“I hope you won’t get me wrong,” said Melkior cautiously, “do you believe Hitler will be …”
“Done in? What does believing have to do with it? I’m working, together with all the other anti-Hitlerites, to bring him down. That is my belief. If I didn’t work, I wouldn’t believe.”
“Or is it the other way around?”
“Well, perhaps …” said the guest with vexation. Melkior feared he might have offended him, but he did not intend to conceal his doubt.
“It’s only …” he began hesitatingly, “that it doesn’t look like everybody’s at work to bring him down. The firmest believers aren’t.” They’ve reached a pact, he thought of Don Fernando.
“Oh yes they are,” said the guest unkindly, “and they’ll be working harder still. They’ll do the hardest work of all. They will have to!” he finished with a fury that went beyond Melkior’s evident falter, reaching much further to strike at something big and hard.
This seemed to conclude the conversation. Melkior undressed and got into bed.
“Shall I turn off the light?”
“As you wish,” the guest answered harshly, evidently far away in other thoughts.
Melkior switched off the light and said goodnight. He got no reply. Fatigue had him in its close embrace in the bed but was not letting sleep near him. Instead it loosed a pack of weird thoughts to rip apart his exhaustion. Surefooted travelers who know their way. Beyond seven grim mountains and seven cruel crocodile-infested rivers there lies something, something founded on wisdom and justice. And they set off to reach there. Across a trackless, muddy wasteland, bone-weary, they trudge on, never for a moment doubting the point of their march. For ten years, night after night (they hide by day) they have carried iron levers and pipes slogging through mud, inquiring as they go: “Where’s the supervisor?”
“What supervisor?”
“The levers and pipes supervisor! We’re tired, will the supervisor please speak up?”
“You are gullible. There is no supervisor.”
Standing in ankle-deep mud they plead, but they do not put down the levers and pipes. It would be more sensible to drop their load in the mud and get some rest while inquiring about the supervisor who is not there.
This saddens me. Then again, I can’t very well tell them to lay down their load, can I? After all, who am I? Am I myself the missing supervisor? Does anyone know anything for a fact? There is a moment when it occurs to me to tell them I am the supervisor just to see what will happen. But, but then, there’d be no telling what responsibility I’d have to shoulder. Carrying the levers and pipes through mud for ten years, night after night … Who’s to tell where this leads to, what purpose it serves, and who is behind it all? Oh no, let them slog on searching for their supervisor — I’ve turned up only by chance, I’m passing through, and I have no idea whether or not there even is a supervisor. Perhaps there is one after all.
“Then why do you say there isn’t?”
“Oh, people say all kinds of things. Would you be better off going back?”
This I say just for the sake of saying something, with a cautious man’s uncertainty. I am afraid to interrupt the conversation; who knows what the consequences might be?
“Go back?” they reply in rage. “We’ve been carrying this stuff for ten years and now you want us to carry it back? Well, that makes it clear—you are the supervisor!”
“I? Not a chance!” I begin to tremble. “I’ll help you if you like, I’ll join you.” Oh God, now I’ve gone and made a mess of it! I know I have even as I say the words.
“All right, if you say so. Prove you are what you claim to be.”
But this is not said in an unkind way, perhaps not in so many words as it later seems. They speak gently, in the manner of weary people who have few words to choose from but suit what they say to their mood, so that while the words themselves may be cutting, the tone is soothing.
“Come on, come on, don’t let’s waste any more time. What’s the idea of going all pensive on us? You’re studying us, right?”
This is what is terrible: how am I to behave? Is my every thought plainly written on my face? You’ve got to think as you walk — somehow it shortens the distance and conquers fatigue. And I (oddly enough!) try to do my thinking in my pocket! Don’t be surprised — it can be done. As soon as a thought comes to life in the mind, another thought takes it down to your pocket, see, and you can turn it over and over in there … for who would think of such a thing? It’s like having a handful of coins in your pocket and counting them with your fingertips: sorting them by size or value, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, combining big with small according to what fits or doesn’t fit where, carrying out mathematical operations, building whole phrases with additions, with subordinate clauses even, with metaphors and ornaments, all of it making sense or not … in a word, thinking in your pocket. “What have you got inside you that keeps making that jingling sound?”
“Jingling? Am I a gilded plaster-of-Paris piggy bank?” Thinking (in my head): well, what do you know — it’s audible. Saying to them: “I’ve got some small change in my pocket and I’m fiddling with it to pass the time. Why, is that so bad?”
“Don’t go all innocent on us. You know what is and what isn’t good far better than we do. All we know is that we must carry and deliver, but that doesn’t mean we’re bored.”
“Have you still a long way to go?”
“We don’t know. There you are playing innocent again. You know we don’t know; it is cruel of you to ask. You can see we’re on our last legs.”
This is true: they have no way of knowing, but I am not asking out of cruelty.
Indeed it seems to me that my conscience demands that I share with them the painfulness of that infinity which even in the imagination cannot be seen as having an end or offering any respite. Well, it turns out I am wrong. What is the point of such a question out of courtesy when there is no answer — and if there is it might well turn out to be pointless. Would the levers and pipes be any less heavy if you knew where and how far they were to be lugged? Of course not. And yet … the effort factor is correlated to the distance to be covered while lugging the load. True, neither is the load lighter nor is the distance shorter if you know its length. But there, at least the traveler has something to keep his mind on during the tedium of marching. He can, for instance, divide (if only in his pocket) the vast quantity before him, split it into smaller parts, into halves, the halves into their halves, the resultant halves into halves, and halves into halves again … and so forth, until he reaches (note the word) such insignificant quantities that it seems to him he no longer has in front of him a magnitude which frightens him. Everything becomes as easy as zero, as a fraction of the insubstantial. Both the distance and the load.
Smiling cheerfully before him is the cunning wisdom of the Greek hair splitter … Come to think of it, a hair, too, can be split to insubstantiality, as any bald man will tell you …
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. Did I say something?”
“Look here, I lost my hair working, sweating. Don’t mock a man for looking like this through no fault of his own.”
As if any bald man looked “like this” through any fault of his own? That is what I could have told him, it would have been instructive; but I do not dare — I only think it, in my pocket, too. … The man is furious, which is why he reads my thoughts …
“Of course there are some who appear as they do through every fault of their own. I refer to libertines, lechers, and all the other drunken scum for which there isn’t enough rope out there to hang them with or lead to shoot them. Parasites.”