Machines in the Head
Page 10
One’s natural impulse, of course, is to question somebody and settle things once and for all. But a person in my situation can’t be too careful; I have to think twice about whatever I do, even about such a simple thing as asking a question. The last thing I want is to draw attention to myself in any way. And then, with our complex system of regulations, continually changing from day to day, how is one to know what is permitted? If I were to make a mistake the result might be fatal for me. A single false step might easily end in disaster. Besides, even if I were so reckless as to stop a passer-by and make my inquiry, how can I be sure that he’d give me an answer? As likely as not he would merely look at me suspiciously and pass on, even if he did not actually lodge a complaint against me. For a passionate secretiveness characterizes the inhabitants of our city. It simply isn’t worth while taking such a chance. I’d rather remain uncertain.
It’s not as if the foreigners were constantly being brought to my notice, either; in the way I live now, I often pass two or three days without seeing a single one of them.
In the beginning it was quite different. Before I was directed to the work which now occupies me, while I had time on my hands to wander about the city, I naturally gave a good deal of attention to the strange soldiers whom I saw everywhere lounging about, apparently as idle as I was myself. In those days I had some peculiar notions about them. Laughable as it may seem, I developed the idea that these men were in some way linked to me, that there was something in common between us, like a distant blood relationship. I, the city’s outcast and prisoner, seemed to feel with these foreigners a connection, sympathetic perhaps, which did not exist where the citizens were concerned. Often, as I glanced at the strangers, their large, tanned, dispassionate, ruminative faces would touch some recollection in me; I would suddenly be reminded of the faces of friends in a far-distant country, the conviction would sweep over me that I was here confronting members of a race that had once been most dear to me, like brothers. And this emotion was so strong that it was all I could do to restrain myself from making an appeal of some kind to them in my desolation.
I remember particularly one such occasion. I was waiting for a bus in one of the main streets when my eyes wandered idly towards a foreign captain sitting at a small table outside a restaurant. Immediately the sensation I have described came over me, but with such intense poignancy that it was as if I had suddenly caught sight of a beloved and well-known face among the indifferent crowd. Instinctively, hardly knowing what I was doing, I started moving towards this man, some incoherent phrase already forming itself in my head. Heaven knows what I might have said to him, what fantastic supplication for comfort, for aid, I might have poured out to him. But precisely at that moment, as if at a given signal, he got up in a leisurely manner and strolled away. It seemed to me that only a few yards separated us, that I had only to take one or two steps in order to catch up with him. And, crazily, I did start forward, meaning to overtake him. Perhaps he had entered one of the neighbouring shops, perhaps he had started to cross the street and was hidden by passing cars, in any case, he had already vanished completely. The pavement, as usual, was crowded with the strange uniforms, so much smarter and better-fitting than ours; and for the next few moments I kept staring distractedly into one and then another of those unknown faces, some of which looked back at me I believe not unsympathetically. But not one of them was in the least like the face for which I was searching, and which I suppose I am never to see again.
Perhaps it was lucky for me that I was denied the opportunity of speaking; but how can I be sure, having no means of obtaining information about the soldiers? So I must go on in uncertainty, even though foreign eyes still sometimes seem to gaze at me in passing with a look of fraternal compassion and understanding, encouraging me to do the thing which I most fear doing.
VIII
Like a recurrent dream, the following scene repetitiously unfolds itself: I am sitting in a bureau, putting forward my case; it is the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth station of my tedious Calvary. In front of me stands the usual large desk covered with papers and telephones; this one has on it, too, a small notice, neatly printed and framed like a calendar, saying, ‘If danger becomes imminent during an alert the bureau will be closed.’ Behind the desk sits the usual bureaucrat; this time it’s a big man with curly hair and a pin-stripe suit who confronts me discouragingly.
My voice goes on and on like a gramophone record. I’m not listening to it, I don’t pay any attention to the words coming out of my mouth. The whole speech became mechanical ages ago and drearily reels itself off without any assistance from me. Instead of associating myself with the dismal recitation, I stare out of the window from which it looks as if some destructive colossus had been stamping upon our city, trampling down whole blocks and boroughs with his gigantic jackboots. Acres and acres of flattened rubble spread out spacious and so simplified that the eye is baffled and it’s impossible to tell which objects are near and which are remote. It’s not possible to say where the cheek of the earth starts to curve or where the unsuppressed bright river loops over the bulge down to the oceans and the archipelagos on the underside of the world. The few buildings which remain intact in this vicinity stand about self-consciously amidst the harmonious demolition. They look singularly uncomfortable and as if they had taken fright at their own conspicuousness: one can see they do not quite recognize themselves in such embarrassing circumstances. They stand there at a loss, wishing to retire into the decent collective security which they dimly remember as being their proper place; or else to lose definition by amalgamating with the undetailed collapse all around them.
Just to the side of the window, a wing of the building from which I am looking juts out sharply at right angles, and here, on the roof and in the interior, I can see men repairing some damage it has sustained. From a gaping black tear in the wall a workman in shirt-sleeves is starting to lower a bucket down the façade. I notice his face contracted in concentration; he’s so close that I can distinguish the hairs on his arms which are straining away at the rope as he lowers the bucket with immense care, as if there were a baby inside it. What on earth has he got in the bucket? If only I could find that out perhaps everything would suddenly come right for me. While my lips automatically go on shaping the phrases of my petition, I am leaning forward and craning my neck in the hope of having a peep inside the bucket which is now hidden from me by the window-sill.
Suddenly I’m snatched away from my preoccupation by the angry voice of the bureaucrat; my own voice snaps off into startled silence in mid-sentence, as if the needle had abruptly been lifted off the record.
‘What’s the good of coming here with this rigmarole, wasting my time?’ the man at the desk is exclaiming. ‘Surely you know we don’t deal with matters of that sort in my department – what you need is a public adviser – he’s the person you ought to go to.’
‘An adviser?’ I repeat, in amazement. I can hardly believe my ears. ‘Is someone in my position allowed to consult an adviser, then?’
For some reason my astonishment makes the bureaucrat still more indignant. He thumps the desk with his fist so that the telephones give a nervous, frustrated, tinkle, the pens shake apprehensively in their tray.
‘I’ve no patience with people like you,’ he shouts rudely. ‘How do you ever expect to get your affairs in order when you haven’t got even enough sense to find out the proper procedure?’
He gets up and approaches me around the desk, and I hastily jump off my chair and back away from him in alarm.
‘Be off with you!’ he cries. His face is suffused with scarlet rage. If he were wearing an apron he would certainly flap it at me, but as it is he can only shoo me towards the door with his hands.
I retreat as fast as I can from the loud, angry voice and the red face bearing down on me threateningly. So it is that I never discover the contents of the bucket which, all the same, I associate with the bureaucrat’s astounding suggestion.
IX
Sometimes I think that the author of those words must have been under a sentence not unlike mine.
It may seem incredible that such a man, a writer of genius and famous into the bargain, could have been found guilty of any crime. But the hard and incomprehensible fact stands that the most frequent convictions and the heaviest sentences fall to the lot of just such sensitive, intelligent individuals as this very poet whose words have so much emotional significance for me. There is, I believe, a kind of telepathy between the condemned, a sort of intuitive recognition which can even make itself felt through the medium of the printed page. How else should I feel – without fear of appearing presumptuous, either – for this great man of another nation, this dead man whom I never saw and to whom I could not have spoken, the tender, wincing, pathetic solicitude that painfully comes into being only between fellow sufferers? How intimately I experience in my heart just what he must have felt in all of those unknown rooms, some of them poor, perhaps, and some splendid, but all opposing him with the cold fearful indifference of other people’s belongings, against which he has to defend himself as best he can with his poor lonely trunk and his case of books.
And I – I haven’t even a case of books to defend me. In my defence I can call up only the few volumes for which I was able to make room when the clothes and personal necessities had been packed into my trunk. They are honourable and precious to me, these books, in proportion to their great heroism. They are like members of a suicide squad who do not hesitate to engage the enormously superior enemy, life, upon my behalf.
When I start to think of my books individually it is always the same one which takes first place in my mind: the only one of the bodyguard about whose loyalty, so to speak, I have any doubt. I have had this book that I’m thinking of for a long time, and until just lately it has never been out of my keeping. I’m not sure how it reached me originally, whether it was a present or whether I came across it by accident on some bookseller’s shelves. I only know that the author’s name was unfamiliar to me. I read it first during that fabulously remote period before my troubles began. I remember the horror the story inspired in me then and how I wondered that any normal brain could conceive and elaborate so dreadful a theme.
But then, as things went from bad to worse with me, as my circumstances became more and more unpropitious, as I wandered further and further into the maze of misfortune from which I have never succeeded in extricating myself, then my feelings towards the book underwent a change.
How can I describe the profoundly disturbing suspicion that slowly grew upon me, for which at the start there was no sort of justification? Again and again I tried to rid myself of it. But like a latent venom it dwelt obstinately in my blood, poisoning me with the idea that the story told in the book related to myself, that I myself was identified in some obscure way with the principal character. Yes, in time it crystallized into this: the terrible book revealed itself as my manual, tracing the path I was doomed to tread, step by step, to the lamentable and shameful end.
If I had come to detest the book it would have been natural. If I had destroyed it or thrown it away one could have understood that. But instead I developed a curious attachment to it, a dependence upon it which is very hard to explain. Of course, there were times when I reacted against the book. On such occasions I felt convinced that it was the origin of my bad luck and that all the disasters which have overtaken me would never have happened had I not first read about them in its pages. But then, immediately afterwards, I would be eagerly turning those pages to discover what fresh tragic or humiliating or confusing experience was lying ahead of me.
This ambivalent attitude prevented me from coming to any hard-and-fast decision about the book, but whether I regarded it as an evil omen or as a talisman, it was always of the greatest significance to me, and the idea of parting from it was unthinkable. I even felt uneasy if I was separated from it for more than a few hours. Particularly on those days which I expected to bring forth some new development in my case, a superstitious anxiety compelled me to carry the book everywhere I went.
That was how I came to be carrying it under my arm in the adviser’s office. How I wish now that I had left it at home. But how could I possibly have guessed that I should be required to deposit some item of personal property there as a token? It came as the greatest surprise to me when, at the end of the interview, I was informed of this regulation. And why did this adviser select the book as a suitable object, drawing it from under my arm with a smile and putting it down on the top of a pile of other books on a writing desk in the corner? He might just as well have taken my scarf or one of my gloves or even my watch. I have wondered since then why I didn’t make any protest. But at the time I allowed him to take the book from me without a word. I was too disconcerted to think clearly, and I was unsure of myself. I was afraid of prejudicing myself in the eyes of the man upon whose somewhat doubtful advice I was prepared to rely. Once he had taken the book in his curiously small, delicate hands it was too late to interfere.
But each time I go into the room and see it lying there, inaccessible although within easy reach, a conflict begins in my heart and I feel deeply disturbed. I start wondering whether my wisest course would not be to seize the book and carry it off, even at the cost of forgoing a support which, however dubious, is all that’s left to me now.
X
My new adviser does not understand my case. There, now I have written the words I knew all the time I would have to write sooner or later. I am not surprised. Not at all. It would have been a thousand times more surprising if he, who is not even a native of our city, could have found his way through the enormously intricate labyrinth which a case that’s been going on as long as mine has is bound to become. The thing which does surprise me is my own optimism. Surely I ought to recognize now that my number is up. Where do I always find enough courage for one more last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.
I have been to the adviser’s office today. It is in a large building full of offices. To get to it from the street I had to walk up an alleyway between barbed wire and concrete-filled bins placed there to impede an attacking force. The officials who work in this building have a vast clientele. You can hardly pass through the alley without danger of being pushed into the barbed wire by one of the people who must hurry to get in or out of the place as quickly as possible. They are preoccupied individuals who frown incessantly, and the king himself would have to step briskly aside, if some abstracted client lost in anxiety took the notion of rushing past headlong to an appointment. It is noticeable that nearly all these impetuous, worried creatures are carrying briefcases of varying sizes which one can presume to contain the most urgent secret documents, the most dramatic dossiers. But I also saw commonplace people coming and going, little men with umbrellas hooked on their arms and women with shopping bags full of parcels.
The waiting-room, when I finally got there, was crowded with people I seemed to have seen somewhere else. Yes, I already seemed to know all their faces only too well. When I had taken the vacant chair that might have been left purposely for me, I saw that among them, as they sat restlessly fidgeting, there were several boys and girls, schoolchildren and some even younger. Although I’m not particularly fond of children I couldn’t help pitying the poor little things, growing up in the vile atmosphere all these rooms have, impregnated with fear and suspense. What could they be but innocent at their early age? And what sort of future could be in store for lives beginning so inauspiciously? But the children themselves paid no attention to their environment. The youngest ones slept on their mother’s laps: Some of the others leaned with empty faces against the knees o
r shoulders of grown-up people. Some were bored and made quiet overtures to each other to pass the time. A boy in a leather jacket had climbed on the window-sill; he had got his paper-white forehead pressed to the pane and was gazing out at the sky as if saying goodbye to it. In a far corner of the room, two big men whose shoulders carried the words ‘Heavy Rescue’ had spread themselves out in chairs and were staring dolefully at their huge black boots projecting in front of them. The air was stale, torpid, laden with unquiet breaths.
Meanwhile a constant bustle was going on in other parts of the building: one heard footsteps hurrying about, boards creaking, doors opening and closing, voices raised sometimes in question or argument. Only we in the waiting-room seemed shut off from participation in the activity, like forgotten castaways wrecked in some stagnant lagoon.
From time to time the door opened a little way and an indistinctly seen person peeped in and beckoned to one of the waiting clients who immediately jumped up and rushed out as if at the point of a bayonet. A stir of excitement went through the room each time this occurred, and it would be some minutes before those who were left behind settled down again to their restless vigil. I don’t know how long this went on. I have the impression that hours passed, perhaps half a day. While I waited I remembered the important man who had been my adviser in former times; his elegant town house, his major-domo, the room with wine-coloured curtains where he used to receive me so promptly. The fact that I now had to seek advice in such a humble and undignified fashion brought home to me painfully how my affairs had changed for the worse. It was as if the authorities, by sending me here, had set their official seal on my degradation.
At last it was my turn to receive the mysterious summons. I had decided that when it came I would walk calmly across the room without impatience or flurry, but, just like everyone else, I found myself jumping up and making a dash for the door as if my life depended on getting through it at lightning speed. It was so dark in the corridor that I could only dimly distinguish a man’s figure walking ahead of me with nonchalant steps. He opened a door on the left, signalled me to enter and followed me in. Apparently it was the adviser himself who had come for me. He was a young, rather plump man, a foreigner obviously, with an impeccably tied bow tie, and there was about him that finical, even dainty air which stout people sometimes have. It was the tie in particular which gave this effect, as if a neat, blue-spotted butterfly had alighted under his chin.