On casually filled pages, out of comprehensible and therefore not wholly uninteresting notes, the picture of a performance in preparation began to emerge; thus, without my noticing the changes occurring within me, I found myself so deep within the labyrinth of my uncertain and risky undertaking, allowing me to experience vicariously the lives of a group of strangers, that it was no longer just a personal obsession to describe the performance down to its minutest details, every word and gesture, each latent and overt connection, to follow the process of realization, to become its chronicler, to respond to their work with my own, which, after all, is the indispensable condition of human fellowship, but within the small community whose activities my notes hoped to follow I also found a place for myself, however peripheral, a role to be played that gave me the joy of having an identity, if only in relation to the people in that theater.
It was Sunday morning, a day of rest, and since it was his turn to make lunch, every once in a while he would kick the chair out from under him, go into the kitchen, come back, and resume banging on his typewriter.
I seem to remember dropping a remark to Frau Kühnert about my notes, which she mentioned to Thea, who, in her usual overeagerness, must have passed on to the others, for I began to notice that they were more cautious with me, indeed took precautions, trying to talk to me differently, more coherently and confidentially, as if they each wanted to shape the image I'd create of them.
I asked him what he was writing.
His last will, he said.
The truth is, I hadn't noticed how deeply I was being affected by the seemingly insignificant and uneventful times we spent together, by his place not merely being familiar but becoming a home, and that I no longer asked what home meant but thought I knew.
He asked me what I was thinking about.
It was quiet — I didn't remember when but at some point he had stopped typing, which meant he had been staring at me staring out the window at the tree and the sky.
As I turned to him and told him I wasn't thinking about anything, I could tell from his eyes he'd been watching me for quite some time; a smile had gathered on his mouth.
You must have been thinking about something, at least about nothing itself, he said, chuckling a little.
No, really, I wasn't thinking of anything, just watching the leaves.
It was true, I wasn't thinking of anything worth formulating in words, and in any case, one doesn't think in thoughts; it was a pure sensation to which I was yielding unconditionally, without thinking, with no tension between the peaceful sight and my body's comfortable position, between perception and the perceived object, and this is what he must have noticed on my face, body and soul in a state that might even be called happiness, but his question made this sensation rather fragile, and I felt it needed protecting.
Because what he'd been thinking, he continued, was that I might be thinking of the same thing, which was that maybe we should stay like this for good.
How did he mean that, I asked, as if I hadn't understood.
The smile vanished from his lips, he withdrew his searching glance from my face, lowered his head, and, pronouncing the words with difficulty, as if we had exchanged roles and now it was he who had to speak in a foreign language, he asked if I had ever thought of the two of us in this way.
Some time had to elapse before I managed to utter the word that in his language makes a deeper, throatier sound: yes.
He turned his head away and with a delicate, absentminded motion raised the paper in the typewriter, and I looked out the window again, both of us being silent and motionless: as fervent as our shyly voiced confessions had been, so charged with fear was the silence that followed— one would want to hold back one's breathing in this kind of silence, even the beating of one's heart, which is why one hears it and feels it all the more.
He asked me why I hadn't mentioned it before.
I said I thought he'd feel it anyway.
It was good to be sitting far from him and not to look at him, since a glance or physical proximity might have shattered what we had, yet the situation was becoming dangerous because something final and irreversible would have to be said; the sharp beam of sunshine streaming through the window seemed to raise a wall between us through which the words would have to pass; addressing the other, we were each talking to ourselves; we seemed to be sitting in our separate rooms in the shared warmth of our single room.
If I had thought about this before, he pressed on, how was it that it had occurred to him only now?
That I didn't know, I said, but it didn't matter.
After a short while he got up, but didn't kick the chair out as was his wont, rather he pushed it gingerly out of the way; I didn't look at him and I don't think he looked at me, and he was careful not to cross the beam of light that was now a wall between us as without a word he left for the kitchen, and judging by the weight and rhythm of his steps he was walking in order to reduce the tension generated by our words but, not letting down his guard, taking his caution along with him.
And the cozy, familial silence became more significant than the allusive words wrapped softly in silence and suppression, because the words alluded to something final, to the possible end of our relationship, while the wrapper of silence alluded to circumstances known to both of us that, contradicting the meaning of our precisely and reticently spoken words, denied the very possibility of an imminent end, and the fact that we could communicate in a language of allusions whose aesthetics we could share gave the impression, at least to me, that of the two options the possibility of our continued relationship was stronger; I think he remained more skeptical and cautious.
As soon as he left the room, I was overcome by a strange, humiliating restlessness; my movements became independent of me, the compulsion to move and at the same time to restrain movement made me play out, in the covert and overt language of gestures, the emotional struggle unexpressed in our dialogue: I couldn't take my eyes from the poplar tree, kept fidgeting and scratching — all of a sudden every part of me felt like getting out of there, I was itching all over — rubbing my nose and smelling my fingers, sniffing the nicotine on the skin, I didn't light up, though I'd have liked to, in irritation I flung my pen on the desk as no longer needed, but right away started groping for it in the pile of papers, picked it up again, kept pressing and twirling it, hoping it would help me get back to my notes, though at this point I couldn't have cared less about those idiotic notes; I wanted to get up, to see what he was really writing, what sort of last will it was, but I stayed put, didn't want my changing of place to disturb the stillness of some unknown possibility, felt I had to protect something I would be better off getting over, something I should somehow evade or wriggle out of.
That's when he came back, which immediately reassured me, being on the alert, waiting eagerly to see what else might happen, what else there was in us to be said out loud, to be known only when actually spoken or soon thereafter; but my new calm was only a grotesque mirror image of the earlier restlessness, since I still couldn't turn to him — I wasn't calm enough — wanting him to believe that nothing had changed in me while he was gone.
The soft patter of his bare feet betrayed the tiny change that had taken place in him, not hesitation or kind consideration, as he had shown earlier, but increased attentiveness, an absorption in his own quickening footsteps, perhaps an objectivity he'd gained in the kitchen when with the help of a dishcloth he lifted the lid off the pot of cauliflower cooking in its salt water; the water had come to a violently bubbling boil, the steam hit his face, and though the cauliflower seemed soft enough, he nevertheless took a fork from the drawer and carefully poked it to make sure that the white rose-like heads did not fall apart — with this kind of cauliflower, if it is overcooked, that can easily happen — and only after that did he turn off the gas under the pot; sitting in his room I'd heard or thought I heard, seen or imagined I saw, every move he made, and in his footsteps I sensed that these routine gestures had taken back some of that emotional effusion which in me had rather unpleasantly intensified.