Peter Handke

Moment of True Feeling

Violence and inanity — are they not ultimately one and the same thing?

M. HORKHEIMER

Who has ever dreamed that he has become a murderer and from then on has only been carrying on with his usual life for the sake of appearances? At that time, which is still going on, Gregor Keuschnig had been living in Paris for some months, serving as press attaché at the Austrian embassy. He, his wife, and their four-year-old daughter Agnes occupied a dark apartment in the 16th arrondissement. The building, which dated from the turn of the century and reflected the bourgeois comfort of the period, had a stone balcony on the second floor and a cast-iron balcony on the fifth floor. It was situated, side by side with similar apartment houses, on a quiet boulevard sloping gently downward to the Porte d‘Auteuil, one of the western exits from the city. Every five minutes or so, in the daytime hours, the glasses and dishes in the dining-room cupboard rattled when a train passed in the railroad cut that ran parallel to the boulevard, carrying passengers from the periphery of Paris to the Gare Saint-Lazare in the center of the city, where if they wished they could change to trains that would take them northwestward to the Channel, to Deauville or Le Havre, for instance. (Some of the older people in this neighborhood, which as late as a hundred years ago consisted partly of vineyards, chose this mode of travel when they went to the seaside with their dogs for the weekend.) But after nine o’clock at night the trains stopped running, and then it was so quiet on the boulevard that the leaves of the plane trees outside the windows could be heard rustling from time to time in the breeze that is frequent in Auteuil. On such a night at the end of July, Gregor Keuschnig had a long dream, which began with his having killed someone.

All at once he had ceased to belong. He tried to change, as an applicant for a job undertakes to change; but for fear of being found out he had to go on living exactly as before and, above all, remain exactly as he had been. Even to sit down as usual to a meal with other people was to dissemble; and if he suddenly began to talk so much about himself and his “past life,” it was only to divert attention from himself. Oh, the disgrace to my parents, he thought, while the victim, an old woman, lay in an inadequately buried wooden box: a murderer in the family! But what oppressed him most was that he had become someone else, yet had to keep behaving as if he were still himself. The dream ended with a passer-by opening the wooden box, which in the meantime seemed to have moved to the sidewalk outside his house.

Formerly when Keuschnig found something unbearable, he had tended to lie down somewhere by himself and go to sleep. This night the opposite happened: his dream was so intolerable that he woke up. But waking was as impossible as sleeping — only more absurd, more tedious, as though he had begun an endless term of imprisonment. Something had been done that could never be undone. He folded his hands under his head, but this habitual action had no remedial effect. Dead calm outside his bedroom window; and when after a long while a branch of the evergreen tree in the courtyard stirred, he had the impression that it had been moved, not by a gust of wind, but by the accumulated inner tension of the branch itself. It occurred to Keuschnig that there were six more stories above his ground-floor apartment, one on top of another! — probably packed full of heavy furniture, of dark-stained cupboards. He did not remove his hands from under his head, but only puffed up his cheeks as though for self-protection. He tried to imagine how his life would go on. Because everything had lost its validity, he could imagine nothing. He rolled up in a ball and tried to get back to sleep. Falling asleep had ceased to be possible. When finally, with the passing of the first train at about six, the water glass on the bedside table tinkled, he mechanically got out of bed.

Keuschnig’s apartment was large and intricate. In it two people could take different itineraries and suddenly meet. The long hallway seemed to stop at a wall, but then after a bend it continued on — you wondered if you were still in the same apartment — to the back room, where his wife sometimes did her homework for her audio-visual French course and stayed the night when, as she said, she was too tired to face the spooky corridor with its abrupt twists and turns. The apartment was so intricate that, though the child couldn’t actually get lost, they were forever calling: “Where are you?” The child’s room could be entered from three sides: from the hallway, from the back room, which his wife called her “study,” and from the “parents’ bedroom,” so called only in the presence of visitors they didn’t know very well. The “front” of the apartment consisted of the dining room, the kitchen, the “servants’ entrance”—they had no servants — and a special servants’ toilet (the bolt of which, strange to say, was outside the door), and directly on the street, the two “salons,” which his wife spoke of as “livings,” while in the lease one of them was termed “library” because of a niche in the wall. The small vestibule opening out on the street was called “antichambre” in the lease. The rent came to three thousand francs a month, the sole income of an elderly Frenchwoman, whose husband had once owned plantations in Indochina. Two thirds of this sum was paid by the Austrian Foreign Ministry.

Keuschnig looked at his sleeping wife through the half-open door to the back room. He wished that the moment she woke up she would ask him what he was thinking about. He would reply: “I’m looking for a way of thinking you out of my life.” Suddenly he wished he would never see her or hear of her again. He wished she would be shipped away somewhere. Her eyes were closed; from time to time her wrinkled lids stretched smooth. That told him she was beginning to wake up. Now and then there were gurglings from her belly; the chirping of two sparrows outside the window, a remark, then an answer, always a few notes higher; separate sounds became distinguishable in what had been the even murmur of the city during the night. There was already traffic enough that the screeching of brakes could be heard and farther away the blowing of a horn. His wife still had her earphones on, and a language record was still turning on the record player. He switched off the machine and she opened her eyes. With open eyes she looked younger. Her name was Stefanie, and only yesterday she had aroused feelings in him, at least occasionally. Why didn’t she notice anything peculiar about him? “You’re already dressed,” she said, and took off the earphones. In that moment he felt capable of kneeling down and telling her everything, everything. Where should he begin? Once or twice in the past he had placed his thumb on her throat, not as a threat but as one kind of contact among many others. Only if she were dead, he thought, would I be able to feel something for her again. Standing still and straight, he turned his head to one side as in a rogues’ gallery photograph, and said only, as though repeating something he had often said before: “You don’t mean a thing to me. The thought of growing old with you is more than I can bear. Your mere existence drives me to despair.” “That rhymes,” she said. True enough. His last two sentences rhymed — he hadn’t noticed it in time — and therefore couldn’t be taken seriously. Closing her eyes, she asked: “What’s the weather like today?” and he replied, without looking out: “High clouds.” She smiled and dropped off to sleep. I’m coming away empty-handed, he thought. Strange. Everything he did struck him as strange that morning.

In the child’s room he felt as though he were taking leave of something; not only of the child, but of the kind of life that had been right for him up until then. Now no kind of life was right for him. He stood there amid the scattered toys, and suddenly in his helplessness one of his knees gave way. He crouched down. I have to busy myself with something, he thought, already exhausted by the short time spent without imagination, and busied himself putting the laces, which the child had taken out of her shoes the night before, back in again. As Agnes slept, he could see nothing of her face; her hair had tumbled over it. He put his hand on her back to see how she was breathing. She was breathing so peacefully and smelled so warm that he remembered certain of the old days when everything seemed to be gathered under a wide dome and to belong together, when for instance he had involuntarily said “Agnes” to his wife and involuntarily said “Stefanie” to Agnes. Now that was gone; he couldn’t even remember it any longer. When Keuschnig stood up, he had the feeling that his brain was gradually cooling. He pulled down the skin of his forehead and closed his eyes firmly, as though that might warm his insensible brain. From today on, he thought, I shall be leading a double life. No, no life at all: neither my usual life nor a new one, for I shall only be pretending to live my usual life, and my new life will consist solely in pretending to live as usual. I no longer feel in place here, but I can’t conceive of being in place anywhere else; I can’t conceive of continuing to live as I’ve lived up until now, but no more can I conceive of living as someone else lived or lives. The thought of living like a Buddhist monk, a pioneer, a philanthropist, a desperado, doesn’t repel me, I merely find it unthinkable. I can’t live like anybody; at the most I can go on living “like myself.”—Suddenly, at this thought, Keuschnig was unable to breathe. In the next moment he felt as though he were bursting out of his skin and a lump of flesh and sinew lay wet and heavy on the carpet. As if he had soiled the child’s room merely by his thought, he hurried out.

Look neither to the left nor to the right, he thought as he went down the hallway. “Eyes front!” he said aloud. He looked at the red sofa in the one living room; a child’s book lay open on it: blatant disorder. Nothing was alien to him, everything repelled him. He closed the book and put it on the table in such a way that its edges lay parallel to the edges of the table. Then he picked up a thread from the carpet and carried it the whole length of the hallway to the trash basket in the kitchen. While doing all this, he made a frantic effort to think in complete sentences.

With a stupid look on his face, he stepped out of the dark apartment into the street. How mercilessly bright it was outside! I might just as well be naked, he thought, but a moment later looked down to make sure he had pulled up the zipper on his trousers, and at the same time fiddled with it discreetly. He mustn’t show that anything was wrong. Come to think of it, had he brushed his teeth? In the gutter on the other side of the boulevard, the water sparkled as it flowed down to the Porte d‘Auteuil. For a few minutes that took the stupid look off his face. The cobblestones under the water were bleached white. As he walked, Keuschnig suddenly saw a sunken lane not far from his native village. There were thin, wet-black blueberry roots along the side walls, where as a child he had often dug clay for marbles or projectiles. Lucky that rhyme cropped up when I was talking to Stefanie, he thought; otherwise, I’d already have given myself away. He pulled his cuffs out from under the sleeves of his jacket and for the first time that day became slightly curious. Keuschnig had always been curious, though he disliked involving himself in things. What would be the end of all this? Ordinarily he took the Métro at the PORTE D’AUTEUIL, changed at LA MOTTE-PICQUET-GRENELLE and got out at LATOUR-MAUBOURG, not far from the Place des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement, on the rue Fabert side of which the three-story mansion housing the Austrian embassy was situated. But that day he wanted to walk a bit. He would allow himself this little detour — maybe, in the course of it, something would turn up. He decided to take the Pont Mirabeau across the Seine and follow the Quais to the Invalides. On the way perhaps he would think up a system by which to deal with the neither/ nor in his head. That’s it, he thought, a system! and in passing looked at himself in the mirror outside a bakery on the rue d’Auteuil. Nothing unusual in his appearance. For a moment he tensed with curiosity.

On the rue Mirabeau, Keuschnig, who as a press attaché had learned to pick such words as Autriche or autrichien out of any newspaper at a glance, as though they were his own name, saw, out of the corner of his eye, a plaque with the word autrichien on it affixed to the wall of a house. It had been put there in memory of an Austrian who had joined a French Resistance group to fight the National Socialists, and had been shot down by the Germans on this spot some thirty years before. The plaque had been cleaned in preparation for the fourteenth of July, the French national holiday, and a tin can with a sprig of evergreen in it had been placed under it. The asshole, thought Keuschnig, and kicked the tin box, but stopped it when it kept on rolling. He crossed the Avenue de Versailles and saw on a hoarding a poster advertising a meeting: “Hortensia Allende will speak to us …” TO us! he thought, turned away and spat. Rabble! Passing a newspaper stand, where the only morning paper on display was the five o’clock edition of Le Figaro, he read that the Turkish invaders of Cyprus had entered Nikosia, the capital, and that war was imminent. How annoying, thought Keuschnig; what intolerable interference in my life! A couple, arm in arm, were coming toward him on the bridge. The woman was biting chunks off a long loaf of bread, as though such a war were quite out of the question, and that reassured him. But why was the man so tall? Disgusting to be so tall. And to think of him squirting his ridiculous sperm into the pathetic belly of this boring woman! He stopped walking in the middle of the bridge and looked down at the Seine. “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine et nos amours.” A poster advertised the high-rise apartments on the opposite bank with the words: “Seen from the Pont Mirabeau, Paris is a poem.” Poetry gone sour! The river was brown as usual and flowed as usual toward the western hills, where the morning light moved the suburb of Meudon closer. To Keuschnig everything was equally far away and equally unreal: the sand pile on the left bank, the hills of Meudon and Saint-Cloud, the tips of his shoes. It was as though his glance, before it could take anything in, had been blunted by an invisible barrier; it could reach nothing, and he felt no desire to reach anything. He saw no friendly sight, saw only as a whipped man might have seen, and thought: I’d better go right down into the Métro, where a blank look attracts no attention. He took the train at JAVEL, and shortly after seven, unchanged except that the absence of prospects had put him in a bad humor, stepped into the Austrian embassy.

Keuschnig had an office on the second floor of the embassy building, with a chestnut tree outside his window. His work consisted chiefly of reading French newspapers and periodicals, marking articles or news items that related to Austria, when possible providing the ambassador with a daily digest, and twice a month sending the Foreign Ministry in Vienna a report on the image of Austria reflected in the French mass media. In drawing up these reports, he was expected to follow new guidelines, which specified that the images of Austria presented in the French press were in every case to be measured against an ideal image elaborated at the Ministry. Above all, Austria must be seen as something more than the land of Lippizaners and skiers. Whenever the traditional image made its appearance in the press or on television, Keuschnig was obliged to write letters of protest and rectification. He had pasted a model of such a letter over his desk. Last year, it pointed out among other things, the Financial Times had awarded Austria an Economic Oscar as the industrial country with the most favorable economic statistics. Keuschnig seldom received answers to these letters, and even more rarely to his reports to the Foreign Ministry. Occasionally he attended “working luncheons” at which French political figures met with the press, and for which he had to pay in advance. From time to time he received journalists at home, and itemized his expenses, for such receptions were regarded as part of his job. “Seated entertainment” meant dinner; “standing entertainment” consisted only of drinks or, in a pinch, of cold buffet. This, more or less, was his work, and thus far he had done it so seriously as to give no one else reason to smile. He himself had no image of his native land, and was glad there were guidelines to follow. He was seldom at a loss for an answer, except when letters came from children wishing to know something about Austria. But most of the questions in these letters had been dictated by grownups anyway.

That morning a small truck finally arrived with the Austrian silent films, which Keuschnig had loaned the Ciné-mathèque some months ago for a series of showings at the Palais Chaillot, and the return of which he had requested a number of times. In the court of the embassy, ignoring the driver’s impatience, he checked every single reel against his list. No one seemed to notice that anything was wrong. Besides, there was hardly anyone in the building. Because of his newspaper reading, he was always among the first to arrive. In his office, he cut open the bundle the night watchman had deposited outside his door, and removed the tag addressed in red: “Ambassade d‘Autriche.” Recalling that the United Nations troops on Cyprus included an Austrian contingent, he first looked through the papers with them in mind. None dead yet? Then, felt pen in hand, he began to read seriously. Every half hour he stood up and tore the reports of the French news agency off the Telex, which went on ticking inexorably. He had also turned on the short-wave radio. It was still early morning when news of the provisional cease-fire on Cyprus came through; after that he was undisturbed, alone with himself. As usual the newsprint made his fingers blacker and blacker. He didn’t once shift his position while reading, didn’t once run his hand over his face, not even when it itched; he merely read and underscored so-called key phrases. Without looking up and without a moment’s hesitation. Where were the SELLING POINTS the guidelines demanded? At the farm show in Compiègne, a reforestation machine made in Austria was on display. At an exhibition of optical instruments in Lyons, a research microscope from Austria had been demonstrated. Le Monde had good things to say of environmental measures taken in the Tyrol. Once again L’Aurore spoke of anti-Semitism in Austria, though in accordance with the guidelines, he had already sent them several letters of protest and rectification. On the other hand, a consumer magazine gave an Austrian ski binding an excellent rating. But Le Parisien liberé referred to Bruckner as a German rather than an Austrian composer. — At about nine Keuschnig washed his hands and reported to the ambassador, who that day had arrived somewhat earlier than usual. The ambassador asked him what he thought of the fighting on Cyprus, but then, almost protectively, answered for him, so that Keuschnig merely had to drop an occasional: “Yes, that’s quite possible,” or “No, that can’t be ruled out.” Even the ambassador, who in his position, as he not infrequently remarked, could be expected to have an eye for people and their weaknesses, seemed to notice nothing. (Would he otherwise have listed course after course of the dinner he had eaten the night before at the home of some French count?) Keuschnig was relieved but at the same time, oddly enough, disappointed.

He drank his usual tea at a café on the Boulevard Latour-Maubourg. As he looked out at the street, it occurred to him that he couldn’t have said anything to anyone. He often heard people saying: “If I had something to say …”—and now he thought: If I had something to say, I’d cross it all out. At the top of a garbage can on the sidewalk he saw a heap of coffee grounds and filter paper; as he looked at it, it reminded him of a lawn freshly fertilized with human manure: there had been toilet paper all over the young grass. He went to the men’s room and pissed gloomily down into the hole. The smell of urine revived him. He thought of tomorrow and the day after and tugged at his fingers in disgust; he opened his mouth wide, at the same time looking around to make sure no one was watching him.

On the way back to the embassy, Keuschnig had a sudden impulse to bare his teeth. Without prospect for the future, he had risen from the protective café chair. Compressing his lips, he nodded to a colleague who was coming toward him. At the sight of this colleague he thought of sleeve protectors, although he hadn’t seen anyone in sleeve protectors for ages. Why couldn’t the other man disregard him? Why did he have to COME TOWARD HIM? Brownish-yellow scraps of scum on milk that had been boiled days ago. True, he was still more or less alive, he was running around loose, but soon it would be all up with him. He wanted to beat everyone to a pulp! Everything, even the sense of well-being his first sip of tea had given him, now seemed RELATIVE. My life line has broken off, Keuschnig thought, as though still trying to cheer himself up a little. A baby carriage with a plastic cover was standing in a doorway, an image of panic terror; as he hurried past, it completed the dream he hadn’t finished dreaming that night. He forced himself to go back and examine the baby carriage in every detail.

He saw two blacks walking ahead of him, both with their hands deep in their pockets, so that the slits of their jackets gaped wide and their behinds stuck out — both had the same gaping slits and the same behinds! A woman was wearing two different shoes, one with a platform much higher than the other. Another woman was carrying a cocker spaniel in her arms and crying. He felt like a prisoner in Disneyland.

On the sidewalk he read, written in chalk: “Oh la belle vie,” and underneath: “I am like you,” with a phone number. Whoever it was had BENT DOWN to write about the GOOD LIFE, he thought, and made a note of the phone number.

In the office he read the newspapers that had just arrived. He was struck by the frequency of the words “more and more” in the headlines of a single page: “More and more babies are overfed,” “More and more child suicides.” In reading Time he was struck, on many pages, by the sentence: “I dig my life.” “I dig my life,” said a basketball star. “We are a happy family,” said a war veteran. “I am very glad,” said a country singer. “Now I dig my life,” said a man who was using a new fixative for his dentures. Keuschnig wanted to howl long enough for everyone in the building to hear him. Then he looked up at the ceiling, cautiously, as though even that might give him away.

He had the sidewalk telephone number in front of him, but first he dialed several other numbers. He wanted to be alone as little as possible in the days to come, and cast about for friends and acquaintances to take up his time. Before each call, for fear some slip of the tongue would give him away or that he would suddenly be unable to go on, he wrote down word for word what he intended to say. In the end he had made an appointment for every evening and his date book was full to the end of the month. I’ll lose myself in my work, he thought. Then he called the sidewalk number. A woman answered. She said she couldn’t remember writing anything on the pavement, she must have been drunk. Keuschnig, who had only wanted to needle her, said: “You were not drunk. I shall be at the Café de la Paix, the one across from the Opera, at nine tomorrow evening. Will you come?” “Perhaps,” said the woman, and then: “Yes, I’ll come. But let’s not arrange any signs. I’d like us to just recognize each other. I’ll be there.”

At twelve o’clock Keuschnig took the rue Saint-Dominique to the stop of the 68 bus, as usual on his way to see a girl friend in Montmartre. For a while he drifted into side streets, following a girl with CHICAGO CITY written on the seat of her jeans. He wanted to see her face. Then he noticed he had forgotten her. In the bus he saw he was all alone, and for a moment that made him very happy. A shudder ran through him, it gave him a sense of power, directed against no one. At the next stop he looked up, and already there were several heads in front of him.

When Keuschnig looked out of the bus window, his field of vision swarmed with transparent pockmarks, and when he closed his eyes and opened them again, there were still more of them. After getting out he decided to stand still for a moment and look patiently at something, the sky for instance. And then he stood there, feeling nothing. “C’est normal,” said a passer-by. Yes, everything was wretchedly normal, elendig normal. He thought of an Austrian country shrine called Maria Elend.

He behaved as innocently as possible: for the first time he bought flowers for his girl friend. An observer’s suspicions would be overcome if he saw him going into this florist’s shop. He was only one among many, someone concerned with everyday matters, carefree enough to buy flowers. He decided to be pedantic. In the cool shop, seeing himself as a man having gladioli wrapped, he felt so secure that he would have liked to help the salesgirl tie the bow. The atmosphere, the smell of water, the puddles on the floor, did him good. The beautiful, slow meticulousness with which she set down the gladioli side by side on the paper! Up until now, when asked whether flowers should be gift wrapped, he would automatically have said no and contented himself with the usual wrapping; today he looked on with interest as the girl stuck the pins into the paper. During the whole operation — cutting the stems, removing the faded petals, wrapping, and finally handing him the wrapped flowers — she had not made one superfluous movement, and today this struck him as beautiful. In the shop he felt sheltered. He was able to smile, though his lips tautened, and she smiled too. Her purely professional friendliness made him feel that she was treating him as a human being, and that touched him.

Just like anyone else he climbed the slope of Montmartre with his bouquet. Amid the smells of the rue Lepic, changing from one market stall to the next — fish, cheese, the flannel smell of suits hanging in the sun — he lost all identity … Then suddenly the smell of bread from the open door of a bakery drew him into memory, not his own, but a new, amplified, and improved memory, in which the flat scene before him took on a third dimension. Here no one seemed irresolute, weighed down by himself; among these people, whom he would never know, he felt secure. Outside his girl friend’s door, he wiped his shoes with exaggerated care, meanwhile laughing maliciously — at whom? — But when he heard steps approaching from within, he was seized with desperate embarrassment at the thought that their meeting would be the same as usual, shameless, that they would smile at each other in recognition. There was still time, he could still climb another flight of stairs. Keuschnig stood motionless, one foot beside the other, until the door opened — as usual, except that now the absurdity almost killed him.

He didn’t show that anything was wrong. For a moment it had upset him that Beatrice recognized him right away. Suddenly he was afraid that he wouldn’t recognize her the next time, and tried to imprint her features, or some distinguishing mark, on his memory. — Beatrice worked part-time as a translator at UNESCO headquarters in the 15th arrondissement. Her husband had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a trailer truck. She lived alone with two children, who were out at the moment. Keuschnig had first met her at a reception at the embassy. She had come up to him and asked: “What shall we do now?”—He came to see her often. He liked to watch her going about her domestic routines. She told a good many stories, and it gave him a strong tranquil pleasure to listen to her. “I’m never afraid of doing anything wrong in front of you,” she said. They saw no harm in being together. “Maybe our seeing no harm in it is a good sign,” said Beatrice. She took everything that came her way as a sign. But even where others saw a harbinger of calamity, she found confirmation of her belief that things would get better and better. Unpleasant happenings irritated her, but she took them too as favorable signs. Consequently she lived confidently from day to day, and when Keuschnig was with her, the moment when everything would cease to count seemed to him, sometimes at least, infinitely remote.

But now, without warning, everything in sight became a sign of death. He didn’t want to look at anything; and because, even with his eyes open, he saw nothing to which he could hold fast, the oppression in his chest rose to his throat. He thought of the baby carriage with the plastic cover in the doorway and the crumbled plaster on the cover, and turned away without meaning to when as usual Beatrice started to help him out of his jacket. But it was he who was suddenly afraid of saying something wrong, or doing something wrong; it was he who suddenly couldn’t help seeing some harm in everything, in cutting meat, in an embrace, even in breathing. The acts that should be performed naturally — drawing-the-cork-out-of-the-bottle, spreading-the-napkin-on-his-knees — he now performed as ceremonial functions and was afraid of being untrue to his role. In mortal terror, he suddenly called up his home. “Is all well?” he asked, deliberately using the stilted phrase to hide his anxiety. Back at the table, he was determined to do everything by himself, though as a rule he had liked Beatrice to peel an apple for him, for instance, at the end of the meal.

He didn’t let her undress him. If she were to touch him, he would crush her with his fist. The actions of laying-his-trousers-over-the-back-of-a-chair, of lying-down-in-bed-together, of inserting-the-penis-in-the-vagina. When she stroked his member with her fingernail, he felt she was infecting him with some loathsome skin disease. Intermittently, under the light pressure of her vagina, he felt protected, but at the orgasm, in place of something hot, a cold shiver came out of him and instantly spread over his whole body. He wished he were washed and dressed that minute, sitting opposite her, at some distance. When she looked at him, he passed his thumb over her lids as though in a caress, to make her close her eyes and stop seeing him. A moment later she opened them again. Those open eyes seemed to be laughing; this time he forcibly held them shut. Beatrice turned her head away from his hand and went on looking at him, more amused than alarmed. Thereupon he closed his own eyes. — He kept them closed until he felt safe again. Then it became unbearable not to see anything. When he opened his eyes, his lids popped obscenely, as though they had been pasted and an effort had been needed to tear them open, first one, then the other. Beatrice was still looking at him, or rather, she had begun to watch him — as though something were wrong. Though her mouth was closed, her lips were slightly parted at one corner, revealing a bit of glinting canine. He thought of a dead pig, but only to avoid feeling inferior to her. The longer they looked at each other, the more concerned she became and the more he lost interest. Merely because he hadn’t a thought in his head, he grimaced — no, his face turned into a grimace without his stirring a muscle. He simulated a yawn, so as to be able to close his eyes again. Then he took hold of Beatrice’s hair and forced her head down to his belly; she took his member into her mouth and pushed it out with her tongue; if her face had been on a level with his, he might have thought she was sticking out her tongue at him. Filled with warmth, he had a feeling that he and Beatrice briefly belonged together, and that if he could only start talking, he would come to understand her completely.

In the kitchen they drank coffee. He watched her taking the crême caramel out of the icebox, so it wouldn’t be too cold when the children came home. Then she did indeed sit down across from him, out of reach, just as he had wished, and carefully sharpened pencils, lead pencils for the older child and colored pencils for the younger one, who still went to the école maternelle. As he looked at her, he succeeded little by little in immersing himself in his vision. He heard the water flowing in the gutter of the silent street outside the open window. It gurgled over an occasional jutting stone, and the longer he listened the more his vision expanded; the flowing water turned into a brook, whose gurgling flow related to an almost forgotten event. The pencils, which Beatrice kept turning in her pencil sharpener, RASPED — and suddenly Keuschnig couldn’t remember his own name. He was out of danger as long as so much unfinished business was left on the kitchen table. Kitchen table: those words meant something now. A certainty. He could get up and leave it, yet always come back to this place — where there were red floor tiles and Beatrice, attentively turning pencils but then suddenly holding a pencil still and turning the sharpener, as though a mere fancy in her head had become an embodied wish, as though an impersonal idea had become a personal contradiction or a long-outgrown memory a present emotion. The apartment around him now seemed to be on ground level, yet bright and airy as if it were somewhere high in the sky. — Ecstatically Keuschnig closed his eyes to keep from crying, but also to relish his tears the more.

He saw everything as though for the last time. While still looking at Beatrice, he no longer belonged to her, he could only — indeed, he had to — behave as if he did. There was a crackling inside him, then everything went to pieces. A complicated fracture of the mind, he thought. A few splinters of emotion had worked their way through the outer covering, and he had gone rigid forever. Can one, in speaking of the body, speak of ugly suffering? The body has ugly wounds, the soul has ugly suffering. And some bodily wounds have been beautiful, so much so that one has been sorry to see them heal, but in the mind there is only suffering, and that is ugly. — “I think I’ve eaten too much,” he said to Beatrice, who looked at him from time to time with interest, but without alarm. Outside the window a seed capsule floated past. Good Lord! Keuschnig had a feeling that the shit in his bowels had turned the wrong way. In another second he would be sending a loud fart into the room.

For a moment Beatrice averted her eyes, but then looked at him again. She wants to help me, he thought, in such a rage that he might almost have struck her in the face; his forearm, resting on the table, had gone tense. He withdrew it discreetly, and she blew the shavings out of her pencil sharpener. Above all, no special treatment! Covertly he checked to make sure the position of his legs under the table was the same as usual. One leg stretched out, the other bent — right. What Keuschnig feared most was that someone might show understanding, or actually understand him. If someone were to say knowingly: “We all have such days. I’ve had them myself”—it would sicken him; but if someone were to understand him silently, then he would feel disgraced. And Beatrice had turned away, as though to avoid seeing through him. But perhaps she had no desire to see through him. That was it, she simply had no desire to. Which meant that she didn’t take him seriously, which was just as well. Cheerfully he stood up, bent over the table, and touched her; she gave her shoulders a big shrug, failing to understand his gesture, but accepting it because it was his. Things would never again be the same as before, thought Keuschnig nor did he want them to be. Actually they never had been. How fragmented his former life seemed to him, how … he couldn’t even say. And for the second time he became curious. “Your eyes have suddenly contracted so,” said Beatrice. “Are you thinking of an adventure?” “What about you?” “Always,” she said. “Just at the most ecstatic moment, I always think the real thing is still to come.”

They left the apartment together. She took the elevator, he went down the stairs. On the street they met again, but parted at once, Beatrice with a serious but untroubled countenance, wordlessly, as though all necessary arrangements had been made. So long, see you tomorrow. But what about today? He would go back to work; at six he would attend a press conference at the Elysée Palace, devoted to the program of the new government; at nine he would dine at home with an Austrian writer who happened to be living in Paris (an instance of the seated entertainment provided for in his budget); and after that he would presumably be tired enough to fall into a dreamless sleep. A full program, he thought gratefully; not a free moment, every move mapped out until midnight or later, when he would switch off his bedside lamp. For today at least every minute was taken up; no room for any dangerous extra motion; the bliss of a crowded timetable. — And indeed, when he thought about it, he felt blissfully hedged about. He was able to lift his eyes untroubled; the world lay before him as though it had been waiting for him the whole time.

The air was so clear that from the hill one was able to look out on all sides beyond the edge of Paris, where the land was green again. This was a vista that precluded all thought of confusion; every detail, however recalcitrant, was subordinated to the overall picture. That suited him at present, because he didn’t want to be reminded of anything. In the presence of this panorama, which even after the first glance presented no salient features, he was able to exhale himself until nothing troublesome remained. — Suddenly he caught sight of a tourist in an army jacket standing next to him. A toothbrush protruded from his breast pocket. Before actually noticing this toothbrush, Keuschnig remembered with a jolt, as though he had suddenly become his own double, that such a toothbrush had occurred in his dream the night before and had been connected with him in his role of fugitive murderer. Thus far he had been able, while standing on the hillside, to see his dream in its proper place, so to speak, to see it as a dream. And what now? How absurd that a panoramic view of this kind should correct the dimensions of things. What then were the right dimensions? My dream was true, he thought, and now I’ve betrayed it to this harmony that was drummed into me. Panoramic coward with the eyes of a glider pilot. That dream must have been the first sign of life in me since God knows when. I should have taken it as a warning. It came to me because I’d been looking in the wrong direction, it wanted to turn me around. To wake me up and make me forget my somnambulistic certainties. It has always been easy for me to forget dreams. It will be difficult to drop my certainties, because they will cross my path day after day — though in reality others have merely dreamed them for me. The certainty, for instance, of my vision as I look on swarming humanity from this hill, merely perpetuates someone else’s dream of life. What, thought Keuschnig, is my dream of life? I will forget my certainty by losing myself in a dream of life. Let us suppose that last night’s dream was my dream of life. — Keuschnig had an impulse to follow the stream that was flowing down the gutter and would soon merge with another stream — to follow it across the whole city.

From time to time, that day, he felt very cheerful, but never for long. In the moment of breathing easy, his breath caught, and everything became impossible. Even in his bright moments he couldn’t help wondering what would happen next. Always having to think of the future, yet unable to conceive of any future — that added up to hopelessness. Up until then he had seldom felt so cheerful and never so hopeless. And every time he felt cheerful he lost confidence in his feeling; his cheerfulness did not remain present to him, nothing remained present — not even the thought of a dream of life. Like a voluptuary he kept thinking of only one thing, though the one thing was not a woman’s hole but the unimaginable. Could it be that no one saw his obscene face? He couldn’t understand why after a first glance someone didn’t cast another, special sort of glance at him, or why no woman turned away after taking one look at him. Actually, a woman had turned away, averted her face in disgust. Maybe people would know him for what he was if he stood beside a clump of bushes in the park.

He had a taste of blood in his mouth. The repulsive part of it was not that he had become different during the night but that everything seemed so eternally the same. And there was nothing repulsive about his showing himself as he did; what was repulsive was that the people around him didn’t do likewise. He tried to figure out how old he was, and counted not only the years but also the months and days, until the minute now, in which he was standing on the top of Montmartre. He had already spent so much time! When he considered how just this last hour had weighed on him, it was beyond him that he hadn’t suffocated long ago. But the time must somehow have passed? Yes, somehow the time had passed. Somehow the time passed. Somehow the time would pass: that was the most hideous part of it. When he saw people older than himself, they instantly struck him as obsolete. Why hadn’t they gone out of existence long ago? How was it possible that they had survived and were keeping right on? There had to be some trick — routine alone couldn’t account for it. He admired them a little, but for the most part they disgusted him; he had no curiosity about their tricks. Undoubtedly that Dane over there in the car with the Copenhagen plates deserved to be admired for driving relentlessly across the whole of Europe instead of falling off a cliff on the way, but wouldn’t it have been more honorable of him to drive his car off a bridge before it was too late — on the Autobahn for instance? Because here he was just making a fool of himself with his Danish presence! — Altogether nothing made sense; the world only pretended to be sensible; much too sensible, Keuschnig thought. That a couple who sat down at a café table should still be a couple when they got up again: how very sensible! It was beyond him how when the two of them got up they could still be talking to each other, and in a friendly tone what’s more, as though nothing were wrong. — And it wasn’t true that he had only begun to see himself and others in this light the night before. Little by little it came back to him that even earlier he had been unable to understand how everything could simply flow along and remain as it was. Once he had crossed the whole of Paris on Line 9 of the Métro just to find out exactly what the advertisement for DUBONNET painted at regular intervals on the walls of the dark tunnels between stations represented. The train went so fast that he never saw the whole picture but always the same small segment, and could make no sense of it. He should have got out in midtown, but as it was he continued on to the PORTE DE CHARENTON on the southeast edge of Paris, where the train had to slow down because of men working, and there he finally saw that the vague blobs represented bright-colored clouds and that the sphere in front of them was a kind of sun decorated with the colors of all the countries where DUBONNET was consumed … In those days everything had tended to run too fast, and he had run along, because he wanted to recognize things. Since this last night something had stopped. This something was unrecognizable, and he could only turn away. To be initiated had become absurd, to be taken back into the fold had become unimaginable, to belong had become hell on earth. He saw great lumps of overcooked rice in a pot as big as the world. The swindle had been exposed and he was disenchanted.

Keuschnig went down the hill, step for step. What affectedly carefree gaits, what inimically serene faces. He felt no desire to emulate them, only a furious impulse to ape them — all these faces so bright and summery that the only way to bear them was to ape them, as sometimes at a café, often involuntarily to be sure, you ape the facial expression of those women who trip past you so mincingly, looking neither to left nor right for fear of losing their semblance of beauty, or as a drunk returning a stare is likely to put on the starer’s expression.

A woman coming in the opposite direction broke into a smile in the middle of the street and began to run. He was frightened. Had she gone mad? Then he saw someone some distance off, walking toward her — and he too was smiling. Imperturbably smiling, they approached one another, preserving their smiles the whole way despite every obstacle, although the man stumbled over an empty wooden crate and the woman collided with a passer-by. Keuschnig couldn’t bear the sight any longer and, conscious of pressure on his bladder, walked away. Now, he thought, they’ll be putting their preposterous arms around each other, looking into each other’s pitiful eyes, kissing each other’s pathetic cheeks, left and right. And then imperturbably they’ll go their senseless ways. Spooky! He had the feeling of having to lower his bottom jaw to let the accumulated saliva run out. He saw a child standing lost in thought; a bubble came out of its mouth and burst. He passed a man carrying a black attache case. You’d think he’d be ashamed! Keuschnig thought. When I see somebody like that, I could cross myself. — Yet he himself was carrying just such an attaché case, and instead of throwing it into the nearest trash can he heroically went on carrying it. Heroes of everyday life. He couldn’t get rid of the idiotic smile he had put on to ape people, and it was starting to itch. He didn’t scratch with his fingers but tried to relieve the itch by making even worse faces. Even the infants under the parasols, with their mashed-carrot-colored cheeks struck him as fakes. Even they, he thought, are only acting as if. The truth is that they’re absolutely fed up with their preposterous baby existence! When he saw an animal, he was amazed that it wasn’t doing its business at that particular moment. Once he thought: if anybody speaks to me now, I’ll crack his skull for him. If anyone so much as looked at him, Keuschnig said to him in his thoughts: Watch your step! (Nevertheless, he couldn’t see why no one spoke to him. When a Frenchman from the provinces asked him the way to the RUE DE L’ORIENT, he was grateful to be able to direct him, and his next few steps were winged.)

To everything that crossed his path he wanted to say: Don’t show yourself again! And instantly whatever it was did show itself again, in another form but with the same loathsome substance. He didn’t catch sight of things; they showed themselves. He walked quickly for fear that someone would notice his ruthlessness. Yet when a woman with a conspicuously low-cut dress came toward him, he stared brazenly in an attempt to spy her nipples. — Everything seemed taken care of, as though in a game of puss-in-the-corner the last player had found a place and there was no further need for a supernumerary to be standing around. How boring he seemed to himself; how alone!

The sweet familiar after-feeling in his member, which ordinarily stayed with him long after he had been with Beatrice, had soon left him. Now he looked only at the ground. A peach stone that someone had just thrown away lay damp on the sidewalk; looking at it, Keuschnig suddenly realized that it was summer, and this became strangely important. A good omen, he thought, and after that he was able to walk more slowly. Perhaps there would be more such signs. The plate-glass windows of a café that had closed for the summer were whitened on the inside … The wheels of a bicycle on top of a passing car flashed as they turned. The smell of shellfish came to him from the market stalls that had closed in the meantime, and he breathed deeply, as though that smell had power to heal.

When at the foot of the hill he stepped out into the Place Blanche, there was suddenly so much space around him that he stopped still. “San Diego.” Had he heard that or only thought it? — In either case, no sooner had SAN DIEGO entered his head than he clenched his fists and thought: Who said the world has already been discovered?

In the next moment, while standing motionless on the Place Blanche, he wanted to leave Paris immediately. But then he realized that though a journey might at one time have made some difference, it wouldn’t any more. From this thing that had hit him, there was no possibility of flight. Besides, it hadn’t hit him — it had just happened. It had long been due. San Diego and his fist clenching — both meant he would stay in Paris and not give himself up for lost. I’ll show you yet! he thought. — Even so, the sound of a typewriter coming out of a travel bureau filled him with envy and yearning; the keys were being struck hesitantly — now one letter, now another — as though someone were typing the difficult name of some city beyond the sea. And then the click of a calculator — as though the waiting customer’s bill for the plane fare and his stay in the faraway city were being made out.

A couple were standing on the sidewalk, both decrepit with age. The man rested his trembling head on the woman’s shoulder, not as a momentary gesture but because he couldn’t hold it up. With one hand the woman pressed his head against her shoulder, and thus inseparable they slowly crossed the square. Like man and wife, Keuschnig thought contemptuously, and yet for a moment he was mollified by an intimation of something else. “You’re not the world,” he said to himself, feeling strangely proud of the couple. — But when he stepped into a cab a moment later the usual dog in the seat beside the driver barked at him as if he shouldn’t have been allowed to get in, and at the old familiar sound of the diesel engine he experienced a murderous rage. Oh yes, now he was the world, and all at once his attempts to hush up the fact appeared to him in the form of an image: he had an apple out of which a bite had been taken, and kept trying to put it into a basket with others in such a way as to conceal the damage, but the apple kept rolling to one side, and the bitten part always ended on top. And that was the truth of it: already the driver was cranking down his window and shouting “Salaud!” at the traffic, already he was talking to him over his shoulder as to an accomplice. From now on, thought Keuschnig, I won’t answer anyone — I’ll only SPEAK SIDEWAYS. Whimper sideways. All at once he sympathized with the dog for letting his tongue dangle from the side of his mouth. What massive nausea — beyond the help of smelling salts! A minute of silence! he thought, just one minute of silence, please, in this eternal hubbub of absurdity! A tumult had sprung up on a street corner, and now everything around him was one great tumult; no end in sight — but the one thought in his head was the thought of an end.

Suddenly he saw his face in the rear-view mirror. It was so distorted that at first he refused to recognize it. He wasn’t looking for comparisons, but several animals came to mind. No one with that face could express thoughts or feelings. He looked at himself again, but since he was now prepared, as he had been in the morning outside the bakery, he couldn’t find the same face, not even when he grimaced while searching for it. But it had happened: with that one unplanned glance he had lost his acceptance of his own appearance. What self-control Beatrice must have needed! Women are said to be less squeamish than men. In any case, he thought, a person with a face like that should keep quiet. With such a mug you’ve got to have your nerve with you even to carry on conversations with yourself. Inconceivable that he would ever again say amiably to himself: “Come on, old fellow.” On the other hand — and at this thought he sat up straight — with such a face I can afford to have feelings which up until now have come to me only in dreams! — and instantly he remembered the brand-new pleasure it had given him to pee on a woman in a dream. He had been upset when he woke up. That wasn’t me, he had thought. But such pleasure went with his newly discovered face; far from being unlike him, it was his very own self. He now understood that with this unmasked face nothing, nothing whatsoever, could be unlike him. “Not like me” had lost its validity as an argument. But by the same token he could now dispense with remorse. With such a face no excuses were possible. Keuschnig thought himself capable of anything, even a sex murder. At last he owned to himself that killing the old woman in his dream had been a sex murder. — Suddenly the cab driver’s dog began to growl at him, and Keuschnig was afraid of himself. Time to get back to work, he thought. Good old office.

The afternoon had been going on and on, and now time became acute, like an organ one doesn’t notice until it stops functioning. All at once there was so much of it that, instead of just passing, it took on an existence of its own. Everybody was affected; now no one could take refuge in activity; and almost with a sense of liberation Keuschnig reflected that at last he wasn’t alone in this predicament. What had previously been a mere organ of universal unity became independent, became something more than its functioning, and from then on nothing functioned. The day seemed to have grown too long, time was now a hostile element that threatened a somnolent civilization with catastrophe. It was as though everyday time were no longer in force, and as though this condensed, hostile time were meant for a human being only in the sense that a trap is “meant” for someone, and as though even an animal would be unable to smell it out. All at once time began to pass amid the buildings as though governed by an extra-human system, in a dimension different from the course of the streets or the riverbank parapet or the motion of construction cranes, different from the whirling of pigeon feathers falling from the roofs or of the seed capsules gliding between motorcars. It seemed to Keuschnig that this merciless, elemental time crawling along under the tall luminous sky had expelled all life from the world, that every manifestation of human beings had become a meaningless interlude. Some children were hopping about on a dance floor that had been knocked together for some long-past fete, and a few ridiculous leaflets that no longer meant anything to anyone were skittering this way and that. As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential — the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor. Keuschnig saw the sky arching over the Place de la Concorde as something incongruous and hostile, plunging its edges down at the Place. The street lamps on the Pont des Invalides glowed black before his eyes, as after long staring at the cloudless heavens — a memory of a past fete. Unable to confront the great open square — no, not now! — he left the cab before it reached the Esplanade des Invalides and ran — to what safety? Suddenly, as he ran, a warm raindrop fell from the clear, dark sky and landed on the back of his hand … When, in the rue Fabert, Keuschnig saw the brass plate inscribed “Austrian EMBASSY,” he was able to “laugh again,” and back in his office, the moment a sheet of clean white paper emerged from the black roller of his typewriter, he had the feeling that things were back to normal … Only once did he cower and hold his ears, his heart pounding deep in his body, as though outside, beyond the sheltering walls, something had erupted, against which the best decorated embassy was powerless. Heaven help those who are now defenseless, he thought, yet at the same time he hoped that this state of affairs would go on, because in his present, apocalyptic mood he had no personal feeling of himself, or at any rate so little as to believe he shared it with all others. But what if he were mistaken? — That, Keuschnig thought, would be the end of a possibility, even if the apparently universal situation outside me were only my personal situation.

For some days Keuschnig had been working on a report for the Foreign Ministry, entitled “The Image of Austria in French Television,” and subtitled “Austria, a Studio Film.” Some television films based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler had given him the idea. The characters in these films had appeared only in bare interiors; the closest thing to the outside world was the inside of a hansom cab. Keuschnig started his article by saying that the image of Austria put forward by these films was expressed in their sets. By this, he didn’t mean that typically Austrian objects figured in the sets; no, he meant that their very bareness seemed to express a view of Austria, that the characters moved in a setting that could have been anywhere. Austria was represented as a historyless no man’s land peopled by historyless Everymans, and to judge by these films, just that was specifically Austrian. When a character entered in a state of excitement, his exciting experience hadn’t occurred in any particular country but in the vestibule. Keuschnig now set out to prove that because the country never played a part and because the action was never inflected by so much as a passing glance at the landscape the characters seemed to RECITE their experiences (possibly after memorizing them in the vestibule) — MEMO-RIZ E D embraces, the MEMORIZED expressions of two lovers looking into each other’s eyes; MEMORIZED kisses — and that the films themselves … (now what exactly did he want to say?), that because the characters in these films.. (was it possible that he too wrote memorized sentences?) … were not really alive (what did that mean?), but … had only MEMORIZED WAYS OF SIMULATING LIFE … because, wrote Keuschnig, nothing can be experienced in or through a country whose only special characteristic is that it consists of a bare set … that consequently these films picture Austria as a country in which the only stories people could possibly tell were SERIALS, which they represented as the story of their own lives! (but in what country or under what system did people not tell each other mere serial stories as though relating their own experiences?) — and that therefore these films …

Suddenly Keuschnig forgot what he had wanted to prove, and was glad of it. He tore up the paper. Then he looked around for more papers to tear up. For a while it cheered him to crumple them, tear them up, and throw them away. It seemed like some sort of vengeance. He ransacked the office for things to throw away, lined them up in front of him, and threw them one by one, after an elaborate windup even if they were only light envelopes, into a wastepaper basket. He tore up the picture postcards sent him by vacationing colleagues, and threw them away too. — Actually I could prove the opposite by these same films, he thought. Only yesterday he would have tried to prove not only some point but also himself with a demonstration developing logically from sentence to sentence — now he preferred to go on reading the newspapers and treat himself to a painless afternoon. He even read the horoscopes, and felt himself growing more and more inconspicuous. Cozily irreproachable, he sat alone in the room, at most allowing himself an occasional glance through the window at the chestnut tree, among whose dark-green leaves the much-lighter-colored prickly nut husks were already in evidence. How right the newspapers were today — how he esteemed the commentators today for having opinions! Those people don’t think about themselves, he thought — why couldn’t he be like that? He was in the mood to underscore every line. In reading a story about “the sad lot of …” he felt that he ought to follow the example of this reporter, who had selflessly risen above his own lot, which, Keuschnig felt sure, was just as sad as that of … He was especially moved by the jokes. What courage one needed to think up a joke! How free from vanity one must be to look for the comical aspect of everything that happened to one — because there HAD TO be a joke in everything! “Have you heard this one: somebody dreams that he’s become a murderer?” “Yes, but where’s the joke?” Was humor the solution? — In any event, as Keuschnig read the evening papers in cozy inconspicuousness, he envied people in general their contempt for death.

Then he noticed that he had stopped reading some time ago and was only looking at the desk in front of him: the typewriter, the neatly lined-up pencils, the fountain pen POISED in his hand. How sanctimoniously I have arranged these things! he thought. In doing so, I talk myself into a sense of security that doesn’t exist. I pretend that everything will take its usual course and that nothing more will happen to me, provided I get my tools ready. — What self-deception to set up things as INSTRUMENTS and entrench himself behind them, as though he were their representative and nothing else! Did the short-wave receiving set secure his future because he used it? Or was the OUT basket beside the door a guarantee that the office boy would actually find the reports and letters expected of Keuschnig ready at the right time? — A car braked on the square outside with such a screech that Keuschnig heard the howl of a dog on whose paw he had once stepped. Once again, from one second to the next, everything hung in the balance. He would finally have to start thinking about himself. But how would he go about it? He was born into … My father was … My mother had … Even as a child I sometimes felt … Was that the only way of thinking about oneself? If I die now, Keuschnig thought, I shall leave nothing but disorder behind me! — and picking up his fountain pen, he began to draw up his will, writing every word, even the figures, in full, so as to prolong the act of writing, which made him feel safe, as much as possible. — As long as his pen was scratching, death seemed far away. He put the will in an envelope, on which he wrote: “To be opened only after my demise”—deliberately avoiding the word “death.”

He looked out at the Esplanade des Invalides: nothing characteristic, nothing for him. He forced himself to look at something to stop the pain in his heart: the construction shacks, for example, for the workers engaged in joining two Métro lines. They were so small that the workers came out backwards and stooped. So that’s it, he thought. A good many of the leaves of the shade trees on the big square were already yellow and gnawed: Well well. Or the pale moon in the eastern sky? Why not? A windowpane in the Air France bus terminal across the square was flashing sunlight into his office — as usual, but a little earlier than the day before. No harm in that, thought Keuschnig. Aloud he listed everything that was to be seen — that was his only way of perceiving.

Then he noticed that on the same story as himself, a few rooms farther on, behind the flagpole, someone was standing at the window: a girl he hardly knew, a file clerk, who had been taken on as a holiday replacement a few days before. Paying no special attention to him, she was pouring water out of a small coffee cup on a pot of geraniums. A moment later she disappeared, then came back with her refilled cup. He noticed how high over the flowers she held the cup and how carefully she regulated the stream of water. Her lips were parted, her face strangely old. All at once it seemed to him that he was watching her doing something forbidden. He felt hot and dizzy, but it was too late for him to look at something else. — When she left the window, he hoped she would come back. She reappeared sooner than he had expected; this time she positively came running, she seemed excited. She gave him a quick sidelong glance, then poured more cautiously than ever; it took her a long time to tip her cup, as though there were some resistance to overcome. Suddenly, without changing her expression, she turned back to him, and this time her glance was long and sustained — old, evil, ravaged with lust. His member went stiff, he gave a start and stepped back. — Then he forgot everything and went quickly down the corridor to her room. Inside she came to meet him. He paused to lock the door. Two, three movements and they were into each other on the floor; after two or three more she opened her eyes wide and he closed them. — A moment later they were both laughing uproariously.

Keuschnig hadn’t had the feeling of being with a unique, individual woman, and afterwards he felt free from the impersonal power that had gripped them both. — They helped each other up. They sat on two chairs, she behind the desk, he in front of it, and exchanged conspiratorial looks. She was grave, smiled only once with set lips while looking at him, and soon grew grave again. He too was able to look at her as a matter of course, without strain, without fear of giving himself away. His glance had no further need of something to hold on to, some detail, some particular by which to recognize her — he saw her all in one, noticing nothing in particular. If in that moment he had told her he loved her, he would, at least for the time it takes to draw a breath, have known what he meant by it. For the moment it was REAL, that’s all there was to it. With her he had no need of secrecy, never again. Without fear he immersed himself in her, they had no secrets from each other, only a secret in common from others. For a few moments they had EVERYTHING in common. They let the telephones in the building blare, let the elevator hum, the door-opening device in the courtyard buzz, a fly in the room hum; nothing could divert them from their unthinking calm. He looked at the handwritten sign on the wall — PER ASPERA AD ACTA; it didn’t strike him as ridiculous now, and he wasn’t repelled by the cooing of the pigeon menage which had settled in the ivy on the opposite wall. He wouldn’t have minded in the least if someone had been watching them all along. Let him watch! — They needed no secrecy, and perhaps it would even give this other fellow an idea. He kept looking at her and suddenly he thought: So now I have an ally! Though he didn’t say a word, she nodded, held a finger in front of her mouth, then set it on her lower lip, as though to underline her meaning. They laughed again, surprised and almost proud. Then they talked together, and he didn’t even mind when she said: “When I’m with a man … when someone touches me here …”—Actually he was glad to be interchangeable as far as she was concerned. In leaving the room he kissed her hand. — But when he thought of her again, back in his office, his breath caught, because he had no recollection of what it had been like to make love to her. There was no particular he could hold on to — no feeling of warmth or yielding softness. Then for the first time he felt slightly ashamed.

When at about six Keuschnig stepped out on the square, on his way to the press conference at the Elysée Palace, he suddenly stopped still and propped his hands on his hips. He felt hostile toward the whole world. “Now I’ve shown you,” he said. “I’ll get you down yet.”—With clenched fists he headed for the Pont des Invalides, crossed the Quai d’Orsay with utter unconcern for the traffic. He felt an urgent need to break some resistance, to prove himself. Now he was sure that something remained to be done — but where? The coins jangled in his pocket as he walked, but he only walked faster, ran, PURSUED. For a short time at least he had the feeling that he was all-powerful and could look down at the world. It had been made for him, and now he was forcing his way into it, to convert all its renegade objects to his way of thinking. “There you are, Mr. Seine,” he said patronizingly, as he hurried across the bridge. “Just keep up that senseless flowing — I’ll get your secret out of you yet.” Then he thought: I’m having an experience; and with that he was happy and walked more slowly. Agnes had often said to him: “You never tell me any stories.” Now he had a story to tell, how he had said: “Be still!” and for a few moments at least the world had obeyed. And he would add further particulars: steep streets had suddenly become level and whole rows of houses one floor lower. That would be the right kind of story for her, because for her “the world” was still a unit of cubic measurement. — And what if he were to tell her nothing, because he had nothing more to say? — Then at least he would have something for himself, a memory that might help him to envisage and deal with what lay inexorably ahead of him. I can be pleased, he thought with surprise: I am a person capable of being pleased. One more thing I had never thought of until today. Suddenly he wanted to draw. Moving one finger through the air, he drew the spiked-helmet roof of the Grand Palais, which he was passing on his way down the Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt …

In Paris one can usually see the sky without raising one’s eyes; even when looking straight ahead, one sees it at the end of many streets. Consequently Keuschnig noticed that clouds had now come into the sky, white immobile stripes high overhead, and under them, rather low and running at an angle to the stripes, other clouds, whose proximity made them seem somewhat darker, moving rapidly just above the rooftops and changing their shapes before he was able to fix them in his mind. Why, he wondered, am I so struck with the sky? It didn’t exactly strike him; he merely looked at it with interest, but thinking nothing in particular. For a few steps it held his attention so exclusively that afterwards he thought: I wish I could learn to prolong these selfless and yet full moments, when I observe nothing in particular but nothing escapes me. But his very next glance at the clouds soured him. He never wanted to look at anything again. Why couldn’t everything finally disappear — everything! He walked in the middle of the sidewalk with his hands on his hips. He would have liked to shout insults at everyone. Out of my way, you clever clever people! He would shout just one word at a woman, and she would have to think of it as long as she lived. He must find the word to which no one knew the answer!

At the far end of the Champs-Elysées, there was only one thing to catch the eye, the Arc de Triomphe. Looking through it from down here at the Rond-Point, one saw nothing but the western sky, which was reflected in the surface of the wide avenue. “If I looked through the arch from farther up the avenue, I would see the cranes being used to put up still more buildings in the Defense quarter of suburban Puteaux.”—I observe as if I were doing it for someone else! thought Keuschnig. But that was a brief diversion.

In turning into Le Drugstore from the sidewalk of the Avenue Matignon, he suddenly felt saved, for the moment at least. The mere act of TURNING IN — of deviating from his depressing rectilinear course — suggested a break in a journey, and as he moved through Le Drugstore along with many others, in a rhythm, determined by others, of stopping, dodging, and starting up again, his only movements now being Drugstore movements, performed in common with others, he was able to see himself leading a totally different life, derived from his Drugstore feeling, in which all his problems would cease to exist. “That’s it, I’ll start a new life!” he said aloud, on a note of urgency. A memory came to him: Schoolchildren in shorts were standing in a row, in front of them the two team captains, each in turn calling out the names of the boys he wanted on his team. Those named stepped forward. The good players were soon taken, and only the incompetents stood there, squirming with embarrassment: please, please call my name! The next-to-last would still be taken — oh, don’t let me be the last of all, don’t leave me standing here by myself. And here now, those crumpled paper napkins on ketchup-smeared plates, those young women sitting alone, rereading their love letters over their open handbags — in such confusion a game in which someone had to be last ceased to be possible. — At a bookstand Keuschnig bought three diner’s guides. He would read them from cover to cover. One more thing to go by, he thought.

He stepped out into the street again … That sordid Drugstore with its trampled pommes frites on the floor and its already dog-eared magazines! Even as he watched it — while waiting to cross the street — the sky clouded over. He tried to remember the new feeling he had had just after turning in. Turning in where? All at once he couldn’t remember anything at all, neither that nor anything else. He could list all sorts of things but remember nothing. He retained the facts, but not the feelings. When some years ago the nurse at the maternity hospital had shown him the child for the first time through the glass partition, something in him had undoubtedly stirred at the sight of that face, which the child itself had badly scratched. He had known a feeling of happiness, of that he was sure — but what had it really been like? He couldn’t remember the feeling, what he remembered was the fact of having been happy. He had been moved, no doubt of it, but even with closed eyes he couldn’t bring back the feeling. “Try inhaling slowly.” He tried … but his breath went down the wrong way and he gagged. — He saw an empty bus going by; the low-lying sun shone on it from the side, lighting up the serried nose prints on the windows. An animal, thought Keuschnig unremembering. The only way he could keep on walking was to count his steps out loud: one … and two … and three, as though he had to trick himself into moving.

As he crossed the playground in the Carré Marigny, which now, at the end of July, was deserted, the whole sky was overcast. A strong cold wind was blowing and the rustling of the chestnut trees was so loud he couldn’t hear the traffic on the Champs-Elysées. Little dead twigs crunched underfoot. The horses of the merry-go-round had been covered with sacking and plastic for the summer and tied with heavy twine. It was beginning to get dark; Keuschnig was alone in the Carré, dust was blowing up his nose. By then the wind was so strong that he was suddenly seized with uncontrollable panic. He ran to the bus-stop phone on the Avenue Gabriel and called home. Agnes was there — it was she who picked up the phone. Pleased with herself for answering, she bit into a piece of candy …

As he walked on, he remembered that he had just been afraid. A feeling;—remember it. What had it been like? His muscles and sinews had suddenly frozen into a structure of their own … a kind of second skeleton. Yes, that’s what fear had been like. I’ll have to rediscover all these feelings! he thought.

Although the Avenue Marigny, on which the Elysée Palace is situated, is in the very center of Paris, there isn’t a single shop on it. The windows of an inhabited house are a rarity, all one sees is chestnut trees and high park walls until one comes to the restaurant and newsstand at the corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. For an approach to so prestigious a residence the Avenue Marigny is neither very long nor very wide, but it is straight and open. Few cars park on it, not even on the sidewalks, which are blocked off by rows of concrete posts. — Pedestrians, too, are rare; only policemen stride back and forth outside the high walls, their hands behind their backs. Involuntarily, as he turned into the avenue, Keuschnig reached for his passport, as if it were forbidden to enter such a thoroughfare without one’s papers … At the corner a policeman was standing in a sentry box, twirling a whistle attached to a long string. Luckily Keuschnig had to sneeze. Wasn’t that a proof of innocence? Even so, he felt that with the face he had on him that day no one could forget him. Any attempt to seem natural would only make him more conspicuous. He saw a mosquito bite on the policeman’s neck, and simultaneously another image from his dream came back to him: the upper part of his body spotted with mosquito bites. He had been naked, he recalled; that often happened in his dreams — but in this dream there was a difference, he had wanted to be naked. For the first time it had given him pleasure to show his nakedness, not just to one person but to a whole group of people; and instead of merely running past, he had stood still in front of the whole lot of them.

What a lot of withered chestnut leaves have already blown into the gutter! he thought word for word — as though thinking in words could protect him. Two other policemen were coming down the street, their leather gloves stuck in their belts, their trouser legs gathered into the tops of their high-laced boots. There being two of them made them seem less menacing, though united against him, the lone outsider. But even if he had been with more people, with lots of people, a witness would have pointed him out instantly in the line-up: That’s the one! — He envied the policemen their faces. How beautiful they seemed to him in their self-assurance; beautiful because they had nothing to hide; beautiful in their unmarred extravertedness. In an emergency they would both know exactly what to do next, and what to do after that. As far as they were concerned, everything was tried and tested; nothing could go wrong because the ORDER of things had been set in advance. Every possibility had been gone over, every eventuality provided for. He saw them as pioneers, as Americans, from Grand Rapids for instance — and such men could only be immortal!

I too need an order, Keuschnig thought. — But an order presupposed a system. — But for him a system had ceased to be possible. — But then again, what did he need an order for? — To conceal the fact that he no longer had a system. — The only ideas that occur to me are ones I can’t use, he thought.

The next policeman he passed was alone — but even alone he was in harmony. Maybe the uniform does it, Keuschnig thought. Then he passed a solitary man in civilian clothes; his face, too, was in harmony. How human they all seemed in comparison with him. The wind upset a no-parking post, and again he began to see signs of death. He had already passed, but then he went back and set the post up again, as though that might invalidate something. — The next thing he saw, through a slit in the park wall, was a row of empty, overturned sentry boxes on a gravel path. Again he retraced his steps, this time to examine the sentry boxes in every detail — the sight slits on both sides, the little radiator on the rear wall — and turn them back into man-made objects. He even counted the ribs of the radiators: six — that couldn’t mean anything, could it? The next omen was the restaurant on the corner: If it’s recommended in one of the diner’s guides, he thought, nothing can happen; if not — none of the three guides so much as mentioned the place! A police car approached with its blue light and siren operating, and turned into another street. At least the keeper of the newsstand he was just passing, who was putting plastic covers over his papers to shelter them from the impending rain, might for a few moments regard him as an innocent bystander, and for a short while they had something in common. A glass half full of beer stood precariously on a pile of newspapers! Keuschnig wanted to go on, deeper and deeper into space, twirling a cane like …

Borrowed life feelings, which that day the organism instantly rejected. His organism had stopped doing anything but rejecting; once he had eliminated all simulated feelings, there was nothing left of his self, nothing, that is, except the dead weight of an unreality at odds with the whole world. Rejection as aversion to all impulses breathed into him from outside, to the charlatanism of internationally certified forms of experience! True, he could go to see a Humphrey Bogart movie; it was summer, the revival season; Key Largo, for instance, was playing all over town that week. After the picture he would climb the stairs side by side with Bogart and his troublingly moist upper lip, but he also knew that after his first few steps on the street, if not before, he would be alone again, with nothing and no one for a companion, asking himself why he bothered to go on, and where to. No, he wouldn’t delude himself; for him the time of revivals was past; there was no article to be had for money that could help him to cope with his new situation, nor would any system whatever or any amount of research ever get what he needed off the drawing board. What then did he need? What was he looking for? Nothing, he replied; I’M NOT LOOKING FOR ANYTHING. With that thought, he suddenly felt in the right and wanted to defend his right against all comers. Why was he still going under false colors? Was he a public menace? Almost all that day he had only wanted to do things — to bellow, to show his nakedness, to bare his teeth — but except for the one incident with the girl (no particular of which he remembered) he hadn’t actually done anything. Coward, he thought. And at the same time he was terrified of giving himself away the very next moment.

He realized that he wanted to look at the soldier with the bayonet over his arm, who was standing in the sentry box at the entrance to the Elysée Palace. What’s more, he thought, I’m going to do it! He watched the tip of the bayonet swaying back and forth; but when the soldier suddenly began to look at him, he quickly averted his eyes and looked at his watch. How imperturbably the second hand kept running along! There was something almost comforting in the passage of time. Keuschnig went on acting as if; he looked around as if … No, no one to call out to as if he’d been waiting for him. What about that street sweeper — it must be all right to look at him? But in this neighborhood even a street sweeper seemed to sweep as a mere pretext, and someone who watched him couldn’t be an innocent passer-by.

He would have preferred to pass through the gate with other people. Could he be the last? Is that why there was no one else? What time was it? (He had looked at his watch before, as if a mere glance sufficed to tell you the time!) Had he come to the right place? In any case, he could see the French Television truck in the courtyard. He showed his invitation and was waved through the gateway. On the top floor of the Palace a window banged; behind another window a waitress in a white cap passed; the driver of a black Citroen limousine at one of the side entrances pushed down his radio antenna while looking up at the dark sky; a man on a motorbike disappeared through a small gate in the park wall. These happenings made the building seem almost homelike; looking at things was tolerated. — An officer frisked him, another examined his attaché case. Looking between his upraised arms at the lid of the case as the officer carefully reclosed it, Keuschnig thought: At last something is being done with no help from me — something I can watch without taking part. A free second! He wanted to be grateful to someone for something … At that moment, to his surprise, the impersonal touch of the hands patting his shoulders had the feel of an encouragement, and in the next free second, under the spare professional movements of the officer feeling his chest, the ugly, prolonged suffering of that day dissolved into a pleasant, compassionate sadness. This time, thought Keuschnig, I mustn’t forget everything so quickly. Today, at six o’clock in the afternoon, I experienced the touch of those hands, which were only doing their job, as a caress.

He trembled. At the same time his face went blank with anxious self-control. The empty, pompous solemnity of a Fascist, he himself thought. The officer glanced at him in astonishment, then he and his fellow officer laughed very briefly at that stupid face.

Keuschnig had never expected to see anyone run in these surroundings — and now he himself was running across the courtyard, past the potted trees to the main entrance. No one blew a whistle and summoned him to halt. Some men in dark suits approached in the opposite direction, and the moment he saw them he slowed to a walk. He remembered that, as a child, if people came along while he was running he had always stopped and continued at a walk until they passed. Then he had broken into a run again. Now the men had passed — why didn’t he start running? — So many situations, so many places in which he had stopped for people had suddenly occurred to him — so many different people as well — that in recollection he could only walk. And something else had surprised him: that with his first running steps the surroundings, which had receded from him until nothing remained but a number of vanishing points — nothing there for him to look at! — were again surrounding him protectively. Where previously he had seemed to be passing the backs of things, he now saw details, which seemed to exist for him as well as for others. — Running again, Keuschnig noticed glistening puddles in the gravel beside the freshly watered potted trees and in that moment he had a dreamlike feeling of kinship with the world. He stopped still outside the entrance and shook his head as though arguing against his previous disgruntlement. Now he was able to look freely in all directions. Before going in, he cast a last hungry glance over his shoulder to make sure he had missed nothing. How his surroundings had expanded! It took free eyes to see them so rich — so benevolent. Now the sky with its low-lying clouds seemed to be sharing something with him. Keuschnig gnashed his teeth. — As he ran up the stairs, he was surprised to find himself reenacting a run that had happened in a dream. Then, for the first time in a dream, there had been actual motion in his running.

As a participant in a press conference devoted to the program of the new government, Keuschnig had nothing to worry about for the present. In such a place the omens of death seemed unthinkable. He no longer had to picture his own future, there was no further need to fear surprises; just to sit here — and better still, to sit here ecstatically taking notes along with so many others — was today his idea of peace. Up front, far in the distance, the President of the Republic was explaining the program, and as he spoke Keuschnig was conscious of an animal certainty that everything would get better and better. When a journalist asked if a certain project wasn’t absurd, the President replied: “I cannot afford to look on what I am doing as absurd.” That answer struck Keuschnig’s fancy and he wrote it down. Here nothing was said that was not meant to be taken down; that in itself was comforting! Keuschnig no longer understood why he had been so relieved some months before when after the elections the good old advertisements had replaced campaign posters on the city’s walls. Had the campaign posters represented a threat that something would HAPPEN? Why at the time had he felt the elections to be meaningless and unreal? Now he felt strangely secure in the thought that a policy was being formulated for him. It was so comforting to be able to think about oneself in terms formulated by others; the program he, along with the others, was taking down told him what kind of person he was and what he needed; it even prescribed a specific order of succession! And that part of him which was not defined in the program could be ignored — since it was only a holdover from rebellious adolescence and he himself was to blame if he hadn’t got it under control. I’ve been defined! he thought — and that flattered him. Being defined had the advantage of making him inconspicuous, even to himself. How could he have let a stupid dream upset him so? Who was he that he should presume to see meaning in life only on high holidays? He had indulged his strictly private caprices long enough! He set too much store by mental games that other people simply couldn’t afford. — And what if he found himself in danger again as today? Then, if only he could learn to see everything in its proper place like an adult, he would have a foolproof system by which to redefine himself at any time. — If I can manage that, Keuschnig thought contentedly, no one will ever find out who I really am! — The President’s THOUGHT-MOLDED face … Through the most tortuous sentence he found his way to a sure conclusion. To the most surprising question he had an immediate answer, and once it was uttered he shut his mouth as though EVERYTHING had now been said. Keuschnig felt he was in good hands. He heard the succession of questions and answers, the hum of the TV cameras, the baying of the Nikons, as utility music devised especially for him. But then a flashbulb exploded. A bird outside bumped into one of the high narrow windows, fluttered away, and collided with another window. A panic broke out in Keuschnig when he thought of the lengths he had again gone to in feigning to feel secure. There was no more room for diversions. This was really a life-and-death matter. — The wind had died down, but when in the stillness a flock of pigeons flew up from the court, it sounded to him like the first squall signaling a hurricane. The President, who had been made up for television and wasn’t missing a trick, thrust out his lips; he had planned every move in advance; that was his charm. Now Keuschnig knew what was troubling him: that the government’s program existed for everyone and not for him alone. He took refuge, as he had done when attending lectures at the university, in looking out the window: the white, looped-back curtains — but that swishing sound — where did it come from? Ah, he thought with pleasure, it’s raining. It had begun with a crackling, as when a heavily loaded hay wagon is set in motion. Then, high above the Elysée Palace, thunder rolled, and a sudden sense of security made his skin tingle.

The President took off his glasses and said: “I am a lover of change.” This remark was followed by a pause, and Keuschnig was afraid the journalists wouldn’t have any more questions. He leafed quickly through his notebook — the sound was like that of the pigeons a moment before. Nothing relevant occurred to him. Mr. President, would you like to see blood? The television lights went out, and no sooner had he taken advantage of his last opportunity to do what other people were doing and put his hand over his eyes, than the President of the Republic vanished. (The how-manyeth Republic? Keuschnig thought. Once again, counting proved helpful. It seemed to him that he too was being counted, which at least gave him the satisfaction of feeling himself to be a contemporary.)

He didn’t want to go home yet. He felt that if he got there too soon Stefanie wouldn’t be ready for him. (And today he too would have to rehearse, to rehearse the act of seeing her and the child again.) Maybe he would surprise her in some secret if he opened the door ahead of time. So he bought a paper at the stand on the Avenue Marigny — from my friend, he thought — and holding it over his head to shield himself from the rain, walked as slowly as he could without its getting on his nerves, this way and that way, through the streets of the 8th arrondissement.

In a bakery with little left to sell, a bakery girl was sitting alone, gazing round-eyed into space. He bought an oval loaf of bread, and she waited on him patiently. She gave him his change and started cleaning her nails as he was leaving. The sight gave him a feeling of lightness. He passed a lottery stand that looked as if it had been closed a long time; all he could see inside was a knitted vest on a hanger. In a laundry, pale-faced women were sitting with their hands in their laps, laughing now and then. In a restaurant the tables were set but still unoccupied, except for one in the far corner, where the boss and his helpers were sitting with elbows firmly propped, pouring themselves red wine out of bottles without labels. — A bus came along — jiggling straps, steam from the passengers’ wet clothing — passed and continued on, as though taking some part of him away with it. I’m going to think up something! Keuschnig thought. A sign by the door of the bus had said: SERVICE NORMAL.

He followed a woman who was pushing a shopping cart down the rue Miromesnil, curious to see what would happen if he just kept following her. Here it was so quiet he suddenly noticed how deeply he was breathing. He heaved a sigh. The few sounds to be heard — the occasional scrape of the woman’s high-heeled shoes, the buzz of a door buzzer farther away, the click of the almost simultaneously opening door, an apple rolling to the street from its pyramid in a COURS DES HALLES shop — seemed to give assurance of his own quietness. He still hadn’t seen the woman’s face, and that aroused him. He waited for her in front of a butcher shop; she had left her cart on the sidewalk, a bunch of parsley was sticking out. But then his gaze lost itself in the agglutinations of sawdust that had formed on the tile floor in the course of a long day, and when at last he looked up, the woman was turning into another street, where there was noise again. He followed her to the Champs-Elysées and into the PRISUNIC. It calmed him to go up and down stairs to the accompaniment of music and amplified announcements of PRISUNIC specials; his independent existence slipped away in the process. — At the pet-food section the woman turned around while some cans of cat food she had bought were being put into a brown paper bag. By that time his curiosity about her was nearly gone. She made a face, as if to say that she had expected no more of him. It wasn’t him she saw but SOMEONE LIKE HIM. Only a moment ago, Keuschnig reflected, I was genuinely unhappy at the thought that in another minute this woman would vanish forever from my life. And now the pleasant feeling that I haven’t missed anything. — Relieved, he had his picture taken at the Photomaton. The flashes of the color machine were so intense that the warmth touched his face like a soothing caress. — Then the PRISUNIC closed, and he had to go out into the street again.

He sat down on a bench near the playground in the Carré Marigny, hoping for some accident that would finally give him an opportunity to think about himself, for as soon as he tried deliberately to think, his thoughts ceased to be credible — they were not his own. As usual in Paris, the rain had soon stopped, and the puddles in the sand were flashing under the setting sun. The pigeons had flown up into the trees. Sitting on his outspread newspaper, he looked straight ahead, because he didn’t want to notice anything in particular. On the ground everything was so close at hand. Ahead of him only the dark foliage of the avenues of chestnut trees, behind them the roof of the Grand Palais, and off to the right the top of the Eiffel Tower: nothing to hem him in. The sun went down, and a moment later things began to glow as though from within, while at the same time the air between them darkened. For a time they glowed intensely, as though radiating their essence and energy. In the shimmering dusk details were blurred. A different system had descended. Then the glow was gone, but things were still as bright as before; they merely ceased to radiate brightness, and the twilight between them became daylight again. — And now this light refused to pass. Everything persisted in staying the same. A hellish everyday world settled in, as though forever. This day, it seemed to Keuschnig, would never end. The unchangingly murmuring trees in the bleak, eternal light made his head ache. Objects seemed so immovable that the mere sight of them amounted to a concussion of the brain. He cringed away from them as from a blow. If he should try to start one of these swings moving with a kick, his foot would bounce back, for the swings like everything else in the playground were locked, clamped, screwed tight. They had little sand clocks fastened to them; the sand wouldn’t start flowing until a child paid for the use of a swing — not today. Keuschnig cursed the dead light, which made him feel like his own ghost. He jiggled his hands in disgust. He wanted to complain about the world, which had again become so bare, so barren, so cold and wet, so cramped. Please, let it be night, he thought through the pounding in his head …

A woman with a full shopping bag walked purposefully across the Carré. Hey you, Keuschnig thought, look at me! Nobody wants to look at me … In a little while, home in her hideous kitchen, she wouldn’t shrink back from pouring nauseatingly golden-yellow oil into a pre-warmed frying pan. That sizzling, so preposterous you want to hold your ears, as she puts a grotesque piece of meat into the pan … And then, as sure as death and taxes, the desolately homelike smell she would send out through the open window at the unoffending passers-by! Keuschnig imagined how, with one hand in a flower-patterned oven glove, she would inevitably go out to her mate, who, aperitif glass in hand, would inevitably be waiting for her in the LIVING ROOM (or LIBRARY), and imperturbably inform him that dinner was ready. (Possibly she would only knock at the door of his STUDY, two shorts, one long.) The husband would get the inevitable corkscrew … And with all that, Keuschnig thought, she was so shamelessly sure of herself, when you’d have expected such concentrated inevitability to make her sink straight into the earth! Suddenly he had a vision of things happening simultaneously all over Paris: in Saint-Germain-des-Près (TOURIST QUARTER) pizzas were being gouged and tugged about and hungry tourists were going from restaurant to restaurant reading menus, unable to make up their minds; in Ménilmontant (WORKING-CLASS QUARTER) workers were drinking their after-work beer at the Rendez-vous des Chauffeurs, an authentic WORKERS’ BISTRO, where today as usual quite a few intellectuals had dropped in; in Belleville (AFRICAN QUARTER) groups of blacks, some in dashikis, all holding beer cans, were standing silent on the sidewalk; in Auteuil (POSH QUARTER) waiters in leather-upholstered PUBS were asking sons and daughters of the upper bourgeoisie whether they wished FRENCH or FOREIGN beer; and all over town idle pinball machines gleamed, while those in use rattled and clicked, the plane trees and chestnut trees on the boulevards murmured, the black coupling pipes between Métro cars wriggled when the train was in motion, lovers looked into each other’s eyes, HAMBURGERS rested on soggy slices of onion in those WIMPY snack bars that were still left — and all that, thought Keuschnig — as he stared with burning eyes into the same forever unchanging light — year in year out with the same inexorability, predictability, mortal tedium, and deadly exclusivity with which this possibly perfectly nice woman, for instance, would now prepare an avocado vinaigrette for dinner.

He didn’t want to be anywhere, he wanted nothing more. He wanted to abolish everything! “I don’t believe in God!” he said, meaning nothing. (Those words had often popped out of him in the past.)

Night was falling and at last Keuschnig was alone. He stretched his legs, put both arms over the back of the bench, and thought: How gloriously alone I am! And really bared his teeth. One last thought: I not only have to see everything at once, now I want to. Suddenly the wind grew stronger, and Keuschnig lost himself …

After a while he noticed that for the first time that day there was perfect silence in his head. It was as though he had been having to talk all day, without stopping for breath. Now he only listened. The grass at the edge of the playground was flattened … He listened. The wind died down. When it rose again and the trees set up a murmur, Keuschnig was aware of a new, calm life feeling. The grass stood erect and trembled. Behind the trees, on the Champs-Elysees, an unbroken procession of cars passed; now and then the sound of a horn, or a rattling and roaring when a motorcycle overtook a car. He had thought himself away, yet he was present.

Then he had an experience — and while still taking it in, he hoped he would never forget it. In the sand at his feet he saw three things: a chestnut leaf; a piece of a pocket mirror; a child’s barrette. They had been lying there the whole time, but then suddenly they came together and became miraculous objects. “Who said the world has already been discovered?” It had been discovered only in respect to the mystifications some people used to defend their certainties from others, and surely there were no longer any pseudomysteries — such as the mystery of Holy Communion or the mystery of the universe — to blackmail him with. All the sublime mysteries, no differently from the Mystery of the Black Spider or the Mystery of the Chinese Scarf, were man-made, designed to intimidate people. But these wishing objects on the ground in front of him did not intimidate him. They put him in so confident a mood that he couldn’t sit still. He scraped his heels over the ground and laughed … I haven’t discovered a personal mystery in them, addressed to myself; what I’ve discovered is the IDEA of a mystery valid for all! “What names cannot accomplish as CONCEPTS, they do as IDEAS.” Where had he read that? He needed no mysteries, what he needed was the IDEA of a mystery — and if only he had the idea of a mystery, there would be no need to hide his fear of death behind a lot of pseudomysteries! At this thought Keuschnig leaped for joy. Suddenly he felt so free that he didn’t want to be alone any more. He would go up to someone and say: “You needn’t have any secrets from me!” At the encouraging sight of those three miraculous objects in the sand, he felt a helpless affection for everyone, but he had no desire to be cured of it, because it now seemed perfectly sensible. I have a future! he thought triumphantly. The chestnut leaf, the fragment of mirror, and the barrette seemed to move still closer together — and with them all other things came together … until there was nothing else. Magical proximity! “I can change!” he said aloud. — He stamped his foot, but there was no ghost. He looked around, but no longer saw an adversary. Since there was no need to wish anything more from the three objects, he scraped sand over them. He thought of keeping the chestnut leaf. To remember by? There was no need to remember: he threw the leaf away. Then he took a bite of his bread. Now I can let myself be hungry, he thought as he was leaving, because I’ve finally had an IDEA. He felt all-powerful again, but no more powerful than anyone else.

What a strange day it was! He couldn’t walk, he was running again. He should have been home at nine. He wouldn’t make it on time, ahead of the Austrian writer, unless he took a cab. But then he thought: I’ve got to experience something more, and stopped in front of the chestnut tree, suddenly taking a great liking to this tree with the still-bright strip of sky behind it. I’ve earned the right to look at it, he thought, and cast a long look at its flapping leaves. — He would experience more in a bus than in a cab. So he went over to the Avenue Gabriel and took the 52 bus, which runs from the Opera to the Porte d’Auteuil.

On the bus he thought: Maybe, if I feel as though I hadn’t experienced anything in a long time, not until last night at least, it’s because I had decided in advance what an experience is. As in a travel prospectus, a mere object stood for experience. According to the prospectus, “the campfire will be an experience”—and to my mind the water flowing in the gutter, the soft-smooth surface of the shoe polish in a new can, a freshly made bed, an elderly person who had preserved his curiosity represented experience. — I must get over needing guarantees of experience, he thought.

In the bus he was alone with a North African worker. The North African was drunk. The bus was going fast, because there was no one waiting at most of the stops. When the driver took the sharp turn into the Avenue Friedland without slowing down, the man vomited in the aisle. The driver pulled up at the curb and without a word opened the door. The drunk spoke loudly in his own language, but without turning toward the driver. Keuschnig pretended to be looking out of the window. Not one of the three in the bus looked at either of the others. The North African began to shout. The driver turned off the motor. It’s too late to say anything now, Keuschnig thought. Suddenly he noticed that the drunk was looking at him and speaking to him. He looked back blandly at him as if nothing were wrong. The North African fell silent and got out. The bus drove on. The driver didn’t say a word, he seemed to need no backing up. When Keuschnig looked at the splattered vomit on the floor, glistening in the harsh white overhead light, he felt it was meant for him. — At the next stop he left the bus, long before Auteuil. In getting out, he said to the driver: “Monsieur, vous n’êtes pas gentil,” but the words didn’t come out right.

The drunk had vanished. By then Keuschnig only felt sorry for him; before, he had also regarded him as a nuisance. If he hadn’t been abusive, I’d have helped him, he thought. But because he was angry and stood up for himself, I stopped feeling sorry for him. How could I be so unreasonable? Was I only sorry for myself as I used to be — did I, at the sight of that humiliated man, remember the child who let himself be humiliated without a murmur? — He had witnessed a humiliation; as a witness he felt that he himself had been surprised in a humiliating situation. Keuschnig fled. He ran down the steps of the nearest Métro station, changed at TROCADÉRO, and then at last, bound for home on good old Line 9, he felt free from persecution.

Without expressly thinking of it, he felt the varying distances between stations in his whole body. As usual, the distance between RUE DE LA POMPE and MUETTE seemed so long that he was surprised at MUETTE not to be a station farther on; and today as usual, between JASMIN and MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL, he automatically went to the door too soon, though the train was only slowing down for a curve. — When at last the letters MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL appeared white on blue, they struck him as the goal of a long arduous journey. — A good many things were as usual. But he wasn’t thinking of that any more, he only sensed it in a remote compartment of his mind. As though something depended on it, he tried, in throwing away his used ticket, to make sure it fell into the waste bin. It missed … Already at the gate, he retraced his steps, picked up the ticket, and kept tossing it until it landed in the bin.

By then he was almost home. He took a detour across the Place Jean-Lorrain, where a market was held three days a week. The square was deserted. In the middle there was a small fountain, from the top of which a jet of water flowed into a little basin. The jet was so round, so clear, that Keuschnig put his hand in to break its flow. The leaves of plane trees lay on the asphalt and around their edges the otherwise dry ground was still moist. It was getting dark. The sky, which had kept some of its light, was reflected only in the oily water that had settled in the holes from which the market stanchions had been removed. A cyclist with purring generator turned into a side street. Keuschnig saw the greatly enlarged shadows of coats on the curtain of a restaurant window. The water in the gutter had flowed off, and here and there a sparrow was drinking from the little puddles that remained. Suddenly Keuschnig remembered a bird which had been flying back and forth in a Métro entrance earlier that day. He raised his eyes and saw the searchlights from the far-off Arc de Triomphe playing through the now dark sky. Then with downcast eyes he walked past the house fronts which concierges had scrubbed almost white but which more dogs would piss on, day in day out.

Keuschnig stopped at the door to his house, feeling sick to his stomach because he didn’t know how to act or in what order he should do things. It was beyond him how he had found his way home every day, why he hadn’t ever vanished on the way. Why today, while still in the Métro, had he held his door key in anticipation? Before going in, he thought, I must mentally rehearse the things I’ll have to do. First, in any event, deposit his attaché case in the hallway. Then it was to be hoped (rather than feared as in the fairy tale) that the child would be first to cross his path and that he’d be able to stay with her awhile as a pretext. If the child didn’t appear (because she had already gone to bed) he would quickly put on an appropriate face and, avoiding superfluous motion — like the flower girl — go in to the people. — He had no feeling of anticipation, he wasn’t looking forward to seeing any of them. The closer he came, the less he felt in common with them. While turning the key, at first purposely in the wrong direction, and clearing his throat, he felt as if he were approaching a stone wall incised with ancient and now illegible hieroglyphics. In a moment he would hear the question: “How are you?” and wouldn’t even be entitled to punch the asker. He moved his chin from side to side, relaxed his muscles, and put on an anticipatory smile, in order to seem, if only deceptively, like himself.

The distances in the apartment were so great that before he got to the salon he fell out of his role. His face went blank, and he had to work up a smile again. When he tried to shake hands with the writer’s girl friend, he missed his aim and caught only her little finger, which he shook. He missed again when his wife proffered first one cheek, then the other, as she had seen Frenchwomen do. Why was she wearing that blouse with a necktie of the same material again? Why was she wearing that skirt with the slit on the side? Simultaneously with these thoughts, he asked: “Where’s Agnes?” “She wanted to wait for you,” said Stefanie. “But she got so tired waiting …” “I know,” said Keuschnig, who couldn’t bear to hear her finish a sentence when he knew the end in advance. Involuntarily, he turned the loaf of bread in his hand, revealing the place where he had bitten into it. The writer took out a notebook, wrote something, and smirked. Why was Stefanie sitting in her hostess attitude, hand to cheek, and elbow resting on the palm of her other hand? “I’ll go and see if she’s still awake,” said Keuschnig, eager to turn his telltale face away from the writer. “But don’t wake her if she …” He interrupted Stefanie by bending down over her blouse as if he had seen a thread on it. Why was she always talking needlessly?

The child was still singing in her room. Keuschnig managed to go in without her noticing. What am I doing here? he thought absently. By going to the child’s room he was asserting something that had ceased to be true. I’ve got to think about her, so as to feel something about her again. — Agnes’s singing grew louder, she was beginning to shout. Then she stopped singing and only experimented with lip noises. So much peace spread through the dark room from the bed that Keuschnig was able to crouch down. Once or twice the child kicked. Then at last she fell asleep, but it was only after a long sigh that her deep sleep began. Keuschnig stood up, conscious of being permeated by a sadness he had never before experienced. His sadness dispelled his fear of the people outside and he looked forward to being with them again. He would sit there and pay attention and be able to look into their faces. “She fell asleep so peacefully she’s sure to sleep until morning,” he said, delighted to be saying something superfluous himself. It was like after a patched-up quarrel, when the quarrelers confine themselves almost entirely to saying the most obvious things, wishing only to show that they’re on speaking terms again. “What a wind that was today!” he said with conviction, and when the writer’s girl friend replied: “It demolished my hairdo,” universal trust seemed to have been re-established. He didn’t mind spreading his napkin over his knees, and he was touched when Stefanie asked: “Something aperitivish?” To respond with “So do I” to everything that was said — that was harmony. — Meanwhile, the writer was still taking notes. “Are you from the police?” Keuschnig asked.

The writer was very fat and a little older than Keuschnig. Though not really clumsy, he seemed to wreck everything he touched. In lighting a match, for instance, he would crush the whole matchbox … Apparently thinking he deserved compensation for putting his notebook away, he began to talk about himself: “I haven’t anything in particular to tell you,” he said. “I’ve lost my curiosity about people. I used to be so curious that if someone said to me: ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? Could you write about me?’ I’d think: ‘Why not?’ Today if someone even says: ‘My mother played the piano … ’ it turns my stomach. The more I realize how much I have in common with everyone, the less solidarity I feel with anyone. When I hear someone singing the praises of solidarity, I stick my fingers down my throat. Once on the stairs leading to the toilets a woman started telling me about herself. I wanted to ask her: How with that little face of yours can you presume to speak in the first person singular? On the street, when I look at the people coming in the opposite direction, I think: What a lot of biographies — and all equally boring! Sometimes I feel like asking the woman at the newspaper stand about her background — but only in derision. Once at the bar of a café a woman was telephoning in rather a loud voice. I held my hands over my ears because I wanted no part in her story. Or think of the fun we used to have listening to conversations at the tables around us. Oh, how sick I am of eavesdropping now! I see a column of cars and I think: Never again will these people interest me. Yesterday I was in Neuilly, at the house of an industrialist. His wife said: ‘I love to observe people, their hands for instance.’ And then after a while she said: ‘My little Portuguese pearl chooses to be in a bad humor today. I feel I’m entitled to harmony in my surroundings; after all, I don’t let people see how I’m feeling.’—I could hardly bear it. Good Lord, I thought, now she’s going to let her hair down. This morning I saw a death notice; it was somebody I didn’t even know, but instantly I thought: Ha, dead at last, the swine. Once when I was visiting someone, he said: ‘It’s so dusty here.’ It flashed through my mind that my place was a lot dustier, but I didn’t mention it, because I didn’t want to comfort him.” (He interrupted himself and said on a note of surprise: “I enjoyed that tomato.”) “I never want to observe anyone again,” he went on. “Not long ago, when I was looking at the people on the street, I said to myself: Maybe I should see them at work or at home in their apartments. But then I realized that there they would be even more predictable than on the street … Someone came to see me. He wanted to tell me his troubles, but I said I’d rather watch the football game on TV. I met a beautiful woman — another one of those, I thought. When I nevertheless catch myself observing somebody out of old habit, I suddenly think: But what about myself? I have a horror of looking to right or left; there’s always something waiting to be looked at: somebody else with a sweater tied around his neck, charcoal smoke pouring out of somebody else’s front garden. Once I had an appointment with somebody and decided to give him my full attention — but then when I had him in front of me, I thought: What for? And I stood there looking disgustedly at his tiresome face … I keep wondering how people can see images in the stars. I am incapable of grouping stars into constellations. The same with phenomena. I have no idea how to CONSTELLATE them, how to group them and find meaning in them. Have you ever noticed how often certain philosophers use the word ‘reconcile,’ ‘secure,’ ‘rescue’? CONCEPTS are RECONCILED, PHENOMENA are RESCUED. And what are they rescued by? By CONCEPTS. And ultimately the phenomena that have been rescued by concepts are secured in IDEAS. I admit that I have some acquaintance with ideas, but I don’t feel secure in them. I don’t despise ideas, but I do despise the people who feel secure in them — mostly because they are safe from me. Do you feel the same way, Gregor? Do you ever wake up and find you’ve lost the connection?” “No,” said Keuschnig instantly. “Every single day I’m happy to be alive, and more curious than ever. I’d have been glad to say ‘Yes, I feel the same way,’ because I know you depend on it. But I cannot afford to look on what I am doing as absurd.” “It’s a funny thing,” said the writer, pouring his glass so full that the red wine ran down over the tablecloth. “My feelings are really hurt when someone doesn’t feel exactly the same as I do. I feel kinship only with people who see no real meaning in what they are doing. I’ve met a good many people like that recently and supported them in their attitude. I had hopes for you when I included you in my survey. Isn’t there any way I can get at you?” “I almost fell for your game,” said Keuschnig, “but then I noticed that while you were complaining so exhaustively you were watching me closely, I might even say slyly. I know all about that from the child: she can be crying for all she’s worth and at the same time observe every detail of my face without batting an eyelash. Besides, how can you expect me to believe you’re not curious when you take notes as you were doing just now?” “I didn’t put down anything about you,” said the writer. “It just happened to cross my mind that my only experience today was the con-sommé madrilène I had for lunch. For the moment you can feel safe from me.” “Maybe I’ll change places with you sometime,” said Keuschnig. “It must give you a sense of triumph to be able to complain the way you do in the presence of others.” “Mostly it makes the others feel better,” said the writer. — At that moment Stefanie asked him: “What sign are you?” and everyone burst out laughing except Françoise, the woman who had come with the writer. — The writer laughed so hard the snot popped out of his nose.

While they were still laughing, Françoise said seriously: “I would like to tell the story of my life, and do you know why? Because I keep discovering more and more how much I have in common with other people of my age, especially women. To tell the truth, all my experience has been very impersonal, yet there has always been something very personal about it. When I think back, my personal experiences always seem to have been brought about by the political events of the time. The day the North Vietnamese took Dien Bien Phu, my stepfather got drunk and raped me. The man who later became my husband took advantage of a headline about an OAS bombing to speak to me on the bus. After the Algerian War we had to move because our apartment was owned by a dispossessed Algerian colonist, who needed it for himself. When France walked out of NATO, I lost my job as secretary on an American Air Force base. In May 1968 my husband went off with another woman … Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman that so much of my experience has been determined by outside events. Almost all my experiences have been sad; as a matter of fact, you can hardly call them experiences. But they’ve changed me. If at the age of forty I get cancer or they take me to an insane asylum, I’ll know why.” “What about your more cheerful experiences?” the writer asked. “Do you account for them in the same way? Your possibly beginning to love me, for instance?” “Thanks to the unions,” said Françoise, “I have a steady part-time job. As a result, the work doesn’t disgust me as much as it might, and I’m not so worried about being thrown out of work. That gives me more time for the better feelings.” The writer wrote something in his notebook. “I just remembered,” he said, “that every time the waiter at the restaurant today opened a bottle of wine he held the cork up to his nose but didn’t really smell it.” “Yes,” said Françoise, “but did you notice how worn down his heels were? I think the reason you’ve lost interest in people is that you’re always looking for obscure details and you’ve run out of them. There’s nothing left for you to discover but the inexhaustible riches of everyday life, and you turn up your nose at that.” “I have not run out of obscure details,” said the writer, who ate with his left hand and wrote so vigorously with his right that the table moved. “In the last few minutes,” he said, “my curiosity has revived — right now I’m curious about somebody.” Françoise pinched his fat cheek and he suddenly stuck his finger in her ear. “About whom?” asked Keuschnig, who, feeling secure, had almost humbly let them talk the whole time, while looking at the wart in Françoise’s shaved armpit. “About you, my dear Gregor,” said the writer, without looking up from his notebook. His ball-point broke; without a moment’s delay he took out another and went on writing. This time no one laughed but Stefanie.

Here we go, thought Keuschnig, and the bite he had just taken of a peach became tasteless in his mouth. “Even here in France,” he said aloud, “the fruit doesn’t taste like anything any more.” “We were talking about you before you came in,” said the writer. Keuschnig asked no questions, though he was curious to know what they had said. “There’s nothing to say about me,” he said. Stefanie was looking at him from the side. That disturbed him, but he didn’t want to justify her by returning her look. Above all, I mustn’t grin as if I’d been caught out! He thought of the sleeping child and wanted to rest his head on the table and fall asleep. From the hallway he heard water trickling in the plumbing of the apartment upstairs, and suddenly he started scratching the base of his nail as he had done years before, in order to see the moon underneath. In the next moment a ball-point clicked, and he gave a start. Now the catastrophe, he thought. He has found out who I really am. He stood up, went to the window, and quickly drew the curtain; now, at least, no outsider would see what was about to happen. He remembered something Stefanie had once said at the sight of Agnes and another child sitting surrounded by toys but not knowing what to do. “They can’t play any more,” she had said. I can’t play any more, he thought, and a blood vessel under his eye twitched almost soothingly. He wanted to prepare himself, but didn’t know how. He sat down at the table again and wound his wrist watch. Not a grain of dust on his suit. At last the ball-point was being pointed at him and Keuschnig couldn’t help grinning.

“I saw you in town today,” said the writer slowly, smacking his lips on the wine he had just swallowed. “You had changed. You always used to look the same when I ran into you now and then, but my impression of you was different each time — I felt good about that. But today you were changed, because you were trying so desperately to look the same as usual. You were so intent on seeming to be your old self that you startled me, it was like seeing a double of someone who’s just died walking down the street. You were the same, but in such a peculiar way that I only recognized you by your suit. And stop looking into my eyes, it won’t work; you can’t fool me any more that way. After Stefanie took your plate away just now, you secretly, behind your cupped hand, cleared away the peas you had spilled while eating. After every sip of wine you wiped your lip marks and fingerprints off your glass, and once when your napkin was lying on the table with the stains where you had wiped your mouth on top, you quickly turned it around — just as you turned that loaf of bread you’d bitten into. You won’t let anyone do anything for you, Gregor. You won’t even let anyone pass you the salt — as if you were afraid that in helping you someone would get close enough to see through you. What are you trying to hide?”

Keuschnig pretended to look at the writer; in reality he was watching the bubble that formed on the crepes suzette Stefanie was flaming in hot brandy sauce, and finally burst. He put the point of his knife to his forehead and thought: The only purpose of all that talk before was to make me feel unobserved. He searched the table for something to throw. Now I’m going to do it! he thought, and actually threw a chunk of bread at the writer. Not even Stefanie laughed. In a minute he would DISGRACE himself forever. Now he really looked at the writer, imploringly, and the writer turned away, not mercifully, but with the air of a man certain of his triumph and modestly proud of it; turning away from his victim, who was still alive but no longer knew it, with an elegant smile. — Keuschnig felt so ridiculous he thought his head would fall off. He realized that he had unintentionally taken on the writer’s facial expression, the same grin, the same lowered eyelids. In the general silence they exchanged the same short sly glances …

At this moment — he had a big peach stone in his mouth — Keuschnig, in full consciousness, had an experience he had never before encountered except in occasional dreams: He felt himself to be something BLOODCURD-LINGLYLY strange, yet known to all — a creature exhibited in a nest and mortally ashamed, IMMORTALLY DISGRACED, washed out of the matrix in mid-gestation, and now for all time a monstrous, unfinished bag of skin, a freak of nature, a MONSTROSITY, that people would point at, and so revolting that even as they pointed their eyes would fix on something else! — Keuschnig screamed, spat the peach stone into the writer’s face, and began to take his clothes off.

He carefully undid his tie, then laid his trousers, carefully folded, over the back of a chair. The others had stood up. The writer observed him. Françoise tried to catch the eye of Stefanie, who was looking down. The naked Keuschnig ran around the table and jumped on Françoise, who was still trying to laugh. They fell in a heap. Blindly Keuschnig thrust his hand into a plate and smeared his face with leftover stew. He chanced to touch the writer’s leg. “Don’t you butt in!” he said, and hauled off at the writer. Keuschnig rose to his feet, and they began to exchange blows, slowly, blow after blow, eye to eye, soundlessly, systematically, and with the obstinacy of children. After a while Keuschnig realized that he was going to burst out crying, with relief at no longer having to dissemble any more, with grief that it was all up with him. Ah, he thought with satisfaction, I’m crying. But he only turned away from the writer and said gleefully to Stefanie: “This afternoon at the embassy I made love on the floor to a girl whose name I didn’t even know.” —She smiled with only one side of her mouth, and he repeated the sentence to emphasize his malicious intent.

Washed and dressed again, Keuschnig asked the writer to go for a walk with him. The women had disappeared into the back room, and could no longer be heard. “As we crossed the Pont Mirabeau on our way here this evening,” said the writer, “the Seine was perfectly calm. Not a ripple.” “I’ve had enough water for today,” said Keuschnig. “Let’s go to Passy, along the railroad. I feel like walking, just walking straight ahead. I can’t do anything else any more.”

In silence they walked down the boulevard. Nearly all the windows in the tallish houses were dark, and a good many of the shutters had been let down, where people had gone on vacation. Only some of the little attic windows were still lit. What with the boulevard and the railroad cut beside it, the space between the rows of houses was so wide that the sound of their footsteps echoed back from the far side. There were no other walkers. A man and a woman were sitting in a car drawn up at the curb, but they were only looking into space. The sky was full of night clouds tinged with yellow city light, and stars could be seen in the openings between them. The breeze was so faint that only the leaves at the end of a branch or twig stirred. In the light of the street lamps behind them the branches had the look of hard black tracery, in and out of which leaves, that seemed illumined from within, played a game of light and shadow. One had to prick up one’s ears to hear the movement of the leaves; no rustling, only a soft, almost eerie breathing. Here and there among the green leaves a lone withered leaf whispered audibly. Looking out of the corners of his eyes at the slowly shifting foliage, Keuschnig suddenly saw knots of animals thrusting forward and drawing back. A black beetle fell brittly to the ground. The sidewalk was awash with fresh dog piss … Though watching nothing, Keuschnig sensed that nothing escaped him. He stood still and felt the breeze only as cool air on his temples.

As they were passing the RUE DE L‘ASSOMPTION, he remembered the Café de la Paix and the woman he had arranged to meet there the evening of the next day. He sat down on a bench, from which one could look down the long, dark, yet because of its name gratuitously promising rue de l’Assomption. He hadn’t wished for a sign, but now unintentionally he had EXPERIENCED one. Did he need it?

The writer sat down beside him, spreading himself so wide that he almost pushed Keuschnig off the bench. After a while he said: “All of a sudden I feel like seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo again, that Spanish church tower with the crape-framed blue sky behind it — right this minute! The editors of some anthology have asked me how I felt about prayer, which is apparently being rediscovered. Have you ever prayed?” Keuschnig was going to say something in answer, but only exhaled. The next moment he experienced a thrill of pleasure because he hadn’t said anything. I’m free, he thought. I don’t have to talk any more. What a relief! And he gave a startled laugh.

They walked on as far as the Passy station. Keuschnig felt an impulse to disappear in the blackness of the Bois de Boulogne. But he didn’t want to walk any more. The blue signal light down in the railroad cut would go on shining uselessly all night … Surrounded by chairs piled on tables, they drank cognac in the one café that was still open. The writer told Keuschnig how a certain bass guitarist had amazed him by never losing his rhythm. “He must have made his peace with the world,” said the writer, who. had just broken a cigarette while putting it in his mouth. A dog barked in the silent streets around the Porte de Passy, and another, up the boulevard, almost at the Porte d’Auteuil, answered, as dogs in the country do at night. In one of the totally dark buildings a toilet light went on and a moment later went out again. Though it was after midnight, a shutter was rolled down. The comfortable apartment houses now gave the impression of impregnable fortresses. The roar of cars could be heard from the Boulevard Périphérique, but none came this way. Was that a rat running across the street on light-colored legs? The sidewalk glistened like the steps of the Métro … By this time Keuschnig was tired and nothing else.

On the way home his fatigue turned to fear and fear made him ruthless. He walked so fast that the corpulent writer fell behind. In his fear he even forgot to see SIGNS. The bare tree roots on the unpaved path beside the railroad cut were terrifying in themselves. When he reached the house in a panic, the two women were sitting on the front steps with their heads together, talking softly. Hostile in their security, they paid no attention to him. Guitar music was coming out of the open door.

They didn’t move aside when he went past them into the apartment. Their only response to his grazing them was to talk louder. He wished them dead.

He sat down in the dining room. The dirty dishes were still on the table. Thoughts pell-mell, in complete sentences, but all unutterable. Unthinkable that he would ever again draw breath to say a word. But equally repellent that he should go to bed now. Like a sick man, he could neither stand nor lie, only sit motionless, leaning forward. He wanted to close his eyes, so as to see nothing more — but for that he’d have needed lids for his whole body. He couldn’t help hearing the women on the steps talk about him in the third person plural—“men like Gregor”—as though he didn’t count any more. Some people passed the ground-floor window talking Spanish in the silent night, and he experienced a fleeting moment of longing and appeasement. The writer came in panting and sat down facing him on the floor. How ridiculous! He knew the writer was there, but didn’t look up. In the presence of this man with his affectation of omniscience, innumerable little worms began swarming in and out of every opening in Keuschnig’s body; an intolerable itch, especially in his member and nostrils. He scratched himself. Dried ear wax detached itself from his auditory passages and fell somewhere … Now I would like to see someone INNOCENT, he thought; someone I know nothing about; neither where he comes from nor what he’s like. — From the writer’s mouth he heard a smacking sound, as though his tongue were detaching itself menacingly from his palate, preparing to speak — and then he really heard him clearing his throat. Don’t speak! “Once I get the hang of it,” said the writer, “I can make do with your gestures. But when your situation gets really critical, you’ll have to start talking.” Keuschnig only bared his teeth. The writer wanted to leave but couldn’t get up off the floor. He rolled back and forth for a while, then called the women to help him. They picked him up, the three of them went out. They didn’t say a word in front of Keuschnig and they didn’t laugh. Once outside, they talked without interruption.

Keuschnig stayed there motionless, until he heard the guests departing from the seated entertainment in a fulsomely rattling diesel taxi. He heard Stefanie putting out the lights all over the apartment and going into the bathroom. He sat in the dark and heard her brushing her teeth. He heard her going down the long hallway to her room, opening and closing the door. He heard things happening one after another, and that day he was unable to skip or disregard any of them.

Much later, without knowing how he got up, he suddenly found himself on his feet, going to her. It was dark in the room. She was breathing as though asleep. He stood there indifferent, beginning to feel sleepy. And then, very much awake, she said slowly: “Gregor, you know I love you …” but her calm gave him a jolt. He switched on the light and sat down beside her. She looked so solemn that the sight of her scattered clothing seemed incongruous. Yet, because of it, he saw her more clearly than usual. Suddenly, while they were looking at each other, he wanted to butt her chin with his head. She began to sob, and he noticed that her arms were breaking out in gooseflesh. “Are you sad?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it.” He bent over her and caressed her, himself trembling and without ulterior motive. How cold she was all over! He grew excited and lay on top of her. At that she kicked him off the bed and he fell on the floor. Almost contentedly, he left the room.

At that point everything had really become a joke! Humpbacked and squinting he entered the PARENTS’ BEDROOM. With malignant sloppiness he dropped his trousers on a chair. Then he sat up in the bed and read the diner’s guides, pencil in hand, drawing circles around stars, crowns, and chef’s hats. The tiniest village at the end of the world was still on the map if it could boast a recommended restaurant. How many escape routes were open to him! — He tried to remember the past day and realized he had forgotten most of it. He began to feel proud that he was still alive. His head drooped and quickly he put out the light. He was asleep before his head touched the pillow.

He awoke soon afterwards at the edge of a precipice, from a dream in which he was about to be murdered. He woke up because it occurred to him at the last moment that he himself was the murderer. He was the intended victim and he was the murderer, who was just coming into the house from the fog outside. Waking didn’t mend matters — the only difference was that his horror no longer expressed itself in objects and images. He had awoken stretched out, his arms straight at his sides, one foot on the other, sole on instep. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes had opened as quickly as the eyes of an awakening vampire. He lay speechless, incapable of moving, infected with the terror of death. Nothing would ever change. There was no possibility of flight, no salvation of any kind. His heart no longer seemed protected by ribs. It pounded as though it had nothing but skin over it.

The room was so impenetrably dark that in his thoughts he groaned with hate, disgust, rage — though he didn’t utter a sound. Yet he used to think that here in a foreign country, in a different language, the fits of terror he had had all his life might take on a different meaning, that at least they would not be so utterly abysmal, that, chiefly because thus far he had not learned to speak the foreign language instinctively and in general lived much less instinctively in France than he had in Austria, he would no longer be so helplessly at their mercy as he had been in the land of his birth and childhood … As though these thoughts had given him back his mobility, he began to slap his bed just as in childhood he had slapped some object he had barked his shins on.

Then he remembered with disgust that before putting out the light he had noticed some dried rings the water glass had left on his bedside table. He’d have to wipe them off first thing in the morning. He also thought of the dirty dishes that were still on the dining-room table. What abominable disorder the whole place was in, what a hopeless mess! That half-full can of corn in the icebox, for instance, that should have been emptied into a bowl. The phonograph records that had not been put back into their sleeves … And in the bathroom, all that hair in the brush! You’d have to be mad to conceive of a future under such conditions!

He tried to fall asleep. Maybe something new would turn up while he slept. I must become a new man! he repeated, and every muscle in his body tensed. That’s how I used to pray, he thought with surprise; my prayer consisted in silently wishing for something, with tense muscles. — He went to the window and opened the curtains.

Back in bed, Keuschnig felt that he had finally earned the right to be tired. On one of the upper floors of the house a child coughed, a long cough from deep in the chest. It must have hurt, for the child cried a little, perhaps in its sleep, and panted heavily. Keuschnig pulled up his legs and laid his hands over his face. He had never spoken to anyone in the house except the concierge couple; he didn’t even know the other occupants by sight. The clock of the Auteuil church struck the hour. The child coughed again, then called out several times for its mother. Keuschnig noticed that without meaning to he had been counting all along. He knew how often the child had coughed, what hour the clock in the belfry had struck, how often the child had called out

Still curious, he fell asleep.

His next dream was about his mother, who had been coming more and more alive in his dreams. He danced with her, rather close but side by side, avoiding frontal contact. He woke up mulling over the words “guest bed,” “north German area,” “visiting hours,” “quick trip,” “Austria cellar,” “stomach timetable,” “darling daughter,” “ginkgo tree”—all of which had been spoken that evening. Then, at the recollection of Stefanie asking in a Chinese restaurant “How’s your chop suey?”, he had to turn over on the other side to keep from vomiting. Next a dead crow fell from the winter sky and landed on a bear. Meanwhile, a big pot of jellied calves’ feet was cooking in the kitchen. Then on a steep slope he came across a dead woman, lying unburied, with black clotted blood in her open mouth, and strewed sand over her. Next he was on a stage and couldn’t remember his part, though he himself had written the play. He woke up and saw a satellite blinking in the night-gray sky as it passed the window. It’s all over, he thought, I don’t love anyone any more. Next he was in someone else’s apartment; he had forgotten to pull the chain after taking a shit, and someone else was already on his way to the toilet. Suddenly everyone was against him. All alone he was running across a quiet Alpine plateau traversed by racing cloud shadows, but they hadn’t yet started shooting at him. War had broken out again, and the last bus drove away with him, while his child was left standing in the street. When he woke up, he was drooling with fear. Next he was riding on top of a very fat woman and his pubic hair was stained with her menstrual blood. Unable to go home because he’d been involved in a million-dollar holdup, he was starting a new life with a false passport and altered fingerprints. This dream moved so slowly that he mistook it for reality. With a strange joy he found out that his case wasn’t covered by the statute of limitations and that he would have to go on living without identity for the rest of his life. An important night, he thought in a half sleep. He was good and sick of empty, incoherent awakeness. Please, one last dream, maybe it will be my salvation! — While in the apartment above him the radio was already blaring wake-up music, Keuschnig in a colorful morning dream was walking through a sunny valley, so immense, so paradisaically alive that he ached with delight. All the houses were inns; in front of them stood wooden tables and benches in softly shimmering grass, the air was balmy — at last he had found his element. Then the calves’ feet were overturned in the kitchen. A peal of thunder, and Keuschnig, forsaken by all his dreams, awoke for good under a dark sky, and he was nothing but a small, contemptible evildoer, who had instantly lost the meaning of his dreams. — So began the day on which his wife left him, on which his child was lost, on which he wanted to stop living, and on which some things nevertheless changed in the end.

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 home — a 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. — All 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 himself — does 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 matter — I’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 digit — or almost — repeated over and over. Suddenly as he was listening to Eine kleine Nachtmusik and waiting for the taxi company’s switchboard to answer, Stefanie fell down — without 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. — As 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.”—The 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.”—With a sense of humiliation he thought: She beat me to it. Now I can’t say that to her. — All 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 sheet — would 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. — What 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 mortadella! 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 done — that 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. — Later, 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. — He 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 …

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 wall — without 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! — But maybe, through the child, I could learn a different way of thinking. — He 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 airplane — that 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, heard — the 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 you — you 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 wistful — as though people not only slept longer and had sweeter dreams during their summer vacations but took their dreams more seriously. — Still, 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 him — on the verge of tears …

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?”—because 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.

In his benumbed state of mind he hoped for a sign, and when he threw the apple core into an empty tin pail and hit the inner wall, there was indeed something menacing in the sound. Quickly he threw the core again, making sure it hit the bottom of the pail, which did not resound. A shirt was slowly slipping off a clothes hanger, and he couldn’t stop it in time! To compensate, he quickly smoothed out the creases in one of the child’s drawings and straightened a pair of shoes, one of which had been resting alarmingly on the other. The door to the storeroom was open a crack; he ran and closed it, thinking: I’ll laugh about this later on. — He went out into the garden and the soft summer breeze soon relieved his oppression. Then a child screamed pitifully on one of the upper floors, and at the same time the clock in the church steeple struck — and again irresistible terror assailed his ears. A chill ran through him. He rushed into the house and phoned Beatrice. “I’m coming over right away.” “As you like,” she answered, and waited before hanging up, almost as though expecting him to ask: Is it all right with you? — But already he was ruthlessly on the way to the door with Agnes.

He locked all three locks from outside, each time turning the key twice, as though to gain time in opening them again when he came home. In the shade of a plane tree beside the railroad cut the concierge and his wife, who had little to do in the house during the summer months when most of the tenants were away, were sitting on a bench that had been painted a light color. They were very old. The husband had his arm around his wife, who was knitting. A ball of wool lay beside her on the bench, and at his feet there was a bird cage with quite a few canaries hopping around in it. They’ll be able to testify that they saw me here in the late forenoon of such and such a day, thought Keuschnig involuntarily, and called out a greeting to them from across the boulevard — as though he would soon need witnesses in his favor. And with the child, he also struck himself as less conspicuous. Oh, to achieve blissful innocence with her help! he thought suddenly. — In the corner restaurant the tables were already spread with white tablecloths and set for lunch, and out in front the patron was walking up and down with his dog. Him, too, Keuschnig greeted distinctly; if the worst came to the worst, the man would testify in his favor. On the restaurant window he caught sight of a handwritten sign he hadn’t seen the night before, to the effect that “the house” no longer accepted checks. He had never paid with a check at this restaurant and now for the first time he felt a bond with the patron, for he was an honest customer and not “one of those.” I need witnesses, he thought, and wanted to be with Beatrice right away. At last the flashing, swift-flowing water in the gutter was having its old effect.

A taxi-ride in pleasant inattentiveness; no other feeling than that of being driven through deserted summery streets. Absently backing into the elevator with the child, who was speechless with curiosity; guilelessly tugging the bellpull, without a thought of preparing his face; then standing with his back to the opening door like a constant visitor, as though it couldn’t possibly be anyone else.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Beatrice. She was very friendly to Agnes and took her to play with her own two children in their room. As though to show that he had changed and was willing to have things done for him, he asked her to get him a drink. “You know where the bottles are,” she said. Still exhilarated by the sensation of riding, he went to the kitchen, and on the table saw the cup Beatrice had drunk her tea out of that morning. She sat there alone, he thought, and all at once it seemed to him that he understood her bitterness. He hurried back to her, threw his arms around her, and said sanctimoniously: “I love you.” She looked at him in surprise and said: “Go and wash. You look so dirty.” He went whistling to the bathroom and washed his face. He wouldn’t let anything discourage him. But at the sight of all the tubes, the hand cream, the foot cream, the toothpaste, so neatly squeezed from the bottom up, he was struck with the certainty that he was now irrevocably excluded. Far, far away the three children were imitating the voices of the birds outside.

He sat down across from Beatrice. For a long while she looked at him, but asked no questions. Soon she would begin to think of something entirely different, and it would be all over between them. Suddenly everything hung in the balance; one more wordless moment and he would be an importunate stranger for her. Already a long breath escaped her in the silence and she started looking at something else … He tried hurriedly to talk, to tell her about a restaurant under mulberry trees on the Yugoslavian coast … Up until then she had turned all his stories into projects for the future: “Someday I’ll go to that restaurant with you; next time we’ll visit that coast together!” Now she responded with silence. He tried memories they had in common, but again there was no answer. Today the teasing remarks that had always made her laugh left her cold. She wanted no part in their tacitly agreed-on games. But perhaps that meant she expected more of him. He sat down beside her. It wasn’t until he had thought for a moment of the child in the next room that he found it natural to put his arm around her — though he wasn’t thinking of her. While stroking her breasts he succeeded in making a slight contact, and at the same time the strange thought came to him that at this moment he was discovering a village far far away, deep in New England, for himself and only for himself. Wasn’t she feeling the same thing? Oh yes, she was looking at him longingly, but with a longing that concerned all her past and future lovers, all except him. Harmony was gone and they both turned their faces away.

Lovelessly but anxiously he made love to her. She didn’t dissemble, she looked at him so unforbearingly that he wasn’t even able to close his eyes. In the next room the children had been laughing loudly for some time, for no reason. He tried in vain to think of another woman; there wasn’t any. Beatrice hadn’t been joining in his movements for some time and they had become all the more violent. He was hopelessly trapped, she had seen through him. His scrotum grew colder and colder. His tongue rattled in his wide-open mouth. He stroked the withered skin of her elbow and wanted to howl with hopelessness. A pile of newspapers under his arm began to slide … Beatrice rested her hand on his shoulder and slipped out from under him. Sitting up, she combed and fluffed her hair. He lay there forlorn, and she covered him up before leaving the room. A window swung open, the city roared; the world seemed to have reduced itself to a few terrifying sounds and otherwise to be empty. Outside something terrible had happened, and he was the victim. Why couldn’t he hear the children any more? Children’s voices would have brought him some relief.

He found Beatrice in the kitchen, where she was shelling peas into a bowl. She was singing — and once, when she got stuck in her song, she stopped shelling until she finally remembered the words. She knew all about him — and he no longer knew anything about her. “I feel so full of longing today,” she said, and paced the floor in front of him. She spoke as carefully to him as if she had been on the phone. “This morning I saw a rainbow and I was ready for almost anything. I need to experience something!” Yes, she was right: with him she had “experienced everything”—but nothing that mattered any more. — He took Agnes and left the singing Beatrice; he slunk away. The elevator was still at the same floor: so few people were there in the summer. Down below, the stone floor of the doorway had just been hosed down, and suddenly Keuschnig smelled the dark church of his native village. In the same street there was a restaurant mentioned in the guides, but it was closed — FERMETURE ANNUELLE; the windows were whitened on the inside and he couldn’t even look in.

Only a plan can help me now, he thought. Whatever I do from now on must be figured out in advance, as if it were business. UNE NOUVELLE FORMULE — that was a slogan used to advertise a restaurant that had only one menu to offer, with no choice. Before a business went bankrupt, you thought up a new formula. Why shouldn’t he do the same for himself? Reinvent himself! — First he would patiently observe other people; that seemed necessary if he was to recompose himself.

He took the child to a restaurant on the Place Clichy for lunch; there were cloth napkins, and today he found it soothing to unfold them. (A good many restaurants used paper napkins during the summer months when they were patronized chiefly by tourists.) He stretched out his legs and looked expectantly at the people around him. The immediate future seemed taken care of. Agnes was noisily guzzling her soup. When he poured water into her glass, he felt his heart going out to her with the stream. There she sat, alone and self-sufficient. She needed him only insofar as he enabled her to attend to herself without being afraid. With the taste of wine in his mouth, Keuschnig longed to find the beautiful strange land where death would no longer be a bodily presence. At last the day is rising, he thought, and felt that his eyes were opening of their own accord, with no effort on his part.

At the next table there was a couple, who talked from the moment they sat down to the moment they got up, without the slightest pause. They’ve found the formula, he thought. At first he admired them; then he had the impression that their faces had been lifted. Every time the husband finished saying something, the wife, as though to reward him, said: “Oh, I love you!” Both had bad colds and it gave them great pleasure to talk in their deep rheumy voices. Once the wife kissed the husband on the cheek and he went right on picking his nose. At another table they were taking a child’s picture, but waiting to snap it until a genuinely childlike smile appeared on its face. They spoke in sentences with the last word missing, and the child had to supply it, so everything they said to the child took the form of a question. “We put our napkin on our …?” “Lap,” said the child. — “The Seine flows into the …?” “Sea,” said the child. — “Bravo! Bravo!” Two men eating alone had the following conversation: “I’ve been having a run of luck with the ladies,” said one. “I’ve got something nice; had her for three weeks now,” said the other. The patron was standing beside another table, telling a joke. After he had left them the people at the table spoke very softly. A fat man had a table to himself; all the waiters stopped to shake hands with him. Before making out a check, he stretched his arm and his coat sleeve slid far up his wrist. As he signed, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and then he looked around, apparently wondering where else he could sign. Another couple were talking about poetry. The husband would make a long pause in midsentence, as though reflecting; then he would say just what anyone would have expected him to say. When someone at the next table asked him for the salt, he started as though interrupted in a reverie. “I’ve always been a romantic,” he said to his wife. Another man spent a whole hour reading a single page of France Soir—the daily installment of the serialized novel; the page he had folded back carried the results of a public-opinion poll, according to which more Frenchmen were satisfied with their lives than according to last month’s poll. The woman at the cashier’s desk was bent over a sheet of paper with a concentration known only to persons checking accounts. In the kitchen a waiter in black was bending the ear of a waiter in white. A handsome man came sauntering in with his lips slightly parted, as though he knew every language in the world; one eyebrow upraised, nostrils perfectly plucked, he was biting his lower lip. He was followed by a not quite so handsome woman, who kept her face rigid for fear of spoiling her not so very great beauty. How shamelessly they displayed themselves — as though everything had already been said about them and they had nothing more to fear. All their worries are behind them, thought Keuschnig. As he looked at those two who were after all so much like him, Keuschnig couldn’t conceive of wanting to be anything but dead.

The food went dry in his mouth. He pushed his plate away and looked at Agnes, who was dipping bread in her sauce. Bent over the table, wholly taken up with eating, she smiled. The most commonplace things make her smile, he thought. At that moment he felt no nostalgia for that condition, but took pleasure in the thought that she might never know such disgust, such hate, such horror as his.

How could he have supposed that he would feel safe in a restaurant? There was no longer any place where he could be outside the world; in his situation nothing could be relied on. The longer he looked at people, the more unimaginative he became. They — and he too — were all characters in a film, the story of which was obvious after the very first frame. (Hadn’t the waiter known in advance what he was planning to order? So naturally he had ordered something else.) Maybe he had been observing them in the wrong way, in the wrong place, with the wrong attitude — in any event, regardless of how he put his perceptions together, they arranged themselves, independently of him, into the traditional well-bred nonsense. The imposture of napkins on laps! The perfume of the women brought up memories he didn’t want, and the pommes frites, which until very recently he had thought of as “good old pommes frites,” only gave him a headache. Long long ago Keuschnig had imagined people he disliked asleep, so as to like them better; now they continued to revolt him even when he thought of them with their knees drawn up in eternal sleep. And the “charming sights,” which had once meant so much to him, or so he thought — the sight, for instance, of the child wearing a dress that was too big for her, accompanied by the strange conviction, the CERTAINTY, that she would GROW INTO it — were of shorter and shorter duration; worst of all, they had lost their afterglow. It was easy for that woman outside, passing the open door, to smile at him; they were safe from one another. The woman inside, on the other hand, sitting alone at a table, had taken one look at him and instantly compressed her parted lips, repelled by the chaos in his face. She hadn’t even wanted to change her place, for fear he might misinterpret the least move as a kind of complicity, if not as sexual provocation. Yet, before catching sight of him, she had been sitting there red-nosed, quietly weeping. — You’re boring, he wanted to say to her, as boring as the world. I need a daydream, he thought, or I’ll start howling like an animal; but to set my mind free, I’d have to be able to stop looking at those people. He did indeed look away, but only as a reflex — when somebody dropped a knife … How steadfastly they go through with it! he thought: and then they go out into the street so nonchalantly, with their palms turned outward. The one link between us is that more and more dandruff falls on our coat collars as we eat. It was still early afternoon, and already everything seemed hopeless again.

Outside on the square a half-naked drunk was bellowing; at the sight of him a mood of smug complicity enveloped many of the diners, who were not only clothed but also more or less sober. A few began talking from table to table, even to Keuschnig. He looked down at his trousers. That’s their kind of solidarity, he thought — though only a short while ago he had thought of solidarity first as the illusion of being taken back into the fold after being cleared of a grave suspicion, and second as a last moment of belonging before one is isolated forever. The innocence of the child, who, while all the others were smirking at each other, was merely frightened by the bellowing! For the first time he was glad to be alone with her.

North of the Place Clichy, after crossing the Montmartre Cemetery on the raised rue Caulaincourt and turning left into the somewhat quieter rue Joseph-de-Maistre, you come to a dusty, grassless park with a children’s playground in one corner. Keuschnig had lived in the neighborhood some years before and sometimes on Sunday mornings he had put the child, who could barely stand at the time, in the sandbox. Since this park was not far from the Place Clichy, he now headed for it, but took a more roundabout route by way of the Avenue de Saint-Ouen. He saw few SIGNS on the way, and even those seemed to tease rather than threaten him: a single boot in a supermarket cart that someone had left standing in the street; a bus ticket which fell from his hand and blew away every time he stooped to pick it up … The beggar who twittered like various kinds of birds was still standing on his old corner, to which the ladies of the neighborhood were dragged by their leashed dogs, which proceeded to piss right next to him, so that their owners felt obliged to give him a pittance to compensate for the humiliation … It gave Keuschnig a sense of well-being to walk slowly through the bright, hot streets with the child hop-skip-jumping beside him. He hadn’t wanted to go to the movies because to judge by the pictures at the Place Clichy the films seemed to take place entirely indoors. What a lot of automatic machines are still out of order around here, he thought in passing, almost cheerfully: washing machines, stamp vending machines, and now this photostating machine outside the stationery store, which even in those days had an EN PANNE sign on it. The air was so hot that vapor formed in cellophane packages of crepes outside a bakery. A thin bony man overtook Keuschnig; of all the people on the street, he was the only one who seemed to be in a hurry; his prominent shoulder blades jiggled under his tight-fitting summer jacket. Here and there North African workers, apparently grown accustomed to the lack of space, were sitting on doorsteps, waiting for the end of the lunch hour. A pale counter girl, with a name tag on the collar of her apron, stepped out of a pastry shop, closed her eyes, sighed and bent back her head so as to get the sun in her face. Another girl, carrying a cup of coffee, crossed the street very very slowly, step by step, for fear of spilling the coffee. Keuschnig stopped still and without a word from him Agnes stopped too — because it was so hot, just plain hot. The street trembled as the Métro passed inaudibly underneath. Keuschnig felt the tremor. This is it! he thought. Yes, this is it! — an experience that he had given up expecting.

They walked in a primeval heat, in which far and wide there was no more danger, step by step like the girl with the cup, but for the pleasure of it, not because they had to. Keuschnig no longer had to adjust to the child’s slow unthinking gait; now he walked like that of his own accord, and the summer breeze, in which a branch crackled now and then, nothing more, seemed a fulfillment, yet still full of promise. High in the air a plane flew by and for a short moment the light changed, as though the shadow of the plane had passed quickly over the street. He wanted to shout at far distant trees that were gleaming in the sun and tell them to stay just as they were. Why didn’t anyone speak to him?

In a side street Keuschnig saw the house he had lived in some years before, with a maple tree in front of it that reached just up to the windows of his old apartment. In that moment he was overcome with bitterness at all the wasted time since then and with disappointment with himself. Since then he had experienced nothing, undertaken nothing. Everything was as muddled as ever, and death, from which he had then been safe, was much nearer. I’ve got to do something, he thought in despair, and no sooner had the thought passed through his mind than he said to the child: “I’m going to start working. I’m going to invent something. I need the kind of job that gives me a chance to invent something.” Agnes, who had heard nothing but his voice, responded with a carefree hopping step, and for the first time in ages his feeling toward her was one of friendliness, rather than of absent-minded indifference and anxious love.

Thinking he’d like to read in the playground, he went to a bookshop and bought a paperback volume of Henry James short stories. Again, as on the morning “when it all began,” he saw a marble plaque in memory of a Resistance fighter who had been shot by the Germans on that spot. This one, too, had a withered fern under it. He told the child what had happened thirty years ago. The man’s first name had been Jacques, and he had been killed at this same season, in late July. And today the Square Carpeaux was as dusty as it had been three years ago, yet as never before. — Keuschnig felt that he was close to discovering the insignificant detail which would bring all other things together.

The child, at least, seemed to be changing. Only a few days before, she had gone down the Métro stairs haltingly, always advancing the same foot and drawing the other behind it; now her movements as she walked down the steps to the playground were one smooth continuous flow, left foot right foot, left foot right foot. At first she only stood at the edge of the playground, looking on. The streets had been almost deserted, but here on the square there was suddenly a crush of children and grownups; most of the grownups were elderly Frenchwomen and young foreign women. Keuschnig sat down on a bench. Agnes was standing there deep in thought. He touched her gently with his foot, and without looking around at him she smiled, as though she had been waiting for this touch. In her self-sufficiency she radiated a pride so objective that it carried over to him. If only he could perceive with her! That would drive away his surfeit and disgust. Who was he to look down on these tired, discontented women dragging behind them and occasionally slapping their screaming children, who now and then forgot their misery long enough to hop-skip-jump for a moment. One of these women, plagued by a bawling, wriggling child, was covertly getting ready to strike when she noticed that Keuschnig was looking at her. Suddenly she let down her guard, and her eyes revealed all her anger and hopelessness, as though she knew she was being looked at by a kindred spirit, from whom she had no need to hide.

How much there was to see, and no trace of disgust dismissed the sights as familiar! The tall, tall ash trees and the dark, dark square … So little sun shone through that the women, especially the younger ones, kept moving their chairs into the few sunny spots. Now and then one of them would stand up and toss a plastic shovel into the sand to stimulate her child — who would scarcely take notice — or to reassemble a collection of toys around a child, who had scattered them … Often, when a child misbehaved, the mother would clap her hands menacingly, without getting up from her bench, and at the sound the pigeons, which had been strolling around in the sand among the children, would fly up into the air. One woman, while watching a child, who had just called out to her because he was about to let himself drop from the climbing bars, rocked an occupied baby carriage with one hand, and held the other over her once again swelling belly. Another woman was counting the stitches on her knitting needle, and still another blowing sand out of the eyes of a crying child. Many foreign names were called: TIZIANA! FELICITAS! PRUDENCIA! … Misery and loneliness descended like a last possible harmony on the swarming, dust-veiled square, on the women with their plastic bags beside them, on the park guardian dozing in his octagonal sentry box yet ready to take action at any moment, on the children, who drummed with their heels on the sheet metal before starting down the squeaking slides, while the next in line were impatiently hopping about at the foot of the ladders, on this constantly repeated, spasmodic to-and-fro, in which nothing happened — even the sewer gratings were plugged with dust and sand; on this whole wretched playground that smelled of soap and resounded with the children’s shrill clamor, the women’s cries, the guardian’s police whistle, and the rasping of roller skates on concrete.

It gave him real pain to expel his breath after looking for so long. Suddenly the child fell heavily against him and almost knocked him over; her cheeks were soft and she was crying over something unconscionably heartbreaking — what? a trembling toy pinscher being carried past in somebody’s bag. “That’s nothing to cry about,” he said. Where the tears stopped, the light was refracted on her cheek and made the skin lighter … A butterfly hovered around his fingertips and refused to go away; as though its clinging to him would stop him from killing it. He caught sight of a black-clad Portuguese woman with a knitted vest over her arm. A white petticoat showed below her skirt. She attended absently to everything, and nothing seemed beyond her reach. Radiating the charm of an idiot, she seemed infinitely untouched, and oh, how infinitely sheltered were the movements of the child in her care! She smiled at a wish another child had expressed to its mother, but here again as though caught up in some serene memory, which — since the child’s wish was immediately satisfied — may have been quite unrelated to the scene before her eyes and in any event was totally free from envy. The knitted vest and the showing petticoat turned Keuschnig’s thought to the poor peasants among whom he had grown up, and he recalled how, as a rule, they were fond of their kin despite all their peculiarities, but were repelled by the same oddities in others, and how he himself had been no different!

He sat in the square for a long while, one among many, with no thought of the future. He expected nothing; just once he had a vision of all these people taking on a strange look and beginning to sob heartbreakingly, but all the while excusing themselves on the grounds that they hadn’t slept the night before, that the sun didn’t agree with them, and that their stomachs were empty. Who could possibly tell them they had nothing to be ashamed of? — When for once he turned away from himself and looked up, he was at a loss to understand why everything hadn’t changed in the meantime. — At last Agnes, now comforted, spoke to him as if she trusted him. She told him a little about herself, and he saw how many SECRETS she already had. She has secrets! he thought, with a glow of happiness. All at once, out of friendliness, she began to use some of his words and phrases. And in everything, in clouds, in the shadows of the trees, in puddles, she saw SHAPES — which he had stopped seeing long ago …

While she was running about with the other children, he was contentedly reading one of Henry James’s frequent descriptions of women’s dress. At last something that wasn’t a newspaper article. “She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bare-headed; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.” He read on and on, and while reading he looked forward to buying something for the first time in ever so long. He thought of himself walking across a square in a new, light-colored summer suit. With all the new things that were happening to him and the old things that he mustn’t forget, he was sure to have a most extraordinary experience.

When Keuschnig looked up, the child was gone. And the other children were playing quite naturally, as though Agnes hadn’t been there for a long time and they had arranged their game differently without her. He jumped up but sat right back down again, and even read a few lines in his book, unable to skip a single word. He must paint his face — this minute! And cut off all his hair! The trees set up a rustling, and he experienced that moment when suddenly, in the middle of the summer, one shudders at the thought of darkest, coldest winter. He held his breath and tried to stop thinking, as though that would stop the course of events. Frantically he tried to make ready for what was to come. A woman looked at him as though she knew something he did not. Who would be the first to tell him? The women screeching behind him weren’t laughing; they were prognosticating doom. Up until then everything had been flimflam and foolishness. This was the real thing. In that moment Keuschnig resolved, as though everything humanly possible had been tried, that he would not go on living.

He searched the whole square, peered into every car that drove up, but only as a matter of form. The unthinkable, because it was unthinkable, was all the more frightfully real. He wanted to go mad immediately; that seemed the only escape. Only in madness could everything be undone; then THE DEAD WOULD COME BACK TO LIFE! Then one could be with them forever, with no thought of death … But powerless to transform himself into a madman, he could only imagine what it would be like. He remained hideously awake. Automatically, with a pleasure he had never known, his hands passed over the bones of his face. Calmly and deliberately, as the guardian would testify later on, he gave him his addresses, said he was going to notify the police, and started eastward through the city streets.

All at once Keuschnig began to feel with the people he saw; his long indifference turned to a sweet sympathy. Those people riding in cars — what torture it must be for them to be always on the move, always fighting their way from place to place in those tin cans; in short, what misery for them to go on living! What despair in the howling of the trucks’ power brakes! For a short moment it struck him that politics, seen as the worldwide defense of concrete local interests and not as inanity masked by bustle and violence, might be possible and worth bothering with. His eyes opened to every detail, but he saw none separate from the rest. A woman taxi driver with a woman passenger; a little boy with a toy tommy gun, bawling as he ran after his mother … He felt he had grown powerful, capable of speaking to everyone and bringing happiness to all. Once in passing he informed a man that his shoelace had come undone, and with no show of surprise the man thanked him. He saw a man in a ten-gallon hat and as though doing him a kindness asked him where he was from. Nothing struck him as ridiculous any longer. At the sight of a woman with a red scarf on her head, climbing the steps to an elevated Métro station, he was at a loss to understand how he could ever have thought of himself. Overwhelmed with regret at having to die now, he took care in crossing the street to avoid every single car.

He had no sensation of his body and hovered weightless in the midst of people dragging themselves painfully along. He was sorry, for the others’ sake! not to have a bit of a toothache. On a bench by a bus stop a man was sitting with his hands in his lap and his head bowed, as though waiting for his pursuers. Keuschnig was sure the man would tell him everything if only he tapped him on the shoulder. He actually did sit down beside him for a moment and asked him what kind of work he did, but the man looked back as though such a question humiliated him!

At one of those little fountains one finds all over Paris, he washed his face in the clear, soundless jet of water, as though he had actually painted it before. How warm the water flowed on this warm day! The closer Keuschnig came to the Buttes-Chaumont, the richer the Paris scene seemed to him. He saw a girl kick away the prop of a motorcycle with her heel and drive off; a big black woman carrying a full plastic shopping bag on her head; a tractor driving down a busy city street, strewing hay behind it; a bakery girl going from café to café with a basket of long loaves, as bakery girls had done since time out of mind; a fat man sitting on a bench in his suspenders; far away, for a few moments, the gilded tips of a park fence … There was nothing his gaze could not take in. In his eyes a woman wedging her handbag under her chin and holding parcels between her knees as she unlocked a house door and pushed it open with one foot stood for moments in a possible life which was being revealed to him now that it was too late. He saw the glittering metal disks at the pedestrian crossings, the treetops moving with a motion of their own as though wishing at every moment to transform themselves into something else; he heard the soft tittering sound of a flock of pigeons flying into the wind; passing a movie house, he heard shots, screams, and the end of a film — soft music and the calm, friendly voices of a man and a woman — smelled freshly polished shoes through the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, saw thick clumps of hair on the floor of a barbershop, saw an ice-cream scoop in dirty water outside a refreshment stand, saw a tailless cat run straight from a doorway to a parked car and sit down under it, heard the whir of a sausage slicer in a horse butcher’s shop, heard the crackle of drying plaster from every floor of an almost finished building, saw the patronne, bouquet in hand, unlocking the door of her restaurant, which she was reopening to make ready for dinner — and said aloud: “What a lot of things there are!” The first grapes of the year, and on them the first wasps; in a wooden crate the first hazelnuts, still in their rufflike carpels; on the sidewalks the outlines of the first fallen leaves, which by then had blown away … The markets were much smaller in the summertime. The coat racks in the cafés — all empty! The post offices freshly painted, the sidewalks dug up for new telephone lines, and the workers down in the ditch grinning as they watched a child wobbling along on plastic roller skates. At a movie house they were running an animated cartoon starring Popeye the Sailorman, who had only to down a can of spinach and he could take on the whole world. How disgustingly squeamish Keuschnig seemed to himself! He felt sure he had overlooked something, missed something that could never be retrieved. He stopped still and looked through all his pockets. A woman wouldn’t dare to stop like that in the middle of the sidewalk, he thought. At last he felt unobserved. Almost contentedly he smelled his own sweat. The incessant roar of the traffic made his head feel better and he let out an animal cry. I don’t have to see any more signs of death, he thought, because there’s no one left to love. Someone dropped a bunch of keys. A well-dressed woman slipped and fell on her behind; but, instead of looking away as usual, he watched her pick herself up with an embarrassed smile. He walked with his hands behind his back like a headwaiter with nothing to do. The cranes moved against the drifting clouds and he moved beneath them, with the calm of eternity.

Keuschnig wanted nothing more for himself. The usual sights took on a magical sparkle — and every one of them showed him inexhaustible riches. He himself had ceased to count, for he had merged with all those others who were moving this way and that with selfless energy, and he fully expected the jolt he created by transferring the happiness he had no use for to these people, to make them change their step. He was still in a certain sense alive — with them. His state was no longer a momentary mood; it was a conviction (to which all his momentary moods had contributed!), a conviction it would be possible to work with. Now the idea that had come to him on seeing those three things in the sand of the Carré Marigny seemed usable. In becoming mysterious to him, the world opened itself and could be reconquered. While crossing an overpass near the Gare de l’Est, he saw an old black umbrella lying beside the railroad tracks down below: this was no longer a pointer to something else; it was a thing in its own right, beautiful or ugly in its own right, and ugly and beautiful in common with all other things. Whichever way he looked, there was something to see, just as in dreams of finding gold one sees its glitter every time one bends down. Particulars remote from one another — a spoon yellowed by egg yolk lying in the street, the swallows high in the air — vibrated with a kinship and harmony for which he required no further memory or dream, and left him with a feeling that one could return home on foot from any point whatsoever.

The sun was already so low that the cars were dark on the dazzlingly bright boulevards. Someone was walking behind him, keeping step with him, neither catching up nor falling back — but Keuschnig didn’t look around. People were standing in line outside a movie house where Ben Hur was being shown. How long was it since he himself had seen that picture; how often since then it had been shown all over the place! Yet there were still people seeing it for the first time, people entirely different from him but at the moment quite the same. How many people were toting bundles of clothing down the street because most of the cleaning establishments closed at the end of July, while others, carrying folded air mattresses in beach bags, were going home from the swimming pools. He sat down on the terrace of a cafe; a sign fastened to the awning said: CHANGEMENT DE DIRECTION: TOUT EST BON. Out in the street, a few yards of old car track that had not been entirely tarred over glistened in the sun. An apartment was still for sale in the new building across the way. Under the café chairs two dogs were barking at each other. A very old man chuckled as he dropped an airmail letter into a mailbox …

It was only when from time to time he saw a woman pass that Keuschnig became uneasy. The lines of the calves and thighs, the clefts of their bosoms filled him with such longing that he felt his face growing stern. Once, when a woman passed behind the frosted-glass pane of a bus shelter and only her silhouette could be seen, he wished she would go on walking behind the frosted glass forever. He was overcome with rage and chagrin at the thought that all these passing women were not meant for him, that he would never see them again, and an intimation came to him of what they might have meant in his life. How it upset him — even today! — when he failed to get a good look at one of those faces — as though he were missing something crucial.

Then the sunshades were lowered, but they still revolved in their supports, for the wind had risen. The waiter smiled on receiving his tip, and today Keuschnig took that smile very seriously. He was grateful to the people who remained seated near him but paid no attention to him. For a long while he watched the water from a hydrant gush foaming into the gutter. When in a newspaper someone had left behind he read that a singer had achieved “a glorious C-major,” he was so moved he almost screamed. He wanted to leave his fingerprints all over the table. A man reading a book beside him took off his glasses, and suddenly Keuschnig was afraid he might be leaving — but the man only thrust the book into the distance and went on reading. What a relief, what peace! … Keuschnig looked around. Maybe something would come of it: a new thought, a possibility. For some time now, a game of ping-pong had been in progress in the cellar under the café, and the regular click-click-click filled Keuschnig with disgust. At last the ball went astray … Thoughtless and unafraid, he left the café and climbed the steep paths of the Buttes-Chaumont.

He passed a police call box. The deep red post was a tangible consolation in a painfully expanding wasteland, and absurdly he made a note of the spot. Someone was RUNNING behind him; no, not running on his account; someone WHISTLED, why wouldn’t he be whistling at him?! Slight incongruities outside him now affected him in his own body; he jumped at the sight of a potato rolling out of a woman’s string bag, cringed when he saw, far below, a child riding a bicycle through a puddle.

He felt cold again. Some blue shirts on a clothesline behind bushes at the edge of the park reminded him of his birthplace, not of any particular event, but of a long, mortal eventlessness. As though that were the possibility, he tried to open his mind to other memories. But nothing happened, except that he suddenly found himself outside the entrance to an underground station in wintry Stockholm … Could new gestures and faces be a way out? How about wagging his head, pursing his lips, and fanning himself with one hand like these French people? No more of that nonsense … By then he was standing on an artificial cliff and looking westward he could see Paris in the yellow evening sun. A little daydream might be his salvation! He felt his pockets to make sure he had his passport. At this point, only someone from another system could hold him back. Not far away, a wrinkled woman with hair on her chin gave a younger man a smacking kiss on the lips, and went off. Keuschnig waited, strangely curious, for the man to wipe away the alien saliva. But he only stood motionless, gazing down at the city, and after a while walked away with long strides.

At that moment Keuschnig felt ashamed of having to die and be dead. The way things had turned out, there was nothing left for him to do but draw a last breath and be a corpse. He could put up with being dead if the rest of the world would stop at the same moment. As it was, his body, in death more pretentious than ever, would only be putting on airs. He took a step forward, not for any precise purpose, but for spite, because he no longer knew what he wanted. — The hair-raisingly repugnant sense of shame he had so often experienced at the thought of living and of being something bodily, nakedly conspicuous and unique, of being ONE TOO MANY, held him back from the last and most singular manifestation of life, and made him for the present stay where he was at the top of the cliff.

Though he no longer envisaged a way out, he looked around from sheer instinct, and saw, some distance away, the fat writer, who had apparently been looking at Keuschnig for some time, for he was not out of breath from the steep climb. The writer clapped his notebook shut and put it away in the inside pocket of his jacket, as though certain he wasn’t going to need it any more. “I’ve been following you all day, Gregor,” he said. “I have tempered my idea with observations and now I’m satisfied. Incidentally, when the murderess flings herself from the tower of the Spanish church at the end of Vertigo, the sky is not blue, it’s deep-dark and clouded, in the last light of the day. ‘God have mercy on her soul,’ says the nun, and tolls the bell. Your child is at my place with Stefanie and that’s where she’ll stay for the present. I have no further use for you and wish you the best of luck.”—The writer stood there for some time, then made a face or two, perhaps to convince Keuschnig that he was real, and walked off across the grass, blindly trampling a flower bed. “You don’t know anything about me!” Keuschnig shouted after him. At that the writer only raised his arm; he didn’t turn around.

Keuschnig wanted to talk to somebody right away, to phone the girl from the embassy, for instance. But at this point no one would believe him without seeing.

He left the Buttes-Chaumont and continued eastward, still uphill, making his way between villagelike hovels and high-rise apartment houses with awnings that were already being rolled up. There in Belleville he bought a suit with trouser pockets he could sink his hands into, a pair of shoes, and a pair of socks. “It’s not expensive,” said the salesman automaticany — in this none too prosperous neighborhood he no doubt had occasion to say such words rather often. Keuschnig left his cast-offs in the shop and started back down the hill, steering a westerly course that would take him to the Place de l’Op-éra and the Café de la Paix.

Now he saw objects clearly, as if they were on display, and no longer transfigured as they had been an hour before. Everything looked as if it had been cleaned. He himself had emerged from under water after a long stay, and little by little the sun warmed his chilled body. The shimmering cracks in the paving stones called to mind the corners of a woman’s mouth, smiling at him in the deserted, summery street. The clouds drifted, the crowns of the trees parted and closed, leaves slithered across the squares, jostling each other now and then; everything seemed to be in motion. He looked at a vaporous funnel-shaped cloud — I’m perceiving a shape! he thought — and when he looked again, it had dissolved in blue. Surprised, he stopped from time to time and looked excitedly at the sky arching over the houses and shining through the leaves of the trees, looked as though something entirely different began behind it — not the sea, no place at all, but an unknown feeling. It occurred to him that the beds in his apartment still hadn’t been made, but that didn’t trouble him now. From one of the hovels, which was already looking deceptively eveninglike, he heard a sneeze. An old woman in black was standing outside her door. She was wearing thick socks over her stockings. She spoke to someone far away at the other end of the street, and both her voice and the answer to what she said were perfectly clear. On the walls of the houses the shadows of leaves moved in the wind. DO NOT SPIT ON THE STAIRS! he read on a sign in an open stairway. Paris lay stretched out below him, transformed into a desert city by the now reddish light; the buildings with their blinded windows were abandoned colonial structures which, as Keuschnig looked at the glowing sky in the west, blended so perfectly with the avenues of trees that the cars seemed to emerge from the blackest jungle … The sun went down. In the dusk some children were sitting peacefully, silently, in perfect calm on an iron railing, shiny with much use, at the edge of a sidewalk. Someone kept calling that it was time to go to bed, but they didn’t want to break up. A girl with a book in her lap looked at Keuschnig from behind an elderberry bush, and he looked back; little by little, as he looked at her, he saw himself more clearly. How reluctant he had been to start looking at things and people — and now he couldn’t stop! All these biographies crowding in on him so wordlessly almost turned his stomach. He mustn’t sleep — he must make himself empty! From a parked car with its door wide open he heard harpsichord music, and suddenly he felt a profound joy at the thought of the time that lay ahead of him. He needed work, the outcome of which would be as valid and unimpeachable as a law! He wanted no system for his life, but merely thought that though perhaps he could not hope for new objects or people, there ought at least, in his future, to be a more sustained yearning.

He looked at everything that came his way as though it must have something to say to him. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the otherwise empty bar of a café. What is there about that black with the bamboo buttons on his coat? And still he was afraid of making some mistake, of missing something essential by not being somewhere else. A woman was coming toward him; her walk appealed to him, so he turned around and followed her, just to see her walking. Now and then she looked over her shoulder, and it seemed as though she were going away from him, only from him.

He saw an overturned wheelbarrow and realized how unmoved it now left him — the fact of its being overturned simply didn’t interest him any more. He was free, at least for this evening and this night. Lusting for conquest, he started running down the hill, and the rows of houses sank, as though reduced by his gaze. “I’m changing right now!” he said. It seemed to him that he hadn’t spoken for ages. He made the kind of sound one might make to frighten an animal, but now it was addressed to everything in the world. Mere breathing, even swallowing, gave him pleasure — every swallowing movement was something new. The world around him was so changed that when, passing a movie house, he saw a photograph of a nude couple covered by a sheet, he thought with amazement: So they’re still making films with lovers draped in sheets! And when, from force of habit, he read in the headlines of a newspaper someone had thrown away: “ … felled by shot in abdomen,” he thought: So people still die of wounds in the abdomen! Although he saw the same things as before, and from the same angle, they had become alien and therefore bearable. Walking with a firm step, he stretched. An unfamiliar perfume came to him through the dusk, but now it did not, as so often in the past, remind him of stifling, hopeless embraces — he no longer remembered, but only anticipated. Passing a shopping arcade, he thought: It could happen here; the unique, never related event could happen here! Outside a café he caught sight of a woman alone; though she was so absent as to be unapproachable, he saw her as the embodiment of a seductive taboo, and once again he thought: Yes, that’s it, that’s her whole story — I would never be able to find out any more about her than in this moment, seeing her sitting there alone. Eagerly he watched his own thoughts, always ready to buttonhole them. He wanted never again to forget anything, and in his mind he recapitulated the moments that had just passed, as though memorizing the words of a foreign language. He had to remember them all, so as to use them later. (Nevertheless he looked forward to every single person he would meet that day, even if they couldn’t talk about anything.) He passed a brightly lighted church; the doors were wide open and he saw the priest raising his arm as a signal for the choir to come in. He saw a hand holding a lighted candle in such a way that the wax dripped onto a tray that was already holding a great many lighted candles. Suddenly the wax dripping from the inclined candle took Keuschnig’s breath away, not because it was dripping candle wax, but because, though he had seen it before, he had never before EXPERIENCED it. When he came to the level streets at the foot of the hill, it still seemed to him that he was looking down at the streets that lay ahead, as though they extended on and on and he was able to encompass the downward-curving surface of the earth in a single glance. Then something on the sidewalk caught his eye (what is it? he wondered); it seemed enormously important — but it was only the last shred of daylight. He read the “Faire signe au machiniste” sign at a bus stop, and it ran through his head like the title of a song hit … Under the evening-blue sky — a star had already come out in the west — the long buildings of central Paris looked totally black, but so furry-soft and rounded that they seemed to have turned into tents, the main tent being the sprawling Grand Palais. He slowed down. The streets were still rather empty, but wherever people were sitting there were a good many of them, talking softly, pressed more closely together than usual. Suddenly he expected a war to break out and bombers to come thundering out of the horizon. A queasy feeling came over him as he thought that everything had been made clear and that nothing more could happen to him.

From the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle on, there were people on the street. Children who should have been home in bed were being dragged coughing through clouds of exhaust fumes. The boulevard was so noisy that the grownups had to bend down to talk to them. Once Keuschnig heard a roaring in the crowd, and all the people seemed to break step and run away. What were they running from? Was he the only one going to the Place de l‘Opéra? Many of the old people looked disgruntled, despite their success in living so long. Seeing a woman at an open window, Keuschnig was sure she was going to jump out. A man yawned and the saliva ran out of his mouth. Keuschnig wanted to take a cab, but the driver, without even looking at him, responded by throwing a black leather bag over his sign. He noticed the swollen ankles of a woman coming toward him, and she made faces at him. Someone leaned against a car with a splintered windshield and vomited. Two men were hopping about on the sidewalk, smiling and pinching each other’s cheeks, but already their teeth were clenched, for in the next moment they would start punching each other. A man with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket was pushed by in a wheelchair. The boulevard was immersed in dark smog; the lower halves of the yellow lamps at the Métro entrances were black with soot. A woman who had been laughing shrilly grew suddenly serious and jerked her head to one side, as though the time had come for her to die. No one got out of anyone’s way; in a moment someone in this jostling crowd would pull a revolver and fire at those faces. The people coming toward Keuschnig looked like people who had been filmed a long time ago; in reality they had ceased to exist — what he saw was only the latest film with them in it. They moved and let themselves drift as if they had had enough of their functions to last them forever. How COMPLIANT they seemed, nevertheless! And meanwhile in their apartments the milk was getting sour, the orange juice was separating, and a viscous scum was forming on the water in the toilet bowls! He passed through the crowd, swaying from side to side for fear of losing his newly won balance. If anyone was in his way, Keuschnig pushed him efficiently aside — after all he had been through, he could allow himself that liberty. He found a trampled letter in the gutter and read it as he went on: “One day, four years ago, I became indifferent to everything from one minute to the next. Thus began the most harrowing period of my life …” It occurred to him that he had never had a real enemy, someone he wanted to destroy mercilessly. I’ll make as many enemies as possible! he thought, grown strangely cheerful. Looking down at the asphalt still soft with the heat of the day, he suddenly saw himself as the hero of an unknown tale … Somewhat listless, almost gloomy at the thought that he was due to make someone’s acquaintance, Keuschnig approached the Café de la Paix just as the three-headed street lamps of the Place de l’Opéra went on. On the terrace a light flashed. The cigarette girl was standing at one of the tables swaying her tray. Someone else, approaching at the same time as Keuschnig, was already being beckoned to.

On a balmy summer evening a man crossed the Place de l’Opéra in Paris. Both hands deep in the trouser pockets of his visibly new suit, he strode resolutely toward the Café de la Paix. Apart from the suit, which was light blue, the man was wearing white socks and yellow shoes; he was walking fast, and his loosely knotted necktie swung to and fro …

Written in Paris during the summer and autumn of 1974

Content

Peter Handke
Moment of True Feeling