In the kitchen they drank coffee. He watched her taking the crême caramel out of the icebox, so it wouldn’t be too cold when the children came home. Then she did indeed sit down across from him, out of reach, just as he had wished, and carefully sharpened pencils, lead pencils for the older child and colored pencils for the younger one, who still went to the école maternelle. As he looked at her, he succeeded little by little in immersing himself in his vision. He heard the water flowing in the gutter of the silent street outside the open window. It gurgled over an occasional jutting stone, and the longer he listened the more his vision expanded; the flowing water turned into a brook, whose gurgling flow related to an almost forgotten event. The pencils, which Beatrice kept turning in her pencil sharpener, RASPED — and suddenly Keuschnig couldn’t remember his own name. He was out of danger as long as so much unfinished business was left on the kitchen table. Kitchen table: those words meant something now. A certainty. He could get up and leave it, yet always come back to this place — where there were red floor tiles and Beatrice, attentively turning pencils but then suddenly holding a pencil still and turning the sharpener, as though a mere fancy in her head had become an embodied wish, as though an impersonal idea had become a personal contradiction or a long-outgrown memory a present emotion. The apartment around him now seemed to be on ground level, yet bright and airy as if it were somewhere high in the sky. — Ecstatically Keuschnig closed his eyes to keep from crying, but also to relish his tears the more.
He saw everything as though for the last time. While still looking at Beatrice, he no longer belonged to her, he could only — indeed, he had to — behave as if he did. There was a crackling inside him, then everything went to pieces. A complicated fracture of the mind, he thought. A few splinters of emotion had worked their way through the outer covering, and he had gone rigid forever. Can one, in speaking of the body, speak of ugly suffering? The body has ugly wounds, the soul has ugly suffering. And some bodily wounds have been beautiful, so much so that one has been sorry to see them heal, but in the mind there is only suffering, and that is ugly. — “I think I’ve eaten too much,” he said to Beatrice, who looked at him from time to time with interest, but without alarm. Outside the window a seed capsule floated past. Good Lord! Keuschnig had a feeling that the shit in his bowels had turned the wrong way. In another second he would be sending a loud fart into the room.
For a moment Beatrice averted her eyes, but then looked at him again. She wants to help me, he thought, in such a rage that he might almost have struck her in the face; his forearm, resting on the table, had gone tense. He withdrew it discreetly, and she blew the shavings out of her pencil sharpener. Above all, no special treatment! Covertly he checked to make sure the position of his legs under the table was the same as usual. One leg stretched out, the other bent — right. What Keuschnig feared most was that someone might show understanding, or actually understand him. If someone were to say knowingly: “We all have such days. I’ve had them myself”—it would sicken him; but if someone were to understand him silently, then he would feel disgraced. And Beatrice had turned away, as though to avoid seeing through him. But perhaps she had no desire to see through him. That was it, she simply had no desire to. Which meant that she didn’t take him seriously, which was just as well. Cheerfully he stood up, bent over the table, and touched her; she gave her shoulders a big shrug, failing to understand his gesture, but accepting it because it was his. Things would never again be the same as before, thought Keuschnig nor did he want them to be. Actually they never had been. How fragmented his former life seemed to him, how … he couldn’t even say. And for the second time he became curious. “Your eyes have suddenly contracted so,” said Beatrice. “Are you thinking of an adventure?” “What about you?” “Always,” she said. “Just at the most ecstatic moment, I always think the real thing is still to come.”
They left the apartment together. She took the elevator, he went down the stairs. On the street they met again, but parted at once, Beatrice with a serious but untroubled countenance, wordlessly, as though all necessary arrangements had been made. So long, see you tomorrow. But what about today? He would go back to work; at six he would attend a press conference at the Elysée Palace, devoted to the program of the new government; at nine he would dine at home with an Austrian writer who happened to be living in Paris (an instance of the seated entertainment provided for in his budget); and after that he would presumably be tired enough to fall into a dreamless sleep. A full program, he thought gratefully; not a free moment, every move mapped out until midnight or later, when he would switch off his bedside lamp. For today at least every minute was taken up; no room for any dangerous extra motion; the bliss of a crowded timetable. — And indeed, when he thought about it, he felt blissfully hedged about. He was able to lift his eyes untroubled; the world lay before him as though it had been waiting for him the whole time.
The air was so clear that from the hill one was able to look out on all sides beyond the edge of Paris, where the land was green again. This was a vista that precluded all thought of confusion; every detail, however recalcitrant, was subordinated to the overall picture. That suited him at present, because he didn’t want to be reminded of anything. In the presence of this panorama, which even after the first glance presented no salient features, he was able to exhale himself until nothing troublesome remained. — Suddenly he caught sight of a tourist in an army jacket standing next to him. A toothbrush protruded from his breast pocket. Before actually noticing this toothbrush, Keuschnig remembered with a jolt, as though he had suddenly become his own double, that such a toothbrush had occurred in his dream the night before and had been connected with him in his role of fugitive murderer. Thus far he had been able, while standing on the hillside, to see his dream in its proper place, so to speak, to see it as a dream. And what now? How absurd that a panoramic view of this kind should correct the dimensions of things. What then were the right dimensions? My dream was true, he thought, and now I’ve betrayed it to this harmony that was drummed into me. Panoramic coward with the eyes of a glider pilot. That dream must have been the first sign of life in me since God knows when. I should have taken it as a warning. It came to me because I’d been looking in the wrong direction, it wanted to turn me around. To wake me up and make me forget my somnambulistic certainties. It has always been easy for me to forget dreams. It will be difficult to drop my certainties, because they will cross my path day after day — though in reality others have merely dreamed them for me. The certainty, for instance, of my vision as I look on swarming humanity from this hill, merely perpetuates someone else’s dream of life. What, thought Keuschnig, is my dream of life? I will forget my certainty by losing myself in a dream of life. Let us suppose that last night’s dream was my dream of life. — Keuschnig had an impulse to follow the stream that was flowing down the gutter and would soon merge with another stream — to follow it across the whole city.
From time to time, that day, he felt very cheerful, but never for long. In the moment of breathing easy, his breath caught, and everything became impossible. Even in his bright moments he couldn’t help wondering what would happen next. Always having to think of the future, yet unable to conceive of any future — that added up to hopelessness. Up until then he had seldom felt so cheerful and never so hopeless. And every time he felt cheerful he lost confidence in his feeling; his cheerfulness did not remain present to him, nothing remained present — not even the thought of a dream of life. Like a voluptuary he kept thinking of only one thing, though the one thing was not a woman’s hole but the unimaginable. Could it be that no one saw his obscene face? He couldn’t understand why after a first glance someone didn’t cast another, special sort of glance at him, or why no woman turned away after taking one look at him. Actually, a woman had turned away, averted her face in disgust. Maybe people would know him for what he was if he stood beside a clump of bushes in the park.