He came out on the long straight road leading back to town. In the distance appeared the lights of an early tram. Here comes Technology, as Maestro would put it. Here comes Power. All right then, let’s see what happens. He was suddenly overcome by a strange thought, a spiteful and terrible thought in fact, it gave him goose bumps all over but he was unable and unwilling to resist it. Let it be. … He stepped down from the pavement onto the track and set off between the rails to meet the tram. Provocatively, irascibly even, with the comic courage of a cartoon hero — a pint-sized intrepid hunter — thumbing its nose at an approaching rhinoceros. The rhinoceros was clanging his way toward him with an angry grumble. Melkior already felt the ground shake under his feet with the approach of the iron beast. Horror gave him a cold lick down his back. Well, let’s see how long we can take it. His imagination began to frighten him with tableaux: limbs torn apart, bowels spilled … Flies. He shooed his imagination away from his dead body and calmly fell to gazing straight ahead. And what’s that? — it’s no longer moving, it’s merely getting larger, more visible. Not approaching at all. The trick is to let the eyes take over. Like in the cinema. That’s the entire secret to this courage. The trick is to regard everything as an image on a screen, to reflect the light from the object to the world-image in my field of vision. And the objects become weak and powerless, under my full control. Symbolic of a world I have created and can banish immediately by closing my eyes. A silent film. He closed his eyes. Fiction. There, the celluloid has snapped, interrupting the projection. But the tram grunted on the uneven rails and the projector came back on in an instant. The addition of sound to the picture alarmed his entire body, exposed in space. This may be the critical moment when the body must be mastered, its fear dispelled by an idea. Well, why shouldn’t my idea, Hold on, be strong enough to bear a courage that is equal to any other great courage? The courage of a captain going down with his ship? A totally useless death. The idée fixe of honor. Which essentially means overcoming one’s fear. Bearing the idea of death — to the death. Spitefully. Stubbornly. But this is where you face a spate of individual variations, mixtures, confusions, with flashes of madness. My idea is mad, too. Hold on. Quite near now. Two hundred meters. If that.
You can see the driver. Not slowing down. Thinking, The fellow will move off on his own … Sitting there calmly. Not yet upset … Having no idea that what he’s up against is a thought on the rails, one stronger than fear of his hardware. Maestro would congratulate me. The tram. The stupid banal machine. The imagination again: arms severed, legs, skull crushed, a mess of brains and blood, the flesh, the bones … The Witnesses Of Horror. He did it on purpose, he meant to kill himself. Nah, he was a nut-case, is all. Drunk. Who is he, anyway? Can you gather anything from his papers? His pockets! Enka’s photo in the wallet. Enka on the beach: an erotic phenomenon! Everything that is feminine and nubile, soft, cuddly, beckoning … He had a flash of desire for the Enka in the photo …
The driver stepped hard on his bell-pedal. Melkior’s innards quaked inside him. Red alert in the entire body, “attention, danger!” in every cell. His blood shot down from the head into the legs (for they were now more important than the head). At any rate there was nothing left inside the head except: something huge and blue growing ever larger and advancing with a bellow. He closed all his sphincters tight, clamped shut the valves, passages, seams, tensed his will to painful rigidity — he was one superpotent, all-powerful, tearing erection. Come on, you stupid tram! The tram was indeed coming on, stupidly. Well, if that’s what you want … Twenty, ten, five meters! Clanging his bell in panic, appealing to him, pleading with him: step aside, man! Man! All right, you’re clever and I’m stupid, but get out of my way! See how big I am — I’ll crush you!
You big stupid hulk, my resolve’s greater than you are! I’m not committing suicide, you iron dolt! I’ve put my thought down in front of you, run it over if you can!
The tram gave a sudden sensible lurch. It let out a fearsome grunt (some dust flew up under its feet) and stopped short as though a huge force had struck it on the snout.
Ha-ha! leered Melkior in mad triumph upward, at the tram. Which was standing still before him, quiet, tired, sheepish. Defeated. Ha-ha, I’ve stopped you, you mammoth!
The driver had already dismounted and was swearing his way toward him.
“Listen, you … Are you off your damned …?” he swung an arm but stopped it in front of his forehead.
“… rocker? No. Why?” said Melkior in surprise. “I’m no suicide. I’m fine.”
“Oh, it’s all right to stop a tram like this, eh? What about my timetable? What do you think you’re doing?”
“All right, carry on then …” muttered Melkior. He now saw revealed the other, banal, city-transport side of the incident.
“I’ll give you carry on!” and the driver would have assaulted him, but the conductor spoke up with greater objectivity:
“Leave him alone, will you? Can’t you see he’s a bit …”
“A bit what? A bit nothing. The silly creep thinks he’s being funny.” The driver was already giving up on the idea of revenge. He was climbing back into the tram. “What about my nerves, damn it?” and he slammed angrily at his bell-pedal and set the car in motion.
Melkior was taken aback by the unexpected victory. How could I explain it to those tram men? I held my own! Eureka! He was crowing with Archimedean madness. I have discovered the biological law of upthrust! A body immersed in fear will lose as much of its mortality as the weight of the fear displaced. Eureka!
Noli turbare circulos meos! is what I should have said to the tram’s arrogant captain. Well, it’s too late now. Vivere …
Vivere senzaa malinconiiaaa … he broke into song hurrying back to town, and the black sky sprinkled him with a fine melancholy rain to make the song all the more absurd.
~ ~ ~
Could there be a price out on your head? An underground political conspiracy in a dark cellar dimly lit by an oil lamp. Three unshaven thugs discussing the ways and means of taking your life. Knives stuck into the table, sharp, shiny, with Rostfrei-Solingen inscribed on them. Running down the blades is a groove, like the kind on butcher’s knives. (First chance you get, ask a butcher what the groove on butcher’s knives is for.)
They will surprise you in a dark street, at night, as you walk by, tapping your fingers absentmindedly on a wall. … But why do they want your head in the first place? For reasons of politics, no less? It’s true, you do have convictions, but they are … well … convictions, nothing more.
“Look, gentlemen (what kind of gentlemen are these?), am I not allowed to have convictions of my own?” and already you fear that these people know all about your pathetic little convictions, that they have furthermore measured the strength of what you believe in using some sort of special device and that you’re done for. Because the dreams, these dreams that torment you …! No, you must have been spotted over there, your name must have been mentioned and indeed added to lists, to printed forms.