“It is wrong for God’s world not to be whole. You, cracks, have crannied into things and cloven them. Why? To nourish your crackist bodies, to tend and widen your twists. You grow and grow. A tiny chink appears, and lo, it is a meandering crack. Then a gaping cleft. You destroy the union and loving convergence of thing with thing. Rocks split apart. Mountains erode and crumble away. In the fields you rob the weak root of rainwater. You abrade fruit. Hollow out trees. Humble yourselves, sister cracks, mortify your flesh. For it is nothing but twists of emptiness.”
The cracks, stretched out on dewy grasses, listened to the sermon. When the Hermit had finished preaching, he blessed them all with three trembling fingers and allowed them to creep back to their homes. Bending their emptinesses, the cracks crept quietly away and reinserted themselves, each where it belonged: the crag crack in its crag, the stove crack in its stove, the moon’s zigzag in the moon’s disk. And so it became the custom for the world to be, every day at night song, without cracks: whole. That hour was one of great stillness and peace; even the cranial seams hidden under the skin on people’s heads, even they wriggled out of the bone and crept down to the Hermit: Heads stopped growing and people could rest, for an hour or two, from their idea spurts. No crack anywhere dared ignore the call. Once even a mountain gorge, blundering through dense forests, dragged itself down, but the Hermit waved it away: “Go back, unbidden one, go back, Christ be with you.”
The gorge, aggrieved, dragged itself back up to its range. But they say that in the night, one of the mountain passes in that gorge suddenly closed up, flattening the little village clinging to its sides.
True, an hour later the pass miraculously opened again, but inside were only ruins and corpses.
I took my eyes off the lines for a moment: the man in the corner was listening, his bony, long-fingered hands clasping one knee.
The Hermit always let the cracks go in good time, before dawn. But one day, preaching fervently, he failed to check the flow of his words. The cock crowed once. The cock crowed twice. And still the Hermit preached. Only when scarlet glimmers of daybreak shone above the earth’s ambit did the Hermit raise three fingers for the blessing.
But too late: The dawn was already blazing up; here and there, hither and yon, over roads and paths, wheel rims and cartwheels clattered, hooves clopped, feet tramped. The cracks crept quickly away, driving their empty twists for all they were worth over roads, footpaths, and impassable places. But lo, one crack had been run over by a heavy cartwheel, another squashed by a boot. And others, still a long way from home, crannied in wherever and however they could: a mountain defile squeezed into the soundboard of a violin; a soundboard crack hid in the cranial bone of a passerby. The moon’s zigzags had farthest to go; realizing they would never reach home, they thrashed about, sowing panic. Some cracks, surrounded by the rattle of cartwheels and the stamp of feet, gathered in great swarms on the roads and plunged straight into the ground: chasms suddenly yawned; people, horses, and carts went tumbling into pits. Frightened by the racket and jolts from above, the swarms of cracks crept deeper and deeper as the earth closed over people and their chattels. People’s panic multiplied the cracks’ fears; the cracks’ terror multiplied human misery. This was a dreadful and woeful day for the earth. Through the leafy walls of his overgrown forest, the Hermit heard the groans and crashes, curses and prayers churning up the earth. He raised one hand, fingers reaching for the sky, and called out: “O Lord, dost thou hear me? Here is my hand, take me and lead me, as thou willed, to thy bright paradise, for the earth has become hateful to me.”
For a long time his fingers waited, reaching for the sky; at length they fell back down and made a fist. The Hermit looked round and saw: Now he was no friend to the forest—the flowers, on meeting his gaze, closed their petals in disgust; the ancient oaks turned away, tossing angrily on their thick knotty roots. The Hermit’s eye found a path, the path found a cart track, the cart track led to a rutted road. And the great saint became a great sinner, blasphemer, and libertine.
I put down my manuscript and surveyed the room: Round me were mouths half open or stretched into smiles, like long narrow cracks. Out of the cracks burst:
“Not bad.”
“Very nice.”
“Only your ending seems rather . . .flat.”
“Incidentally, there’s one thing . . .”
Freeing my gaze from the swarm of eyes, I glanced at the man in the corner, by the door. He of the buttoned-up frock coat was silent.
His clasped bony hands would not release his knee; his mouth seemed soldered shut.
I felt slightly uneasy: “But isn’t it very late?”
The silent man in the corner by the door unclasped his hands, rose to his great height, and rapped out in a low, cold voice, “Twenty-seven past one.”
Then he made me a polite bow, turned toward the door, and was gone.
“That late? It can’t be.”
Dozens of fingers fumbled in vest pockets: but indeed.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Some people were still smiling. Others were already yawning.
3
“I go to the left. And you?”
“No.”
I came out onto the boulevard’s straight line and set off between banks of shadows twitched from the treetops by a moonbeam and ranged neatly down the sandy path. The boulevard was deserted. The benches empty. Then suddenly, from a bench off to the left, a tall and thin silhouette loomed black; the silhouette looked somehow familiar—the crossed legs, the hand-clasped knee, the face obscured by a broad-brimmed hat pulled low. Yes, it was he.
I slowed my step.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Without changing his attitude, he motioned me to the bench with the nervous flick of his shoulder. I sat down beside him. For a minute there was silence.
“Tell me,” he began abruptly, suddenly straightening up and nearing his face to mine, “among the cracks that crept down to the Hermit was there that ineradicable crack that always exists between ‘I’ and ‘I’? Take the two of us now: sitting side by side, our heads a few feet apart . . . Or perhaps a million miles? Isn’t that true? By the way,” the stranger tipped his hat, “my name is Lövenix, Gott-fried Lö-ve-nix.” He stressed each syllable, as though trying to remind me of something.
We shook each other firmly by the hand.
“Now then. To return: The subtitle of your ‘Collector of Cracks,’” he began, resuming his customary attitude (legs crossed, knee in palms, sharp shoulders cocked), “is ‘A Fairy Tale.’ Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. I suspect that if reality were to appear in reams of dreams, then they—the dreams—would accept it as their own. To you, that’s a fairy tale; to me, it’s protocol. A scientific fact. True, your concepts are confused and your words inexact. But a confusion is not a phantasm. A phantasm—I’m no poet, so a poor judge—is better made from figures, than from mists. I suppose this doesn’t interest you.”
“On the contrary.”
“Primo: a mistake in emotion; at this one does not smile. Your smile cuts you off like a crack from your theme of cracks. You fancy that you are playing with your theme, that it’s in the split of your pen, when in fact your theme is playing with you, and me . . . And all of this”—his hand described a circle; following his hand with my eyes, I saw first the ground at our feet, then the treetops, then the litter of stars overhead, then the slopes of roofs and again the ground at our feet—“yes, all of this, I maintain, is caught in an empty crack. That’s right. The Theme of Cracks. Do you know what’s at the bottom of it? You, for example, are afraid to leave space. People tend to speak of cracks in a board, in the ground, and so on. But if, by a leap of the imagination—isn’t that the stuff of poetry—you were to try and measure your cracks not in inches but in seconds, not in space but in time, then you would see—”
“I don’t fully grasp—” I mumbled.
“No one can fully grasp this,” Gottfried Lövenix cut me short. “Perhaps it’s better: less than grasped. Tell me, when did you first begin thinking about this?”
“I don’t remember. The theme turned up under my pen by chance. Two or three months ago.”
Lövenix smiled. “Aha. I, on the other hand, have not left my Kingdom of Cracks in thirteen years. And I didn’t find it in a fairy tale—no. Thirteen years ago, during my first experiments in the psychophysiology of the visual process, I encountered the discontinuousness of our vision.
“Allow me to explain. Say you’re in an automobile: The explosions of gasoline inside the engine cylinder that push the piston are discontinuous. That’s inside. Outside the wheels spin smoothly and continuously. There is—how shall I put it—the appearance of something seen: The object on which our eye is fixed seems to us to be continuously connected to our eye in all fractions of a second by a constant beam. I, however, had my doubts. The spark-like flash from an electric machine lasts only 1/50,000th of a second. But it remains in the eye for one-seventh of a second. Thus seven fleeting flashes, separated by pauses of almost one-seventh of a second, will be perceived by the eye as a continuous, second-long flash. Yet the actual flashes take up only 7/50,000ths of a second. In other words, for 49,993/50,000ths of the length of the experiment there is darkness perceived as light. Do you understand? Now extend that second to a minute, the minute to an hour, the hour to a year, to a century, turn that flash into the sun, and it turns out that the sun may be taken out of orbit for 99/100ths of a day and we, who live under that sun, won’t notice—you understand—we won’t even notice and, cast into darkness, will rejoice in an illusory sun and an illusory day. Am I boring you?”
“No.”
“My thinking was based on earlier experiments done by others. The jerkiness of our vision, the discontinuousness of our perception of a motion picture, say, is a fairly well-known fact. But to face that fact is not enough: One must go inside it. Wedged in between instants—when the film, having withdrawn one image from the retina, is advancing so as to produce another—is a split second when everything has been taken from the eye and nothing new given it. In that split second the eye is before emptiness, but it sees it: Something unseen seems seen.
“I did not rush to generalize. Between one’s eye and the beam of a film projector, perpendicular to the beam, is a shutter: an evenly rotating disk with a slit on one side. Turning now its solid section, now the slit to the beam of light, the shutter now breaks, now binds the beam. Using a differential regulator, one may slow the disk’s revolutions and so prolong the pause between flashes of light. I did just that. Experimenting in a laboratory on a group of young people, I occasionally made the pauses slightly longer, but in the life of the gray figures moving about on the screen, neither my subjects nor I noticed anything that might have interrupted, even for an instant, their gray and flat existence.
“Emboldened, I made my black intervals even longer in two or three places; no one noticed except me. No wonder; running the shutter, I knew just where and when to expect them. What’s more, none of my subjects—students from a physics seminar—knew what was wanted of them. But then we none of us, subjects all in daily experiments with the sun, know what is wanted of us.
“Encouraged by my success, I made the black cracks twice as wide. These too went largely unremarked. Two or three people spoke of a black flicker, one mentioned ‘skips in the images,’ another ‘a black tinge to the projector’s even light.’ Only one of the students surprised me, an extremely modest-looking, pale-faced fellow with narrow shoulders. He too had noticed the skips, he said. ‘But doesn’t that happen in life?’ The others smiled. Embarrassed, he fell silent. A few days later I happened to run into him and so was able to question him further. Flustered and abashed, as though caught in some evil secret, he confessed that as a child he had twice felt the world fall away from his eyes. For only a split second, true. But both times in broad day when he was entirely conscious, so it wasn’t a matter of a momentary fainting spell—he turned out to be studying medicine. Did this ever happen to him now, I asked. Yes, but not to the full extent; things would merely grow dim and recede farther and farther from his eyes, turning into tiny specks and dots, and then, swelling back up again, would become clearer and brighter and resume their former places. That was all.
“That conversation, though inconclusive, had a strangely disturbing effect on me. My hypotheses kept piling up: If there can be a pause between a contraction and expansion of the heart, I reasoned, why can’t there also be solar pauses? It was then that I began shadowing the sun; that was twelve years ago and I haven’t stopped for a single day, a single instant since. I had my doubts, you see, doubts about that yellow disk cut into the blue. Now everyone knows the sun is covered with black spots. But do many people realize that the sun itself is just a black spot striking the planets with black beams? I have on occasion seen, even in the bright noon light, a moment of night thrust its black body into the day. Have you ever known that horribly sweet feeling? The beams stretching from sun to earth, like the strings of a musical instrument, stretch tighter and tighter, become finer and brighter and suddenly break: darkness. For an instant. And then—everything is as it was. Again the beams, blue sky, and earth.
“Night, you see, never goes away, even at noon: Torn up into myriads of shadows, it hides right here, in the day; lift up a burdock leaf, and a black wisp of night will dart down into the root. Everywhere—in archways, by walls, under leaves—night, torn up into black scraps, waits. When the sun begins to flag, the black scraps slip cautiously out from everywhere—from under leaves, stone cornices, hillsides—and knit together again into darkness. Just as the eye can follow and catch, even in the midday glare, this purely optical night waiting for the signal to come out of hiding, so that other night—what I would call the ontological night—never forsakes souls or things. Even for an instant. But this is philosophy; in those days I was still afraid of generalizations. The threshold separating my laboratory from the world was still too high for my thinking.
“I continued to fiddle with the numbers, with the concavities and convexities of optical lenses, with my ophthalmoscope, with Hering’s color-mixing disks and a dreary series of films. And if not for one fortuity . . .” The storyteller cracked his fingers softly. “Yes, if not for that . . .”
Lövenix cocked an ear. On the boulevard’s moon-dappled path two figures suddenly appeared; they plodded along in silence, wearily trailing after their own black shadows creeping ahead of them over the sand.
“Led by shadows,” Lövenix whispered and went on. “At the time I . . .loved someone. Now I wouldn’t know how. But then . . .I distinctly remember that limpid, windless fall day. I remember making my way among the lindens flecked with purple and gold to a place where two paths crossed. We were to meet at half past one. I was hurrying, afraid to miss even a second. One bend remained. At the bend, ten paces ahead, the long translucent shadow of a linden was sprawled across the entire path. That instant is still etched in my memory: I was all, through and through, love. The shadow was ten, five, three paces off—I trod on it, and suddenly something monstrous happened. The shadow, as though roused by the blow of my sole, swayed, swirled up into a black clot, and whisked off, swinging along at an incredible rate—up, forward, right, left, down. For an instant the shadow engulfed everything: path, trees, sky, sun, world, my ‘I.’ Nothingness. Then—an instant later—the yellow ribbon of sand reappeared; on the sand lay a skimpy shadow with trellises of trees either side and blue sky overhead. In the blue sky was a disk. Having winked out, everything had winked back and was as it had been before that instant, yet something was missing. I clearly sensed it: Something had been left behind—in nothingness.
“I took a mechanical step forward. But having taken that step, I thought: Where? I remembered: not right away and not without effort. Now I knew what was missing. My heart was strangely empty and light. I remembered everything about ‘her,’
from the vibrations of her voice to the flutter of her eyelashes; I could see her waiting there, around the bend, yet I could not understand why I needed her: so unlike me; so like everyone else. Yes, the black crack, having closed up, had restored all things, all but one: Ripped from my heart and cast into the night along with suns and planets, it had not found its way back; the sun was again in the sky, the earth was again in its orbit, but that thing was missing—the crack had swallowed it.
“I felt strangely faint; my ears were ringing; my legs wobbled; I sat down on the nearest bench. Without thinking, I pulled out my pocket watch: twenty-seven past one.
“Three minutes remained till the appointed hour. Overcoming my faintness, I got to my feet and marched automatically to the park gates. My ‘I’ now seemed uninhabited: Passing between the ranks of houses, I stopped mechanically before motley shopwindows, peered at things of absolutely no use or interest to me, formed words from the giant letters on playbills and did not understand them. I stood at length by a tattered notice covered with dust, reading the fine print only to forget what I had read and begin all over again. Chance produced a signboard clockface; I glanced at the frozen hands and wanted to pass on, but the hands would not let go of my eyes; I struggled, trying to tear my pupils away, then suddenly realized: The time painted was twenty-seven minutes past one—my hour.
“Clockfaces have tormented me ever since. Ordinarily, when trying to forget myself, I would go for a brisk walk through the din-filled streets. I attempted this now, but no; as soon as I stepped out onto the pavement I was surrounded by clockfaces, dozens of dead clockfaces, and almost all of them said: twenty-seven minutes past one. I tried not to look, but the black hands inside blue rims, black rims, gold rims, kept reaching for my eyes with their black tips, while those accursed disks, blazing white, assailed my eyes with the same combination of numerals. I hid from the streets behind the door and walls of my room. But there too, even in sleep, there was no oblivion: Night after night I dreamed of dead, peopleless streets. Shuttered windows. Doused lights. Wastes of pavement where I alone walked from crossroad to crossroad, amid hundreds, thousands of white disks stuck to the walls, and on every disk the same numerals, and between those same numerals—wherever I looked—clock hands at the same telltale angle: twenty-seven past one—twenty-seven minutes past one—one twenty-seven.
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