He hears a faint halloooo and one or two distant thumps like inflated paper bags being exploded by a fist very far off. He looks up and sees a few persons hardly bigger than the palm of his hand: they are dressed in red jackets, or red shirts maybe, or maybe their torsos are burnt very red from an excessively long exposure to the sun. He sees how they gesticulate and lift long objects to their shoulders: then there are sudden little eruptions of silvery-white smoke. Much closer to him he sees the leaping hither and thither of a hare, elegant to the eye, the zig-zag course and the abrupt changes of direction over shrubs, tufts and stones, the long ears down in the neck like blinkers which have slipped down, the bobbing powder-puff of the tail. He lies low in a hollow in the earth with his nose nestled close to the dirty wet soil. He doesn’t hear the hare and he doesn’t hear the grassroots either. Nobody will bother about him here. He does hear a vague rumbling which may emanate from tanks being deployed behind a distant hill. There is neither sun nor birds.
In the dog-watch of the night he arrives at R’s house on the outskirts of the city. He knocks and the door is opened. R is not at home — or is the old man with the grey crewcut and the heavily framed glasses R after all? In his memory lies a grey desert of empty time-passages, of tastelessness and cottonwool and cardboard. The inhabitants of the house are not surprised to see him. The house consists of a large number of small rooms, all painted white and roughly plastered, and nearly all situated at different levels so that you continually have to climb up a few steps or step down to the next room. The house is full of women and girls in white nightshifts, their eyelids swollen with sleep. Their cheeks have the hue of tomatoes. Must be R’s family, he reflects.
He explains that he should like to reach his own people but that the authorities have probably started a manhunt for him by now. R, or the convivial old gentleman who might have been R, his friend from youth, says that there is no hurry and also no need to worry. That much time has evaporated in the meanwhile. That his own wife no longer resides where she used to live before but elsewhere now in an unknown sector of the city, and in any case that she remarried and so she has another family. Also that it will not be necessary for him to apply a disguise, only that he should get rid of his prison garb, but that has already been taken care of, look, here is exactly the right white shorts and here a white shirt for tomorrow, they will fit him. And that they will then put a bicycle at his disposal so that he may go looking for his people somewhere in Market Street it would appear, hard by the yellow cathedral. But for now he must first relax, listen, he should take a bath and then eat something — why not a few peaches? That it is after all still night outdoors and that they are glad to have him there with them.
It is still night outside and wind pushes cool against the walls of the houses, rustles in the papers and the tatters on the street, the dusty branches. He hears the muted rumbling of the city which never really sleeps. He is taken to a small white room where there’s a bath. On a chair, next to the bath, there lie a pair of white pants and a white shirt neatly folded. A girl — R’s daughter? sister? niece? third wife? — has placed an oil lamp on the table with its dark marble top. He sees their shadows flowing excessively large and grotesque against the white walls. Like fire they move. Now she brings pitchers with steaming hot water which she pours into the ancient bath. He enters the bath. One should not cover the ground too rapidly. She also lifts her nightdress over her head and takes off her glasses. Her breasts are small and crumpled. Without the spectacles her eyes are huge and watery like those of a hare. On her thin thighs small black hairs grow. She gets into the bath with him. Under the water her yellowish body seems to be shivering. The bathroom has no door. He is aware of other figures in their nightclothes in the corridor. And the huff-puffing fluttering of shadows against the wall.
She slides down lower in the bath with her knees pulled up and the small creases of the water over her belly. He pushes her knees apart and covers her body with his. With the fingers of one hand he feels her genital organ which is small and round and stiff under the water. The stone of a fruit without any flesh.
And Move
Do you remember when we were still making memories?
I am human. Or humanoid if you prefer. Subject to the same whims and fancies as you may be. Lazy in a similar way too: the flesh thickens and the mind becomes blunt, the imagination caducous, if you see what I mean. Let me put it another way: that I live like a blind and aged foetus inside the layers of myself, gobbling up whatever experience I find at hand, feeding the caecum (and that that in itself gives carnal satisfaction). I am, I think, (still) bent on gaining weight in this charnelhouse so as not to be blown away by the black wind of oblivion. For to live and to feel yourself living you have to jiggle around with D. Death. (Perhaps it is the other way around.) And for sure I am a miserable petit bourgeois, an obyvatel. Of what possible use or contribution can I be to the revolution anyway? Often the same nightmare recurs: some delegate is dumping a batch of dead horses’ heads in my lap and blood and mucus will yet be dribbling from the horrible nostrils and lips to mess up my pants. No, I am too far removed to be (vigorously) of the proletariat.
I have said that I am lazy but it should rather be that I am lying in wait. For what? Ah, for nothing — since I’m not particular. That is exactly it: for nothing. I have thought of that before. Why then communicate? That, I can assure you, is not a matter of choice. Besides — I don’t. I digest. Words are winds, obliterating taste. And often I have to assume that I’m still alive. Merely a prolepsis? Even so I shan’t be making any hurried attempts to move (even if I could): one shouldn’t provoke a prolapsus. It needs something protuberant to get me going if at all; a salient experience. If at all. And then I just leave the acts lying about. Let them grow fat, become facts. Erst kommt das Fressen und dann kommt die Moral. I am furthermore, I must tell you fairly, like Procrustes the highwayman who made his victims fit his bed by stretching or lopping them.
This prolegomenon (this proem, yes) is necessary because of what my friends Tuchverderber and Galgenvogel keep saying to me. They don’t fancy the way in which I bring up my words (to put it mildly). They carp at my being prolix, verbose. They think that I am putting on. They accuse me of being weighty (which is exactly to the point). They don’t comprehend why I procrastinate, why I don’t burp and get it over with. (But be careful of the black wind, I feel like telling them.) Of an afternoon we sit chewing the fat and there they are munching their lips and gnashing their gums. “Why dontcha write a simple story?” one of them, either Galgenvogel or Tuchverderber, asks. “Why not ‘boy sees gurl, gurl sees boy, boy likes gurl, gurl screws boy (or the other way around), alas gurl is already married, boy terminates husband with extreme prejudice, luckily the court finds it legitimate defence and they all live happily ever after’? To what purpose all this hum-hum muck?” One of us refills the little shot-glasses with kümmel (we don’t wish to know the sun disappearing). The thin blood from bloated horses’ heads has soaked into my trousers. They think I’m writing for obscurity. Just jiggling around with Kultur. Little do they know. If at all. Their chins are grey too. Each goitre a gobbling half a gander. Wobbling in earnest indignation. “Ja,” I answer, “am I to scribble for the worms?2 Would you have me suffer the delusion of a Weltverbesserungswahn? To amuse the masses? To be flatulent? (I beg your pardon.) But I’m too fat for that. And D. Death is too thin, too white, too scaly. All the same.” All the same what then? A piercing question. “All the same it is a Kriegspiel.”