The World Goes On

by László Krasznahorkai

  I am not saying that the whiteness, the pure whiteness of the sub-basement—the whiteness of floor, walls, and ascetic furnishings, upset me, as my guards, or whatever you want to call them, believed on more than one occasion—no, the problem isn’t this whiteness, which for others may indeed be truly blinding, nor for that matter the total absence of any color whatsoever, no, as long as we are on this subject, for me this universal banishment of all color into whiteness constitutes an elegant summation of the actual ongoing events, so that far be it from me to protest against that; it would make no sense at all.

  It’s about my honorarium.

  Up until now I have not broached this subject, nor would I do so at this time, had I not felt myself now aboard the Titanic, but since that is where I seem to be, I must inform you that even though I lay no claim to monetary considerations, nonetheless since those particular near-zero needs of mine I have referred to have now indeed arisen, they are as follows—and I ask you to take note of them. I would require:

  1. Any and all documents and objects that survive from my childhood.

  2. Two hundred and twenty thousand meters of yarn.

  3. A revolver.

  As for the first, suffice it to say that here I am thinking of diaries, report cards, certificates, photographs, school notebooks, storybooks, coloring books, drawings, dolls, toys, collections of napkins, postage stamps, insignia, and matchbooks, in other words anything that a special commando sent out by you would be able to retrieve from this labyrinth of my childhood. (If he finds the house I was born in, he should by all means search the attic, the entrance to which—possibly you don’t have this in my file—is found in the back, on the side next to Uncle Feri’s house . . .)

  About the second requirement it will be enough to say that for my purposes the yarn can be in a ball or in a hank, it’s all the same to me, the important thing is that it should all be in one piece, that is, I require a single length of yarn two hundred and twenty thousand meters long.

  As for the third item, I believe no comment is necessary, since the issuance of permits for weapons of self-defense has been extended to include middle school students.

  This would be all, and I trust you will dispatch that commando at the earliest opportunity, just as, I trust, you will not question my reasons; for all I care, you may consider this to be my last request, after all it makes no difference to me what you take it to be, since we are dealing with an absolutely private matter as far as why I need these, what they have to do with each other, and why exactly these three. In any case bringing up these documents and objects of my childhood comes at a most opportune time for you gentlemen as well, since this is exactly what will now follow: a reference to these things, for we have now reached the end of the detour where I am able to disclose everything I could tell you about possessions as the cornerstone, the supporting pillar, the foundation, the most profound essence of our world or should I say our former world; all of that by now can only refer to the absolute loss of all possessions, although the roots reach all the way back to my childhood, where all of these requested documents and objects originate. This is the same childhood—of dolls, report cards, and matchbox collections—that belongs to the story that is of concern to you, gentlemen. You see, the story that follows, and which you have been obviously very much anticipating after all of these seemingly incidental and trivial tales and analyses, began back there in my childhood, and its starting point was a love of possessions. As for its ending, it can be summed up briefly as being about the absolute disgust evoked by possessions. Of course what intrigues you is what could have possibly happened between the beginning and end of this story. Well, I must say that the matter is a lot simpler than you would think; and can be recapitulated briefly.

  In the beginning I had only one doll and I loved it very much.

  Then I was given a teddy bear and a lion, both made of imitation plush, and I loved them very much, too. After that I was given a castle made of wood, complete with tin soldiers, and after that came school, and I was given a soccer ball, a backpack, a blue sweatsuit, and love slowly turned into liking, I was glad to have all these things—soccer balls, backpacks, sweatsuits. And the hoard of my possessions grew, and kept growing, and as it kept on growing, my gladness turned into a hunger for owning more of these things, or at least for these things that I owned to remain mine forevermore in the strictest, most undisputable sense, and for this hoard to keep on growing and growing.

  And so this hoard grew and kept growing, just as I did. Then I grew up into man’s estate with all the usual: wife, child, house, car, TV—all of which of course really amounted to a hunger and desire that all I possessed should remain mine.

  But there came a day, in my adulthood of course, when I stopped in a tavern and lingered the way husbands usually do on the way home after shopping, and when it came to leave-taking and someone asked who belonged to that full shopping bag, being somewhat tipsy I said nothing, even though it belonged to me, but nobody knew it, my words simply refused to come, so I said nothing and allowed the befuddlement over the absent owner turn into a powwow among my drinking buddies, ending in a dividing up of the contents of the full shopping bag, each of us taking home whatever he liked, given that some unknown drunk had obviously failed to keep a watchful eye on his belongings. (I seem to recall that I got to take home a tomato.) Later I proved unable to come up with a serious reason for remaining silent, but that particular day proved to be fateful: from then on as if the devil had gotten into me, I kept doing that sort of thing more and more often, I seemed to have acquired the habit of distancing myself from my possessions, of denying that things were mine, and this distancing and denial, although it started with tangible things—the proper objects of ownership—did not stop there, but began to metastasize to things that were not proper objects of ownership, and spread from, say, a shopping bag full of goods to a head full of ideas, from tomatoes to thoughts, and finally to language itself. For instance it became increasingly difficult to say, “Come here, my love!” or “Please pass me my hat!” and I began to have trouble even with such innocuous expressions as “Oh my god!” or “Your mother . . . ,” that is, I just started to have trouble with any and all possessive language—adjectives, pronouns, suffixes—especially when it involved the first person singular, while of course I had every reason to keep using these, for after all I did have my love, my hat, my god, my mother.

  Perhaps I hardly need say that eventually, along with this transition, though not connected to it, I did lose everything: my god, my mother, my love, and ultimately even my hat; but do not for a moment think that this explains the baleful crisis of possessive adjectives and pronouns, no, not at all, this explains nothing whatsoever; years of this crushing duplicity went by and I found no way out. Duplicity I call it, but I could say it was total anarchy, because even as I was trying with all my might to say no to possessions, at the same time I also said yes to them. Let’s take, for example, the street, where, you see, I had noticed a peculiar fact, namely that people went around, not with their eyes straight ahead in a normal manner, but sidling aberrantly, all of them, without exception, twisted, with sidelong glances at shop windows; that is, while I recognized and recused myself from the fact that I was living among people blatantly unable to resist the hypnotic attraction of acquiring possessions, at the same time I found myself from time to time unable to resist casting the occasional glance at these shop windows. And at times, fighting off my nausea, I even entered some store or another to purchase, say, a new hat to cover my head. I can only characterize my situation as the most abysmal anarchy, riven as I was by possessive pronouns and nausea, actual possessions and actual disgust, the mendacious, or at the very least unclean, foundations of my life, while I hadn’t the slightest notion of what was tearing me apart, what was confounding me so thoroughly when I had to apply the first person singular to the world.

  You already know what ended this anarchy for
me.

  Yes, gentlemen, it was that telegram at the post office on that autumn afternoon.

  I cannot claim that everything became clear to me right away; first it was only that single word, “useless,” that pierced my heart, then that “addressee unknown.” There I was, my heart pierced, walking homeward, meandering, and if I may take the liberty of putting it this way for you: teetering between a lethally sweet melancholy and the necessity of immediate revolt.

  I no longer recall how long this lasted, possibly days, even weeks, until one morning I was sitting by the window, looking out at the unconsoling light, and outside, below the kitchen window, a band of sparrows burst upward from the dry twigs of an unclipped hedge only to almost instantly swoop back down again.

  It was as if a veil had been plucked away, then lowered, so swift was this bursting upward and swooping back down, and even though there couldn’t have been an immediate connection, still to this day I believe that some connection must have existed between the swift impulse of the band of sparrows and my enlightenment, for it was enlightenment-like, the way I awoke to the realization—as I had on that earlier day of nausea (I recall that succubus)—that I did not possess anything, and never would, nor was I the only one like this—and I imagined my eyes taking in this entire world mired in the desire for possessions—all of us were and would be like this forever.

  By now you may have gotten used to the fact that, other than repeating evidence, nothing much can be expected of me, so that you should not be surprised, hearing for the second time, although coming from deeper down, that “I possess nothing” and that “You, too, possess nothing.” All the same I would like to make sure that you understand what I mean.

  You gentlemen are well aware that there once was a world where—quite apart from qualifying its contents—it was possible to ascertain clearly, even if only in a limited sense, the meaning of possessions, and this meaning was ascertained only as long as peace reigned in both human as well as natural relations. Looking at those dry twigs in front of the kitchen window, I suddenly understood; that is, the band of sparrows bursting upward and swooping back down, flicked aside the veil from the fact that this world, whose existence by the way many would characterize as notional, was finished, the conditions of peace no longer obtained in human and natural relations, because now a state of war prevailed in these relations, in short, a decisive turnaround has taken place, whose chance of occurring and our progression toward which we have of course been aware of all along (we even kept saying to each other, blinking, that there was no way to hold it back, everything was being swept unstoppably toward the brink, etc., etc.)—except we didn’t realize that the change had already occurred.

  Just as on a train journey, when emerging from a forest or the gently swelling hills, we suddenly find ourselves out in the middle of a bleak desert, that was how this had happened, from peace into war, the only difference being, in this case, that it was far more difficult if not impossible to draw the line where one ended and the other began, because no borderline sets these two apart, instead one gives rise to the other, is somehow wedged into the other, that is why—in contrast to an actual train journey—in the war/peace-situation everything happens almost unnoticeably, one moment we glance out the window and it’s still woods and gently sloping hillsides, then we look again, and it’s the desert.

  Please don’t mistake my meaning; when I say state of war I’m not thinking of . . .I don’t know . . . say, gunfire in the streets, or something like that . . . No, it is not shots fired in the street, or the fear that we might be shot at, obviously this may happen at any time, but that is not what makes war, not at all, it is not manhunts on the street and such things. But when . . .how should I put it . . .time passes, the world goes on its way, and arrives at a road sign, along the way, and this road sign points nowhere, the road ends here, the going cannot go on, everything seems to converge here, and then . . . for some reason—and we may call this the one and only true and unexplainable mystery—a demon is released from its bottle.

  This most maleficent demon is not the same as the angel of death, for it is not the spirit of peace but the demon of war, of delight that everything in existence can be ruined. This is the most intense delight, supreme, unsurpassable—and nothing and no one is exempt from its sway.

  You can say no to everything except this, because it seeps in everywhere unnoticed, because it is the be-all and end-all of every real utterance, the inimitable ecstasy of power over things, where the depths of dominion are utterly limitless.

  This demon is driven by an inexplicable hatred, and it compels us to destroy ourselves. And once it is actually released, the defensive perimeter around us, the empire of things outside us, everything we lord over, from a collection of matchboxes to a kingdom, all that is ours, suddenly loses its meaning and collapses into itself.

  There I sat by the kitchen window and that flurry of sparrows made me understand.

  That, actually . . . We possess nothing.

  IV

  Esteemed gentlemen!

  Before I take my final bow, allow me to share some news with you, perhaps you haven’t heard it yet.

  In 1981, on Okinawa, one of Japan’s southern islands, known primarily for the American military base there, and which is a part of the East Asian faunal region—after the dismantling of the American base and the return of the Japanese, the local government decided to build a road. Till then there had been no road connecting Okinawa’s southern portion—where thanks to the American base, a relatively extensive civilization reigned—and the island’s northern part, which had remained entirely in a state of nature. The road to be built was meant to establish a connection between the southern and northern parts, between civilization and nature.

  The work began, and bulldozers, excavators, and work crews arrived in the subtropical jungle until then undisturbed by humans, and one fine day, namely on July 4, 1981, in that realm of previously untouched nature, workers with their bulldozers ran over a beautiful bird. This bird was about thirty centimeters long, its back was olive brown, its chest and belly had black and white bars, its long bill and legs were a bright coral red. The workers themselves thought it was beautiful, and thanks to this, the carcass fell into the hands of a scientist investigating the fauna of the island in the wake of the road builders and American troops, and this scientist beheld the carcass with astonishment.

  The bird belonged to an unknown species.

  No one had ever seen one before, none of the ornithological monographs mentioned it, and the scientist, whose name was Mano, realized the magnitude of the discovery. But he refused to monopolize the glory, and offered the honor, in the customary Japanese manner, to Professor Yamashina, director of the ornithological institute in Tokyo, insisting that the distinctive honor of describing the species belonged to the professor.

  The unspoiled nature of the island’s northern portion of course did not exclude aboriginal inhabitants who had been living there for centuries, so that, given the presence of this aboriginal population, the bird had still evinced such perfect skill in keeping its existence invisible for endless successions of generations, and well, this fact understandably created considerable worldwide interest.

  Professor Yamashina, on the basis of Mano’s observations, determined that the new species belonged to the family Rallidae, and since because of its long bill it could not be classified among the short-billed crakes, he opened a lateral branch in the classification, and named it the Okinawa Rail, Yanbaru-kuina in Japanese. Unsurprisingly, in the description of the bird’s behavior, Professor Yamashina’s first sentence noted that the Okinawa Rail leads a most reclusive existence.

  Now all that remained was to explain how it could have happened that this secretive mode of existence was such a resounding success.

  The observations concluded that we were faced with a regrettably small population, and it was precisely this, plus the extremely li
mited range of the species, that in part explained the success of this invisible mode of survival. One theory was that the birds inhabited a terrain where small predators must be relatively few in number, or entirely absent, and they considered the fact that humans hadn’t presented a danger—miraculously the aboriginal population had refrained from hunting them, the birds had managed to stay out of sight, so their paths never crossed.

  These observations, inasmuch as we may speak of observations in the case of such a shy creature, were thorough and wide-ranging, while leaving room for a few intelligent guesses that didn’t come any closer to solving the mystery.

  Subsequent inquiries brought up the possible significance of the flightlessness of the Okinawa Rail.