It was only when from time to time he saw a woman pass that Keuschnig became uneasy. The lines of the calves and thighs, the clefts of their bosoms filled him with such longing that he felt his face growing stern. Once, when a woman passed behind the frosted-glass pane of a bus shelter and only her silhouette could be seen, he wished she would go on walking behind the frosted glass forever. He was overcome with rage and chagrin at the thought that all these passing women were not meant for him, that he would never see them again, and an intimation came to him of what they might have meant in his life. How it upset him — even today! — when he failed to get a good look at one of those faces — as though he were missing something crucial.
Then the sunshades were lowered, but they still revolved in their supports, for the wind had risen. The waiter smiled on receiving his tip, and today Keuschnig took that smile very seriously. He was grateful to the people who remained seated near him but paid no attention to him. For a long while he watched the water from a hydrant gush foaming into the gutter. When in a newspaper someone had left behind he read that a singer had achieved “a glorious C-major,” he was so moved he almost screamed. He wanted to leave his fingerprints all over the table. A man reading a book beside him took off his glasses, and suddenly Keuschnig was afraid he might be leaving — but the man only thrust the book into the distance and went on reading. What a relief, what peace! … Keuschnig looked around. Maybe something would come of it: a new thought, a possibility. For some time now, a game of ping-pong had been in progress in the cellar under the café, and the regular click-click-click filled Keuschnig with disgust. At last the ball went astray … Thoughtless and unafraid, he left the café and climbed the steep paths of the Buttes-Chaumont.
He passed a police call box. The deep red post was a tangible consolation in a painfully expanding wasteland, and absurdly he made a note of the spot. Someone was RUNNING behind him; no, not running on his account; someone WHISTLED, why wouldn’t he be whistling at him?! Slight incongruities outside him now affected him in his own body; he jumped at the sight of a potato rolling out of a woman’s string bag, cringed when he saw, far below, a child riding a bicycle through a puddle.
He felt cold again. Some blue shirts on a clothesline behind bushes at the edge of the park reminded him of his birthplace, not of any particular event, but of a long, mortal eventlessness. As though that were the possibility, he tried to open his mind to other memories. But nothing happened, except that he suddenly found himself outside the entrance to an underground station in wintry Stockholm … Could new gestures and faces be a way out? How about wagging his head, pursing his lips, and fanning himself with one hand like these French people? No more of that nonsense … By then he was standing on an artificial cliff and looking westward he could see Paris in the yellow evening sun. A little daydream might be his salvation! He felt his pockets to make sure he had his passport. At this point, only someone from another system could hold him back. Not far away, a wrinkled woman with hair on her chin gave a younger man a smacking kiss on the lips, and went off. Keuschnig waited, strangely curious, for the man to wipe away the alien saliva. But he only stood motionless, gazing down at the city, and after a while walked away with long strides.
At that moment Keuschnig felt ashamed of having to die and be dead. The way things had turned out, there was nothing left for him to do but draw a last breath and be a corpse. He could put up with being dead if the rest of the world would stop at the same moment. As it was, his body, in death more pretentious than ever, would only be putting on airs. He took a step forward, not for any precise purpose, but for spite, because he no longer knew what he wanted. — The hair-raisingly repugnant sense of shame he had so often experienced at the thought of living and of being something bodily, nakedly conspicuous and unique, of being ONE TOO MANY, held him back from the last and most singular manifestation of life, and made him for the present stay where he was at the top of the cliff.
Though he no longer envisaged a way out, he looked around from sheer instinct, and saw, some distance away, the fat writer, who had apparently been looking at Keuschnig for some time, for he was not out of breath from the steep climb. The writer clapped his notebook shut and put it away in the inside pocket of his jacket, as though certain he wasn’t going to need it any more. “I’ve been following you all day, Gregor,” he said. “I have tempered my idea with observations and now I’m satisfied. Incidentally, when the murderess flings herself from the tower of the Spanish church at the end of Vertigo, the sky is not blue, it’s deep-dark and clouded, in the last light of the day. ‘God have mercy on her soul,’ says the nun, and tolls the bell. Your child is at my place with Stefanie and that’s where she’ll stay for the present. I have no further use for you and wish you the best of luck.”—The writer stood there for some time, then made a face or two, perhaps to convince Keuschnig that he was real, and walked off across the grass, blindly trampling a flower bed. “You don’t know anything about me!” Keuschnig shouted after him. At that the writer only raised his arm; he didn’t turn around.
Keuschnig wanted to talk to somebody right away, to phone the girl from the embassy, for instance. But at this point no one would believe him without seeing.
He left the Buttes-Chaumont and continued eastward, still uphill, making his way between villagelike hovels and high-rise apartment houses with awnings that were already being rolled up. There in Belleville he bought a suit with trouser pockets he could sink his hands into, a pair of shoes, and a pair of socks. “It’s not expensive,” said the salesman automaticany — in this none too prosperous neighborhood he no doubt had occasion to say such words rather often. Keuschnig left his cast-offs in the shop and started back down the hill, steering a westerly course that would take him to the Place de l’Op-éra and the Café de la Paix.
Now he saw objects clearly, as if they were on display, and no longer transfigured as they had been an hour before. Everything looked as if it had been cleaned. He himself had emerged from under water after a long stay, and little by little the sun warmed his chilled body. The shimmering cracks in the paving stones called to mind the corners of a woman’s mouth, smiling at him in the deserted, summery street. The clouds drifted, the crowns of the trees parted and closed, leaves slithered across the squares, jostling each other now and then; everything seemed to be in motion. He looked at a vaporous funnel-shaped cloud — I’m perceiving a shape! he thought — and when he looked again, it had dissolved in blue. Surprised, he stopped from time to time and looked excitedly at the sky arching over the houses and shining through the leaves of the trees, looked as though something entirely different began behind it — not the sea, no place at all, but an unknown feeling. It occurred to him that the beds in his apartment still hadn’t been made, but that didn’t trouble him now. From one of the hovels, which was already looking deceptively eveninglike, he heard a sneeze. An old woman in black was standing outside her door. She was wearing thick socks over her stockings. She spoke to someone far away at the other end of the street, and both her voice and the answer to what she said were perfectly clear. On the walls of the houses the shadows of leaves moved in the wind. DO NOT SPIT ON THE STAIRS! he read on a sign in an open stairway. Paris lay stretched out below him, transformed into a desert city by the now reddish light; the buildings with their blinded windows were abandoned colonial structures which, as Keuschnig looked at the glowing sky in the west, blended so perfectly with the avenues of trees that the cars seemed to emerge from the blackest jungle … The sun went down. In the dusk some children were sitting peacefully, silently, in perfect calm on an iron railing, shiny with much use, at the edge of a sidewalk. Someone kept calling that it was time to go to bed, but they didn’t want to break up. A girl with a book in her lap looked at Keuschnig from behind an elderberry bush, and he looked back; little by little, as he looked at her, he saw himself more clearly. How reluctant he had been to start looking at things and people — and now he couldn’t stop! All these biographies crowding in on him so wordlessly almost turned his stomach. He mustn’t sleep — he must make himself empty! From a parked car with its door wide open he heard harpsichord music, and suddenly he felt a profound joy at the thought of the time that lay ahead of him. He needed work, the outcome of which would be as valid and unimpeachable as a law! He wanted no system for his life, but merely thought that though perhaps he could not hope for new objects or people, there ought at least, in his future, to be a more sustained yearning.