His right hand was perfectly functional. His eyes still seemed astonished by the empty space where his index finger had been, but his hand, apparently, continued to behave like a group that had decided, internally, to continue to carry out its mission regardless. Immediately after the first few movements of his hand, it seemed clear to Walser that his index finger hasn’t been indispensable. Without thinking about it for a single second, so that he didn’t start to feel apprehensive about it, he grabbed a ruler with his right hand, placing it alongside the piece of metal he held with his left. All these things were resting on top of the desk: the piece of metal, his left hand, his right hand, and the ruler. He looked down at these four objects as though they were four elements, four elements that were completely separated from one another, yet belonged to the same family: the family of “things.” What other words could be used to describe them? Visible things, four visible things?
Ever since he first saw the absurd empty space where his index finger used to be, he realized that his fingers were just things, like any other thing; his whole hand was a thing, like anything else, a thing that could be separated from him, exactly like the ruler and the piece of metal.
With the three fingers of his right hand supported by his thumb, Walser slid the ruler up against the piece of metal and measured its length: 3.6 inches. He’d guessed right once again. It was a piece that could be part of his collection: the longest of its dimensions was still under four inches.
Yes, it was impressive to see how well Walser’s eyes had been trained when it came to such minute measurements. He rarely picked up an object that surpassed the required maximum and would thus have to be excluded from his collection. It was as though his eyes had, over the years, acquired a new feature, a feature stolen from this most practical and functional tooclass="underline" the ruler. As such, it wasn’t long before Walser had progressed to the point where he began ascribing certain affective qualities to concrete measurements. Emotionally — and this was all to do with emotions, sometimes even feelings of fright, dread, anxiety — emotionally, for Walser, the experience of seeing, in space, wherever that space happened to be, a piece of metal longer than four inches was completely different from the experience of seeing one that was shorter than four inches. His constant use of the ruler, which from the very first had been an affective tool for him (Walser had abandoned the idea that the ruler functioned in the service of scientific objectivity early on), eventually transformed his very nature, this “metrical affectivity” being transferred from the ruler to Walser’s own perceptive capacity. Thus, it might be said that the very dimensions of a given piece of metal were capable of directly influencing Walser’s feelings of excitement or disappointment.
His collection had become such an obsession that the moment Walser saw a piece of metal that met the required conditions, his concentration on it became unwavering; this intense concentration could be called predatory (predatory concentration, a hunter’s concentration). It was unwavering until the moment came when nobody was paying attention, which allowed Walser to grab the piece — or, rather, to steal it (this verb could certainly be used to describe the act, since that was precisely what Walser was doing).
Many — though not all — of the times someone was compelled to ask that familiar question (“Are you listening, Mr. Walser?”) he was, Walser, instead of paying attention to his interlocutor, or indeed the concrete external experience that he was sharing with this particular person at this particular time, attuned to some piece of metal and, consequently, the actions that would be necessary to obtain it. His continual lack of awareness during conversations and his often quirky behavior both certainly resulted from the same cause: his collection. Useless, absurd, and secret, it had gradually become the center of Walser’s existence. He enjoyed his wife’s company, even after it became clear that she was sleeping with Klober Muller, the foreman; he also took a certain, inexplicable physical pleasure in working at his machine, and he still liked to join his friends in the dice game they played for money, but his collection constituted the one real individual mark that Joseph Walser felt he would leave on the world. A unique mark, one that couldn’t be copied; no one else had a collection like his.
It was an “irrational” collection, more irrational than the usual sorts of collection already are, and this fact set Walser apart from other men. Joseph Walser had been educated to function with absolute rationality, to participate in the mandatory, continual evaporation of unreason that is always interfering with the lives of men. He knew very well that it was Reason that protected him, that allowed him to defend himself, even more so now that the chaos of the war, the military occupation, and the bomb attacks were becoming, more and more each day, a source of increasing and widespread danger: nothing at all was beyond the reach of the disorder that had descended upon the city.
Nevertheless, Walser had never been as obsessive about his collection as he’d grown in the last few months. The more the disorder and unpredictability of the war grew, the more time Walser spent locked away in his study taking measurements: width, length, and height, drawing the shape of a piece of metal as well as the machine or simple structure to which it belonged, jotting down its color and function — any possible concrete functions it might have had — jotting down the place where he’d found this “precious” piece of metal, and the date and time; even compiling statistics about which spots had yielded the most specimens for his collection and the days of the week that were most providential; consulting his notebook and correcting any tiny errors from the days before, grouping the objects according to different characteristics: pieces from industrial machines, pieces from domestic or personal appliances, etc., etc.
All the specimens in his collection were thus catalogued in great detail, and their measurements recorded in his black notebook — with the roman numeral XXVI on the cover — long before the pieces of metal were placed on their respective shelves, organized according to their essential functions. This world which, when viewed from the outside, might seem illogical and strange, was in fact thoroughly ordered; it was a secondary order, one that only Walser could perceive.
Thus, what Walser did on that day wasn’t at all out of the ordinary: after he put the new piece on top of his desk, his first act was to write down its measurements. After a slight hesitation, Walser slid the ruler up against the piece of metal with his right hand. He had never noticed it before, but he usually, out of instinct, laid his right index finger along the length of the ruler to hold it in place. Now, as he repeated the same movement, the fact that his index finger wasn’t in the right place became obvious. Concentrating intently, he was able to stop looking at the empty place that was left by the amputated finger and focused his eyes on his middle finger, the longest finger on his hand, which slid the ruler into place in the exact same way as his index finger once did, only now he had to slightly raise the part of the palm of his hand that led up to the empty space left by the amputatation. But his middle finger was able to perform the task that his index finger had: it slid the ruler into place and kept it straight while his other hand held the piece of metal.
He had finished measuring the piece of metal that he’d stolen from the hospital. Given that it was the first time, since the accident, that he’d taken measurements, he was satisfied: he accomplished the task relatively effectively. Holding a pen in his hand, with three fingers pushing on one side and his thumb pushing on the other, Joseph Walser — albeit with hesitant, unsteady handwriting — wrote the following under the column marked height:.5.