'Then his strength runs out. He no longer gets out of bed. He only looks on as the luminous half-forms dance, and listens to the noises that draw together and blend until
they sound like rushing water. He feels that he's no longer lying down, but falling. He falls into depths that are more bottomless than the sky, and as he falls the light around him becomes calm and clear, the sounds blend into a single tone, a penetrating whistle, which permeates him so that he no longer knows whether it's coming from outside or from within. At that moment he understands that he is perceiving the divine presence, the presence of God, and he whispers, God: his last word.
'They find him in the middle of the empty studio, lying among scraps of paper covered with words in an incomprehensible language and sketches of improbable creatures. The dead man is smiling. One of those who find him says, "The poor bugger must have gone off his rocker."'
The room is silent, like the dead man's studio. Perhaps she had fallen asleep, but her eyes were staring wide into the darkness outside the window. 'And the bird. What about the raven?' she asked finally.
'I forgot about him.' Her question disappointed him. 'He discovers that one of his ancestors had the nickname Corvus.'
'That's a strange story. It's not the kind of story I'd expect from you. It's as though someone else had invented it, someone else inside you, someone who longs to have faith in something.' She leaned over to him and began to kiss him, her cheeks damp with tears. He didn't know if she was crying because the story moved her, or because she was sorry for him, or because they were about to part.
What was faith?
Faith was a longing that pretended to be a conviction.
The noise in the room suddenly stopped. Then a powerful male voice announced that they needed five messengers to go out into the countryside that very night. They would need to be prepared for any eventuality because the situation in the countryside was unclear, and they had unconfirmed reports that armed militia units were standing by at the outskirts of the city, ready to intervene. The voice listed all the places the messengers were to go, the most distant of which was at the far end of the country. Volunteers immediately stood up.
At that moment he heard Sokol's voice offering them the use of the television van.
So he got up. It seemed unlikely that there would be any shooting, but if so, and he and his camera were to survive, he would get some unique footage, though of course there always was shooting somewhere in the world, and that kind of unique footage always looked the same.
A long-haired boy and a girl whose face was still that of a child got into the van. Other students brought a bundle of posters and some flyers.
As they left he looked out of the window and saw several hands waving at them. It was the first time strangers had ever waved to a car in which he was sitting. Both the kids were sitting beside him talking quietly about people he didn't know. The girl addressed the boy as Dan, and the boy called her Dora.
It was already past midnight, and the streets were completely empty. There was no sign of militia units.
He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to the students beside him. The young man refused; the girl accepted and he lit it for her. She noticed that his lighter was shaped like a tiny revolver. 'It's a good thing we're armed,' she remarked.
'We don't shoot in this country,' said the boy — as though he could remember. 'When the shooting starts, someone has to come from somewhere else to deal with it.'
'You can kill without shooting,' countered the girl.
'Have they killed anyone you know?' he asked her.
'No one I know,' she replied, 'but that's not important. You can poison people so slowly that no one notices.'
'Do you mean with television?'
'That's possible,' she said, 'but there are lots of ways of doing it. Like the way they poisoned us at school for fifteen years.'
'Are you counting nursery school?'
'That's where it starts.' She laughed. 'But now it's all over.'
Sokol, who was sitting beside the driver, turned to her. 'Too bad you didn't say that on camera.'
'Anyone will tell you that any time,' she said. 'Too bad it took you so long to come to us.'
'We would have come sooner, but they wouldn't have broadcast our footage. And maybe you wouldn't have spoken this way either.'
'Perhaps,' admitted the student. 'Everything in its own good time.'
The van drove out of the city, but they had to go slowly because the road was veiled in mist. The girl leaned her head on the boy's shoulder and closed her eyes.
'What are you studying?' Pavel asked the young man.
'As a matter of fact, just what you're doing. I mean I'm studying to be a cameraman.'
'That's good. You can take over from me, if necessary.'
'Why not?' he said. 'It would be more interesting.'
'What do you mean?'
'I couldn't stand your programmes, any of them. Whenever they turned the television on at home, I'd leave the room. Now here I am, riding in the same car as you.'
'Maybe we found it even more disgusting than you did,' said Sokol. 'We had even more reason to.'
'But you did it,' objected the student. 'Even so, you did it.'
'You went on studying too,' said Sokol, 'even though you knew they were poisoning you.'
'That's an interesting comparison. But it's not quite the same thing.'
'Maybe you'll be able to do everything better now, when you take over from us,' Pavel interjected.
'I hope so, otherwise I wouldn't want to touch it.'
That's what you say now, Pavel thought, when you have a hope that things will change. But he said nothing. He lit another cigarette and looked out into the impenetrable fog.
He too hoped that things would change. People like this student would come to replace him because he was one of the poisoners. And he would acquiesce because in the end, he too wanted everything to be done better. So this was what the beginning of freedom was like. If it would not be for him, then at least it would be for his unborn son.
2
The cameras were set up, the writing-desk lit. The old man held in his hand some sheets of paper from which to read. He seemed gaunt, tired and old. Nevertheless, his voice was as harsh and domineering as ever. 'Can we begin?' He clearly wanted to get this over with. A resignation forced upon him by popular demonstrations in the streets, by a people who now eagerly awaited his final humiliation.
'Two more minutes, Mr President.' Pavel also wanted to get it over with, even though no one would see him doing it. He had not wanted to see this man at close range again, though it would probably be for the last time. 'Who else but you?' they had said.
'Stand by, Mr President!'
The old man sat down, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. He was obviously feeling very emotional. When they had elected him head of state years ago, he had been moved to tears. Many others across the country had no doubt wept too, from despair or shame. But most had looked on, as Pavel had, with merely curious or shocked indifference.
'Fifteen seconds! I'll give you the signal with my hand, Mr President.'
The paper, covered with words that had been enlarged several times so the half-blind man could read them, trembled. Pavel gave him the signal, and the old man began to deliver the last speech he would ever make before falling into the dark hole of utter forgetting.
Through the viewfinder, he saw the face he had filmed so often; the microphones captured the voice they had captured so many times before. The voice quavered, and the face looked even more gloomy and serious than usual. It seemed that not only had he written this speech himself, he had also invested it with some real feeling, and now was now trying to speak from the heart, to reach the people to whom he had so often delivered vacuous appeals, messages in which emptiness was wrapped up in grandiloquent nothingness.