Fiasco (3 page)
The situation pertaining at the start of our story, to which we have consistently adhered all along—not at all out of obstinacy, merely due to the ponderousness of the old boy’s decision-making process—has now been modified as follows:
The old boy was standing in front of a wide-open filing cabinet, in whose half-emptied upper drawer only a grey box file, upon which, as a paperweight, so to say, a likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, lump of stone is visible, and was thinking:
“I’m afraid,” he thought, “I’m finally going to have to get my papers out.”
Which, by the way, is what he proceeded to do.
And then, out of orderliness (for what other reason might we discern) (unless we take the shortage of space into consideration) (or perhaps as a way of setting a seal on the irrevocability of the decision), he tidied the typewriter, several files—among them one labelled “
Ideas, sketches, fragments
”—as well as the two cardboard boxes back into the upper drawer of the filing cabinet.
It may be found to be more than sheer prolixity if we were now to report, as briefly as we can, on a further modification to the situation pertaining at the start of our story, already modified as it is:
The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and reading.
“
August 1973
What has happened, has happened; I can do nothing about it now. I can do as little to alter my past as the future implacably ensuing from it, with which I am as yet unacquainted …”
“Good God!” the old boy uttered aloud.
“… Yet I move just as aimlessly within the narrow confines of my present as in the past or the time which is to come.
How I got to this position, I don’t know. I simply frittered away my childhood. There are no doubt deep psychological explanations for why I should have been such a poor student in the lower classes at grammar school. (“You don’t even have the excuse of being dumb, because you have a brain, if only you would use it,” as my father often stressed.)
Later, when I was fourteen and a half, through a conjunction of infinitely inane circumstances, I found myself looking down the barrel of a loaded machine gun for half an hour. It is practically impossible to describe those circumstances in normal language. Suffice it to say that I was standing in a crowd which was sweating fear, and who knows what scraps of thoughts, in the narrow courtyard of a police barracks, the one thing which all the individuals had in common being that we were all Jews. It was a crystal-clear, flower-scented summer evening, a full moon beaming up above us. The air was filled with a steady, low throbbing: obviously Royal Air Force formations flying from their Italian bases and headed for unknown targets, and the danger which threatened us was that if they should chance to drop a bomb on the barracks or its environs, the gendarmes would mow us down, as they phrased it. The ludicrous connections and imbecilic reasons on which that rested were, I felt then and also since then, absolutely negligible. The machine gun was mounted on a stand rather like the tripod of a cine camera. Standing behind it, on some sort of platform, was a gendarme with drooping Turanian moustache and impassively narrowed eyes. Fitted onto the end of the barrel was a ridiculous conical component, rather like the one on my grandmother’s coffee grinder. We waited. The drone’s rumbling grew louder and then again faded to a low buzz, only for each quiet interval to give way to a renewed intensification of the rumbling. Would it drop or wouldn’t it, that was the question. Gradually the gendarmes let the deranged good humour of gamblers take control of them. Is there any way I can describe the unforeseen good spirits that, after I had got over my initial surprise, coursed through me as well? All I had to do to be able to enjoy the game, in a certain fashion, was
to recognize the triviality of the stake. I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this …”
“For fuck’s sake” the old boy suddenly broke off his reading at this point as he lifted himself partway from his seat to reach over to the filing cabinet.
The reason for this curious development lay in an event that, although it had not been anticipated, could not be categorized as unexpected (because it occurred regularly, practically every single day), but even the frequent repetition of the event had not robbed it, as we have seen, of its original, elemental impact on the old boy (indeed, quite the opposite, one might say).
Obviously, it would be wrong for us to hold back on providing a satisfactory explanation.
Still, this obligation undeniably puts us somewhat at a loss.
It hardly serves as sufficient explanation for the words which erupted from the old boy’s mouth, for the mild cramps which constricted his stomach, or for the ever-so-slight nausea that shot up with a hurtling and a dizzying jolt, like some kind of elevator, through his chest and throat to slam against the back of his neck, for us merely to say—sticking to the bare facts—that a radio had been switched on above his head.
It is not without purpose (indeed, we are admittedly thinking of easing our task as narrator) that we now leave the old boy’s papers where they are and, in their stead, open a not overly bulky book with a green half-cloth binding that the old boy had been leafing through frequently, and to great advantage, in recent days, evidencing especially appreciative relish for the following lines (on page 259 of the volume) (at which page, incidentally, the green half-bound volume fell open, almost as if by pre-arrangement, once the old boy had lifted it down from the bookshelf occupying the northeast corner of the
room) (although, as a further safeguard to unerring location, the yellow bookmarking ribbon of artificial silk had also been inserted at the same page) (on which page the following lines) (for which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish) (may now be read by us too, bending over his shoulder, so to speak):
There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it has penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose
.
This creature is one’s neighbour
.”
True enough.
Oglütz is what the old boy called it.
The Unsilent Being.
Not female, not male, not beast, least of all human.
Oglütz is what the old boy called it.
Whether due to unlimited listening to radio and television or as a consequence of some hormonal imbalance (the explanation for which imbalance lay, perhaps, in unlimited listening to radio and television) (though a copious intake of foodstuffs should not be overlooked), the Being proliferated not only in the old boy’s brain but across the entire 28 square metres above his head.
The old boy lived below a female Cyclops which fed on noise. (Although this particular Cyclops had two eyes, two tiny rhino eyes.)
All day long the old boy was helplessly tossed about on the heavy swell of its sounds. He heard the appalling slam of the door each time it got back to its lair; a burst of quickfire thuds and rumbles, perhaps (the old boy conjectured) through dumping the haul
of spoils that it had brought back home; a broken, jarring rhythm of heavy bumps—training bears, as the old boy was in the habit of commenting; and soon enough the bellowing wild beast of some broadcast service or other, either the radio or the television.
Oglütz is what the old boy called it.
Nothing could be done about it.
One had to resign oneself to it.
Some time long, long ago, at the beginning of time, the old boy had willy-nilly surrendered himself into admitting that the noises disturbed him (indeed, had requested that they be moderated). Since which time it had kept an unremitting watch above his head.
He had got to know its habits.
It waited for him to strike the first key on the typewriter keyboard.
It sensed infallibly when he was in the habit of standing in front of the filing cabinet and having a think.
Nothing could be done about it.
One had to resign oneself to it.
The course of long years had built up a set of automatic defence reflexes in the old boy (rather like, for instance, opening his umbrella when it rained).
The above-cited lines from the not overly bulky, green half-bound volume (for which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish) may likewise be classified as one of those defence reflexes.
This wholly spiritual consolation and source of strength would have been to little avail, however, without his considerable collection of earplugs of fusible-wax, which took up almost the entire left rear—southwest—corner of the lower drawer of his filing cabinet (as it was not always possible to procure them, since they were of foreign manufacture) (OHROPAX Noise Shields, VEB Pharmazeutika, Königsee) (on account of which, during periods when they were procurable, the old boy laid in such a stock of them, that his earplugs) (like Josef K.’s shame) (would in all likelihood outlive him),
from which stock a pair of wax balls, in a cylindrical glass phial, lay constantly ready for use at the front of the next drawer up in the filing cabinet, so that in the event of need (and the need almost always arose, with clockwork regularity), after a certain amount of preparatory softening work with the palm of the hand, they could be instantly inserted into the old boy’s ears.
During the preparatory softening work, the old boy was in the habit of reciting, in an undertone, yet another longer or shorter text—more in a mechanical sort of manner, sacrificing, as it were, the vital emotion which had once provoked the words (just as, with frequent repetition, the essence dwindles even from the ritual of prayer, making way for dutiful distraction)—the length, or shortness, of which longer or shorter text varied with the season: in winter he recited a longer text than in the summer, which finds a simple explanation in the physical fact that wax softens more rapidly in the warmth than in the cold.
And so it was that on this splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning, all that the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, was “You fucking miserable, scummy, old Nazi bag …”, while carefully shaping the by now softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond the reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit—the entire world in effect (by virtue of which the modified situation is once again modified a bit, insofar as the old boy now carried on with his reading with two wax plugs in his ears):
“… the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this, by the way not particularly original, perception disturbed me a little; it may be that it left a deeper impression on me than was justified, for how many countless others went through exactly the same mass justice, whether on
the same spot at the same time or at other times and other places in the big, wide world. Perhaps I was an oversensitive child, and even later on was unable to rid myself of my subtlety: possibly some sort of short-circuit occurred, a disturbance in my normal metabolic relationship with my experiences, even though I could only lay claim to essentially the same normally grubby experiences as any other normal being. Many years later—and many years before now—I knew that I would have to write a novel. At the time I happened to be hanging around, completely indifferently, in some indifferent office corridor when I heard an indifferent sound—of steps. The whole thing was over in a trice. In recollecting that moment, which I am otherwise incapable of recollecting, I have to suppose that if I had been able to preserve within myself its lucidity, some kind of distillate, as it were, of its content, then I would probably be able to grasp the thing that was truly always of greatest interest: the key to my existence. But moments pass and do not recur. I therefore supposed that I ought at least to remain faithful to its intimation; I started to write a novel. I wrote one and tore it up; I wrote it afresh and again tore it up. Years went by. I kept on writing, writing until I felt that I had finally hit upon a possible novel for me. I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to obtain a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semigloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit specially tailored for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause and would imagine that our beached life would finally work free from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branch
of the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for my claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew, and in the years that I have just put behind me this dominating passion grew to be an obstacle even to my being able to present my public, avid for entertainment, with fresh comedies and myself with renewed royalties …”
“Well now,” the old boy got up and began, with the pliable wax plugs in his ears muting the sound of his tread to the velvety glide of a panther, to pace up and down between the west-facing window and the closed entrance to the east (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway), “It starts off as if it were aiming to be some sort of confession,” he muttered. “Not bad as such, but it can still go off. The trouble is that it’s honest. Not the happiest sign. Nor the subject either.”
Well indeed, if he had to write a book (any old book, just so long as it was a book) (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad—that had no bearing on the essence of the matter), at least let it be a book on a happy subject.
