So take a look at what he’s doing! Look at the fists shoved into the clenched teeth, from where he’d love to cry out, but he’s afraid. And those eyes, which moan for you right now, right now, to tolerate his tears; otherwise, they’ll well up on their own, they can’t hold back any longer—oh, this weepy thief, whose left hand is reflexively bidding us: “Come closer, don’t be afraid. But don’t beat me, alright?” his boyish anxiety adds, howling. “Don’t beat me!”
What would you say to that?
I said simply, if just a little peevishly:
“What is it you want here? And why are you bawling? It’s ridiculous!” – And I shut the door behind me.
And I go about my business. You know, like he isn’t there. That guy right there! I know very well that he’s behind me. That he’s skulking like an obedient dog. You’d almost say: like a cunning bitch. – Please, just imagine it: a surprised thief, or something of that sort, and instead of the least bark, he’s skulking behind me like a pinscher I’ve whistled for, and which has rushed in, wagging its tail as a sign it knows it’s going to get a beating. And which doesn’t have any idea that I only whistled out of terrible fear, that I was staking everything, everything on that whistling. A dog, shall we say, with fists to its maw, and with terror-stricken, teary eyes, and with that left hand comically bidding me not to be afraid of coming home, like I have nothing to fear. Home! Just imagine: a thief who bids me not to be afraid of coming home! And then, sure enough, something popped into my head. To wit: this guy is unspeakably unthreatening.
Like anybody, I too have a silly weakness for wanting to wedge myself into a spot where someone else is not. It was by chance that this occurred to me right after I’d made that move—I say by chance, for there was no reason why it should have occurred to me after that move in particular—when I had turned around, crowding him. Let’s understand each other: “to crowd” suggests the notion of assault. Just this once, however, it merely indicates that I turned to face him, nothing more. I don’t go after him; I don’t preach; I don’t reprimand. With the possible exception of reiterating with my eyes what my mouth had uttered a moment before, as in: “What is it you want here?” (Sounding neither threatening, nor overly curious!)
But look at him! Just take a look at him! For on my soul, this spectacle was worth it: the elegant pantomime of some deep, some unfathomable loss! The right hand at last pulled away from chattering teeth! The twisted right hand, away from which the cramp is slowly and incessantly drifting, and which is again mindful, which is again cautiously connected, which, under his coaxing eyes’ crazed surveillance, is dragging itself forward, approaching, astir; whereas the left, heretofore so beseechingly outstretched, has suddenly gone slack, so helpless, as if felled. But that right hand on the march and its rebellious fist opening slowly, slowly, grudgingly, out of the superiority of some insidious enmity: you could call it a bud, but one that would admit under pressure that it is no bud at all, but a hard knot of little snakes wrapped in rose petals. – It opens so grudgingly, so shyly. But why? Why? If it doesn’t even hold anything so foul?
O thief, my thief, what will you give me, then, for the key?
He is so afraid of me. Don’t be afraid! But he’s so afraid of me! Why are you afraid of me? You have the key—who gave it to you? You have the key. Thieves pick the lock to get in. This is a key. The real thing. Thieves don’t have a key. They can’t have a key. You have one; perhaps you’re worse than a thief? – Show me. Glory be, the notched key. The lackey’s key. Kept with the porter. It’s no fake. It’s the real thing. From where? How did you get it, whoever you are? Did you pinch it off someone you’d killed? Did you just steal it? Hmm? Nothing to say, whoever you are?
Then, for the first time, something flashed in his eyes, something other than astonishment, other than fright, other than pleading, other than lamentation. But perhaps it was an order above all orders, one regarding not people so much as things. A directive as follows: for it not to matter that I get hold of the key. And I obeyed. I loyally obeyed that it not matter. After protracted confusions, the first certainty. Oh, hardly a comforting certainty, hardly a negotiable certainty. But rather a suspiciously unfair certainty, you might say, kind of like someone sweetly talking you down while readying the straitjacket. It was a tricky, treacherous certainty, but a certainty nonetheless.
“Are we up to something here?” I asked. “Then let’s be up to something, right? A drama, is that what we’re going to have here?”
His eyes got ready to answer, but they changed their mind; suddenly, as though he had replaced them, they were again just the eyes of a frightened and pleading thief. I say: a thief—but who is this stranger behind my door exactly, of whom I should have been terrified but was not terrified, who assumed my terror within himself, and around whose corporeal being—for he is corporeal—I step with such stubborn indifference, as if around my own shadow? Who is this unexpected intruder into my bachelor life’s daily rhythm who, all things considered, does nothing to spoil it? Under whose gaze, watchful yet remote, am I pretending to be disinterestedly inspecting my ground-floor apartment, my abode, where it’s so easy for a stranger to intrude, no different today than any other (when I am invariably alone)? For God’s sake, who is he, paradoxically present, a man so rare that it’s almost like he’s not here, and under whose haunting, haunted supervision I perform an array of passes suited to an inspector, after which I lie down fully aware that I could sleep peacefully, that I am alone, that I am still alone despite the fact that he’s here with me? I’m not bothered, not at all bothered by this someone, whom I see and do not regard.
I throw myself into my rounds, beginning with the dining room. Pedantic, manic passes through the cupboards, the drapes. On my heels, he whom I take for no one. He’s a shadow, more shifting aside than moving—a shadow, a nothing that delights in nothingness; a shadow, an amplified, unfathomed nothing. Can you heed the presence of someone incarnated only as if in confirmation that he’s not there for real?
The hand outstretched with the turning key, the imploring eyes, beseeching me to take it, this, my key, all of it has the accent of an essence so paradoxical that it bothers me . . . What is meant by this ataraxia of the nerves, this eerie breakdown of all experience?
“Don’t be afraid. Surely you see I’m not scared, and that I won’t do anything to you.”
He went over to the corner, put his hands behind his back— a petal flutters down, circles in darkness; a memory—rather like the way day laborers used to wait at Klein’s, in the cobbler’s shop, until work came for them. You could see into the workshop through the glass doors from the office, where Mr. Štajer, the Vorarbeiter, would measure us with a brown paper ribbon, which he used to tickle our feet.
The memory circled around, drained of color. It landed softly and, once landed, sobered up, and in so doing unwittingly betrayed where it was supposed to have been going: to the realization that I’d already spent quite some time, as they say, in an impossible situation. Yes, because something really isn’t right here. The passive resistance of dumbness isn’t okay; the boyish fright and impetuous distress of this certain someone are not okay. Everything is like it’s inside-out, and that’s not okay. If it was okay, this thief (or whatever he is) would behave differently. But this disconsolate, this shrinking, this unnaturally withering thief: none of this is okay. And how could it be okay that I can’t manage, I can’t even manage to be struck properly dumb by things I know should strike me dumb, in a position that so urgently demands my dumbness? Which I refuse. No: what refuses is something within me. How dumbfounding it is that I’m not struck dumb. It’s dumbfounding! And behold: dumbfounding, the word, is like nightshade, like a blossom of nightshade, with which something that was supposed to be has also come into bloom; and barely has this flower opened before it flips over,