Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli

  In the clamorous throng people bend over piles of luggage, lurking like exotic fish on the ooze of the ocean floor; they exchange words that are inaudible amid the hubbub, mutely moving their lips. Others resting their heads against their suitcases gaze at little country stores, at skinny oxen in harness, at a ramshackle truck rattling along a sandy road, yet they do not forget about the bags heaped around them which every so often they must raise their eyelids to count. Their dreams are as unsteady and unsure as the steps of a tightrope walker. At the sound of the loudspeaker they fall, arms flapping, but they do not wake. Staring at green hills and the dry grasses of the steppe, they listen without emotion and without comprehension to announcements about the arrival at various platforms of trains on which they will not leave. Their alien dreams are intertwined with the dreams of this place like warp and weft. Without the partial and hesitant presence of these dreamers the whole would not be complete. In the place of Kazakhstan, Transylvania and at many other points of the city, gaping holes would open up.

  This is also the best place in the world for insomniacs, a true sanatorium. For at the station night never falls; evening turns at once into morning, no one knows when. Only here is it possible to look for hope even at the latest hour, to find it and squander it as one sees fit and then hide safely till night outside has passed. There are many insomniacs here. It is time to reveal that it was for them the stations were built. If the insomniacs did not keep vigil night after night the city would fall to pieces for it would be dependent in every way on the dreams of those sleeping. But as is common knowledge night at the station is not really night and dreams are not real dreams and it is only because of this that those hiding in station waiting rooms finally fall asleep, stretched out on the hard benches, at the time when the first trams are already pulling out of the depot.

  On the city map the stations look like little rectangles in camouflage colors; there is no sign of the trains that leave – somewhere underneath – for east, west, north and south. Here are the boundless tracks, gleaming iron rails marking the direction through hazy space. The farther it is from the central figure of the map the more vulnerable the order of the world is to disturbance. New branches of railroad routes appear leading toward places that lie neither to the east nor to the west, nor to the north nor to the south. Toward places that are utterly and permanently closed. They cannot be reached by any railroad line despite the fact that they have ticket halls, waiting rooms, platforms and everything that is needed at a station – even arriving and departing trains. One cannot go there by car or even on foot even if one wanted to do so with all one’s heart. These are places cut off from the world as if by natural disaster, deprived even of telephone service though there is no lack of telephones there and every post office can receive telegrams. Submerged, there stands in the green waters of memory the city of a month ago, the city of a year ago, the city of forty years ago, each with the last editions of newspapers in its kiosks: meteorological depressions and atmospheric fronts, military parades, influenza epidemics, theater programs and crime reports. This entire space is filled with newsprint. Over every day is suspended a unique configuration of capital letters; unrepeatable shapes are formed by the swarm of lowercase letters, blown away by the winds. Are they not thrown to the winds here every day in their thousands, in their hundreds of thousands?

  The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical-looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge. There people went to bed in the evening; here they will get up in the morning. Every night, to the rhythm of tomorrow’s newspapers revolving on the drums of the rotary presses, the cities of yesterday are rolled up and then vanish. In the morning no trace of them remains. When the new day is over the city will be thoroughly and utterly used up; nothing will be left of it besides the nouns, verbs, adjectives, affirmative and negative sentences drifting everywhere. Yesterday’s chair, hat and teapot are already beyond the reach of today’s hand, immaterial and unusable. And those who went to bed yesterday evening exist today in the same immaterial way as yesterday’s teapots.

  The life of today’s inhabitants is possible only in one single place in the world: the ephemeral city of today, which differs from the city of yesterday and that of tomorrow in the nature of its substance. Only there can one touch that which lies within reach. Though it may come about that a person will no longer touch the next issue of the newspaper. The newspaper is there but the person is not. This absence indicates that the resemblance between the two pictures in the puzzle means nothing beyond a chance convergence. If however the pictures have already faded then the multitude of visible differences will be so great that recognition will remain in the realm of uncertainty. Here is the square in which the crowd undulates in dance on a summer evening lit by the sun’s afterglow or where shivering soldiers trample the snow in the gloom of winter, warming their hands at a brazier. Here is the wind blowing yellow leaves across the empty viewing platform – then how did a Renaissance palace appear in the same place? The possibilities are boundless; it is not hard to imagine cities without a single detail in common. By waiting a sufficiently long time it is even possible to encounter an image of the city with the Eiffel Tower standing amid extensive lawns and flowerbeds with a view of the Arc de Triomphe. It would seem unlikely that the name of such a city would include so many Ws and As at once. Yet does the Eiffel Tower not suggest a letter A itself? And there will always be intermediate cities in which the Arc de Triomphe rises quite unremarkably in the middle of Constitution Square. Every change is simply a matter of time.

  And what is time? Those asking have a right to know; they have a right to drum their fingers on the tabletop as they wait for a reply. But the reply does not come. Changes are the only trace that time leaves. What is it made of; how does it flow? Is it like string unwound from a reel or like the knife that cuts the string into pieces? It is that which turns the cogs of clocks or that which the clocks crush in their cogs? Amid the inscriptions chiseled on gateways and the notices pasted on the walls of underpasses, amid advertising catchwords, price lists and election slogans, amid the tangle of sentences unmarked by the slightest shadow of doubt, the one sentence that would resolve the preceding question is missing. The answer was not incorporated into the plans for the city. When its shape was being decided, as attempts were being made to combine the principle of the rectangle with the principle of the star, clocks had only just started to work and no one yet knew anything about time. And when the passage of time revealed the ignorance of the inhabitants the city was already governed by the rule of the meander. Nowhere could one encounter either straight lines or a clear relation between cause and effect, and it became impossible to investigate the truth about the nature of the main construction.

  Whatever the mechanism known as time is like, it keeps the machinery in constant motion and through countless gears moves the sun, stars and clouds. Perhaps it operates like steam, depressing pistons, or like compressed gas, the product of the burning of diesel fuel, setting in motion the main V-belt which being a V-belt turns in a circle having neither beginning nor end. It may also be that time is nothing more than change: the shifting of creaking gears; mere revolutions without pistons, steam or flywheel; mere movement without sky or clouds; mere appearance and disappearance. No more than the addition of layers on the trunk of a tree and the growing of new shoots by the branches.

  In the dense crown of the tree it is impossible to see where one branch ends and the next begins; there are so many of them intertwined and jumbled together, including those cut off long ago, leaving only knots. For nothing in the world can be cut off completely and finally. The work of the pruning shears brings the proper semblance of order but no improvement can be discerned. The farther away from the trunk one looks the smaller and thinner the branches are; the smaller and thinner they are the more there are of them. The
most numerous are next year’s branches, so tiny and thin that they are not even visible. The unbridled confusion of the tree prevents one from understanding the purposefulness of the machinery’s movement. Yet understanding the movement of the machinery turns the tree into a crude construction of wood and bast, a banal arrangement of water circulation.

  Everyone knows that tree and machine are only words; whoever utters them stops the motion of the world for a moment in their head. Thus, along with irritation at this willfulness, in places there arises a temptation to set in order the movement of the world in the heads of those who oversimplify it or render it excessively complicated. But the removed imaginations leave behind scars and hatred. Even if one were to imprison all those who think the world is like a tree, or their adversaries who maintain that it is like a machine; even if they were all to be shot and buried in mass graves, the prisoners, and especially the dead, would be confirmed in their convictions and would become more stubborn and less willing to compromise than ever before. For nothing in the world – even imaginations – can be destroyed completely and finally.

  Since nothing can be annulled or removed, in the spaces of the name there still exists the city of excavations peopled by men in rubber boots and women wearing headscarves, the place where this story had its beginning. No change has occurred there, no new house has been finished nor have any more burned-out ruins been pulled down. The vast bomb crater in whose roar everything began has not been filled in. It remains as a trace of the sudden flare that at a certain moment bathed the tenants of the apartment buildings, the owners of glass-fronted cabinets containing china, of escritoires and ottomans. They were bathed in it and then they burned along with their furniture or else they were swallowed up by the earth, lying outstretched, their arms crossed over their chest. So the crater is still there, deep as the caldera of a volcano, and in it a stinking bloody gurgling persists – a welter of dirty bandages, baby carriages, single shoes, crushed hats, rusty scrap metal, trampled eyeglasses. While above it, like volcanic ash, hover feathers from ripped-open pillows.

  The people in the rubber boots looked alike, as if they were cast from the same mold. They had arms and legs; they had noses, ears and eyes. It seemed that when they stood in their ranks they must have seen the same things. Yet they barely looked at those things. They each looked in their own direction at memories they preferred to keep to themselves, at scenes that always took place in the foreground against a chance backdrop of scaffolding. They were the children of characters sitting in curved chairs in a photographer’s studio or standing in front of sepia-colored trees in all kinds of outfits and headgear: round cloth caps with oilskin peaks, pomponned kepis and pill-box hats and even bowlers and panamas. Along with a physical description the heirs to these images also inherited – like a promissory notice to be paid off – the impermanence of form. Transformed from children into adults and themselves at the mercy of others’ recollections, in their own memories they preserved nonexistent addresses and interiors and carried palaces, squares and streets with which they were unable to part. At hand they kept only what was most necessary: watch, suitcase, pocketknife, Primus stove, scarf, pictures of ladies in hats and veils.

  One of the most important differences between the city of excavations and the city of memories was that the majority of characters from the photographs were gone. Their eyes – grayish or brownish, staring rather naively from behind their veils at some spring afternoon or perhaps a summer morning that no one remembers anymore – could see neither the excavations nor the people in rubber boots who carried their singed pictures with them. It was not known what had happened to the love that lent a warm tinge to their sepia-colored gaze: whether it had crumbled to dust amid the flames like a china teacup or whether it had blown away with the smoke into the sky.

  Gazes, interiors and objects were gradually erased from memories to the extent that observers grew accustomed to new images. Certain things, soot-blackened but undamaged, were taken directly from the ruins. The observers of the changes were convinced that they knew where they came from. In their view they were from the city of furnishings where they had once been seen. They assumed that the things had somehow found their way out of the aforementioned crater, perhaps expelled by it along with the rubble and the ashlike lava. Yet if this is true, in such a manner barely one typewriter in a thousand, only one china teacup out of fifty thousand, made it from the city of furnishings to the city of excavations. Where were the other thousands of typewriters and china teacups? The fact was that they were no longer anywhere: neither on the earth nor below the earth nor in the air.

  At this point the obvious truth should be mentioned: The inhabitants of the city of excavations were also not from here. They too crawled out from the crater, filthy, smoke-blackened, in rags. There was no return to the place they had come from. They were born in the immediate or distant vicinity of the mass of tapering Ws and As, in regions through which there passes a dark and turbid stream bearing the image of those same letters, recognizable yet indistinct, like steep roofs or pencil-thin steeples. In the city of excavations different Ws and As gazed at their reflection in the river; they were somewhat similar to the others, but more like steeples with their tops snapped off, burned-out roofs, lone apartment buildings surrounded by piles of rubble.

  But since nothing in the world can be completely and finally destroyed it is clear that the letters written on the water still exist somewhere and will continue to do so forever along with the city abounding in fragile teacups and flammable furniture, the city of the grotesque, safe, entirely free of disasters and unsusceptible to pathos. Whoever recalls its misfortunes has to laugh: Its sorrow has a false bottom in which merriment is concealed. A lot of space there is occupied by New York, with paper shares swirling in the air like petals, populated by financiers jumping out of the windows of skyscrapers, and New Orleans where black men in white tuxedos play golden saxophones at all hours of the day and night, and London where there are crowds of bankers in bowler hats, urbane criminals, detectives in checkered cycling caps and police inspectors from Scotland Yard moving their lips silently to the rhythm of rag-time music played on out-of-tune upright pianos thrust into the corner under the screen. For in this city there is a movie theater on every street and a piano in every theater. That is why it is swarming with portly industrialists with a monocle in one eye hunting for a wife and trying to marry off their daughters. Bands play tangos for them; tuxedoed waiters bustle around them and the doormen bow low. Here there is everything needed in life: horse races, air shows, military parades and roulette. While in the background fashionable men with small mustaches take the air, a schoolgirl in eyeglasses wanders by and a child newspaper vendor with a cigarette in his mouth hawks his wares.

  Within the frame there is no room for what the industrialists never need: rundown stores with no sign or window display, selling matches, shoelaces and cheap soap: things none of those fat genial fellows would ever dream of buying. The anemic storekeepers are doomed to inevitable bankruptcy; there is no hope for the tailors with their many children, masters of the art of turning well-worn garments, nor for the cobblers who can take a pair of boots worn to shreds and turn them into one brand-new shoe. Spurned by the elegant public, they are starving. Their brilliant work is known only to those who cannot afford it. The capricious eye seeks out gleaming signboards and large glass windowpanes behind which are flaunted all possible models, patterns and styles that can be thought up in this city of endless entertainment. Here no frill bears the weight of final things and final things are not anticipated at all. Even those who jump off the bridge into the river do so for banal and laughable reasons.

  Can it be said then of this feather-light city that of its buildings not one stone was left upon a stone? Rather they crumbled to the four winds. The latest models, patterns and styles which the world had doted on simply evaporated. They were destroyed at least to the extent that even in recollection they proved strikingly unfashionable. Yet they
were destroyed – like everything in the world – only partially. For what is fashion? That which makes a hat with a broad brim and adorned with artificial fruit one day start to look ridiculous, so it becomes clear that it must be replaced with a tiny toque. For a moment everyone believes sincerely that toques will always remain what they are: appropriate in every regard.

  The stage of the memory is equipped with panoramas rolled up beneath the ceiling, on which there is a permanent record of the transitory configurations of shop signs, monuments and municipal gardens. In the memory’s submerged theater the empty rows of seats are overgrown with algae. In the standing water everything has its place. The city of toques in window displays becomes completely covered over when all of a sudden from the ceiling there falls the canvas of the next panorama, unrolling as it falls and painted with piles of bricks. The toques arouse pity and it becomes obvious that they must be replaced with headscarves tied beneath the chin.

  Behind, yet another panorama is hidden, the one for which large hats with artificial fruit are appropriate: the city of shop signs in two languages, a city glistening with muddy puddles and smelling of must, animals and blood. Against its background there rises a perpetual fog, while a procession moves forward bearing crosses and banners; Cossack horsemen in fur hats raise their swords, the hand of a thief removes a wallet from someone’s pocket and there can be heard the whistle of bullets frozen in midair and the whinnying of horses rearing on their hind legs. After the rain little boys, the illegitimate sons of cooks and firemen, sail paper boats on the frothing streams in the gutters. In this city two train stations stand on either side of the river, each sending forth its own separate railroad network. Between these two rail networks a connecting line is unthinkable. The only possible connection turns out to be a horse-drawn tram that shuttles between the two stations across the entire city, crossing the bridge that spans the river.