Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli

  The trams had barely pulled in to the depot before they had to set out on their routes again; the street lamps had scarcely gone out when they had to come on once more; milk bottles and bowls of porridge were perpetually being filled and emptied, while yesterday’s children were already putting on and taking off hats, brassieres and neckties. Men were constantly shaving; their stubble would grow back in the blink of an eye between one morning and the next. Bed sheets appeared and disappeared on foldaway sofa beds with no more than a flash of white; one after another, tanks of gasoline, kerosene and gas were emptied in the thousands and tens of thousands. There was no hope that the speeding cycle of past and future tasks would finally attain its goal – a sufficiency of the paper, steel and other substances the city voraciously demanded – that it would finally be sated and things would be able to slow down.

  In this mad rush no one looked carefully enough to also notice what was in the background. Thought was led by appearances and it was hard to recognize the thing that one’s eye lighted upon. In this way all the worlds were mixed together: the world that bordered on this one through the surface of newspaper photographs with its own depth, the world that opened up in mirrors and the world that was visible from the highest floors in which people were as tiny as little toys. Only the world that unfolded inside the stones and could not be seen retained its frontiers.

  The momentum of the city was in certain respects becoming onerous. From the incessant clicking of switches the instrument panels wore out; for this reason it was eventually decided not to turn the lights out at all, not to turn the machines off and not to go to bed. The uninterrupted work of factories and power plants in turn made it possible to accelerate the passage of time even more; this opportunity was not passed over. The present shot by at a rate of twenty-four frames per second; at the same speed, amid a low hum, images of the factories and power plants were wound onto massive spools right until movement finally began to cease and against a dark background there appeared a white inscription: THE END.

  For everything that has a beginning also has an end. The tape must be of the right length so it can be wound onto the spool and after being shown it can be put away in its flat metal can. If only for this reason time limits both the filming and the projection. The bulb of the projector can shine for a specified number of hours, rather less than more; it was installed in the projector after the previous bulb burned out and in time it too will burn out. What happens to the factories and power plants after the projector is switched off? They are dispersed. A certain aspect of them finds its way into the flat metal can; another aspect remains beneath the eyelids of the moviegoers standing up from their seats. Yet another is expressed in the cable that joins the projector to the electrical outlet and through it to the entire machinery of the world, which for a certain period did indeed work quickly and efficiently and then – it was unclear when – began to slow down. For momentum too has a beginning and an end.

  The laws of nature on which the plans for development were at one time based declared that what grows quickly will grow even more quickly, that explosion rules out implosion and that motionlessness is foreign to motion. The calculations that arose from these laws initially produced satisfactory approximations. They continued to be applied for some time, errors being dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders, until it became evident that the approximations being used had ceased to be adequate. For they failed to make adjustments for the wheel of fortune, for the unstable course of the affairs of this world, for the sudden unforeseen vagaries of fate. They did not make allowance for the chance obstacle that will stop an inscrutable thought in flight. They knew nothing of the vibrations that would cause the ever more powerfully thundering megaphones to fall apart. The greater the acceleration a speeding locomotive has the sooner it must begin to brake, otherwise disaster will ensue. A crane that bears record loads will eventually collapse under the excessive burden. Fatigue of the materials, and also arrhythmia and pain, will suddenly manifest themselves in advanced stages. The curve of growth sooner or later will reach the edge of the chart and be suspended in the air.

  The consciousness of this state of things emerged gradually and did not shake the foundations of the city. Amazement was spread over a long time, during which some began to have their suspicions and others refused to hear anything about it. Another generalization slowly began to spread which proclaimed that what was large would become small and not larger still, what was full would be empty and what grew tall would sink beneath the earth. In practice the new formula produced approximations that were at least as good as before, if not better; since it was easier it quietly displaced the old one, even though it irritated many. Whoever began to apply it was liberated from pathos, and on their lips appeared an ironic half-smile like a secret stamp. Its ever more numerous adherents, laboring without enthusiasm, accomplished neither more nor less than previously, when they had given their all, working their fingers to the bone. The discovery that a fiasco does not require sacrifices brought relief.

  Should the making of adjustments for the fatigue of materials be condemned as a sign of faintheartedness? Can a conciliatory attitude toward their natural tendency to decay and rust be labeled cynicism? Gearwheels wear down and convert ever greater amounts of energy into ever fewer revolutions. They once were new but now are old, used up, for the trash heap. And the cogs of the world also turned more slowly than before, both from the worn gears and because of the defective power source. The skies with their stars and sun revolved more slowly and even the clouds moved less rapidly, drawn sluggishly on invisible strings by a dilapidated motor.

  The greediest consumers of energy were the installations that sorted order from chaos, those that separated the city from the countercity. It was these installations that would grind to a halt at every break in the power supply, threatening an emergency of catastrophic proportions. For everything depended on these devices just as a steamship with a leaky hull depends on efficient pumps to keep it afloat on the ocean. It is possible that without them the city would have ceased to exist in an instant, submerged by the turbulent waves of the countercity. Rather let the tramcars stand idle, it was decided, and they stood for hours on end, all in a line, abandoned. For a long time it was still possible to ensure a continuous supply of power to the special mechanisms at the cost of the production lines and the street lights.

  It transpired that the greatest resistance to breakdown was presented by clocks and watches, which did not require a constant power source. It was enough for someone to remember to wind them up once a day. But the speed of the hands no longer matched the present time. Each revolution of the minute hand around the dial corresponded with fewer revolutions of the gears or cylinders in the machines. The difference was not great but it was clear and tangible. For instance the lathes which had been the pride of the times of growth and development: As things slowed down, they began to produce many defective parts which made assembly difficult and held up production. The operators of the machines were glad of this. It turned out that the inhabitants of the city preferred resting to working. Each minute contained fewer movements of human hands than previously.

  The day’s work was too short for all the labors associated with maintaining order in the world: vacuuming, polishing floors, mending door handles, washing windows. The inhabitants of the city did not have time to eat dinner before sundown. They set aside their spring cleaning till summer was almost over, the leaves were turning yellow and snow was beginning to fall. They turned away from the growing backlog of jobs. What had been neglected always seemed impossible to make up, the vast amounts of work deprived them of hope, and no one wished even to remove their hands from their pockets. They smoked without taking the cigarette out of their mouths and tossed the butts underfoot. In the newspapers they read only the headlines. They took shortcuts by trampling over flowerbeds and made no effort to save electricity. In kitchens beneath washing lines hung with threadbare laundry they scoffed at the naive labor of floor pol
ishing, at marches played on golden trumpets and at lathes, great furnaces and even waiting rooms painted with yellow oil paint. In case of need worn parquet could be replaced with linoleum, a window pane with a sheet of plywood and a broken lampshade with newspaper. No one now looked for the right lampshade or a window pane of the appropriate dimensions, since the inhabitants of the city began to realize that any thing could be replaced with some other thing just as any word could be replaced with another word of the same or – equally well – of the opposite meaning. They no longer cared about things and even less about words; they sought only oblivion.

  They defended themselves as best they could from the rapacious city, that immense leech sucking all their strength out of them. They moved slowly like sick people and were sparing in their gestures. Whatever they had to do they wondered whether it might be possible not to bother. It was for this reason that they even jumped out of the way of tramcars too late. Hope, said to be the mother of fools, abandoned the city. In its absence pity also went missing. People laughed at those who were swindled and those who were run over when the light was green. They lorded over the weak and kowtowed to the powerful. They got drunk, seduced women and abandoned them, embezzled money, informed on one other and wept.

  No one knew if the perfection of the city was meant to be passed on to its inhabitants or whether on the contrary it was originally hoped that the inhabitants would already be perfect. Those whose lot it was to live there would shout angrily that a person would have to be a saint to even put up with the place. Or they would ask whether frailty was a defect of the race or rather was the consequence of an error in urban planning. They cast doubt on the intentions of those who had created the project. They asked whom the palace had been built for that stood empty at night with its spire reaching up to the clouds. They laughed at the belief that anyone could manage without cupboards and they expressed the suspicion, which quite independently suggested itself, that the creators of the project had a need for even more magnificent interiors and concealed them somewhere as deep as the spire was high.

  At kitchen tables, over cups of tea growing cold they conjectured that they were not the ones for whom the city was built. They themselves knew that everything in them was too soft and too fragile, that their will bent too easily while their desires ran first one way and then the other without rhyme or reason. Their hands barely matched the handles of their tools; their hearts were utterly isolated from the rest of the world by a cage of ribs and an integument of skin. There was nothing here for them; all around they found strangeness.

  Certain signs – such as the warm tone of voice of radio announcers as they recounted the course of mass celebrations – suggested that hope was still placed in them. That to them, local people, belonged the task of producing that perfect race untrammeled by doubt or fear of emptiness, the race that perhaps the city was waiting for. For them it was certainly not waiting: All those employed in the local factories and offices, recorded in the registration lists and in the ledgers of the registry office, exhausted by their hardships and their lust for comforts, suffered from problems of the stomach, liver and teeth and were tormented by shortness of breath. But despite all this the thought that their women were to give birth to children of another clay, different from their parents, was disagreeable to them.

  From other signs – for example, sarcastic comments about the laziness of turners and fitters printed in the broadsheets of factories and pinned to the walls – the inhabitants of the city could conclude that they were an interim species that was to yield to another better than itself, which would appear once the city finally achieved perfection. These unpalatable speculations gave birth to troubling visions of having to move out. No one wanted to take their belongings and their children and leave that unloved place, the only one they had. Humiliated, they fell into an obstinate, angry silence. No one wanted the coming of children of stone or the appearance of new tribes. And everyone was more or less reconciled to what they already had.

  There were also those from whom the inhabitants of the city could hear that it had been perfect for some time now – much too good for the drivers, fitters, nurses and bus conductors, cleaning ladies and their mechanic husbands who lived in it. All that riff-raff.

  Quite unexpectedly refrigerators and washing machines appeared in the world, some of them broken from the very beginning. And also televisions in whose innards, through a glass screen people gazed in astonishment at a trembling, indistinct, black-and-white world the like of which no one had ever seen before. In the meantime more and more disorder was creeping into their lives. Over the years the city plan grew ever more complicated. The basic pattern of the star was effaced and little remained of the grand symmetry of the project, as if the world lacked the ideal of the mechanical equilibrium that was meant to be conveyed by the orderliness of the architectural treatments. With time the plan of the city included ever more irregular shapes lying across and upon one another in an inappropriate and disturbing way. Certain streets that previously had been broad and straight began to weave around, turning now one way, now the other with no sense of purpose or direction, seeming to forget the whole they were a part of and the angle at which they were supposed to intersect. In the place where a carousel had stood there would suddenly appear a plaza round as a plate, on whose wet asphalt cars would circle day and night. Where flocks of birds had passed through in the fall an overpass would arise which cars drove on one after another, heavy and ungainly, amidst clouds racing across the sky. The jammed viaduct released a spiral of them out of which – bursting through the iron guardrail – one by one they plummeted downward into puddles that shone with rainbowed patches of gasoline.

  At times there were discrepancies between later plans and earlier ones. Successive projects were faced with an ever greater number of particular requirements and restrictions. The most recent were developed in multiple mutually exclusive versions, every one of which had some defect. An eight-story apartment building broke up the perspective of a street and blocked the view of the palace but a low shopping arcade in the same place was soon surrounded by crooked stalls that introduced a spirit of insubordination, disarray and truculence. An underground parking lot, spitting out dozens of automobiles per minute, could not be built in the proximity of the school, yet the school could not be closed down so as not to leave unsupervised the local children, who were in the habit of setting fire to trash bins and throwing stones at windows. Each of the projects was imperfect yet each had certain advantages; for this reason the limping whole spread out on the drafting boards needed all of them at once to avoid collapse. In this way space acquired a depth possessing qualities that could not be encompassed by the mind. Three dimensions are sometimes too many; what then of fifteen? Suffice it to say that park, viaduct and department store were able to occupy the same location in space without interfering with one another in the slightest, while their paths, escalators and lanes intersected without ever colliding.

  Everything that happened on the draftsmen’s desks was connected in a complex way with changes that took place in the city of bricks, where in the meantime there had appeared new bridges, new monuments and new chiming clocks. But the multiplicity of interpenetrating spaces and the accumulation of variants meant that none of these works had the panache of earlier ventures from the infancy of the world. Interiors became cramped, granite and sandstone ceased to be lavishly used, façades were no longer decorated with bas-reliefs which at some unknown moment had gone out of fashion. It should also be noted here that the new chimes rang somewhat out of tune and that their sound barely rose above the hubbub of the street.

  It was easier and easier to see additional unplanned cities that had arisen no one knew when or how and that undermined the entirety with their hole-and-corner endurance. The police officer directing the traffic inhabits a city built of license plates to which are added car bodies, chassis, engines and turn signals. For the switchboard operator the metropolis of telephone receivers, enwrapped i
n cables, grows from the municipal telephone exchange as from a hidden rootstock. The drunkard’s city is empty; it is composed only of undulating trails of light and hard edges rising up unhampered in space. Different still is the city of the dead person; it is entirely devoid of radiators, dank and dark; one cannot even ask for a cup of hot tea there and it is quite simply unlivable, especially at five o’clock in the morning, that coldest of hours.

  Because of the existence of all these interpenetrating spaces a city becomes ever more confused, entangled, diffuse. It has to be simultaneously dark and light, crowded and deserted, noisy and soundless. And also, it must finally be admitted, it has to mean many things at once and mean nothing. Depending on the needs of the moment, its name could signify license plates, telephones, undulating trails of light, or anything else that in someone’s eyes can form itself into a pattern called a city and that conceals the walls just as the beautiful and improbable glass of a kaleidoscope placed between the eye and the source of light takes the place of heaven and earth.

  In this way the city misted over, lost its clear contours and became partly invisible. Yet even without seeing the city its inhabitants felt its existence distinctly enough. The rough walls of its buildings, the depth of stairwells bearing the dirty colors of oil paint, the unreliability of its elevators like cupboards suspended on steel cables in cavernous shafts, the scored interior walls, the spat-upon floors and broken bottles in corners. It was better not to see the never-washed windows in the factory halls or the machines whose lack of perfection was evident even when they stood idle. Their housings, covered in peeling paint, were thick and weighty, marked by the coarse angularity of the molds in which they had been made. Despite the uncomplicated nature of the casting every second one came out defective. Coal was not spared; enough of it was burned to turn the cast-iron shell back into red-hot pig iron. It was known that thinner castings would never work. Every part bore the stamp of its relationship with the hammer and the wrench; scratches testified to the lack of precision that weighed on these tools whose blind power was capable of breaking the resistance of rusted carbon-coated screws as thick as a finger.