The man was holding a pot between his knees and using his spoon to dunk the bits of bread he had dropped into his soup. Sitting beside him on the small bench was an old woman with a basket: the other pot contained meat and potatoes fried with onions. There was a smell of food. Melkior’s stomach reared in anger, only to subside into hopeless whimpers like a puppy being punished.
When Melkior stepped onto the machine the old woman stood up to attend to him. The invalid didn’t even look up. Tant mieux. He was slurping his soup with gusto and … leave me be.
“Sixty-two,” pronounced the old woman in a businesslike, even mildly unpleasant tone, having cursorily read Melkior’s weight from the calibrating bar.
“You didn’t round it off, did you? That was a bit quick.”
“No haste, no rounding off!” said the old woman sharply, so much so that the invalid looked up, ready to defend the quality of his service. “That’s what it showed, no two ways about it!”
The invalid nodded with satisfaction and went back to his meal. Approving of his wife’s resoluteness.
“But I couldn’t have gained that much overnight, could I?” I’m turning into a Dom Kuzma, noted Melkior, and he felt something akin to shame.
“You can put on up to eight hundred grams, you know,” said the invalid with professional patience through a sizeable bite he was pleasurably preparing in his filled-to-capacity mouth. “You’re forgetting the eating, sir. You have dinner, you have lunch, well, it all adds up, and the machine only shows your weight, whatever the freight.”
There it was, the “freight-weight” again. The firm’s slogan.
He paid and went down the street, worrying. Say what you like, I would have to weigh less following the simplest bookkeeping logic. There have been outlays, damn it! fumed the unhappy proprietor of a fresh two hundred and forty grams. And no receipts at all, no dinner or lunch, no food or drink.
Lunch, dinner: what pedestrian explanations. No, no, there is definitely a mystery to this weight business, a whim of physics. Exactitude? Exactitude my foot! There are deviations, exceptions, paradoxes, in the laws of physics. Water gains volume by freezing, said Melkior, triumphing over physics. He tried to recall another example. In vain. Perhaps there is no other. After all, weight is gravity. Newton’s law: mass attraction. Does the Earth attract me more strongly today as a result? The mass of Melkior Tresić is today drawn more strongly to the mass of the Earth, if you please. By two hundred and forty grams. Exactly. On the other hand, mightn’t the Earth have gained weight from some sort of cosmic nourishment and consequently exerted a greater pull? Who knows what stellar spaces Mother Earth traipses about in, what galactic feasts she fattens at. Finally to descend, having eaten and drunk her fill, to attract my underfed self. Will you just look at her? Metamorphoses!
A new law on the invalid’s machine: Earth attracts the starving body of Melkior Tresić with a force that is directly proportional to his army weight and inversely proportional to his resistance. The war being W, a constant. Constantina.
Constance! Could that be Viviana’s true name? He subsequently found he liked the meaning of the word very much. More so than the word itself. An ugly name, really, but its heart was in the right place …
He walked with a queer feeling of weight inside. This was a disruption to his ever-scrupulously-tidy mind. It was as if someone had brought a foreign piece of furniture into his familiar, private domestic realm of peace. Apparently he couldn’t accommodate, he couldn’t accept the change without frowning and resisting. Normally, when he was left alone with himself he was able to resume his train of thought as if it were an interrupted game of chess, with the situation precisely defined; but now somebody had been tampering with the chess pieces, changing their positions, leaving a muddle behind. … He could not abide disorder. Everything inside and around him had to be in its place. Defined, arranged to a certain logic, a system of his for classifying things by value, importance — a subjective, ridiculous hierarchy that made no crucial, objective sense. But it was so important to him that he was apt to climb back up to his third floor just to take out a book and put it “in its proper place” because … There was no because, it simply had to be that way for some reason he couldn’t explain.
This is a stain of some sort of poison spreading inside me. It’s a stain … I wasn’t wary enough to take care, to take care. It’s Enka’s lust that has overflowed over, over … what? He was climbing the stairs to his room to the accompaniment of such faux musings. Everything was unclean, everything insincere! Including the autumn with its faux sky, faux heat, with its greenery tired and withered like the face of old age done up with cosmetics. There were supposed to be rains, sad, autumnal, and yellow leaves in the parks and the sound of wind in the trees, the days gray and gloomy, the nights long and wet and monotonous. Verlaine. Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne … A surrender to sorrows, a relaxation, ease. Instead, this is all tense expectation outside the operating theater. Inside, the mystery of the to-be-or-not-to-be alternatives is under way. It’s no longer a question, my good prince, it’s a matter of waiting. The only question is: When? When will the blood-stained surgeon slice into my navel and reconnect me to Mother Earth who exerts this gravitational pull on me out of love? But I take away her force. I foster my antigravity using ascetic, saintly, angelical means. Wings will sprout out of my anti-Earth and I will take off for the disinterested, neutral, suprapatriotic, suprahuman skies. I shall hitch myself to a cloud and swing above you, Mère-Folle, I, your crazy son, Melkior Tresić the spider.
“Ah! Hail-fellow-well-met!” ATMAN surprised him on the stairs. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Adam?” Melkior spoke like someone ambushed by a loan shark.
“She’s here,” whispered Mr. Adam straight into his ear, so that the vowels tickled him deep inside his Eustachian tube.
“She’s in here, in my room,” whispered ATMAN confidentially, as if making preparations for a murder.
“Yes? What have I got to do with …?” But these were not words turned over in the mind in advance, it was just the tongue knitting a small mask for the palmist’s benefit.
“I promised to invite you when she came by, did I not? Well, she has come. Unexpectedly. I’ve already been upstairs looking for you, in your room.”
The palmist spoke with elation, as one speaks of an extraordinarily joyous event. He had the air of a man exalted and aquiver. Nervously interlacing his long white fingers, he was making small bows to Melkior like a shop assistant enjoining a window-shopper to step in and have a closer look at the merchandise.
“Won’t you come in, Mr. Melkior? We have been waiting for you.”
“But why? She’s your guest, isn’t she?” In fact, he was afraid. Trembling at the very thought that he did wish to go in and was actually going to go in at any moment now. Oedipus facing the Sphinx! But he knew the answer to the riddle, “What animal walks on four feet … on two feet … on three feet …”