Now the summer nights grow shorter and fiercer, his groaning and snoring hectic and ever louder, increasingly perturbed that the whole street, and the side streets as well, hear him circle himself with his indictments, hear him talk in his sleep, struggling for life and yet cursing himself, unable as he is to follow the old man into innocence.
The woman in her distant room knows nothing of all this. . and is my initiate all the same; she bore me and abandoned me to this hideously long life. She slumbers for me, all the deeper since I’ve grown up out of childhood. She’s oblivious of the cycle of the viruses, oblivious that close at hand the world’s guilt dreams of vengeance — one day I’ll move the block of night, one day I must roll it over her body.
II
THE AFTERNOON
Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word arrival, though, I’ve already said too much: there’s something so familiar in the soapy taste of the air that I wouldn’t dream of describing my walk into town as a return — I don’t think of myself coming back; I’ve never been away. No, I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that’s alclass="underline" in truth it was the town that never really left me. The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval. I always had this impression, long before the whole country’s upheaval, and it lingered after the country’s authorities had surrendered and fled, after the government and its closest vassals had been replaced: this town seemed in no way to confirm the changing of the system. In a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis, and that collapse had survived the regime change.
For years I fled from the town, years that have sped from my grasp as though chased by the furies, and yet never passed quickly enough for me. These are all the years I can recall with ease, quite in contrast to those I spent here in this town. It’s as though in those other cities, the bigger, more attractive ones I chose to live in, I never really settled down. Those cities’ easily summoned images were dimmed by a sense of loss, a sentimental feeling originating in this town to which I return from time to time. It’s here that this barely explicable sense of absence grew on me, one I only really felt once I had settled down elsewhere with the more or less firm resolution to stay. It made itself felt as a kind of living without a background, it was a state of severance, a state without a past, and yet I’d learned to feel severed from the past in the small town afternoons.
Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog banks that merged beneath an earth-colored sky appeared unlikely to pass for decades to come. And more and more smoke seemed to spill from the sodden lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal.
Nothing new in the town of M., then. — Bahnhofstrasse, the station road, is still rutted by construction pits, as it was months before, the last time I came here: in the same darkness in which gusts of wind seem to snatch the faint light from the trembling lamps that mark, at irregular intervals, the edge of what was once the sidewalk. Cold fog with wind and rain knotted in it; now snow seems to mingle there as well. The way ahead of me has metamorphosed into a causeway of shadow, beginning to glitter treacherously. Ahead of me hurry a few bundled-up people who got off the train along with me; the street seems barely negotiable, on both sides the invisible looms. I look about for a better path: the alternative route is also broken up and blocked by railings behind which, in the yellow-red flicker of lamps, listing construction vehicles seem to sink into the sand. Every route has been torn up; evidently, after digging up half the town, all work was ceased; I’ve never known it to be otherwise.
For one fleeting moment — an eddy of wind parts the mix of rain and snow — I can see the clock on the station façade: it shows three! — There’s no mistake, it always told this time, its hands always formed this exact right angle in the upper part of the diaclass="underline" three o’clock, as long as I can remember. I have a photograph a friend took of me at the lower end of Bahnhofstrasse, twenty or more years ago. Our intention was to record the strange sight of a bulky pipeline: along the side façades of the factory buildings by the road, the pipe, more than a yard in diameter with its insulation, ran straight across the factory windows, blocking both the view and the daylight, so that the lights in the factory halls had to be left on perpetually. The spectacle of this disconcerting stopgap constituted the charm of the photograph for us; it recalled some absurd technological fantasy. — The station stood at the street’s upper end: on the clearly discernable clock above its entrance it was precisely three o’clock!
Eternal afternoon prevails in the town. The photo shows not a soul on the sharply lit street; the trees, evidently sycamores, still in existence then, are bare. Beneath the white-gray autumn sky, the town has been struck by some blow of mysterious origin. At exactly three o’clock on an ice-cold Sunday, when none of the inhabitants were on the street, the town had been transformed into a phantasm. It had frozen to a motionless backdrop; no one noticed, not even that harmless hobby photographer, himself observed only from behind grimy curtains by several perpetually lurking informers. — Ever since then you were excluded, upon entering the city, from a fundamental law of human existence: since then you were excluded from the soft, relentless onward flow of time, which the trigger of an old-fashioned camera had brought to a standstill. There was only one copy of this black and white photo; the negative had vanished in the dusty back rooms of a photo lab whose owner retired long ago.
And ever since then you were transformed into a shadow upon entering this town, this sinister, bleakly motley heap of houses. And if someone had walked the streets at night, only years later might you hear his steps echoing up the walls.
Those were my thoughts when I’d walked across town and sat at last in my little upstairs kitchen. I thought of these steps, scuffing, hasty, sometimes dragging with weariness, and I thought that they had never ceased. . they were the only movement in the town. — Outside, human life and living voices still existed! Beyond the bounds of this obliterated town I sensed language still at work, and I believed that with its help certain things could be achieved. New generations will partake of it, I told myself; I’d long been waiting for the moment when young people would at last take on the language. And at last seize the ideas buried in the language, and put them on the line. Perhaps I myself had grown unable to guess at these ideas; for far too long now, words have seemed to give out on me. But in some obscure future perhaps the words will reemerge, I thought. Like lights that flicker and stutter at first, as when long-forgotten wires and connections are suddenly flooded with electricity.
I’ve always spoken of the wrong things, presumably! At least that was my perpetual suspicion. . and despite my change of scenery, I increasingly felt I was governed by inertia. Inertia kept me captive, lying constantly in wait, prepared to take full possession of me, to fix me like a botched statue to the spot where I happened to be. — The cause lies here in M., I said to myself. Here, in this town, annihilation planted its foot on me. — And how long ago was it that I began to dissect the doom I called M. into words and phrases in order to achieve clarity about it: how many years ago that I failed in the attempt and gave up again. .