Out of the blue, I felt like doing something as yet undefined (her eyes, without turning from me, flickered under this caprice, as if seeking a balance they’d momentarily lost), and before I know it I’m seeing my own hand reach for her hair and tug at it feebly. He was standing right next to us. He caught sight of the end of that touch and turned to meet my eyes once again. Amiably and tactfully, he gave them an approving, impish, and encouraging smile. Pulling her hair, I heard and felt a weak snap. She smiled. She put her hands under her chin and raised it slightly. It was an obliging gesture that reminded me, I don’t know why, of the gesture of a shopkeeper explaining how to work a toy you’ve purchased. Under that pressure, her head slipped out a little. It revealed on her neck the kind of groove you see on poseable dolls. When she’d shown this, her hands again withdrew, and her head fell with a faint click.
He, seeing this, slapped his hips like a man who’s “having a laugh,” turned my chin so that I’d pay attention, and seized the woman by the arm. She rose up, and when he let her go she fell with a faint click, just as her head had. The woman sighed, but as if she’d done no more than the thing with her skirt.
He doubled over as if seized by impudent laughter, which was bizarre, for his face remained impassive. Or no, it was rather sad. He doubled over like a good prankster who’s pulled off a joke, then he performed a hasty “now watch” gesture and did a tumble like a little clown. His aspect, however, in no way fit this apparently boisterous move: it remained sad the whole time; in fact, now it was quite desolate. This lasted for a while. I watched attentively, stiffly, with interest, but like at a spectacle I’d deliberately come for.
Then he sat down on the sofa as well, at her head. He started to stroke her tenderly. I can’t say how ghostly, yet in no way frightening, was the suddenness by which he passed to those tender displays immediately following that quiet and crazy footwork. So sensuous and chaste were his caresses! I saw him exactly in profile. It was the profile of an impenetrable ascetic. That’s how it struck me. For until then he had always shown me his full face, whereas from that point on he had the look of an eager goody-goody—eager for temptation. Two different people. I was reminded of my friend Fuld, whom I hadn’t seen for several months. Fuld’s head, too, was a sort of Janus head (we ascribed this to the peculiar configuration of his upper lip). This one here was like Fuld, but it was not Fuld—it could not be Fuld. And it was just then, in the thought that it was literally “as if it were Fuld,” though it couldn’t really be Fuld, it was just then that I was chilled, and immediately after, I was chilled again, because that’s when I first realized that the anxiety had arrived precisely with my Fuldian memory. But it was with that double trembling that I’d caught the trail of “where to put them.” It had been so indistinct till then, who could say it was a trail. More like you’d woken up in a strange land, but on a road that suggested an almost overbearing certainty that it led precisely to where you had to go, though you yourself have no idea where that is.
It struck me how great an error it was to think that—as if all journeys end—and I smiled. Fortunately, however, no one would ever see that smile. I then caught sight of it unwittingly, in them, they’d suddenly become like mirrors. And my apartment indulgently resolved to return to the axis from which he had dislodged it.
Not for long. – I left them with a silent “goodnight” and made for bed. It was late, time to go to sleep. Yet, as I was crossing the threshold, everything was again knocked off its axis. – In the frame of the door, a kind of obstruction. I didn’t see it, I didn’t feel it, and still, an obstruction. Nothing to be torn down, nothing to chop through, nothing to vault over, and still, an obstruction. That is, something that demands that it be overcome. Nothing in the bedroom had been touched. In my mind, I repeated to myself: “And yet (I said ‘and yet’), and yet nothing in here has been touched,” and I quickly got stuck. I was stuck on that “and yet,” and suddenly I understood how very ponderous it was. And I knew: I knew that that “and yet” had been dispatched by a heretofore underground impulse that had already revealed, though concealing it from me, that in the bedroom it only appeared that nothing had been touched. It wanted to conceal from me that the order I was seeing with my eyes was a momentary, desperate, slapdash order, the likes of which are thrown together in towns shattered by earthquake, so that the lord who has announced his tour of compassion not encounter devastation—unwashed, unbrushed, unshaven. Here was this bedroom, where it appeared that nothing had been moved. This ambiguous, evil bedroom, this stupid bedroom that wanted to deceive me with its Potemkin order. No change, then? Who are you kidding, you disaster smoothed over with hasty rakes of sham sympathy? You want to confound me! Me!
So there’s this bedroom where nothing appears to have been touched. – Order? By all means! – But not the usual kind. – Order? By all means! But after the revolution that broke out whilst I was sojourning far away, that triumphed, that, in the meantime, settled in and blocks my view of where it was really heading, what it has achieved, what its point had been. This bedroom had been my atelier, where I’d hack away my wasted days. – But this bedroom was changed, albeit without appearing that anything had been touched. Only now I know, now I know what that unfeelable thing is, that invisible obstruction in the doorframe—it is the cumulative resistance of all the wasted days to come: they’ve mutinied against the hack; they’ll no longer allow themselves to be done up; they won’t be a party to masquerades; they’re resolved not to lie and not to be duped. They will strictly be what they will be. In the doorframe, there stood not future time, but future tense—it leaned on a knotty cane, for it was an old man, and asked not to be a party to my hack masquerades. And that resistance of the future tense had the shape and range of a truly immeasurable silence. Which, once I’d recognized it, drew aside, let me in, and I crossed the threshold.
And I entered chambers that whispered to me that nothing is also something. I was willingly convinced. Then it was as though their immeasurability gradually diminished. Slowly, slowly I came back to myself. I was somewhere that resembled my bedroom, at first nearly, then almost, and finally enough that it set the mind aglow. It was actually that a revolution had gone down here, and that it was hiding what it really wanted. – The whole time there was this great silence, though no longer hermetic; the sound of beingness carried in, as if from a far-off passage. More and more distinct. – And then, as if my millstone had been suddenly removed: I turned my head. I determined that yes, I was in my bedroom. It was different from before, but it was still my bedroom. – A bitter relief rippled through me. I started getting undressed.
I started getting undressed. The day, already departing for tomorrow, returned hastily and somewhat reluctantly, as it does daily, somewhat like a chastened child on his way to bed, who in the confusion forgets that he has to say goodnight. He’s returned, the helpless little cripple, and he’s sobbing into his elbow, “Look what you’ve done to me!” What a wretch! Day after day, the same story: I hear out his grievances, but absently; I argue with him, but without interest; I promise that I’ll do right by him tomorrow, but my mind is elsewhere; I warn him to cut it out, but I warn without passion. Because that’s pretty much it, my mind is elsewhere: on the harbor that awaits me. But where you enter, it seems to me, you don’t sail out from again, so I’m making sure I keep to the buoys that lead the way: straight ahead, sleep. A line of buoys leads me there, they’re quietly swaying on a very black, very languorous surface. The pilot plows through the water, which doesn’t so much as splash. As if he were slithering over it. This pilot is silence. – Today, however, he doesn’t quite want to be. In what silence there is, something