It is hard to work when it is unclear which truth should be adhered to. When we think of the world as a tree we see a tree, when we think of it as a machine it is a machine. In both cases observations corroborate one’s assumptions, in both cases everything falls into place. Things are not provided with any telltale sign; there is no maxim to which one can appeal. Anyone who says, “it is a tree,” will immediately think of a machine; whoever says, “it is a machine,” will think at once of a tree. For this reason the expressions “it is a tree” and “it is not a tree” in essence mean the same thing. Would it not be better if the creators of the project were right? They treated the world as if it were a machine and were prepared at any moment to remove and repair whatever needed it. And thanks to the certainty that was their lot, separating objects from counterobjects turned out to be childishly simple. For a machine contains nothing that can be destroyed during the act of separation. It is inanimate by assumption and from the beginning and no one expects things to be otherwise. After the casing is removed the parts can be seen. There is no secret here, nothing elusive, nothing that cannot be touched. Even the rules governing the breakdown of parts are utterly plain. It is clear that they are associated with dust and water vapor finding their way into the mechanism. If the world is a machine then the separation of object from counterobject must begin with the sealing up of the casing. And from the construction of a vault that will rest on solid ground. By this means the upper and lower waters will be parted and from that moment it will be obvious what is the top and what is the bottom, what is order and permanence and what is chaos and change. And only then will it be possible to distinguish night from day.
A properly sealed casing will protect the world from dust and vapor coming from the outside. However, the solving of one problem opens the door to further complications. Cooling apparatuses need to be installed to prevent the mechanism from overheating. The more auxiliary devices there are the more dust and vapor there is on the inside, released by friction and by differences in temperature. The final separation of movement from friction, warmth from cold and good from evil requires only an installation to remove vapor, dust and dirt beyond the dome of the sky directly into the churning waters that swirl on the other side of the vault. Thus the difficulty of separating the city from the countercity comes down to powering all the essential devices. In accordance with the conception of the project’s creators a safe dry space beneath the vault requires effective seals and large power stations.
The city spread out on the draftsman’s blueprint had something festive about it. It had been designed with the thought of sunny days and no one even knew what it would look like in rainy weather. The sidewalks with their evenly laid-out flags recalled squared paper or the other way round: The square-patterned paper copied the stones of the sidewalk. There was no space for kitchen refuse lying about near trash cans. On one of the streets there was a kindergarten, on another bricklayers walked along in pants stained with lime while on a third a band played with gleaming trumpets. Care was taken that the sun should shine both on the bricklayers and on the kindergarten although – it goes without saying – it shone most handsomely of all on the trumpets.
All this could also be seen in the photographs appearing in the daily press. There bricklayers with their caps pulled down over their brows saw the deliberation of a bricklayer over a game of drafts on Saturday after work, the confidence of a bricklayer writing a compound fraction on the blackboard at night school, the pride of a bricklayer showing a new building to a trim-looking nurse. For newspapers were among the first things that appeared in the world, even, it seemed, before the creation of printing presses.
The news photos came into contact with our world through the surface of the paper yet they had their own depth in which pasteboard suitcases, kept under bunk beds in twenty-person dormitories, were filled not with loops of sausage and not with fustian long johns but with books about the lives of bricklayers. For in that world what could be more interesting for a bricklayer than the life of a bricklayer, the work of a bricklayer, the thoughts of a bricklayer? The same applied to turners, foundrymen, fitters, and all the other people who lived happily in the other world beneath the surface of the paper.
The original plan of the city consisted of a drawing of many symmetrically arranged square shapes linked harmoniously to a great central rosette. It should be stated that the acoustics were excellent. A garland of megaphones arrayed around the base of the central building sufficed to bring sound to every street. The palace erected in the center of the rosette was filled with marble and mirrors. From ceilings so high they were scarcely visible and seemed always to be shrouded in mist there hung crystal chandeliers outspread like fountains. Of the ten thousand double doors at least half were locked from the very beginning since they were needed not for access but for symmetry. As the latter concept so closely expressed the notion of the mechanical equilibrium of the world, it was elevated to the status of guiding principle in the project. In the meantime the keys to the doors had been mixed up and lost from the start. Every bricklayer, machinist or foundryman who entered the interior would doff his herringbone cap and twist it in his hands, gazing about in admiration at the walls and ceilings, and would retire at once to the exit, having glanced by accident into a mirror in its gilt frame.
The mirrors were little smaller than the walls on which they hung, one opposite another, duplicating their reflections into infinity. Kilometers of tiled floors retreated into the distance of mirrored spaces, into the boundless world that is separated from ours by the surface of the glass. An endless number of cleaning women had to work without a break in all the mirrors, polishing the floors from morning till evening all through the month; before they finished their work, it was time to start over again.
From the ground level, elevators shot up like speeding bullets to the highest floor; they were operated by female attendants with silver buttons who sat on gold-colored stools. From the dizzy heights the tramcars below looked like matchboxes and the people like ants, while dogs and pigeons could not be seen at all. That world, in which everything was so small, bordered on the highest floors through the panes of windows that were always closed, and it was only from there that it was visible. It was not easy to reach the miniature square that the miniature tramcar was passing. One first had to break the window, lean outside, hear the whistle of the wind and ask for the last time if this was truly what one desired. For in that world, where everything was small, all one could do was die.
The edifice, which reached as high as the clouds, on certain frosty days resembled a glass mountain crowned by a needle with an icy sheen. On foggy days passersby would be startled when it loomed unexpectedly out of the whiteness and revealed itself for a moment, very close, immense, immense, and then just as suddenly disappeared. Though efforts were made to prevent other buildings from concealing it, due to the changeability of the weather and the light it could not always be in plain view. But it was this building that was the heart of the city. In the evening it grew completely deserted and was locked up, in this way isolating the heart from the rest of the organism. It may be that at night the city did not require a heart. Because what would a heart be, in the machinery of the city, if not its principal pump and central valve, a place where the pressure of the flow of what is necessary and what is unnecessary is regulated? It would seem that at night, when the city slept, there was no flow and all movement ceased.
At the moment when the centrally located palace was locked up shoals of fifteen-watt lightbulbs could be observed from its heights. By their wan light it would have been possible to see, all set out carefully as in a doll’s house, dressers painted with oil paints, grayish laundry drying on clotheslines strung from the ceiling, rust-colored patches of damp on the walls, packages wrapped in greasy paper and jars of pickled cucumbers hidden from the sight of the tenants across the way, behind lace curtains fastened with tacks to the lower sections of the windows. Above all one would have seen, through bill
ows of steam rising from kettles, unshaven men in undershirts and women in dressing gowns. Who were these people and where had they come from? If someone had looked closely they might have recognized them. But the top floor, from which such an extensive and curious sight was to be observed, remained unoccupied.
The builders did not live there. They were above the everyday; they had no need of kettles, dressers or lace curtains and had no use for clotheslines or for jars of pickled cucumbers. In all probability they lived nowhere. Or rather they lived everywhere, but only in the way that music lives in a concert hall, filling the entire space with its existence. It was they who were lit up in the electric lightbulbs, who fluttered in pennants, and who ticked inside clocks. It was they who, hanging on the walls and looking down keenly through framed glass, thrust the countercity from the city with the power of their gaze. Beneath their eyes cleaning women cleaned, clerks filed documents and mechanics scrubbed and oiled machines. It was precisely for this that the mechanics, clerks, cleaners and all the others rose from their beds every day and donned their assigned outfits. It was for this that the seamstresses sewed, and the bakers baked rolls for them; for this the tram drivers drove their trams, and the bricklayers constructed buildings for them. All the while the children of all these people learned in kindergarten to tie and untie their shoelaces and ate their porridge and milk, waving their spoons about, in order to grow up without delay and reinforce the ranks of those who made sure order was maintained.
Cleaning and repairing, repairing and cleaning, laborious efforts to keep the chaos on the outside, the daily repulsing of the countercity – all this utterly filled the lives of the inhabitants, even though they themselves might imagine they were doing something else, earning money to live on or trying to overcome the hardships of life. And even if the city was equipped with some kinds of special devices to remove what was unnecessary, they had no interest in this, confident that the appropriate office would take care of them.
It was for this race of people with straightforward, cheerful minds that the beautiful streets, squares and gardens were meant; for them were the floors of marble and sandstone and even the mirrors in their gilded frames. It was for them that those times were opened wide toward the broad expanses of the future, toward its boundless plateaus where there rose higher and higher chimneys and further on chimneys higher than the highest ones and others even higher; it seemed that in the future there would be no limit to the height of chimneys. It was precisely the beauty of chimneys that was associated with the captivating charm of the future, that distant realm extending always a little up and to the left-hand side, toward which rose the hopeful gaze of the bricklayer and the steelworker on posters tacked up on the fences around the building sites.
In the beginning the reserves of faith and strength seemed as inexhaustible as the deposits of coal. These reserves, like the coal, lay somewhere down below, underneath the feet of steelworker and bricklayer – feet planted widely as a sign of conviction. Thus, simply through the feet’s contact with the ground faith and strength filled the hearts of the simple, brave people as they stared at that place up there to the left.
The builders gave unstintingly of hands, with thousands of them at their disposal. It may be that they yielded to the temptation to create beauty as well as order, to impose enchantment alongside obedience. Despite the enormous labors required to set the world in motion and to maintain its order painstaking ornamental work was undertaken. Fanciful grates and gutters were made, though beauty served no practical purpose. Thanks to the overabundance of faith and strength, façades were adorned with attics and bas-reliefs, and statues appeared in the recesses of walls. These figures of stone were clad in stone aprons, stone shirts with rolled-up sleeves and stone pants. Their stance was imperturbable; they had protruding eyes without pupils and held a bricklayer’s trowel or carried a pickax over their shoulder. They were a hard-handed race who wore clothes sewn by stone seamstresses and ate loaves of stone; the ablest of the master craftsmen who at the beginning of the world, out of bricks, sheet metal and plaster created all the wonders of that world. Inside their stone pockets were stone documents with a photograph and a stamp from the residence office, stone certificates and stone letters of recommendation. But these cannot be seen, because for us stones have only a surface. The solid interior of the stone belongs to another world: a world in which unity of substance prevails. Ligaments and muscles are as hard as shirt and apron. There is no boundary between the heart and the document in the breast pocket; none between head and cap or between hand and tool.
The unimaginable homogeneity of the stone was an object of wonder, a matchless model and example. For each of the bricklayers made of stone there were dozens of living ones, shock workers on the building sites, yet on whose hands blisters appeared from the handling of bricks and whose documents – while they themselves were beating records on the scaffolding – lay under lock and key in the manager’s desk at the workers’ hostel as security for the blankets they had borrowed from the storeroom; otherwise they could have taken the blankets with them, quitting their job without reason. Fate had presented these people with tasks that were great and important or petty and inconsequential. For each exalted one there were a hundred others imitating every movement of his hands, and a thousand more who had only once ever had the opportunity to see him from a distance, craning their necks as they stood in the crowd.
So that the labor should not be forgotten, and its goal properly understood by the benign sea of heads covered in herringbone caps, a watch was awarded to the hand that laid the first hundred bricks, the one that poured the first steel, and the one that set the first lathe in motion. Photographs were taken of front teeth bared in a smile and tight-fitting jackets decorated with sashes that bore an appropriate inscription. And beneath the jackets was the calm, even, synchronized beating of dark red hearts that were not prone to arrhythmia or pain or even fatigue and kept on pumping blood to the bulging blue veins on work-worn hands. This was how the age of commemorative watches began and also the age of commemorative teapots and irons, an age of ever new inscriptions on sashes, ever new faces in photographs and challenge trophies which were constantly being given and taken away, whereas the cut of the jackets, the rhythm of the hearts and the shape of veins in the hands did not change in the slightest. At its rapturous peak this age was ablaze with crimson plush and gilding, instinct with the trembling of countless rows of seats facing a stage enfolded in draperies and bearing a magnificent presidial table. There resounded torrents of speeches and especially thunderous cascades of applause filling the concert halls in place of music, which none of them needed any longer, even operettas. The echo of shoes creaking in the hallways, the whispers, the coughs and especially the clatter of tin spoons in the snack bar – all this disappeared without a trace in the background.
At that time the machinery of the world worked smoothly, without grinding noises or surprises, like the machinery of a stage that enables practiced hands to move the sky along with the stars and the sun and to turn the earth, flat as a plate, with the aid of a special crank. In this time of the world’s infancy, with the necessary effort the impossible also turned out to be achievable.
In the meantime the city blossomed moment by moment. On the blueprints colonnades reached to the fourth and fifth floors; golden fountains played in the squares while hanging gardens extended overhead and there flew past helicopters which were used by the municipal transit authorities and for which landing pads had been planned on rooftops as big as city squares; while underground, hovercraft moved quietly along barely touching their rails. And trams, trams and more trams ran from dawn till midnight and from one end of the city to the other and back again.
Imperceptibly the network of tram cables grew beyond all measure. The hanging gardens receded before them. Ground waters appeared whose complex system necessitated changes in the subterranean installations connected with the hovercraft traffic; it suddenly transpired that lines drawn on dra
fting paper could be threatened by water flowing somewhere beneath the earth. In this way, in the city emerging within the plans modifications appeared that could not have been predicted and that curbed the momentum of the city growing in space. Nevertheless the chimneys sprang upward without hindrance and were indeed ever taller and more splendid. They were constantly being observed and also photographed and filmed. They appeared in the posters stuck on fences around each new building site, where, stern and black, resembling exclamation points, they served as a background to vivid red letters. Along with the chimneys there rose lofty slag heaps, silos containing cement, and warehouses. Yet at times it seemed that all this was not enough and that the movement should be even faster, the exclamation point even more emphatic.
Time was barely able to keep up with the rapidity of thought. The days were counted and planned out many years in advance and if these calculations contained any errors, they never involved a surplus. It could be said that the days were used up before they arrived, like anticipated assets against which debts have already been incurred. Time, like electricity, was a good that had a specific value and purpose. Thus everything humanly possible was done to accelerate its passage. It is even likely that use was made of certain possibilities for improving the efficiency of astronomical phenomena. There came a time when the city hurtled round like a carousel; scarcely had it emerged from dawn than it already sank into darkness and with it its factories and steel mills and its plumes of sparks and its smoke filled with fumes and sulfur, which turned black as pitch in the red light of the rising and setting sun. While successive tons of new steel were being forged the old steel was wearing out and rotting upon the earth, beneath the earth and in the air. Newly manufactured paper was delivered immediately to the printing presses, where it was used to print newspapers that the very same day ended up in the trash.
Dreams and Stones Page 2
