Now he keeps talking about this guy Kirsárt or whatever his name is, said the interpreter to his partner, shaking his head incredulously, like the other night there he is in the kitchen again and he is beginning to feel that the man is literally stalking him, hiding in wait somewhere between the front door, the kitchen and the hallway, just looking for that moment when he might “accidentally” bump into him, and what a ridiculous state of affairs, trying to evade someone, having constantly to be on the alert in his own apartment, having to hesitate before entering the kitchen in case the guy should be there, it really was intolerable, for after all he is perfectly aware of what the man is up to, hanging around behind doors, listening, but there are times he just can’t avoid these so-called “accidental” encounters, like the one last night when he pounced on him too, asking him if he could spare a moment while he babbled on about how his work was progressing and about this Misfart, or Firshart, or whatever his name was, unloading all this nonsense on him, nonsense of which you can’t understand a single word of course, because it’s all confused and he talks as if he, the interpreter, should have some clue as to who the hell this Dirsmars was: the guy was crazy, crazy in the strictest sense of the word, crazy and scary, there was no doubt about that anymore, scary and dangerous, you could see it in his eyes, in other words it was time to put a stop to all this because if he didn’t, he felt things would come to a bad end, and in any case it was fair to say that Korin’s days were numbered because Korin would be out on his ass now that he’d had this great offer, which was the chance of his life, believe me, said the interpreter to his partner, and if it worked out, and the way it looked was that it would need divine intervention to foul things up now, it would mean the end of poverty for them, they could get a new TV, new video machine and everything, whatever she wanted, a new gas stove, a new pantry, in other words an utterly new life down to the last saucepan, don’t you worry, and Korin would be sent packing too, there’d be no more need to hide from him or to scurry about like rats in their own apartment in order to avoid him, nor would she have to spend hours listening to the affairs of Birshart, no, Hirschhardt, Korin corrected him in confusion for he didn’t know how to conclude the conversation he had unfortunately become engaged in, for Hirschhardt was his name and Mr. Sárváry should picture him as someone who hated any kind of mystery, for mystery meant ignorance, which was why he loathed mystery, was ashamed of it and tried to dispel it whatever way he could, in the case of Kasser and his companions, by taking note of any incidental, casual and, for the most part, misunderstood remarks and, in his own fashion, drawing quite unfounded conclusions from them, constructing an entirely arbitrary view of affairs on the basis of extremely shaky foundations, presenting himself to his fellow citizens as someone wholly in the know when he sat down at various tables and told tales about them, quietly so they shouldn’t hear, suggesting that they were of some strange monastic order, the four of them there by the window, never saying anything, mysteriously coming and going, nobody knowing the least thing about them, what with their foreign names, not even where they were from, and of course they were all peculiar creatures, but they should regard them as refugees from the triumph at Königgrätz, or rather the hell of Königgrätz as anyone would say had they witnessed the Prussian victory on that notorious July 3 three years ago, a victory bought at the price of forty-three thousand dead, and that was just the Austrian casualties, Hirschhardt told the local drinkers, forty-three thousand in a single day and that was just the enemy, and, well, I ask you, he said, anyone seeing forty-three thousand dead Austrians is never going to be the same again, and that lot, said Hirschhardt indicating the four of them, were part of the entourage of the famous general, members of the strategic corps, in other words no strangers to the smell of gunpowder, and must have come face to face with death in many engagements, Hirschhardt concluded, his voice lingering on the word “death,” but the hell of Königgrätz had shocked even them, for that was hell, it really was, for the Austrians he meant of course, he quickly added, in other words they were heroes of Königgrätz, and that’s how they should be regarded, nor should they wonder that they did not seem in exactly high spirits: and, having heard this, people naturally did regard them as such, saying to each other as they walked into the bar, oh yes, indeed, there are the heroes of Königgrätz, before looking round for a vacant table or for their friends, calling for beers while surreptitiously casting sidelong glances in the direction of the window, assuring themselves that there, indeed, sat the heroes of Königgrätz, as Hirschhardt had told them time and time again, participants in that heroic battle, that great victory, which was a triumph looked at from one point of view but absolute hell from another, what with forty-three thousand dead, which was part of the history of the four men over there who were involved in the glorious battle and had had to witness the death of forty-three thousand people, all on a single day.
Kasser and his companions were perfectly aware, Korin explained to the woman, that the landlord of the inn was talking all kinds of nonsense but since they observed that the result of the landlord’s fabrications was that the locals by and large left them in peace, they only occasionally tried to broach the subject with Hirschhardt to ask him why he went about saying they were heroes of Königgrätz when they had never in their lives visited Königgrätz nor had ever claimed to have been there, adding that taking flight before the battle of Königgrätz was not the same as fleeing from Königgrätz itself and so forth, that they were not members of Moltke’s entourage, not even soldiers, and had only tried to escape an impending battle, not emerged from the heat of one, though, truth to tell, they only occasionally pointed this out because there was no point telling Hirschhardt anything for Hirschhardt was incapable of comprehending and simply nodded, his broad, completely bald skull covered in perspiration, his face set in a false smile as if he knew what the truth really was, so that eventually they gave up trying altogether and Kasser picked up a train of thought he had long been following, the original thread, the thing they had been talking about since they first arrived, that is the notion of preparing themselves for utter failure, for that was a genuine, unarguable possibility, since history was undoubtedly tending toward the ever more extensive force, violence, although no proper survey of affairs should omit the fact that a marvelous work was under construction here, a brilliant product of human endeavor, the chief element of which was the discovery of sanctity, holiness, the holiness of unknown space and time, of God and the divine, for there is no finer sight, Kasser declared, than a man who realizes that there is a God, and who recognizes in this God the spellbinding reality of holiness while knowing that reality to be the product of his own awakening and consciousness, for these were moments of enormous significance, he said, resulting in momentous works, for at the center of it all, at the very apex of each and every achievement stood the radiant single figure of God, the one God, and that it was always the man with the vision, the one who beheld him, that was capable of constructing an entire universe in his own soul, a universe like a cathedral aspiring to heaven, and the remarkable thing, the thing in Cologne, was that mortal creatures felt the need for a sacred domain, and this was the thing that completely overwhelmed him, said Kasser, that this desire persisted in the midst of an undeniable failure, a precipitous collapse into ultimate defeat, and yes, Falke took over, that was indeed extraordinary, but what was still more extraordinary was the personal quality of this God, since man, in discovering that there might be a God in heaven, that there might indeed be a heaven beyond this earth, had found not only a kind of lord, someone who sat in a throne and ruled over the world, but a personal God to whom he could speak, and what was the result of that? what happened? asked Falke rhetorically—what happened, Korin echoed him — what happened, Falke answered his own question, was that it extended man’s sense of being at home in the world, and this was the truly startling, truly extraordinary thing, they said, this all-consuming idea that weak and feeble man was capable of creating a universe that far exceeded himself, since ultimately it was this that was great and entrancing here, this tower man raised to soar way beyond himself, and that man was capable of raising something so much greater than his own petty being, said Falke, the way he grasped the vastness he himself created, the way he defended himself by producing this brilliant, beautiful and unforgettable, yet moving, poignant, thing, because of course he was not capable of governing such grandeur, unable to handle something so enormous, and it would collapse and the edifice he had created would tumble about his ears so the whole thing would have to start all over again, and so it would go on ad infìnitum, said Falke, the systematic preparation for failure changing nothing in the desire to create ever greater and greater monuments that collapsed, it being a natural product of an eternal desire to resolve an all-consuming, overwhelming tension between the creator of vast and tiny things.