The stranger never moved beyond the superficialities of their first reunion. For the next three years, Chief Engineer Caba, moreover, did not succeed in clarifying their positions. Now, all his previous protector and schoolmate did was repeat the one ridiculous phrase, stubbornly persisted on leaving it behind, and repeating it correctly and distinctly, like the words of a magic spell. Just as the stranger became terrified by the continuously increased complicity that followed their initial conversation, which led him, then, forced him, to raise his hand to his throat to defend himself, similarly, three years later, Sebastian Caba was hiding, sheltering himself in the soundlessness of the room and in his interlocutor’s silence, becoming transfixed by the phrase about the unbearable typewriters which was paralyzing him in the paradox of their past circumstances, except now the roles were reversed. Caba hurried to raise his hands, yielding himself, conducting the stranger to the door, regaining his politeness, his amiability, and standing frozen in the doorframe, resigned to himself, abandoning words that weren’t useful, because they couldn’t explain what can’t be said.
There would need to be a new morning, further delayed, a morning like all other mornings: the fatigue, the noises, Mişa the comrade spy, clocking in to work, pumps, projects, and masks, and little Moni-pig, the fat teacher, typing stories as though sprayed from a machine gun and pounded into the walls. And finally the damp, illusory street.
You were far away or nowhere or had remained there, in the shadow of another spring, slouching against the walls, waiting.
• • •
Shoulders, hands, hair: your entire body glued to the cold, damp wall. You were watching the stranger’s hasty passage, his particular passage measured against everyone else’s passage, all in the friendly blink of an eye. By now, you were used to that hallucination, repeatedly present and in its smile. You were wading in the waters of your old terrors, which were abating. Your arms were becoming weightless, disburdened of your dead father’s memory. The forgetfulness you craved was catching you as you were becoming free, fearful, about to scream from visceral terror, suddenly light, yet available to recall the dead man — he who is always with you, in you, against you — like an outstretched shield, a casing, a shell that stifled as it defended, like being enclosed in an evil force-field that separated you from a riptide of hatred and loathing that no living being could resist. You were becoming corruptible. Another death was on the threshold, heavier than any burden on earth. You were frightened for him, the stranger — for tomorrow’s dead, brother of an instant. Another liar, loved with no way out.
You felt the conversion’s beginning. The obstacles that stood in your way would have to be reinforced to keep you at a distance, far from the center of the earthquake, from everything except the shadow’s oblique passage through the long corridor. You should remember the dead man, place that memory in front of you, so his cowardly, tired, parental face can defend you with his death, the final escape. Until the days when the recollection of the lost one — that last powerless despair — becomes a lamentation full of longing, and you will be able to think of them together. The dead man’s final revenge on the threshold of becoming unforgettable: he forced you to wait for your treacherous new ally, being swept away by the stranger.
Yesterday, a year ago — which is to say “once upon a time” — the dead man would have to be brought back to life, as a warning to the man still living, to understand his kinship with a hypothetical, unseen parent, at least for now, when you fling the shield of an absent corpse in his face, so that he can recognize himself quicker, defend himself or run away, so that he can see his own resemblance, and while there is still time, run away from the weakness that may be his fate.
Father is still tall — this thin, careless, negligent, weak man with elongated hands who crosses the cool corridor of bygone, youthful days, spending evenings in his room absorbed in his books (whitened by the lampshade), holding them with nervous fingers. His face is handsome, full of lunacy.
Difficult, tiring evenings: he hangs over his little girl like the burden of damnation.
Suffocated by loss, wounded by incurable guilts, no longer able to find his rhythm, he tried everything and nothing in those postwar years. His breath is like the lazy, dusty city’s. It stinks of death and hard work. He would like to live in an empty house somewhere in undulating uplands, disentangling trees over crisscrossed streets.
There in an enclosure of nights with gusts and gales where the dead meet the living to exchange places, where you can strike a bargain with the insomnia of the little girl from back then, he returns, leaves, returns, pursues, alienated from himself, wanting to hear his daughter’s laugh again. Maybe he would have arrived at the other end of the country and would have met a son — a fervid and reclusive son, if there had been time for such deluxe forms of hopelessness. But there wasn’t.
The war left him dazed, as though he had forgotten how to return to the rest of humanity: thoughtless, careless with words, indifferent to songs, flags, slogans, or prosecutors, burdened by noises, and mistrustful and deaf to the promises of spies and interrogators, silenced by their tiresome, monotonous exaltation, as if he had landed among them by mistake, ready to flee at random, to anywhere else, to nowhere. In their company, his face contorted with memories and hesitations, he collapsed into laziness and became odd and defiant. . they cast him aside like a tiresome phantom, a suspect that didn’t even deserve a trial.
The tall, nearly transparent Captain passed through layers of exile, a jailbird only seeing a small square of sky, an outline of color, changeable with the hours. He had grown used to the reduced landscape. Enclosed in the damp tranquility of narrow spaces, his gaze had fallen into the square of sky, into the realm of sleep. He’d been left to wait for his sentence. Then they threw him back, to transform him into what he could no longer become. After that, he avoided talking about the pitch-dark cells just as he had avoided talking about the war. The rupture of his being was barely the beginning of the expiation of his guilt or non-guilt. He threw himself into heavy drinking again, became exhausted, happy, tired of feeling powerless and ashamed, and spent near-catatonic days in silence. He would say “I’m going,” and then later he’d say “I’ve come,” and reprises of apathy would follow, cut by Sunday walks. . rarely illuminated by startled reactions, dizzied by the sun, by words: satire, station, bridge, and promises, particles, pigeons.