War & War (38 page)

Moon, valley, dew, death.

Behind the counter the refrigerator shuddered and gave a loud crack as if wanting to give up the ghost but then decided against it, and started up again, rattling as it painfully resumed its business, and the two liter bottles of COCA-COLA that must have shifted in the convulsive movement now found themselves next to each other and began to tinkle and chime with the vibration.

Revolution
—Korin proclaimed as the four words in his head, like four rooks circling in the darkness, were slowly absorbed into the vanishing horizon.

What is more, a revolution of world historical moment, he said, and having made this grave announcement, it was as if his strange manner of speaking were striving for some consonance, for there came a change, a change that the ravages and predictable consequences of drunkenness had made entirely predictable, a change, whereby the mind had hitherto been strapped into place, and the continuity between throat and tongue that had been maintained only with the utmost effort to prevent the words falling apart, shifted key as it was bound to do. For while the words had till now been broken up like stones into distinct syllables, there now began a complete reversal of the process so that they ran into each other, the power that had hitherto disciplined and ordered them having suddenly run out of steam, and his speech was held together only by some bitter compulsion, a compulsion that after three ill-fated days of searching for the appropriate celestial luminaries he should at all costs now finish what he had to say, what the finally and painfully located emissary of such luminaries should, in his opinion, at all costs have to hear, and his capacities being such as they were it was like watching a train crash, the engine hitting the stationary vehicle while the phonemes, like the cars piled into each other, required the notary of heaven and earth to whom the speech was addressed, to descry the word “revolution” from the ruins of “rvshon” and the sense “world-historical” from “wrldstical.”

I … Ikdnto … thefyoor … atard … spisl …
Korin declared in the appropriate new spirit.

And since this signified that he had reached a state of terminal disillusion in the celestial light that had, so to say, cleared the doors of his perception, he felt genuinely capable of having “looked into the future at our disposal,” a future—if he might condense everything that meant anything into a single word, he raised his voice—that frankly horrified him. It horrified him, he continued at the same volume, and it broke his heart, for so far he had only been speaking of how the good and transcendent were defeated as the result of a loathsome rebellion, but now that he had had a glimpse into the future he, Korin, could report that his vision of that future had clarified, that this future that had been based on rebellion, lacked not only the good and the transcendent, but the perspectives provided by the good and transcendent, that is to say, he continued with increasing tension in his voice, the way he saw it, it wasn’t so much a case of the good and transcendent of the future being usurped by the bad and mean-spirited, but of something radically, startlingly different, a future that would lack both good and bad, that at least is what Korin had recognized when, the doors of his perception having been cleansed, as they say, he had a glimpse of the dark future, when he looked forward and sought what he could not find, for the perspective was lacking, the perspective whereby the scale of the aforementioned good and transcendent might be related to the scale of the aforementioned bad and mean-spirited; that set of perspectives required to gauge the value of actions and intentions, those shadowy and ever more disquietingly lifeless perspectives—the empty glass was trembling in his hand again—were broken and unusable in that future, or, to employ a somewhat frivolous analogy, they had passed their sell-by dates much like the goods displayed in the refrigerators of butchers’ stalls at the market, and once he had understood this, once he had reached the bottom of that safely strapped-in mind, it not only broke his heart, it simply and utterly crushed him because suddenly there in front him there opened the saddest map in the world, that of a whole disappearing continent, the true Atlantis which was now completely and irretrievably lost. These are the words of a broken man, quite broken, said Korin, his voice fading, and so that there should be no doubt as to whom he meant he tried to indicate himself with the empty glass. Since this movement meant letting go of the counter then recovering his balance, the gesture turned out to be much grander than he had intended, so grand that it seemed to include the entire buffet where nothing had changed so there was no one present who might have felt himself included in it, for the figure chiefly addressed seemed to be frozen, completely shrouded in smoke, and the pair of beggars seemed to slide ever further beyond the actual compass of the premises. Their scarves had slipped to the floor, their heavy coats were open, and they no longer sat, but in their unabated passion, seemed to have assumed a horizontal position. The old male was on top, his moustache and beard completely soaked in saliva. He was kissing the female in a frenzy, squeezing her hard, only momentarily loosening his hold on her so that he might seize her again, accommodating her to the waves of his cresting desire, seizing her with ever more convulsive vehemence. The old woman no longer simply reminded him of a dead bird, but bore it all as if the bird had collapsed in on itself, dangling in the old man’s embrace as though raised in mid-swoon, spent, helpless, resigned, indifferent, surrendering like a servant to its master, obliged to let herself be used according to any command, and only once the increasingly demanding, ever more unchecked, panting and gripping kisses no longer allowed her to remain in her passive state, did she obey the imperative of response with the faintest, hardly perceptible raising of her left hand from the floor in an attempt to stroke the other’s face. But since her attempt to reach the face had twice been obstructed by considerable rolls of fat, her hand grew uncertain as to how to resolve the contradiction between fat and face, and dropped back to the floor, that is to say having started to rise by reflex it hovered for a moment hopelessly then began to sink back again, past the neck, past the ribcage, past the top of the stomach, to hesitate halfway between face and floor, to intrude itself between the two tightly pressed bodies, to shift in the first place from the dome of the old man’s stomach down toward her own, then, sliding further down, to locate the simple mechanism of the fly and after a certain amount of fumbling to reach the erect male member. The scarves were crushed beneath them by now, and their legs kicking and straining now this way, now that, caused considerable ruckus among the plastic bags too. None of them was completely kicked over but they were shedding items, or to be precise, items were trailing from them like the intestines of a mangy dog that had been run down by a car, the sleeve of a greasy shirt from one, the frayed electric cord of an old iron from the second, the terry cloth material of belts from old bathrobes from the third, a set of door handles tied attached to a ring from the fourth, dirty underwear from the fifth, two yellowing Advent wreaths from the sixth and so on from the seventh to the twelfth, from the pile of felt strips to the toilet paper rolls, all of which created a filthy mess between their shuffling feet, there where a thin faint light from above could expose it to view, and the mess the dirty light revealed conclusively defined the status of the owners of those legs, and equally conclusively differentiated them from the quite improbable province of the buffet, locating them in another reality, as the sickly writhing progeny of the waste dump below them, since they seemed genuinely to have grown out of the dump, and were continuing to grow minute by minute, their legs growing ever more irreversibly entangled with the waste, and their embraces, the way they were joined together on the wooden floor of the booth, added to the complexity, like a shadow that swam first one way then another caught in the thickets of a sudden, unpronounceable sentence signaling desire. They were flat out on the floor by now, the table shielding them from the eyes of anyone at the counter so that nothing could be seen of them, only an occasional elbow as it was raised to indicate in its own mysterious vague fashion what might be going on down there. The man at the counter pushed away the current cigarette and lit a new one.

Deargel!
…. Korin leant closer to him.
Evring … iverd … zonzat … atliss!

What he meant, he continued quietly, was, really and truly, that everything he ever had was on that Atlantis, everything he ever had, he repeated a few times, putting the accent now on everything and now on had, then straightened up again, regained balance by resting his right arm on the counter and was clearly struggling to gather himself so that he might continue with his account in the detached, unemotional manner in which he had begun, especially now that he had reached the point at which it seemed likely to take a particularly delicate turn. For from this point on his peculiar way of stringing words together, which seemed to be addressed exclusively to the notary of heaven and earth, was engaged in explaining how difficult it was to continue his account in such a detached yet detailed manner in the light of all that had happened, and how terrible was the taste in his mouth, a taste that extended to the tiniest detail, when he was painfully obliged to itemize all that had disappeared with the sinking of Atlantis. Let us therefore mention the mornings and the afternoons, said Korin, the evenings, the nights; all the unforgettable, enchanting hours of spring and fall, when we knew the meaning of innocence and conscience, of good will and companionship, of love and freedom, so moving in thousands of old stories; when we knew what a child was, what lovers were, when we knew what was fading away and what was coming into being, all those things that for someone waking or for someone entering a dream were so unarguably eternal; such things, he said, can no more be expressed in words than can the pain caused by the utter loss, the non-existence, of their enchantment, their heart-shaking and eternal being, for the pain ran so deep that it simply could not be circumscribed or articulated, it could only be mentioned, discussed to some extent, referred to, and so he, Korin, was now at least mentioning it, discussing it a little, no more than referring to it, to this aforementioned pain, to indicate roughly where it was and how deep it ran. For he had to confess, he confessed, that when he first decided to render this account at what, for him, was this highest and most holy of tribunals, to tell of this decisive historical turn in human affairs; when he first determined that it would be he who would finally inform the denizens of heaven that the reign of good was finally at an end, that its time, like the time remaining for him to render his account, was run; then, at that point of decision, he had hoped that he would be able to describe the fatal wounding of his spirit, the sense of being hunted and struck down by melancholy at one and the same time, to describe the punishment or price set by fate for his recognition of this state of affairs. And now he was standing here, now that he knew that this was the proper occasion, his report was concluded, and he had absolutely nothing more to add. There was nothing left that was his, he said, nothing, no possessions, no place on earth, the place where he might have deposited his personal memory was lost, that’s to say he couldn’t even give the things he had lost a decent burial, the place had sunk, vanished without trace, and the knowledge of a higher order of things that was once part of him had sunk with it, swallowed by the last of the waves that covered Atlantis; to put it in a nutshell, he said, this should have been the right time to tell all, but now, even though he felt its presence, knew it inside out, he was incapable of speaking. And the feeling of personal pain, the sense of being harried, of deepening melancholy, was partly borne of the bitter loss of the aforementioned mornings and evenings, the enchanting histories, the honor, the sense of eternity and heartbreaking loveliness, and partly of a recognition that defied belief, that the mornings and evenings had themselves vanished, as had the histories and codes of honor; and not only the good but the bad mornings and bad evenings, bad histories, bad faith, because, he said, it so happened that the good dragged the bad down with it, so that one day you woke or went to bed and realized that there was no longer any point in drawing distinctions between waking and sleeping, between morning and morning, between evening and evening, since the distinction had suddenly, from one day to the next, become meaningless, for at that point you understood that there was only one morning and one evening, that at least was what happened to him, said Korin, for he saw that there was just one of each thing to be shared by everyone, one morning and one evening, one history and one honor—it was only the enchantment, the heartbreaking beauty, the sense of eternity that was not shared, since they no longer existed, and furthermore, said Korin, in feeling this pain a man begins to feel that he has imagined it all, that there never had been such a state of affairs, never. That’s to say, he continued unremittingly, and it was very clear from the way his voice broke from time to time, that his thoughts were leading him into such deeply emotional territory that he would be powerless to resist, that’s to say, he said, that mornings and evenings no longer existed for him, he had neither history nor honor, and since it was all the same to him where he was he might as well be nowhere, that is to say, his voice broke again and again, it deeply grieved him to report that the future of mankind was standing before them in his, Korin’s, person, for he was already living in the future, in a future where it had become absolutely impossible to speak of loss because the very act of speaking had become impossible, for everything you said in the language turned into a lie the instant you pronounced it, and particularly when anyone tried to speak of mornings and evenings, particularly of histories and honor, and most particularly of enchantment, of the shaken heart, of eternal truth. And this condition, said Korin, for someone like him, who saw clearly that this tragic turn of events was not the product of supernatural agency, not of divine judgment, but of the actions of a peculiarly horrible heterogeneous bunch of people, there was nothing left to do than to use the rest of his speech to lay the most terrible, most incurable curse on them, so that if reality itself were incapable of addressing them, the language of curses might at least establish such terms that the sheer weight of words would cause the ground under these unprecedentedly repulsive people to give way, or cause the sky to fall in on them, or cause all the misery wished on them to take effect. So he was cursing them, he said in a voice trembling with emotion, cursing the mean and degenerate; let the dry flesh fall from their bones and turn to dust; he cursed them once, he cursed them a thousand times; that they should prepare themselves for ruin, for the time their children, their orphans, their widows roamed the world unconsoled, as he has roamed it, starving and fearful in the impenetrable darkness, abandoned forever. He cursed them, he said, cursed those on whom curses had never nor ever would take effect; he cursed those who worked evil and destroyed trust; he cursed the cold-hearted slick ones, cursed them in victory and in defeat; he cursed the very idea of victory and defeat. And he cursed the ruthless, the envious, the aggressive, those who were so in their thoughts; he cursed the treacherous, and the way the treacherous always triumphed; he cursed the cheapskate, the confidence man, the unprincipled. Let the world be cursed, he declared, choking, a world in which there is neither Omnipotence nor Last Judgment, where curses, and any who pronounced them, were held up to ridicule, where glory could only be bought with trash. And above all, he said, curse the infernal mechanism of chance that upholds and maintains all this, and reveals it; curse even the light that by illuminating it exposes the fact that there are no worlds but this, that nothing else exists. But above even that, he said, curse humanity, curse mankind that enjoys control of the mechanism whereby it may reduce and falsify the essence of things and make that reduced and false essence the cornerstone of the deepest laws of our existence. All is false by now, he shook his head, it is all one lie after another, and these lies so permeate the most obscure recesses of our souls that they leave no room for expectations or for hope, and so, should that which will never happen actually come to pass after all and present itself anew, then he Korin had a message for this breed of humanity: that no, there would be no point in expecting mercy, that they should scurry away, for they should not trust to forgiving and forgetting, for in their case there would be no forgetting; nor should they try to mend their ways or to reform, for reform and salvation are most certainly not for them, for under no circumstances will they be forgiven, nothing awaits them but memory and punishment; for in their hands even the good has become bad; for his message to them was: perish, rot and perish, for it is enough that the mark they have left, that indelible mark, had its place in eternity. The man he was addressing neither nodded nor shook his head, in fact he did nothing whatsoever, or at least nothing to indicate that he had been listening to Korin or had understood anything. All you could say was that nothing had changed in his behavior, that he went on smoking, slowly exhaling the smoke, his gaze fixed on the same point at the edge of the counter as before, and as he blew the smoke out, blowing it before him in thin wisps, this wisp of smoke … precisely as before … rose from the side and top of the counter to more or less his own height ahead of him and seemed to stop there, forming a ball that gradually drifted back toward him, enveloping his face. It was hard to tell what was happening for a while: the ball of smoke stationary, the man perfectly still, then, very slowly, the ball drifting toward him, enveloping him, his head, as a cloud might a mountaintop, at the same time thinning, losing something of its bulk. It took a whole minute at least to make out the process, to see how the man tried to draw back into himself the whole mass of that which he had earlier expelled, trying to direct that which had formed itself into a ball back down into his lungs, and how this maneuver, he having calculated the precise volume with impressive precision, not only succeeded but succeeded gloriously, with no vestige of smoke left, how the ball of smoke did not dissipate but remained a ball, albeit of smaller mass, to disappear from the area round his head, sucked back down through his mouth into his lungs, only so that it should pretty soon reappear in the form of a thin wisp of smoke.