Yet, although it wasn’t very significant, the change in luck that had taken place over the last little while was a source of comfort for Walser. Winning, even trifling quantities, was important: a feeling of pride — moderate, to be sure — came over him every time he gathered his winnings from the middle of the table, with his two hands: his left hand whole, compact, strong; his right hand deformed, missing its index finger, instinctively closed in upon itself, as if to protect itself from the stares of the other players — both hands, parallel to each other, pulling the money toward him from the middle of the table with a greediness that was made grotesque by the conspicuous absence of his index finger.
During the first few moments when Joseph, having been challenged by Stumm, was forced to shake the dice in his right hand, the sensation was profoundly unpleasant. The movements that he had performed with five fingers countless times before, those slight movements that had made the dice rattle in his hand, were now limited, and Joseph felt — at the precise moment when the dice rolled toward the place that his index finger used to occupy and thus couldn’t complete their journey, instead having to draw back toward the palm of the hand, rolling straight from the thumb to the middle finger and then from the middle finger to the pinky — at that moment, Walser felt that someone, or something, had not only stolen a part of his body, but his movements as well. And this realization completely changed Walser’s understanding of his accident: more than just a material and objective part of him — which is how Walser viewed his finger, and how he had always viewed his body parts — he had been robbed of possibilities of movement; in a word: desires. He now had intentions that he could no longer carry out.
More important than the amputation of an organic, concrete body part was the feeling that he had been defrauded of something that had been housed in his brain, yes, precisely that: something in that intimate, hidden organ, that most personal of human organs. Something of great importance had taken place in the less visible parts of his body: external reality had interfered with that which he had assumed was most protected, and which he most considered his; thus: “the furthest removed from the day-to-day.” The things in his body that he had always considered “the furthest removed from the day-to-day,” to take up this felicitous expression, were, without a doubt, his thoughts, his inner life — made up of his mental images, his plans, his intentions. The external world had tampered with the part of his body that he had always considered invisible, and thus untouchable.
Soon enough, with the two dice in his right hand, at the moment when the dice, instead of rolling from his middle finger to the index finger, were forced to proceed directly from his middle finger to his thumb: at that very moment, an instinctive moment — after having played many dice games under his “new material conditions” (an expression that Walser himself employed, out loud, when referring to himself) — at that essential moment, Walser no longer felt the impulse or desire to roll the dice toward the spot where his index finger had once been; that is to say: in just a few weeks’ time the most violent amputation of all had been accomplished: the amputation of his desire. His immaterial being had suffered an accident, just as though it had returned to the moment of the concrete, real accident. There was no exact date for this second accident, as there was for his accident with the machine, but about three months after the first, objective date, the one that could be pointed to on a calendar, Walser lost something else.
Yet it was still strange for him to notice that, with even less possibilities available to him — with the shorter path that the dice now had to take as they rolled around in his right hand — his luck had improved. In an objective, external way, in the material world of the dice game, his increased winnings corresponded to the decreased possibilities of his movement. And even though he was sure that the outcome of a roll of the dice had nothing to do with whether he had five fingers or four fingers on his hand, Walser looked upon his recent spate of good luck as a mystery, and this mystery bespoke an entrance to another world, a world with which he was yet unfamiliar. For Walser, the connection between those two facts — one less finger, more luck in the dice games — was still incomprehensible and impossible to catalog. Where does one situate the connection? How does one classify the link that existed between these two facts? Which occurrence should Walser classify as the cause and which the effect? And if neither were the cause nor effect of the other, how to classify them, and what other facts could be linked to these two?
To Walser, the opposing hypothesis seemed the most absurd. If he accepted that these two facts weren’t connected in any way, but instead depended on other factors, then he would have to accept that his body and existence weren’t defined internally, but externally. Did his personal, private luck depend on the war, or the course that it took? Might it depend on the number of dead soldiers or dead insurgents? If this hypothesis were correct, the world would seem even stranger to Walser than it already did.
Such confusion aroused, in Walser, an urgent need to feel safe, which he only felt when he was locked away in his study, in front of his collection. In his study everything was finally whole. There was nothing left to explain. All the pieces of metal were in their proper places on the shelves; they were perfectly coordinated with the records contained in his notebooks, all without a single mistake. Nothing superfluous, nothing missing. And only this precision could comfort him. If the world could be nothing more than his collection, Walser would then have to be described as a happy man — indeed, a powerful one.
However, the occupation continued and — even though the resistance was starting to show signs of weakening — soldiers continued to die. The most significant piece of news was that Ortho — that important military official and war hero, who had already survived a number of assassination attempts — had finally been assassinated. He was killed during his own wedding, by a musician.
The war continued apace: like a lunatic, or maybe like some other thing.
CHAPTER XV
1
Margha Walser wouldn’t be considered a pretty woman, but she wasn’t completely uninteresting.
Margha had black hair, which was perhaps too long for someone her age, and buttocks that were too big for the average male taste, but her firm-looking breasts compensated for that slightly “unfortunate feature,” if one can call it that. She had light-colored eyes, and even though she wasn’t a tall woman, she was almost the same height as Walser, which had always sort of bothered her, although she wasn’t conscious of it. For Margha, tallness was emblematic of the man who could protect her in any situation.