Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (23 page)

For a moment he resembled an old bird, a slender, withered raptor.

“Because there are too many elephants in our poetry,” Wu answered. His masticatory muscles tensed in anger at having to repeat such drivel.

“Go on! What else did he say? Go on!”

The censor leaned over in his chair, and suddenly his elaborate elderly deferentiality gave way to the aggressiveness of a secret imperial lord. His handsome face regained its shape.

Wu had always been far removed from the world of poetry. Although he had been forced to live his whole life at its legally sanctioned heart, it had never held great interest for him. It is fair to say he took note of it only once the censor had initiated the ingenious inch-by-inch shift from propaganda songs to the torment of self-reflection. And strange as it sounds, Wu belonged to that scant handful who noticed the difference. What's more, the change astounded him far more than it astounds us today, from the heights of our foreshortened omniscience of all those years to come.

“The thaut. He went on about the thaut.”

“And then?”

“As if I know! That the thaut used to have its own character.”

The tall functionary suddenly stood up. With surprising agility he strode over to the stove and grabbed the ash-rake from the wall. While Wu spoke, while he dredged fragments and snatches from his memory, in rapt attention the censor sketched word after word on the dirty tiles.

“Quiet!” he abruptly silenced the chef. “Not another word. Let me think.”

He tapped the rake and then squatted. Pained, Wu stared at the narrow back, at the censor in all his imperial majesty, robed in gold from head to toe, crouched in a position Wu associated only with servants, or with little girls, who could toy with things this way for days on end.

Suddenly the censor laughed. It was a laugh full of wonder and distress. Then he shook his head and put back the rake.

“Wu,” he said politely, “excuse me, I'll be leaving now. But I'd like to know: where does your nephew sleep?”

When Wu was a bit over forty (he was slightly the elder of the two old men) the censor's existence struck him like a lightning bolt to the head. It happened in late spring, one luminous evening. It is relevant that Wu already thought he was past his peak.

It is true that, from a certain perspective, the censor temporarily became his “number one,” despite the fact that Wu never felt toward him any love or affection in the true sense of the words, or even closeness or trust. But still, thanks to the censor (or rather: in the grip of his emotional force field) Wu experienced these feelings more deeply and passionately than ever before.

Long ago, when the censor's thunderous confessional whisper first resounded in the world's Word, Wu knew as little as
could be known about poetry. He had never had the slightest need for the medium of words, and treated poetry with the indifferent attitude typical of masters in other professions. He had a simplistic, if by and large correct view of poetry as a secondary accompaniment to music and, of course, as the history of the empire. Wu always vastly preferred wandering tellers of fables and outlaw stories, which no longer fell into that category.

When quite by accident he later heard one of the censor's more intimate poems (he remembers it to this day: it was a clear evening, the sun was pale, the censor was smoking, and the smoke from his mouth rose into the olive branches), he was shaken to the depths of his soul.

The poem that struck him so was not intellectually complex and today would be dismissed as banal. It unobtrusively expressed surprise at a common fact: namely, that there was a single encounter, never repeated, which the poet could not forget, while in his heart's memory people he saw every day were far less meaningful. It was essentially just the flip side of the German wordplay
einmal ist keinmal, aber zweimal ist dreimal
— “once is never, but twice is thrice.” Emotional life is exactly the opposite, as we know. There
einmal
is a relatively high card and singularity is the gate to eternity.

(Incidentally, a further note: a few years later, when Wu no longer knew him, the censor finally arrived at the celebration of the sovereign
never,
at the troubadors'
amor d'onques,
which sings the praises of unrequited love.
That which has not happened
always has a slightly unfair advantage over reality. It is hard to say whether the censor knew this from his own experience. It could have merely been logical speculation, in which his beloved leitmotif reached its most extreme point.)

But the poem Wu heard that day was not this far along. Formally it was modest. It revealed the fatal
einmal
in a traditional form full of flowers, meteorological phenomena, and melancholy evening sounds.

Wu was astounded. He was promiscuous by nature, as is
common among such sensual beings, and he was also impatient. He had never understood why (in the language of his scullions) he so quickly lost interest in every woman and why repetition deprived physical love of all savor. It was that fateful
einmal
that made the strongest impression; after it, everything else seemed shallow. He was astounded that someone else could feel the same way. He had never spoken of his
einmal
— a thin, middle-aged woman, long ago, when he had trekked across the desert in his youth — to anyone, even to himself. And suddenly someone had said out loud what had happened to Wu, and had said it precisely, rhythmically, openly.

Wu did not understand how anyone could name that mute gust of wind, and not only name it, but broadcast it. It was not chastity or introversion that bewildered him; he was simply and methodically amazed at the shattering of a concept — here, presumably, the concept of poetry. Someone had jumped the hedge of his heart, penetrated his gravitational field. The cook was overcome by shock.

But once that first astonishment had passed, it was replaced by a much more subtle amazement. Wu discovered that he could identify, more or less, with the majority of the censor's poems, which he only now began to notice. It seemed to him that the censor, by some sleight of hand, could look right into his blindly tumbling soul and then willfully toy with it out loud.

Inexperienced as he was, Wu took every word as an authentic expression of the censor's feelings and was startled by their great similarity. Yet it is worth noting the single, characteristically intractable mistake the impatient cook was making. It is, by the way, an exceedingly common mistake, and even today various psychologies have foundered on it.

Wu had had a rare experience: an alien inner space had been opened to him, one which he had till then been unaware of, but he was only tentatively getting his bearings in it. He accepted it quite simply — we could even say
flatly,
at the expense of its multilayeredness. Wu had erroneously let himself believe that every hidden feeling he found in this other ego had to be made of the
same substance. He did not know that hiddenness does not by any means entail depth, that secrets can be utterly superficial. Lacking experience in the affairs of the soul, Wu was fascinated to hear the censor speak of things that were not commonly discussed — which was, incidentally, the censor's primary contribution to literary history. The more the censor's work enthralled him, the more he came to believe that the two of them were a single being. The other man was by some magic speaking for him and, like the wind, stealing the words from his mouth.

Wu put himself into close contact with the censor. With persistence he became the censor's constant companion, in order to get to the heart of the matter. Wu saw the censor as some sort of freak of nature. He studied him like a spice box.

The censor (we will let him keep this title for clarity's sake, but back then he was not yet censor; he obtained that post only once his productive days were past) was a tall, polished, somewhat coolly attractive man. A ring of reserve surrounded him; inside it he had no real friends. He was not married and did not conduct “affairs.” The censor accepted Wu's aggressive affections with kindness and a monotonous politeness, and in time he even found a certain pleasure in his debates with the master chef.

This not too close friendship lasted about three years. After all that time Wu was not a step nearer his goal. His tenacity came to nothing. Who is this man? How does he know what I know and yet don't know? And why him?

The more Wu saw the censor, the more the man disturbed him. He simply could not reconcile that restrained — one could even say British — exterior with the fevered cry of his poetry. They spent hours together on the covered terraces, idly gossiping just so as not to lapse into silence. In his work Wu was accustomed to step-by-step analysis; at one point he secretly focused on one after another of the censor's characteristics — his face, tastes, way of speaking — and delved into them with a persistence he had never before applied to another person. But the censor's eyes were expressionless, his hands calm as they poured the wine, and his
tastes temperately indifferent.

By the third year he felt the censor was deliberately deceiving him. The further this current of introspection carried him, the more he came to believe that while he conducted his detailed study of the censor, the censor was doing the same to him. In each new poem he found a piece of himself and countless times erroneously ascribed to himself the poem's feelings and states. He experienced an entire range of emotions never before imagined, and he was quick to appropriate each of them, like a hypochondriac does with the symptoms of diseases. In the final analysis, poets everywhere can thank this egocentricity and its uncontrollable tendency toward error for the fact that we tolerate poetry's existence at all.

“How did you think up that poem?” he would turn on the censor during their early evening meetings. “Who were you thinking about? What kind of mood were you in when you wrote it?”

Wu posed the censor questions that are heard all the time on television. He rousted them forcefully from time's womb. The answers that most of today's artists prefabricate as an integral part of their work were at the time beyond anyone's concern. The creator as subject was beside the point. Wu's insistence came across as slightly vulgar.

“This?” the censor would answer with a smirk. “I don't even know. I can't remember.”

“When did you write it?” Wu would not be put off.

“Yesterday.”

“All at once?”

“No. Before supper and after.”

“And what did you have for supper?” Wu would persist, growing louder and louder, until the servants on the terraces stopped to look.

“Duck.”

“With what?”

“Something green. Broad beans, perhaps? No, probably string beans.”

“What did you think about during supper?”

“I don't know.”

“Why not?”

At some point Wu's desire to understand the censor turned into an obsession. He tracked him like a hunter. Day after day he prized intimate details out of him, longed to lay bare his heart, and still failed to get even the most everyday confidences so easily shared among his cooks.

“You have to know what you were thinking! It was yesterday evening! Any idiot knows what happened yesterday!” Wu would shout.

“Aha, now I know. I was thinking about the fact that the west wing is the oldest part of the entire palace. They should really get the roof repaired. The administrator isn't forward-looking enough to anticipate the autumn rains,” was his exhaustive, obliging, and empty answer.

As the sunlight over the terrace gradually faded, Wu would wander deeper into ever more inconclusive interrogation. Finally he would stalk off, full of anger, each time bewildered that a poem created not an hour after this tiresome chatter could be a crowning achievement of refined insight and an astounding inner likeness.

At that age Wu was already quite powerful and dangerously irascible. He ruled the fate of hundreds and took hard the feeling that the censor was making fun of him. One day, using a minor palace conflict as a pretext, Wu shouted at him that he'd had enough of his supercilious glances. The censor gave him a kindly smile. In the grip of an insane rage, Wu grabbed a bowl of boiling water and hurled it at the censor's feet. The puddle soaked their boots, which were made of the same thin material. It got him no further with the censor.