Since there
was scarcely any interval between the lightning and the thunder, Keuschnig found no time to think about his dreams. For a while the morning storm gave him a feeling of homeâa gloomy summer morning in the country. In the back garden of the next-door apartment a man and a woman were talking calmly and with long pauses, as though it were already evening! Or as if they were blind, Keuschnig thought.âAll over the house, people were running to close windows they had just opened. Record players and radios were turned off. It began to rain, but the sound didn't soothe him. The rain wasn't for him; it was for other people in this foreign country. The sky wasn't so dark any more, and that sent a disagreeable chill through him. Because he was unable to go on, his disgust, his exasperation suddenly struck him as LAZINESS, and because his laziness made him feel guilty, his nausea became worse than ever, but he was no longer convinced, as he had been, that it was justified. This guilty conscience over my listlessness, he asked himselfâdoes it stem from my ancestry, which says: Work hard, then nothing can go wrong? Or from religion? Enough of that!
His brain seemed
physically
to reject all attempts at explanation.
THINGS, at least, were comforting that morning: the hot water of the shower on his belly, he wished he could stay under it forever; the soft towel, in which he suddenly smelled the vinegar his hair had been rinsed in years before in another country. He decided not to shave. That was a decision and it relieved him. Then he shaved after all and strode through the apartment, proud of this second decision.
In one of the front rooms he found Stefanie, dressed in a gray traveling suit. She was sitting at a marble-topped desk, writing something in block letters. “I'm only waiting for the storm to pass,” she said. “Then I want you to call me a taxi.” She looked at him and said: “It doesn't really matterâI'm happy, and at the same time I could kill myself, or I could just sit down and listen to records. I only feel sorry because of the child.” Her face, thought Keuschnig, looks as if she'd slept in her misery. And he also thought: She could have washed the dishes first. Horrified by her fixed animal eyes, her enlarged black nostrils, he couldn't get a word out. “Are you sick?” she asked, as though there were a hope and she would be able to help him if at least he would say he was sick. But Keuschnig was silent. Finding nothing to say, he caught himself thinking: Maybe I should buy her a present; but what? “Call the taxi now,” she said. The phone number was another one of those THINGS he found comforting that day. The same digitâor almostârepeated over and over. Suddenly as he was listening to
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
and waiting for the taxi company's switchboard to answer, Stefanie fell downâwithout putting out her hands to cushion the fall. He bent over her and slapped her
face. As far as he was concerned, she might just as well be dead. “In five minutes,” said the operator. He couldn't help laughing. Stefanie lay still and he, so insensible he could hardly breathe, lifted her up. He didn't want her to go, though her presence got on his nerves.âAs she was getting into the taxi, he wanted to say: I hope you come back. But the wrong words came out, and in the intended tone he said: “I hope you die.”âThe sun was shining again. The sky was blue, the street almost dry. Only the tops of the cars coming from the still overcast north glistened with trembling drops of water. A broad luminous rainbow arched over the Bois de Boulogne. At a time like this, he thought, something might begin for someone else.
Keuschnig went to the desk and read the note Stefanie had written: “Don't expect me to supply you with the meaning of your life.”âWith a sense of humiliation he thought: She beat me to it. Now I can't say that to her.âAll at once he felt like a character in a story told long ago. “That morning he woke up earlier than usual. Even the twittering of the birds still had a sleepy sound to it. A hot day was in the offing ⦔ That was how stories about last days began. The rainbow was still there, but now he wished it away. He went down the long corridor to the child's room with the ridiculous feeling that his handkerchief was in the wrong pocket, the left instead of the right. How stolidly he continued to exist!
Helplessly he watched the sleeping child. He sniffed at her. She turned over. Finally she woke up with a sigh, but didn't notice him. She only cried out: “I want a coconut,” and dropped off to sleep again. She woke up with a WISH ! he thought. She opened her eyes again, and with her first
glance looked far out the window. He made himself noticeable and she looked at him without surprise. “A snow-white cloud has just flown by,” she said. He looked with dismay at the chocolate smudges on her sheetâwould he have to change her bedding on top of everything else? Unthinkable. When she wanted to say something, he bent over expressly to show he was paying attention, but that only made him more inattentive than ever. Absently he held her close. “Don't forget me,” he said senselessly. “Sometimes I forget you,” she replied. In leaving the room he looked at himself in the mirror.
Before lighting the gas in the kitchen to warm the milk, he had one of his
idées fixes:
they were in the desert, and the match he was now striking was the last. Would it burn? When the match caught fire, he was very much relieved. Then another hallucination: Martial law had been declared, it would be impossible to go shopping in the foreseeable future. Anxiously he looked into the icebox, which was almost empty. He phoned the ambassador and said he couldn't go to work because the child was sick. That's asking for bad luck, he thought, and corrected himself: No, not really sick, he just had to take her to the dispensary for her inoculations.âWhat if she comes down with something because of my lie? he thought after hanging up, and looked her over. She lay in bed yawning, and he took that as a good sign. On the other hand, the overturned toy pail in her room was a warning. He carefully set it straight. Then, rummaging in his trouser pocket, he found two month-old tickets to the marionette theater in the Luxembourg Gardens, and for a few moments felt perfectly safe. A little later he caught himself folding a white sheet in the doorway of the child's
room. Alarmed, he took the sheet somewhere else ⦠The air had gone out of a balloon during the night! He quickly blew it up again. And surely it was no accident that the sausage the child was eating in bed was called
morta
della! He took it away from her and gave her a piece of garlic sausage instead ⦠He himself ate a pear, core, stem, and all, as only a carefree man could have doneâthat restored the balance, didn't it? And to counter the next bad sign in advance, he picked up a book from the floor and placed it accurately in the bookcase.âLater, when he squeezed a toothpaste tube he had thought empty and something came out, he was moved to see how THINGS were coming to his help.
He sat down in the garden, which was now sunny again, and began to shine all the shoes he could lay his hands on. If only he would never run out of shoes! The child looked on in silence, and he managed not to think of anything. When he did think of something, his thoughts were like a soothing half sleep ⦠The sun had warmed the insides of his shoes, and he felt a spurt of happiness when he stepped into them. But what if his sense of security were only a passing mood? The thought jolted him and spoiled his good humor.
He wandered around the apartment, picked things up with the intention of putting them away and after a while put them back where he had found them. He would take a few steps, stop, and turn about, and it suddenly occurred to him that in his perplexity and disgruntlement he was doing a kind of dance.âHe couldn't pass a mirror without looking at himself. He would turn away from one mirror in disgust and look at himself in another. I'm really dancing! he
thought. This idea, at least, made it possible for him to move through the somber rooms from end to end of the apartment.
He wanted to watch the train as it passed the house on its way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where you could change and be at the seaside in two hours ⦠He waited at an open window, and at length a train left the Auteuil station. The light bulbs in the cars flickered as the train passed over the switches. He saw the broad yellow stripes on the cars and the blue sparks under the wheels as something very personal, something exclusively meant for him ⦠The passengers sat propped on their elbows, their faces benignly calm and relaxed, as though they couldn't conceivably think any evil, not at least for the first hundred yards after the train left the station â¦
He wanted to go out. But Agnes wanted to stay home. He tried to dress her. When she resisted, he came very close to forcing her into her clothes. He punched his head so hard the tears came to his eyes. Then he left the room and tore up paper. He felt as if he were going to bash his head against the wallâwithout conviction!
Again he started wandering around. Agnes sat painting watercolors, at the same time eating a piece of cake and smacking her lips. Suddenly he saw himself throw a knife at her. He hurried over and touched her. She pushed him away, not out of hostility, but because he was interfering with what she was doing. He wanted to throw the dirty paint water in her face. If at least he could tell her his story about yesterday, how he had had only to speak and the world obeyed. He tried, but he was so far away, so hopelessly absent, that he garbled every sentence. She laughed at his mistakes and
corrected him. “Go away!” she said. Suddenly he was afraid of killing her with a blow of his fist. He went away, far away, and made faces at himself. It seemed to him that with the mere thought of striking Agnes he had forever forfeited the right to be with her for so much as a second. The mortar on the walls looked oozy; in another minute it would fall to the floor in cakes. Even in the toilet, where he always had felt blessed relief the moment he had pushed the bolt, he didn't feel safe any more. He sat there awhile, too apathetic to squeeze out the shit; then he went somewhere else and stood around, at a loss for anything to do. He thought of what Stefanie had once said when he had asked her if she wouldn't like to go to London for a few days: “I have no desire to SIT in London all by myself.” And here I sit, he thought, like a woman SITTING in a hotel room in a strange city. The child prevents me from thinking!âBut maybe, through the child, I could learn a different way of thinking.âHe felt alone in a disagreeable way. In a suddenly remembered image, he saw a furrow that had just been plowed and the writhing parts of a white grub that the plow had cut in two. For a little while he walked in a circle with his head bowed, round and round. The child had such reasonable wishes: that he should make her a paper airplaneâthat he should simply PLAY with her. But it was impossible for him to play now, to satisfy her reasonable wishes. She was taking everything he had thrown into the trash basket out again ⦠He phoned for the time and heard the revoltingly brutal voice of a man, whom he pictured fat and misanthropic in an armchair, announcing the hour. Again he walked in a circle, his heart growing heavier and heavier. From time to time he shouted at the child to leave him
alone. If he could only kick someone! But who? He walked, saw, breathed, heardâthe worst of it was that he also lived!
While roaming from place to place he absently read the print on some circular that was lying around. When at the end of it he sighted the words “Yours very truly,” he felt they were addressed to him personally, and that encouraged him. Avidly he reread the whole circular. “We congratulate youâyou have made a good purchase.” He found a picture postcard he had received from a vacationing woman friend: “I dreamed of you last night and I am thinking of you now.” He read all the letters that had come in the last few days. How tender they were, how wistfulâas though people not only slept longer and had sweeter dreams during their summer vacations but took their dreams more seriously.âStill, it depressed him to recognize the handwriting on an envelope. He longed for a letter from someone he didn't know.
He washed the night's dishes, ironed a few handkerchiefs, and sewed a snap on one of Agnes's dresses. He was very pleased with himself when he had finished, and kept going back to look at his handiwork. He thought of Stefanie, who had spent most of her life either at home with her parents or at a girls' boarding school, and how grateful she had been when they went to a restaurant together and she didn't have to eat everything on her plate. The way she'd looked at himâon the verge of tears â¦
He played cheerful, whistling and humming for fear that too much quiet would upset Agnes in the next room. “Stop it!” she cried. What could he do to amuse her? Once, when he bumped into something, he exaggerated the pain and shrieked, in the hope of relieving the monotony. Then he asked “Do you want an apple?” in a tone suggesting that
the apple was THE IDEA. Before washing the apple, he made an extra trip to show it to her. That was a way of communicating with her, he couldn't think of any other. “Look how red it is!” he cried, affecting surprise in the hope that she would be surprised. The redness of the apple was bound to teach her something that he himself could not. He was terrified that she would ask him: “What should I do now?”âbecause he would have nothing whatever to suggest.
He decided to go to the kitchen. On the way, it suddenly seemed important to look up a certain restaurant. But instead he searched the guides in vain for another restaurant, on the seaside, where he had once been served a
pâté maison
with sand in it. He resumed his trek to the kitchen, but turned back because there was still an ash tray that needed emptying in the dining room. Then he remembered all the unmade beds and, still holding the full ash tray, went to make them. But first he wanted to put out the light in the bathroom. On the way he saw a newspaper and stopped to read it ⦠Then at last he went to the kitchen and turned on the water without knowing why; after a while he turned it off again.