2.
He clicked on the file, titled it War and War, gave it a proper file name, saved it, checking first that the address was working, then pressed the last key, switched the machine off, closed it, and carefully put it down on the bed, and having done so was quickly out of the house, running down the sidewalk in a panic with no idea where he was going, but then stopped, turned and set off in the opposite direction, as fleet-footed as before and, being just as uncertain, stopping once more some two hundred yards down the road to massage his neck and swivel his head before looking first ahead and then behind him as if seeking someone he failed to find, for it was early and there was hardly anyone on the street, and those few he saw were far away, a couple of blocks off at least, around Washington Avenue, with only some homeless under a mound of garbage directly opposite him on the other side of the road and a very old blue Lincoln turning out of 159th Street getting into second or third gear and passing him on its way back—but where to go now, he wondered, at a complete loss, just standing there, and you could see that he knew the answer to the question but had forgotten it, so he fiddled with a paper handkerchief in a pocket of his coat, cleared his throat, and poked his toe at an empty pack of Orbitos lying on the hard snow, but since the paper had almost completely come to pieces, it was hard work shifting it: still, he persisted and eventually succeeded to the extent that the pack turned over, and while he was poking the thing, clearing his throat and fiddling with the paper handkerchief in his pocket, his eyes darting now this way, now that, it is possible that he remembered where he wanted to get to.
3.
Red 1 and Red 9 were equally fine for him since they both ran from Washington Avenue to Times Square where he would have to switch to the black line by means of which he could get to Grand Central and the green line that would take him to the Upper East Side, since he wanted to get there as soon as possible, Korin explained to his companion, having gleaned from his landlord the previous night that there was a Hungarian quarter in New York, for that was when he decided that he would buy the gun there, since, after all, not speaking English, he realized that he needed to be instructed in Hungarian, which was why his landlord’s mention of it in his monologue came at such a handy moment, for he didn’t feel he could ask him, having already bothered him so much, and as for others, well, he didn’t have the English and was therefore constrained to turn to a Hungarian to whom he could clearly explain his requirements and discover where the business might be arranged, for the language problem left him with no alternative, he immediately realized, but to find a Hungarian speaker, but once he found a seat opposite a large black woman on the Red 9 and began to examine the subway map above the woman’s head, he decided that he would make the journey between Times Square and Grand Central on foot, for it was not clear to him from the map what the black line connecting the two signified, and it was chance, the merest chance that decided things, not he himself, for he simply sat opposite the huge black woman and recognized that however long he studied the subway map he would not succeed in working out what the black line between the green and red routes actually meant, so it had to be on foot, he decided, and that’s how it turned out though he had no inkling what curious farewell gift the inscrutable will of fate had reserved for him on this, his last day, not the faintest idea, he repeated enthusiastically, but he had got thus far, he explained, everything on this last day worked out; he made smooth progress toward his ultimate goals, for it was as if something had taken him by the hand and was leading him there by the most direct route once he got off at Times Square, emerged from the subway and starting walking eastward, directly toward the tower he might almost say, immediately noticing that everything around him seemed to speed up, the whole world accelerating in extraordinary fashion as soon as he reached the street and made his way among the skyscrapers, pressing through dense crowds and gazing at the buildings, craning his neck, until it struck him that there was no point in seeking to discover a meaning in these buildings because however hard he tried he would not, said Korin, though it was a meaning he had been constantly aware of from the moment he first glimpsed the famous skyline of Manhattan from the window of his cab, a meaning of peculiar significance that he sought day after day each night about five P.M. after he had finished work and set out to walk the streets, particularly Broadway—trying in vain to give his thoughts some shape, first by meditating on the fact that the whole thing reminded him keenly of something, then by sensing that he had been here before, that he had seen this world-famous panorama, those breathtaking skyscrapers of Manhattan somewhere, but no, it was no good, the walks were all in vain, it was useless trying, he could not solve the puzzle, and, as he told himself this very dawn walking down toward the tower and the bustle of Times Square, he would have to leave without having found out, without having discovered or stumbled across the answer, without the least notion that in just a few minutes he would understand, said Korin, that in a few bare minutes he’d realize and achieve what he had set out to do, and that this would happen only a few minutes after setting off among the skyscrapers toward Grand Central Station.
4.
We pass things without any idea of what it is we have passed, and he didn’t know, said he, whether his companion knew the feeling, but that was exactly what happened to him, in the most literary sense, for he had no idea what it was as he passed it, and only a few steps later, once he had slowed down, did he vaguely suspect something, and then he had to stop, stop right there and stand stock still, at first without knowing quite what the sensation was related to, racking his brains to find out the cause, but then he turned to retrace his steps and as he spun round he found himself in front of a huge store, the one he had just passed, a store full of television sets, several racks high and some twenty meters long of nothing but TV sets, all turned on, all working, every one of them showing a different program; and all this, he felt, was trying to tell him something very important though it was far from easy discovering what it was or why these advertisements, film clips, blond curls and western boots, coral reefs, news channels, cartoon films, concert excerpts and aerial battles should have anything to say to him, and first he stood puzzling in front of the display, then tried walking up and down in front of it still mystified, until, suddenly, having taken a step closer and leaned over, in the second row from the bottom, roughly level with his eyes, he noticed an image, a medieval painting, which must have been, there was no doubt about it, the thing that had stopped him as he passed, though he still didn’t know why, so he leaned closer still and saw it was a work by Breughel, the one showing the building of the Tower of Babel, an image that, being a history graduate, he knew very well, the camera focusing on the detail where King Nimrod, stern, serious and very fearsome looking, arrives at the site, with his moonfaced chief adviser beside him escorted by a few guards and there are some stone carvers working in the dust in front of them, the film being probably some kind of documentary, said Korin, that at least being his impression, though, naturally enough, he could not hear the commentary through the thick glass of the window, only the racket of the street in which he stood, the sirens, the squealing of brakes and the blast of horns; and then the camera began to pull slowly away from the foreground and Nimrod, and to take in more and more of the picture until Korin stood facing the landscape and the enormous tower with its seven infernal levels, unfinished, abandoned and damned, straining toward the sky at the end of the world, and, ah now he understood! Babel! he declared aloud, ah if only everything was so simple: Babel and New York! for had he understood this he would not have had to traipse about the city all those long weeks seeking a solution to the mystery—and he continued staring at the picture, stopping by the window display until he noticed that a big adolescent boy in a leather jacket kept staring somewhat challengingly at him, when he felt compelled to move on, and doing so, step by step, he felt a sort of calm settling over him and he carried on toward Grand Central Station while the stores by either side of him began to open up, chiefl
y the smaller greengrocers and delicatessens at first, but a little bookstore too, the owner being in the act of rolling out a bookcase on castors and the case full of cut-price books before which Korin stopped, having plenty of time for he had never in his life felt so free, and looked through the brightly colored volumes as he always did on his five o’clock strolls whenever he passed such a store, picking out one book with a familiar picture on the cover, the title of the book being Ely Jacques Kahn, and, in smaller letters below it, the words New York Architect, with the 1931 foreword by Otto John Teegen, and masses of black-and-white photographs of big New York buildings, precisely the ones he had seen in the course of his walks, images of the same gaggle of New York skyscrapers—the scraper-scape, he muttered to himself, and the word scraper-scape began to ring in his ear—and then he turned over a few pages, not systematically page by page, but in a vague arbitrary fashion, jumping from the end of the book to the early pages, then from the early pages to the later ones, when, suddenly, on page 88 he came upon a photograph labeled “View from East River, 120 Wall Street Building, New York City” at which point, he said that afternoon in the Mocca restaurant, it was like being struck by lightning, and he went back to the beginning and leafed through the whole book properly, from “Insurance Building, 42-44 West Thirty-Ninth Street Building” through “Number Two Park Avenue Building,” “N.W Corner Sixth Avenue at Thirty-Seventh Street Building,” “International Telephone and Telegraph Building,” “Federation Building” and “S.E. Corner Broadway and Forty-First Street Building” right through to the end, when he checked the name on the front of the book once more, Ely Jacques Kahn, and again, Ely Jacques Kahn, then raised his eyes from the book jacket and sought the nearest such building in the direction of the Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan, and could not believe his eyes, he said, simply didn’t want to believe his eyes, for he immediately found it: there stood the building in the book, as well as others whose pictures he had just looked at, and though there was undoubtedly some relationship between them, there was at the same time an even greater relatianship between them and the Tower of Babel as painted by Breughel, and then he tried to find other such buildings, rushing down to the next intersection to see better, or rather to get a better view of Lower Manhattan, and discovered them immediately, and was so shaken by his discovery that, without thinking, he stepped off the sidewalk into the crosswalk and was almost knocked down, cars hooting at him while he continued to stare at Lower Manhattan even as he leapt back, mesmerized by the view, it having struck him that New York was full of Towers of Babel, good heavens, imagine it, he said the same afternoon in a state of high excitement, here he had been walking right amongst them for weeks on end, knowing that he should see the connection, but had failed to see it, but now that he had seen it, he announced with great ceremony, now that he had got it, it was clear to him that this most important and most sensitive city, the greatest city in the world, the center of the world, had deliberately been filled by someone with Towers of Babel, all with seven stories, he noted, his eyes screwed up, examining the distant panorama, and all seven stories stepped like ziggurats, a theme with which he was very well acquainted, he explained to his companion, having attended university some twenty years ago as a student of history, later a local historian, for they were dense with references to the towers of Mesopotamia, and not just the Babel of Breughel, but also to material from Koldewey too, the German amateur archeologist’s name being Robert Koldewey, as he recalled perfectly clearly even now, the man who excavated Babel and Esagila and discovered Etemenanki, partly uncovered it and even made a maquette of it, so it was no wonder that when he arrived at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport, got into the taxi and took a first look to see the famous panorama that something immediately rang a bell with him, it was just that he didn’t know what it was, couldn’t put a name to it, though it was there lurking in some corner of his aching brain, reluctant to appear, hiding away, he said, until today, and frankly he didn’t understand the way it all suddenly came together on this, his last day, but it was as if it had been all laid out before him and always had been, because ever since dawn he had this feeling that someone was taking him by the hand and leading him on, and that this book about Ely Jacques Kahn was, so to speak, thrust into his hands; for why on earth would he pick up this book rather than any other, and why should he have stopped precisely before that particular bookstore, why walk down that very street, why walk at all—oh, it was quite certain, Korin nodded smiling in the Mocca restaurant, that they were there with him, leading him, holding his hand.
5.
A king among stone carvers: the idea shocked everyone in Babylon, for it meant that whatever laws had governed them so far were now invalid and that there was no longer any foundation on which order might be built, and, this being so, from now on it would be the unpredictable, the sensational and the senseless that ruled their lives, and yet he walked among the stone carvers as any man might do, treading the length of the Marduk road, through the Ishtar Gate, over to the hill opposite, acting against all the ruling conventions and thereby advertising the fact that power was no longer with the empire, for leaving the palace without the appropriate retinue and the presence of the court, with just four guards as escort and, of course, the fearsome moon-faced chief adviser at his side was more than Babylon could bear, and when the chief adviser cried, The King, and the armed escort carelessly echoed the words, the stone carvers on the hillside thought someone was playing a joke on them and did not even rise to their feet and stop working at first, but when they saw it really was the king they threw themselves on the ground facedown until the adviser, communicating the king’s wishes, ordered them to rise and to continue what they were doing, for such were the king’s commands, he said, the king’s expression stern and frightening, but somehow disturbing too, the eyes faintly idiotic, the eyes of a man bearing the authority of Nimrod’s robes and scepter, but among workmen, and that’s how the priests of Marduk knew that the last judgment must be near though sacrifices continued undisturbed on the altars, but there was the king, engaged in direct conversation with the stone carvers on the hillside, and news of this apocalyptic event quickly spread and terrified even those who had given themselves over to fierce pleasures and the evils of forgetfulness behind the thick but now useless walls of the city; and the four of them threw themselves on the ground once more but none of them dared answer such questions as they did not understand, for their hearts were in their mouths, loudly drumming in fear that the mighty Nimrod was standing before them in an act of madness, that the king himself was asking them whether the stone was hard enough, and they went on nodding, saying, yes, yes, hard enough, but the king gave no sign of having heard their answer and stepped away to join the guards who were openly grinning, then stood on a ledge that offered a perfect view with a deep chasm at his feet, the vast tower of Etemenanki rearing up before him on the far side, and stood immobile, a dry scalding breeze above the river blowing directly into his face; so Nimrod watched the builders at work, laboring at the enormous monument, that impossible structure rising before him, almost ready now, a perfect silence at his back, the hammers and chisels frozen in the workmen’s hands as he surveyed his creation, Nimrod’s challenge to the world, a triumph, a work of genius, an edifice of godless majesty designed to confront time itself—that, at least, was how Nimrod imagined it, said Korin to his new friend, for what else could it be, as they sat down for a drink at the Mocca restaurant, what else could it be if we are to believe Breughel rather than Koldeway, and he did believe Breughel in preference to Koldeway, for that was what he had assumed from the beginning, that Breughel’s painting was correct, since after all one had to, in fact absolutely had to assume something, for there had to be a reason for him being in New York, and there had to be some mysterious guiding hand to lead him here so that he might accomplish his own humble task and receive a clear explanation of all these references to Babel, and why should all this be as it was, smiled Korin, his head swayin
g, if not to enable us to comprehend that this is what God’s absence leads to, to the production of a miraculous, brilliant and utterly captivating kind of human being who is incapable, and always will be incapable, of just one thing, that is of controlling that which he has created, his own feeling being, he declared, that it was true, that there really was nothing more miraculous than man, for think, to take a random example, of computers, of satellites, of microchips, motor cars, medicines, televisions, of unmanned stealth bombers, a list so long we could continue it forever, and this was probably the reason and explanation for his own presence in New York, so that he should be able to sort the essential from the banal, in other words to understand that that which is too big for us is altogether too big, and having understood this to convey this understanding to others, because, and he couldn’t emphasize this strongly enough, he, Korin, had to point out the true state of affairs, and he did not merely imagine but felt most clearly that something had taken him by the hand and was leading him.
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