The President took off his glasses and said: “I am a lover of change.” This remark was followed by a pause, and Keuschnig was afraid the journalists wouldn’t have any more questions. He leafed quickly through his notebook — the sound was like that of the pigeons a moment before. Nothing relevant occurred to him. Mr. President, would you like to see blood? The television lights went out, and no sooner had he taken advantage of his last opportunity to do what other people were doing and put his hand over his eyes, than the President of the Republic vanished. (The how-manyeth Republic? Keuschnig thought. Once again, counting proved helpful. It seemed to him that he too was being counted, which at least gave him the satisfaction of feeling himself to be a contemporary.)
He didn’t want to go home yet. He felt that if he got there too soon Stefanie wouldn’t be ready for him. (And today he too would have to rehearse, to rehearse the act of seeing her and the child again.) Maybe he would surprise her in some secret if he opened the door ahead of time. So he bought a paper at the stand on the Avenue Marigny — from my friend, he thought — and holding it over his head to shield himself from the rain, walked as slowly as he could without its getting on his nerves, this way and that way, through the streets of the 8th arrondissement.
In a bakery with little left to sell, a bakery girl was sitting alone, gazing round-eyed into space. He bought an oval loaf of bread, and she waited on him patiently. She gave him his change and started cleaning her nails as he was leaving. The sight gave him a feeling of lightness. He passed a lottery stand that looked as if it had been closed a long time; all he could see inside was a knitted vest on a hanger. In a laundry, pale-faced women were sitting with their hands in their laps, laughing now and then. In a restaurant the tables were set but still unoccupied, except for one in the far corner, where the boss and his helpers were sitting with elbows firmly propped, pouring themselves red wine out of bottles without labels. — A bus came along — jiggling straps, steam from the passengers’ wet clothing — passed and continued on, as though taking some part of him away with it. I’m going to think up something! Keuschnig thought. A sign by the door of the bus had said: SERVICE NORMAL.
He followed a woman who was pushing a shopping cart down the rue Miromesnil, curious to see what would happen if he just kept following her. Here it was so quiet he suddenly noticed how deeply he was breathing. He heaved a sigh. The few sounds to be heard — the occasional scrape of the woman’s high-heeled shoes, the buzz of a door buzzer farther away, the click of the almost simultaneously opening door, an apple rolling to the street from its pyramid in a COURS DES HALLES shop — seemed to give assurance of his own quietness. He still hadn’t seen the woman’s face, and that aroused him. He waited for her in front of a butcher shop; she had left her cart on the sidewalk, a bunch of parsley was sticking out. But then his gaze lost itself in the agglutinations of sawdust that had formed on the tile floor in the course of a long day, and when at last he looked up, the woman was turning into another street, where there was noise again. He followed her to the Champs-Elysées and into the PRISUNIC. It calmed him to go up and down stairs to the accompaniment of music and amplified announcements of PRISUNIC specials; his independent existence slipped away in the process. — At the pet-food section the woman turned around while some cans of cat food she had bought were being put into a brown paper bag. By that time his curiosity about her was nearly gone. She made a face, as if to say that she had expected no more of him. It wasn’t him she saw but SOMEONE LIKE HIM. Only a moment ago, Keuschnig reflected, I was genuinely unhappy at the thought that in another minute this woman would vanish forever from my life. And now the pleasant feeling that I haven’t missed anything. — Relieved, he had his picture taken at the Photomaton. The flashes of the color machine were so intense that the warmth touched his face like a soothing caress. — Then the PRISUNIC closed, and he had to go out into the street again.
He sat down on a bench near the playground in the Carré Marigny, hoping for some accident that would finally give him an opportunity to think about himself, for as soon as he tried deliberately to think, his thoughts ceased to be credible — they were not his own. As usual in Paris, the rain had soon stopped, and the puddles in the sand were flashing under the setting sun. The pigeons had flown up into the trees. Sitting on his outspread newspaper, he looked straight ahead, because he didn’t want to notice anything in particular. On the ground everything was so close at hand. Ahead of him only the dark foliage of the avenues of chestnut trees, behind them the roof of the Grand Palais, and off to the right the top of the Eiffel Tower: nothing to hem him in. The sun went down, and a moment later things began to glow as though from within, while at the same time the air between them darkened. For a time they glowed intensely, as though radiating their essence and energy. In the shimmering dusk details were blurred. A different system had descended. Then the glow was gone, but things were still as bright as before; they merely ceased to radiate brightness, and the twilight between them became daylight again. — And now this light refused to pass. Everything persisted in staying the same. A hellish everyday world settled in, as though forever. This day, it seemed to Keuschnig, would never end. The unchangingly murmuring trees in the bleak, eternal light made his head ache. Objects seemed so immovable that the mere sight of them amounted to a concussion of the brain. He cringed away from them as from a blow. If he should try to start one of these swings moving with a kick, his foot would bounce back, for the swings like everything else in the playground were locked, clamped, screwed tight. They had little sand clocks fastened to them; the sand wouldn’t start flowing until a child paid for the use of a swing — not today. Keuschnig cursed the dead light, which made him feel like his own ghost. He jiggled his hands in disgust. He wanted to complain about the world, which had again become so bare, so barren, so cold and wet, so cramped. Please, let it be night, he thought through the pounding in his head …
A woman with a full shopping bag walked purposefully across the Carré. Hey you, Keuschnig thought, look at me! Nobody wants to look at me … In a little while, home in her hideous kitchen, she wouldn’t shrink back from pouring nauseatingly golden-yellow oil into a pre-warmed frying pan. That sizzling, so preposterous you want to hold your ears, as she puts a grotesque piece of meat into the pan … And then, as sure as death and taxes, the desolately homelike smell she would send out through the open window at the unoffending passers-by! Keuschnig imagined how, with one hand in a flower-patterned oven glove, she would inevitably go out to her mate, who, aperitif glass in hand, would inevitably be waiting for her in the LIVING ROOM (or LIBRARY), and imperturbably inform him that dinner was ready. (Possibly she would only knock at the door of his STUDY, two shorts, one long.) The husband would get the inevitable corkscrew … And with all that, Keuschnig thought, she was so shamelessly sure of herself, when you’d have expected such concentrated inevitability to make her sink straight into the earth! Suddenly he had a vision of things happening simultaneously all over Paris: in Saint-Germain-des-Près (TOURIST QUARTER) pizzas were being gouged and tugged about and hungry tourists were going from restaurant to restaurant reading menus, unable to make up their minds; in Ménilmontant (WORKING-CLASS QUARTER) workers were drinking their after-work beer at the Rendez-vous des Chauffeurs, an authentic WORKERS’ BISTRO, where today as usual quite a few intellectuals had dropped in; in Belleville (AFRICAN QUARTER) groups of blacks, some in dashikis, all holding beer cans, were standing silent on the sidewalk; in Auteuil (POSH QUARTER) waiters in leather-upholstered PUBS were asking sons and daughters of the upper bourgeoisie whether they wished FRENCH or FOREIGN beer; and all over town idle pinball machines gleamed, while those in use rattled and clicked, the plane trees and chestnut trees on the boulevards murmured, the black coupling pipes between Métro cars wriggled when the train was in motion, lovers looked into each other’s eyes, HAMBURGERS rested on soggy slices of onion in those WIMPY snack bars that were still left — and all that, thought Keuschnig — as he stared with burning eyes into the same forever unchanging light — year in year out with the same inexorability, predictability, mortal tedium, and deadly exclusivity with which this possibly perfectly nice woman, for instance, would now prepare an avocado vinaigrette for dinner.