‘How did you get on with Christian, then?’ one of them shouts.
‘I hope you were really nice to him,’ another one bellows.
‘It’s about time you got yourself a boyfriend,’ yells a third. But nobody hits him, nobody laughs, and in the end everybody’s face is stiff with contempt, and he’s infectious, and everybody else has gone into quarantine. He just stands there with his arms dangling and feels their contempt seeping into his blood, and then he realizes with a feeling of enormous happiness that he couldn’t care less, it’s just good that people feel contempt for him, perhaps the best thing that could possibly happen, and he has no problems at all when he goes back again up the ladder after one of them shouts, ‘Clear off, you’ve no business round here! Go back to Christian, you can sleep in his cabin from now on! There’s plenty of room for you as well in his bed.’
And so he stays in Christian’s cabin for the rest of the trip because that makes him lonelier than ever and you can get used to anything and there are ways of lying like a desert island miles away from anywhere: true, it can be plundered and pillaged, but when the plunderers and pillagers have gone away the water is still lapping around its shores and it’s still just as remote as it ever was, as long as nobody builds a bridge to it.
But he’s brought back to school, and time passes and heals all wounds and a romantic teacher tricks him into believing there’s such a thing as sublimation, you can sublimate your urges, you can get away from all your bad experiences by experiencing all your actions on an inner plain. He leaves school and starts work in a solicitor’s office, works as a language teacher, gets married early and becomes a father and hasn’t felt any urge to travel out into the world of solitude for ages, because somebody has told him the only possible way of doing things is the normal way, and all you can do is to laugh in the right place and cry in the right place and conform to all the conventions and only go against them on an inner plain, the popular inner plain; you want to be happy after all, and happiness means being ruthless with yourself and considerate towards everybody else, and then again: time itself has bidden farewell to all freebooters of the soul.
He sits on the girl’s bed as the hairy dawn creeps animal-like over the window-pane, and diagonally opposite the house is a bridge and when the two halves of the bridge start to open all the sand in the tramlines slides down like white beams and dives into the water.
‘Hey,’ he says to the girl, grabbing her by the shoulder for she’s fallen asleep, ‘you should have seen me marching backwards and forwards along that triangle between the table, the bed and the window, trying to condense my solitude and to believe that I was the greatest because I’d been the most solitary of all, and all the time being aware of how impotent I was, understanding all that poetry business, which was a waste of time in fact because nobody was interested, and knowing full well that whatever went on between me and my desk was just a pitiful case of opting out. Sometimes I nearly choked, and managed to save myself at the last minute by throwing myself to the ground and ripping my clothes off; I felt I was being got at, and I screamed at my wife: Why are you getting at me? I’m not your judge, she said. No, you’re my executioner, I yelled. I don’t have a chopper, she yelled back. No, but I do, I screamed back at her — and so it went on: our confrontations went on for ever and ever without end, like an escalator, and I was choking more and more and not getting anywhere on any front. But one evening a couple of weeks ago when I was all on my own — she’d left me, just for the time being, as usual — I suddenly overturned the table and stood it in front of me like a barricade, because I was convinced somebody had just come into the room with the aim of attacking me, biting me to pieces, crunching me between his teeth, and it was as if I’d just been bashed violently on the back of the head: the room disappeared, erased from my consciousness by a giant with a rubber, and I was consumed by a dazzling light and then I was lying once again on the shiny surface in the midst of space, and everything was so boundlessly silent at first, and then there was a whining sound as if a drop of water had let go and had suddenly started falling at tremendous speed through eternity, and then there was that invisible rain that always came before the song started — and then space would start singing and I could see myself like an ear, just growing and growing out of the ground, and once when I woke up my room was just the same as it always was but I was sweating because of the singing and I didn’t realize that I would never again be able to run away from my solitude, least of all by using artificial methods like poetry, and all the past homed in on my scent and flung itself upon me and I got the strange feeling that I was a woman and a man at the same time and I got dressed up in my wife’s clothes and I got drunk and I masturbated and suddenly I found I had something to do up in the attic. Nobody saw me going, but when I got to the attic door I found I’d forgotten the key, and I could hear a noise on the stairs and when I leaned over the rail I could see a mass of black figures, among them my wife, on their way upstairs. I curled up into a ball on the attic stairs in the hope that no one would notice me, but, needless to say, somebody grabbed me by the shoulder and rolled me over. Why, Ernst, somebody shouted, and I ran into my room but they came racing after me. I looked round the room in a panic and was shattered to see that the disorder everything was in was a woman’s disorder, a slightly confused disorder, not the spiky, brutal disorder a man creates. I pushed my desk into the corner and crouched behind it so that I could defend myself.
‘What do you know about solitude?’ I yelled at them, ‘What do you know about the great solitude of space? You don’t know what it’s like when space starts singing out of solitude. You may have read poems about it, you may have heard something about it in Gothic novels — but that’s about all.’
‘But,’ I screeched in a voice that rose up as wild as a stallion, for the executioner within me had grasped the axe outside me and chopped off my normal, decent self, ‘what is the whole of literature compared with a single suicide? What is life but an unsuccessful suicide attempt? What’s the point of decency in life compared with the decency of death?’
‘But now it’s all over and done with,’ he says to the girl, who has fallen asleep again. ‘I’ve sold out, and there’s only one way out now.’ And he wakes her up cruelly and stuffs a banknote into her ear.
‘I didn’t hear a word you said,’ she says, yawning, ‘but thanks all the same.’ He’s already hoisted the rucksack on to his shoulders and is on his way to the station.
And the track slices its way through the deserts, it glows blood-red in the sunsets and he runs through it and his sweat and his blood spurt out of him like a fountain, and he curses the track as well as loving the track, and it’s covered in pure white snow which crunches under his feet and under the wheels, and rib-cages of animals and humans stick up like white spikes out of the track, and in the rivers the skeletons of ancient, wrecked ships all look the same; occasionally, fires flare up alongside the track and sometimes he feels fires burning within him, but the best he can do is to keep going with the only hope he has left now that all the others have gone bankrupt: that the track will dare to make the final leap into solitude, that gigantic solitude where solitude itself sings, and the best thing to do is to sacrifice everything, to be faithful to your solitude and unfaithful to everything else, and maybe the track will pass over Boy Larus at an acute angle, or maybe one of the other survivors, and press down on to his rib-cage, or somebody else’s, because there is always a hope, the only great hope left: the hope that the final leap will be from that very rib-cage, that very heart.