The World Goes On

by László Krasznahorkai

  I am truly reluctant to derail my audience from the menacing momentum of this narrative, but alas, I feel that it is high time to put on the brakes for a moment, and since it has obviously escaped your attention, to remind you gentlemen of my request regarding the locked exit of this otherwise captivating lecture hall. If the splendid baroque clock behind you shows the accurate time, then I have been standing on this podium sort of thing for about fifteen minutes, and these fifteen minutes for me—for a man who has spent his entire life either in fear of being locked up, or else in fear of not being able to lock himself in—are an eternity. I would not burden you gentlemen with this confession if the matter were otherwise understandable for you, in other words that I for one feel myself shoved straight into hell by the kind of automatic gesture such as this gentleman’s, who showed me in here, and who, after I entered and turned my back, most likely out of absentmindedness turned the key in the lock, and presumably out of further absentmindedness, sank the key into his pocket.

  My dear Sir, I think no one will make fun of your absentmindedness nor blame you if you don’t wait until the end of my lecture and get up right now and unlock that door, nor do I think any further words need be wasted regarding this peculiar sensitivity of mine that really has nothing to do with our subject, for I can see from your gesture that you intend to comply with my request and with this said I can return to the Zoologischer Garten and continue where I had left off, that is I can continue with a brief sketch of the layout of this subway stop, which seems to be absolutely necessary so you can follow what actually happened upon the arrival of the police in the subway station on that early August afternoon.

  The hub of subway lines at Zoologischer Garten is a system involving several underground levels. Dark and forbidding passages and corridors with stairways lead from one level to another, and the same types of dark and forbidding passages connect on any given level underneath it, the two platforms serving the two opposite directions of train traffic, so that if, let us say, you arrive at Zoologischer Garten from the direction of Ruhleben, but change your mind and decide not to continue on toward Kreuzberg but instead to return to Ruhleben, then you can’t simply up and march straight across to the opposite side on your level, because the two sets of rails upon which traffic passes to and from Kreuzberg are sunk into a trench, a channel not too deep, but with a most strictly dedicated purpose, so that if you change your mind you must descend a set of stairs leading to a dark and sinister passageway under this twin set of rails, and make your way under the trench with its twin set of rails, across to the other side and another set of stairs that lead you up to the platform, which we may call our platform, from where you may return to Ruhleben, if that’s how things played out for you.

  It was in a sytem as complex as this that the two transit cops suddenly arrived opposite us, on the other side of the trench housing the twin set of rails.

  As a matter of fact only one of them was a full-fledged policeman, while the other one—to judge from his youth and his face flushed to the very tips of his ears as he tried to control an unruly German shepherd that kept snarling at him—must have been some kind of novice policeman; in any case I could not make out their facial features, other than the greasy, shiny, pimply complexion and the regulation thin, merciless lips of both the old and the young one; no facial features therefore, because with facial features of this kind, even if you placed a thousand sheets of drawing paper in front of me, and after each spoiled drawing lashed me with a knout, still not one out of a thousand would turn out to be a true likeness. So only one of the two was the real thing, this was immediately obvious, the one who noticed the clochard urinating on the opposite platform—in the forbidden zone at that—and who sprang into action at once, stepping to the edge of the platform, the point where he was closest to the clochard, and furiously ordered him to stop what he was doing at once, or else—bellowed the policeman—the clochard would regret it.

  The shortest distance between the two platforms was of necessity equal to the widths of two trains gliding past each other, meaning this shortest distance between the two men could not have been more than ten meters at most. But this ten meters’ proximity wasn’t enough for the clochard’s fear of the police to override the certainty in his mind that to interrupt this uncomfortable urination would be even more excruciating, so that he—now turning his woeful visage partly in our direction, and as it were letting the officer’s raucously official warning fly past his ears—thereby in the eyes of this policeman committed an act toward him that no one is allowed to commit toward a policeman: the clochard ignored him and kept on urinating.

  I tried once before to write down for myself what happened after this, and I must confess that my failure to do so deeply affected me. Today I can see clearly where I made my mistake, but to see the mistake clearly is of course not the same thing as undoing the fact of the mistake. The mistake—the result of placing an emphasis on the wrong things—was a lapse in my own attention that made me miss the mark by seeking to grasp the pivot of the events in the wrong place. But this was not the most distressing aspect, it was not the actual mistake that left such a deep trace in me, but its cause, namely, that my attention had been led astray by empathy, my empathy for the clochard, because I preferred to see the essence of this early afternoon in August exclusively in his flight triggered by the pursuit.

  Nor will I deny today that, as you may very well gather, the story I am telling here is the story of a pursuit and flight—what else would there be to speak about?—but that first written attempt was strictly confined to merely mentioning the pursuit, before devoting itself to a detailed, thorough analysis of the flight, confined in other words, mostly, if not exclusively, to the flight alone, as if ignoring the fact that preceding and accompanying it there was the pursuit, there were these two pursuers, and this fact, and these pursuers, should have been subject to the most thorough scrutiny. This one-sidedness upset the equilibrium and together with it the truth, so that I will not commit the same mistake now, especially in front of you.

  The only thing the written version revealed about the real policeman (and even that in a great hurry, for it wanted to get to the clochard as soon as possible) was that, seeing that his warning had no effect, and noting the unceasing flow of urine upon the rails, he opted for the only possible solution: he zeroed in on the entrance to the stairway leading down to the corridor under the rails that connected the two platforms, and, more or less at a run, followed by the apprentice cop and the snarling German shepherd, off he went toward this stairway. Yes indeed, he zeroed in—I now append to this immediately and with disciplined restraint, granting that while making this absolutely necessary rectification, instead of appending I would like best to scream out, sure, off he went, because he could not vault across that distance of ten meters.

  Esteemed audience—and let me say this to you today at last, on this second attempt, with a desperate insistence—it was this distance of ten meters, esteemed gentlemen, that constituted the focal point of those few minutes preceding the arrival of the delayed train from the direction of Kreuzberg that early afternoon—and I beg you to envision this for yourselves as sharply as if a hundred floodlights shone upon those ten meters in the subterranean platform of Zoologischer Garten!

  That first version . . . I have it here, just a moment . . .yes, here it is, this written version says, and I quote, “enraged by this abyss separating them, they bolted . . . for the stairway entrance leading down below the rails”—blah-blah-blah-blah, we already know that—“one could see,” the text continues, “from the way they sprinted”—yes, this is it!—“how enraged they were by the possibility that the guilty party might somehow give them the slip while they were down below the rails, racing toward him. On their way to the stair entrance they were on tenterhooks for temporarily having to put greater distance between themselves and what they were dying to reach, and on their way, they kept casting tormented glances at the clocha
rd on the opposite platform, for fear that he might somehow vanish while they crossed over below the tracks. By now, the old clochard had at last taken this in and stopped urinating since he realized”—this is still the first version—“that they would be there in a second to seize him. And so he prepared to run away, aiming for the exit at the center of our platform that led up toward freedom, that was his goal, but as he turned in our direction, to begin this so-called flight, it became instantly obvious to every commuter there that this flight would never happen, because the old clochard’s entire body was quaking so violently that a sudden silence fell over the entire platform. Somehow his leg muscles refused to work, because even with the most tremendous effort, and flailing arms, it took him about half a minute to advance at most a few centimeters, in front of our eyes, as he struggled to totter forward, body quaking, arms sawing the air”—continues the first version—“whereas in the meantime the policeman and his cohort with the snarling German Shepherd were approaching, swift as the wind. I watched the old man, his hopeless struggle to escape, and all the while I sensed the gimlet-eyed cop down below drawing ever closer, as yet unseen, but soon to heave into sight with a smile”—says the manuscript—“radiating satisfaction that all is well with the world, all is in place, and what’s more, everything in this wonderful world is exactly where it should be, for this is how it has been decreed, that the guilty should quake and inch along, whereas the pursuer, swift as the wind in seven-league-boots . . .,” and so on, all of it breathless and hysterical to the end, so that I’ll stop quoting here, this sample was perhaps more than enough.

  I don’t know whether you have noticed that this first version simply ignored the essence, this first version quite simply skipped the all-important ten meters, as if it had made no difference how the policeman’s indescribable facial features hardened, then totally darkened, and at last became overcome by rage and the ensuing thirst for revenge, as if all of this had made not the least difference in this godforsaken world for the writer of the earlier text, that earlier me, whereas it was precisely this grim darkening and this thirst for revenge that revealed most clearly what had been transpiring inside the policeman on account of those ten meters.

  This policeman, in his own eyes, was a creature of limited powers, in fullest measure authorized by society’s presumable contempt for clochards to turn this limited power into an unlimited power in order to smite and crush especially such clochards, such ragged old pariahs as the one here at Zoologischer Garten, instantly and with the most resolute force, when such a pariah, illustrating by his mere presence in a prohibited space the rationale behind society’s contempt, then practically threw himself through sheer negligence at the feet of the resolute enforcer of the law. The policeman’s facial expression could be read to say that while these clochards generally spent the whole day avoiding forbidden spots (zones fraught with danger for them), that for these people there were only trails surrounded by such spots, such danger zones, as they staggered all over the place, meandering like civilians lost in a minefield, wandering among landmines, trying to scrape by, but they were unable to do that, because from time to time—presumably out of weariness, ridiculously exhausted—they strayed by mistake and managed to step on just such a landmine, and the mine exploded, and then these wasted good-for-nothings found themselves face to face with someone who promptly called them to account, and collared them, one who struck a blow at pariah-hood, just as this policeman was doing now—well, one could read all this and more in that indescribable face, when this full-fledged policeman, noticing what was happening on the opposite side, rushed to where the shortest possible distance separated him from the clochard and ordered him to stop urinating.

  All of the foregoing could very well be an everyday occurrence, I know, but before you get too drowsy, and think, so what, a clochard taking a leak and a cop collaring him, before you say that to yourself, I would ask you to please consider that in this story, the one I am telling here, the policeman was unable to collar the clochard. There they stood, facing each other, the distance across, as you know, was no more than ten meters, and at ten meters each could see the slightest swerve in the other’s eye, without being able to touch that person, well, there they stood facing each other, the complete pariah and the complete policeman, and this complete policeman turned into a helpless policeman, and the complete pariah turned into a disobedient pariah, and that was how they stood there facing each other on one of the underground levels of Zoologischer Garten.

  In the eyes of a policeman, a helpless policeman is even more insufferable than a drunken pariah, so it is small wonder that this policeman, seeing this noncompliance on the opposite side, grasped his truncheon, then realizing it was useless to swing it—there was the distance, those ten meters—well then, his facial features really hardened, those brows definitely darkened. Unlimited power meant that this unlimited power had to produce an immediate and absolute effect, as long as that pariah was supposed to be thus deprived of the minimum of protection, rights, or recourse guaranteed by society. But this unlimited power suddenly lost all of its effectiveness, the clochard simply ignored the cop and kept on urinating, with a pained grimace, meanwhile to be sure turning this woebegone face slightly in our direction, whereas he, the policeman, merely marked time there on this humiliating stage while being ignored, and was forced to take notice of how all his unlimited power could turn into plain helplessness; moreover, since after all, he was unfortunately not permitted to fire his revolver at the man, you could see that he felt himself positively disarmed, and this condition of being disarmed—his darkened brow indicated—was especially intolerable for a policeman with a sidearm in his holster.

  A policeman usually divides the world into good and evil, and I could see in this policeman’s eyes that he thought no differently. There could be no doubt as to where he placed himself, and even less doubt about where he placed the old clochard, and so from his own point of view here was an instance where the good would set out to wreak vengeance upon evil. I do not want to become entangled in this issue of good and evil, and I evoke it from the policeman’s eyes only because it is precisely such a policeman-like simplemindedness that sheds the brightest light now, and at the time it had cast an even brighter light, on that truly unbridgeable gap of ten meters separating the two of them, and the remarkable thing was not—as the first written version attempted to convey by inciting emotions—the manner and mode in which the pursuit and flight took place (that all happened, by the way, more or less as the rough and ready wording of the first version described it), but that in spite of the pursuit, and in spite of the flight, the policeman did not succeed in bridging that gap of ten meters, those ten meters persevered, or rather: in vain did the policeman at last collar the clochard about the same time as the arriving train roared into the station, in my eyes those ten meters had proved to be insurmountable, because what my eyes had seen in this pursuit and this flight, to employ the simplicity of police language, was that good can never catch up with evil, because with the gap between good and evil there is no hope whatsoever.

  This was what had moved me so, and not the clochard inching and quaking, the policeman flying in seven-league boots swift as the wind.

  Gentlemen, you have probably guessed by now why I brought up this story.

  III

  You might say now, fine, fine, but let’s hope this man isn’t saying here that the smell of urine should waft everywhere, and we ought to plant a kiss on the lawbreaker’s forehead?

  Before speaking about essential matters I usually wait and procrastinate as long as possible, but at this time I consider the following announcement so important that any further delay is out of the question; I beg you to understand, the policeman was ready to kill that clochard because of that distance of ten meters, and I dragged up this story to make it clear, standing in front of you here: evil exists, and the good, sad to say, can never catch up with it.

  Then I boarded one of th
e trains at Zoologischer Garten, the light under the mirror turned green, and we glided past that zone measuring a meter and a half where by now of course there was no one. I was thinking that the world was intolerable, and felt like leaping out onto the dark rails, but of course did not do so, instead I mulled over when the last time was that I had spoken the words “good” and “evil.”

  Was it in childhood? Or when I was in high school?

  Anyway, it was a long time ago, I concluded then, hurtling along from Zoologischer Garten in the direction of Ruhleben, and now I would like to request you gentlemen not to believe, not even for a moment, that by alluding to this “evil” dragged up from the murky depths I am referring, say, to the clochard and the policeman! I hope you will understand that back there we were talking about the drama of good and evil, and about how, sad to say, there was no communication between the two, and how a single decisive detail in the world is, sad to say, enough to make the whole world intolerable.

  On the train ride toward Ruhleben I recalled that quaking body, those flailing arms, and I mused about that clochard and the other pariahs—when would they revolt, and what that revolt would be like. No doubt most violent and dreadful, I shuddered, they would take turns massacring each other, but then I stopped and said to myself, no, no, the revolt I had in mind would be something else, an all-out revolt.

  Revolt is always all-out, I thought, suddenly sobering up, and I looked on tensely as one lit-up station after another flew past, and saw the clochard in front of me again, and understood that for him not only that meter and a half between mirror and platform’s end was forbidden, his forbidden zone included the whole platform, stairs, streets, buildings, what was above the ground and underneath, everything.