His attitude toward me now was not that of our last brief encounter, but that which I remembered from the days of our youth, when he would come to coach me. No doubt he was perfectly aware that, chronologically, a quarter of a century had passed since those days, and yet as though along with his soul he had lost his sense of time (without which the soul cannot live), he obviously regarded me—a matter not so much of words, but of his whole manner—as if it had all been yesterday; yet he had no sympathy, no warmth whatever for me—nothing, not even a speck of it.
They seated him in an armchair, and he spread his limbs strangely, as a chimpanzee might do when his keeper makes him parody a Sybarite in a recumbent position. His sister settled down to her knitting, and during the whole course of the conversation did not once raise her short-haired gray head. Her husband took two newspapers—a local one, and one from Marseilles—out of his pocket, and was also silent. Only when Falter, noticing a large photograph of you that happened to be standing right in his line of sight, asked where were you hiding, did Mr. L. say, in the loud, artificial voice people use to address the deaf, and without looking up from his newspaper: “Come, you know perfectly well she is dead.”
“Ah, yes,” remarked Falter with inhuman unconcern, and, addressing me, added, “Oh well, may the kingdom of heaven be hers—isn’t that what one is supposed to say in society?”
Then the following conversation began between us; total recall, rather than shorthand notes, now allows me to transcribe it exactly.
“I wanted to see you, Falter,” I said (actually addressing him by first name and patronymic, but, in narration, his timeless image does not tolerate any conjunction of the man with a definite country and a genetic past), “I wanted to see you in order to have a frank talk with you. I wonder if you would consider it possible to ask your relatives to leave us alone.”
“They do not count,” abruptly observed Falter.
“When I say ‘frank,’ ” I went on, “I presuppose the reciprocal possibility of asking no matter what questions, and the readiness to answer them. But since it is I who shall ask the questions, and expect answers from you, everything depends upon your consent to be straightforward; you do not need that assurance from me.”
“To a straightforward question I shall give a straightforward answer,” said Falter.
“In that case allow me to come right to the point. We shall ask Mr. and Mrs. L. to step outside for a moment, and you will tell me verbatim what you told the Italian doctor.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Falter.
“You cannot refuse me this. In the first place, the information won’t kill me—this I guarantee you; I may look tired and seedy but don’t you worry, I still have enough strength left. In the second place, I promise to keep your secret to myself, and even to shoot myself, if you like, immediately after learning it. You see, I allow that my loquacity may bother you even more than my death. Well, do you agree?”
“I refuse absolutely,” replied Falter, and swept away a book from the table next to him to make room for his elbow.
“For the sake of somehow starting our talk, I shall temporarily accept your refusal. Let us proceed ab ovo. Now then, Falter, I understand that the essence of things has been revealed to you.”
“Yes, period,” said Falter.
“Agreed—you will not tell me about it; nevertheless, I draw two important deductions: things do have an essence, and this essence can be revealed to the mind.”
Falter smiled. “Only do not call them deductions, mister. They are but flag stops. Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self. Why set out on that journey, then? Be content with the formula: the essence of things has been revealed—wherein, incidentally, a blunder of yours is already present; I cannot explain it to you, since the least hint at an explanation would be a lethal glimpse. As long as the proposition remains static, one does not notice the blunder. But anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment.”
“All right, for the present I shall be content with that much. Now allow me a question. When a hypothesis enters a scientist’s mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. Its plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults. I believe the whole of science consists of such exiled or retired ideas: and yet at one time each of them boasted high rank; now only a name or a pension is left. But in your case, Falter, I suspect that you have found some different method of discovery and test. May I call it ‘revelation’ in the theological sense?”
“You may not,” said Falter.
“Wait a minute. Right now I am interested not so much in the method of discovery as in your conviction that the result is true. In other words, either you have a method of checking the result, or the awareness of its truth is inherent in it.”
“You see,” answered Falter, “in Indochina, at the lottery drawings, the numbers are extracted by a monkey. I happen to be that monkey. Another metaphor: in a country of honest men a yawl was moored at the shore, and it did not belong to anyone; but no one knew that it did not belong to anyone; and its assumed appurtenance to someone rendered it invisible to all. I happened to get into it. But perhaps it would be simplest of all if I said that in a moment of playfulness, not mathematical playfulness, necessarily—mathematics, I warn you, is but a perpetual game of leapfrog over its own shoulders as it keeps breeding—I kept combining various ideas, and finally found the right combination and exploded, like Berthold Schwartz. Somehow I survived; perhaps another in my place might have survived, too. However, after the incident with my charming doctor I do not have the least desire to be bothered by the police again.”
“You’re warming up, Falter. But let’s get back to the point: what exactly makes you certain that it is the truth? That monkey is not really a party to the cast lots.”
“Truths, and shadows of truths,” said Falter, “in the sense of species, of course, not specimens, are so rare in the world, and available ones are either so trivial or tainted, that—how shall I put it?—that the recoil upon perceiving Truth, the instant reaction of one’s whole being, remains an unfamiliar, little-studied phenomenon. Oh, well, sometimes in children—when a boy wakes up or regains his senses after a bout with scarlet fever and there is an electric discharge of reality, relative reality, no doubt, for you, humans, possess no other. Take any truism, that is, the corpse of a relative truth. Now analyze the physical sensation evoked in you by the words ‘black is darker than brown,’ or ‘ice is cold.’ Your thought is too lazy even to make a polite pretense of raising its rump from its bench, as if the same teacher were to enter your classroom a hundred times in the course of one lesson in old Russia. But, in my childhood, one day of great frost, I licked the shiny lock of a wicket. Let us dismiss the physical pain, or the pride of discovery, if it is a pleasant one—all that is not the real reaction to truth. You see, its impact is so little known that one cannot even find an exact word for it. All your nerves simultaneously answer ‘yes!’—something like that. Let us also set aside a kind of astonishment, which is merely the unaccustomed assimilation of the thingness of truth, not of Truth itself. If you tell me that So-and-so is a thief, then I combine at once in my mind a number of suddenly illuminated trifles that I had myself observed, yet I have time to marvel that a man who had seemed so upright turned out to be a crook, but unconsciously I have already absorbed the truth, so that my astonishment itself promptly assumes an inverted form (how could one have ever thought honest such an obvious crook?); in other words, the
sensitive point of truth lies exactly halfway between the first surprise and the second.”
“Right. This is all fairly clear.”
“On the other hand, surprise carried to stunning, unimaginable dimensions,” Falter went on, “can have extremely painful effects, and it is still nothing compared to the shock of Truth itself. And that can no longer be ‘absorbed.’ It was by chance that it did not kill me, just as it was by chance that it struck me. I doubt one could think of checking a sensation of such intensity. A check can, however, be made ex post facto, though I personally have no need for the complexities of the verification. Take any commonplace truth—for instance, that two angles equal to a third are equal to each other; does the postulate also include anything about ice being hot or rocks occurring in Canada? In other words, a given truthlet, to coin a diminutive, does not contain any other related truthlets and, even less, such ones that belong to different kinds or levels of knowledge or thought. What, then, would you say about a Truth with a capital T that comprises in itself the explanation and the proof of all possible mental affirmations? One can believe in the poetry of a wildflower or the power of money, but neither belief predetermines faith in homeopathy or in the necessity to exterminate antelope on the islands of Lake Victoria Nyanza; but in any case, having learned what I have—if this can be called learning—I received a key to absolutely all the doors and treasure chests in the world; only I have no need to use it, since every thought about its practical significance automatically, by its very nature, grades into the whole series of hinged lids. I may doubt my physical ability to imagine to the very end all the consequences of my discovery, and namely, to what degree I have not yet gone insane, or, inversely, how far behind I have left all that is meant by insanity; but I certainly cannot doubt that, as you put it, ‘essence has been revealed to me.’ Some water, please.”
“Here you are. But let me see, Falter—did I understand you correctly? Are you really henceforth a candidate for omniscience? Excuse me, but I don’t have that impression. I can allow that you know something fundamental, but your words contain no concrete indications of absolute wisdom.”
“Saving my strength,” said Falter. “Anyway, I never affirmed that I know everything now—Arabic, for example, or how many times in your life you have shaved, or who set the type for the newspaper which that fool over there is reading. I only say that I know everything I might want to know. Anyone could say that—couldn’t he?—after having leafed through an encyclopedia; only, the encyclopedia whose exact title I have learned (there, by the way—I am giving you a more elegant definition: I know the title of things) is literally all-inclusive, and therein lies the difference between me and the most versatile scholar on earth. You see, I have learned—and here I am leading you to the very edge of the Riviera precipice, ladies don’t look—I have learned one very simple thing about the world. It is by itself so obvious, so amusingly obvious, that only my wretched humanity can consider it monstrous. When in a moment I say ‘congruent’ I shall mean something infinitely removed from all the congruencies known to you, just as the nature itself of my discovery has nothing in common with the nature of any physical or philosophical conjectures. Now the main thing in me that is congruent with the main thing in the universe could not be affected by the bodily spasm that has thus shattered me. At the same time the possible knowledge of all things, consequent to the knowledge of the fundamental one, did not dispose in me of a sufficiently solid apparatus. I am training myself by willpower not to leave the vivarium, to observe the rules of your mentality as if nothing had happened; in other words, I act like a beggar, a versifier, who has received a million in foreign currency, but goes on living in his basement, for he knows that the least concession to luxury would ruin his liver.”
“But the treasure is in your possession, Falter—that’s what hurts. Let us drop the discussion of your attitude toward it, and talk about the thing itself. I repeat—I have taken note of your refusal to let me peek at your Medusa, and am further willing to refrain from the most evident inferences, since, as you hint, any logical conclusion is a confinement of thought in itself. I propose to you a different method for our questions and answers: I shall not ask you about the contents of your treasure; but, after all, you will not give away its secret by telling me if, say, it lies in the East, or if there is even one topaz in it, or if even one man has ever passed in its proximity. At the same time, if you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question, I not only promise to avoid choosing that particular line for a further series of related questions, but pledge to end the conversation altogether.”
“Theoretically, you are luring me into a clumsy trap,” said Falter, shaking slightly, as another might do when laughing. “Actually, it would be a trap only if you were capable of asking me at least one such question. There is very little chance of that. Therefore, if you enjoy pointless amusement, fire away.”
I thought a moment and said, “Falter, allow me to begin like the traditional tourist—with an inspection of an ancient church, familiar to him from pictures. Let me ask you: does God exist?”
“Cold,” said Falter.
I did not understand and repeated the question.
“Forget it,” snapped Falter. “I said ‘cold,’ as they say in the game, when one must find a hidden object. If you are looking under a chair or under the shadow of a chair, and the object cannot be in that place, because it happens to be somewhere else, then the question of there existing a chair or its shadow has nothing whatever to do with the game. To say that perhaps the chair exists but the object is not there is the same as saying that perhaps the object is there but the chair does not exist, which means that you end up again in the circle so dear to human thought.”
“You must agree, though, Falter, that if as you say the thing sought is not anywhere near to the concept of God, and if that thing is, according to your terminology, a kind of universal ‘title,’ then the concept of God does not appear on the title page; hence, there exists no true necessity for such a concept, and since there is no need for God, no God exists.”
“Then you did not understand what I said about the relationship between a possible place and the impossibility of finding the object in it. All right, I shall put it more clearly. By the very act of your mentioning a given concept you placed your own self in the position of an enigma, as if the seeker himself were to hide. And by persisting in your question, you not only hide, but also believe that by sharing with the sought-for object the quality of ‘hiddenness’ you bring it closer to you. How can I answer you whether God exists when the matter under discussion is perhaps sweet peas or a soccer linesman’s flag? You are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way, cher monsieur, that is all the answer I can give you. And if it seems to you that from this answer you can draw the least conclusion about the uselessness or necessity of God, it is just because you are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way. Wasn’t it you, though, that promised not to follow logical patterns of thought?”
“Now I too am going to trap you, Falter. Let’s see how you’ll manage to avoid a direct statement. One cannot, then, seek the title of the world in the hieroglyphics of deism?”
“Pardon me,” replied Falter, “by means of ornate language and grammatical trickery Moustache-Bleue is merely disguising the expected non as an expected oui. At the moment all I do is deny. I deny the expediency of the search for Truth in the realm of common theology, and, to save your mind empty labor, I hasten to add that the epithet I have used is a dead end: do not turn into it. I shall have to terminate the discussion for lack of an interlocutor if you exclaim ‘Aha, then there is another, “uncommon,” truth!’—for this would mean that you have hidden yourself so well as to have lost yourself.”
“All right. I shall believe you. Let us grant that theology muddies the issue. Is that right, Falter?”
“This is the house that Jack built,” said Falter.
“All right, we dismiss this false trail as well. Even though you
could probably explain to me why it is false (for there is something queer and elusive here, something that irritates you), and then your reluctance to reply would be clear to me.”
“I could,” said Falter, “but it would be equivalent to revealing the gist of the matter, that is, exactly what you are not going to get out of me.”
“You repeat yourself, Falter. Don’t tell me you will be just as evasive if, for instance, I ask you: can one expect an afterlife?”
“Does it interest you very much?”
“Just as much as it does you, Falter. Whatever you may know about death, we are both mortal.”
“In the first place,” said Falter, “I call your attention to the following curious catch: any man is mortal; you are a man; therefore, it is also possible that you are not mortal. Why? Because a specified man (you or I) for that very reason ceases to be any man. Yet both of us are indeed mortal, but I am mortal in a different way than you.”
“Don’t spite my poor logic, but give me a plain answer: is there even a glimmer of one’s identity beyond the grave, or does it all end in ideal darkness?”
“Bon,” said Falter, as is the habit of Russian émigrés in France. “You want to know whether Gospodin Sineusov will forever reside within the snugness of Gospodin Sineusov, otherwise Moustache-Bleue, or whether everything will abruptly vanish. There are two ideas here, aren’t there? Round-the-clock lighting and the black inane. Actually, despite the difference in metaphysical color, they greatly resemble each other. And they move in parallel. They even move at considerable speed. Long live the totalizator! Hey, hey, look through your turf glasses, they’re racing each other, and you would very much like to know which will arrive first at the post of truth, but in asking me to give you a yes or no for either one or the other, you want me to catch one of them at full speed by the neck—and those devils have awfully slippery necks—but even if I were to grab one of them for you, I would merely interrupt the competition, or the winner would be the other, the one I did not snatch, an utterly meaningless result inasmuch as no rivalry would any longer exist. If you ask, however, which of the two runs faster, I shall retort with another question: what runs faster, strong desire or strong fear?”
Nabokov's Dozen: Thirteen Stories Page 24
