Later, when the TV news came on, with items on left-wing and right-wing demonstrators fighting hand to hand with the forces of law and order, he could not rid his mind of the thought that at that very moment on the screen it could have been him out there, down in the square….
For some time now he had felt constrained by this second life, parallel to the one he was leading. He smiled about it, to be sure, but he had to wonder how high he would have risen by now if he had joined the police. Maybe he would be an assistant chief of police in some desolate backwater just like this one.
Two days before, when he had heard the story of the now-famous holdup of the National Bank, he had caught himself grinning, just as a rake who hears talk of women prides himself on being the expert in the field.
He was both ashamed and jubilant. No matter: he felt that he had jumped, of his own accord, into a pool of inanity, and could no longer climb out. His attitude was that of an obligation toward his second life, rather as he might feel obligated toward a long-abandoned girlfriend.
In recent times his second life —which for so many-years had existed as a silent parallel — had not, as anticipated, dwindled to nothing but rather had seemed to reassert itself ever more firmly. It sometimes weighed upon him so much that he imagined, that his police uniform was right there, waiting for him. At the back of the studio he had an old chest that he was afraid to open because he feared his uniform was already inside it.
It was no accident that the Gentian affair and the story of the snakeskin had both had such a strong impact on him.
He had presumably gotten himself tangled up in one of those gauzelike webs that lie in wait almost everywhere, but which people of normal sensitivity are unable to see or feel Maybe he would get free of the sticky threads when the time came (a time long ago determined) for his parallel life as a policeman to be cut short, scythed by a gangster’s bullet.
Then he would feel free, that’s for sure.
Sometimes he told himself to be thankful: at least he didn’t have to cope with a third or a fourth life! He didn’t dare broach the subject with his girlfriend, afraid she would think him out of his mind. All the same, he imagined talking it over with her: You’re lucky not to be afraid of that, he might say. You know, there are people who, for one reason or another, maybe just because things turned out that way, come up to the surface, as if they were climbing out of a deep hole, after they’ve been lost… how can I say… in another universe, in a different system. Just as it must be with black holes in space. Can you imagine coming to the edge of a black hole? Time slows down, then comes to a stop…. But then, at that point, when you’ve fallen in, you reappear in a different space … a different system… a new state of being…. Obviously no one has actually been inside a black hole … except that snake in the old legend.
He had another nightmare, that of seeing millions of people taking leave of their own lives, in some general decomposition of the universe, so as to take possession of others; but he managed to keep that mad fear at bay. Pythagoras must surely have thought about it carefully, but, in sheer horror, had never described it anywhere.
In the context of such impending chaos, his own tumbling fall into a second life sometimes seemed no more than natural to him. As did his fascination with unsolved mysteries. With the secret of the pyramids, for instance. He had always been curious about the pillaging of the pyramids. But such things were relatively close at hand, located in the suburbs of human history. The thefts of biblical times were more distant, and beyond them, after a yawning chasm of time, the celestial region began. That was where the really great plundering must have taken place: maybe even the mother of all burglaries, or at any rate, the essence of theft.
You’re off your rocker! he told himself But that didn’t stop him from summoning up the image of Prometheus as he had drawn him at the School of Fine Arts, scuttling away from Mount Olympus with fire clutched under his cloak. His instructor had pulled a long face at the drawing: That’s not Prometheus, lad! That’s just a common pickpocket!
The locksmith was probably right. Civilization began with a robbery. Yet it was a fact that no one wanted to acknowledge. Out of shame, presumably; or maybe not?
Mark jumped off the bed and went to the shelf where he kept his books. He leafed through the Dictionary of Mythology, to P … Pr … Pro … Prometheus. His quarrel with Zeus … the theft of fire. Aha! he cried. The theft of fire was the second robbery carried out on Olympus. The first was the theft of immortality.
He browsed through the pages and ended up finding what he was looking for. It seemed he had always known this, but maybe he had forgotten it in the meanwhile. He drank in these few lines once, then again, shaking his head, not fully satisfied. It was obscure and poorly explained, like a ruined building in the dark. That’s what accounted for his lapse of memory.
Under the thief’s name, Tantalus, he found nothing further. A theft committed on a dark night… the proof of immortality implemented through a mortal. Tantalus caught in flagrante delicto. The punishment he suffered …
Seen from a great distance, the two events that took place in the heavens seemed almost simultaneous. But if you look more closely, you see that the scandal of immortality was prior to the theft of fire. To be sure, they were closer together than, say, the pillaging of the pyramids and the holdup at the bank of B——. That’s why he had lost his grasp of it all.
Nonetheless, in the fire business, some of the circumstances were known: Prometheuse visit to the workshop of He-phaistos, where fire was kept, the seizure of a burning coal or torch, the flight over the earth with his booty hidden in his breast, and the gift that he made of it to men. But absolutely nothing was known about the theft of immortality: neither when nor where it had happened; in what shape it was held to exist; how it could have come to be stolen, and, in the event, transported by its thief….
He shook his head again and again. No, the event had not been rubbed out by forgetting. It was just that it had never been properly explained. The human mind had stopped short on the threshold of the mystery. The mind that gives way to no obstacle, had, in this instance, recognized its own impotence. It had gone too far, come too close to the frozen wastes at the very frontier of the impossible, and had been forced to turn back.
With his hands clasped at the back of his neck as if they were needed to hold his head up straight to withstand the shock, Mark recalled the fragments of the myth of the theft of immortality. One pitch-black night, a messenger of Death knocks at the door of a thoroughly ordinary mortal. “Who goes there?” To which Death’s emissary gives his customary reply: “Open up, I am the envoy of Death.” From behind the closed door, the mortal answers: “Go back whence thou came, I have nothing to do with you.”
Mark smiled to himself. He hadn’t indulged in such idle dreams for a long while. He had even felt hurt by imagining himself no longer capable of such reveries. Lazily, in the way you sip and savor a delicious summer drink, he tried to reconstruct the smallest details of the long-buried event. But something was stopping him. He got up, paced up and down the room, looked out of his bay window at the poplars lining the street, then at the low clouds, and he realized that a different story had woven itself in his mind into the one he was trying to recall. You thought you had become a great painter, didn’t you? You thought you had become an immortal artist, like people say, and so you wouldn’t have anything to do with us anymore? Isn’t that what you thought?
That’s what the interrogator had said to Gentian, and what Gentian had reported to him as soon as they let him out of prison. If he were to live a thousand years, Mark knew that he would never snuff out the memory of his terror during that stifling summer in Tirana. Gentian hadn’t yet been hauled in, but the threat was palpable, hovering in the air. As soon as the Fourth Plenum was over, there had been meetings all the time at the Writers’ and Artists’ Union. The heat was unbearable, and for some reason Mark imagined that it would somehow help to mitigate the disaster. Maybe the
authorities would remember that holidays and beaches and seasides also existed. And if they had forgotten, then their wives and children would remind them. So maybe they would put off all those meetings until September.
But no, nobody seemed to be thinking of ordinary life that summer. Quite the opposite: yet more sessions were planned. Some of them were to be closed sessions. Others were to be public hearings. And yet others half open and half closed. They all seemed to be the same, and yet they weren’t. People also whispered about extra-special meetings that were to be declared to have taken place when they hadn’t, and others that would really be held but would be said to have never happened.
Whenever he heard rumors of this kind, Mark put them down initially to the mental muddle fostered by the psychotic atmosphere of the times, but on second thought, they seemed to be perfectly coherent assumptions. It was obvious that not everybody would be summoned to appear at public meetings, and that closed sessions would be designed to allow fear-inducing rumors to leak out. Otherwise, what was the point?
He was almost certain that his turn would come, after Gentian’s. Once his friend’s flat had been searched and his paintings confiscated by the police, Mark fully expected he would be arrested in short order. He felt the same terror when other painters were summoned to appear before the tribunal to give evidence against the suspect. Later on, Gentian told him that in all there had been twenty-six witnesses for the prosecution. After the regular informers, who had amended their statements two or three times each, they had summoned quality witnesses, people who had not yet been “grilled,” which showed how important the case against Gentian was considered. Then they called the officials of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union themselves, then the officials of the Art Museum, then the café waiters from both places, then one of Gentian’s neighbors, who happened to be a veteran of the national liberation struggle of ‘45, then the girls who had posed nude for him, and last of all they heard testimony from local prostitutes. “Gentian asked me to shave the hair on both sides of my pubic area because, apparently, it is the fashion in the West.” “Vermin! Cardsharp!” the magistrate yelled at the painter. That insult took Gentian by surprise, who hardly had time to reflect on the model’s turpitude. He’d never played cards, and he took the magistrate’s outburst as a random taunt — but a few days later, when they began to confront him with notorious gamblers, he guessed that a new case was being prepared even while the initial charges against him were being maintained. On some days he was questioned about the decadent nature of his canvases, and on other days about his newfound vice of gambling. He supposed they would eventually decide under which of the two heads he was to be judged, but the magistrates kept on switching from one to the other. Apparently they were waiting for an order from above. The decision would hang on various external factors, maybe on international relations, or the discovery of new oil fields, or even on the next annual report of Amnesty International.
“You thought you had become an immortal painter and would thus have nothing more to do with us? So you started gambling, you need money that badly?”
Mark got up in a start and went back to leafing through his dictionary of mythology. He stared at the one illustration that went with the text, an image of Tantalus in his eternal suffering. Above and beneath him, but just out of his reach, were water to slake his thirst and apples to quell his hunger. A strange sentence, quite inappropriate to the incomparably more serious crime that he had committed. It looked more like the punishment of a glutton who had allowed his fellow men to go hungry and thirsty.
True enough, it’s always the same old story, Mark thought. Maybe Tantalus also had two cases against him? In the end, Gentian had been found guilty of decadent tendencies in his art, but the vice of gambling was also mentioned in an appendix to the main charge. It seems that Tantalus had had the opposite result. Since it couldn’t be entirely erased, the theft of immortality had been tacked on as a minor count, to be taken into consideration. Anyway, there was no proof, no testimony about it. That had presumably been done to rub it out more easily later, since it would be held to have been a charge unproven — a mere supposition, maybe just an optical illusion. The theft of immortality was to be erased from the memory of men as from the memory of the gods.
Mark lay down again. Somehow or other he felt that in order to imagine the most mysterious event in the history of the universe, which is what he was now sure it was, he would have to be physically absent, on the outside, so to speak, in some kind of exile.
Once again his mind turned to the messenger of Death looking, in the jet-black night, for a door to knock on.
COUNTER-CHAPTER 2
IN THE PITCH-DARK NIGHT the messenger of Death knocks at a man’s door. To the challenge of “Who goes there?” comes the traditional reply: “Open up, I am the messenger of Death.” From behind the closed door the man shouts out, “Be on your way, you have no business here!”
The envoy scowls. He supposes that the mortal has not grasped just who he is, that the mortal has mistaken him for the tax collector or for a bailiff. And as the mortal who lives there has paid his taxes and has no quarrel with the law, he reckons the visitor has no business with him. So the envoy must knock again, and speak his words a second time, but to his amazement, from behind the closed door, the same answer comes: “Go back whence thou came, I have nothing to do with thee.”
The messenger stands rooted to the ground, quite bewildered. It’s the first time anything like this has happened. Preparing himself to knock on the door for the third time, he pulls the death warrant out of his satchel, checks the mortal’s name as well as the date and exact time set down for his passage into the other world — in fact, the man should have been gone from life to death for some time already, yet he is still alive and kicking. The messenger is incensed, and knocks a third time.
No answer comes from behind the door. Suddenly the door swings open, and there stands the man on the threshold. What he says is as incomprehensible as it is disturbing: “Go tell your mistress Death that I do not recognize her writ.”
Upon which he flashes some trinket or other… well, nobody has ever discovered exactly what it was, but it must have been something like a secret medallion or cipher, an emblem or credit card number, the seal of some sect or the badge of some club, maybe even a visa that allows you to cross a border unimpeded.
The messenger of Death stands there stock-still, wide-eyed and struck dumb. Perhaps it is the first time he has ever seen that sign or symbol, but he recognizes its power and yields to it. Anyway, he is no more than a messenger, and his mission is only what he has been told to do: gather up souls. He does not even think to ask why the talisman has been entrusted to a mere mortal. All the same, since it is the first time in thousands of years that he has come across an incident of the kind, he feels duty-bound to report it to his superiors.
So he decides to alert his boss. He too is shaken by the incident, takes advice from another colleague — necessarily one more highly placed than he is — and then the two of them pluck up their courage and go to wake up Erebus, the Minister of Death himself.
Erebus can’t believe his ears. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” he screams.
He adds, almost instantly, “That just about does it!” And off he goes to wake the great leader of them all, Hades.
He knows it won’t be easy. He hasn’t done it in the last six thousand years, at least. Especially as Hades has just wedded the sweet Persephone. That all flashes through his mind in an instant. But he does not dither or dally. Using a secret method he alone knows, he wakes the great leader.
What he hears from a distant Hades is much the same as what he had thrown back to his subordinates: “Erebus, are you in possession of all your senses, or have you lost your wits entirely?”
So Erebus has to repeat word for word all that he just said. A long silence follows. Erebus thinks with sadness of his leader’s unseeing eyes. Then the latter says, “Come straight on down to see me.�
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When he gets there, Erebus finds the entire Bureau of Death assembled. The mines are darker than they have ever been. The black sockets of Hades’ eyes express the gravity of the circumstances better than any living pupils. His widely separated words are strangely related to those empty holes. He tells himself that what has just taken place is the most serious, the most extraordinary event imaginable. Death has been struck to the very root, for the first time in a million years. If the breach is not closed, Death will never recover. And the whole edifice of the universe will fall apart.
He lends his ear to his various ministers, and their words are just as gloomy, if not more so, than his own. Then he gives the order: Make ready my chariot!
He rides his chariot across the earth and the heavens, flying on to Olympus, to meet Zeus, the god of gods.
No one was ever to know what went on up there between them, neither how Hades awoke from divine slumber he whom none dared disturb, nor what all the others on Olympus said, or shouted, or sighed. No one was ever to know the voices they took on to mask their identities, or even the way they pronounced words backwards so their enemies could not understand them. There were never any leaks.
Lights go on in the gods’ villas and offices. Chariots dash through the night. Various classes of investigators are roused: special intelligence officers, then the spies who investigate special intelligence officers, then those who keep an eye on the spies. And in all the hustle and bustle the whole of the ministry’s staff awakens — professional delators, epileptic whistle-blowers, informers whose words are believed once in a thousand years, lead-swinging supervisors, allegedly blind tipsters, people who claim they would prefer to die rather than cease to be informers, and, in their train, all the cloak-and-dagger men, along with the bisexual scouts, the decoders of posthumous messages, the intuitives, the lunatics, and dealers in every kind of hocus-pocus. Old files are reopened, men and gods put to torture, a great hole dug — who knows why! — in the middle of Mount Olympus, and a column dropped into it straight away. Other incomprehensible acts follow, some for the first time ever, others for the last, and yet others that would have happened anyway, or which appear to be happening right now.
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