Not yet, ferryman, I said, I’m not ready to board your boat. Cast off once more without me, old friend; I must find my way back first. I must know those names first, that myriad of names. . then I’ll follow you.
For one day I will find them. . and then, to show you all, I’ll hurl it after you, my love, and the names for it, and the thoughts I have. — Into the lake! The lake! I cried, and, inflamed by a dull bolt of lightning in my body, I stepped close to the shore, where I tore my trousers open. Panting I began to empty myself, as though to form a bond between myself and the earth, I pissed steaming into the water, painfully I poured myself and emptied myself utterly into the dark water on which the swelling white gowns floated.
THE SLEEP OF THE RIGHTEOUS
The dark divests us of our qualities. — Though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness. . it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten. . it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of his breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. And we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling each other, still and hostile. By day we keep silent, we know too much about ourselves, and our resolve to skirt or ignore this knowledge of ourselves is unshakeable. For years no contention has arisen between us, it seems settled that we respect both our lives, that we grant ourselves our existence. His existence is that of the father of his daughter, mine that of the son of my mother, no more and no less; the woman we mean, descendant of a dead woman, sleeps in more distant back rooms. One of our qualities, common to both of us, must be an arduously hidden fear: never mentioned in the light, it exhausts us in night sweats, swallowed by the dark, which we put down to the hot summer nights. We rest sweating side by side in an old marriage bed, and the square weight of the gloom lies upon us, clasps us, it presses us together, we lie with bodies completing each other, like two conspirators exchanging signs with their breaths.
When Grandmother died, it was decided without discussion that I, still a child, would move that same day to her vacated bed, next to my grandfather, so as to banish for good all clarity as to who had killed the old woman. And he, the old man, parted that day from his daughter. . she retired to the back, into my former room.
It was one of us two, that much is for sure: it was a blow from the cast-iron poker, descending with a thud to strike her on the hip, right between kidney and spine, a blow to which, after weeks of hunched shuffling and vomiting of black blood, she ultimately succumbed. How absurd that her end was ascribed to several prunes, soaked in cold water, which she was said to have eaten too greedily; it was the farcical justification that we had all agreed to believe, and no one dared call it a cowardly fiction.
He who goes to bed first is the innocent one, for he can fall asleep. If the old man goes first, if he’s asleep already when I come, the strained, sustained groaning and snoring that rises from his rib cage won’t let me fall asleep, not until I grasp at last, hours later perhaps, its irregular rhythm, and am able in the pauses in which he seems to have died, so long and so stunned are they, to chime in with my own groans and snores, so that our two voices begin to prowl about each other. They seek to wear each other down in a continual game of questions and answers that suddenly breaks free of its confusion and becomes a game in which at synchronized intervals we accuse each other again and again. — Who? Whoo. . is the ever-repeated question concealed within one of these chest tones; and: You! Youu. . is the response that just as inevitably follows.
Sometimes I awaken with a start, bathed with sweat in a darkness that admits no concept of time, and even before I completely come to, the last of his emphatic replies enters my still-feeble consciousness so fiercely that I turn rigid with dread. For a moment, he seems to listen, but my wheezing question doesn’t come; he tosses with sinister force onto his other side, turning toward me, I can’t tell if his eyes are open, and before I can place the horror of that insistent you in my vaguely straying thoughts, I’ve fallen asleep again; he turns back onto the old side, I feel his back at my breast again, again we lie like the nested forms of two soup spoons, my hand once more touching his. And I feel how, full of fury, he awaits the judgment from my howling throat; over and over, with the tirelessness of a torturer, he’ll ask me the terrible question: Whoo. .? — Youu. .! I’ll reply. Whooo. . — Youuu. . — And so on, and it seems that sleep is assured to me till morning. It seems we both believe firmly in the reciprocal truth of our testimony.
But in reality we’ve both forgotten the true course of events, and we both think ourselves the murderer. Or both of us doubt that the murderer was the other. It’s a circling about a common guilt, it’s two ellipses of a double guilt no longer to be teased apart; night after night it grows menacingly into the dark and drives the viruses of the gloom into a frenzy. No doubt the survivor will be the murderer. . whichever of us two dies first will sink redeemed into his grave. . no doubt that’s why we hold our breath so often and so long. — The survivor, suddenly isolated, suddenly lacking his consort, lacking his accuser by his side, will fully grasp his guilt: while the innocent one sleeps forever, the guilty one shall never taste sleep again. Long, grinding thoughts will keep him awake. . the initiate with the power to keep silent is dead. The powerless one is left behind; fear will torment him, mistrust of all the neighbors whose unrest he senses more keenly in the short summer nights, when his voice can be heard through the open window on the street: how much longer can the preposterous tale of the prunes be maintained? There is no one left who knows when the plum trees in the garden were felled; when might someone ask whether that wasn’t before the old woman’s death?
Bad dreams will visit the survivor’s doze; at one point he’ll think his grandfather has come in; while he feigns sleep, the old man will turn his back, drop his trousers to his knees, seat the lean, unsightly bareness of his buttocks on the bed, shed his trousers all the way, and lie beside him with a groan, hands folded on his breast in the innocent hope of sleep. . meanwhile the one left behind will wrench his eyes open all the way and see that he’s alone. — Never again will they nestle against each other by turns, one’s back pressed to the other’s front, filling all the bends of the sideways position, hands clawed together, dealing out each other’s breaths, rhythmic in heat and gloom. — Again and again the survivor will dream the first day of solitude, dreaming every night anew the horror with which, waking, he grasps that his last question has gone without a reply. . until he hears the reply from the depths of his own breast: none but he can be meant, beside him the bed is abandoned.