The Lost Writings Read online

  There are many waiting here. A vast crowd disappearing into the darkness. What do they want? There are obviously certain demands they want to make. I will listen to them and then make my reply. I will not go out onto the balcony; I couldn’t even if I wanted to. In winter the balcony door is kept locked, and the key is somewhere else. Nor will I step up to the window. I will see no one, I will not have my head turned by a spectacle, my desk is the place for me, with my head in my hands, that is my posture.

  I was sitting in the box next to my wife. We were watching a rather exciting play, all about jealousy, in a hall of gleaming pillars a man was just raising a dagger to stab his wife as she was walking off. Tensely I leaned over the parapet, against my temple I could feel a lock of my wife’s hair. Just then we both shrank back; what we had taken for the velvet upholstered parapet was the back of a long thin man, who, slender as the parapet, had till that point been lying on his front and now turned around to shift his position. My wife clutched me in shock. His face was very near mine, no larger than the palm of my hand, pure and clean as wax, and with a black chin beard. “Why are you alarming us?” I demanded, “what are you doing here?” “Forgive me!” said the man, “I am an admirer of your wife’s; the sensation of her elbows in my ribs made me happy.” “Emil, please, protect me,” cried my wife. “My name is Emil as well,” said the man, who propped his head on one hand and lay there as on a chaise: “Come here, little wifey.” “You vagabond,” I said, “one more word out of you, and you’ll be down in the stalls,” and, certain this word would be forthcoming, I made to push him down, but it wasn’t so easy, he seemed to be part of the parapet, built into it in some way, I wanted to roll him down, but he laughed and said: “Forget it, you fool, don’t waste your strength, the fight is only just beginning and it won’t end until your wife gratifies my desires.” “Never!” exclaimed my wife, and, turning to me: “Please push him off!” “I can’t,” I cried, “you can see how hard I’m trying, but there’s some trick here and I can’t.” “Oh dear, oh dear,” wailed my wife, “what will become of me?” “Calm yourself, please,” I said, “your getting excited just makes things worse, I have a new plan: I will take my knife and cut through the velvet upholstery, and tip the whole thing down, along with this man.” But then I couldn’t find my knife. “Do you know where I put my knife?” I asked, “do you think I left it in my coat pocket?” I was at the point of running down to the cloakroom, when my wife brought me to reason. “You’re not about to leave me on my own now are you, Emil?” she cried. “But if I don’t have my knife — ” I shouted back. “Take mine,” she said, and with trembling fingers groped through her little handbag and, of course, produced a tiny mother-of-pearl-handled thing.

  A delicate matter, this tiptoeing across a crumbling board set down as a bridge, nothing underfoot, having to scrape together with your feet the ground you are treading on, walking on nothing but your reflection down in the water below, holding the world together with your feet, your hands cramping at the air to survive this ordeal.

  What is your complaint, forsaken soul? Why flutter around the house of the living? Why do you not disappear into your distance, instead of fighting here for what is not yours? Rather the living pigeon on the roof than the tenacious sparrow half-dead in the hand.

  It is a mandate. It is in my nature that the only mandate I can accept is one that no one has given me. It is in this contradiction, always in a contradiction, that I am able to live. But maybe it’s like that for everyone: dying we live, and living we die. Take a circus, it’s walled in by canvas, so that no one on the outside can see anything. Now someone finds a little hole in the canvas, and he can see in. Admittedly, his presence there has to be suffered. We all will be suffered in that way for a while. Admittedly — second admittedly — most of what you can see through such a hole is the spectators’ backs. Admittedly — third admittedly — you will hear the music and also the roaring of the animals. Until finally, unconscious with terror, you fall back into the arms of a policeman, who for professional reasons has walked around the circus and quietly tapped you on the shoulder to draw your attention to the shameful fact that you have been tensely watching something for which you have not paid.

  I was helpless in the face of the form quietly sitting at the table looking at the tabletop. I walked around her and felt she was choking me. A third person was walking around me, feeling choked by me. A fourth walked around the third. And so it carried on to the stars, and beyond. All of us feeling the grip around the throat.

  The Count was eating lunch, it was a quiet summer’s day. The door opened, but this time it wasn’t the servant, it was his brother Philotas. “Brother,” said the Count, rising to his feet, “imagine seeing you again after years of not even seeing you in dreams.” A pane in the French window that gave onto the terrace broke in pieces, and a bird, russet-brown like a pheasant, but larger and with a longer beak, flapped into the room. “Just a minute, I’ll catch it first,” said the brother, bunching up his robe in one hand and grabbing for the bird with the other. Just then the servant walked in with a splendid bowl of fruit, which the bird, flying in small circles, pecked at vigorously.

  Rigidly the servant held the bowl and stared with little semblance of surprise at the fruit, the bird, and the brother continuing to give chase. Another door opened, and some villagers entered with a petition, they were asking for free use of a forest road that they needed for better access to their fields. But they had come at an inopportune moment, because the Count was still a small child, sitting on a stool, doing his homework. The old Count had admittedly gone on, and the young one was to have been his heir, but that’s not what happened, there was a lacuna in the history and so the delegation went knocking into a void. Where will they end? Will they return? Will they grasp in time how things stand? The schoolmaster who was one of their number stepped forward, taking over the tuition of the little Count. With a stick, he pushes everything off the table, which he sets on end like a blackboard, and on it with a piece of chalk writes down the number 1.

  To be perfectly honest, I am not very interested in the whole matter. I am lying in a corner, watching, inasmuch as you can see anything from a recumbent position, listening, inasmuch as I am able to understand anything, other than that I have been living in a sort of twilight for months, waiting for night to fall. My cellmate is in a different situation, an adamantine character, a captain. I can imagine his situation. He is of the view that his predicament is like that of a polar explorer who is frozen in some bleak waste but who will surely be rescued, or rather, has already been rescued, as one will be able to read in some account of polar exploration. And now there is the following schism: the fact that he will be rescued is for him beyond doubt, irrespective of his will, simply by virtue of the weight of his victor’s personality; now, should he wish for it? His wishing or not wishing will affect nothing, he will be rescued, but the question of whether he ought to wish for it as well remains. It is with this seemingly abstruse question that he is engaged, he thinks it through, he lays it out before me, we discuss it together. We don’t talk about his rescue. For the rescue he is apparently content to pin all his hopes on a little hammer he has somehow obtained, the sort of little hammer you use to drive thumbtacks into a drawing board, he cannot afford anything more, but he doesn’t use it either, its mere possession delights him. Sometimes he kneels beside me and holds the hammer I’ve seen thousands of times in front of my face, or he takes my hand, spreads it out on the floor, and hammers all my fingers in turn. He knows that this hammer is not enough to knock the least splinter out of the wall, he doesn’t seek to do so either, sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way, the rescue will begin in its own time, irrespective of the hammer, but it remains something, something palpable and graspable, a token, something one can kiss, as one cannot kiss rescue.

  Of course, one
might say the captain has been driven mad by captivity. The circle of his thinking is so diminished that it barely has room for a single thought.

  A rainy day. You are standing over the sheen of a puddle. Not tired, not sad, not reflective, just standing there in all your earthly mass, waiting for someone. You hear a voice whose mere sound, without words, brings a smile to your face. “Come,” says the voice. There is no one anywhere around for you to go to. “Happily,” you say, “but I can’t see you.” Whereupon you hear nothing further. But the man you had been waiting for comes, a big strong fellow with small eyes, bushy eyebrows, thick pendulous jowls and side whiskers. You have the sense you’ve seen him somewhere before. Of course you have, he is your old friend from work, you arranged to meet him here and talk with him about a long-looming business matter. But even though he’s standing in front of you with the rain dripping off the familiar brim of his trusty hat, it’s difficult for you to recognize him. Something is in the way, you’d like to push it aside, you want to get into conversation with the man, so you take him by the arm. But straightaway you let him go again, something disgusts you, what have you touched? You look at your hand, and even though you can’t see anything you are nauseated. You come up with some excuse, which probably isn’t one, because even as you’re saying it, you forget what it is, and you walk off, straight into a wall — the man calls after you, perhaps to warn you, you gesture back at him — the wall opens up before you, a servant is carrying a candelabrum aloft, and you follow him. Where he leads you is not an apartment but a pharmacy. A large pharmacy with a lofty concave wall studded with a hundred identical drawers. There are plenty of shoppers there as well, most have thin long sticks with which they rap on the drawer from which they want something. Thereupon the assistants scale the wall with tiny speedy climbing motions — you don’t see what they’re climbing on, you wipe your eyes and still you can’t see it — and bring down whatever has been called for. Is it just by way of entertainment or is it part and parcel of the assistants? Either way they have long bushy tails sticking out at the back of their trousers, like squirrels’ tails but much longer, and these tails jerk as they climb. Because of the bustle of shoppers streaming this way and that, it’s not possible to see how the shop is connected with the street, but you do see a small closed window that probably gives onto the street, to the right of where you think the doorway probably is. Through this window you can make out three individuals who so completely fill the window that it’s not possible to say whether the street behind them is jam-packed or deserted. What one principally sees is a man who draws all attention to himself, on either side he is flanked by a woman, but one hardly notices them, they are bowed or sunk or are just slumped against the man, they are completely beside the point, whereas the man, the man himself somehow has a feminine aspect. He is powerfully built, wearing a blue work shirt, his face is broad and open, the nose flattened, it’s as though it has just recently been flattened and the nostrils are fighting for their lives, twisting and writhing, the cheeks are full of healthy color. He stares into the pharmacy, moves his lips, cranes left and right as though searching for something. In the shop one man catches the eye who is neither looking for anything nor serving, he walks around perfectly upright, seeking to keep everything in view, pinching his restless lower lip between two fingers, sometimes examining his pocket watch. He is obviously the owner, the shoppers point him out to each other, he is easily identified by numerous long, thin, round leather straps that are looped around him, vertically and horizontally, neither too tight nor too loose. A fair-haired boy of ten or so clutches onto his jacket, and he sometimes reaches for one of the straps as well, he is asking for something that the pharmacist will not give him. The bell rings over the door. Why does it ring? So many customers have come and gone without it ringing, and now it rings. The crowd pushes away from the door, it’s as though the ring had been expected, it’s even as though the crowd knew more than it admitted. And now one sees the large glazed double door. Outside is a narrow empty alleyway, nicely paved in brick, it’s a cloudy gray day, no rain is falling. A gentleman has just opened the door from the alleyway, setting the bell in motion, but now it seems he is doubtful, he takes a step back, he reads the sign of the firm, no, he’s come to the right place, and he steps inside. It is Herodias the doctor, and everyone in the crowd knows it. With his left hand in his trouser pocket he walks up to the pharmacist, who is now standing all alone in empty space; even the boy has retreated, albeit only as far as the front row of the spectators, and is watching with blue eyes opened wide. Herodias has a smiling supercilious way of speaking, his head is tipped back, and even when he is speaking he gives the appearance of listening. And yet he is very unconcentrated, some things he needs to be told twice, it’s difficult to get through to him, and something is making him smile as well. How should a doctor not know a pharmacy, and yet he looks about him as though he were here for the very first time, and he shakes his head at the sales personnel with their twitching tails. Then he approaches the pharmacist, takes his shoulder with his right hand, turns him around, and now the pair of them make their way through the retreating crowd into the interior of the pharmacy, the boy in front of them, always shyly looking back. Behind the counter they come to a curtain that the boy raises for them, then they proceed through the laboratory rooms and finally reach a small door that, as the boy doesn’t dare, the doctor is compelled to open himself. There is a risk that the crowd which has followed them thus far will follow them into the room. But the salespeople, who have made their way into the front row by now, turn against the crowd, not waiting for an order from the gentleman; they are young and well built, but also clever; gently and quietly they push back the crowd, which, incidentally had come after them only by sheer force of numbers, not with any intention. Still, there is now evidence of some countermovement. It is the man with the two women who is responsible for this, he has left his place by the window, has come into the shop, and means to go farther than any of the others. Purely because of the yieldingness of the crowd, which has evident respect for this place, he succeeds. In between the salespeople, whom he thrusts aside more by a couple of quick glances to either side than with his elbows, he, with his female escorts, has approached the two gentlemen, and being taller than they are, peers between their heads into the darkened room. “Who is it?” comes a woman’s feeble voice from within. “Be quiet, it’s the doctor,” replies the pharmacist, and they enter the room. It doesn’t occur to anyone to switch on a light. The doctor leaves the pharmacist and approaches the bedside by himself. The man and the women lean against the bedposts at the invalid’s feet as if on a balustrade. The pharmacist doesn’t dare go farther, and the boy is back at his side. The doctor feels hampered by the presence of the three strangers. In a low voice out of respect for the sick woman, he asks, “Who are you?” “Neighbors,” says the man. “What are you doing here?” In a voice much louder than the doctor’s, the man says, “We want [. . .]

  I was rowing on a lake. I was in a hollow cave with no daylight, and yet conditions were perfectly bright, a clear even light was shining down from the pale blue rocks. Though there was not a puff of wind, the waves were high, though not so high as to endanger my small but sturdy craft. I rowed calmly through the waves, hardly thinking about my strokes, so intent was I on taking in with all my faculties the silence that reigned here, a silence such as I had never encountered in all my life. It was like a fruit I had never tasted, though it was the most nutritious of all fruits. I had closed my eyes and was drinking it in. Admittedly, I was not undisturbed, the silence might have been absolute, but a disturbance was looming, something still held back the noise, but it was at the door, bursting with a desire to break out. I rolled my eyes against the one who was not there, then pulled an oar out of the oarlock, stood up in the unsteady boat, and brandished my oar at the void. It remained quiet, and I went back to rowing.