War & War

by Krasznahorkai, László

  10.

  The men from the District Psychiatric Unit, said Korin, never explained to him what he had wanted to know, which was the reason he had attended the unit to start with, and that was the matter of how the whole system that held the skull in place, from the first cervical vertebra through to the ligaments (the Rectus capitis), actually functioned, but they never explained it, because they couldn’t, chiefly because they themselves had not an inkling, their minds being shrouded in a wholly impenetrable darkness that resulted in them first staring at him in astonishment, as if to indicate that the question itself, the mere asking of it, was so ludicrous that it provided direct and incontrovertible proof of his, Korin’s, madness, then giving each other significant glances and little nods whose portent was (was it not?) perfectly clear, that they had dismissed the subject, as a consequence of which he made no further enquiries regarding the matter but, even while steadfastly bearing the enormous weight of the problem, literally, on his shoulders, tried to solve the problem himself by asking what that certain first cervical vertebra and the Rectus capitis actually were, how (sighed Korin) they performed their crucial functions and how it was that his skull was simply propped on the topmost vertebra of his spinal column, though when he thought about it at the time, or so he told them now, the idea of his skull being fixed to his spine by cerebro-spinal ligaments, which were the only things holding the lot together, was enough to send shivers down him when he thought of it, and still did send shivers down him, since even a brief examination of his own skull demonstrated the patent truth that this arrangement was so sensitive, so brittle, so vulnerable, in fact one of the most frail and delicate physical structures imaginable, that he concluded it must have been here, at this particular juncture, that his problems had begun and would end, for if the doctors were incapable of coming to any worthwhile conclusion after looking at his x-rays, and things had turned out as they had done so far, then, having steeped himself to some degree at least in the study of medicine, and having conducted an endless self-examination based on this study, he had no hesitation in declaring that the pain he was in had its root cause here, in that arrangement of tissue and bone, where vertebra met ligament, and that all attention should be focused on this point, on the ligaments, on which precise point he was not yet certain though he was certain enough about the sensation that spread through his neck and back, week by week, month by month, constantly increasing in intensity, knowing that the process had started and was proceeding irresistibly, and that this whole affair, if one considered it objectively, he said, was bound to lead to the terminal decay of the union of skull and spine, culminating in a condition, not to beat around the bush, for why should one, said Korin pointing to his neck, whereby this frail piece of skin finally gave out when he would inevitably lose his head.

  11.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine sets of rails could be distinguished from the vantage point of the footbridge, and the seven of them could do little but count them over and over again, concentrating their attention on the confluence of rails in the perceptibly deepening darkness accentuated by the red lights of the signals while waiting for the six forty-eight to appear at last in the distance, for the tension that had suddenly appeared on everyone’s hitherto relaxed countenance was occasioned by nothing more at this stage than the impending arrival of the six forty-eight, the mark they had set out to mug having failed, after their first couple of attempts, to provide sufficient entertainment in the short period of their waiting, so that within fifteen minutes of having cornered him, even if they had wanted to, they would have remained incapable of listening to a single word more of the seamless and endless monologue that, even now, cornered as he was, flowed unstoppably from him, because he kept on and on regardless, as they explained the next day, and it would have been unbearable had they not ignored him, because, they added, if they had continued to pay attention to him they would have had to do him in if only to preserve their own sanity, and they had, unfortunately, ignored him for the sake of their sanity, and this resulted in them missing the chance of eliminating him, for they really should have eliminated him good and proper, or so they kept repeating to themselves, particularly since the seven of them would normally have been perfectly aware what failing to eliminate a witness might cost them, a witness like him, who would never completely vanish in the crowd, not to mention the fact that they had begun to get a reputation in certain important places as “cut-throats,” a reputation they had to protect, and killing him would not have been difficult, nor indeed a new proposition to them, and this way they would have been taking no chances.

  12.

  What had happened to him—Korin shook his head as if he still could not believe it—was, at the beginning, almost inconceivable, nigh unbearable, because even at first glance, following an initial survey of the complex nature of what was involved, one straight look told him that from now on he’d have to abandon his “sick hierarchical view of the world,” explode “the illusion of an orderly pyramid of facts” and liberate himself from the extraordinarily powerful and secure belief in what was now revealed as merely a kind of childish mirage, which is to say the indivisible unity and contiguity of phenomena, and beyond that, the unity’s secure permanence and stability; and, within this permanence and stability, the overall coherence of its mechanism, that strictly-governed interdependence of functioning parts which gave the whole system its sense of direction, development, pace and progress, in other words whatever suggested that the thing it embodied was attractive and self-sufficient, or, to put it another way, he now had to say No, an immediate and once-and-for-all No, to that entire mode of life; but some hundred yards on he was forced to reconsider certain aspects of what he had originally termed his rejection of the hierarchical mode of thinking because it seemed to him that he had lost nothing by rejecting a particular order of things that he had elevated into a pyramid structure, a structure that self-evidently needed correcting or rejecting in perpetuity as misleading or inappropriate, no, strange to say, he had lost nothing by the rejection, for what had actually happened that certain night of his birthday, could not be accounted loss as such but rather gain, or at least as a first point gained, an advance in the direction of some all-but-inconceivable, all-but-unbearable end—and in the gradual process of walking the hundred paces from the river to the point where the struggle had begun, and having been granted a glimpse of the terrible complexity ahead, he saw that while the world appeared not to exist, the totality of that-which-had-been-thought-about-it did in fact exist, and, furthermore, that it was only this, in its countless thousands of varieties, that did exist as such, that what existed was his identity as the sum of the countless thousand imaginings of the human spirit that were engaged in writing the world, in writing his identity, he said, in terms of pure word, the doing word, the Verb that brooded over the waters, or, to put it another way, he added, what became clear was that most opinions were a waste of time, that it was a waste thinking that life was a matter of appropriate conditions and appropriate answers, because the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth—and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance, because from that time on he knew that w
hatever had once existed, existed still and that, quite unexpectedly, he had stumbled on an ontological place of such gravity that he could see—oh but how, he sighed, how to begin—that Zeus, for instance, to take an arbitrary example, was still “there,” now, in the present, just as all the other old gods of Olympus were “there,” as was Yahweh and The Lord God of Hosts, and there alongside them, the ghosts of every nook and cranny, and that this meant they had nothing and yet everything to fear, for nothing ever disappeared without trace, for the absent had a structure as real as the structure of whatever existed, and so, in other words, you could bump into Allah, into the Prince of the Rebel Angels, and into all the dead stars of the universe, which would of course include the barren unpopulated earth with its godless laws of being as well as the terrifying reality of hell and pandemonium which was the domain of the demons, and that was reality, said Korin: thousands upon thousands of worlds, each one different, majestic or fearsome; thousands upon thousands in their ranks, he continued, his voice rising, in a single absent relationship, that was how it all appeared to him then, he explained, and it was then, when he had got so far, continually reliving the infinite capacity of the process of becoming, that the trouble with his head first started, the predictable course of which process he had already outlined, and possibly it was the sheer abundance, the peculiar inexhaustibility of history and the gods that he found hard to bear, for ultimately he didn’t know, nor to this very day was it clear to him, precisely how the pain that started suddenly and simultaneously in his neck and his back, began: the forgetting, subject by subject, random, ungovernable and extraordinarily rapid, first of facts such as where he had put the key that he had only just now been holding in his hand, or what page he had got to in the book he had been reading the previous night, and, later, what had happened on Wednesday, three days ago, in the time between morning and evening, and after that, whatever was important, urgent, dull or insignificant, and finally, even his mother’s name, he said, the scent of apricots, whatever made familiar faces familiar, whether he had in fact completed tasks he had set for himself to complete—in a word, he said, there was literally nothing that stayed in his head, the whole world had vanished, step by step, the disappearance itself having neither rhyme nor reason in its progress, as if what there was left was somehow sufficient, or as if there were always something of greater importance that a higher, incomprehensible force had decided he should forget.

  13.

  I must somehow have drunk of the waters of Lethe, Korin explained, and while disconsolately wagging his head as if to convey to them that the understanding of the manner and consequence of events would probably always lie beyond him, he brought out a box of Marlboros: Anyone got a light?

  14.

  They were roughly the same age, the youngest being eleven, the oldest perhaps thirteen or fourteen, but every one of them had at least one slipcased razor blade nestling by his side, nor was it just a matter of nestling there, for each of them, from the youngest to the oldest, was capable of handling it expertly, whether it was of the simple “singleton” kind or the triple sort they referred to as “the set,” and not one of them lacked the ability to yank the thing forth in the blink of an eye and slip it between two fingers into the tense palm without the merest flickering of outward emotion while gazing steadily at the victim so that whichever of them happened to be in the right position could, quick as a flash, find the artery on the neck, this being the skill they had most perfectly mastered, a skill which rendered them, when all seven of them were together, so exceptionally dangerous that they had begun to earn a genuinely well-deserved reputation, only through constant practice, of course, the practice that enabled them to achieve their current level of performance and involved a carefully planned course of training that they carried through at constantly changing venues, repeating the same moves a hundred times, over and over again, until they could execute the moves with inimitable, blinding speed and such perfect coordination that in the course of an attack, they knew instinctively, without saying a word to each other, not only who would advance and who would stand, but how those standing would form up, nor was there any room for boasting, you couldn’t even think of it, so faultless was their teamwork, and in any case, the sight of gushing blood was enough to stop their mouths and render them dumb, disciplined and solemn, perhaps even too solemn, for the solemnity was something of a burden to them, leaving them with a desire for some course of action that would lead rather more playfully, more fortuitously, that is to say entailing a greater risk of failure, to the fact of death, since this was what they all sought, this was the way things had developed, this was what interested them, in fact it was the reason they had gathered here in the first place, the reason they had already spent a good many afternoons, so many weeks of afternoons and early evenings, passing the time right here.

  15.

  There was absolutely nothing ambiguous about the way he moved, said Korin next day in the MALÉV office, the whole thing being so completely normal, so ordinary, the reaching for his cigarettes so perfectly innocent and harmless that it was merely a kind of instinct, the result of an on-the-spur-of-the-moment notion that he might lessen the tension and thereby ease his own situation by a friendly gesture such as the offering of cigarettes, for really, no exaggeration, it was just that and nothing more, and while he expected almost anything to happen as a result, what he did not expect was to find another hand holding his wrist by the time his had reached the Marlboros in his pocket, a hand that did not grip the way a pair of handcuffs would, but one that rendered him immobile and sent a flood of warmth lapping across his wrist, or so he explained the next day, still in a state of shock, while at the same time, he continued, he felt his muscles weaken, only those muscles that were grasping the pack of Marlboros, and all this happened without a word being exchanged and, what was more—apart from the child nearest to him, who had responded so nimbly and with such breathtaking skill to the gesture he had misinterpreted—the group did not move an inch, but merely glanced at the falling Marlboro pack, until one of them eventually lifted it up, opened it and drew out a cigarette, passed it on to the next, and so forth to the end while he, Korin, in his terror, behaved as though nothing had happened, nothing significant at least, or, if anything had happened it was only by an accident so minor and so unworthy of mention as to be laughable, an accident that left him gripping his wounded wrist with his blameless hand, not quite understanding what had happened, and even when he did eventually realize, he merely pressed his thumb against the tiny nick, for that was all it was, he told them, a miniscule cut, and when the expected rush of panic, with its attendant throbbing, trembling, and loud noises in the head began to die away, an icy calm had lapped about him in much the same way as the blood had lapped about his wrist, in other words, as he declared the next day, he was utterly convinced that they were going to kill him.

  16.

  The work in the records office, he continued in a quavering voice, having waited for the last of the children to light his cigarette, did not involve, as did that of so many others, at least as far as he personally was concerned, a process of humiliation, blackmail, of wearing people down; no, not in his case, he stressed: on the contrary, he was bound to say, that after “the sad turn of events in his social life,” it was precisely his work that remained most important to him, that was his sole consolation both in the obligatory and voluntary after-hours areas of his specialization; it was the one thing, in the fundamental and, as far as he was concerned, fateful, process of the last few months of coming to terms with a reality which involved acknowledging the not-so-much bitter as amusing evidence that showed history and truth had nothing to do with each other, that demonstrated to him that everything he, in his capacity as a local historian, had done to explore, establish, maintain and nurture as history, had in fact given him an extraordinary freedom and raised him to a state of grace; because once he was capable of considering how any particular history served as a peculiar—if one rega
rded its origins, accidental, and if one considered its outcomes, cynically concocted and artificially articulated—a peculiar blend of some remaining elements of the truth, of human understanding and the imaginative re-creation of the past, of what could and could not be known, of confusion, of lies, of exaggerations, of both fidelity to—and misuse of—given data, of both proper and improper interpretations of evidence, of inklings, suggestions and of the marshaling of a sufficiently imposing body of opinion, then the work in the records office, the labor of, what was referred to as, the classifying and ordering of archive material, and indeed all such enterprises, represented nothing less than freedom itself, for it did not matter in the least what task he was currently engaged on, whether the classification was within general, median or specific categories, whether it was filed under this or that heading; whatever he did, whichever section of that almost two-thousand-meters’ length of archival corridor he dealt with, he was simply keeping history going, if he might put it that way, while knowing, at the same time, that he was entirely missing the truth, though the fact that he knew, even while he was working, that he was missing it, rendered him calm and equable, gave him a certain sense of invulnerability, the kind that comes to a man who recognizes that what he is doing is as pointless as it is meaningless, and furthermore that, precisely because it lacks point and meaning, it is accompanied by an entirely mysterious yet quite inimitable sweetness—yes, that was the way it was, he said, he really did find freedom through work, and there was just one problem, which was that this freedom wasn’t quite enough, for, having tasted it these last few months and having realized how rare and precious it was, it suddenly seemed insufficient, and he had started to sigh and pine for a greater, an absolute freedom, and thought only of how and where he might find it, until the whole issue became a burning obsession that disturbed him in his work in the records office, because he had to know where to seek it, where absolute freedom might reside.