But even when I was alone I could be afraid. Why should I pretend that they never happened, those nights when I sat up gripped by the fear of death, clinging tight to a sense that the mere act of sitting signified life: the dead did not sit. It was always in one of those rooms I just happened to be living in, rooms that promptly abandoned me when things went wrong, as if they were afraid of being cross-examined and involved in my woeful affairs. There I sat, probably looking so frightful that nothing had the courage to take my side; not even the lamp, which I had just done the service of lighting, wanted anything to do with me, and burned away blithely as if in an empty room. At such times, my last hope was always the window. I imagined that outside there might yet be something that was mine, even now in this sudden destitution of dying. But scarcely had I looked than I wished the window had been barricaded shut, as closed up as the wall. For now I knew that out there, too, things took their indifferent course; that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness, the loneliness I had brought upon myself and which was of an enormity that my heart was no longer equal to. I recalled people I had once left, and it was simply beyond me that one could part from other human beings.
My God, my God, if any more such nights still lie before me, at least leave me one of those thoughts I have occasionally been able to think. What I am asking is not so unreasonable; I know, after all, that they were born of very fear, because my fear was so great. When I was a boy, they hit me in the face and told me I was a coward. That was because my fear was still of an unworthy kind. Since then, however, I have learned to be afraid with a genuine fear, which grows only as the force that engenders it grows. Of that force we have no conception, except in our fear. For it is so utterly inconceivable, so entirely opposed to us, that our brain fails us precisely when we strain to think upon it. Nonetheless, for some time now I have believed that that force is ours, it is all our own, and still it is too powerful for us. It is true that we do not know it; but do we not know the least about what is most our own? At times I reflect on how heaven came into being, and death: we put away what was most precious to us, because there was so much that had to be dealt with first, and because it was not safe with us, in our busy lives. And now ages have passed by, and we have grown accustomed to things of less consequence. We no longer recognize what is our own, and are appalled at its vasty greatness. May it not be so?
[48] I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour. It need not even be one especially chosen; they all have something well nigh distinctive about them. Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of Félix Arvers's death? He died in a hospital, at ease and in repose, and the nun perhaps supposed he was closer to death than in fact he was. She called out some instructions or other, in a very loud voice, detailing where this or that was to be found. This nun was quite uneducated; the word ‘corridor’, which she could not avoid using, she had never seen written down, so it happened that she said ‘collidor’, thinking that was how it was pronounced. This decided Arvers to postpone his death. He felt it was necessary to clear the matter up first. He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the word was ‘corridor’. Then he died.36 He was a poet and hated the inexact; or perhaps he was simply concerned with the truth; or else it bothered him that his last impression of the world should be that it was carrying on in this careless fashion. There is no determining which it was. But let no one think it was pedantry. In that case, the same stricture might be brought against the saintly Jean de Dieu,37 who leaped up from his deathbed and was just in time to cut down a man who had hanged himself in the garden, knowledge of whom had in some miraculous way penetrated the inward tension of the saint's agony. He too was concerned with the truth alone.
[49] There is a creature that is perfectly harmless if you set eyes on it; you hardly notice it and instantly forget it. Should it somehow get into your ears unseen, however, it begins to evolve, and hatches, as it were; there have been cases where it made its way into the brain and flourished there, with devastating effect, like the pneumococci in dogs that enter by the nose.
This creature is your neighbour.
Now since I have been living like this in various places, on my own, I have had countless neighbours, above me and below, to the right or to the left, at times all four at once. I could simply write the history of my neighbours; that would be a life's work. True, it would be more the history of the symptoms they have caused in me; but that is something they share with all creatures of a similar sort – that their presence can only be demonstrated through the malfunctions they occasion in certain tissues.
I have had unpredictable neighbours, and others who were very regular in their habits. I have sat trying to work out the law that governed the former; for it was plain that they too had one. And if the punctual ones failed to return at the usual time one evening, I imagined what might have happened to them, and left my lamp burning, and was as anxious as a young wife. I have had neighbours filled with sheer hatred, and neighbours in the toils of a passionate love; and I have witnessed that moment when the one abruptly turned to the other, in the middle of the night, and then, of course, there could be no thinking of sleep. Indeed, I had every opportunity to observe that sleep is by no means as widespread as people suppose. My two St Petersburg neighbours, for instance, attached little importance to sleep. One of them would stand playing the violin, and I am sure that as he played he looked across to the too-wakeful houses that never ceased to be light in those improbable August nights. As to my other neighbour, to my right, I know that he lay in bed; in my time, he never got up at all. He even kept his eyes shut; but you could not say that he slept. He lay there reciting long poems, poems by Pushkin and Nekrassov, in that intonation children use when they are called upon to recite poems. And despite the music of my neighbour to the left, it was this man with his poems who spun a cocoon inside my head, and God knows what would have hatched had not the student who sometimes visited him knocked at the wrong door one day. He told me the story of his acquaintance, and in a way it proved a comforting one. At all events, it was literal and unambiguous, a story that defied the teeming maggots of my conjectures.
One Sunday, this petty functionary next door had got it into his head to solve a singular problem. He took it that he would live for a good many years, say another fifty. The generosity he thus showed himself put him in excellent spirits. Now, though, he meant to surpass himself. He reflected that those years could be expressed as days, as hours, as minutes, even (if you could be troubled) as seconds; and he did his sums, and did some more, and in the end had a total such as he had never seen. It was dizzying; he had to rest a while. Time, he had always heard, was precious, and it baffled him that a man who possessed such a quantity of time was not accompanied by a guard. How easy it would be to rob him. But then his good, almost jolly spirits returned; he put on his fur coat, to look a little broader and more imposing, and made himself a present of the whole fabulous capital, addressing himself in a somewhat patronizing manner:
‘Nikolai Kuzmich,’ he said benevolently, picturing himself seated on the horsehair sofa, without the fur coat, skinny and wretched, ‘I do hope, Nikolai Kuzmich,’ he said, ‘that you will not let your wealth go to your head. Never forget that it is not the main thing. There are poor people who are thoroughly respectable; there are even impoverished aristocrats and generals' daughters peddling things around the streets.’ And the philanthropist adduced a whole number of other examples that were well known in town.
The other Nikolai Kuzmich, the one on the horsehair sofa, the recipient of the gift, did not look at all puffed up and purse-proud, not yet; it was a safe assumption that he would keep his feet on the ground. In point of fact, he made no change whatsoever in his modest, regular ways, and from now on he spent his Sundays setting his accounts in order. But after only a few weeks, he found that he was spending an incredible amount. I shall economize, he thought. He g
ot up earlier, he washed less thoroughly, he drank his tea standing, he ran to the office and was there much too early. In everything he saved a little time. But when Sunday came, there weren't any savings to show for his efforts; and he realized he had been cheated. I should never have got small change, he told himself. How long a full, unbroken year would have lasted. But this blasted small change simply disappears, who knows where. And one disagreeable afternoon, there he sat on the sofa in the corner, waiting for the gentleman in the fur coat, from whom he meant to demand his time back. He would bolt the door and not let him leave until he had forked out. ‘In notes,’ he would say, ‘ten-year notes, for all I care.’ Four notes of ten and one of five, and he could keep the rest, in the devil's name. Yes, he was prepared to let him have the rest, simply to avoid difficulties. So there he sat on the horsehair sofa, irritable, waiting – but the gentleman never showed up. And he, Nikolai Kuzmich, who just a few weeks before had seen himself sitting there so very much at his ease, he was unable, now that he was really sitting there, to picture the other Nikolai Kuzmich, that generous gentleman in the fur coat. Heaven only knew what had become of him; probably his frauds had been exposed, and he was already behind bars somewhere. No doubt he was not the only one he had ruined. These confidence tricksters always operate on a grand scale.
It occurred to him that there must be a public authority, some sort of Time Bank, where he could at least change part of his miserable seconds. After all, they were perfectly genuine. He had never heard of any such institution, but surely something of the kind would be in the directory, under ‘T’; or perhaps it was called the ‘Bank of Time’ – it would be easy to check under ‘B’. Conceivably it might be under ‘I’, since it was presumably an imperial institution, as befitted its importance.
Later, Nikolai Kuzmich would always insist that on that Sunday evening, though he was understandably quite dejected, he hadn't had a drop to drink. He was thus completely sober when the following incident occurred, so far as one can tell what did in fact happen. Perhaps he had briefly nodded off in his corner; one could easily imagine it. At first, this little snooze brought him a great sense of relief. I have been messing about with numbers, he admonished himself. Now, I don't know a thing about numbers. But it is obvious that one shouldn't attach too much importance to them; after all, they are only an arrangement made by the state in the interests of public order. No one has ever seen them anywhere but on paper. You couldn't possibly meet a seven, say, or a twenty-five, at a social gathering. They simply weren't there. And then there was this little confusion, occasioned by mere inadvertence, between time and money – as if the two could not be distinguished from each other! Nikolai Kuzmich very nearly laughed. It was definitely a good thing to have figured out what he himself was up to, and in good time, that was the important thing, in good time. Now things would be different. Time, there was no denying, was a delicate matter. But was he the only one affected? Did it not pass for others too, as he had worked out, in seconds, even if they were unaware of it?
Nikolai Kuzmich was not altogether innocent of rejoicing in the misfortunes of others. Just let it – he was about to think, when something peculiar happened. A draught suddenly wafted on his face, and breezed past his ears; he could feel it on his hands. He opened his eyes wide. The window was firmly closed. And as he sat there in the dark room with his eyes wide open, he began to understand that what he was now feeling was real time, passing. He could actually recognize each one of them, all those seconds; they were all equally tepid, one exactly like the other, but how fast they were, how fast! Heaven only knew what they were up to. That it should happen to him, of all people, who took wind of any kind as an insult. Now he would sit there, and the draught would be never-ending, his whole life long. He foresaw all the attacks of neuralgia that would result; he was beside himself with rage. He leaped to his feet; but the surprises were not yet over. Under his feet, too, there was a sort of motion, not just one motion but several, interwoven in a curious reel. He stiffened with terror: could that be the earth? Most certainly it was the earth. The earth did move. They had said so at school, though it was passed over rather hastily, and later there was a tendency to keep quiet on the subject; it was not the done thing to talk about it. But now that he had grown sensitive he felt this too. Did others feel it? Perhaps, but they did not show it. In all likelihood it did not bother them, these sea-going folk. But Nikolai Kuzmich was somewhat delicate, in this of all respects; he even avoided taking the tram. He staggered about his room as if on the deck of a ship, and had to hold on with both hands. Unfortunately he further recalled something to the effect that the earth's axis was at an angle. No, he couldn't take all these motions. He felt wretched. Lie down and rest, he had once read somewhere. And ever since, Nikolai Kuzmich had been lying in bed.
He lay with his eyes closed. And there were times, the less turbulent days, so to speak, when life was quite tolerable. And that was when he thought up the business of the poems. It was scarcely credible that it should have helped so much. To recite a poem slowly, with an even emphasis on the end rhymes, was to have something stable, as it were, that you could keep your gaze fixed on – your inner gaze, of course. It was sheer good fortune that he knew all those poems by heart. But he had always taken a most particular interest in literature. He did not complain about the condition he was in, the student who had known him a long time assured me. But in the course of time he had developed an inflated admiration for those such as the student who walked about and endured the earth's motion.
I remember this story so precisely because I found it inordinately reassuring. It is not too much to say that I have never again had so pleasant a neighbour as this Nikolai Kuzmich, who would doubtless have admired me too.
[50] After this experience, I resolved that in similar cases I would always go straight to the facts. I noticed how straightforward they were, and what relief they brought, compared with conjectures. As if I had not known that all our insights come after the fact; they draw a line under an account, and that is all. On the very next page a quite different account begins, with no balance carried forward. What use, in the present case, were the handful of facts that could easily be established? I shall name them in a moment, once I have said what concerns me right now: that the facts have tended rather to make my situation, which (I now concede) was quite difficult, more troublesome still.
To my own honour be it said that I have written a great deal in recent days; I have been writing compulsively. Even so, when I went out I did not look forward to returning home. I would even walk a little out of my way, losing half an hour in which I might have been writing. I confess that this was a weakness. Once I was in my room, however, I had nothing to reproach myself with. I was writing; I had my life, and the life next door was a completely different one, with which I had nothing in common – the life of a medical student studying for his finals. I had nothing comparable before me, and that in itself was a signal difference. In other ways, too, our circumstances were as different as they possibly could be. All of this made perfect sense to me, up to the moment when I knew that it would come; and then I forgot that we shared no common ground. I listened so hard that my heart pounded. I abandoned everything else and listened. And then it happened: I was never wrong.
Most people are familiar with the noise made when you drop a round metal object, say the lid of a tin. Generally, it is not very loud when it hits the floor: there is the brief impact, then it rolls on its rim and only really becomes disagreeable when the momentum runs down and the lid reels down every which way till it finally comes to rest. Now, that is all there was to it: some metal object of this description fell next door, rolled, came to rest, and while this was happening someone stamped on the floor at intervals. Like all sounds that impress themselves upon us by repetition, this one too had its own internal structure; it changed, and was never exactly the same, but this very fact argued that it obeyed its own laws. It could be violent or soft or melancholy; it could run its co
urse at a terrific rate, as it were, or it could glide along for an infinity before coming to rest. And the final reeling decline was invariably a surprise. The stamping that accompanied it, on the other hand, had an almost mechanical quality. But it always punctuated the noise in a different manner; that seemed to be its function. I have a much better grasp of all these details now; the room next to mine is unoccupied. He has gone home, back to the provinces. He needed a period of rest. I live on the top floor. To my right there is another building; no one has moved into the room below me; I have no neighbour.
In this condition, I am almost surprised that I did not take the matter more lightly. Though an intuition gave me advance warning every time. I should have profited from that. Do not be startled, I should have told myself, now it is coming; I knew I was never mistaken. But perhaps my state was due to the very facts I had ascertained; once I knew them, I was more susceptible to alarms than ever. There was something almost sinister in the thought that the cause of the noise was that small, slow, soundless movement with which his eyelid drooped over his right eye as he read, and closed against his will. This, a mere trifle, was the key thing in his story. He had already had to defer his finals a couple of times; his self-esteem had made him touchy, and quite likely his people at home put pressure on him whenever they wrote. So what alternative did he have but to pull himself together? But the problem was that a few months before he took his resolve, he had developed this weakness, this trivial and quite impossible tendency to fatigue; it was as absurd as a window blind that refuses to stay up. I am certain that for weeks he felt it should be possible to overcome the problem. Otherwise I should never have hit on the notion of offering him my own will. The fact was that one day I grasped that his own willpower was exhausted; and ever since, whenever I felt it coming, I would stand there on my side of the wall urging him to use mine. And in due course I realized that he had accepted the offer. Maybe he should not have done so, especially if you consider that it did not really help. Even assuming we managed to win time, it is still a moot point whether he was truly in a position to make use of the moments we thus gained. As for my own outgoings, I was beginning to feel the pinch. I know I was wondering if things could go on like this on that very afternoon when someone came up to our floor. Since the staircase was so narrow, this always caused quite a commotion in the small guest-house. After a while I had the impression that someone entered my neighbour's room. Our doors were the last on the passage; his was right next to mine, at an angle. I did know that he occasionally had friends call on him, but, as I have said, I took no interest whatsoever in his affairs; it might be that his door was opened several more times, that people were coming and going out there, but it was really no business of mine.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Page 15