Memoirs Found In a Bathtub (22 page)

“I only know that you told me what they told you to tell me.

“And you wouldn’t believe me if I denied that, and you shouldn’t, because even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be the truth. Who knows?”

“Don’t you?”

“After what I’ve just said, you should know better than that. True, I was not actually given any such order. But perhaps my superior was, perhaps he chose that I should carry it out without my knowledge. Or perhaps the choosing was without his knowledge too, in which case he had no choice. Listen: I don’t know what the Building really is. Dolt may have been right. Perhaps there were originally two sides which, locked in mortal combat, eventually devoured one another. Perhaps, too, this is not a madness of men, but of an organization, an organization that grew too much and one day met a remote offshoot of itself, and began to swallow it up, and swallowed and swallowed, reaching back to itself, back to its own center, and now it loops around and around in an endless swallowing… In which case, there need be no other Building, except as a pretense to hide its autophagia…”

“What are you?”

“A priest, as you know.”

“A priest? You turned me over to Major Erms! You only wear a cassock to hide the uniform!”

“And do you only wear a body to hide the skeleton? Try to understand. I am hiding nothing. You say I betrayed you. But here everything is illusion: betrayal, treason, even omniscience—for omniscience is not only impossible, but quite unnecessary when its counterfeit suffices, a fabrication of stray reports, allusions, words mumbled in one’s sleep or retrieved from the latrines… It is not omniscience but the faith in it that matters.”

Would they or would they not want him to tell me this?

Now grown very pale, he hissed with unexpected vehemence:

“You
still
believe in the Building’s wisdom! What else can I say? You’ve seen the men in command, those deaf, wart-covered sclerotic relics at the top! Look here.”

He took a small, smooth stone out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was spotted like a bird’s egg.

“Nothing but a stupid piece of gravel! A few spots … a little hole here… But take a million pieces of gravel like this, a trillion, and an atmosphere will form around them, the wind will blow over them, and cosmic rays will bombard them—until from out a pile of debris there will crawl forth something we call—Sacred… And who gave the order? Who? It is exactly the same with the Building…”

“You mean, the Building is Nature itself?”

“Heavens, no! They have nothing in common beyond the fact that they are both ineffably perfect. And here you thought you were a prisoner in a labyrinth of evil, where everything was pregnant with meaning, where even the theft of one’s instructions was a ritual, that the Building destroyed only in order to build, to build only in order to destroy the more—and you took this for the wisdom of evil… Hence your mental somersaults and contortions. You writhed on the hook of your own question mark to solve that equation of horror. But I tell you there is no solution, no equation, no destruction, no instructions, no evil—there is only the Building—only—the Building—”

“Only the Building?” I echoed, my hair on end.

“Only the Building,” he echoed my echo, shivering. “This is not wisdom, this is a blind and all-encompassing perfection, a perfection not of man’s making but which arose from man, or rather from the community of man. Human evil, you see, is so petty and frail, while here we have something grand and mighty at work… An ocean of blood and sweat and urine! One thundering death rattle from a million throats! A great monument of feces, the product of countless generations! Here you can drown in people, choke on them, waste away in a vast wilderness of people! Behold: they will stir their coffee as they calmly tear you to shreds, chat and pick their noses as they outrage your corpse, and brew more coffee as it stiffens, and you will be a hairless, worn-out and abandoned doll, a broken rattle, an old rag yellow and forgotten in the corner… That is how perfection operates, not wisdom! Wisdom is you, yourself—or maybe two people! You and someone else, that intimate flash of honesty from eye to eye…”

I watched his deathly pale face and wondered where I’d heard all this before, it sounded so familiar. Then I remembered—that sermon, the sermon about choking, evil and the Devil, the sermon which Brother Persuasion told me was intended as provocation…

“How can I believe you?” I groaned. He shuddered.

“O sinner!!” he screamed in a whisper. “Dost thou still doubt that what may be a harmless conversation or joke on one level doth constitute, on another, legal action and, on yet another, a battle of wits between Departments? Verily, if thou followest this line of thought, thou shalt end up nowhere, since here anything, hence everything, leadeth everywhere!”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Treason is inevitable. But the Building’s purpose is to make treason impossible. Ergo, we must make the inevitable evitable. But how? Obliterate truth. What’s treason when truth is but another way of lying? That is why there is no place here for any real action, whether legitimate despair or honest crime—anything genuine will weigh you down, drag you to the bottom for good. Listen! Come in with me! We’ll form a secret alliance, a conspiracy of two! This will liberate us!”

“You’re mad!”

“No! If we trust one another, we can save ourselves yet. I will restore you to yourself, and you will do the same for me. Only in this way can we be free!”

“They’ll arrest us!”

“All the more reason we should work together! Knowing our cause is lost from the start, we will redeem ourselves! I shall die for you and you shall die for me—and they’ll never be able to take that truth from us! Think of it! You will be Christ, and I Judas—since I was ordered to incite you to treason as an agent provocateur…”

“What are you saying?”

“You
still
don’t understand? I’m an
agent provocateur
because I’m a priest. Only as your agent provocateur am I, a priest, allowed to say what I’ve said here. Of course, we expect you to cooperate…”

“How could I possibly cooperate?”

“How could you not? You’re obviously at the end of your rope. Today you denounced an innocent man, a man who was on your side, for Dolt was—as far as you knew—on your side when you denounced him. You’ll cooperate all right, if not now, then tomorrow, if not with me, then with somebody else. But then, don’t you see, you’ll be cooperating on the Building’s terms, which means cooperating just for appearances. Don’t do that! Cooperate here and now, once and for all, heart and soul, so that in the foul bosom of Treachery we may bear witness to the blessed birth of Truth!”

“But then you’ll have to inform on me as the man who agreed to join your conspiracy!”

“Of course! And they’ll take it as a false conspiracy, a conspiracy entered into only under orders, not realizing that your betrayal is voluntary, from the heart as it were, and so you, knowing this and acting with that knowledge, will fill the dreadful vacuum, and thus our conspiracy, engineered by the Building to be another false conspiracy, will become Flesh. Will you cooperate now?”

I was silent.

“You refuse?” he asked, and a tear rolled down his cheek.

I sat there, my leg still dancing, and I didn’t see or hear him any longer. Once again I was surrounded by those endless rows of white corridors and white doors, robbed of everything that could ever be mine. It was with the lifeless light of the labyrinth before me that I said:

“I’ll cooperate.”

His face lit up. He turned away and dabbed his forehead and cheeks with a handkerchief.

“Now you wonder if I’ll
really
betray you,” he said at last. “It can’t be helped. All promises, vows and oaths are worthless here, so I’ll only say this: not today. Also, no recognition signals: they wouldn’t help. Our weapon will be openness—we’ll make no secret of our conspiracy and they’ll never believe us. Now I’ll go and denounce you to my superior. Meanwhile, act natural, do whatever you would normally do.”

“I should go to the Registry then?”

“Would you otherwise?”

“I guess not.”

“Then don’t. Get some rest instead, you’ll need your strength. Tomorrow, after dinner, between the two marble caryatids near the elevator on the seventh level, Two will be waiting for you.”

“Two?”

“That’s me. Our code names.”

“And I’m One?”

“Right. I’d better leave now. We shouldn’t be seen together—it’ll look suspicious.”

“Wait! What should I say if they interrogate me before we meet again?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Can I betray you?”

“Of course. They already know about our conspiracy—the false one, that is, not the true one. As long as you don’t begin to—”

He broke off.

“And you too.”

“And me too, yes. It’s best not to think too much. Just remember: this way we save one another, we redeem ourselves, even if we perish. Farewell.”

He left quickly, stirring the air with his departure—a pleasant breeze.

He was off to denounce me—ostensibly. But how did I know it was only ostensibly? Either way, I didn’t care. I got up. I had something to say but there was no one around to listen. I coughed deliberately, to hear myself. But the room had no echo. I peeked into the next room—a table and a tape recorder, its spools slowly turning. I took them off, tore the tape into little pieces and stuffed my pockets with them, then headed for the bathroom.

The wailing in the pipes woke me up. I opened my eyes and noticed for the first time that the bathroom ceiling had a bas-relief: a scene from paradise. There was Adam and Eve playing hide-and-seek among the trees, and the serpent lurking on a branch, apparently debating whether or not to take a bite out of Eve’s plump behind, and there was an angel on a cloud busily writing a denunciation—exactly as Dolt had described it. Dolt! I sat up, wide awake, and realized I was freezing—the towel wrapped around my naked body was no protection against the chill of that tiled floor—I was stiff as a corpse. Only a long, hot bath brought me back to life. Then I looked myself over in the mirror. It was no surprise to find an old man looking back at me. Yesterday had lasted forever, drained me, taken a lifetime … if only that idiotic song wouldn’t plague me…

I was singing it even now—I could tell—my lips moved in the mirror! Come to think of it, though, I hadn’t really aged. Merely a bad hangover. I must have been dead drunk to have accepted Father Orfini’s proposition. A conspiracy—good Lord! And a conspiracy of two!

I sang in the empty bathroom—listened—no one was joining in. I was accustomed to eating at odd hours—on the other hand, I wasn’t hungry after last night (night?)—so I gargled a little and left.

At the elevator I realized I wasn’t my old self—I mean, where was I going anyway? Peace and quiet, that’s what I needed. The smartest thing would be to join a crowd and follow it to some big meeting or assembly. There I could collect my thoughts without standing out—and get away from the bathroom and this hateful isolation!

But there was no crowd, only an occasional officer—and one can’t follow an occasional officer very well. I wandered up and down the fifth level, then the sixth, took an elevator to the eighth where I seemed to recall the doors along one corridor, indicating the presence of a large hall on the other side. Today the corridor was empty. I waited around for a while. No one showed up. I went in.

The anteroom of a large museum. Along the highly polished parquet stood a row of long showcases that blazed light in the general gloom. The lane between them ended in a turn, but the reflection on the dark walls there indicated more of the same around the turn. On display were hands—hands severed at the wrist, often clasped in pairs on their glass shelves, very true-to-life hands, too true-to-life—not only was the skin dull and the fingernails shiny, but there were even little hairs on the backs. Frozen in an incredible number of poses, they seemed caught forever in roles of a vast drama, a theater under glass. I decided to go through the entire collection. Why not? I had plenty of time to kill. I passed: the hands of a saint (praying) and the hands of a sinner (dealing cards); fists of anger, fists of despair, and triumphant fists; then challenging hands and hands of denial; senile fingers giving a shaky blessing, senile fingers begging for bread; then some indecent gestures; over here, the shy blossoming of sweet innocence in the shadow of doom, and over there, a mother’s relentless concern. I followed the turn and walked on, then stopped to take in one particularly heartwarming scene—enacted by the most eloquent gesture imaginable—but found it a bit too cloying and so moved on. The connoisseur awoke within me. Now I could appraise an expression at a glance—this was shallow, that a trifle overdone, and so on—and soon grew weary and bored, began looking for more complex, more subtle presentations, and quickly found that the creators of this exhibit had the very same idea—around the next turn, the gestures were more and more controlled, laconic, enigmatic … ambiguous…

No waving of fists here, no rude insistence—the maudlin twist of fingers breathed foul play, for that rosy enclosure shielded not a bright (imaginary) candle but, crouched furtively there in the palm, the little finger, the pinkie, and where did the pinkie point? My interest was rekindled. I savored, like vintage wine, the way one finger suddenly side-stepped the monastic solemnity of its fellows and signaled to someone behind my back—deceit and deception indeed permeated the digital air, that patted and pointed space from shelf to shelf, for one gesture negated another nearby or across the way, and a forest of fingers clamored at the glass or gathered in the shadows to connive among many thumbs… Here a plump knuckle frolicked and cut capers, and there were handsprings, handstands, but suddenly in the midst of their innocent abandon a hangnail passed across a wrist, all thumbs turned down, and accusingly they pointed—they pointed—they pointed at me!!