Some few bottles had been filled, and as there was no one who cared to drink the cider, they had outlasted the years. At the very front they sat enthroned atop the first shelves in the cellar. The juice in them, once viscous and brown, had turned into a solid, white-shimmering substance, into crystal, into a petrified mold that had forced off the rubber caps. The mold rose inches above the bottlenecks: these appendages — like the senseless pride of arrogated masculinity — blackened in the fusty air, made these bottles isolated; unable to prove themselves, they could not take part in the festival of procreation at their feet. And so they led the shadowy existence of deposed tribunes, while below them, in the outskirts of their territory, chaos and revolt fermented: the desperate and demoralizing apostasy of the empty-bellied bottles as yet unsullied by nonalcoholic liquids.
I was appalled at first by the desolate petrifaction of the upper bottles; later it was a complex bond with the existence of the mass below that increasingly perturbed me. In the nights when, aided by the contents of new bottles, I attempted to force myself into a murky doze, the incriminating fact of these bottles’ emptiness, which in many ways had come about and become irrevocable through my fault, began to horrify me. I had not filled them, the bottles, I had not yet disposed of them; on the contrary, I had bolstered their superior might with more and more treacherous fringe groups. . it was I who emptied the full bottles to swell their number, a recurring cause of strife, and to establish an inextricable chain of causation: the emptier the bottles became, the more unfillable, and the more numerous the emptied bottles became, the more new bottles I had to procure to be emptied. The more bottles I emptied, the more intense was my desire to do so. . in my body there was a curse like the very being of bottles: for a fullness in me did not lead to satiety, but flung open ever greedier maws within. — I knew of several bottles, filled with the contents that most revolted me — liqueurs and cloying red wines — hidden away in my aged mother’s bedside cabinet. There, in a nook by the head of her bed, behind a hideously clicking door, they awaited guests who never came. There were extremely demeaning nights in which I crept into my mother’s bedroom, crawling on all fours along the edge of her bed, inch by inch, trying to reach the cabinet as noiselessly as possible. I opened it, despite my caution causing a metallic snap at which my mother stopped snoring and seemed to listen; for minutes I waited for the noise of her regular breathing to return, the drops of my sweat falling on the floor sounding to me like detonations. . then I took one or two bottles from the bedside cabinet, let the door snap shut, again I waited, lying flat on my belly the whole time, until at last I could crawl out of the room with my booty. The way back seemed barely surmountable: I felt as though I had to crawl over endless heaps of empty bottles that sent up no frightful clinking and jingling only because beneath them was deposited the quagmire of several wagonloads of potatoes rotted to mush, combined with cobwebs and soot, as down in the cellar where there was no more room for the winter provisions. This was the morass through which I seemed to worm in nights like that. . Darkness, sweat, and thirst were the foundations of my now-adult existence: and in this belly-crawling life my fists trembled with too-heavy bottles which, from sheer weakness, I could barely transport without noise. However evil and stupefying the contents of the stolen bottles, they had to vanish into the cellar as empty bottles that very same night, and the way downstairs, which I staggered rather than walked, the way down to the plane of the bottles, was an ordeal, tormenting me for a long time afterward until sleep finally felled me. It was a feeble sleep in which all dreams turned my stomach: a hundred times I must have seen myself vomit into the toilet bowl, I saw my herbal-bitter heart, my syrup-filled veins, my candied entrails tumble out until there was nothing left in me but dust-black crystal that had to be dissolved in liquids. Droughts laid waste to my throat, my stomach walls burned like desert sands. . in my body no desire ever could have been appeased: in reality I never could vomit, and there wasn’t a drop of alcohol that didn’t have its proper place in me. It was something else I wanted to vomit, something imaginary: perhaps it was an ocean, frozen to glass to the very bottom, perhaps it was an earth, plummeting through the night like an overripe apple. Or I wanted to vomit a sleep that brought me no satisfaction because it always had to end again. The sleep that gave me no rest in the nights when, thirsting, half-asleep, half-awake, I listened to the howling of the bottles in the cellar.
COMING