanation, not even in the most general way, as to its meaning, but, as so often in this chapter it merely repeated everything, three times, to be precise, in a row, and having done so, the text simply shows us Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót recumbent in that refectory decorated with huge laurel branches, their eyes sparkling with excitement as they listen to this Castus character who, true to his promise, vanishes like the Corax or raven, an army of astonished servants behind them and the scented dates, raisins, nuts and walnuts as well as the delicious cakes, products of the confectioners of the Corstopitum Castrum lying on the tray in front of them, all of which make a very deep impression on a person, as do the broken sentences of Castus, though none of this actually leads anywhere—it didn’t lead nowhere, said Korin — except into obscurity, into the densest, foggiest obscurity, or it might possibly mean, Korin declared, that the kind of total obscurity into which it led was of the so-called Mithraic sort, since, at the end of the speech, when Kasser on behalf of his companions silently nodded to him, Castus seemed to be indicating that some not-quite-definable Pater was awaiting them on the day of Sol’s resurrection in the Mithraeum at Brocolitium, and that it would be he — Castus pointed at himself — or some other person, a Corax, a Nymphaeus or a Miles, who would come for them and lead them into the cave, though who precisely was to do that remained unknown as yet, but there would be someone, and that this person would be the leader, the guide, and so saying he raised his arms, fixed his eyes on the ceiling then addressed them, saying: please oblige me by also desiring that we may summon him, as we do, the blushing Sol Invictus, after the becoming manner of Acimenius, or in the form of Osiris the Abrakoler, or as the most hallowed Mithras, and you should then seize hold of the bull’s horns under the crags of the Persian Dog, the bull who will take a firm stand, so that henceforth he should follow you, having said which he lowered his arms, bowed his head and added, very quietly: outurn soluit libens merito then departed—leave taking, said Korin — the end of the fourth chapter being entirely steeped in puzzles, secrets, enigmas and mysteries, much like the text that followed, an extraordinarily and equally significant part of which was also comprised of such puzzles, secrets, enigmas and mysteries, though all this served to characterize only one of the groups waiting at the Albergueria, there being one recurring image involving some Sephardic and Sicilian brothers in which — whatever the Sephard or Sicilian’s occupation, whether he be beggar, printer, tailor or cobbler, whether he be interpreter or scribe in Greek, Turkish, Italian or Armenian, or a money-changer, or a drawer of teeth, or whatever—never mind, said Korin — what you plainly saw was that suddenly he stopped being what he was and was transported to another world, that suddenly the tailor’s scissors or the cobbler’s knife ceased moving, the spittoon he was carrying or the maravedi he had counted out stood still in the air, and not only for an instant but for a minute or more, and the person, we might say, was lost in meditation — that he would brood, said Korin — and had entirely ceased to be a tailor or cobbler or beggar or interpreter and became something completely different, his gaze contemplative, oblivious to the calls of others, and then, since he continued in this state for some time, the person confronting him also fell silent, no longer addressing remarks to him nor shaking him, simply watching the peculiarly transformed countenance before him as it gazed, entranced, into the air, watching this beautiful face and those beautiful eyes—beautiful face and beautiful eyes, said Korin — and the manuscript kept returning to this moment as if it too were lost in contemplation, meditative, entranced, suddenly letting the text go and allowing his inner eye to gaze on these faces and eyes, this manuscript, said Korin, of which it was possible to know this much at least, or at least he himself knew this from his first reading of it, and indeed it was the one and only thing he knew about it from the very beginning, that the whole thing was written by a madman, and that was why there was no tide page, and why the author’s name was missing.

It was getting late but neither of them moved while Korin — his dictionary and notebook in his hand — continued the story complete with explanations without once stopping and the interpreter’s lover continued holding the same magazine in her hand, occasionally raising her head from it, sometimes folding it for a moment, but never putting it entirely aside, even when she turned toward the door, or, tipping her head on one side, listened out for something in the air, always returning to it, to the pictures in the black and white pages, with its list of prices for necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings as they sparkled, colorless, on the cheap paper.

Lewdness, erotica, passion and desire, continued Korin after a short pause for thought in obvious embarrassment before the woman, and explained that he would be misleading the young lady if he pretended they did not exist, if he attempted to keep silent about them or deny that they were an important aspect of all he had been talking about so far, for there was this other vital factor in the final collapse, the collapse, that is to say, of the text whose narrative was drifting toward Rome, for the text was deeply drenched in desire, a fact he simply could not deny on account of what followed, for the Albergueria was packed with prostitutes, and the sentences of the text, when they touched on the various levels of life in the Albergueria were constantly coming up against these prostitutes, and when they did so, he had to tell her straight, the text described them as extraordinarily shameless, the way they hung around the stairs and on landings, lounging in the corridors, or in the lit or darkened nooks of each floor or communicating passageway, nor was the text satisfied with pointing out their commodious breasts and buttocks, their swaying hips and slender ankles, their wealth of hair and the roundness of their shoulders, all of which constituted a colorful, variegated market, but insisted on following them as they picked up sailors, notaries, tradesmen or money-changers, entertained punters from Andalusia, Pisa, Lisbon, and Greece as well as adolescents and lesbians, strolled alongside aged priests who were continually blinking and gazing in terror behind them, lasciviously licking their lips and shooting come-hither glances at a random selection of already aroused customers then vanished into some darkened nearby room, and yes, blushed Korin, the text does indeed draw apart those curtains that should under any circumstances remain closed, and, no, he did not want to go into further detail regarding the subject, simply to indicate that the fifth chapter was unremitting in its portrayal of what went on inside these rooms, describing an infinite range of sexual practices, recounting the vulgar exchanges between whores and their customers, depicting the crude or complex nature of each sexual act, the cold or passionate expressions of desire, desire as it awakens or dies away, and noting the scandalously flexible rates offered for such services, though when it talks of these things it does not suggest that the world in which they happen was corrupt, nor was there anything high-handed or judgmental in its account of them, the text being neither euphemistic nor scatological, but rendered them remarkably methodically or, if he might so put it, with remarkable sensitivity, said Korin spreading his hands, and since this methodical and sensitive manner carried extraordinary power, it sets the tone of the text from the middle of the chapter onward so that whatever new or as yet unmentioned characters are discovered in the Albergueria their positions are immediately established in terms of desire, the first such character being Mastemann, who at this point, and possibly unexpectedly, turns up once more, having had enough of the dangerous and wasteful stillness of the becalmed bay, and is shown leaving a Genoa-bound coca and arriving on shore in a rowing boat to take a room on an upper floor of the Albergueria, accompanied by a few servants, yes, Mastemann, Korin raised his voice a little, Mastemann who had reason enough to weigh his decision carefully since he had to take into account the hatred — the hate, said Korin — felt by the inhabitants of Spanish-controlled Gibraltar toward Genoans, a hatred that extended to him; just as before, in the earlier episode, when Kasser and his companions first heard from guests arriving at their accommodation, from the first cohort of the primipilus at Eboracum, from the librarius of the castrum at Corstopitum, and finally from the Preatorius Fabrum himself, who had arrived in the seventh week of their sojourn in Britannia, about the hatred felt for the mysterious leader of the Frumentarians, who, it was said, Caesar held in the highest affection, and who was regarded by some as a genius and by others as a monster of depravity, as a man of the highest credentials on the one hand, an underling on the other, but whichever the case, he was referred to by all those dining under the friendly laurel branches of the shared refectory as Terribilissimus—the Most Fearsome, said Korin — an epithet applied first of all to the Frumentarius, said Korin, those cells of the imperial secret police implanted in the cursus publicus, who kept an unblinking eye on absolutely everyone, and were in the confidence of the immortal Hadrian, ensuring that nothing should remain shrouded in the fogs of ignorance, whether in Londinium, in Alexandria, in Tarraco, in Germania or in Athens, wherever, in fact, immortal Rome happened to be at the time.

Kasser was very ill by then—very ill, said Korin — and spent most of the day in bed, rising only to join the others for the evening meal, but nobody knew what sort of disease was eating him because the only symptom he exhibited was extreme chill: no fever, no coughing, no pain of any sort, but a cold that continually shook his whole body, his arms and legs, everything trembling all the time, however they stoked the fire up, the two slaves allotted to the task continually feeding the flames, until the place was so hot that perspiration ran off them in rivers, all in vain, for nothing helped Kasser, and he continued to freeze while the doctor from Corstopitum examined him, as did physicians from Eboracum, prescribing various herbal teas, feeding him the flesh of serpents, and in general trying everything they could think of without any of it making the slightest difference, and his three guests, the three agents of the Frumentarius with their all-comprehending web of informants, headed by Mastemann, made him visibly worse, and were, in fact, a decisive factor in his deteriorating condition, so that after the visit of the Praefactus Fabrium he no longer rose to take his evening meal but had it brought to him by the others, and even then they couldn’t really talk to him because he was either trembling so violently under the blankets and pelts that he was incapable of even contemplating conversation, or they found him lost in such a deep well of silence they didn’t feel it worthwhile trying to rouse him from it; in other words the evenings—the nights, said Korin — passed with few words or in general silence, as did the days, the early and midmornings, in silence or with just a few bare words, Bengazza, Falke and Toót spending the time in composing their reports on the Vallum, and going to the baths in the afternoon, so that they might return to the peace of the villa by dusk, and that was how time passed on the surface, said Korin, or genuinely seemed to, with Kasser inside, shivering in his bed, and the rest writing their reports or enjoying the waters of the baths, though in actual fact they were all cultivating the peculiar art of not mentioning Mastemann, not even pronouncing his name, although the very air was heavy with his presence, with his physical form and history, a history they could glean in detail from the accounts given by the three visitors and one that weighed on their thoughts, so that after another week it had become obvious to them that they were not only keeping silent about him but that they were waiting for him, counting on him to act, and were convinced that as the Magistere of the cursus publicus of Britannia he would seek them out, said Korin, the manuscript being obsessed with the necessity of reminding the reader how they kept watching the events outside the villa, how they trembled when the servants announced the arrival of a guest, but Mastemann did not come to seek them out—he was not coming, said Korin — for that was not to happen until the next chapter, when, on the evening of his arrival, he announced himself as the special representative of the Dominante of Genoa and, wafting a cloud of subtle perfume around him, requested a place at their table which being granted he gave a curt nod, sat down, briefly examined their faces, then, before they could reveal who they were, set out on an encomium of King John as if he already knew who it was he was dealing with, telling them that in his eyes and in the eyes of Genoa, the king of Portugal was the future, the spirit of the age, Nuova Europa, in other words the perfect ruler whose dictates were based not on emotion, interest, or the vagaries of his fate, but on the reason that governed emotions, interest and fate, then having said so, turned his attention to discussion of the Great Tidings, to Colombo whom he referred to now as Signor Colombo and now as “our Cristoforo,” and to their utter astonishment, talked of the expedition as of something successfully completed, then ordered some heavy Malaga wine from the landlady for everyone and announced the beginning of a new world—a new world coming, said Korin — in which not only Admiral Colombo but the very spirit of Genoa would triumph, and what was more, he raised both his glass and his voice, the all pervasive, all conquering spirit of Genoa, the spirit that, judging by the looks that followed Mastemann’s least gesture, Korin explained to the woman, aroused in the lodgers of the Albergueria nothing but intense and the most wholesale hatred.

Should we die, the mechanics of life would go on without us, and that is what people feel most terribly disturbed by, Korin interrupted himself, bowed his head, thought for a while, then pulled an agonized expression and started slowly swiveling his head, though it is only the very fact that it goes on that enables us properly to understand that there is no mechanism.

The whores’ fit of madness, he continued, could only be explained by the appearance of Signor Mastemann, though no one was clear about the reasons for it at the time because they all missed the most important thing, that Mastemann’s presence produced a kind of magnetic field, the power appearing to emanate from his entire being, and it can’t have been anything else, for as soon as Mastemann arrived and settled in on an upper level, the Albergueria changed: the ground floor fell silent as never before, silent, until he came down that first evening of his stay and sat down at an impromptu choice of table — that of Kasser’s companions as it happened — at which point everything changed, for though life went on nothing was as it had been, so that tailors, cobblers, interpreters and sailors, though they continued where they had left off, all kept an eye on Mastemann, waiting to see what he would do, though what could he have done? — Korin spread his hands — since he simply sat down opposite Kasser’s companions, talked, filled his glass with wine, touched his glass to theirs, leaned back and in other words did nothing to suggest that this universal stillness—this general rigor, said Korin — might have its origins in him, though one had to admit that it was enough to look at him in order to feel the terror he inspired with his frighteningly pale and immobile blue eyes, his pockmarked skin, his huge nose, his sharp chin and long, delicate, graceful fingers, his cloak black as ebony, especially when its scarlet lining flashed from beneath it, when the words froze in everyone’s mouth: hate and fear, hate and fear being what he inspired in the tailors, cobblers, interpreters and sailors on the ground floor; though all this was nothing as to the effect he had on the prostitutes, for they not merely trembled before him but were completely beside themselves whenever he appeared, wherever they came across him, the nearest and loveliest girls of Algiers and

Granada immediately running to him and surrounding him, as if drawn by an irresistible magnet, swarming round him as though he had bewitched them, touching his cloak and begging him, please, to come with them, he needn’t pay, they whispered in his ear, it could be the entire night, every part of them was his, anything he wanted, they crooned and burst into bubbles of hysterical laughter, jumping up and down, running about, hugging his neck, pulling at him, patting him, dragging him this way and that, sighing and rolling their eyes as if Mastemann’s mere presence was a source of ecstasy, and it was perfectly obvious that once Mastemann arrived they had taken leave of their senses, though this meant that the thriving trade that had depended on them very quickly and most spectacularly went bust, for a new age, an epoch, had begun in which whores no longer sought financial rewards for their services but sought payment in orgasm instead, though orgasm was not to be had since there wasn’t anyone left who could satisfy them, and men advised each other to leave them alone for they would only drain you to the dregs and use you rather than you using them, and everyone knew which way the wind was blowing, that the cause of all this was Mastemann, so that, under the apparent calm, the fear and hatred—hate under the quietude, said Korin — grew hour by hour, in a manner very similar to that experienced in Corstopitum, for you could hardly describe it as anything else but fear and hatred, as Bengazza and his companions detected in the general attitude toward the unknown Mastemann, as they heard the depressing accounts of the primipilus and the librarius, and marked the bitter words of the Praetorius Fabrum recalling how adept Mastemann had been at exploiting the well-oiled machinery of the cursus publicus ever since it started building up its network of agents, and how people had already feared and hated him then, though they hadn’t even seen him, holding him in contempt and shuddering at his name despite the fact that there was no chance of actually meeting him, and it was only Kasser who did not reveal his feelings, said Korin, Kasser who remained inscrutable, without a stated view for he was incapable of saying a word and expressed no opinion either in Corstopitum when the others came to visit him, nor at the table in the Albergueria, where he hardly ever appeared now to take part in conversations, and when he did come, he only sat silently, watching the bay through the window, gazing at the wreath-like sails visible through the fog patches, that ghostly gathering of galleons, frigates and corvettes, the naviguela, caravelles and hulks as they waited so that, finally, after eleven days, the wind should begin to rise again.

Castus returned precisely seven days later to tell them that their rhapsodic report on the divine Vallum had been passed to the Praetorius Fabrum and that having been delivered their business in Britannia was in fact done, and having done so bowed his head and once again addressed them as an emissary of the Pater, telling them that he was doing them an honor by addressing his task to them, the task being that they should follow him to Brocolitia for the sacred feast of Sol and Apollo, on the day, he raised his right hand, of the great sacrifice and the great feast, where he would see them through the purification ceremony required of those who wished to partake in the glorious day of the killing of the Bull and the rebirth of Mithras, though only Bengazza, Falke and Toót were to make the journey for Kasser was incapable of undertaking it, especially in weather that was, if anything, worse than before, as Kasser told Falke, very quietly, when asked, saying no, it was too late, he was beyond making the attempt, and the others should go without him, asking them to report everything in great detail on their return, and so Bengazza and the others gathered together the cloaks and masks required for the ritual, put on heavy fur coats and, following their instruction to the letter, proceeded without an escort and therefore in the utmost secrecy — and, for the first time in their adventures, without Kasser — setting out on their journey most of which, with a quick gallop and three changes of horse, they managed to complete in one short night despite the icy wind blowing in their faces, which made any kind of gallop a superhuman task, as they told Kasser later, on their return, but they made it in time, that is to say they arrived before dawn in Brocolitia where Castus directed them to the secret entrance of a cave a little to the west of the encampment, though Kasser had the feeling they were hiding something from him and gazed at them with ever greater sadness, not asking, nor expecting them to reveal what it was, but plainly knowing that something had happened to them on the road, something that they were keeping quiet about, and all the while their eyes sparkled as they spoke of Mithras’s rebirth, of the gushing of the bull’s blood, the feast, the liturgy and the Pater himself, how inspiring he was and how wonderful, yet Kasser noticed some subtle shadow in their sparkling eyes that spoke of something else, nor was he mistaken in this—no error, said Korin — the manuscript was clear on this point, for something did actually happen along the way, at the second stop, between Cilurnum and Onnum, where they had changed horses and drank a little hot mead and where they were suddenly confronted by something they might have anticipated but could not prepare, for as they were about to leave the precincts of the mansion and set out on the road again, a group of horsemen of unknown appearance, but reminiscent, if anything, of Swedish auxiliaries, burst out of the darkness, wearing chain mail, fully armed with scutum and gladius, who simply rode them down, so they had to dive into the ditch along with all their horses to avoid being killed, the assailants being a cohort in tight formation headed by a tall man in the midst of them, a man without insignia, wearing a long cloak that flowed behind him, who cast the merest glance at them as they clung to the ditch, a glance, that’s all, then galloped on with his cohort toward Onnum, but a glance that sufficed to tell Bengazza who it was, and thereby confirm the rumors, for the glance was harsh and stern, though that is not quite accurate enough, said Korin, for stern would not quite do, it was something more like a blend of seriousness and dourness, as he put it, the kind of look a murderer gives his victim to inform him that his last hour has come, or, more to the point, Korin tried to sum up, his voice taking on a bitter tinge, it was the Lord of Death they saw in him, the Lord of Death, said Korin in English, from the wayside ditch on the road from Cilurnum to Onnum, and the narrative of the Gibraltar chapter merely pauses to point out how in one place it was the terrible distance dividing them and in the other the terrible proximity that frightened Bengazza and his companions, since it is probably superfluous to add, Korin explained, that when Mastemann sat down at the table with them at the Albergueria and embarked on a perfectly normal conversation they were aware of how close they were to such a terrifying face, a face that was more than terrifying, a face that froze their blood.

He preferred Malaga wine, that heavy sweet Malaga, those first few evenings following his disembarkation, evenings he spent largely with Kasser’s companions, ordering one flask after another, filling glasses, drinking, then refilling, encouraging the others not to hold back but to go on, have a drink with him, all of them, then, surrounded by his band of lovelorn whores; he talked endlessly—talk and talk, said Korin — talked so that no one dared interrupt him because he was talking about Genoa and a power the like of which the world had never seen — Genoa, he said, as if merely to pronounce it was enough, and: Genoa again, after which he rolled off a list of names beginning with Ambrosio Boccanegra, Ugo Vento and Manuel Pessagno, but seeing that these meant nothing to his listeners, he leaned over to Bengazza and quietly asked him if perhaps the names of Bartolomeo, Daniel and Marco Lomellini had a familiar ring; but they didn’t for Bengazza, who shook his head—no, he said, said Korin — so Mastemann turned to Toót and asked him whether that phrase of Baltazár Suárez in which he says “these are people who consider the whole world not to be beyond their grasp” meant anything to him; but Toót answered in confusion that, no, it meant nothing, in answer to which Mastemann prodded him with his finger, saying that the perfection of the words, “the whole world,” told him not only that the world would indeed be theirs, and pretty soon, but that they stood at the threshold of a momentous event, the period of Genoa’s greatness, a greatness that would pass in the course of nature, naturally, though the spirit of Genoa would remain, and that even after Genoa was dead and gone its engine would continue to drive the world, and if they wanted to know what this Genoan engine consisted of, he asked them and raised his glass so that it caught the light, it was the power generated when the Nobili Vecchi, that is the world of the simple trader would be surpassed by the Nobili Novi, the trader dealing exclusively in cash, in other words by the genius of Genoa, boomed Mastemann, in which the asuento and the jura de resguardo, the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word the borsa generale, the building up of the system, would produce an entirely new world where money and all that stems from it would no longer be dependent on an external reality, but on intellect alone, where the only people needing to deal with reality would be the unshod poor, and the victors of Genoa would receive nothing more nor less than the negoziazione dei cambi, and, in summing up, said Mastemann, his voice ringing, there would be a new world order, an order in which power was transformed into spirit, and where the banchieri di conto, the cambiatori and the heroldi, in other words roughly two hundred people in Lyon, Besançon or Piacenza would occasionally gather to demonstrate the fact that the world was theirs, that the money was theirs, whether it be lira, oncia, maravédi, ducats, reale or livre tournois, that these two hundred people constituted the unlimited power behind these things, just two hundred people, Mastemann dropped his voice and swirled the wine about in his glass, then raised it to the company and drained it to the last drop.

Two hundred? Kasser asked Mastemann on their last evening together, and with this the packing—the wrapping, said Korin — began, for there was a moment the previous night as they were going up the stairs and heading for their rooms when they looked at each other and without saying a word decided that this was the end, it was time to pack up, there was no point in waiting any longer, for should the News arrive, even if everything should turn out as Mastemann had predicted, they would not be affected by it—the news was not for them, as Korin put it — for though they believed Mastemann, and indeed it was impossible not to believe him, his words were as hammer blows to Kasser and over the course of several evenings they were increasingly convinced of the coming into being of this new world, a world born diseased; in other words they had already decided to leave and Kasser’s question, that Mastemann in any case had chosen to ignore, was only the mood music to all this, said Korin, so that when Kasser repeated the question — two hundred? — Mastemann once again pretended not to hear him though the others did and you could tell from their faces that the time had come, that once a wind sprang up there would be no point in prolonging their stay, and it didn’t matter from which of the hoped-for directions the News did arrive, whether from Palos or Santa Fé, or whether they first heard it from one of the people around Luis de Santangel, Juan Cabrera or Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, this new world would be more dreadful than the old—awful than the old, said Korin — and Mastemann kept repeating the same message, even on this, their last evening, about how the wine from La Rochelle, the slaves, the beaver-pelts and wax from Britannia, the Spanish salt, the lacquer, the saffron, the sugar from Ceuta, the tallow, the goatskin, the Neapolitan wool, the sponge from Djerba, the oil from Greece and the German timber, all these things would become merely theoretical items on paper, you understand? allusions and statements, and what mattered was what was written on the scartafaccio and in the ledgers of the great risconto markets, that is what they should pay heed to, for that was what reality would be, he said, and downed another glass of wine; then the next day a bunch of sailors from Languedoc arrived with stories that they had seen a few magogs coming down to the sea at Calpe, this being the first sign, soon to be followed by many others, such as the Andalusian pilgrims who turned up one day to report that an enormous albatross was flying low over the surface of the water, so that everyone should recognize that they were no longer becalmed, that the iron grip of the calma chicha was loosening, that the lull was over—the lull is over, said Korin — and within a few hours delighted servants entered the room where Kasser’s companions were lodged, and told the gentlemen who had been locked in there for days, that a wind had sprung up, that sails had been seen to tremble and that ships were moving, slowly at first then with ever greater speed, as the Cocca and frigates, the karaks and the galleons set off, so suddenly the Albergueria was a hive of activity, seeing which Kasser and his companions also made a start, their backs to Gibraltar, Ceuta before them, Ceuta where, in accordance with their earlier plans and with the preparation of a new navigational map, they should pick up a new commission from Bishop Ortiz, and in other words they knew what was to happen next, as they did at Corstopitum when they took their farewells before they crossed the channel, knowing what would await them on the beach at Normandy—what comes at the beach of Normandia, said Korin — and it was only Kasser who didn’t know whether he would reach the other side, the others having wrapped him in the warmest fleeces and led him to the dormitory of the carruca reserved for their special use by the cursus publicus, helping him up and settling him in, then getting on their horses and escorting him in the face of terrible winds, through thick fog that surrounded them at Condercum, past the wolves that attacked them at the bridgehead of the Pons Aelius, then boarding the extremely fragile-looking navis longa awaiting them in the Roman harbor to face the enormous waves of a tempestuous sea, moving into the daytime darkness and falling across the shore, the sun in hiding, said Korin, and no light at all, no light whatsoever.

He gazed vacantly for a long time, not saying a word, then took a deep breath indicating that he would close the account for the day, and glanced over at the woman, but for her the story had been finished some time ago and she was leaning back against the wall behind the bed, her head having dropped forward, her hair across her face, fast asleep, and Korin hadn’t noticed until now, at the end, that she had had enough of the story, and since there was no need to take elaborate leave he rose carefully from the bed and left the room on tiptoe, returning after a moment’s thought, to look out for a piece of rumpled bedding, an eiderdown left behind for them by the movers, and covered the woman with it, then went to his room and, fully dressed, lay down on his own bed but couldn’t sleep for a long time, and when he did fall asleep it was in an instant so he had no time to undress or draw the blanket over him, the result of which was that he woke the same way the next morning, fully clothed, his whole body shivering, in the dark, and stood at the window gazing at the vaguely glimmering roofs, rubbing his limbs to warm himself, then sat down on the bed again, turned on the laptop, entered the password, checked that everything was still there on his home page, that he hadn’t made any mistakes, any miscellaneous errors, and found no error, so, after performing the few ritual strokes demanded by the format he looked to see the first few sentences of the manuscript on the screen, then turned the computer off, closed it and waited for the eviction to begin, the eviction he said, though it wasn’t an eviction that got under way, he said later, but rather a moving in, if he might put it that way, for moving in was what it most resembled, since boxes and packages kept arriving as he stood in the corner of the kitchen by the door with the woman beside him, gawping at the furious activity of the four movers, the head of the household, the interpreter being nowhere in sight, utterly vanished, as if the ground had swallowed him, and so the movers carried on shifting their endless boxes and packages until they covered every inch of available space, at which point the four workmen got the woman to sign another piece of paper then cleared off while they remained standing by the table in the kitchen staring at the upheaval, understanding nothing, until the woman eventually took the nearest package, tentatively opened it, tore the wrapping paper and discovered a microwave oven; and so she continued through other packages, one after another, Korin joining in and unwrapping, using his hands or else a knife, whatever served the purpose, uncovering a refrigerator, he said, a table, a chandelier, a carpet, a set of cutlery, a bathtub, some saucepans, a hair-dryer, and so on until they were done, the interpreter’s lover walking up and down among the vast gallery of items, treading over mounds of wrapping paper, wringing her hands and darting panicky glances at Korin who did not respond but carried on walking up and down himself, stopping every so often to lean down, examine a chair, a pair of curtains, or some bathroom taps, checking that they really were chairs, curtains and bathroom taps, then went over to the front door where the workmen had left that purple polyester fabric, opened it up, examined it, and read aloud the writing on it saying start over again, and said to himself, this is an enormous length of tape, perhaps it is some sort of game, or prize, since everything was tied round with it, but his remarks meant nothing to the woman who continued marching up and down in the chaos, and this went on until they were both worn out and the woman sat down on the bed and Korin settled beside her as he had done the day before, for it was exactly the same, just as mysterious and worrying as it had been the previous night, or at least, as Korin explained much later, as far as he could judge from the interpreter’s lover’s look of deep anxiety, which was why everything went exactly the same as the night before, the woman leaning back against the wall behind the bed, casting frequent glances at the open door through which she could see the entrance, leafing through the same magazine full of advertisements, while Korin, in an attempt to divert her attention, picked up the story where he had left off last night, for all was ready, he announced, for the last act, the finale, the ending, and this was the important moment when he could reveal what was hidden there, to tell her about the realization that changed everything, the realization that made him alter all his plans and was, for him, a moment of dizzying enlightenment.

There is an order in the sentences: words, punctuation, periods, commas all in place, said Korin, and yet, and he began swiveling his head again, the events that follow in the last chapter may be simply characterized as a series of collapses—collapse, collapse and collapse—for the sentences seemed to have lost their reason, not just growing ever longer and longer but galloping desperately onward in a harum-scarum scramble—crazy rush, said Korin — not that he was one of the those ur-Magyar fast-speaking types, said he, pointing to himself, he was certainly not one of them, though no doubt he had his own problems with gabbling and babbling, trying to say everything at once in a single sentence, in one enormous last deep breath, that he knew all too well, but what the sixth chapter did was something altogether different, for here language simply rebels and refuses to serve, will not do what it was created to do, for once a sentence begins it doesn’t want to stop, not because — let’s put it this way — because it is about to fall off the edge of the world, not in other words as a result of incompetence, but because it is driven by some crazy form of rigor, as if its antithesis — the short sentence — led straight to hell, as indeed it had tended to do with him, but not with the manuscript, for that was a matter of discipline, Korin explained to the woman, meaning that this enormous sentence comes along and starts to egg itself seeking ever more precision, ever more sensitivity, and in so doing it sets out a complete catalogue of the capabilities of language, all that language can do and all it can’t, and the words begin to fill the sentences, leaping over each other, piling up, but not as in some common road accident to be catapulted all over the place, but in a kind of jigsaw puzzle whose completion is of paramount importance, dense, concentrated, enclosed, a suffocating airless throng of pieces, that’s how they are, that’s right, Korin nodded, it was as if—all the sentences—each sentence was of vital importance, a matter of life and death, the whole developing and moving at a dizzy rate, and that which it relates, that which it constructs and supports and conjures is so complicated that, quite honestly, it becomes perfectly incomprehensible, Korin declared, and it’s better that it should be so, and in saying this he had revealed the most important thing about it, for the sixth chapter, set in Rome, was inhuman in its complexity, and that was the point, he said, for once this inhuman complexity sets in the manuscript becomes genuinely unreadable — unreadable and, at the same time, unrivalled in its beauty, which was what he had felt from the very beginning when, as he had already told her, he first discovered the manuscript in that far-off archive in distant Hungary, in the time before the deluge, when he had read it right through for the very first time, and he continued feeling this however often he reread it, still experiencing, even today, how incomprehensible and beautiful it was—inapprehensible and beautiful, as he put it — though the first time he attempted to understand it all he could make out was that they were standing at one of the gates of the walled city of Aurelianus, at the Porta Appia to be precise, already outside the city, perhaps some one hundred meters from the wall, gathered around a small stone shrine and looking down the road, the Via Appia, as it approaches from the south, straight as a die, and they are just standing there, nothing happening, in autumn or early spring, you couldn’t tell which, at the Porta Appia, the door of the Porta being lowered, and, for the moment, just two guards, their faces visible at the arrow-slits of the maneuver room, with the scrub of the plains full of trampled weed on either side of them, a well by the gate with a few cisiarii, or vehicles for hire, ranged about it, and that was all he could make out of the sixth chapter, apart from the fact, Korin made a point of pursing his lips, that everything, but everything, was terrifically complicated.

They were waiting by the shrine to Mercury, about a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards from the Porta Appia, Bengazza sitting down, Falke standing and Toót with his right foot on a stone, his arms folded and propped on his knee — nothing else happening, the very image of expectancy—expectancy in the heart of things, said Korin, for when the text was examined in greater detail it seemed that time had ceased and history itself had come to an end, so whatever appeared in those huge inflated sentences, whatever new element entered them, none of it led anywhere or prepared the way for anything, it was neither preamble nor closure, neither cause nor effect, simply one glimpsed element of a picture moving at unprecedented speed, a detail, a cell, a chunk, a working part of an indescribably complex whole that stood immobile in those gigantic sentences, to put it another way, said Korin, if he was not mistaken — and he did not wish to mislead — the sixth chapter was ultimately nothing but an enormous inventory, there was no other way to describe it, and the contradictions in it had, from beginning to end, always unnerved him, for what was he to do with those mutually exclusive statements, that were both true yet impossible, and no, no, no he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere with it yet that’s how it was, he said with a slight smile, the three of them standing there without Kasser, at one end of the Via Appia, watching the road as it approached them from the south, and, as they stand there, the monstrous inventory begins, from Roma Quadrata to the Temple of Vesta, from the Via Sacra to Aqua Claudia, and in one way it really does work, but in another, said Korin, his eyes beginning to burn, it really doesn’t, it really does not work at all.

He got up, left the room, then returned a moment later with a big wad of paper, sat down beside the woman, picked up the manuscript and searched through it for a while, then, begging her pardon for just this once having to have the text in front of him, chose a few pages, glancing over them and continued from where he had left off last time, at Rome, and how the road to Rome was filled with slaves, the libertus and the tenuirs, with makers of staircases and makers of women’s shoes, with smelters of copper, blowers of glass, with bakers and workers at brick ovens, with Pisan weavers of wool and potters from Arretium, with tanners, barbers, quack-doctors, water-bearers, knights, senators, and fast on their heels, accenti, viators, praeca and librarii, then ludimagisteri, grammatici and rhetors, flower-sellers, capsarii and pastry-cooks, followed by innkeepers, gladiators, pilgrims and, bringing up the rear, delators, with libitinarii, vespiilons and dissignatori all coming their way, or rather they had come their way for they were no longer actually coming, said Bengazza looking up the deserted road, while Falke agreed, saying no, because there’s no Farum, no Palatinus, no Capital, no Campus Martius, nor is there a Saepta, an Emporium on the banks of the Tiber, no gorgeous Harti Caesaris, no Camitum and no Cura, nor is there an Arx, a Tabularium, a Regia and no shrine of Cybele; no more marvelous temples such as those of Saturnus or Augustus, or Jupiter or Diana, for grass covers the Calasseum and the Pantheon too; nor is there a Senate to bring in laws, nor is there a Caesar in place, and so on and so forth ad infinitum, Korin explained; they just went on saying these things, one picking up where the other left off, the words pouring from them, words about the immeasurable quantity of gifts the earth had bestowed on them, for it brought forth corn, continued Toót, and it gave us firewood and stump-wood by way of the Vicus Materarius and honey, fruits, flowers and precious stones by way of the Via Sacra, cattle for the Forum Baarium, and swine for the Farum Suarium, fishes for the Piscatarium, vegetables for the Halitorium, and oil, wine, papyrus and herbs to the foot of Aventinus and the banks of the Tiber, but there is no incentive for this infinite store of earthly goods to flow in our direction, Bengazza took over, for there is no more life, no more festival, and never again will there be chariot races, or Saturnalia, for Ceres and Flora are forgotten; and there is no Ludi Ramani to organize, nor Ludi Victariae Sullanae either, for the baths are in ruins, the thermals at Caracalla and Diacletians are wrecks, and the pipes to carry the water are dry, dry as the Aqua Appia, empty as the Aqua Marcia, and who cares, said Toót, where Catullus, or Cicero or Augustus once lived, and who cares where those vast, imposing, peerless palaces used to stand or what wine they used to drink there, the Falernian, the Massilion, the Chiasi and the Aquileian, it’s all the same now, no longer interesting; they no longer exist, no longer flow, nor is there any reason for them to, and that’s the mad way it goes on from page to page, said Korin, leafing through a little helplessly, and he, of course, he added, was quite incapable of conveying the tight discipline that drove the whole thing, since it wasn’t just a case of one thing after another, because, he should explain, alongside the inventory there was a sense of a thousand other incidental details, for, say a man reading about what the cisiarii were doing with their coaches between the Farum Baarium and the Caracalla Thermae, or some guards closing the gate — the iron bars and the wooden panels — at the Parta, then, for example, a pile of ceramic figures in relief glittering between the Aquae, the Saturnaliae and the Holitorium, and the dust settling on the leaves of cypresses, pines, acanthus and mulberry bushes on either side of the Via Appia, and, yes, that’s precisely it, sighed Korin, details all and yet all part of a single thing, some cipher engraved in the heart of each long list, so you see, young lady, it isn’t just a simple sequence, a row of items on a list, say, of the crowds flowing into Rome, followed by, let us say, the dust on the cypresses and then an endless catalogue of the goods arriving at their depots, and then, for example the cisiarii, no, it’s not that, but the fact that these are all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you, so you begin with one thing, but then a second thing comes along and then a third, and then the sentence returns to the first thing again, and so on, so the reader’s hopes are continually raised, said Korin glancing at the interpreter’s lover, so that he thinks he has got some kind of hold on the text, believe me when I say, as I said before, he said, that the whole thing is unreadable, insane!!! and Korin trusted that the young lady understood by now that the whole thing was extraordinarily beautiful, and in fact moved him to an extraordinary degree every time he read through it, moved him deeply, until, about three or so days ago he got to this sixth chapter, until he arrived here, just a few days ago as he was typing up, by which time he had believed that it was finished, that the whole thing was doomed to remain obscure, when, ah yes, then, said Korin, his eyes shining, having typed the first few sentences of the sixth chapter, the manuscript — and there was no other way to put it — opened up before him, for how else could it have been that three or so days earlier he simply found himself with an open door in front of him, and that, wholly unexpectedly, after so much reading, astonishment, effort and agony, he should understand it, and it was as if the room were suddenly filled with a blinding light, and he leapt off the bed into the light and started walking up and down in his excitement, and he kept leaping and walking and understood everything.

He read the enormous, ever longer sentences and typed them into the computer though his mind wasn’t on it but somewhere else altogether, he told the woman, so everything that remained of the last chapter of the manuscript practically typed itself and there was still a good deal left, for there remained all the stuff about the journey, the modes of transport, and about Marcus Cornelius Mastemann, who by way of farewell, had decided to call himself curatar vìarum—about the journey, in any case, about how the route needed to be constructed, and in the most painstaking explanations of what was a statumen, a rudus, the nucleus and pavimentum, the regulated dimensions of roads, the two obligatory ditches on either side of them and about the positioning of the crepinides and the milliarii, the rules regarding notices, then about the workings of the centuria accessarum velatorum, the famous brigade founded by Augustus for the maintenance of roads, and then the means of transport themselves, about the countless carriages and carts, the carpentum, the carruca, the raeda, the essedum, and all the rest including the birota, the petarritum, and the carrusa: vehicles on two wheels, the uncovered cisium and so forth until only Mastemann remained, or, more accurately, a description of the essential powers and responsibilities of any curatar vìarum, but all this, of course, contained in the central image of Bengazza, Falke and Toót standing by the shrine to Mercury, watching the Via Appia in case anyone appeared on it after all, and so, said Korin, he just kept writing, typing the last sentences into the computer while something completely different was going on in his mind, buzzing away continuously, shuddering, clattering, ticking away as he tried to sum up what it was he had seen in that great blinding light, for where did it all begin, he asked himself, but there, at the point when having left the records office, he took the manuscript home and read and reread it, time again, repeatedly asking himself what was the point of it, that it was all well and good, but what was it, and that this was the first question and the last too, holding within it the seeds of all the other questions, such as, for example, seeing the manuscript employed language what was the manner or pitch of it, what form of address was involved, for it was perfectly clear that it was not addressed to anyone in particular; and if it was not a letter, why it did not respond to the pressure of expectation demanded as a bare minimum by other works of literature; and what was it in any case if not a work of literature, for it was clearly not that; and why the writer employed a mass of amateurish devices while having not a scintilla of fear that he might sound amateurish, and besides that, why, in any case — Korin’s agitation was evident in his expression — does he describe four characters with such extraordinary clarity then insert them at certain historical moments, and why precisely one moment rather than another, why precisely these four and not some other people; and what is this fog, this miasma, out of which he leads them time after time; and what is the fog into which he then drives them; and why the constant repetition; and how does Kasser disappear at the end; and what is this perpetual, continuous secrecy about, and the ever more nagging impatience, increasing chapter on chapter, to discover who Mastemann is, and why each episode concerning him follows the same pattern, as does the narrative of the others too; and, most important of all, why does the writer go completely mad, whoever he is, whether he is a member of the Wlassich family or not, and how did his manuscript find its way into the Wlassich fasciculus if he was not, might it by some accident; in other words, said Korin still sitting on the bed and raising his voice, what, in the final analysis, does the manuscript hope to achieve, for there must be some reason for its coming into existence, some cause, Korin kept telling himself whenever he thought of it, some reason for its presence here; and then came the day, hard to say precisely when in retrospect, he couldn’t tell precisely now, three days ago or something like that, when suddenly there was light, and in that instant everything became clear, hard as it was to explain why then and not before, though he did think it was right, then, whenever it was, some three or so days ago, if only because he had thought about it for precisely the right length of time over the past few months, and because his thinking had taken precisely so much time to mature to a point at which it could at last become clear, and he himself most clearly remembered how, when he was having this experience, this blinding light and understanding thing, his whole heart was filled with a kind of warmth as he was unashamed now to say, if he might so put it, and furthermore it might have been better to begin with this, since it was very likely that this was how it began, and that the clarity could be traced back to this source, this warmth flooding through his heart, not that he wanted to get sentimental about it but that was how it happened, meaning that somebody, a certain Wlassich or other, had decided to invent four remarkable, pure, angelic men, and equip these four admirable, floating, infinitely refined beings with the most marvelous thoughts, and if one scanned through the story we are presented with, it seemed he was seeking a point from which he might lead them out of it, said Korin, indeed, he said, his hand trembling and his eyes glowing as if he had suddenly developed a fever, yes, he said, it was a way out that this Wlassich or whatever his name is, was seeking for them, but he could not find one that was wholly airy and fantastical so he sent them forth into the wholly real realm of history, into the reality of eternal war, and tried to settle them at a point that held the promise of peace, a promise that was never fulfilled, though he conjures this reality with ever more infernal power, with ever more devilish fidelity, ever greater demonic sensitivity, and populates it with the products of his own imagination, in vain as it turns out, for their path leads but from war to war, and never from war to peace, and this Wlassich, or whoever it is, despairs ever more of his one-person, amateurish ritual, and eventually goes completely off his head, for there is no Way Out, young lady, said Korin and bowed his head, and this conclusion must be agonizing beyond telling for the person who invented and had fallen in love with these four men — Bengazza, Falke, Toót and the ultimately vanishing Kasser — for they live so vividly in his own heart that he can hardly find the words to tell how he walks, walks up and down in his room with them, how he carries them out into the kitchen then back into his room, because something is driving him, and it is terrible to be so driven like this, young lady, said Korin to the woman, his eyes full of despair, for they have, as you might say, no Way Out, for there is only war and war everywhere, even within himself, and finally, and what’s more, now that it is finished and that the whole text is sitting there on his home page, he really doesn’t know what awaits him, for originally he had thought, and had made all his plans on that basis, that at the end he could set calmly out on his last journey, but now he must embark with this terrible helplessness in his heart, and he feels this is not the way it should be, that he should think of something, something at all costs, for he can’t carry them with him, but should put them down somewhere, but he can’t, his head can’t cope, he is too stupid, hollow, crazy, and it does nothing but ache, and is heavy and wants to drop off his neck, for there is nothing but pain and he can’t think of a damn thing.

The interpreter’s lover looked at Korin and quietly asked him in English, What’s there on your hand, but Korin was so surprised that she said anything at all, and in any case she spoke too fast for him to understand, that for a while he was incapable of answering, just kept nodding and staring at the ceiling as if he were busy thinking, then put the manuscript aside and took the dictionary instead to look up a word he hadn’t understood then suddenly slammed it shut and cried out in relief that he had understood, that it was a matter of “what’s” and “there” not “Whatser,” or what the hell, of course not, no, he nodded, it was clear now: “what is there on your,” well, “hand” and he held both his hands out and inspected them but couldn’t see anything unusual on them, until it occurred to him what the woman wanted to say, and he sighed and pointed with his left hand to a scar on the right which had been there for ages, an old thing, he said in English, not interesting—no interesting—the result of an incident a very long time ago, at a time when he felt bitterly disappointed, and he was almost embarrassed to mention it now for the whole disappointment was so childish, but what happened was that he had shot through it—perforate with a colt, as he put it, peeking into the dictionary, but it was nothing, it didn’t cause him any problems and he had got so used to it he hardly noticed it anymore, though he would carry the mark around for the rest of his life that much was sure, as the young lady most certainly noticed, but what was a much bigger problem was that he had to carry this head around on this weak and aching neck, a neck that was groaning — he pointed to it and started massaging it with his palm and swiveling his head from right to left — under too great a burden, or rather the same problem kept recurring, for after a short transitional period of easement the old agonizing weight returned just as before so that he has felt, particularly in the last few days, as though the whole thing was genuinely ready to drop off, and having said this he stopped massaging and swiveling his head, picked up the manuscript again, shuffling its concluding pages while adding that he couldn’t in fact tell where it ended because the text had grown so dense and impenetrable, one couldn’t even decide precisely when it was taking place, at what point of history to locate it, for though the earthquake of 402 is mentioned in one bitter monologue, and a few crazy sentences take a melancholy turn in referring to the terrible victory of the Visigoths, to Geiserich, to Theodoric, to Orestes, to Odoacer and even, at the end, to Romulus Augustulus, mostly there were just names, said Korin, spreading his hands, references, flashes, and the only thing certain was that Rome was dying there at the Porta Appia, over, over, declared Korin, but was unable to continue because suddenly there was a loud noise outside, the drumming of feet, a rattling and banging, and some cursing as well — after which there was not much time left to meditate as to who it was, or what it was, for the drumming, rattling, banging and cursing soon revealed their source to be a man, bellowing on the staircase, crying Good evening, darling, a man abruptly kicking the door open.

No need to ask anything, just be happy, the interpreter hesitated swaying on the step, and while the great weight of bags and satchels he was carrying might have explained the swaying, for there were some round his neck and others hung on both shoulders, there could be no doubt about the real reason for his condition, for he was clearly drunk, the red eyes, the slow looks and the stumbling speech immediately betraying the fact, not to mention that he was in unprecedented good spirits and wished everyone else to know it, for when he surveyed the apartment and noticed the two figures emerging from among all the clutter of boxes and packages he started laughing so violently that he was quite unable to stop for several minutes, his laugher self-perpetuating, leading to more and more laughter until he fell back against the wall, quite helpless, the drool trickling from his mouth, but still could not stop himself, and even when, for one reason or another, he got tired and began to calm down, shouting at Korin and the woman — what’s up? how long you want to keep staring? — can’t you see this mass of bags and satchels I’m carrying — so that they ran to help relieve him of his load it was still all in vain, in vain to venture a step forward, for by the time he came to a second step and had run his eyes over the chaos of boxes and packages, the laughter seized hold of him again and he carried on laughing, while choking out the words, start over again, in English, pointing at the mess and falling flat on his face, at which point the woman went over to him, helped him up and, somehow supporting him, got him over to the inner room where he flopped down on the bed, right on Korin’s manuscript, dictionary and notebook as well as on the woman’s magazine, gave a grunt and immediately fell asleep, his mouth open, snoring, though his eyes weren’t fully closed so the woman did not dare move from where she was for she couldn’t be certain that this wasn’t a practical joke he was playing on them, a fact they never found out, because he was awake again, that is if he had really slept, a few minutes later and was bellowing once more—start over again—though this might have been a joke since he kept looking at the woman with a mischievous look on his face, eventually telling her to come closer, he wouldn’t bite her, don’t be afraid, let her sit down beside him on the bed and stop all that quivering because he’d smack her one if she continued like that, couldn’t she understand that the days of their poverty were over, and that from this time on she too should behave as though she had a few nickels to rub together, for nickels there were now, he declared, sitting up on the bed, though he couldn’t tell, he winked at her, whether she had noticed the fact, but their lives were changed in the blinking of an eye since he’d got his act together, since he’d gone down to Hutchinson’s and signed up for the “start over again” deal in which they change everything in a single day, replacing old things with new, and true enough he had exchanged all the old shit cluttering up the place and here it was, all filled up with the new, because, by God, did he need a change, and it needed a stroke of genius like the Hutchinson’s offer at Hutchinson’s store, an idea so brilliant in its simplicity that it simply said: rid yourself of this shit at a day’s notice, of every little trace of it, and completely re-equip yourself in the space of a day, and as soon as that was done then you could really start, in order to do which you need nothing more than to pick a convenient moment for the change, and he did find such a moment and did change, and not a moment too soon, for everything here was going downhill all too fast and he had had enough of counting dimes, wondering if he had enough change to buy something from the Vietnamese downstairs; enough, he had decided: he had made the decision, took hold of himself and had yanked himself out of the mire, changed and seized the moment of opportunity, that was the shortest, most efficient way he could put it, he said, stumbling over his words, and now, he sprang from the bed and started toward the door, he would find Korin and they would, he raised his voice, celebrate, so hey, where is our little Hunkie hiding, he bellowed into Korin’s room, as a result of which Korin quickly emerged and said, Good evening Mr. Sárváry, but he was already being dragged away, the interpreter joyfully demanding to know where the damned bag was, then, after a cursory search, finding it himself by the front door, pulling out a couple of bottles, he raised them high in the air and shouted in English once more: start over again, so the woman had to fetch three glasses, a none too easy task, for first they had to look through the mess to find the boxes with glasses in them, but when they eventually did so the interpreter opened a bottle and poured half into the glasses and half on the floor, then raised his own glass to the alarmed Korin who was desperately trying to smile, saying, To our new lives! concluding the toast by clinking glasses with the cowering woman and declaring And let bygones be bygones! after which he made a sweeping gesture, dropped his glass without noticing it, and simply gazed into the air to signal that he was about to make a ceremonial announcement, a signal that was followed by a long period of silence eventually broken by nothing more than a simple: that’s over, that’s over, then he dropped his arms, his eyes cleared for a second, he shook his head, shook it again, asked for a new glass, filled it, ordered the woman to come closer, put an arm round her shoulder and asked her if she liked champagne but did not wait for an answer, pulling from his pocket a small package that he placed in her hand, tightening his grip on her at the same time, then leaned closely into her face, looked in her eyes and, in a whisper, asked her whether she liked the good life.

He had been traveling by taxi for days, just as he was now, on his way home, drunk and carrying masses of stuff, the backseat entirely filled with it as was the trunk that he had packed right up before getting in, the one thing he didn’t know, he said to the driver, being how the hell he was going to get all this up to the top floor, for he couldn’t see how it could be done since it was too much for one man, you see? and so saying he lifted one of the bags, saying, this is caviar, and not just any old caviar but Petrossian Beluga, and this is Stilton cheese, and this thing is some kind of preserve, and, he peeked in deeper, what’s this, ah yes, bagel with salmon cream cheese, and see this? he asked, grabbing another package off the floor, this is champagne, Lafitte, the most expensive brand, and cultured strawberries from Florida, and this, he searched around among the pile of paper bags, is Gammel Dansk you know, and then there’s chorizo and herring and a couple of bottles of Bourgogne wine, best in the world, world famous, so he hoped he understood, the interpreter told the taxi driver, that there would be a big party at home tonight, in fact the biggest party of his life, and did he know what they were celebrating, he asked leaning closer to the grille so the driver should hear him over the noise of the engine, because it wasn’t a birthday or a name-day, not a christening, no, no, no and no, he’d never guess because there were few people in New York who could celebrate what he was celebrating, and that thing was courage, his own personal courage, the fact, he pointed to himself, that he took the correct steps at the correct time, that he didn’t shit himself, he never wavered when the decision had to be made, asking himself whether he dared or not, but went and decided without a second thought, and dared do it, and not just at any moment but at precisely at the best, most appropriate moment, not one moment too soon, not a moment too late, but when the moment was dead right, and that is why this night would be the celebration of his courage, and at the same time the decisive prelude to the re-launching of a great artistic career, and this was why they’d all be drunk out of their minds tonight, he could faithfully promise that, and the two of them could drink to that right now for he had a drop of something on his person somewhere that would do, and so saying pulled a flat bottle of bourbon from his pocket that he slipped through the driver’s grille and the driver took it, licked the bottle’s lip then, nodding and laughing silently, returned it to the interpreter, who said, OK, OK, if you want more just say the word, they could finish the bottle, there were more where that came from, the whole cab was full of goodies, and the only thing he didn’t know was how in God’s name he was going to get it all upstairs, all this stuff, he shook his head grinning, no, he couldn’t imagine it was all to be carried up to his apartment, but actually, he had suddenly had an idea, like how would it be if they did it together for an extra dollar or two, seeing the cab wouldn’t run away, and the driver smiled and nodded, fine, and he did in fact help carry but only to the bottom of the stairs, that much he agreed to, but no further, not up the stairs themselves and he laughed silently again and kept nodding, but eventually said he had to be getting on so he received only one dollar and the interpreter cursed him vigorously for his pains while struggling up the stairs a good many times until finally it was all piled up at the top, and it felt so good then kicking the door open, he told the woman next morning, he in bed, she standing by the door, it was so good to stand there watching her and the little Hunkie stare at him among that vast pile of boxes, packages, satchels and bags without the faintest idea what it was about, that he forgot his fury and would happily have hugged them, but maybe that was what he actually did, didn’t he? before unpacking a table and two chairs, and, he was pretty sure, sitting Korin down opposite him, putting a couple of champagne bottles before him, switching to Hungarian and explaining to him how he should lead his life, how he should not go on like an idiot, that he should stop wasting his time and so on, though his listener didn’t seem to be listening to all this good advice but only wanted to know where the Hungarian quarter was, the area that he, the interpreter, had told him was the best source of paprika salami in New York, and that seemed to be the most important thing to him because he could swear this was what he kept asking about, that place he thought was above Zabar’s deli round about 81st or 82nd Street, but he wanted to get the street just right, and so it went on for ages, but he hadn’t the foggiest idea why now, or indeed yesterday evening, when he just wanted to tell him what to do should he ever come to a crossroads where he had to make a choice, and how, if he did come to one, he should be brave and trust to his instincts: courage, he said, it was the importance of courage he tried to impress upon him, giving a broad smile as he lay in bed and stuffed his head into his pillow, but the guy had gone on muttering something like, Mr. Sárváry, Mr. Sárváry, and so the time passed, him saying he had done what he had set out to do and a lot of stupid things like that in his usual fashion, and — he had just remembered — that he then paid what was owing on the rent and finally, or so he thought, dipped into his pocket, searched through the pocket of his trousers, brought out all the money he had left, saying it had to be in there, and had asked him, that is to say the interpreter, to pay the provider an advance that would ensure permanent maintenance of his site, and, he even had some glimmering that at the end they kissed each other — he snorted with laughter into his pillow remembering this — and had sworn themselves to eternal friendship, or so he thought, but beyond that he couldn’t remember a thing, so leave him alone now, he had a splitting headache with a bucket of snot for brains, leave him be, he just wanted to sleep now, sleep a bit, and if he’s not here he’s not here, who cares, but the woman just stood in the doorway crying and kept repeating, he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s left all his things behind, but he’s gone, his room is empty.

In the corner opposite the bed the TV was on, a brand-new, large-screen, remote-controlled, two-hundred-and-fifty channel SONY MODEL, with the sound turned down but the screen was alive, the images continually running on a loop, the charming smiling man and the woman, and as the diamond show moved toward its conclusion the set darkened then flickered into life again, back to the beginning once more, the screen fading then brightening so that the room too began to pulse and twitch with the neurotic light, while the interpreter lay fast asleep, his legs spread out, with the woman beside him, turned away from him toward the window, on her side and still wearing her blue terry cloth bathrobe, having kept it on because she was cold, the interpreter having dragged all the covers off her this first night, so that she remained wide awake, unable to sleep for the excitement, on her side, her knees drawn up to her stomach, her eyes open, hardly blinking, while using her right hand under the pillow to support her head and extending the other arm along her body, her fingers bent, clutching a small box, gripping it tightly and never letting go, gripping it in sheer joy, staring straight ahead in the neurotically pulsing blue light, looking straight ahead and hardly blinking.