It was in the midst of this urgency of normality that emerges at the most dynamic times, those days whose borders most readily allow for important actions to be taken within them — as if time contained a specific volume, which can be either volatile or concentrated — it was in the midst of this urgency that the dice game, for example, was organized, the game that Joseph Walser participated in every Saturday night. The game was a habit that predated the soldiers’ invasion of the city, and had continued afterward, without any significant changes.
The rules of an autonomous world, a closed world, do not change, especially when unpredictability occupies a central place in each day in the outside world.
In opposition to the administration of their country, every man in time of war, individually, on his own, founded, as it were, a Ministry of Normality, which established, essentially, repetitions. Because only repetitions calmed their minds, only repetitions allowed each individual to wake up to find themselves human the next day. Repetitions of small actions or small gestures, of banal words or phrases — even repetitions of invisible acts, acts that weren’t noted by other people, like repeated images and memories in one’s brain, all of which allowed each person to survive in the midst of chaos, stand fast in the midst of the reigning disorder, in the midst of that which Klober was wont to call a century of unpredictability, a century that wasn’t merely opposed to repetition, but was the enemy of repetition. “This is not a normal century,” Klober often said, “but men in this century are still the same as they always were.” And that was it, that mixture: these were men who had been invaded while repeating the essential actions of generations past — and this is a precise use of the word invaded, for it describes both the directional flow and the speed of the movements under discussion — and, through this invasion, found themselves invaded as well by completely new phenomena.
“No prophet ever so much as correctly predicted the color of shoes in our century,” mocked Klober.
2
The city was bustling, and the sounds from the Saturday night revelry were coming in through the windows of Margha and Joseph Walser’s house.
Margha looked at the clock in the living room and then at her husband.
“It’s already nine o’clock. What about your game?”
“I’m not going today,” said Joseph Walser.
3
On that Saturday night three men were arrested in Fluzst’s house. Fluzst himself, Normaas, and Rolph. Normaas and Rolph were arrested on charges of “knowledge of important information” and “friendship with members of the resistance.” At four o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, Fluzst was executed by a firing squad.
On that night, of the five regular dice players, both Joseph Walser and Strumm were missing. These two men had disrupted their normality by not showing up, as was their habit, at Fluzst’s house.
Seated around the table, Fluzst, Normaas, and Rolph began to think that Joseph and Strumm’s lateness was odd. Their lateness was, after a certain point, “surprising,” given that neither of the two had sent word. When they heard someone knocking on the door, the feeling of oddity disappeared and the sensation of normality was, for a few moments, restored. Normaas was the one who, with his customary good nature, went to answer the door. He opened it with a joke in his head about the two missing players’ unpunctuality. He never got to say anything. It was the soldiers.
The night would no longer be normal. Confusion had invaded the few hours that the dice players had previously managed to protect from the century going on in the outside world. You can’t escape the century, each of the men must have thought, at the moment when the eight soldiers pointed their guns at each of their terrified human heads.
CHAPTER XVIII
1
Months after the execution, Joseph Walser passed by Fluzst’s widow in the street. The city had been through so many disturbing days that this one tragic, albeit limited, individual event seemed, even to the people closest to it, to have appeared and disappeared many years before.
“How have you been?” Walser greeted her politely.
Fluzst’s widow had stopped wearing her mourning clothes some time ago. She was wearing a long, gray skirt from which projected a robust feminine backside; her breasts were also ample. Clairie had gained a few pounds since the “event,” as everyone, out of a sense of propriety, called Fluzst’s execution (or occasionally as: “the thing that happened”); those ample breasts seemed to want to escape from the inside of her white shirt, and caused some intense disquiet in Walser.
Clairie was a woman who had always stimulated his curiosity. She was extremely circumspect, said very little, only what was necessary, responding solicitously to any request her husband made; aside from all this, Clairie played an important role on the nights when they held the game in which Walser had participated for years.
Any of his previous, more prolonged glances at her had, nevertheless, been filtered through and annulled by a situation that was completely different from the present one; a fixed situation, one could call it, a situation that, in and of itself, didn’t give any indication of the changes which were imminent, and thus presented itself to Joseph Walser as an eternal situation; a situation in which this woman — Clairie — the wife of the man of the house — the aforementioned Fluzst — often brought a bottle of homemade wine into the game room, which reinvigorated the players and allowed for a small interruption of the greed that gradually took hold of them through the evening. It was the entrance of a woman into the room, together with the wine, let’s say, that allowed for a certain emotional restraint to be practiced, in the game. The instinctual and borderline dangerous avarice that accumulated with each roll of the dice was suddenly diverted in another direction, thanks simply to the introduction of a feminine element into the space. A strong, unexpected downpour on a day when the forecast had called for mild weather wouldn’t produce a greater surprise than the one brought about by the entrance of this woman, Clairie, into the game room. She was the conspicuous infiltration of another world, a prompt reminder that the outside world never failed to send to the five players. Her entrance halfway through the game, with wine and sometimes pieces of bread, in spite of her discretion, her reticence, was like an indication that there was still a war on, in that it represented, for the players, an “awakening.”
However, the situation was now completely different. It was fixed in a new way, a new eternity seemed to have been established: the woman was now a widow; which is to say that the woman — Clairie — no longer had a man at her side. And she was still young, this woman who passed by Walser on the street on that late afternoon, wearing a white blouse, not transparent, but a blouse in which her breasts were, so to speak, a powerful element, an element that disturbed the unequivocal way that Walser tended to look at her. The contour of her especially robust right breast, due to some oversight or impulsive movement on her part, was now faintly visible; this contour became an obsession for Walser.