And so it was that on this splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning, all that the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, was “You fucking miserable, scummy, old Nazi bag …”, while carefully shaping the by now softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond the reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit — the entire world in effect (by virtue of which the modified situation is once again modified a bit, insofar as the old boy now carried on with his reading with two wax plugs in his ears):
“… the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this, by the way not particularly original, perception disturbed me a little; it may be that it left a deeper impression on me than was justified, for how many countless others went through exactly the same mass justice, whether on the same spot at the same time or at other times and other places in the big, wide world. Perhaps I was an oversensitive child, and even later on was unable to rid myself of my subtlety: possibly some sort of short-circuit occurred, a disturbance in my normal metabolic relationship with my experiences, even though I could only lay claim to essentially the same normally grubby experiences as any other normal being. Many years later — and many years before now — I knew that I would have to write a novel. At the time I happened to be hanging around, completely indifferently, in some indifferent office corridor when I heard an indifferent sound — of steps. The whole thing was over in a trice. In recollecting that moment, which I am otherwise incapable of recollecting, I have to suppose that if I had been able to preserve within myself its lucidity, some kind of distillate, as it were, of its content, then I would probably be able to grasp the thing that was truly always of greatest interest: the key to my existence. But moments pass and do not recur. I therefore supposed that I ought at least to remain faithful to its intimation; I started to write a novel. I wrote one and tore it up; I wrote it afresh and again tore it up. Years went by. I kept on writing, writing until I felt that I had finally hit upon a possible novel for me. I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to obtain a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semigloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit specially tailored for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause and would imagine that our beached life would finally work free from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branch of the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for my claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew, and in the years that I have just put behind me this dominating passion grew to be an obstacle even to my being able to present my public, avid for entertainment, with fresh comedies and myself with renewed royalties …”
“Well now,” the old boy got up and began, with the pliable wax plugs in his ears muting the sound of his tread to the velvety glide of a panther, to pace up and down between the west-facing window and the closed entrance to the east (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway), “It starts off as if it were aiming to be some sort of confession,” he muttered. “Not bad as such, but it can still go off. The trouble is that it’s honest. Not the happiest sign. Nor the subject either.”
Well indeed, if he had to write a book (any old book, just so long as it was a book) (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad — that had no bearing on the essence of the matter), at least let it be a book on a happy subject.
Certainly his subjects so far had not been too happy.
As the old boy saw it, the reason for that — on the rare occasions he gave it any thought — was that he probably had no fantasy (which was quite a disadvantage, considering that his occupation happened to be writing books) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).
As a result — for what else could he have done? — he drew his subjects, for the most part, out of his own experiences.
That, however, always ruined even his happiest subjects.
On this occasion he wanted to be on his guard.
“It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers. Best pack them away again.”
“Only,” he mused further, “they’ve got my interest now.”
“I feared as much,” he added (musing).
Rightly so, because for once we can now report the restoration of an earlier situation, itself only temporarily modified by the pacing back and forth: the old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and reading.
… with the guilty conscience of a thief … to present my public … and myself with renewed royalties—
But this is getting me nowhere. In the final analysis, it is just a story; it may be expanded or abbreviated but still explain nothing, like stories in general. I can’t make out from my story what happened to me, yet that is what I need. I don’t even know if the scales have just now fallen from my eyes or, on the contrary, are just now dimming them. These days, at any rate, I am caught off guard at every turn. Take the flat in which I live. It takes up twenty-eight square metres on the second floor of a comparatively not too ugly Buda apartment house of fairly human proportions. A living room and a hallway that lets on to the bathroom and the so-called kitchenette. It even has belongings, furniture, this and that. Disregarding the changes that my wife held to be necessary every now and then, everything is just the same as yesterday, the day before, or one year or nineteen years ago, which was when …”
“Nineteen years!’ the old boy snorted.
“… or nineteen years ago, which was when we moved in, under circumstances that were not without incident. Yet, recently some sort of perfidious threat issues from it all, something that makes me uneasy. At first I had no idea at all what to make of this since, as I said, I see nothing new or unusual in the flat. I racked my brains a long time until I finally realized that it’s not what I see that has changed: the change comes just from the way I see. Before now, I had never properly seen this flat in which I have lived for nineteen years …”
“Nineteen years,” the old boy said, shaking his head.
… and yet there is nothing puzzling about that if I think it over. For the fellow with whom I was once, even just a few months ago, identical, this flat was a fixed but nevertheless provisional place where he wrote his novel. That was this chap’s job, his express goal, who knows, perhaps even his purpose; in other words, however slowly he might actually have done his job, he was always rushing. He viewed objects from a train window, so to speak, in passing, as they flashed before his gaze. He gained at best a fleeting impression of the utility of individual objects, taking them in his hands and then putting them down, going through them, pulling them, pushing them about, bullying them, terrorising them. Now they no longer feel the power of the controlling hand they are having their revenge: they present themselves, push their way before me, reveal their constancy. How indeed to take account of the panic which grips me on seeing them? This chair, this table, the sweeping curve of this standard lamp and the shade, scorched in the areas near the bulb, that hangs submissively, so to speak, from it — each one of them now jostles me and surrounds me with sham meekness, like forgiving, mournful nuns after some king of drubbing. They want to convince me that nothing has happened, though as I recall it, I have lived through something with them, an adventure, let us say — the adventure of writing, and I supposed that in pursuing a certain path to its very end my life had altered. But nothing at all has altered, and now it is clear that with my adventure it was precisely the chances of altering that I forfeited. This twenty-eight square metres is no longer the cage from which my imagination soared in flight every day, and to which I returned at night to sleep; no, it is the real arena of my real life, the cage in which I have imprisoned myself.