War & War (36 page)

an end really to be found in Schaffhausen.

This plaque marks the place where György Korin, the hero of the novel
War and War
by László Krasznahorkai, shot himself in the head. Search as he might, he could not find what he had called the Way Out.

Moon, valley, dew, death.

In the year of Our Lord—in March, to be precise, on the night of the third day of the month, between about four and quarter past four—that is to say a bare eight years before the two thousandth anniversary of what may be understood by Christian reckoning to be the new age, but far removed from the mood of rejoicing usually occasioned by such events, Dr. György Korin applied the brakes by the entrance to the NON STOP buffet at the bus station, managed to stop the car, scrambled out onto the sidewalk, then, having assured himself that after three continuous days of drunken misadventure he had arrived at a place where, with these four words ringing in his head, he would discover what he was looking for, he pushed the door open and swayed over to the one lonely-looking man at the bar, where instead of collapsing on the spot as he might have been expected to do in his condition, with a tremendous effort, very deliberately, he pronounced the words:

Dear Angel, I have been looking for you for such a long time.

The man thus addressed slowly turned to face him. It was hard to say whether he had understood any of this. His face looked tired, his eyes had no light in them and sweat was running in streams down his brow.

I have been looking for you for three days,
Korin explained,
because when it comes down to it you have to know that, once again, it’s over … That here … those damned bitches of a …
Then he fell silent a long while and the only thing that betrayed how much raw emotion he was suppressing—for his fixed expression betrayed nothing—was the way he repeated the phrase he must have practiced a thousand times:
once again, it’s over.

The man turned back to the bar, raised his cigarette slowly, deliberately, delicately to his mouth and, while the other watched him, drew deeply on it, as deeply as he could, drawing the smoke right down to the very bottom of his lungs and because it could go no deeper closed his lips and pouted slightly, keeping the smoke down for an extraordinarily long time and only began emitting it in narrow wisps once his face had turned quite red and the veins stood out on the nape of his neck. Korin watched all this without moving a muscle and it was impossible to be sure whether that was because he was waiting for some kind of response to his comments once the performance was over, or because he had suddenly turned his mind off for a while, but in any case he simply stared at the man, watching as a slowly swelling cloud of smoke enveloped him, then, without taking his eyes off him, without being able to take his eyes off him, with one blind gesture he succeeded in grabbing an empty glass and tapped it on the bar a few times as if calling a bartender. But there was no bartender to be seen, nor was there anyone else in the hangar-shaped buffet unless you counted the small booth to the left of the toilet where a pair of beggar-like figures were hunkering close, an old man of indeterminate age with a dirty unkempt beard and a good many greasy pimples on his face, and an old woman, who on closer examination turned out to be of similarly indeterminate age, thin and toothless, with cracked lips that gave her a look of idiotic cheerfulness. But you couldn’t really count these two because they were sitting somehow further off, maybe just a hairsbreadth too far away, nevertheless removed in some way from the world of the buffet, further removed than might have been suggested by the positions they physically occupied within it, the boots on their feet tied round with string in one case and wire in the other, their overcoats torn, their scarves serving the office of belts, with a liter bottle of wine in front of them, the floor around them covered in a mass of commercial plastic bags stuffed to overflowing. They said nothing, simply stared ahead of them and gently held each other’s hands.

All is ruined, all is brought low
—Korin continued.

But he might as well have said, he added in his own clumsy almost incoherent way in an attempt to explain himself, that when you thought about it, it should be crystal clear to any notary of heaven and earth, that they have ruined everything, brought everything low, because here, he said, and this was something the man he was talking to had, whatever else he did, to understand most precisely, it wasn’t a case of some mysterious divine decree driving an innocent human agency—the empty glass in his right hand was shaking at the words “divine decree”—but precisely the opposite, a disgraceful decision taken by humanity at large, a decision far exceeding normal human authority but drawing on a divine context and relying on divine assistance, which was to say that it was the crudest imaginable imposition when you got down to it, the infinitely vulgar production of an order determined by the so-called civilized world, an order that was complete and all-comprehending, and horribly successful. Horribly, in his opinion, he repeated, and, for the sake of emphasis lingered as long as he could on the word “horribly,” which so slowed his speech that he almost came to a stop near the end of it, a remarkable achievement since all the way through, right from the beginning, he had been speaking as slowly and with as little passion as it was possible to speak, every syllable reduced to its mere phonemes, as if each of them were the product of a struggle against other syllables or phonemes that might have been uttered in its place, as though some kind of deep and complex war were being fought out somewhere at the bottom of his throat, in which the right syllable or phoneme had to be discovered, isolated, and torn from the clutches of superfluous ones, from the thick soup of syllable-larvae energetically thrashing about there then carried up the throat, led gently through the dome of the mouth, forced up against the row of teeth and finally spat forth into freedom, into the terminally stale air of the buffet, as the only sound apart from the sick, continuous moaning of the refrigerator, a sound heard on the edge of the bar where the man was standing immobile; hor-rib-ly, in his opinion, Korin said, slowing, after which he did not so much hesitate as come to a complete stop, and this being said it was possible to conclude without the shadow of a doubt, from the changed, clouded, ever more unfocused look in his eyes that his mind having simply and hor-rib-ly packed up at this point, he could do nothing but stand there, though the powerful gravitational force exerted on the right-hand side of his body might at any moment have caused him to tip over as he leaned heavily on the bar on his right-hand side with those ever duller eyes of his fixed immovably on the man as if he could see what he was looking at though in reality he saw nothing and was simply staring at his face for a while, without the least trace of comprehension, leaning against the bar, swaying gently and hor-rib-ly.

They have ruined the world
—he said a whole minute or so later, the life returning to eyes that had regained their earlier muddy ditch color.

But it doesn’t matter what he says, he said, because they’ve ruined everything they’ve managed to get their hands on, and by waging an endless, treacherous war of attrition they have managed to get their hands on everything, ruined everything—and, one should remember, they have seized everything—seized it, ruined it and carried on in this way until they had achieved complete victory, so that it was one long triumphal march of seizing and ruining, right down to the final triumph of the hordes, or more precisely, it was a long story running over hundreds of years, hundreds and hundreds of years, of seizing and, in seizing, ruining, seizing and thereby ruining, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes brazenly; now subtly, now crudely, whatever way they could, that’s the way they carried on, the only way they could carry on over centuries, like rats, like rats in hiding waiting to pounce; and in order to achieve this utter and complete victory they naturally needed their opponents, by which we mean anyone noble, great and transcendent, to reject, for reasons of their own, any kind of conflict, to reject in principle the idea of moving beyond bare being and engaging in some passing struggle for the notion of a slightly better balanced state of human affairs; for what was needed was for there to be no struggle at all, simply the disappearance of one of the two parties, in historical terms the lasting disappearance of the noble, the great and the transcendent, their disappearance not only from the struggle but also from the realm of mere existence, and in the worst case, for all we know, said Korin, their utter and complete annihilation, all this for some peculiar reason quite unknown to anyone but themselves, no one knowing why this should all have happened the way it did, or what had happened to allow those who had been waiting to pounce and gain the victory to do so, and thereby control everything today, and there is not a nook or cranny in which you could hide anything from them, everything being theirs, said Korin at his accustomed speed, theirs is everything that may be possessed, and the decisive proportion of even those things that can’t, because heaven is theirs, and every dream, every moment of silence in nature, and, to use the popular saying, immortality too is theirs—only the most common and vulgar of immortalities of course—in other words, as the embittered losers justly but mistakenly say, everything is lost and lost forever. And—his unstoppable monologue flowed on—the power in their hands is truly of no small proportions, for their position and their depraved all-pervasive strength has enabled them not merely to reduce all scale and proportion to match their own, such exercise of power being maintainable for only a short time, but their remarkable perspicuity had ensured that their own sense of scale and proportion should determine the very nature of scale and proportion, that is to say they made sure that their being should permeate any sense of scale and proportion that was inimical to them, keeping a close eye on every tiny detail so that from whatever angle you looked at them, the details would all support, strengthen, ensure and so maintain this momentous historical turn of events, this treacherous insurrection of false scales, false content, false proportions and false extents. It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would be unconditional only if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty “no” to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say “yes” from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection, so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people’s lives … how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated … how to explain this more effectively, he fell to meditating, perhaps if he said it again; he ended … that, you know … that tragic lack of nobility. By embracing the good and the transcendent, he continued, his eyes not shifting a millimeter from the man, they turned them into objects that today are of all things the most repulsive, so that even pronouncing the words “good” and “transcendent” is enough to fill a man with shame; they have become so horrible, so hateful, that you only needed to say them once—the good, the transcendent—and there was nothing left to say, people’s stomachs cramp up and they’re ready to vomit, not because the words mean anything to them, but because it’s enough simply to pronounce them, these two words, and how many more such words are there, and it’s done! every time they are pronounced the victorious rulers of the world sit that much more comfortably on their thrones, are just that more firmly established there than before, and the road to the worldly throne is lined with precisely such things, for they make a nice little tapping sound, clickety-click, good and good, and there go Red Riding Hood, the hoofs of the horses, the wheels of carriages and the valves of cars as they move up and down the cylinders, good and good, clippety-clop, it’s hopeless!—Korin was slowing again—but actually that was not the right word, hopeless was somehow wrong, there was no way out of this deadly loop, since it was ready and fully functioning in its own way, and calling it hopeless was not going to foul up the works, quite the contrary, in fact, it would simply oil them, bring a constant shine to them, help them to function. It was self-oiling, said Korin, raising his voice a little and looked up at the cold light shining above him, as if he thought the light was too dim, though the light in the buffet was almost intolerably intense. The whole ceiling was packed with fluorescent tubes, neon next to neon, at least a hundred tubes from right to left, from left to right, as densely and hauntingly packed as the graves in a military cemetery without an inch of bare space, the whole fluorescent, every tube burning and not one gone out, not one dark, so that the whole buffet glowed, as did the man standing at the bar with his back to it all, a cigarette in his right hand, staring fixedly at the edge of the bar and at nothing else, with Korin leaning on the bar and glowing beside him, his ditch-gray eyes fixed on the man, facing him, with these broken, painfully slow words proceeding from his mouth, and the two tramps in their booth by the toilet also glowing, squeezed in tightly next to each other like two neon tubes, the old man stroking the old woman’s left hand as it lay on the table, she, by not withdrawing her hand, offering it to his to be stroked, the pair of them just sitting, their eyes gently resting on each other, the old woman occasionally adjusting a lock of her greasy matted hair with her right hand, that is to say her free hand.