And yet again, it’s already like he’s going to snuff it out. Who? With what? From where? Or perhaps it’s just the brightness from the crack under the door to the next room? Someone in there has turned on a light. Who? Why? – He knows for sure, for sure he knows, and I turn around quizzically. Meanwhile, how close my confidence has become with this person so reminiscent of “the fellow from Klein’s.” He’s not the kind who begs the question; he’s someone whom it’s impossible not to ask. So I say, “I would bet . . . ,” stifling an explosive rage, but placated by the awareness of his having ferreted out my testament, “. . . that you’ve gotten yourself into a mess.” For he nods like a boy who’s been caught and reproved, but who has already ascertained that the incubation period for his lashing has already lapsed. – He nods, with gratitude for such magnanimity, and in agreement that he would come to earn it. – Good, good! If that’s the way it has to be, let’s also have a look at the bright crack under the door.
To the door! Let’s get it open! Look sharp! Not the look sharp of distraught impatience, ravenous after a long and cunning play for the irrational hope that a fugitive experience is again lying in wait behind the door, that there at last we will find the key, the only true key . . . to the gates, then . . . the gates of hell . . . And who should open up—it’s me who opens up—don’t think he has the look of the damned, bedeviled by a yearning to “put an end to this.” Instead, imagine someone like . . . yes, someone like a happy father returning home from work and impatient for his portrait of the family idyll, which he is already conjuring for himself in advance. Oh, that group of loved ones he hastens toward! He’s bought a baggie of delectables on the way. Standing at the threshold, he is singing happily, jovially, grinning: “Guess what I have!”
I was impatient, too, but not curious. I, too, knew, opening the door, what to expect, though unknowing what I would behold. I, too, already knew that whatever I would see, I would see something from the world now poised, perhaps befuddled, within me: a smooth sheet of paper pulled out of a crumpled, squeezed, twisted—by me, no less—ball. I knew that that inside-out world where I had made my home till now would not end behind the door, and could not end. I knew the door would open and the mystery would remain intact, I was merely aware, and unwittingly, that I would find the mystery—now only tight-lipped, not twisted—and the question of what form the mystery would have no longer upset or irritated me. That’s why it’s not odd that what actually surprised me wasn’t the woman lying on the sofa but her gesture, so peculiarly automatic, like the gesture of a sleepwalker, and at the same time as direct as a greeting: she tugged at the hem of her loden skirt, as if embarrassed about her exposed legs. It was a futile gesture, she had on a skirt short enough that you could see her green silk stockings almost to the knee—it was a gesture so nakedly futile as neither to provoke, nor to repulse. But she also abandoned it so naturally, so easily, and in the same way that she would abandon it every time that, in the naked silence that presently seemed to encircle the three of us, it announced itself anew. I say it announced itself, for this gesture was talkative.
I shrugged my shoulders and smacked my lips; not surprised, merely annoyed, and annoyed by the thought that the taciturn “fellow from Klein’s” might have come in behind me. Might he be so indiscreet? I turned my head, and it was indeed a wonder that I didn’t brush up against him. He was there, right up behind me, with the same old-woman’s curiosity and excusing himself like a footman: the helpless flinch of the shoulders; the faint upward drift of the otherwise vertical arms; the awkwardly moronic smile. All in all, the sum total of his embarrassed excuse for a bad habit he was attempting in vain to suppress. I looked at him from an oddly skewed perspective, as if on a mound that was sagging; that is, he followed me so close that we were nearly attached.
Trickster! He was concealing the fact that they were acquainted, that they were playing their agreed-upon roles. In vain. I caught on in an instant. Her nostrils, nonsensically blushed to cinnabar; her long, mascara-caked lashes, no different from blinds brought down over a suspiciously demure gaze that transports explicitly outlawed goods! To smuggle them, to smuggle—what she wouldn’t have given! That vision, sweet-and-innocent to the eye, gets at you. But the stereotypical tugging at the skirt testifies that it’s all a ploy, hard-headed as a ram, to fool the guard. A ploy ultimately thwarted again and again. And with each new failure, there was this little display, packed with fierce forbearance—the enraged repose of an ant assuming a burden that will come to naught. Resignation shining with needles of frozen irony. The gentleman-servant, caught with his hand in someone else’s pocket, a pickpocket dutifully admitting that it’s checkmate, and who neither repents nor talks his way out of it, knowing with a comfortingly obdurate certainty that this will not be his last time . . .
That slyboots, that intelligent little bitch! She knew immediately that together we were playing, if not at life and death, then at truth and lie (how she recoiled as she came to the certainty that it was worse than life or death); she calculated her odds solely by squinting, and having inferred that she could not win, with feigned indifference she launched an effort to play for stalemate. Three times, five times, seven times she shifted in the hope of turning my attention away from her eyes, which were trying to sneak past to him; seven times, nine times, eleven times I caught her off guard with a sideward glance, and the ploy was thwarted. – She answered each of my displays with the foxiness of a servant coolly faking gentlemanly resignation to his fate, and again she would surreptitiously ready a new round. It was as if two bitter adversaries were butting heads again and again, fully aware that but for the referee’s favor neither one of them would win. Our unbridled hatred melted our grimaces into the affable smiles of knightly adversaries—foul cunning pretended that this was less a matter of success than of playing fair. Her empty gesture of tugging at her skirt was repeated so frequently, steadily, and stereotypically that it eventually took on the character of a sort of secret means of communication. It was, consequently, a talkative gesture and, you would say, a luridly provocative one. It piled up like vile snowdrifts; I was unable to dig out with my eyes; they put up massive resistance. The sense of a peculiar world pointlessly besieged by terror persisted. I came to feel at home there. I was supremely aware that my uninvited guests were here because of some supernatural unrest; everything in this apartment was different from how it usually is, but the shape and form of things had not changed; the change was separate from them, as if it were their distinguishing feature, overlooked until now. Imagine that every day you eat from the same plate with a floral print; you know it so well that it would not escape you were it replaced by a plate with slightly different flowers. But one day you take a closer look and discover a tiny, heretofore overlooked flaw. Go on, try—how should I put this?—try to enthrall it; fix your eyes on it; a moment later, you’re looking at a kind of intimate unreality: the one reality, irrefutable, since it’s quotidian, remains solely this heretofore overlooked flaw; it’s like the only discernible shape in a fog, only you don’t know “where to put it.” Or else try saying your own name over and over again. Suddenly, it’s not that you’re estranged from it; on the contrary, it’s emerged as the last debris of the real—it’s a name that has become a thing while remaining a name, the name of someone you don’t know, though it’s yours.
It was no different with my uninvited guests. They were strangers to me; they were estranged from me all at once, but not as much so as my own apartment, albeit still familiar and unaltered to my eyes. They were somehow more real than it was. They were strangers, unfamiliar, and yet theirs was an assigned unfamiliarity, promised; only I didn’t know “where to put them.”
And that pointless, telling game with the skirt, again and again! It was sort of like the rhythmic incantation of voiceless conversations. It was a measure; but this measure turned into gesture, and in turn the gesture was becoming eternal. This meter was unstable: at the outset, I would say, it was moving toward the key of shabbily artful ploys, then it passed unnoticed to the slower meter of a trapped pickpocket’s indifference, after which it settled into the time of the woman’s embarrassment. This embarrassment: it struck an irritating contrast with her makeup, with her posture and attire, but it was remarkably sincere; indeed, it was gripping. And despite her brazen eyes, which, no, did not cease their efforts to arrive artfully