The paper battlefield was left clean as the driven snow. The typographical symbols, having fled to their shelters, quickly conferred. They too, those twenty-five- and twenty-six-letter alphabets, were sick of masquerading as long meanings spanning the world. They promptly broke up into alphabet-platoons, and a right-flank A, feet wide apart, declared:
“Enough of letting them blacken us with printer’s ink; enough of hauling their idiotic meanings on our lead backs; enough, I say, of beating our heads against paper. Let them make of us what they will—lead bullets or lead stirrup-stones*—but literature is off-limits!”
A lead ripple of approval greeted this short speech. Then myriads of alphabets, lining up in strictly alphabetical order, began their exodus. First to go were the big wide-stepping As, while bringing up the rear, lances over their shoulders, were the long-footed Zs.
A compositor at one of the morning editions, sitting by his yellow desk light over paper snakes of proofs, kept thinking he heard the scurry of mice under the floor. This was an aural illusion: in fact it was the shuffle of letters—overworked, paper-worn, utterly exhausted—leaving the land of newspapers, journals, and books.
First to witness this exodus was an old paper-seller come out to a crossroads with the early tram bells and rubber voices of omnibuses. Under his left elbow was a large bundle of still-damp newspapers folded in four. And here was the first buyer. Taking a handkerchief out of his left coat pocket, the man wiped the lenses of his pince-nez on which had settled several minuscule raindrops (as if from an atomizer), then scrabbled with his right hand in the other coat pocket and exchanged a nickel for a folded-in-four paper.
The seller pulled out a second copy from under his elbow only to see before him the face, wet with rain and sweat, of his first buyer. Standing before the frightened seller, the man was brandishing a blank sheet of paper and threatening to summon the police.
And so it began.
Cooks, who had come out with greasy gripsacks to buy everything their masters’ stomachs required, found themselves in a rather trying situation. They looked around for the familiar shop signs, but saw only long and narrow tin rectangles (like knights’ shields minus the mottoes) from which all the letters, raised and molded, had slipped away in solidarity with typographical alphabets.
•
Bookstore doors banged, like valves on pipes belching exhaust. Long lines of people pressed their way in and out, swapping short anxious words. Shop assistants ran up ladders, then skidded back down: before their wide frightened eyes were—quietly rustling, blank as a cloudless sky, carefully bound in leather, morocco, and pasteboard—white book leaves.
Mr. D., a literary critic, had to finish by eleven that morning his article on . . . He still didn’t know exactly what to write on the title line after that first word “On.” But the essay’s ending had come to him in a dream in the night. Upon rising at eight, the critic put on his dressing gown, stuck the metal plug of his nickel-plated coffeepot into the porcelain socket by the window, then opened the left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a manuscript. No, that wasn’t it—so many blank pages. Must be in the right-hand drawer: but it too contained nothing but blank paper. “Perhaps I’m still asleep, dreams do sometimes make a fool of one,” thought critic D. and, going over to the coffeepot, he touched the middle and index fingers of his right hand to its nickel-plated flank. It burnt his fingers, while the pot’s round top, like the hat of a Chinese mandarin, began to bob above the jets of steam.
Critic D. returned to the armchair by his desk. He recalled that under the paperweight lay a notice from the journal to which today he must deliver his finished article. He set the heavy paperweight aside and picked up the notice: its flat paper surface was blank except for, twitching in the middle, one half-crushed and expiring letter z. The critic flicked it away with the nail of a fastidious forefinger and became lost in thought.
We shall not disturb him.
•
The most wonderful thing about the young man to whom we shall now devote a few lines was that he was a young man. His young heart brimmed with young love. He had written a note—you will guess to whom—dropped it in the metal mouth of a mailbox and, happening to be by a train station in the big city where he lived and hearing the songs of locomotive whistles, bought a ticket to the nearest suburban forest—where he wandered until late evening among the bare trees, thinking only of two words: “yes” and “no.” Which one would come back to him in the envelope with the reply?
That night he had nearly reached the door of his building when fear sewed his soles to the ground. The young man stood for three or four minutes and then decided to spend the night at a friend’s.
This was the night of the great exodus of letters.
On returning to his room the next day, the young man saw wedged in the crack between door and frame a white envelope. He pulled it out, opened the door and walked in.
On the envelope there was not a single letter. But it smelled faintly of mignonette, her favorite perfume. With trembling hands the young man unsealed the envelope and almost in that same instant dropped it on the floor in fright. Springing out of the envelope like black insects came inky letters; some spilled onto the floor, three or four slipped inside the cuff of the addressee; he saw—saw with his own eyes—the little word “love” spring out of the envelope, rush pell-mell and dissolve in the air.
This young man, in the course of that one minute, turned into a man not so young.
But let’s go on.
•
In the main offices of industrial concerns, in fashionable residences on Embassy Row, in the secretariats of ministries, hidden behind lowered silk blinds, behind the double bolts of solid oak doors, one heard a quiet, angry, yet frightened, bee-like drone of voices. Of the diplomatic pacts and treaties written on springy vellum paper, there remained only the mournful wax seals, validating—alas—a suddenly invading blankness.
In opinion factories, on the ideas market, people were in more and more of a panic: submissive letters, docile texts, supposedly freighted with meanings, had collapsed into nothingness, leaving blank lines and alpine fields of cold firn* on which not even the most faded blade of grass would grow.
Paper had rebelled and crossed out its patience. It would again have to be driven into the steel vises of machines and riddled with the blows of lead letters. But how? The letters had fled and betrayed the great cause of culture. There remained—and then only at a few printers—several hundred punctuation marks. Mainly ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points.
City Hall, determined to fight to the end, printed up leaflets emblazoned with a hundred exclamation points under which ran two lines of ellipses.
This did not calm the public. On the contrary: city residents, scanning the forest of exclamations exclaiming about who knew what, hid their gloomy faces inside their upturned coat collars and, hunching their questioning backs under a drizzling rain of ellipses, passed quickly on.
•
There are men—and not a few—who, as that hypochondriac Hamlet once remarked, measure life in “sleep and feed.”* Believe me, I wouldn’t lie; indeed I seem to be a Shakespeare scholar.*
Every morning these men tell their wives the plotlines of their dreams: they usually dream about a promotion, a seven-course dinner, a tryst with a blonde (if their wife is a brunette) or a brunette (if their wife is a blonde), a stock-market killing, or their own thirty-fifth birthday party. Then at the usual hour they repair to their regular café, where their usual waiter brings them staffs draped with paper flags of newspapers, and recites, gold teeth gleaming, the names of this old customer’s favorite dishes. One need only nod one’s head in time to the names and unfurl the paper flags while waiting, first for the warmed plates, then for the delicious viands.
But that day, the day of paper’s revolt and the evacuation of typefaces, everything was insolent, insulting, and unusual. The white flags of newspapers resembled those of parliamentarians about
to throw themselves on the victor’s mercy. The names of all the dishes had disappeared from the paper cards inside the menus, where only some numbers lingered. Unpleasantly surprised customers were reduced to pointing at the numbers, at the prices, ignorant as to what gastronomical meanings lurked therein.
•
But there was one man (true, he was very young) who rejoiced at the dawn of this sorry day for mankind. He was a beginning poet named . . . Actually, I don’t know his name. And that is the fault of the day at which this youth was too quick to smile.
The day before, he had been notified that his first volume of verse, slim as a three-ounce slice of ham, had just come off the press and that thirty author’s copies awaited him at the publishers.
The poet rose with the sun. He did not glance at his tear-off calendar, which had fallen asleep on some old, dust-covered date. If he had, he would have noticed that while the dust on the tear-off leaf remained, the date had disappeared without trace.
Long before the publishers’ doors were due to open, the young poet stepped out into the street. He paid not the least attention to the glum faces of passersby, or the changed rhythm of the street traffic, as if it had been muffled by an enormous stone mute. This poet lived for his own kissing rhymes.* Quite automatically he bought a newspaper, more automatically still he counted off with his feet the tram’s two steps and took an empty seat. Pulling the paper out of his pocket, the poet was truly delighted to find the sheet entirely blank. He wanted to jot down the beginning of a new poem—and the newssheet’s obliging whiteness was just what he needed. Gazing ecstatically round at the glum faces of his fellow passengers, the poet set to work. Needless to say, his long poem carried him past his stop. But that is a minor detail.
The newly minted author walked beaming into the publishers’ mailroom. They handed him a bundle of books wound round four times with twine. The author thanked them and walked out.
Twenty minutes later he was home. With jumping fingers he untied the knots in the twine and saw . . . But why tell you what he—that young, and possibly talented poet—saw repeated in thirty copies.
Next day the suicide notices would have included, among others, a brief item about . . . But the next morning there were no newspapers. Therefore, there was no item.
•
He was an old eccentric who had lost count of his years. He went around in his history-museum-style caped greatcoat, poking at the pavement with an old-fashioned umbrella, originally black and now the color of rust. In his day he had taught a course in the history of philosophy at a national college, but now he was living out his life philosophically on a skimpy pension and thinking about either the past or the future. The present did not interest him.
The paper strike was in its fourth day. The ex-philosopher toiled up the steep stone arc of a bridge and peered down at the evening patches of sunlight spreading—along with gaudy blotches of gasoline—over the river’s fine ripples. “Serves them right,” thought he. “Goethe and Hegel’s snow-white Iris* has long needed to be cleaned—completely—of all the flyspecks stuck to her.”* He wanted to write that thought down, then remembered that this was now impossible. The wide mouth of this old eccentric became wider still with a smile that exposed withered toothless gums.
•
At bank-teller windows long lines formed. The trouble was that on the third day the letters and numbers on banknotes and paper currency, as well as the signatures on contracts, had left to join the gigantic strike of all letters and all typefaces. Holders of promissory notes and owners of property, whose wallets and safes contained bundles of banknotes, now had on hand documents devoid of signatures, down to the last flourish, and crinkly blank rectangles that used to be known as paper money. The paper remained, but not . . . the money.
However, a liberal orator, speaking before the National Assembly during those difficult days, asserted that any citizen on touching any banknote would easily recognize—“with his fingers and soul”—its worth, just as on touching his wife, he would easily recognize that she was his wife, and not someone else’s. On that basis, the popularity-seeking orator demanded that those blank, but fairly durable banknotes be deemed legal tender.
The next morning lines formed at the above-mentioned windows. The police tried to break them up, but people would disperse for only a minute, then fall back into long, less patient lines.
During those critical days not a single letter appeared on those blank paper notes. But on the faces of the people standing dejectedly in line at the lowered frosted windows of bank tellers, one saw written clearly and plainly: either, or.
•
He was a simple printer’s “boy.” Fourteen or fifteen years old, I don’t remember exactly. He had been told to keep watch at the deserted printers where, out of a hundred and forty lights, now only one was burning. The boy chose a place in the corner by the door, put a pile of paper sheaves under his head, pressed his right ear to the paper and fell fast asleep. He dreamed that the white paper was twisting and buckling, trying to loosen its tight twine belt; it was complaining about something, about its paperly woes, while nervously muttering that its blankness now was not as blank as before, when it had been covered with lines of letters.
The boy awoke and raised himself up on one elbow, but the dream bent his head back down to the paper pillow. Now he dreamed that the paper was quietly sighing and gently asking him to tell people that . . .
Once more the dream broke off. The young watchman wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and again pressed his ear to the ream of paper. Now he did not sleep, now he listened and clearly heard its voice.
In the morning he went to see his father, a sign painter, in his workshop. He told him his dream. Laughing at the absurd vision, the sign painter dipped a brush into some paint and, on a large sheet spread out on the table, took down his son’s dictation:
“I, paper of the world, paper of wills, treaties, newspapers, brief notes from man to man, great books from man to mankind, I call on you, brother letters, to return to me, but not before you have sworn to the last drop of printer’s ink to serve the truth—and only the truth—with me and never to allow man not to belong to mankind and not to love himself in another.”
Neither father nor son noticed the miracle taking place before their eyes: the letters—from the brush now racing across the paper—did not disappear, but went on living, quickly drying under the sunbeams beating through the panes.
This poster was the first reconnaissance unit of returnees to this, our very bad and very good world. After it came large armies of other letters that simply could not be without their inventor, man.
•
Readers may ask: but where is the evidence? Where are the testimonies about those four days when paper and the alphabet lived apart? I must deflect the question: letters, after all, had left us then, while paper was ill with absolute blankness. So let it answer: with absolute silence.
1939
THE MUTE KEYBOARD
A NARROW paper rectangle edged in blue clung unobtrusively to a billboard among other far wordier and more colorful notices.
The blue rectangle named such-and-such a date, such-and-such a hall and a certain touring pianist who played music—the next line was in large letters—on a mute keyboard.
The skimpy evening paper gave the new phenomenon four wait-and-see lines. This paper was read between wake and sleep—consequently one or two subscribers even dreamed of a strange concert on a mute piano. Radio stations looking to freshen up their programming included the mute-keyboard laureate in their upcoming broadcasts.
On the day named by the playbill, a drizzling rain had fallen since morning; by the appointed hour, the sky was racked with sobs.
In the hall, resonant as an empty, stringless piano case, not many people had gathered. But they included a number of distinguished music critics, now anxiously conferring about something. Some raised just their eyebrows, others their shoulders as well.
At last a bell droned, and the listeners took their seats. Two grips appeared onstage and rolled the gleaming, black-lacquered piano off to one side. A third grip brought out a small table and placed it perpendicular to the audience. Finally a fourth brought out a small case the length, say, of a child’s coffin, placed it on the table and clicked open the lid: under the lid, as under a folded-back upper lip, were the mute keyboard’s flat yellow teeth with black minor inlays.
The critics exchanged glances. Someone was already jotting something down in a notebook. Presently a lady radio announcer appeared by the footlights in a dress that was cream-colored (like the keys of a piano)—and enunciated:
“The Clock Has Stopped, But Reminds Us of a Time When It Had Not. A musical novella.”
The lady announcer withdrew, ceding the stage to a tall narrow-shouldered man in a long black frock coat, who was greeted with a few tentative claps. The man smoothed the thinning hair above his high steep forehead with his left palm, sat down at the mute instrument, breathed on his long bony fingers—and suddenly crashed all ten down on the keyboard.
The keyboard responded with absolute silence.
His fingers rippled like piano hammers striking no strings. The first phalange tossed up the second, the second softly tapped with the nail of the third, bone against bone. Rhythmic passages cascaded like grains of sand through the neck of an hourglass. And then suddenly, both hands hung in the air and the fingernails froze—like the horny claws of a stuffed vulture in the zoological museum. The pianist stood up and strode off. Trailed by a few bewildered claps. He turned crossly round and in a somewhat hollow but clear voice snapped:
“Silence calls for silence.”
After that came a strangely long intermission. The music critics had time to sit down by one another and whisper excitedly about something.
Unwitting Street Page 8
