He stepped out into the street again … That sordid Drugstore with its trampled pommes frites on the floor and its already dog-eared magazines! Even as he watched it — while waiting to cross the street — the sky clouded over. He tried to remember the new feeling he had had just after turning in. Turning in where? All at once he couldn’t remember anything at all, neither that nor anything else. He could list all sorts of things but remember nothing. He retained the facts, but not the feelings. When some years ago the nurse at the maternity hospital had shown him the child for the first time through the glass partition, something in him had undoubtedly stirred at the sight of that face, which the child itself had badly scratched. He had known a feeling of happiness, of that he was sure — but what had it really been like? He couldn’t remember the feeling, what he remembered was the fact of having been happy. He had been moved, no doubt of it, but even with closed eyes he couldn’t bring back the feeling. “Try inhaling slowly.” He tried … but his breath went down the wrong way and he gagged. — He saw an empty bus going by; the low-lying sun shone on it from the side, lighting up the serried nose prints on the windows. An animal, thought Keuschnig unremembering. The only way he could keep on walking was to count his steps out loud: one … and two … and three, as though he had to trick himself into moving.
As he crossed the playground in the Carré Marigny, which now, at the end of July, was deserted, the whole sky was overcast. A strong cold wind was blowing and the rustling of the chestnut trees was so loud he couldn’t hear the traffic on the Champs-Elysées. Little dead twigs crunched underfoot. The horses of the merry-go-round had been covered with sacking and plastic for the summer and tied with heavy twine. It was beginning to get dark; Keuschnig was alone in the Carré, dust was blowing up his nose. By then the wind was so strong that he was suddenly seized with uncontrollable panic. He ran to the bus-stop phone on the Avenue Gabriel and called home. Agnes was there — it was she who picked up the phone. Pleased with herself for answering, she bit into a piece of candy …
As he walked on, he remembered that he had just been afraid. A feeling;—remember it. What had it been like? His muscles and sinews had suddenly frozen into a structure of their own … a kind of second skeleton. Yes, that’s what fear had been like. I’ll have to rediscover all these feelings! he thought.
Although the Avenue Marigny, on which the Elysée Palace is situated, is in the very center of Paris, there isn’t a single shop on it. The windows of an inhabited house are a rarity, all one sees is chestnut trees and high park walls until one comes to the restaurant and newsstand at the corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. For an approach to so prestigious a residence the Avenue Marigny is neither very long nor very wide, but it is straight and open. Few cars park on it, not even on the sidewalks, which are blocked off by rows of concrete posts. — Pedestrians, too, are rare; only policemen stride back and forth outside the high walls, their hands behind their backs. Involuntarily, as he turned into the avenue, Keuschnig reached for his passport, as if it were forbidden to enter such a thoroughfare without one’s papers … At the corner a policeman was standing in a sentry box, twirling a whistle attached to a long string. Luckily Keuschnig had to sneeze. Wasn’t that a proof of innocence? Even so, he felt that with the face he had on him that day no one could forget him. Any attempt to seem natural would only make him more conspicuous. He saw a mosquito bite on the policeman’s neck, and simultaneously another image from his dream came back to him: the upper part of his body spotted with mosquito bites. He had been naked, he recalled; that often happened in his dreams — but in this dream there was a difference, he had wanted to be naked. For the first time it had given him pleasure to show his nakedness, not just to one person but to a whole group of people; and instead of merely running past, he had stood still in front of the whole lot of them.
What a lot of withered chestnut leaves have already blown into the gutter! he thought word for word — as though thinking in words could protect him. Two other policemen were coming down the street, their leather gloves stuck in their belts, their trouser legs gathered into the tops of their high-laced boots. There being two of them made them seem less menacing, though united against him, the lone outsider. But even if he had been with more people, with lots of people, a witness would have pointed him out instantly in the line-up: That’s the one! — He envied the policemen their faces. How beautiful they seemed to him in their self-assurance; beautiful because they had nothing to hide; beautiful in their unmarred extravertedness. In an emergency they would both know exactly what to do next, and what to do after that. As far as they were concerned, everything was tried and tested; nothing could go wrong because the ORDER of things had been set in advance. Every possibility had been gone over, every eventuality provided for. He saw them as pioneers, as Americans, from Grand Rapids for instance — and such men could only be immortal!
I too need an order, Keuschnig thought. — But an order presupposed a system. — But for him a system had ceased to be possible. — But then again, what did he need an order for? — To conceal the fact that he no longer had a system. — The only ideas that occur to me are ones I can’t use, he thought.
The next policeman he passed was alone — but even alone he was in harmony. Maybe the uniform does it, Keuschnig thought. Then he passed a solitary man in civilian clothes; his face, too, was in harmony. How human they all seemed in comparison with him. The wind upset a no-parking post, and again he began to see signs of death. He had already passed, but then he went back and set the post up again, as though that might invalidate something. — The next thing he saw, through a slit in the park wall, was a row of empty, overturned sentry boxes on a gravel path. Again he retraced his steps, this time to examine the sentry boxes in every detail — the sight slits on both sides, the little radiator on the rear wall — and turn them back into man-made objects. He even counted the ribs of the radiators: six — that couldn’t mean anything, could it? The next omen was the restaurant on the corner: If it’s recommended in one of the diner’s guides, he thought, nothing can happen; if not — none of the three guides so much as mentioned the place! A police car approached with its blue light and siren operating, and turned into another street. At least the keeper of the newsstand he was just passing, who was putting plastic covers over his papers to shelter them from the impending rain, might for a few moments regard him as an innocent bystander, and for a short while they had something in common. A glass half full of beer stood precariously on a pile of newspapers! Keuschnig wanted to go on, deeper and deeper into space, twirling a cane like …
Borrowed life feelings, which that day the organism instantly rejected. His organism had stopped doing anything but rejecting; once he had eliminated all simulated feelings, there was nothing left of his self, nothing, that is, except the dead weight of an unreality at odds with the whole world. Rejection as aversion to all impulses breathed into him from outside, to the charlatanism of internationally certified forms of experience! True, he could go to see a Humphrey Bogart movie; it was summer, the revival season; Key Largo, for instance, was playing all over town that week. After the picture he would climb the stairs side by side with Bogart and his troublingly moist upper lip, but he also knew that after his first few steps on the street, if not before, he would be alone again, with nothing and no one for a companion, asking himself why he bothered to go on, and where to. No, he wouldn’t delude himself; for him the time of revivals was past; there was no article to be had for money that could help him to cope with his new situation, nor would any system whatever or any amount of research ever get what he needed off the drawing board. What then did he need? What was he looking for? Nothing, he replied; I’M NOT LOOKING FOR ANYTHING. With that thought, he suddenly felt in the right and wanted to defend his right against all comers. Why was he still going under false colors? Was he a public menace? Almost all that day he had only wanted to do things — to bellow, to show his nakedness, to bare his teeth — but except for the one incident with the girl (no particular of which he remembered) he hadn’t actually done anything. Coward, he thought. And at the same time he was terrified of giving himself away the very next moment.