Step by step I return outside. I take a breath. There are no men, no human beings, neither alive nor dead, inside or out. Only a dog or two whose howling reaches my ears, the rain beating down, and me.
I must convince myself that I am alone. No fairy tales, no “sarcasm en dentelles” after Borges, none of his lace-edged sarcasm. I’m stuck in a gigantic, empty universe in which there’s no room for mirrors that multiply, for labyrinths and loopholes, avoidable magic, allusive warnings. Everything is linear and unidirectional. As solid and lacking in handholds as glass, where nothing points to anything if not to my insignificance, my ignorance, my perfect inadequacy. No equivocal ambiguities, no enigmas to resolve, apart from the disproportion between events and the person involved. There is but one way forward for me, resignation. Someone is enjoying the immense irony of this disproportion. Exemplary cautionary tales will be drawn from it.
In their cafeteria, the absent miners kept stores of dried beef, hardtack, beer, and Italian wine. I eat, and my physical resilience is in its way mysterious; the entrepreneurs of early detection would be dismayed. It is only now that fatigue, cold, bitterness, and fear knock me down and I fall into a stony sleep, my head on the table.
•
Today I discovered what was causing the cadaverish stink that’s been haunting me for the past few days at the Mayr. On top of a delivery van in the alleyway beside the hotel, I found a number of cages full of chickens. Dead, long dead, and decomposing. Dead poultry tends to become flesh, undeniably real, and this is one of the things that terrify me. There’s the plane of the natural and the causal, and the one of the unnatural and the inexplicable, and the coexistence of the two intensifies the unnatural and the inexplicable.
It appears my fate is to oscillate between the two planes. Like swimmers in a pool, but not so comfortably.
Swimmers. Between gusts of wet, soaking wind I built a sort of carnival set of plastic and papier-mâché in the square in front of City Hall. Widening the breach I’d made in a window of the Grand Emporium, I carried out twenty or so mannequins. I chose the ones in the department with the End of Season sale, slightly old-fashioned mannequins, the most realistic, with wigs. And I set them out in bunches in the middle of the piazza. The place livened right up and took on its usual appearance. Even realer than what I remember. Plastic and papier-mâché. The great Roland Barthes, writing about plastic, eminently maintained that matter is far more prized than life.43 I take other, feminine mannequins to the city swimming pool, surging beneath the gusts of Föhn behind the square. To one foot of each, I attach a brick and toss them in. I’ve calculated the weight well; they don’t sink, but float, the whole bust above the water. My swimmers gather and disperse, bob cheerfully up and down in the puzzled waters.
When I return to the piazza, the wind, coming at it from one side, has lashed out at my friends. They lie on the ground in patches of melting snow, beaming their intrepid smiles toward the heavens, like those who were left in the square in front of the Winter Palace after the Cossacks had fired on the crowd.44
I collect them patiently, one by one. This time I seat them in the automobiles stubbornly waiting in the parking lot. It’s true that they are jointed, yet I realize that no force is needed to get them into the cars, they go willingly. Human beings resume their privileged habits with ease.
Especially because those automobiles are still alive. I try one of the keys and the engine responds. After pumping the accelerator a couple of times, I find the car idles well. Even that.
•
It’s late in the evening, and I’ve spent the entire day in my morgue-hotel. At night, an old prompting seizes me, and I look for a typewriter in the office, and shove a sheet of paper in it. Once a journalist . . . : it seems one remains true to the instincts of the ruminating intellectual. Nothing’s wasted; any experience can be recycled if the usual filters are employed.
I type out half a page.
The human-centered type of immanence has become an inescapable rule, just as the idealistic type once was. We have reduced the universe of reality to mankind, not excluding science. Now mankind seems to have disappeared, but panhumanism has not, and everything, even the night of June 2, can be resolved using its terms. The solution is sarcasm, “lace-edged” sarcasm, and cheerful humor. The car engine will start up again: A Dissipatio H.G. doesn’t prevent a carburetor from regulating the carburation. The proprietors in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, subject to the Last Judgment, and their cars down there, are ready to roll out. The Last Judgment, what’s the point? Our century preceded it. The damned and the supposed blessed filled the many, huge Chrysopolises. The Valley of Jehoshaphat is our century, which was always making distinctions, according to its innumerable, rigorous rules.
I leave the office and my text, not particularly pleased with myself.
Not pleased, and not convinced. I don’t actually believe in immanence. And pan-humanism is a fad, as my ex-colleague Lopez would have said. A fashion. A fashion that has endured for a while and still does because there is one conformist left—and it will endure as long as that conformist does.
•
Nevertheless, I’ve come back from terror to routine, and recovering one’s habits is a positive thing when one is traumatized. The habit of strumming on a typewriter, the pleasure (even if sloppy, or morbid) of intellectualizing ordinary experiences, including those that are highly personal and all but inconfessable.
Charles, or Carlos, Lopez. A walk-on character in the not entirely agreeable commedia of my thirty-, thirty-two-year-old existence. I have no idea why he turns up again on such a different stage, and an empty one.
A North American, he was the correspondent of a New York financial weekly in Chrysopolis when I met him. Lately promoted to write a column for a Washington paper. To him I owe my meeting with the sweet Henriette, who from all appearances was part of his harem and so technically I pinched her from him, without losing his sympathies. Carlos had a gift for friendship of a formal kind, and he was one of those who took part in the annual extortion of greetings. At Christmas and other holidays he would send me marvelous, exceptionally beautiful cards. With messages of impassioned encouragement to put out. To produce, to publish? Publish what?
“He was,” “he would send.” Carlos was my age. There’s still no reason to speak of him in the past tense.
Anyway, I can check on it. The Mayr has a number of eminent American clients; a list of phone numbers is not likely to be lacking at the desk.
There is a list, and the clock in the vestibule points to ten minutes before midnight. It will be six PM on the East Coast, certainly not an hour when a columnist would be expected to be in the office. But someone will answer. The intercontinental phone lines won’t be tied up these days and I’ll be able to speak to someone quickly—that is, if someone there is able to speak. I dial the number, preceded by a litany of prefixes.
Three, four seconds go by. A woman’s voice. You’ve reached Washington, DC, and this is the Washington Post. Today, Saturday June 1 and tomorrow, Sunday, June 2, the publisher’s offices are closed. To speak to an editor, please dial the following numbers . . .
A woman’s voice. Recorded. As at the office of the dentist Ibn Yussef, Ahmed, in Paris. And the message hasn’t changed since Saturday June 1. Them too. Over there as well.
The broad American accent rings in my ear: “Uàscinton Di Si.”
17
I LINGER in front of the door of the phone booth, humiliated by the foolish outcome. It occurs to me that because I am not personally “aligned” with the Western bloc, I ought to try—in order to be scrupulously impartial—to telephone Moscow, Peking, or Tirana. At the same time I’m thinking to myself, the night of June 2 didn’t distinguish between East and West, it’s pointless, I’ve phoned enough. In that instant, the phone booth still open, someone calls me.
The (masculine) timbre of the voice doesn’t sound like that of someone s
peaking through a receiver. In any case, the receiver can’t be working. I hang it back up.
“Yes,” says the man, “you recognize me, it’s me.” I recognize the voice. “It’s me and I’ll prove it; do you remember that poem you taught me? Here are the first couple of verses.” He recites them. “Now listen to me. I know you need help, and I can help you. I hope we’ll soon meet where you were unable to follow me.”
The hallucination (am I hallucinating?) is crystal clear and precise, there is no sophistry to it, and nothing frightening about it. It is good. It is calming. I didn’t recall the detail Karpinsky refers to, but he is right. I had only just arrived at the clinic a few days before when I read Karpinsky the opening lines of a poem by a well-known Latin-American writer. “The stethoscope falls on a white coat.45 Under the white coat, a shirt, under the shirt, a chest. In that chest, a heart.”
The circumstances in which I heard his voice were ordinary, but I have no doubt about the fact that he spoke to me from some place far more distant than Washington, DC, from a place that isn’t of this earth. I don’t need to think about it to know that, my intuition tells me with absolute certainty. He convenes me. For when? Tomorrow, if I wish. Where? Where does he reside now? No: here, down here. He’ll come down here. Didn’t he say, “You need help, I’ll help you.”
So, where? Once a week, Saturday or Sunday, Karpinsky was free to take the day off from his work in the clinic, and we wouldn’t see him. A friend of his, Carlini, told me the doctor was a believer and had a position in his church in the city. Someone else told me that no, he was active in politics, likewise in the city. That he was an activist in one of those dissident circles that went under the name of rayons (rays) or Fäustchen (fist, diminutive) and once upon a time were ungenerously known as “extremist sects.” In any case, he didn’t speak of it. I myself asked him how he spent his free time and he replied, “Come with me and you’ll see.” But Wanhoff the director advised me not to leave the premises, and I did not insist. Which explains Karpinsky’s final words: “Where you were unable to follow me.” He did give me a hint, though.
This paradoxical new world of mine admits dear and pious ghosts, it admits a Karpinsky. Ghosts that curiously address me using the formal Lei, not tu, and speak from telephone booths. The medium, fortunately, is not the message. The message is benevolence, aid.
I’ll see Chrysopolis again, the city is Chrysopolis.
Morning has just dawned, and I search for my little car. This time I’m not shy about it, and I find it, as well as a small surprise that seems a good omen. A baby ibex is stretched out on the ground between the wheels; it has fallen asleep out of the rain. The mother and some other adult goats are grazing on the lawn of the Hôtel Kursaal. I’ve never met such a large group of these animals, even high in the mountains. At Claus where my valley ends on the plain, I walk around a factory. A sign in large letters on the fence says, Our detergents are 93% biodegradable. In the meantime, the factory workers and the customers are one hundred percent biodegraded. The ibex have noticed and are taking advantage.
Passing through the silent outskirts of Chrysopolis, I stop at the synagogue of the Community of the Temple, a famous heirloom left by Gropius among the houses in this neighborhood in the suburbs. I climb the stairs, wait. I don’t expect to talk to him; this new encounter with him will be mute. I just need to have him in front of me. He saw me leave (I say to myself), he can see me right now, he knows I’ve been called to meet him. The Community of the Temple advises, by way of a sign, that there is another synagogue available to would-be attenders, that of the Temple of the Son of Zion–Chief Rabbinate. Not far away.
But is it certain that Karpinsky— although he’s Polish and exhibits certain somatic traits—is Jewish?
Doubt broadens my research. I climb, under the rain, toward the center of town and turn onto Calvinstrasse. I recognize the Evangelical Methodist church, and others: this street is a great flowering of cultural devotion. I move on to the headquarters of the Society of Friends (Quakers). After pausing there for a bit, I proceed toward the Association of Reformed Christians. I don’t look at the venerable cathedral of the Great Monastery behind me; I don’t think my friend would have chosen the cathedral. Too well known, overrun with tourists. Apart from that exception, I finger one by one the rosary beads of the city’s sacred institutions. Église Évangélique Libre. Karpinsky, a foreigner, might have belonged to one of the odd denominations like the Assemblée Évangélique des Frères, or further along, the Église Biblique. No trace of Karpinsky. Or at least I don’t “hear” him.
I’m beginning to get tired, but I persist. I must find him, he can’t have deceived me.
I cross the first of the great avenues that lead down to the lake and enter the business district. If a wide array of religious denominations can be found in the residential areas, the financial and trade center offers no fewer:
United Lutheran Church
National Lutheran Synod
Church of St. Theresa
Chapel of the World Missions
Parish Church of St. Mark
Sanctuary of the Sacred Fount
Chiesa Parocchiale di Santa Maria del Popolo
Catholic-Christian Church of the Apostles (So there was a Catholic-Christian faith at Chrysopolis, as well as simple Catholic.)
Iglesia Evangelica Española
Church of Pius X
House of the Catholic-Christian Alliance
Piccola Basilica dell’Immacolata (A 1/16 scale copy of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre, painted by Utrillo.)
The churches of St. Martin, Corpus Domini and St. Jeanne de Chantal
Church of the Adoration of the Sacred Heart (Built in the Secession style, it looks like a movie house. Not tremendously inviting for mystical purposes.)
The Chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes (“Sundays Only.” In compensation, there’s a real grotto next to it and even a real miniature waterfall.)
Russian Orthodox Church
Ukrainian Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, church and parish
Chapel of the Infant Jesus, of the Visitandine Sisters
Christ Church, Anglo-Catholic
Christ’s Chapel of the Free Christian Brotherhood
Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints
My hope, though waning, is slow to expire altogether. I visit these houses of worship one after another, contrite and dull as an Easter pilgrim to Rome.
I stand in front of closed doors, look around; then I concentrate, keep my ears open.
•
Melancholy, not bitter, the return to Widmad. My friend has been held up elsewhere; or else I misunderstood.
But a little irony about our fair city would not be out of place. It hosted, with careful deference and to its inestimable profit, the headquarters of fifty-six banks. (That was one bank for every 7,000 inhabitants while Paris had one for every 40,000 people, and London one per 50,000.) And, one eye on the stock market indexes, soul aimed toward the heavens, the banks were flanked by almost that many churches, adorned with domes and towers, marble floors and trim, and stained-glass windows rich in Biblical legends. A city devoted to Holy Plutocracy. Chrysopolis-Christopolis: I could call it that and any Max Weber could reconcile the contradictions. But I don’t have the heart to ironize, to intellectualize. Meditative, I drive my little wagon of the apocalypse over the smooth, silent, odor-free asphalt, the asphalt of eternity.
Waiting for Karpinsky? No, quite the contrary. It’s Karpinsky who’s waiting for me. It’s I who’s making him wait, misunderstanding his invitation. I’ve been searching for him in temples built of wood or of stone, when for him the divine is vast and free. In the clinic, the staff imagined he was a deacon or sacristan, a man who could go and take Communion in the eyes of a lover. He’s the one who’s waiting, he�
�s the disappointed one, disappointed by my conformism.
But not so disappointed as never to speak to me again. He’ll speak to me.
For the last time last night, I slept in the hall at the Mayr.
Today I’ll move to the station, beyond the station, to a freight train. Perhaps it’s my asceticism. But more than that, it’s the sound impulse that once led people to take refuge in trains when earthquakes or bombardments struck. The train represents a provisory solution, but also mobility, theoretical escape. At the Grand Emporium I find the necessaries to furnish my new residence. Among those necessaries, a portable typewriter. The car where I’ll be staying is one of those used to repair the lines (the symbolism didn’t fail to strike me), and in fact there’s another car ahead of it that’s full of bolts and railroad ties. My old goatherd’s hut was a palace by comparison, but there are some comforts. The rail workers had a kind of lodge with a stove, chairs, and a table at which I can eat and where I can put my typewriter, as well as berths to sleep on, a small pantry, lamps and kerosene. Where I can put my typewriter: me, shipwreck of shipwrecks. In what bottle will I seal my manuscripts, to what waves will I confide them? I haven’t asked myself the question.
Here’s something important, however. Nobody in my new residence has passed away. On the night of June 2, between Saturday and Sunday, the car was certainly empty. It welcomes me with a good clean smell of rough pinewood.
•
And thus I’ve taken permanent possession of the Inheritance. I’m fully aware of the situation. Trans-historic, post-theological, metaphysical it may be, absurd, impossible, but I’m digging in. I shall take from it what I can.
Karpinsky once told me of an episode in the Freud-Jung correspondence. Jung wrote to Freud, on a postcard: “I propose a summary of our experience as psychologists in four words: Inside and out, man is a creature of habit.”
Freud replied: “Agreed! And allow me to add a footnote. The more traumatic the stimulus, the more urgent and vital the need to adapt.”
Dissipatio H.G. Page 11
