Sweet Passages

There was plenty of discussion, but no bickering. Vanity was not engaged, for the speakers were also the audience. They would talk over their work among themselves and take counsel of each other with the delightful openness of youth. If the matter in hand was serious, the opponent would leave his own position to enter into his friend’s point of view; and being an impartial judge in a matter outside his own sphere, would prove the better helper; envy, the hideous treasure of disappointment, abortive talent, failure, and mortified vanity, was quite unknown among them. All of them, moreover, were going their separate ways. For these reasons, Lucien and others admitted to their society felt at their ease in it. Wherever you find real talent, you will find frank good fellowship and sincerity, and no sort of pretension, the wit that caresses the intellect and never is aimed at self-love.

When the first nervousness, caused by respect, wore off, it was unspeakably pleasant to make one of this elect company of youth. Familiarity did not exclude in each a consciousness of his own value, nor a profound esteem for his neighbor; and finally, as every member of the circle felt that he could afford to receive or to give, no one made a difficulty of accepting. Talk was unflagging, full of charm, and ranging over the most varied topics; words light as arrows sped to the mark. There was a strange contrast between the dire material poverty in which the young men lived and the splendor of their intellectual wealth. They looked the practical problems of existence simply as matter for friendly jokes. The cold weather happened to set in early that year. Five of d’Arthez’s friends appeared one day, each concealing firewood under his cloak; the same idea had occurred to all five, as it sometimes happens that all the guests at a picnic are inspired with the notion of bringing a pie as their contribution.

All of them were gifted with the moral beauty which reacts upon the physical form, and, no less than work and vigils, overlays a youthful face with a shade of divine gold; purity of life and the fire of thought had brought refinement and regularity into features somewhat pinched and rugged. The poet’s amplitude of brow was a striking characteristic common to them all; the bright, sparkling eyes told of cleanliness of life. The hardships of penury, when they were felt at all, were born so gaily and embraced with such enthusiasm, that they had left no trace to mar the serenity peculiar to the faces of the young who have no grave errors laid to their charge as yet, who have not stooped to any the base compromises wrung from impatience of poverty by the strong desire to succeed. The temptation to use any means to this end is the greater since that men of letters are lenient with bad faith and extend an easy indulgence to treachery.

There is an element in friendship which doubles its charm and renders it indissoluble--a sense of certainty which is lacking in love. These young men were sure of themselves and of each other; the enemy of one was the enemy of all; the most urgent personal considerations would have been shattered if they had clashed with the sacred solidarity of their fellowship. All alike incapable of disloyalty, they could oppose a formidable No to any accusation brought against the absent and defend them with perfect confidence. With a like nobility of nature and strength of feeling, it was possible to think and speak freely on all matters of intellectual or scientific interest; hence the honesty of their friendships, the gaiety of their talk, and with this intellectual freedom of the community there was no fear of being misunderstood; they stood upon no ceremony with each other; they shared their troubles and joys, and gave thought and sympathy from full hearts. The charming delicacy of feeling which makes the tale of Deux Amis a treasury for great souls, was the rule of their daily life. It may be imagined, therefore, that their standard of requirements was not an easy one; they were too conscious of their worth, too well aware of their happiness, to care to trouble their life with admixture of a new and unknown element.

. . .

Now Goldmund was questioned about his adventures. “Ach,” he said sadly, “let’s not speak of it. I wandered and wandered, and the plague was everywhere and the dead lay about, and everywhere the people grew mad and wicked with fear. I survived; perhaps one day we’ll forget it all. Now I’ve come back and my master is dead! Let me stay here for a few days and rest, then I’ll wander on.”

He did not stay in order to rest. He stayed because he was disappointed and undecided, because memories of happier times made the city dear to him, and because poor Marie’s love did him good. He could not return it, he could give her nothing but friendliness and pity, but her quiet, humble admiration warmed his heart. But more than all this, the burning need to be an artist once again kept him in this place, even without a workshop, even with only makeshift tools.

For a few days Goldmund did nothing but draw. Marie had found pen and paper, and he sat in his room and drew hour after hour, filling the large sheets with hasty sketches, now with lovingly delicate figures, letting the overfilled picture book inside him flow out onto the paper. Many times he drew Lene’s face: the way it had smiled with satisfaction, her love and murder lust after the vagrant’s death, her face as it had been the last night, in the process of melting into formlessness, in its return to the earth. He drew the small peasant boy whom he had seen lying dead across his parents’ threshold, with little clenched fists. He drew a cart full of corpses, with three pitifully straining nags pulling it, the death churls running beside it with long staffs, their eyes squinting darkly from the shadows of their black plague hoods. Again and again he drew Rebekka, the slender black-eyed girl, her proud narrow mouth, her face full of sorrow and indignation, her graceful young figure that seemed created for loving, her proud bitter mouth. He drew himself as the wanderer, the lover, the fugitive from death’s reaper, as a dancer at the orgies of the life-greedy. He sat absorbed over the white paper, drew the contemptuous face of Mistress Lisbeth the way he had known her in former days, the caricature of the old servant Margrit, the loved and feared face of Master Niklaus. Several times, with thin, intuitive strokes, he also sketched a large female figure, the earth mother, sitting with hands in her lap, a hint of a smile in her face under melancholy eyes. The outpouring of work, the mastering of these faces, did him great good. In a few days he filled with drawings all the sheets Marie had found for him. He cut off a piece of the last sheet and on it he drew Marie’s face with sparing strokes, the beautiful eyes, the resigned mouth, and gave it to her.

Drawing had greatly lessened his feeling of heaviness and lightened the bursting fullness in his soul. As long as he was drawing, he did not know where he was. His world consisted of nothing but a table, white paper, and, at night, a candle. Now he awoke, remembered the most recent events, saw more hapless roaming ahead of him, and began strolling through the city with a strangely split sensation half of homecoming, half of departure.

On one of these strolls he met a woman. Seeing her refocused all his disordered feelings and gave them a new center. She was riding a horse, a tall light-blond woman with curious, cool blue eyes, and a firm, strong body, a blossoming face full of eagerness for pleasure, and power, self-esteem, and a certain sniffing curiosity of the senses. She sat on her brown horse somewhat domineering and proud, accustomed to giving orders, but not withdrawn or haughty. Her nostrils seemed to be open to all the scents of the world, and her large loose mouth was obviously capable of taking and giving in the highest degree. The moment Goldmund saw this woman, he became fully awake and full of desire to measure himself against her. To conquer her suddenly seemed a noble goal to strive for, and if he were to break his neck on the way it would not have seemed a bad death to him. He felt that this blond lioness was his equal, rich in sensuality and soul, at the mercy of all storms, wild as well as delicate, well versed in passion from an ancient heritage of blood.

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years. Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carrion. Out there under the blue lamplight the trolleybacks run on to darkness, curved like cockheels in the pinchbeck dusk. The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway. Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk’s shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and fishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty flowers grow. Down pavings rent with ruin, the slow cataclysm of neglect, the wires that belly pole to pole across the constellations hung with kitestring, with bolos composed of hobbled bottles or the toys of the smaller children. Encampment of the damned. Precincts perhaps where dripping lepers prowl unbelled. Above the heat and the improbable skyline of the city a brass moon has risen and the clouds run before it like watered ink. The buildings stamped against the night are like a rampart to a farther world forsaken, old purposes forgot. Countrymen come for miles with the earth clinging to their shoes and sit all day like mutes in the marketplace. This city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad. A carnival of shapes upreared on the river plain that has dried up the sap of the earth for miles about.

Factory walls of old dark brick, tracks of a spur line grown with weeds, a course of foul blue drainage where dark filaments of nameless dross sway in the current. Tin panes among the glass in the rusted window frames. There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamps globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

Here at the creek mouth the fields run on to the river, the mud deltaed and baring out of its rich alluvial harbored bones and dread waste, a wrack of cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds moneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rainflattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry landkeepers, grating along like bonedust, afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost. Houseboats ride at their hawsers. The neap mud along the shore lies ribbed and slick like the cavernous flitch of some beast hugely foundered and beyond the country rolls away to the south and the mountains. Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains with the spoorless analogues of all that was, lean Aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.

We are come to a world within the world. In these reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept or what’s the counter of his fate? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world’s nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just suchwise that he’s invited in.

The sky was already bright at something after five in the morning, but even so, I could make out a lot stars overhead. It was just as Lieutenant Mamiya had told me: from the bottom of a well, you can see stars in the daylight. Into the perfect half-moon slice of sky, faintly glowing stars were packed neatly, like specimens of rare minerals.

Once before, when camping on a mountaintop with some friends in the fifth or sixth grade, I had seen stars in such numbers that they filled the sky. It almost seemed as if the sky would break under the weight of all those things and come tumbling down. Never had I seen such an amazing skyful of stars. Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted. But in fact, the earth was nothing but a chunk of rock floating in one little corner of the universe: a temporary foothold in the vast emptiness of space. It – and all us with it – could be blown away tomorrow by a momentary flash of something or a tiny shift in the universe’s energy. Beneath this breathtaking skyful of stars, the uncertainty of my own existence struck me full force (though not in so many words, of course). It was a stunning discovery for a young boy.

Looking up at the dawn stars from the bottom of a well was a special experience very different from looking at the full, starry sky on a mountaintop, as if my mind – my self – my very existence – were firmly bonded through my narrow window to each one of those stars in the sky. I felt a deep sense of intimacy toward them: they were my stars, visible to no one but me, down here in the dark well. I embraced them as my own, and they in turn showered me with a kind of energy and warmth.

As time passed and the sky came increasingly under the sway of the bright morning sun of summer, one star at a time would obliterate itself from my field of view. They did this with the utmost gentleness, and I studied the process of obliteration with wide-open eyes. The summer sun did not, however, erase every star from the sky. A few of the strongest ones remained. No matter how high the sun climbed, they took a stubborn stance and refused to disappear. This made me very happy: aside from the occasional cloud that drifted by, the stars were the only things I could see from down there.

I had sweated in my sleep, and now the sweat was beginning to grow cold and chill me. I shuddered several times. The sweat made me think of that pitch-dark hotel room and the telephone woman there. Still ringing in my ears were the words she had spoken – every one of them – and the sound of the knocking. My nostrils retained the strangely heavy smell of flowers. And Noboru Wataya was still talking from the other side of the television screen. The memory of these impressions remained, undimmed by the passage of time. And this was because it had not been a dream, my memory told me.

Even after I was fully awake, I continued to feel an intense warmth in my right cheek. Mixed in now with the warmth was a mild sensation of pain, as if the skin had been chafed with rough sandpaper. I pressed my palm against the spot through my one-day stubble, but this did nothing to reduce the heat or the pain. Down in the bottom of the dark well, without a mirror, it was impossible for me to examine what was happening to my cheek.

I reached out and touched the wall, tracing the surface with my fingertips and then pressing my palm against it for a time, but I found nothing unusual: it was just an ordinary concrete wall. I made a fist and gave it a few taps. The wall was hard, expressionless, and slightly damp. I still had a clear impression of the strange, slippery sensation it had given me when I passed through it – like tunneling through a mass of gelatin.

I groped in my knapsack for the canteen and took a drink of water. I had gone a full day now without eating. The thought itself gave me intense hunger pangs, but these began to fade soon enough as they were absorbed into a limbo-like numbness. I brought my hand to my face again and tried to gauge the growth of my beard. My jaw now wore a day’s worth of stubble. No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by. But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

I turned upward again and looked at the stars. The sight of them gradually calmed the beating of my heart. Then it occurred to me to grope along the wall for the ladder. Where it should have been, my hand encountered nothing. I felt over a broad area, checking with the utmost care, but there was no ladder. It no longer existed in the place where it belonged. I took a deep breath, pulled the flashlight from my knapsack, and switched it on. But there was no sign of the ladder. Standing, I shone the light on the floor and then the wall above me, as far as the beam could reach. The ladder was nowhere. Cold sweat crept down my sides like some kind of living creature. The flashlight slipped out of my hand, fell to the ground, and switched off from the impact. It was a sign. In that instant, my mind snapped: it was a grain of sand, absorbed into the surrounding darkness. My body stopped functioning, as if its plug had been pulled. A perfect nothingness came over me.

This lasted perhaps a few seconds, until I retrieved myself. My physical functions returned bit by bit. I bent over and picked up the flashlight lying at my feet, gave it a few taps, and switched it on again. The light returned without a problem. I needed to calm myself and put my thoughts in order. Fear and panic would solve nothing. When had I last checked the ladder? Yesterday, late at night, just before fell asleep. I made certain it was there and only then let myself sleep. No mistake. The ladder had disappeared while I was sleeping. It had been pulled away. Taken away.

Shortly after that, I was taken before the examining magistrate again. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and this time his office was filled with sunlight barely softened by a flimsy curtain. It was very hot. He had me sit down and very politely informed me that, “due to unforeseen circumstances,” my lawyer had been unable to come. But I had the right to remain silent and to wait for my lawyer’s counsel. I said that I could answer for myself. He pressed a button on the table. A young clerk came in and sat down right behind me.

The two of us leaned back in our chairs. The examination began. He started out by saying that people were describing me as a taciturn and withdrawn person and he wanted to know what I thought. I answered, “It’s just that I don’t have much to say. So I keep quiet.” He smiled the way he had the first time, agreed that that was the best reason of all, and added, “Besides, it’s not important.” Then he looked at me without saying anything, leaned forward rather abruptly, and said very quickly, “What interests me is you.” I didn’t really understand what he meant by that, so I didn’t respond. “There are one or two things,” he added, “that I don’t quite understand. I’m sure you’ll help me clear them up.” I said it was all pretty simple. He pressed me to go back over that day. I went back over what I had already told him: Raymond, the beach, the swim, the quarrel, then back to the beach, the little spring, the sun, and the five shots from the revolver. After each sentence he would say, “Fine, fine.” When I got to the body lying there, he nodded and said, “Good.” But I was tired of repeating the same story over and over. It seemed as if I had never talked so much in my life.

After a short silence, he stood up and told me that he wanted to help me, that I interested him, and that, with God’s help, he would do something for me. But first he wanted to ask me a few more questions. Without working up to it, he asked if I loved Maman. I said, “Yes, the same as anyone,” and the clerk, who up to then had been typing steadily, must have hit the wrong key, because he lost his place and had to go back. Again without any apparent logic, the magistrate then asked if I had fired all five shots at once. I thought for a minute and explained that at first I had fired a single shot and then, a few seconds later, the other four. Then he said, “Why did you pause between the first and second shot?” Once again I could see the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on my forehead. But this time I didn’t answer. In the silence that followed, the magistrate seemed to be getting fidgety. He sat down, ran his fingers through his hair, put his elbows on his desk, and leaned toward me slightly with a strange look on his face. “Why, why did you shoot at a body that was on the ground?” Once again I didn’t know how to answer. The magistrate ran his hands across his forehead and repeated his question with a slightly different tone in his voice. “Why? You must tell me. Why?” Still I didn’t say anything.

Suddenly he stood up, strode over to a far corner of his office, and pulled out a drawer in a file cabinet. He took out a silver crucifix which he brandished as he came toward me. And in a completely different, almost cracked voice, he shouted, “Do you know what this is?” I said, “Yes, of course.” Speaking very quickly and passionately, he told me that he believed in God, that it was his conviction that no man was so guilty that God would not forgive him, but in order for that to happen a man must repent and in so doing become like a child whose heart is open and ready to embrace all. He was leaning all the way over the table. He was waving his crucifix almost completely over my head. To tell the truth, I had found it very hard to follow his reasoning, first because I was hot and there were big flies in his office that kept landing on my face, and also because he was scaring me a little. At the same time I knew that that was ridiculous because, after all, I was the criminal. He went on anyway. I vaguely understood that to his mind there was just one thing that wasn’t clear in my confession, the fact that I had hesitated before I fired my second shot. The rest was fine, but that part he couldn’t understand.

I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn’t matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. “Do you want my life to be meaningless?” he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn’t have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, “I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive your sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?” I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I’m not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. “You see, you see!” he said. “You do believe, don’t you, and you’re going to place your trust in Him, aren’t you?” Obviously, I again said no. He fell back into his chair.

He seemed to be very tired. He didn’t say anything for a minute while the typewriter, which hadn’t let up this whole time, was still tapping out the last few sentences. Then he looked at me closely and with a little sadness in his face. In a low voice he said, “I have never seen a soul as hardened as yours. The criminals who have come before me have always wept at the sight of this image of suffering.” I was about to say that that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I realized that I was one too. It was an idea I couldn’t get used to. Then the judge stood up, as if to give me the signal that the examination was over. He simply asked, in the same weary tone, if I was sorry for what I had done. I thought about it for a minute and said that more than sorry I felt kind of annoyed. I got the impression he didn’t understand. But that was as things went that day.

As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.

It’s so long since I’ve sat in the company of well-dressed people that I feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too. But nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A faint odor of perfume . . . very faint. Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I’ve never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place. After what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake, rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body, slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into place. Suddenly the lights flare up and the man in the white box whom I had taken for a Turkish officer turns out to be a woman with a flowerpot on her head.

There is a buzz now and all those who want to cough, cough to their heart’s content. There is the noise of feet shuffling and seats slamming, the steady, frittering noise of people moving about aimlessly, of people fluttering their programs and pretending to read and then dropping their programs and scuffling under their seats, thankful for even the slightest accident which will prevent them from asking themselves what they were thinking about because if they knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad. In the harsh glare of the lights they look at each other vacuously and there is a strange tenseness with which they stare at one another. And the moment the conductor raps again they fall back into a cataleptic state – they scratch themselves unconsciously or they remember suddenly a show window in which there was displayed a scarf or hat; they remember every detail of that window with amazing clarity, but where it was exactly, that they can’t recall; and that bothers them, keeps them wide awake, restless, and they listen now with redoubled attention because they are wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they will not lose consciousness of that show window and that scarf that was hanging there, or the hat.

And this fierce attentiveness communicates itself; even the orchestra seems galvanized into an extraordinary alertness. The second number goes off like a top – so fast indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they would answer without thinking – 4, 967, 289.

By the time we get to the Debussy number the atmosphere is completely poisoned. I find myself wondering what it feels like, during intercourse, to be a woman – whether the pleasure is keener, etc. Try to imagine something penetrating my groin, but have only a vague sensation of pain. I try to focus, but the music is too slippery. I can think of nothing but a vase slowly turning and the figures dropping off into space. Finally there is only light turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself. The man next to me is sleeping soundly. He looks like a broker, with his big paunch and his waxed mustache. I like him thus. I like especially that big paunch and all that went into the making of it. Why shouldn’t he sleep soundly? If he wants to listen he can always rustle up the price of a ticket. I notice that the better dressed they are the more soundly they sleep. They have an easy conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified; he imagines that he has committed a crime against the composer.

In the Spanish number the house was electrified. Everybody sat on the edge of his seat – the drums woke them up. I thought when the drums started it would keep up forever. I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or throw their hats away. There was something heroic about it and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had wanted to. But that’s not Ravel. Suddenly it all died down. It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake, in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed.

My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away from me, now that the drums have ceased. People everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as if he were posing for the “Balzac” of Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail – marvelous if she were to have a hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies!

Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen.  In the air is a smell of salt water.  The cobbled streets are wet with last night’s rain.  Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.  He stumbles out, finds a pump in a courtyard between brick walls and casement windows nobody stares out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps the pump, soaking his head for as long as he thinks he needs to.  A ginger cat, meowing for breakfast, comes stalking him, doorway to doorway.  “Sorry, Ace.”  Doesn’t look like breakfast for either of them.

He hitches up Tchitcherine’s pants and heads out of town, leaving the blunt towers, the domes of copper corroded green swimming up in the mist, the high gables and red tiles, gets a ride with a woman driving an empty farm wagon.  The horse’s sandy forelock bobs and blows, and the fog settles in behind. 

This morning it looks like what Vikings must have seen, sailing this great water-meadow south, clear to Byzantium, all eastern Europe their open sea: the farmland rolls gray and green as waves . . . ponds and lakes seem to have no clear boundaries . . . the sight of other people against this ocean sky, even the military, comes welcome as sails after long days of passage. . . .

The Nationalities are on the move.  It is a great frontier-less streaming out here.  Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and the Lithuanians trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs too hard to sing talk pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between Berlin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away, numb, indifferent to all moments but the deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to give shape to, white wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving the vehicles beside the roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns, trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside for army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the way west, Kazakh ex-P/W’s marching east, Wehrmacht veterans from other parts of old Germany, foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs, wrapped in the army blankets they kept, pale green farm worker triangles sewn chest-high on each blouse bobbing, drifting, at a certain hour of the dusk, like candle flames in religious procession – supposed to be heading today for Hanover, supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they’ve been chasing these nonexistent potato fields now for a month – “Plundered,” a one-time bugler limps along with a long splinter of railroad tie for a cane, his instrument, implausibly undented and shiny, swinging from one shoulder, “stripped by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field, and what for?  Alcohol.  Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets.  Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking.  It’s unbelievable.”  “What, the rockets?”  “No! The SS, picking potatoes!” looking around for his laugh.  But there are none here to follow the brass and flourish of his less solemn heart.  They were infantrymen, and know how to snooze between footfalls – at some hour of the morning they will fall out by the side of the road, a moment’s precipitate out of the road chemurgy of these busy nights, while the invisible boiling goes on by, the long strewn vortices – pinstripe suits with crosses painted on the back, ragged navy and army uniforms, white turbans, mismatched socks or none, Tattersall dresses, thick-knitted shawls with babies inside, women in army trousers split at the knees, flea-bitten and barking dogs that in packs, prams piled high with light furnishings in scarred veneer, hand-mortised drawers that will never fit into anything again, looted chickens alive and dead, horns and violins in weathered black cases, bedspreads, harmoniums, grandfather clocks, kits full of tools for carpentry, watch-making, leatherwork, surgery, paintings of pink daughters in white frocks, of saints bleeding, of salmon and purple sunsets over the sea, packs stuffed with beady-eyed boas, dolls smiling out of violently red lips, Allgeyer soldiers an inch and a quarter to the man painted cream, gold and blue, handfuls of hundred-year-old agates  soaked in honey that sweetened great-grandfather tongues long gone to dust, then into sulfuric acid to char the sugar in bands, brown to black, across the stone, deathless piano performances, punched on Vorsetzer rolls, ribboned black lingerie, flowered and grape-crested silverware, faceted lead-glass decanters, tulip-shaped Jugendstil cups, strings of amber beads . . . so the populations moving along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t know is destroyed forever. 

When Slothrop has cigarettes he’s an easy mark, when somebody has food they share it – sometimes a batch of vodka if there’s an army concentration nearby, the GI cans can be looted for all kinds of useful produce, potato peels, melon rinds, pieces of candy bars for sugar, no telling what’s going to go into these DP stills, what you end drinking is the throwaway fraction of some occupying power.  Slothrop drifts in and out of dozens of these quiet, hungry, scuffling migrations, each time getting hard Benzedrine jitters off of the faces – there aren’t any he can really ignore, is the problem, they’re all too strong, like faces of a racetrack crowd, each one urging No, me – look at me, be touched, reach for your camera, your weapon, your cock. . . . He’s stripped all the insignia off Tchitcherine’s uniform, trying for less visibility, but very few people seem to care much about insignia. . . .

Much of the time he’s alone.  He’ll come on farmhouses, deserted in the night, and will sleep in the hay, or if there’s a mattress (not often) in a bed.  Wake to sun glittering off some small lake surrounded by green salted with blossoms of thyme or mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up to pines in the mist.  Sapling tomato-frames and purple foxgloves in the yards, huge birds’ nests built up under the eaves of the thatched roofs, bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.

At a farmhouse in a river valley far south of Rostock, he comes in to shelter out of the midday rain, falls asleep in a rocking-chair on the porch, and dreams about Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, his friend from long ago.  He has come back, after all and against the odds.  It’s somewhere out in the country, English country, quilted in darkened green and amazingly bright straw-yellow, of very old standing rocks on high places, of early indenture to death and taxes, of country girls who walk out at night to stand naked on the tor and sing.  Members of Tantivy’s family and many friends have come, all in a mood of quiet celebrating, because of Tantivy’s return.  Everybody understands it’s only a visit: that he will be “here” only in a conditional way.  At some point it will fall apart, from thinking about it too much.  There is a space of lawn cleared for dancing, with a village band and many of the women dressed in white.  After a spell of confusion about the day’s schedule of events, the meeting takes place – it seems to be underground, not exactly a grave or a crypt, nothing sinister, crowded with relatives and friends around Tantivy who looks so real, so untouched by time, very clear and full of color . . . “Why, Slothrop.”

“Oh – where’ve you been, gate?”

“‘Here.’”

“‘“Here”’?”

“Yes, like that, you’ve got it – once or twice removed like that, but I walked in the same streets as you, read the same news, was narrowed to the same spectrum of colors. . . .”

“Then didn’t you –”

“I didn’t do anything.  There was a change.”

The colors in here – stone facing, flowers worn by guests, the strange chalices on the tables – carry an under breath of blood spilled and turned black, of gentle carbonizing in the blank parts of the cities at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon . . . it makes crisper the outlines of Tantivy’s suit, rather a gigolo suit of unspeakably foreign cut, certainly nothing he ever would have thought of wearing. . . .

“I guess we don’t have much time . . . I know this is shitty, and really selfish but I’m so alone now, and . . . I heard that just after it happens, sometimes, you’ll sort of hang around for a while, sort of look after a friend who’s ‘here.’ . . .”

“Sometimes.”  He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are the stretch of an impotent cry past Slothrop’s reach.

“Are you looking after me?”

“No, Slothrop.  Not you. . . .”

Slothrop sits in the old weathered rocker looking out at a rolling line of hills and the sun just come down out of the last of the rainclouds, turning the wet fields and the haycocks to gold.  Who passed by and saw him sleeping, his face white and troubled nodded on the breast of his muddy uniform?

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably.  The oak work creaks in the night, honest and wooden.  Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them.  Up on the rooftops the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upside down and looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love.  Rabbits come scurrying at night to eat whatever’s good in the yards.  Trees, now – Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally.  When he comes in among trees, finally.  When he comes in among the trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down.  Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper.  “That’s really insane.”  He shakes his head.  “There’s insanity in my family.”  He looks up.  The trees are still.  They know he’s there.  They probably also know what he’s thinking.  “I’m sorry,” he tells them.  “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach.  What can I do?”  A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you.  That what you can do.”

Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period:

Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about.

Let Tantivy really be alive.

Let this fucking zit on my back go away.

Let me go to Hollywood when this is over so that Rita Hayworth can see me and fall in love with me.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.

Let Bianca be all right, a-and –

Let me be able to take a shit soon.

Let that only be a meteor falling.

Let these boots hold out at to Lubeck.

Let that Ludwig find his lemming and be happy and leave me in peace. 

Well, Ludwig.  Slothrop finds him one morning by the shore of some blue anonymous lake, a surprisingly fat kid of eight or nine, gazing into the water, crying, shuddering all over in rippling fat-waves.  His lemming’s name is Ursula, and she has run away from home.  Ludwig’s been chasing her all the way north from Pritzwalk.  He’s pretty sure she’s heading for the Baltic, but he’s afraid she’ll mistake one of these inland lakes for the sea, and jump into that instead –

“One lemming, kid?”

“I’ve had her for two years,” he sobs, “she’s been fine, she’s never tried to – I don’t know.  Something just came over her.”

“Quit fooling.  Lemmings never do anything alone.  They need a crowd.  It gets contagious.  You see, Ludwig, they overbreed, it goes in cycles, when there are too many of them they panic and run off looking for food.  I learned that in college, so I know what I’m talking about.  Harvard.  Maybe that Ursula’s just out after a boy friend or something.”

“She would have let me know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Russians aren’t sorry about anything.”

“I’m not a Russian.”

“Is that why you took off all your insignia?”

They look at each other.  “Uh, well, you need a hand finding that lemming?”

This Ludwig, now, may not be completely Right in the Head.  He is apt to drag Slothrop up out of sleep in the middle of the night, waking half the DP encampment, spooking the dogs and the babies, absolutely sure that Ursula is out there, just beyond the circle of fire, looking in at him, seeing him but not the way she used to.  HE leads Slothrop into detachments of Soviet tankers, into heaps of ruins high-crested as the sea, that collapse around and, given a chance, on top of you the minute you step in, also into sucking marshes where the reeds pull away in your fingers when you try to grab them, and the smell is of protein disaster.  This is either maniac faith, or something a little darker: it does dawn on Slothrop at last that if there’s any impulse to suicide around here it ain’t Ursula’s, it’s that Ludwigs’s – why, the lemming may not even exist!

Still . . . hasn’t Slothrop, once or twice, seen something? scooting along ahead down gray narrow streets lined with token saplings in one or another of the Prussian garrison-towns, places whose industry and meaning was soldiering, their barracks and stone walls deserted now – or – or crouching by the edge of some little lake, watching clouds, white sails of gaff-riggers against the other shore so green, foggy, and far away, getting secret instruction from waters whose movements in lemming-time are oceanic, irresistible, and slow enough, solid-looking enough at least to walk out on safely. . . .

“That’s what Jesus meant,” whispers the ghost of Slothrop’s first American ancestor William, “venturing out on theSea of Galilee.  He saw it from the lemming point of view.  Without the millions who had plunged or drowned, there could have been no miracle.  The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table.”

“Wait a minute.  You people didn’t have jigsaw puzzles.”

“Aw, shit.”

William Slothrop was a peculiar bird.  He took off fromBoston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of theWinthropmachine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially ordained.  The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William.  He just started climbing.  He was one of the very first Europeans in.  After they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going – used to drive hogs right back down the escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows.  By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn’t really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself.  He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day – Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people – and most of all just being with those pigs.  They were good company.  Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day – pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn’t, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been like for William.  Of course he took it as a parable – knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in cross-country movement.  It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air.  William must’ve been waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into the extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn’t lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .

He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition.  It had to be published inEngland, and is among the first books to’ve been not only banned but also ceremonially burned inBoston.  Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation.  William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect.  You can bet the Elect inBoston were pissed off about that.  And it got worse.  William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite.  Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart.  How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational?  Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too.  Right?  How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.  He must’ve had connections.  They did finally 86 him out of Massachusetts Bay Colony – he thought aboutRhode Island for a while but decided he wasn’t that keen on antinomians either.  So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency, and that’s where he died, among memories of blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when the backs if his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising road to Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass and still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep. . . .

Could he have been the fork in the roadAmericanever took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from?  Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had time to consolidate and prosper?  Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?  It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back – maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. . . . Such are the vistas of thought that open up in Slothrop’s head as he tags along after Ludwig.  Is he drifting, or being led?  The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming.  If she exists.  The kid shows Slothrop photos he’s packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves . . . Ursula in a cage decked with a giant ribbon and swastika’d seal, first prize in the Hitler Youth pet show . . . Ursula and the family cat, watching each other carefully across a tiled stretch of floor . . . Ursula, front paws dangling and eyes drowsy, hanging out the pocket of Ludwig’s Nazi cub-scout uniform.  Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter.  Even knowing when she was a baby what they’d be in for someday, still Ludwig has always loved her.  He may be thinking that love can stop it from happening.

Slothrop will never find out.  He loses the fat young lunatic in a village near the sea.  Girls in full skirts and flowered kerchiefs are out in the woods gathering mushrooms, and red squirrels flash through the beeches.  Streets curve on into town, foreshortening too fast – it’s wide-angle, small town space here.  Lamps are clustered up on the poles.  Street cobbles are heavy and sand-colored.  Drayhorses stand in the sun flourishing their tails.

Down an alleyway near the Machaeliskirche, a little girl comes tottering under an enormous pile of contraband fur coats, only her brown legs visible.  Ludwig lets out a scream, pointing at the coat on top.  Something small and gray is worked into the collar.  Artificial yellow eyes gleam unwholesomely.  Ludwig runs hollering Ursula, Ursula, grabbing for the coat.  The little girl lets out a flurry of curses.

“You killed my lemming!”

“Let go, idiot.”  A tug-of-war among the blurry patches of sun and shadow in the alley.  “It isn’t a lemming, it’s a gray fox.”

Ludwig stops yelling long enough to look.  “She’s right,” Slothrop points out.

“I’m sorry,” Ludwig snivels.  “I’m a little upset.”

“Well, could you help me carry these as far as the church?”

“Sure.”

“Can I have found the solution to it all? Can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat or his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. “What have I discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it that makes me glad? What have I discovered?

“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.

“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? Into what? – Eternal evolution and struggle. . . . As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride,” he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.

“And not merely pride of intellect, but dullness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginnings of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question – it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor, reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”

[. . .]

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it round and not bounded, an in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”

Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.

“Don’t be like that,” Gregorovius said humbly.  “All I wanted was to understand your life a little better, what you are, how you happen to have so many facets.”

“My life,” said La Maga.  “Even if I were drunk I wouldn’t tell you about it.  And you won’t understand me any better after hearing about my childhood.  Besides, I didn’t have any childhood.”

“I didn’t either.  In Herzegovina.”

“Mine in Montevideo.  I’ll tell you one thing.  Sometimes I dream about grammar school, it’s so horrible I wake up screaming.  And age fifteen, I don’t know if you were ever fifteen years old.”

“I think so,” Gregorovius said uncertainly.

“I was; in a house with a courtyard and flowerpots where my father used to drink mate and read dirty magazines.  Does your father ever come back to you?  His ghost I mean?”

“No, actually my mother is more apt to,” Gregorovius said.  “Especially the Glasgow one.  My Glasgow mother comes back sometimes, but she’s not a ghost, just a memory that’s a little too wet, that’s all.  She goes away with an Alka-Seltzer, it’s easy.  But you . . . ?”

“How should I know,” La Maga said impatiently.  “It’s that music, those green candles, Horacio over there in the corner, like an Indian.  Why must I tell how he comes back?  But a few nights ago I was at home waiting for Horacio, I was sitting near the bed and outside it was raining a little, the way it does on that record.  Yes, it was something like that, I was looking at the bed and waiting for Horacio, I don’t remember how the bed was made, and suddenly I saw my father lying with his back towards me and covering his face as he always did when he was drunk and beginning to fall asleep.  I saw his legs and could make out his hand on his chest.  I felt my hair stand on end, I wanted to scream, everything you feel at times like that, you must have been afraid sometime . . . I wanted to run away, the door was so far off, at the other end of the hallway and more hallways, the door was farther and farther away and I could see the pink bedspread going up and down, I could hear my father snoring, in a moment I would see a hand, then eyes, then his hooked nose, no, I shouldn’t be telling you all this, finally I screamed so loud that the woman upstairs came down and made me some tea, and later on Horacio said I was hysterical.”

Gregorovius stroked her hair and La Maga lowered her head.  “Here it comes,” Oliveira [Horacio] was thinking, and he stopped following Dizzy Gillespie’s tricks as he swung on the high trapeze without benefit of net, “here it comes, it was bound to.  He’s crazy about this girl and that’s his way of showing it, with his ten fingers.  The same game over and over.  We keep falling into worn-out molds, learning every trite role there is like idiots.  But just as if I were stroking her hair while she told me sagas of the Rio de la Plata, we feel sorry for her and we have to take her home, all of us a little tight, and put her to bed, petting her gently as we take off her clothes, slowly, button by button, every zipper, and she does want to, wants to, doesn’t want to, straightens up, covers her face, cries, hugs us as if suggesting something sublime, wiggles out of her slip, kicks off a shoe with a gesture that connotes protest and gets us as excited as we ever can get, how base, how base.  I’m going to have to bust you in the face, Ossip Gregorovius my poor friend.  No desire, no pity, exactly what Dizzy is blowing, without pity, without desire, just as absolutely without pity as what Dizzy is blowing.”

“What a damned drag,” Oliveira said.  “Take that crap off the machine.  I’m not coming to the Club any more if I have to listen to that clown.”

“That gentleman doesn’t like bop,” Ronald said sarcastically.  “Wait a minute, I’ll put on something by Paul Whiteman for you.”

“Let’s compromise,” Etienne said.  “Common consent, sweet Ronald: let’s hear Bessie Smith, the dove in a cage of bronze.” 

Ronald and Babs began to laugh for some obscure reason and Ronald looked through the pile of old records.  The needle made a terrible scratch, something began to move down deeper as if there were a layers and layers of cotton between voice and ears, Bessie singing with a bandaged face, stuck in a hamper of soiled clothes, and her voice got more and more muffled, it came out stuck to rags and proclaimed with neither anger nor plea, “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll,” it fell back to wait, a street-corner voice, one from a houseful of grannies, “to be somebody’s baby doll,” hotter and more yearning, panting now “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll . . .”

Oliveira burned his mouth with a long drink of vodka, put his arm around Bab’s shoulders, and rested against her comfortable body.  “The intercessors,” he thought, sinking softly into the tobacco smoke.  Bessie’s voice thinned out towards the end of the side, and now Ronald was flipping the Bakelite disk (if it was Bakelite) and from this piece of worn-out material the Empty Bed Blues would be born again, a night in the twenties in some corner of the United States.  Ronald had closed his eyes, his hands on his knees, faintly keeping time.  Wong and Etienne also had their eyes shut, the room was almost dark and the needle scratched on the old record; it was hard for Oliveira to believe that all of this was taking place.  Why there, why the Club, those stupid rites, why did those blues come out like that when Bessie sang them?  “The intercessors,” he thought once more, snuggling up to Babs who was completely drunk and was crying quietly as she listened to Bessie, trembling in time to the rhythm or counterpoint, weeping inside so as not to get far away from the blues about an empty bed, tomorrow morning, shoes in puddles, unpaid rent, fear of old age, the ashen image of dawn in the mirror at the foot of the bed, the blues, life’s infinite cafard.  “The intercessors, one reality showing us another, like painted saints pointing to Heaven.  This cannot exist, we cannot really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is Horacio.  That ghost there, that voice of a Negro woman killed in an automobile accident twenty years ago: links in a nonexistent chain, how do we support ourselves here, how can we be meeting tonight if it is not a mere play of illusions, of rules that are accepted and agreed upon, a deck of cards in the hands of an inconceivable dealer . . .”

“Don’t cry,” Oliveira whispered to Babs.  “Don’t cry, Babs, none of this is true.”

“Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” Babs said, blowing her nose.  “It is true.”

“It could be true,” said Oliveira, kissing her on the cheek, “but it isn’t.”

“Like those shadows,” Babs said, snuffling and swallowing the mucus and moving her hand from side to side.  “And it makes you sad, Horacio, because everything is so beautiful.”

Brother, my beloved brother!

                It is decided, I have been sentenced to four years at hard labor in a fortress (I believe in the Orenburg Fortress), to be followed by service in the ranks. Today, this 22nd of December, they carted us off to Semyonovsky Square. There, they read us all our death sentence, allowed us to kiss the cross, broke a sword over each of our heads, and attired us for execution (white shirts). Then three of us were placed at the post for the execution to be carried out.

                They were calling three names at a time. I was in the second group and so I had no more than one minute left to live. I thought of you, brother, of all your family; at that last moment you, you alone were in my mind, and it was only then that I realized how much I love you, my dear brother! I also had time to embrace Pleshcheyev and Durov, who were nearby, and to say goodbye to them.

                Then they sounded the retreat. Those who were tied to the post were led back, and they announced that His Imperial Majesty was granting us life. After that they read us our actual sentences. Palm alone was amnestied and returned to the army, retaining his former rank.

                They have just informed me, my dear brother, that we are to set out on the march either today or tomorrow. I requested permission to see you, but I was told this was out of the question. All they would do is to allow me to write you this letter, which I should like you to answer right away. I am worried that you may have heard somehow about our being sentenced (to death). Out of the windows of the carriage in which I was being to Semyonovsky Square, I saw throngs of people; possibly the news had already reached you, too, and you were suffering for me. Now, you will feel easier about me. Brother, I have not lost courage and I do not feel dispirited. Life is life everywhere, life is within ourselves and not in the externals. There will be people around me, and to be a man among men, to remain so forever and not to lose hope and give up, however hard things may be – that is what life is, that is its purpose. I have come realize this. This idea has now become part of my flesh and blood. Yes, this is the truth! The head that created, that lived by the superior life of art, that recognized and became used to the highest spiritual values, that head has already been lopped off my shoulders. What is left is the memories and the images that I had already created but had not given form to. They will lacerate and torment me now, it is true! But I have, inside me, the same heart, the same flesh and blood that can still love and suffer and pity and remember – and this, after all, is life. On voit le soleil! Well, good-bye, brother, don’t grieve for me!

                Now some practical considerations. The books (I have the Bible) and some manuscripts – rough sketches of a play and a novel (and a completed story, “A Child’s Fairy Tale”) – have been taken away from me and I suppose will be turned over to you. I am also leaving behind my overcoat and my old suit, and you can send someone to pick them up. And now, brother, I am faced with what may be a long journey to my place of deportation. I need money. As soon as you get this letter, my dear brother, get some money if you can and send it to me right away. Money is more important to me than the air I breathe just now (for a special reason). Also, write me a few lines. Then, if the Moscow money arrives, work on my case and don’t abandon me. Well, that’s that! There are debts, but what can I do about them? –

                Kiss your wife and the children. Remember me to them now and then, see to it that they do not forget me. Who knows, perhaps we’ll meet again sometime?! Look after yourself and your family, brother, lead a quiet and provident life. Keep your children’s future in mind – Lead a purposeful, useful life.

                Never before have such rich and healthy reserves of spiritual life been seething in me as now. But will my body stand the ordeal? – that I do not know. I am setting out in poor health, I am suffering from scrofula. But who knows! I have been through so much in my life that there are few things left now that can frighten me. Come what may! Let me have news of you at the earliest opportunity. Give the Maikovs me final farewell regards. Tell them that I am grateful to them for all their unwavering concern for me. Say a few, particularly warm words for me – whatever your own heart dictates to you – to Yevgeniya Petrovna. I wish her much happiness, and shall always remember her with grateful respect. Shake the hands of Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Maikov for me, and also those of all the rest. Find Yanovsky. Thank him and shake his hand for me. And thank all those who have not forgotten me. And those who have – remember me to them. Give my love to our brother Koyla. Write our brother Andrei and inform him about me. Write to our aunt and uncle. Do it on my behalf and give them my regards. Write to our sisters and tell them I wish them happiness!

                And perhaps we’ll meet again some day, brother. Take care of yourself and, for the sake of God, live to see me again. One day, we may yet hug each other and remember our young years, our bygone golden times, the dreams of our youth that at this instant I am tearing bleeding from my heart and burying.

                Can it be that I shall never take pen in hand? I hope that, in 4 years’ time, it will be possible. I shall send you everything I write, if I write at all. My God! How many images to which I have given life and which are still alive will perish, will be snuffed out inside my head or will spread like poison in my blood! Yes, if I cannot write, I shall perish. Better fifteen years of confinement with a pen in my hand!

                Write me more often, write me in greater detail, longer and fuller letters. Describe lengthily in every letter all the little things of family life, the trivia – and forget that. It will give me hope and life. If only you knew how much your letters sustained me in my casemate here. These (last) two and a half months, when we were not allowed to receive letters, were very painful to me. I was in poor health. The fact that at times you failed to send me money made me worry for you, because it meant that you yourself were in dire need! Once again kiss the children, I cannot get their lovely little faces out of my head. May they, at least, be happy! You, too, brother, I want you to be happy, too!

                But, for heaven’s sake, don’t grieve over me! I want you to know that I am not discouraged, that hope has not abandoned me. In four years things will be a bit easier for me. I shall be an army private – that is already quite different from being a convict, and bear in mind that I will hug you one day. Why, didn’t I face death for three-quarters of an hour today, live with this thought in my head, was I not a hairsbreadth away from death, and now I am living again!

                If anyone remembers me unkindly and if I have quarreled with anybody or left him with an unpleasant impression of me, ask him to forget about it, if you happen to come across him. There is no bile or malice in my soul, and I should like so much, at this instant, to love and to press to my heart any of these former acquaintances. It is a joy; I experienced it today as I was taking leave of those who were dear to me before I was to die. At that moment, I was thinking that when you heard the news about my execution, the news would kill you. But now, I assure you that I am still alive and that I shall live in the future in the hope that one day I shall take you in my arms. That is all that I have in my mind right now.

                I wonder what you’re doing now? What have you been thinking about today? Did you know what happened to us? How cold it was today!

                Ah, I hope my letter reaches you quickly. Otherwise, I shall have some four months without news from you. I saw the packets in which you sent me the money during the past two months; the address was written in your own hand and I was glad to see you were well.

                When I turn back to look at the past, I think how much time has been wasted, how much of it has been lost in misdirected efforts, mistakes, and idleness, in living the wrong way; and, however I treasured life, how much I sinned against my heart and spirit – my heart bleeds now as I think about it. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute could be an eternity of bliss. Si jeunesse savait! Now, at this turning point in my life, I am being reborn in another form. Brother! I swear to you that I will not lose hope and will keep my spirit and heart pure. I shall be reborn to something better. This is all my hope, all my consolation!

                Life in the casemate has already largely killed in me some demands of the flesh that were not quite pure; I hadn’t guarded myself against them sufficiently before. Now, privations are nothing to me, and so do not be afraid that material hardship of some kind will kill me. Ah, if only I had my health!

                Farewell, brother, farewell! When shall I be able to write you again! You will get as detailed a report of my journey as feasible from me. If only I can manage to preserve my health, everything will be fine!

At noon we were stuck in a muddy road about, as nearly as we could figure, ten kilometers from Udine.  The rain had stopped during the forenoon and three times we had heard planes coming, seen them pass overhead, watched them go far to the left and heard them bombing on the main highroad.  We had worked through a network of secondary roads and had taken many roads that were blind, but had always, by backing up and finding another road, gotten closer to Udine.  Now, Aymo’s car, in backing so that we might get out of a blind road, had gotten into the soft earth at the side and the wheels, spinning, had dug deeper and deeper until the car rested on its differential.  The thing to do now was to dig out in front of the wheels, put in brush so that the chains could grip, and then push until the car was on the road.  We were all down on the road around the car.  The two sergeants looked at the car and examined the wheels.  Then they started off down the road without a word.  I went after them.

“Come on,” I said.  “Cut some brush.”

“We have to go,” one said.

“Get busy,” I said, “and cut some brush.”

“We have to go,” one said.  The other said nothing.  They were in a hurry to start.  They would not look back at me.

“I order you to come back to the car and cut brush,” I said.  The one sergeant turned.  “We have to go on.  In a little while you will be cut off.  You can’t order us.  You’re not our officer.”

“I order you to cut brush,” I said.  They turned and started down the road.

“Halt,” I said.  They kept on down the muddy road, the hedge on either side.  “I order you to halt,” I called.  They went a little faster.  I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired.  I missed and they both started to run.  I shot three times and dropped one.  The other went through the hedge and was out of sight.  I fired at him through the hedge as he ran across the field.  The pistol clicked empty and I put in another clip.  I saw it was too far to shoot at the second sergeant.  He was far across the field, running, his head held low.  I commenced to reload the empty clip.  Bonello came up.

“Let me go finish him,” he said.  I handed him the pistol and he walked down to where the sergeant of engineers lay face down across the road.  Bonello leaned over, put the pistol against the man’s head and pulled the trigger.  The pistol did not fire.

“You have to cock it,” I said.  He cocked it and fired twice.  He took hold of the sergeant’s legs and pulled him to the side of the road so he lay beside the hedge.  He came back and handed me the pistol.

“The son of a bitch,” he said.  He looked toward the sergeant.  “You see me shoot him, Tenente?”

“We’ve got to get the brush the quickly,” I said.  “Did I hit the other one at all?”

“I don’t think so,” Aymo said.  “He was too far away to hit with a pistol.”

“The dirty scum,” Piani said.  We were all cutting twigs and branches.  Everything had been taken out of the car.  Bonello was digging out in front of the wheels.  When we were ready Aymo started the car and put it in gear.  The wheels spun round throwing brush and mud.  Bonello and I pushed until we could feel our joints crack.  The car would not move.

“Rock her back and forth, Barto,” I said.

He drove the engine in reverse, then forward.  The wheels only dug in deeper.  Then the car was resting on the differential again, and the wheels spun freely in the holes they had dug.  I straightened up.

“We’ll try her with a rope,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s any use, Tenente.  You can’t get a straight pull.”

“We’ll have to try it,” I said.  “she won’t come out any other way.”

Piani’s and Bonello’s cars could only move straight ahead down the narrow road.  We roped both cars together and pulled.  The wheels only pulled sideways against the ruts.

“It’s no good,” I shouted.  “Stop it.”