“How much?” he asked the invalid, faking a casual tone.
“Sixty-one kilos, seven hundred and eighty grams.”
“It can’t be!” he cried in alarm.
“Oh yes it can,” replied the invalid with self-confidence. He was used to the bickering of skinny clients.
“What? Why, I’m …”
“You’re skinny enough to weigh that much,” said the invalid with a doctor-like cynicism. “My machine does not steal,” he added for the sake of his reputation. “Don’t worry, we earn our bread fair and square.”
“I’m not worrying about it stealing,” he used a smile to explain his meaning. “What I’d like to know is, does it give a little?”
“Neither. The true weight whatever the freight.”
“And that … that priest fellow … how did he fare?”
“Same as this morning.”
“You mean he was here this morning as well to …?”
“Oh yes. Twice a day he shows up.” The invalid had visibly had enough of the pointless conversation; he was finding Melkior’s curiosity a bit suspicious: “This fellow’s too nosey by half …”
“Could it be a case, then, of mortification of the flesh?” insisted Melkior. “He may be trying to become a saint for all you know.”
“I don’t know what saints you have in mind, but he’s a subscriber, if you must know. Pays in advance by the month, he does. Third year running.”
“Third year? And he weighed more then — three years ago, I mean — than he does now, didn’t he?”
“Not up to anything funny, are you?” the invalid shot a glance at the newspaper in Melkior’s hand. “He tipped them at eighty-plus to begin with. He was so strong his eyes flashed. Now he barely makes fifty-six. And that’s with my help.”
“Your help?” Melkior felt fear at the technical term. So the scrawny neck did not come of the cellar and penance at Monte Cassino? To the invalid he said hypocritically, “Well, there you are, it’s like I said: he’s bound for sainthood.”
“Ahh,” the invalid waved his hand compassionately, “he’s bound for Mother Earth, that’s where he’s bound. He’s got this wasting disease, poor man, and every single gram he’s lost has been registered by me — and my old gal,” and he gave the machine’s iron neck a chummy slap. “The twenty-six kilos he’s lost so far, that’s nothing. He never noticed how I slashed them, I did it all little by little. He knows I took them away, of course he does, but he’s not said a word to me about it. But when it’s a question of ten grams … you’re killing me, he mutters, you’re killing me indeed.”
Melkior thought back: perhaps it was all due to the loss of those seven locks while he was sleeping?
“And now I have to drop him by over eight hundred grams a month. The man’s dying on my machine, as it were, before my eyes, and I have to keep a record of it day in and day out. I’m having a hard time of it, but what can I do?” The invalid was not lying, he genuinely felt for Dom Kuzma. “I give him anything up to sixty grams of an evening, to set him up nicely for bed, but come morning I bring him down by a hundred and twenty. He hangs his head, there are tears in his eyes, he doesn’t believe me; you’re lying, he says, how could I have possibly lost so much overnight? Your machine’s out of whack, he says, get it fixed! I’m a human being, don’t forget! and he cries with fear. He goes to the blind colleague over there on the corner, who consoles him — by mutual agreement, shall we say — with a couple of grams. But then he won’t believe him either, and comes back to me again, the pest.
“Your machine’s good, he says, all things considered. On second thought, he says, you can lose weight overnight, through the digestive process and so on. … All the same you should keep an eye on it, you should indeed! As for that man on the corner, his contraption’s no good at all. If you ask me, he says, his license should be revoked. Chose a corner position, no less! You think he’s really blind? That’s their cover, no doubt about it. … And I have no choice but to say yes. Now then, he says, let’s have another go in the name of God. So I weigh him again, pressing a wee bit, to reassure him. I’ve driven this here nail into my peg leg for him special, and I press the bottom bar, careful like, as if I am squeezing drops into his eye. But he smells a rat, thinks the measure’s now too good all of a sudden, and he won’t believe me. Go on, he says, press your scale! There will be somebody to press the scale for you, too, when your soul is weighed before God! And off he goes, all angry and unhappy. He was unhappy just now, too, over weighing the same as he did this morning. He’d had the feed of his lifetime, he said … he even showed me his belly. There he is now, over at the other fellow’s, he may yet be back here again. I feel sorry for him, you might say. The man’s wasting away like a leaf in autumn, and all I can do is look on. Not to mention that he still owes me over two kilos.”
“Oh, you give credit then?” Melkior joked to hide his feeling of shock. The invalid did not like the joke and let it pass with a sigh:
“Ahh, he’s to be pitied, believe me.”
“Pitied indeed,” Melkior echoed in all sincerity, but presently hastened to undo it, “and yet conceivably he can retrieve his kilos, while you can’t get your leg back. Your loss is greater than his.”
“But he’s going to die!” the invalid cried didactically.
“Meaning you won’t? Haven’t you in fact been at death’s door, weren’t you dying in Galicia when the Russian Emperor’s brotherly shell kissed your leg? And later on, in the field hospital in Káposvár or somewhere, bedbugs eating you as punishment, as if you’d invented war! ‘Wasting away,’ indeed! Come off it, man!”
Without bothering to collect his ticket, Melkior hurried over to the corner where Dom Kuzma was standing on the blind man’s weighing machine, leveling the arms himself, seeking a balance for them. His fingers were trembling in the prayer wherein he supplicated God to stretch forth his arms and show His mercy by way of the arms of the scale. And, lo and behold, God lent him a hand, Dom Kuzma stepped down, elated, and began hurriedly emptying his pockets, as if preparing to rob himself. He piled his keys, wallet, watch, coin purse, breviary, and handkerchief and other odds and ends on the small bench next to the scale. He even took off his hat — and stepped back up. The inspired machine mercifully overlooked the fact that the client had divested himself of a thousand grams and showed his previous weight with a smile. In vain did the priest and the blind man shake and whack it (Dom Kuzma actually struck it) — it stood firmly by its statement, suffering for the truth.
Dom Kuzma took offense at the act of consolation. What was the point of sprucing up reality so stupidly? “Damn you,” he said and decided to weigh himself once again, with all his possessions back in place.
The scale now gave a joyous leap of a full one thousand two hundred grams and stood steadfastly by its assertion. It bore all the torture unleashed upon it by its frightened rider, stubbornly repeating what it had said before. The martyr. Its beaklike weights were seeking each other with the yearning of amorous birds, to come together in an everlasting kiss of equilibrium, harmony, and peace.
“At last!” Dom Kuzma sighed with relief and gave his blessing to the innocent kiss. “See?” he said to the blind man. “Obviously it got it wrong the first time. It’s not without reason that I keep telling you to have it fixed. Oh well, third time’s a charm, as they say …” He paid the blind man twice as much as usual, but warned him before leaving, “Anyway, you’d do well to have it checked. You’ll lose your customers, my friend!” and away he went, his faith shaken in all the scales in the world.
“How interesting,” thought Melkior, himself feeling a weakened confidence in the invalid’s machine. Dom Kuzma’s mistrust was weighing on him; God only knew how many tricks of the trade those people had up their sleeves. … Nevertheless he stepped onto the blind man’s machine.