War & War (24 page)

11.

If he were to describe their reaction, Korin ventured, simply as
indescribable
, it would be only an overused, hackneyed form of speech that the young lady should not take literally, for the manuscript was particularly sensitive and precise on the subject of Kasser’s disappointment, dealing with it in great detail, and not only with that but with the whole
morning
after the exchange with the driver, at the conclusion of which they understood, not without considerable difficulty, that one purpose of the dawn message was to let them know that Mastemann did not envisage continuing the journey with them—and this was the point, explained Korin, this sensitivity, this refined eye, this proliferation of precise detail, the way
the manuscript had suddenly become extremely precise
, as a result of which an even stranger situation confronted him, for now, because of the valedictory at the end of the third chapter, it wasn’t events at the inn at Padua following the appearance of the peculiarly well-prepared driver with his peculiar mission that he wanted to tell her about, but the
description
and its extraordinary quality, in other words not about how, having understood the matter, Kasser and his companions themselves considered the idea of continuing their journey with Mastemann to be out of the question, since according to the thirteenth part of the message the road to Venice that they had so desired to take, either with Mastemann or with anyone else, meant nothing to them now, not about that but about all those apparently insignificant events and movements that had now become extremely important, or to put it as simply as he could, said Korin to the woman in an effort to clear the matter up, it was as if the manuscript had suddenly recoiled in shock, surveyed the scene and registered every person, object, condition, relationship and circumstance individually while utterly blurring the distinction between significance and insignificance, dissolving it, annihilating it: for while events of obvious significance continued to pile up, such as that Kasser and his companions continued to sit at the table facing the driver until he rose, bowed and left to start preparations for the departure of the carriage, to secure the luggage, to check the straps and examine the axles, following this, if such a thing was at all possible, the narration focused entirely on minute particulars of utter apparent insignificance such as the effect of the sunlight as it poured through the window, the objects it illuminated and the objects it left in shadow, the sound of the dogs and the quality of their barking, their appearance, their numbers and how they fell silent, on what the servants were doing in the rooms upstairs and throughout the whole house right down to the cellars, on what the wine left in the jug from the previous night tasted like, all this, the important and the unimportant, the
essential and the inessential
, catalogued indiscriminately together, next to each other, one above another, the lot building up into a single mass whose task it was to represent a condition, the essence of which was that there was literally nothing negligible in the facts that comprised it—and this, basically, was the only way that he could give her some idea, said Korin, of the fundamental change that overcame the manuscript, while all the time the reader, Korin raised his voice, carried on without noticing how he had come to accept and realize Kasser’s disappointment and bitterness, though it was only by registering this disappointment and bitterness that he could foresee what still lay ahead, for of course, much still did lie ahead, he said, the chapter leading to Venice would not abandon its readers at this point, only once Mastemann himself appeared at the turn of the stairs wearing a long dark-blue velvet cloak, his face stiff and ashen, and marched down to the ground floor, dropped a few ducats in the palm of the bowing landlord, then, without casting a glance at the travelers’ table, left the building, got into the carriage and galloped off along the bank of the Brenta while they remained at the table, and once the innkeeper came and placed a small white canvas package in front of them, explaining that the noble gentleman from Trento had commanded him to pass this on, after his departure, to the man they said was wounded, and once they opened the package and established the fact that what it contained was the finest powdered zinc for the healing of wounds, only once that had been recounted did the third chapter end, said Korin standing up, preparing to return to his room, with this mysterious gesture of Mastemann’s, then with their own settling of bills with the landlord, and, he hesitated in the doorway, with their farewells to him as they stepped through the gate into the brilliant morning light.

12.

All is of equal gravity, everything equally urgent, said Korin to the woman at noon the next day, no longer concealing the fact that something had happened to him and that he was on the edge of despair, not sitting down in his accustomed chair but walking up and down in the kitchen, declaring that either it was all nonsense, all of it, that is to say everything he was thinking and doing here, or that he had reached a critical point and was on the threshold of some decisive perception, then he rushed back into his room and for several days did not appear at all, not in the morning, not at five, not even in the evening, so on the third day it was up to the interpreter’s lover to open his door and with an anxious look on her face enquire,
It’s oil right?
or
Okay?
for nothing like this had happened before—not even to stick his head out of the door, for after all anything might have happened, but Korin answered with a simple,
Yes, it’s all right,
rose from the bed where he was lying fully dressed, smiled at the woman, then, in an entirely new and relaxed manner, told her that he would spend one more day thinking, but tomorrow, about eleven or so, he would appear in the kitchen again and tell her everything that had happened, but that wouldn’t be until tomorrow, having said which he practically pushed the woman out of the room, repeating, “about eleven,” and “most certainly,” then the lock clicked shut as he closed the door behind her.

13.

Well then, all is of equal gravity, everything equally urgent
, Korin declared the next day at precisely eleven o’clock, taking a long time to pronounce the words and holding his silence for a good while, at the end of which silence, having said all he had to say, he simply repeated, significantly:
Equal, young lady, and of the utmost importance.

1.

They took the wardrobe down first, the big one they used for clothes in the back room, and it wasn’t clear for some time why they were doing so, who had sent them or at first what they wanted, but they went about it, gripping their caps in their hands, gabbling away in a completely incomprehensible pigeon English, showing the woman a piece of paper with the interpreter’s signature on it then pushing their way into the apartment and getting to work at something that seemed to mean nothing in particular, tramping up and down through the rooms, hemming and hawing, taking the odd measurement, nudging to one side any object that happened to be in their way, in other words clearly taking stock, making lists, arranging the contents of the apartment—from the refrigerator to the dishcloth, the paper lampshade to the blankets used for curtains—into a sort of order, stringing the items together on some invisible thread then classifying them by some specific criterion, but betraying nothing about that criterion, assuming it was known to them, so that, by the end, with an ostentatious look at the clock and a your-obedient-servant look at the inhabitants, all four of them sat down on the kitchen floor and started eating their breakfasts, while both the frightened woman shrinking into the background, and Korin who had been roused from his work at the computer and was now staring this way and that wide-eyed, were too startled to say a word, both remaining in their original states, the first of frightened confusion, the second of idiotically gaping, the interpreter being nowhere to be found and therefore unable to offer an explanation; and nor was he available the next day, so even though they grasped the fact that he must have consented to the process they had not the foggiest idea why the four men, having finished their breakfast, mumbling away in their incomprehensible mother tongue and throwing the odd word at them, began removing all the movable objects in the apartment and loading them onto a truck waiting outside the house: the gas-fire, the kitchen table, the sewing machine, everything down to the last cracked salt cellar, in other words systematically removing every last item from the apartment; nor did they understand the next morning, after the men had ruthlessly taken away the beds they had left the night before, what they wanted when they rang the bell again and threw a huge roll of tape made of some synthetic material down in the corner, and, screwing their caps up in their hands, chorused a brief
morning
, then continued the previous day’s nightmarish activity, but this time in reverse, removing from the truck parked in front of the block countless numbers of wooden and cardboard boxes, among them certain heavy large items they could only manage between two or even occasionally four of them, using straps, dragging them upstairs for hours on end so that by noon the containers had piled up head high and there was nowhere to lie or sit or even move much, and the interpreter’s lover and Korin stood beside each other, squeezed into a corner of the kitchen, staring at the extraordinary upheaval until, at about four o’clock, the men departed and suddenly there was silence in the apartment, at which point, seeking an explanation, they began tentatively to open the boxes.

2.

They were proceeding along the West Side Elevated Highway, all four in apparently very good spirits, yesterday’s
catrafuse
, the Romanian for loot, being of immeasurable importance to them, a really big deal, they repeated to each other, slapping each other on the back, regularly breaking into laughter in the driver’s cab, the process of sneaking off with the
bozgors
’ or that bozo’s gear, and rather than delivering it all to the agreed garbage dump squirreling it away at their pad behind Greenpoint, having gone much smoother than they had imagined it would, since the fake certificate of dumping went unnoticed by everyone, for who the hell would have noticed, since the
catrafuse
was of the kind that would have been chucked away in any case, and as for Mister Manea, their benefactor as they referred to him, he was unlikely to be interested in such things, or so they told each other, and now they had everything they needed, beds, tables, a wardrobe, chairs, stove and a mass of other little items, enough to furnish a complete apartment, which was nothing to be sneezed at, including coffee cups and shoe brushes, the lot, and all for a single dime that Vasile had thrown out of the cab in superstition as they were leaving, and to throw all this away at the dump, such a wardrobe, such a bed, such a table and chair and stove and coffee cup and shoe brush was out of the question, they had decided, no, they would neatly take it home and no one would have the faintest idea where that was, the point being to spirit the stuff away, and indeed why not do so in Greenpoint for that matter, and fit out the entire apartment of a completely vacant block overlooking Newtown Creek with it, their own apartment, not to put too fine a point on it, the one that, following their arrival in the New World a bare two weeks ago, Mister Manea had offered them for seven hundred and fifty dollars a week, that is to say one hundred and eighty-eight each, on top of the employment, a deal they immediately accepted the day before yesterday when they took stock of the load they were to carry, decided there and then, and began to haul the stuff downstairs, stuff that was to be their own, the tenants of the apartment counting for nothing, not for a moment,
Mā bozgoroaicã curvā împutitã
, they said with a courteous smile at the woman, and
Dāte la o parte bosgor împutit
, they said to the man with a sideways glance, and it would have been great to laugh out loud, but they didn’t, just carried on shifting the stuff and left the laughing till later in the evening, when fully loaded up they set off toward Greenpoint, and then again now, when having got over their day of excitement, wondering whether they would be apprehended but weren’t, nobody asking or checking anything, enquiring where they were really taking the
catrafuse
, no one at all, they could happily drive down the West Side Elevated Highway, leaving behind the horrendous traffic of Twelfth Avenue, in other words after, and only after all this, could they allow themselves to laugh as they sat in the driver’s cab and laughed, after which they left off laughing for a while and stared out of the window, their eyes bright and their mouths wide open with astonishment at the blaze of headlights, their hands in their laps, three pairs of hands with fingers that could not be straightened, thirty terminally crooked fingers from the endless fetching and carrying; three pairs in their laps and one pair, Vasile’s, turning the steering wheel now left, now right, as they cut their way through the unknown, terrifying core of the city that was the frozen center of all their hopes.

3.

They’ve gone, said Korin to the woman on the evening of the first day of the upheaval, and looked terribly sad in the empty apartment, indeed more than sad: broken, defeated, exhausted, and, at the same time, highly tense, continually rubbing his neck, turning his head this way and that, going into his room then coming out again, and repeating this several times, clearly unable to stay in one place, in-out, in-out all the time, and whenever he reached the kitchen he looked through the gap left by the open door into the back room to see the woman sitting immobile on the bed, waiting, then he immediately looked away and moved on, until the evening when he finally plunged in and entered and sat down beside her but carefully so as to reassure her, not frighten her, nor did he talk about the subject he had first thought to talk about, about the discovery in the landing toilet, or about what they should do should they find themselves evicted, since, for his part, he took it for granted that this wasn’t about eviction, so no, he didn’t want to talk about such things, he explained to someone else later, but—and this would be genuinely reassuring—about the three long chapters he would now have to recount in one big go, though he would happily leave them aside or quickly pass over them and not mention them at all, but he couldn’t do this because then it would not be plain, clear, he said, that thing he had promised earlier to explain, and he couldn’t just skip over those three great chapters,
three chapters
, himself these last few days, nor could he simply say, OK, now everything is
absolutely clear
, the devil take it, and I won’t write up another line of it, though he might have said it because everything did in fact become
absolutely clear
, but he still had to finish it and not just abandon it like that, for
an archivist
does not leave things half done simply because he happens suddenly to have solved the puzzle,
the rebus
, for what actually happened was that he did in fact suddenly solve the puzzle, only once he had read through the entire material, that was true, but solve it he did and this led him to a comprehensive revaluation of his plans, in other words changed everything, though before he gets on to that, he declared, before he reveals what this is all about, he would say but one word: Corstopitum, that’s it, and just Gibraltar, and just Rome, for whatever happened he had to get back to where he had left off, for it was only the actual sequence of events as always, in every case, that made it possible to understand something, it being a matter solely and exclusively of
Continuous Understanding
, he said, seeking out the most appropriate phrase in his notebook, which is why he must refer back to Corstopitum and the terrible weather there, for it was truly terrible, this melancholy realm of eternal drizzle, terrible, an
enormity
, this constantly droning, bone-penetrating zero domain of icy wind, though more terrible still, he added, was the superhuman effort of the manuscript to provide descriptions of Corstopitum, followed by Gibraltar and Rome, for from this point on beyond the fourth chapter it was no longer a matter of the established practice of minutely cataloguing selected facts and circumstances, but of the ever deeper and ever more intensive exploration of selected facts and circumstances, which the young lady should try imagining, he told her, though what she was listening to with such nervous intensity was not him but to noises outside while he was leafing through a black and white notebook on his lap so that, for example, he noted the chapter began with four mentions of Segedunum, that is the say the mouth of the Tyne, and moved west to the fourth (!) manned passing place, then, from there on to the road that led to Corstopitum, four times in a row, four times the same thing (!), only filling it out every so often with an extra clause or so, but usually just with some adjective or adverb to drive the point home, as if somehow it were four distinct acts of breathing he wanted to describe, and with it of course everything concerning the journey through fog and rain that could be contained in four breaths, and thus repeating four times the experience of traveling the army communication route to the Heavenly Vallum, four times the story of how they changed horses at Condercum, of what first impression Kasser and his companions formed of the Vallum fortifications, of the forests and the military posts along the way, and of how they were stopped six miles before Vindolava where it was only the energetic intervention of the commander of the troop and the providing of a pass by the
Praefectus Fabrum
that persuaded the centurion in charge of the fort to allow them to continue toward Vindolava, though he could say the same of the Gibraltar episode where the repetition of the descriptions took a different form, such that it kept referring back to the extraordinarily precise
picture
it had drawn, and by continually keeping that picture in front of the reader it etched the image of the whole ineradicably on his mind, for example how, in the fifth section, it preserved the spectacle witnessed by Kasser and the others when, having reached Calpe by the mainland route they arrived at an enormous inn with the name of Albergueria and having settled into their rooms there they went downstairs to exchange some money and looked out of the window to catch a first glimpse of the spectral gathering of galleons, frigates and corvettes,
naviguelas
,
caravelles
and a variety of hulks below in the fog-bound bay: craft from Venice, Genoa, Castile, Brittany, Algeria, Florence, Vizcaya, Pisa, Lisbon and who knows how many others kinds of vessels in that absolute graveyard stillness, that immediately declared what happens when you get a spell of
calma chicha
, the sea becalmed, said Korin, among the dangerously narrow, fatal straits of Gibraltar, and this was what confronted the mind of the reader, such an image and other images like it, drawn in lines of ever greater depth, and confronted him too when, between the writing of the fourth and fifth chapters the beginnings of an understanding burst upon him and he realized that this was how he should express the matter, as regards what still remained to understand.