Sleep in peace … Sorry, gentlemen, a bit of a misunderstanding here. I naturally am safe by your side — I mean, under your wise and powerful aegis. And I’m afraid of no one as long as you are here. But when I go to sleep you’re no longer at my side and I’m alone and mindless like an idiot. Can’t you see the dreams I have? How can I sleep? Inside your safe circle of fire, treaties, and bayonets — don’t be surprised — I’m very poorly protected from myself! I panic like a scorpion.
There’s nothing I can do about it — I am a scorpion. And if you don’t let me out, I fear I will give myself a lethal injection, just like a scorpion, in despair!
He thought he ought to go back to bed after all. But what was the use, given that van der Lube would appear immediately, crazed by the terrible death he had experienced, and mutter madly, “Give me back my head, you thieves, give me back my head, my head, my head …”
Melkior leaned against the windowpane. The barracks were still asleep. The guard had crawled into the sentry box like a dog and was dozing on his feet inside, troubled by soldierly dreams. In the house next door lived a young woman in the last stage of pregnancy. What is she going to have? A daughter. Then she would be impressing upon the girl, in later years, that the wife holds up three corners of the house and the husband only the fourth. (If a bomb hit a house who held up the corners?) If she had a son, his father would worry about his FUTURE, which might well exceed three months. He would buy him a spring-action toy rifle and some tin soldiers, give the lad something to play with. The boy would guard their house all day long, like that soldier was guarding his barracks across the street, and would shoot at the unarmed enemy children on the block. And in the evening, when his father returned from work, he would shoot at him, “Bang! Daddy, I’ve killed you. Lie down, Daddy, you’re dead.” Daddy was worried and grave, he didn’t even notice the child’s game. He had a newspaper in hand, an extra-late addition. The boy was angry at Daddy’s refusal to lie down when dead, and shot him again with murderous rage, Bang! but Daddy did not fall. The boy flung himself to the floor in desperation, pounding it with his fists, weeping over the disregard for the rules of his game. “Humor the child a bit, can’t you,” his mother cut in. “What, and die to please him?” His father was not in the mood for joking. “It’s only a game. Don’t be a spoilsport.” “We’ll be playing the game for keeps soon enough,” his father said anxiously. The boy had been eavesdropping slyly and redoubled his screams on realizing the failure of his mother’s intercession. In the end his father spanked him and sent him to bed. Lying in bed, he sobbed, offended, in the dark. Later on, half asleep, he heard his father and mother talking quietly in bed, his mother crying and his father tossing and turning, saying, “If only it weren’t for the boy.” And the boy thought: “It’s me Daddy’s talking about, he’s sorry I’m alive. All right then, I’ll kill myself in the coal shed first thing in the morning” and envisaged dropping a stone down the gun barrel and shooting himself in the eye.
Leaning on the window, engaged with the little drama, he had not noticed the arrival of the dawn. A gray cloud in the middle of the sky was going faintly pink: from its height it had caught sight of the sun below the horizon.
In the distance, engines whistled, early trains departed.
Melkior greeted the morning from his window. “Good morning, Morning! Welcome! Hey, I’m alive!” But this was only a moment of welcome. “Aah, I’m alive … so what?” and he was again gripped by a dull and despairing dread, feeling a strange and repulsive anxiety all over his body.
The landlady was up. He could hear her tottering and tramping in the dawn’s half-light, still woozy from sleep. She purposely banged an elbow on his door and muttered, “Up and moving all night …”
Melkior felt the cold metal of the knife in his hand and gave a shiver of strange revulsion. He stepped quickly out onto the landing and went into the landlady’s flat. He found her in front of the bathroom door, tousled, limp, sodden with sleep.
“Up all night again, were you?” she gathered her housecoat at her chest, concealing her un-maternal and still ambitious breasts.
“Would you please take this knife, Madam?”
Fully dressed, pale, thick blue rings around eyes. She watches him with what is almost fear.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Melkior? Why do you want me to take the knife?”
“I have bad dreams when it is near me.”
“Ah, I dream of those damned knives myself. Snakes, too.” But she took the knife with a kind of passion. Melkior noticed it.
“Why don’t you remarry, Madam? It’s not too late for you at all.”
“What about you? Why don’t you get married?” she retorted with fresh matutinal coquetry.
On his way back to his room Melkior thought of Viviana. Of Enka, too, in passing. Her knife. She does not have knives stuck into her belly in her sleep like the poor landlady. Her dreams are like a cat’s — nocturnal mouse-hunting.
A bird piped up in a park near by: chee-chee-caw … chee-chee-caw …
“Chi-chi-kov … Chi-chi-kov …” replied Melkior with literary sarcasm. “Dead Souls. And so to bed, with our own soul dead”—this he was barely able to say as he toppled on the bed, dead with exhaustion and lack of sleep.
“They have these binges night after night. He’s clearly drunk. He didn’t even take off his clothes.”
“Never mind, don’t wake him. We’ll just leave my things and go.”
He heard the voices above, but couldn’t open his eyes. A tremendous fatigue sat heavy on his eyelids and kept his consciousness in a state of listless floating on the surface of a very shallow sleep. From time to time he felt contact with wakefulness underneath, as if his sleep were bobbing in a shallow and scraping the bottom. He made out “he’s drunk”—that was Pupo speaking; “never mind” was someone else, a stranger. But he thought he was dreaming, so he let himself sink into his stupor like a drunkard, using the voices to put together a small sketch:
“Binges for flowers, thank you, thank you,” says the old lady pianist over his bed. Pupo tries to drag her away, “He didn’t even take his clothes off”; she struggles with him, “Never mind, don’t wake him.” But there is a third person here, someone invisible, important, “We’ll just leave my things and go.” And everyone leaves.
Melkior was suddenly frightened at the prospect of being left; he jumped to his feet: “Wait! No, wait! Right away … I’ll get undressed right away.” … But his eyes were still closed. “He’s dreaming,” said a strange voice. But Melkior was awake already, it was just that his eyes were still glued shut by thick, greasy sleep.