When they concluded, a long, doleful silence spread over the group. I suspect many, like me, failed to grasp the details of the calculations, or the transmutations of superlight and superheavy particles in relation to the shrinkage of spatiotemporal fields. Yes, few could grasp the details, but the gist of it was clear. Still, no one dared imagine that the device could address the fundamental problem. Could it truly be the instrument of such grace? The room was quiet, the only sound the breathing of those present.
Eleanor believed the device had far greater powers than any before we had tested. She believed it was essentially a doomsday device.
After a period of time which I am unable to estimate, gradually we awoke from our trance and it was clear there was an unspoken question: Who would be the first to test this enticing theory? We took a quick vote, and the majority of the Committee for the Restoration of the Device was divided between Master Matthias and Eleanor. Two or three members were incapable of casting a vote, experiencing such a profound sense of happiness that we chose not to disturb them. The fact that both candidates had received the same number of votes presented us with a seemingly impossible situation. Then all of a sudden Professor Alexander Pazdera, who up until then had been one of those off in his own world, absently smiling, declared clearly and distinctly: “Let whoever is oldest go first. They deserve it most.” That hadn’t occurred to any of us. No one had bothered to count their age since … centuries ago. Yet again, Alexander had demonstrated his uncommon depth of understanding. His proposal was accepted by the Committee, along with Master Matthias and our colleague Eleanor.
Master Matthias went and stood on one of the two foci of the ellipse that formed part of the device. Then the device was set in motion and Master Matthias disappeared before our eyes. We heard some noises that to me sounded like a snatch of a plaintive melody, although later someone said it was the sound of a soul leaving the body. I don’t know, it seems to me that each of us heard something different. And then it happened. His body lay before us. Master Matthias was dead. We all wept with emotion and joy. Yes, I can say that it was the happiest day of my life.
It was the day we were finally rid of our accursed immortality. Our accursed, despicable immortality, which had been with us, like the plague, for so many hundreds of years, afflicting us the way the plague once afflicted our ancestors, back in the now nearly inscrutably dark age of the cathedrals. For thousands of years our accursed ancestors lived as parasites on life, having perfected their lives and in so doing ours as well — unfortunately, to the point that they achieved what they called absolute valorization. The word immortality was no longer in use by that time, no one would have understood it. Humankind had become immortal. For generations it was no longer possible to die of disease, injury, ill will, or suicide. Humankind had achieved absolute valorization, a goal it had staked out for itself in the dreadful gloom of ancient times. Thus did we become the monstrous descendants of monsters. And thus did we now finally cease to be immortal creatures and once again became mortal, which is to say human.
12. MAXIMILIAN
They gave their boy the name Kryštof, the mildest male name that Alice was willing to allow. In celebration of not only their love but the joining of their families, Maximilian had suggested he be named after one of his ancestors who had made their mark on history. The problem was most of the names were of Polish or German origin, and Alice didn’t see any reason to complicate their son’s life with a name that even his parents had difficulty pronouncing. So Kryštof is what stuck. To Maximilian the name sounded both moderately ponderously Baroque and at the same time sufficiently lofty, and so ultimately, after several groaningly polite arguments he conceded, reconciling himself to the name of Christ’s carrier, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Alice was upset that her father and mother had broken up for no apparent reason, but most of her attention was swallowed up by the child. Nor could it have escaped anyone’s notice that despite his loud, boisterous nature, Maximilian had begun to act differently toward Alice. He had become a father, which filled him with joy but also brought back a vague, fuzzy drove of memories and feelings, regrouping and swarming, searching for their leader, like circling swallows weaving Persian motifs into the heavy carpets of memory. Flocks of memories, assumptions, and inklings were returning home. Remembering his parents, the buds of a kind of understanding began to ripen inside of Maximilian. His employment had ceased to be enjoyable and begun to make him tired, and he would wake up sometimes with his forehead coated in the pearly sweat of nightmarish dreams, whose content, however, he could not recall. Maximilian was unhappy. He wasn’t satisfied with himself, feeling more than ever before like a stranger in his own time. He had married Alice out of the deepest love for her, and she had already fulfilled part of the unwritten marriage agreement by bringing their son into their world, but what about him? What was expected of him? He wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t happy about the fact that he wasn’t sure. He was as sleep-deprived as she was from getting up to feed the child, and the only thing that still provided him any remnant of self-esteem was the fact that every afternoon he would lock himself in his office, take the phone off the hook, sit down in the office’s one armchair, and fall asleep.
The company Maximilian worked at manufactured souvenirs, and his vaguely defined job consisted of reviewing proposals for new products. He corrected any gross grammatical errors and ensured that the names of the towns and villages that ordered the souvenirs from them were spelled and engraved correctly. What he enjoyed most was the pins with city coats of arms. They were so cheap, though, he wondered how his work could ever be worth it to someone. Every now and then, for instance, he would point out that there was a difference between a belted and an unbelted fleur-de-lis, but nobody cared except him, no one else was interested, and eventually he realized it was better to be left alone in his office undisturbed, especially now, when he needed to catch up on his sleep. Thus his passable knowledge of the insignia of cities, institutions, and high church dignitaries, instilled in him by his father, a little-known local historian in his lifetime, lay fallow, nor was his patchy knowledge of history, also handed down from his father, of any practical use. What good did it do Maximilian, for instance, that he knew in detail the history and meaning of the papal bull Inter gravissimas, his father’s favorite? To be precise, the bull, issued on February 24, 1582, prescribed a change in dates, designating that October 4 was to be followed by October 15 that year, which was of no help to Maximilian in dealing with the inner turmoil caused by his fatherhood. Under the bull, the new calendar was not introduced in the Czech lands until 1584, when January 6 was followed by January 17. All this to compensate for the inaccurate calculation of the length of the year in the Julian calendar by Caesar’s astronomer Sosigenes in 46 BC. Over the course of several centuries the original one-minute difference had increased to enormous proportions, so the calendar had to be adjusted. Maximilian knew all of this, but it was useless now as he watched his wife in awe, realizing that her physicality since she had given birth both attracted and repelled him. How much in humans is animal, and how much in humans is human? The question unsettled him. The same way it did that he couldn’t wait for his son to be old enough to talk about things that interested nobody else for miles around but him.