Emergency measures had to be taken. Especially since not only yellow society but yellow industry was beginning to break down. The teeth of the mechanical saws at one factory, as though tired of chewing wood fibers, suddenly stopped. The wheels of trains and trams were turning a little more slowly. The light inside glass lampshades looked a little dim. True, the accumulators, still filled with centuries of rage, could feed power-operated belts and pinions for four or five years to come. But supplies of new vital spite were dwindling by the day.
The governments of all nations were making every effort to avert a full-blown crisis. They needed to raise spite-radiation to former levels by artificial means. They decided to cut off people’s heat and electricity from time to time. But those people with their bankrupt livers simply sat, patiently and uncomplainingly, in their enormous now-dark rooms and didn’t even try to move closer to their rapidly cooling stoves. Even had it been possible, it would have been pointless to turn on a light to see the expressions on their faces: Their faces wore no expression at all. They were vacant, rosy-cheeked, and mentally dead.
Doctors were brought in. They prescribed pills to activate the liver, also liquids and electric stimulation. All in vain. The liver, having said all it had to say, had wrapped itself in its fatty cocoon and fallen fast asleep. No matter how they bombarded it with patent medicines, increased doses, and radical therapies of all kinds, the result was of no value to industry.
Time was running out. Everyone knew it; the sea of bile was ebbing, never to flow again. New sources of energy would have to be found thanks to a new Leker, whose discovery would reorganize life from top to bottom. CANOE, which had been phased out, went back to work. The commission appealed to inventors around the world for help. In response they received almost nothing of any significance. Inventors there were many, but their inventiveness had vanished along with their spite. Now nowhere could one find—not for a seven-, eight-, or even nine-figure sum—the old spiteful minds, the furious inspirations, the stinger-sharp pens dipped in bile. Today’s insipid ink, devoid of blood and bile, pure and unfermented, produced nothing but silly scribbles and vague, blot-like thoughts. The culture was dying—in disgrace and in silence. In its final years, amid the entropy spread by amiability, not a single satirist could be found to poke proper fun at the rise and fall of the Age of Yellow Coal.
1939
1. Let there be hate. (Latin)
BRIDGE OVER THE STYX
ENGINEER Tintz tossed the drawing on the bedside table and pulled the blanket up to his chin. Lying with eyes closed, he could sense even through his lids the lamp’s blue-green light and, roaming over his retinas, the latticed reflections of trusses not yet lost to sight along with the cast-aside drawing. Checking numbers and symbols, his thoughts went round from formula to formula.
Next to the drawing sat a half-drunk glass of tea. Without opening his eyes, Tintz felt about for the glass and brought it to his lips: nearly cold. Afterthoughts kept squeezing under his eyelids, eyelids become like shop doors wanting to say CLOSED. Angry and insistent, the unwanted thoughts kept banging on the glass, or perhaps it was his pupils, jabbing at the ciliate hands of their watches and refusing to come back tomorrow. Under Tintz’s heavy lids the flux and reflux continued. The blue-green light—as if filtered through stagnant, musty water—seeped into his eyes. His throat was dry. Again Tintz reached for the glass of tea: “Must be stone-cold.”
And indeed, what his fingers now touched was cold and slippery, but not like glass—it yielded under pressure and, skin rubbing against skin, spurted out of his hand.
Tintz’s eyes flew open as he tore his head from the pillow. Under the lamp’s blue shade, on top of the drawing, round eyes meeting his gaze, sat a toad. Its white, languidly pulsating belly nearly blended with the white paper; the greenish-gray blotches on its back were the color of the light. The toad’s fat, flaccid rump was warily perched on the table’s edge, while the watchful curve of its webbed feet conveyed a readiness to spring at any moment from the illumined circle into the darkness. Tintz’s nostrils detected a slimy, faintly marshy smell emanating from the phenomenon. He wanted to cry out, to wave away the unblinking pair of starey toad eyes, but they, their pupils grappling his, prevented him; the toad’s mouth moved and—strangest of all—instead of a croak, forced out words: “Excuse me, please, is it far from here to death?”
Backing away to the wall, the bewildered Tintz said nothing. After a pause, the toad shifted irritably on its splayed toes.
“I see I’m completely lost.”
The webfoot’s voice was soft and all-enveloping; the drooping corners of its wide mouth expressed sincere bitterness and disappointment.
Pause.
“You’re not very forthcoming,” the white mouth went on, twisting itself into a martyrish grin, “yet someone ought to help me jump from Extrastyxia to the absolute and definitive from, since you so dislike the word I just used. You see, I am in transit between cispendent and transcendent (metaphysicians, I hope, will not take umbrage at my cis[1]). And as so often happens with travelers, I’ve gotten stuck in—”
“How very strange: At night, on my bedside table—and suddenly . . .”
The toad, on hearing these first words in reply, rounded its mouth into a smile and plopped onto the table edge nearest Tintz with a gentle half jump.
“Believe me, I find it even stranger. In all these millennia I have never exchanged my ooze for an odyssey. And here I am, a bottom-dwelling homebody on principle, at night on somebody’s bedside table . . . Strange, passing strange.”
Growing gradually accustomed to the filmy eyes, drawly voice, and undulating shape of his night visitor, Tintz reflected that the right way to treat dreams was to let them finish. He did not say this out loud for fear of offending his guest, now settled quite correctly and trustingly not eighteen inches from his ear. But the thought, evidently, was guessed.
“Yes,” said the toad, veiling either eye with a membrane, “Juvenal wrote about ‘the Stygian frogs in which even small children admitted to the baths for free do not believe.’ But about this, one had better ask those who are washed for a fee of one obol by the purest waters of all, the waters of the Styx: not the newborn but the new-dead. Then again, belief in my existence is what I need least of all: Being a dream has its advantages—it frees one from the constraint of connection, though I’ve no intention of abusing that prerogative. Besides, if a dreamer may not believe in the reality of his dream, then a dream may doubt the existence of its dreamer. It’s all a question of who anticipates whom: If people stop believing in God before God loses faith in them, then God comes off badly, but if God stops believing in the reality of his invention—the world, that is—first, then . . .O, many bubbles round as O’s rise to the surface of the Styx, and they all inevitably burst. But we digress. If you will allow me to refer to Hegel, who saw certain nations, for example yours, as having existence but no history, as extra-historic, then why shouldn’t I, descended from an ancient line of Stygian toads despite my exclusion from existence (I stand Hegel on his head), tell you my story, again if you will be so good as to listen. After all, all apparitions are given to one’s consciousness without prior permission; they spring unbidden into the brain, as I did just now, and this method of springing . . . But there’s no sense becoming too nonsensical and delving too deeply into metaphysics—don’t you agree?”
With a calm fixedness, Tintz again surveyed the Stygian ooze-dweller plumped down in the lampshade’s blue light. Preparing to begin its story, the toad resettled its fat rump and gripped the table’s edge with its warty hind feet. The round eyes, round belly seemingly swaddled in white waistcoat material, and thin lips pursed in the English manner recalled Seymour’s drawing of the phlegmatic Pickwick just as that researcher into tittlebat life in the Hampstead Ponds is about to recount one of his adventures. Tintz smiled at the toad’s smile and, detaching his back from the cold wall, tucked up the flapping blanket and prepared to listen. After seve
ral “hmm”s and “ko-ax”s the white-and-green night jumper under the blue glass shade began.
“As I’ve already said, strangest of all strangenesses to Stygian ooze-dwellers are moves from one here to another here. Wayfaring is waywardness—ko-ax, umm-yes. Or so the best bottom minds think. No matter how you crawlers about the earth have wound it round with winding roads, all your wanderings, all of them and all of you, invariably wind up in a pit, in the final here from which no one has ever escaped. How silly to wait till a one-legged but light-footed spade overtakes you, better to burrow into the slime yourself and in good time. But not everyone is able to converse with the ancient, wisely squelching mire on the bottom of the Styx, the river into which all meanings fall. Indeed, life compared to death is a provincial backwater. A paradox? Hardly. When you, Tintz, reach our mires . . .O, there’s nothing you can’t find in nothing! I assure you, all that life of yours betinseled with stars and suns is so much . . . Extrastyxia. To live is to defect from death. True, all of you who have run away from nothing return to nothing sooner or later—because there is nothing else.
“But we Styx-bottom stay-at-homes need never go abroad. We have everything that exists when it no longer does. The waters of the Cocytus, Lethe, Acheron, and Styx converge, you see, and to enter the land of death round which they flow, one must leave one’s memory of life in our waveless waters. Thus myriads of human memories cast their entire contents into the black depths of the Styx, the whole load of their lived-out lives; down they slowly sift—dissociating into days and instants—through the fissures between droplets, down to us on the bottom. Lives upon lives, layers upon layers, turbid and faded deposits from days, silhouettes of actions and refractions of thoughts. One cannot take a step without scattering the human memories carpeting the bottom of the Styx; with my every leap, polyglot profusions of words no longer heard and viscous mysteries of crimes and caresses swirl about me, sticking to these very membranes.”
Stopping its story for a second, the frog edged the toe-festooned ends of its front feet closer to a corner of the pillow. Tintz peered intently at the white skin mottled with greenish blotches rising in bubbles on the toad’s toes.
“So then,” the toad went on, plopping onto the pillow by Tintz’s ear with a gentle jolt of its hind feet, “so then, it’s clear that we, who inhabit time’s mire, have no reason to leave it. Unlike ordinary river frogs, we do not hunt flies. Why should we? Those lived-out lives weave a black-threaded carpet that blankets the bottom of the Styx. Buried up to our eyes in time’s mire, we hear only the sublime and distant plash of Charon’s oar and see the gliding shadow of his skiff drifting between the banks, living and dead. Our ooze is the death of all ‘or’s’; cool shadowy eternity is enslimed with gossamer threads through us, the velvety ooze, nirvana of nirvana, coalescing round pensées, arrière-pensées, arrière-arrière-pensées, and . . .”
Membranes now hid the toad’s eyes, while its head, half submerged in its neckless green-and-white body, lolled back to reveal protruding bow-like lips.
“But then how does it happen that . . .”
Tintz’s voice twitched back the membranes from the toad’s sunken eyes; still its words were slow to break the silence.
“Something happened, you see, that forced me to emigrate. Yes, I know, coming from me, after all I’ve said, that must sound strange. However, chains of events rarely coincide with chains of conclusions. The problem is that public opinion at the bottom of the Styx is divided. The mixed nature of memory residues clearly influences even us. Concerning death, there are two camps: liberal and conservative. I belong to the latter. But of late, the liberal approach to death has, alas, begun to prevail. We old toads adhere to a time-tested principle: The dead should be entirely dead. We don’t need half-baked deaths, the barely-beens, the suicides, the killed in battle—in short, all those upstarts who wade untimely into the sacred waters of the river of rivers. We consider that a hasty, slapdash corpse is not entirely a corpse; death must work patiently and painstakingly, slowly seeping into a person, year by year, gradually eroding his thoughts and sapping his emotions; his fading memory must—from illness or old age—turn gradually gray, in the manner of an engraving; only then will it be the color of the Stygian ooze. All lives hurled forcibly into the Styx, undeathurated, cut down in their prime, retain a vital momentum; the Lethe refuses them, sweeping their agitated, many-colored memories down to the Styx, there to disturb and deform our nonexistence. You would think that was self-evident. Yet the liberals—who always play on greed, on the lust for more—have long been wedded to the watchword: MORE DEAD.
“We conservatives, of course, did not give in; we resisted the liberals’ rapacious and extensive death policy at every turn. But it was an uphill struggle. The liberals, truth be told, knew better how to sway the vulgus.[2] They regularly assembled choruses of militant frogs whose croaks rose over the Styx demanding mass deaths. The drone of their stentorian calls usually reached the earth, rousing the voices of human throngs, which, echoing the frogs, called for their own deaths, ko-ax. Then the wars began. Battle burden filled Charon’s skiff to the gunnels. And for a time, the clamorous clique of death was mollified.
“But, as one might have predicted, the liberal appetite for wholesale slaughter only increased with the centuries. The liberals’ demagogic leaders vowed to make the waters of the Styx run red. Almost all frogs, down to the polliwogs, were won over by the propaganda. Swarms of spindle-legged tadpoles would hop up onto sandbars, turn their thousands of mouths earthward, and cry: More—more!
“The situation was turning tense and alarming. The inevitable—either from life or from death—was approaching. Even I, who had not left the bottom in millennia, swam up to the turbid surface and surveyed both shores. The dead one, ours, was all powdery ash, flat and soundless; with no air above it, the black sky was forever falling into the ashes with all its starless weight. The other shore, yours, was shrouded in billows of fog, but even through the fog your sun shone repulsively as cascades of tumbling rainbows became entangled in its beams. Life—ugh! How vile. I tore my eyes away and dove back down, into the ooze.
“Meanwhile the long-sought death to millions had begun: It rang out from the earth, from thousands of metal muzzles; it crept like a poisonous fog, dousing rainbows and shearing the sun of its beams as its bullet winds blew souls like dandelion clocks straight to the Styx. A gloating croaking from nearly the entire Styx bottom greeted the first surges of deaths. I don’t know if the turning of the earth hasn’t turned men’s heads, even in war; the fools hurl at death what is least deathworthy, their young. The memories of the young are still half empty, and so, swept by the Lethe down to the Styx, they cannot sink and must float on the surface, half in and half out of the water. This less-than-dead greenery accretes into a kind of duckweed, a filmy something separating the bottom of the river of rivers from its surface.
“We old-school toads tried to explode the pervasive idea of the rebound. I remember I gave a talk—in one of the river’s deepest feeders—about a gardener who, wishing to hasten a flower’s growth, tugged it upward by the stem till he tore it out by the roots. My arguments did not find a large audience. All our efforts were in vain: Seduced by the murderous croaking, the rabble turned red with the carnage steeping the ancient black Styx in blood. Charon’s oar kept getting stuck in ichor. The overloaded gunnels of his skiff were awash. Many souls jumped overboard and began swimming for dear death, roiling the river that had been still from time immemorial.
“That was the last straw. I could bear it no longer. Farewell, native ooze! Farewell, motionless eternity! Farewell, soundless song of death! I decided to flee—to the ashes. My webbed feet propelled me swiftly to the surface. I stuck out my head, eyes searching for the dead shore. It was then my troubles began. No matter how hard I looked, I could not tell the shores apart, life from death; both were burnt to ashes and deserted, pocked with deep funnel-like grave pits; fog mixed with a litter of poisonous gases blanketed the
left and right distance. Which way? I had to make up my mind. So I leapt at random.
“My heels’ cautious thrusts took me deeper and deeper into the depths. Little by little the smoke-laden air began to clear, glimmers of cities flared up, and it turned out, as chance would have it, that—”
“That you were on earth? Well, well!” Tintz squeezed an elbow out from under the pillow and edged closer to the end of the story.
“Alas, yes, else our meeting would scarcely have been possible. Of course, I did try to go back. But I couldn’t find my tracks. Roaming about at random, I kept coming across human rookeries. What to do? By day I hid from the yellow tentacles of your sun, biding my time damply in ponds and deep pools. Life-tamed river frogs jumped away in fright from me, a visitor from the Styx. But come nightfall, I would slip out in search of fellow travelers on their way back to death. My efforts were none too successful. I remember that once—this was late at night, as now—I leapt onto the pillow of a consumptive eighteen-year-old girl. Her braids had come undone on the hot linen as she gasped for air with short, shallow breaths. I wanted to reassure her with a joke the way doctors, those spies for the Styx, sometimes do. Pressing my mouth to her ear, I punned: ‘Pneumothorax, croarax.’ But strangely, my fellow traveler cried out; in reply to her cry came footsteps; taking to my heels, I plunged through the paper ends of prescriptions poking out from under medicine bottles, back into the darkness.
“Another time I managed to steal under the thin blanket of a typesetter dying of lead poisoning. Yes, ko-ax . . . The alphabet from which you fashion your prayer books and political primers is rather toxic. I remember I pressed an eardrum to his chest and listened to his failing heart, and . . . By the way, I’m easily confused by your folklore, the folklore of Extrastyxia. But that famous old refrain, ‘Lend me your ears,’ doesn’t that mean: ‘Give ear, listen closely’? As I say, my footing is not firm on your linguistic hummocks—”
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 18