Joseph, however, had been locked in his study for hours, excited. He had already removed the buckle from the rest of the belt, which he’d thrown in the trash, drawn the sketch of the piece in his notebook, and recorded all its measurements. Under the column marked “location,” Walser had written: Dokrement Blukn Street; under “time” he’d written: 7:30 p.m.; under “function”: buckle belonging to a black leather belt (to fasten/unfasten it); and under “Other Particularities” he’d written, with a certain pride: “Taken off the body of a corpse, with the assistance of Mr. Hinnerk Obst.”
Joseph Walser shut the door to his study, locking it with his key from the outside, as usual, and walked into the living room: Margha was crying.
“What’s the matter?”
Margha wiped her face; and after a brief silence, softly said:
“It’s Klober. He said he doesn’t want me anymore.”
PART III
CHAPTER XXIV
1
The foundations of any event are fragile, even war. There is no fact so pure that it can become definitive or put an end to History: what appears to be in flux might seem to proceed upon what seems to be in a state of permanence, but the invisible foundation that supports even the most important moments is the first to shake, and signs of change soon make their way into the material world.
As the weeks passed by it became clear that the war would have to come to an end. It was as if, we might say, obscenely, an aesthetic saturation had been reached: at first, the particular way in which the city had been fragmented by the conflict became a little irritating to see, and then, little by little, it became intolerable. Thus, the necessity of ending the war wasn’t due to the return of some moral imperative or the recurrence of old resolutions: it was only that the repetition of its images had become excessive; the intense, fearful excitement people felt on seeing a corpse had now waned; explicit violence had abandoned its central place in narratives and had become integrated, now in an objective, neutral way, into written reports. The way people said “one more” while standing in front of a corpse had become more indicative of violence than the corpses themselves — lying crumpled in the street, mere matter divested of any trace of that humanity which had now disappeared in the same instantaneous and mysterious way that it had first arrived, in the midst of the person’s family, on the day it was born. The desire for war was thus demolished, day after day, by this purely verbal construction, by this phrase that only existed in the world of language, without any visible connections to the world of objects: “One more.” It was this “one more” that was going to end the war. Since the war had just been repeating itself for months, this feeling of “I’ve seen it all already” began to hold sway over even the most naïve and least clever people in the city.
The war, when it first arrived, had quickly become the only topic of conversation, and it was inserted into every form of human excitation, so to speak, populating the cities — even those intimate, private excitations shared by a man and his wife were dominated by this seemingly global form of excitation, by the excitation of the entire country. And for that reason the war was welcomed as a stimulating surprise, there’s no other way to describe it, something that brought fear and obvious suffering, yes, but, in truth, it was hoped that these would remain tangential, indirect consequences. And, furthermore, the war satisfied a basic human need: intensity. Everything became more intense, from a simple glance at a map of the country — to find out where the soldiers were then marching — to the city streets, the shops, the houses, one’s kitchen utensils: everything, from the universal to the miniscule, from the most public garden to the most personal chair, everything became more intense.
A mere knife in the kitchen possessed intensity. At the beginning of the war, whenever anyone picked up a household knife, for entirely peaceful purposes, fleeting energies would begin to flow, bestowing a certain new gravity upon this simple act and brutally amplifying one’s otherwise monotonous or barren existence. However, this excitation faded with repetition — as might happen with any book or film that one has read or seen numerous times. How does one retain the anxiety of the moment when one is diving into the first page for the umpteenth time? What had taken place in the city, the streets, the houses, in the entire country, and with the kitchen knives too, what had taken place was something similar to aesthetic exhaustion; so similar that the two become confused. The war was starting to bore everyone; first those who were least involved, the ones who had the least to win or lose, and later, little by little, even those closest to its center, those who were stronger and, therefore, more ambitious. Ambition, although it was one of the last qualities to succumb, also became boring and, from a certain point onward, was also seen as a repetition: “I want more, one more time.” And when tedium reached the strongest, those who could either win or lose the war, it marked the beginning of the end for all those things that had, for some time now, been repeating themselves to excess. Little by little, the signs became more pronounced, encroaching upon the realm of the visible, anxious to make their material entrance into the world. The end of the war was drawing near.
2
Over those years, the chaotic and unpredictable violence of the war had exhausted men. Simple, almost petty desires began to take on significant proportions. More and more each day, Margha Walser reminded her husband of the peaceful walks they used to take through the main city garden.
Certain people still had memories of a noiseless sky, one without airplanes. And there were memories too of something that had disappeared completely, at least in the public parts of the city: laziness. How long had men and women been deprived of the right to laziness, to moments devoid of useful action, and what’s more: moments devoid of meaning.
For in wartime the meaningfulness of actions had become — as they say — inflamed, contaminated with something that quickly spread from one body to another, from men to women, from women to children, to the elderly, to the disabled: every single action had taken on meaning: What do you mean by that? What are you doing? Where are you going?
Laziness in wartime was either an obscenity — a lack of respect for those who were on the verge of dying or killing (one lowered ones eyes when faced with the victim or the perpetrators) — or else this action without action, laziness, was simply a manifestation of insanity: a retreat from the new norms.
Because actions full of import and meaning were the norm in wartime, and laziness was their inverse. Seeing someone who wasn’t doing anything and didn’t want to do anything would cause as much amazement and, probably, as much disapproval as seeing a lunatic in the middle of the city garden, in spring, repeating his brusque, impulsive movements: ripping flowers violently from the ground, stomping on flower beds, digging holes in the dirt with his fingers. During times of great intensity, someone who didn’t know where he was headed or why he was doing what he was doing was a lunatic, for he was abstracted from the events around him. To delve into the world of abstraction in wartime — a period of absolutely concrete things, a period when matter and energy collide and battle one another — was the most violent of actions. Perhaps even the most immoral.