Wallon was now feeling really ill, as though under the effect of some drug, the bitter taste of which persisted in his mouth in a disturbing manner, while the mistress of the house suddenly brought her explanations and commentaries to an end, the suddenly piercing gaze of her green eyes examining her captive as he turned and staggered toward the salon in search of a place to sit down.…8 All the armchairs were unfortunately occupied, not by life-size dolls, as he had originally supposed, but by real adolescent girls in scanty underclothes who kept making funny faces and winking conspiratorially…. In his bewilderment, he dropped the gilded frame, and the glass smashed to pieces on the floor with a disproportionately loud cymbal crash.… Wall, suddenly imagining himself to be in danger, stepped back toward the marble-topped end table, where he blindly grabbed, behind his back, a small, rounded, smooth object, like a polished pebble, which he thought would be heavy enough to serve as a weapon of defense if he needed one.… In front of him, Gigi was there, of course, sitting in the first row, smiling at him with an expression both provocative and derisive. Her companions, scattered around the room, also accentuated for the Frenchman’s benefit their lascivious attitudes. Sitting, standing, or half-reclining, several of them seemed to be miming the living reproduction of more or less famous works of art: Greuze’s Broken Pitcher (but in a further state of undress), Edouard Manneret’s Bait, Fernand Cormon’s Chained Captive, Alice Liddell as a little beggar girl with her shift in suggestive tatters photographed by the Oxford don Charles Dodgson, Saint Agatha exposing her naked breasts, already decorated with a very becoming wound under the fair martyr’s crown.… Wall opened his mouth to say something, he didn’t know what, which would save him from the absurdity of his situation, or perhaps merely to utter a cry as people do in nightmares, but no sound emerged from his throat. Then he realized that in his right hand he was holding an enormous glass eye which must have come from some giant doll, and he raised it to his own horrified eyes in order to examine it more closely.… The girls all burst out laughing at once, in their various timbres and registers, with crescendos, shrill notes, and deeper trills, in a devastating concert.…9 The traveler’s last sensation was that he was being transported, weak and helpless as a rag doll, while the whole house was filled with the racket of a chaotic shifting of furniture, or even of some kind of pillage, in what seemed the uproar of a riot.
* * *
Note 8 – Taking advantage of the situation in which our troubled agent is drowning in the flood of imperfect and past tenses, we can clarify or correct certain points of detail in the preceding dialogue. If my memory serves, the family-vacation photo was not taken on the island of Rügen, but in the immediate environs of Graal-Mürutz, a Baltic seaside resort closer to Rostock, where Franz Kafka stayed during the summer of 1923 (that is, fourteen years earlier) before coming to spend his last winter in Berlin, not moreover in the center of town, as our narrator has supposed above, but in the fringe neighborhood of Steglitz, which today, with Tempelhof, marks the southern limit of the American zone.
And I also recall the planes in the sky, for it was not indeed a flight of the ash-colored cranes, so spectacular at that season, which the father was observing. Yet it was not, on the other hand, the Stukas in a training flight, but the Messerschmitt 109s roaring at high altitude, without much disturbing the summer people’s repose. Joëlle Kastanjevica’s mistake derives from a confusion with the remarkable war-propaganda film we had seen that same day in the newsreels, in a primitive Ribnitz-Damgarten movie theater. As for the vocabulary of theater people which she uses concerning her marriage (“rehearsal,” “opening night,” “reprise,” etc.) its obvious origin was her stay in Nice (thus, much later). She ran a modest neighborhood stationery shop there, where children came to buy pencils and erasers, though she was much more interested in the troupe of amateur actors some friends had founded. They say she distinguished herself in the role of Cordelia in a stage adaptation of The Diary of a Seducer, the French translation having been published before the war in Le Cabinet cosmopolite.
Note 9 – The author of the problematic narrative doubtless seeks, by his outrageous statements, to convince his eventual reader of the poisoning theory: hence we would be observing in this obviously delirious scene the first effects (nausea, then hallucinations) of the so-called narcotic coffee we so carefully prepared. His plausible tactic, in the bad pass from which he is struggling to escape, would thus be to dissolve his personal responsibilities—conscious or unconscious, deliberate or involuntary—in an opaque bath of complicated machinations hatched by his adversaries, of false-bottomed drawers, of spells and various hypnotic charms worked upon him, exonerating his unfortunate and fragile person from any fault or implication. Obviously it would be preferable if he himself could specify our own interest in destroying him. Anyone who has examined his previous reports, however summarily or partially, will in any case be in a position to observe that these twin themes of conspiracy and enchantment recur, under his pen, with remarkable frequency, including the tumultuous final aggression by an outburst of erotic little girls.
* * *
Suddenly everything grew still. And it was in a total, too perfect, and rather disturbing silence that Franck Matthieu (or else Mathieu Frank, since what is involved are his two given names) awakens, at the end of an unknown number of hours, in a familiar bedroom of which he seems to recognize every last detail, though this setting is for the moment impossible to situate in space or time. It is night. The thick double curtains are drawn. Hanging in the center of the wall opposite the invisible window, there is the picture.
The walls are covered with an old-fashioned wallpaper with alternating vertical bands—rather dark bluish stripes with white edges, five or six centimeters wide—which leave equivalent but much paler surfaces between them, through which runs from top to bottom a line of tiny identical designs whose dull color must have originally been gilded. Without needing to stand up in order to see it at closer range, Mathieu F. can describe from memory this sign with its uncertain signification: a rosette, a sort of clove or a tiny torch, or else a dagger, but also a tiny doll whose body and two legs pressed together would replace the broad blade of the dagger or the handle of the torch, her head becoming either the latter’s flame or the former’s rounded handle, while the arms stretching forward (and thus slightly foreshortened) represented the hilt of the weapon or the cupel which keeps the burning substances from running onto the hand holding the torch.
Against the wall on the right (for the observer with his back to the window) stands a huge mirrored armoire, deep enough to hang clothes in, the heavy mirror with beveled edges occupying almost the whole of the single door, in which can be seen the image of the picture, but inverted—i.e., the right part of the wallpaper appearing in the left half of the reflecting surface, and, reciprocally, the exact middle of the rectangular frame (materialized by the old man’s nobly borne head) coinciding exactly with the central point of the pivoting mirror, which is closed and hence perpendicular to the real picture, and hence moreover to its virtual duplication.
On this same wall, between the armoire—placed almost in the corner—and the outside wall where the window is located, though it is entirely concealed by the drawn heavy curtains, are backed up the headboards of the twin beds, which are so narrow as not to be usable except by very young children: less than one and a half meters in length by about seventy centimeters in width. They are separated from each other by a painted wooden night table of matching dimensions, which holds a small lamp in the form of a candlestick, its faint electric bulb not turned off. The second night table, absolutely identical to the first, being the same pale blue color and holding the same lit lamp, finds just the space it requires between the second bed and the outside wall, immediately next to the left edge of the ample folds created by the dark red material of which the curtains are made. These must considerably overlap the invisible window recess, which would have little reason to be a bay wider than the kind built nowadays.<
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Wanting to check a detail to which he has not had access in his prone position, Mathieu props himself up on one elbow. The two pillows are each embroidered, as might be expected, with the initial of a given name in large gothic capital letters in high relief, and in them can be readily recognized, notwithstanding the highly ornamented complication of the three parallel legs which each of them involves, not at first glance easily differentiated from each other, the letter M and the letter W. It is at this moment that the traveler understands how bizarre his situation is: he is lying stretched out in pajamas, his head supported by a sort of heavy linen bolster propped against the wall beneath the window, on a mattress without a sheet lying on the floor between the foot of the twin beds and the long toilet table, on the white marble top of which rest two identical porcelain bowls, though one has a clearly visible crack blackened by time and repaired by means of metal clasps now corroded by rust. In the decoration of monochrome flowered volutes which embellishes a squat water pitcher, placed between the two bowls and made of the same material, appears a large escutcheon on which can be read with some difficulty the same two quite similar gothic letters, this time so ingeniously interlaced that only an experienced eye can permit them to be identified.
The neck of the pitcher is reflected in one of the twin mirrors attached to the striped wallpaper, over each bowl at a height suitable only for very young boys. The same is the case for the level of the white marble tabletop. In the other mirror (the one on the right) appears once again an image of the picture, its design inverted. But in observing the first (the one on the left) more closely, a third reproduction can be discovered, distinctly farther away, of the same picture, with its design, in this case, the right way round—that is, reflected (and inverted) twice over: first of all in the toilet-table mirror, then in the mirror of the armoire door.
Mathieu struggles to his feet, his whole body exhausted for some unknown reason, and goes over to look at his unshaven face by leaning toward the middle of the little mirror over the mended bowl, the one involving in the design painted inside it a big letter M, barred diagonally by the old crack in the porcelain. The picture represents some episode (perhaps quite famous, but he has always wondered which one) of ancient history or of mythology, in a hilly landscape in which can be made out in the distance, to the left, several columned buildings in Corinthian style forming the background of the setting. Coming from the right, in the foreground, a horseman riding his black stallion brandishes a warlike sword in the direction of the old man in a toga who is facing him, standing in a high-wheeled chariot which he stops in its course, restraining by their taut reins the two white horses, one of which, more nervous than the other, rears and whinnies, suffering from the bit, which is too suddenly tightened.
Behind this proud driver of such august stature, who is crowned with a royal diadem, stand two archers in rigid loincloths who stretch their bows, but without the arrows seeming to be pointed toward the untimely aggressor, whom they do not even appear to notice. The latter wears a pectoral cuirass which might well be Roman, and its probably from another period than the vaguely Hellenic toga of the old king, whose one bared shoulder has nothing bellicose about it, while the short fitted loincloths of the two soldiers, as well as the headgear extending very low on the napes of their necks and over their ears, suggests something rather Egyptian. But one detail is even more disturbing from the historical point of view: among the stones in the road lies a woman’s shoe, a delicate high-heeled dancing slipper, its triangular vamp covered with blue sequins sparkling in the sun.
The immemorial scene transpires once more, in its familiar strangeness. Mathieu pours a little water in his bowl, the glued crack being much more noticeable than it used to be. How long has it been since this yellowish liquid has been renewed? Unconsciously making the gestures of his childhood, he immerses the washcloth bearing the letters M v B, sewn in red thread on the narrow hem which serves to hang the cloth on the hooked end of the chromium-plated brass towel rack. M rubs his face gingerly with the dripping, spongy material. This is not sufficient, unfortunately, to reduce the nausea which has overcome him ever more powerfully. His head is swimming; his legs collapse. Pushed back against the wall, on the left side of the picture, the mannequin is still there.… Lifting his toothbrush glass, he drinks a mouthful of lukewarm water that tastes like ashes and immediately lets himself fall back onto the mattress.
Third Day
HR awakens in an unknown bedroom which must be a children’s room, given the miniature size of the twin beds, the night tables, the toilet table with its double complement of thick porcelain bowls painted with a grayish design. He himself is lying on a bare mattress, though of adult dimensions, placed directly on the floor. There is also a big traditional mirrored armoire, its heavy door ajar, looking gigantic in this room of doll furniture. Over his head, the electric light is on: a cup-shaped translucent ceiling fixture representing a woman’s face completely surrounded by long undulating serpentine locks, like a sun’s rays. But so bright is the harsh light that he cannot explore the details any further. On the striped wallpaper facing his mattress hangs an academic painting, a vague imitation of Delacroix or Géricault, with nothing remarkable about it save its huge size and mediocre quality.
In the big beveled mirror of the armoire appears the reflection of the wide-open bedroom door. In the doorway, and against the dark background of the hallway, stands Gigi, staring at the traveler lying on his mattress. Since he habitually sleeps on his right side, he sees the girl only by means of her reflection in the armoire mirror—twice removed, it would seem, in a very calculated fashion. Yet the young visitor is staring directly at the bottom of the red curtains and the bolster, without glancing at the armoire mirror, so that she cannot know if the sleeper has his eyes open now, watching her, and speculating further about this strange child. Why does this active little creature remain silent and motionless, keeping watch so attentively over the guest’s troubling repose? Is there something abnormal about such sleep; is it too sound, is it lasting too long? Has some physician, summoned by an emergency call, already attempted to rouse the man? Is there a sort of anguish to be discerned on the child’s pretty face?
The evocation of a doctor possibly being at his bedside suddenly wakens in HR’s troubled mind a fragile and fragmentary memory from his immediate past. A man with a bald skull, a Lenin goatee, and steel-rimmed glasses, holding a notepad and pen, was sitting on a chair at the foot of the mattress, while he himself, his eyes on the ceiling, talked on and on, but in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice, without managing to control what he was saying. What could he be telling in his delirium? Now and then he cast a terrified glance at his impassive examiner, behind whom was standing another man, smiling for no evident reason. And this latter man curiously resembled HR himself, the more so because he had put on the suit and the fur-lined jacket in which the special agent had arrived in Berlin.
And now this false HR, whose face remained quite identifiable despite his obviously artificial mustache, has leaned toward the recording physician to whisper something in his ear, while showing him a passage in a bundle of manuscript pages.… The image freezes for a few seconds in the incontestable density of the real, and then collapses with disconcerting speed. Scarcely a minute later, the whole phantasmal sequence has vanished, dissolved in the mist, completely unreal. Doubtless there was nothing more to it than the drifting residue of a dream fragment.
Today Gigi is wearing a navy-blue schoolgirl’s dress, pretty enough though reminiscent of the severe costume of religious boarding schools with its short pleated skirt, its white socks, and its demure white collar. And now she’s moving quite decisively, though gracefully too, toward the mirrored armoire, as if she had just discovered its inopportune (or else henceforth useless) opening. With a careful gesture she closes the door, its rusty hinges creaking for several seconds. HR pretends to waken with a start because of the noise; he hurriedly readjusts the buttons of the pajamas that someone has p
ut on him (who? when? why?) and abruptly sits up. As casually as possible, despite a persistent uncer tainty about just where he is and the reasons that have led to his sleeping here, he says: “Hello, little girl!”
The child responds by no more than a toss of her head. She seems preoccupied, perhaps upset. As a matter of fact, her behavior is so different from that of the day before (but was it the day before?) that she might be an altogether different girl, though physically identical with the first one. The bewildered traveler risks a neutral question, offered in an indifferent tone of voice: “Are you off to school, dear?”
“No, why?” she asks in a sulky, surprised tone of voice. “I’ve been through with my courses and homework and tests for a long time.… Besides, you don’t have to call me ‘dear.’”
“Whatever you like.… I guess I was influenced by what you’re wearing.”
“What’s that got to do with it? These are my working clothes. Besides, no one goes to school in the middle of the night.”
While Gigi stares at herself in the armoire mirror, methodically passing her entire person in review, from the blond curls she ruffles quite knowingly to the white socks she pushes a little farther down on her ankles, HR, as if such scrutiny were contagious, stands up to inspect his own exhausted face, bending far over toward one of the two toilet mirrors, placed too low for easy examination, above the porcelain bowls. His borrowed sky-blue striped pajamas have the letter W embroidered on the left breast pocket. Without seeming to attach much importance to the question, he asks: “What kind of work?”
Repetition Page 7