The voice the police had recorded on magnetic tape, with its diffuse, dark tone and deep vibrations, indicated something of the young man’s secret life.
Kienast could not tell whether, given the agitated face and dark tone of voice, the young man was attractive or insane, whether he was attracted to his insanity or whether all these impressions in fact repelled him.
Anyone poking around in the drawers of a schizophrenic’s brain is likely to feel close to the person’s whims and perverse ideas. At any rate Kienast’s peculiar feeling, which he’d been struggling with independently of the young man, was growing stronger.
Everything in the world that surrounds one and might influence one is, in reality, only a copy, and everything on earth is condemned to permanent repetition. Once, ten times, a hundred times, infinite times, even the feeling of love is but a copy of an earlier feeling. The act of love is surely more important for everyone than the object of love, more important than the other person is, though without an object of love one cannot perform the act of love. Perhaps his exertion had made him overly sensitive and he had grown so weak because of his barely two-day-old focus on love, or perhaps he had become both weaker and more sensitive because what really interested him, certainly more than what has been happening here, was the person he’d left behind. Something was definitely not right. The phenomenon of love is probably preceded by the idea of love, but that truth greatly irritates and humiliates the person in love, no matter how hard Socrates tried to convince Alcibiades of the opposite.
It would be pointless trying to understand something, get to the bottom of something, find something tangible in the other human being, or any proof of anything, or a handle on something, if everything is constantly being repeated a hundred or infinite times, and therefore happening within a person but not to him.
On some future night it might seem to him a delusion that he had actually discovered something the night before, or was discovering something now, but at the moment he was assailed by memories of nights alive with the sounds of amorous grappling and helpless pounding of flesh accompanied by shouts and squelches coming from the lubricating secretions of two different sexual organs.
In reality he had not become dizzy, of course — more precisely, his sensations did not have much to do with dizziness — but he could not have said whether they were copies or the original. There was a humming, like that of the wind in telegraph wires or an idling engine. Was his body simulating thirst because he was supposed to test the young man and possibly jolt him out of his schizoid fit.
Who had been waiting for his help, who knows why, but then pretended he hadn’t even heard the stupid request for water, or maybe he really didn’t hear it.
Which meant, again, that neither of them was an original specimen, only two copies working on each other. But a copy cannot satisfy a personal request.
The two of them had stepped into a world in which cues intended for the roles they were playing could not impede their mutual, laborious legerdemain.
Illusion, everything is only illusion.
The thought made him thirsty, or at least compelled him to get up defiantly and get a glass of water for himself in this peculiar house.
He had to pull himself out of his own illusion.
The short corridor opening from the far end of the room had three doors, which he had noted earlier. The first door was to a broom closet full of cleaning tools and miscellaneous items. He had no more time to waste. Like an electric shock it occurred to him that what he felt was neither thirst nor its illusion but the prelude to an epileptic fit, which would be his first; just when love was supposed to free him, his father’s fate was catching up with him.
That is how the final judgment arrives, ridiculously repeating itself. Then he went into a very clean toilet, and as in alarm he kept opening and closing doors, Döhring said not a word behind him.
Perhaps he would have made a move if Kienast had gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He must have been preoccupied with his own madness, because he sensed nothing of Kienast’s dread, which was ready to erupt; oddly, it was already enough to strengthen the embarrassing mutuality between them.
At least he will find out, before he has a fit, where things are in the house. The kitchen was icy cold. That meant the bathroom had to be upstairs. He was glad his brain was still under control and working professionally. He greedily drank water, which helped somewhat, and when he turned on the faucet a second time, the pump connecting the pipes to the outside well kicked in automatically, which made him wince, like a civilian. But he had a quick response to this: he slapped water on his face and drank from the palm of his hand in order to wake up from his torpor or from his illusion.
From the kitchen window he could see the old well.
Then he changed his mind: whatever has to happen, let it happen. He will not resist the madness and he will not surrender to his own fit, no way. He would have poured himself some apple wine; there were at least ten wax-sealed bottles of it on the table. But to have a little apple wine he needed a glass, a knife, and a corkscrew; he had to pull out drawers and deal with all sorts of objects. One can’t say he was calm when he returned to the living room; he at least admitted to himself that he was dead tired and extremely vexed. What with the things he’d had to do and those rotten little tools in the kitchen drawers, he was on the brink of losing patience.
He would rage and demand results.
The young man, poker in hand, was still squatting before the fire as if, as opposed to Kienast, he had found no reason to change his position.
Kienast continued shamming, however; he had to. He was the adult and the stronger of the two. Not only because of his profession but also because having grown up with two women meant he was used to the stereotypical role of the long-suffering strong male. He resettled himself in the armchair and, feigning great bodily comfort, busied himself with the wine for a while. What else could he do. He examined the wine’s color and bouquet, while watching himself to see whether he could weather his fit of anger.
I’d be willing to have an epileptic fit just so as to jolt this miserable little fairy, this little meat-beater, this sick little shit-head out of himself. But why should I. This is what his ambition dictated — his insight into human nature, his empathy, his compassion, and all his inclinations and abilities — which also happened to destroy and devastate his own life.
Less would have been more.
At least this way he understood something of himself and of the young man; he even understood that it would not be good for him to jolt Döhring out of himself or engage his attention. What interest would he have in that, save for the possible result.
To forgo that result would not be a professional self-sacrifice.
He found the young man abhorrent, but he was ready to do anything for him now, even show him some kindliness.
Noisily, he tasted the wine, found it rather awful and, clicking his tongue, went on sipping it. Under the guise of this purposeful activity, he had to reassure himself that his rotten life, his brand-new love — of which, by the way, he could have said anything but that it was animal-like — and his very ordinary, idiotic career weren’t going to end now because of an epileptic fit or because of his own dread.