The life of stones is entirely free of coercion. When they lose support they fall down. Having fallen they lie there. True, they have no influence over the form they are given; but they accept it with absolute indifference. With the same indifference they endure or crumble. Whatever happens they will never add anything from themselves. They never contribute the slightest effort to any undertaking. They are never pleased and never worried, nor can they ever be persuaded of anything. They are imperturbable, because they are not afraid of suffering. Light-bulbs too do not weep when they are switched off; cables do not attempt to avoid short circuits and firewood does not flee from the flames.
The inhabitants of the city might well envy the stones their freedom, if they were capable of perceiving it. Yet they too, though they do not know it and do not wish to, besides the ephemeral life of their bodies and minds, contain within themselves the indestructible life of stones. Whereas that which they themselves call their life turns out to be a fever eating away at their thoughts, which are tormented by the perpetual movements of sand, the powerlessness of clay, and the troubling plash of water. The inhabitants of the city want nothing to do with the life of stones, the only life that is in fact given to them. They are repelled by the stony calm of walls, and especially the certainty of the stone hand, which never trembles; by the firmness of features that never know sorrow and by the cold indifference of the monolith. The world of silence that endures inside the stones and the bricks, a world devoid of thoughts, feelings or desires, astounds and frightens them. And life without desires seems even more unbearable than the life without fulfillments that is experienced every day by many an inhabitant of the city.
Stupefied by the muddle of signs covering the walls, they miss the questions that dwell within the walls themselves. Those to which any answer is sufficient yet that nevertheless must remain unanswered, since they are stacked upon one another, forever joined by the cement of convictions. The answers to the questions that appear in the posters are attached to them with string, like a label on an item for sale secured additionally by a lead seal. The greatest number of questions are imprisoned within a desire. They ride up and down, like an elevator rattling the cage of its shaft. Or they roll along between two sidewalks like an abandoned ball, bouncing first one way then another, ever more slowly. Those that are light as down float in the air and are blown away on the wind. Everywhere there are multitudes of them, though no one needs them. But there is a shortage of questions that easily cut through space in search of answers. The city built of questions that have lost their momentum, and of routine answers, contains nothing that surprises or captures the attention. It is obvious that memory has nothing to latch on to here.
Each route is driven by trams bearing now one number, now another. In the middle of the street there suddenly appears a scrap-metal warehouse with boarded-up windows. It sometimes happens that the same place cannot be found twice, because the layout of streets has changed overnight. An elegant passage may suddenly become a foul-smelling blind alley; a luxury hotel will turn into a homeless shelter. This city is so dislocated that its Paris – a place about which all that is known is that they cannot make silk purses out of sows’ ears there – has been transformed into a trash heap combed by hobos. An old umbrella with twisted spokes juts from it instead of the Eiffel Tower.
But in a city like this, even if it were made of gold and platinum and encrusted with diamonds, every precious building would still be merely a repository of disquiet; columns of wrongly posed questions would support arches of unserviceable answers and every door, without exception, could turn out to be the worst possible exit. And even if the city were constructed entirely of brand-new bricks and fresh plaster, pipes without a trace of rust, spotless windows and sidewalks glistening like mirrors, it would still remain a cage and a prison.
Like the countless reflections of an invisible dust mote in a kaleidoscope, there will multiply the numbers of Left Bank Parisian bistros in which girls in low-cut dresses lean over cups of black coffee with French novels in their hand. Red lightbulbs will shine over a street corner evidently detached from the Soho district of London, with garishly lit signs in English. In place of the pissoirs there appears a smoke-filled pub in which Irish poets drink, sing and play darts, while fanatical terrorists in army jackets plant time bombs. The place of the post office is taken by a New York drugstore where at four in the morning a pale theater critic suffering from a migraine will call in for sleeping pills. In the closed-down stocking repair shop there can be found a Palermo ice cream parlor in which taciturn men in shades will stare for hours at the glass door, pistols thrust beneath their jackets. At the newspaper kiosk brightly colored paper lanterns will light up while inside there will appear long rows of tables covered with tablecloths, on which dishes of snake and monkey meat will be served. Forever trapped in this city and occupying within it less space than a bookmark, Palermo, Belfast and Hong Kong also go to rack and ruin, and fragments of them are found in ever different and more unexpected places.
Names also ebb away. Erosion has polished the letters; some it has crumbled and scattered. Those that remain no longer have any substance. It is a pity that the name vanishes. Yet could it be as beautiful as it is if it did not disintegrate from one moment to the next? When there are no letters there is no city. For only they were something certain in the chaos of dates, events and imaginings. Only they encompassed that which could not be encompassed: joyous First of May parades, and the forgotten helicopters of the municipal transit system, which from having flown for so long without fuel have also shrunk and apparently now hover low over the ground in the botanical gardens in the guise of dragonflies.
A rickety enclosure made from a handful of letters, amongst which there jut out the spikes of Ws and As, now has to contain air-conditioned American banks, cruel and ruthless arms dealers, illegal manufacturers of heroin who shoot at the police from behind chewing-gum kiosks, shivering Gypsies squatting on the sidewalks, and Asian women selling French perfumes on the street directly from suitcases. It may be that at some point supercilious Cossacks in armored personnel carriers will surround the city’s central intersection, or that the savage hordes of Genghis Khan will pitch their tents and build campfires along the main thoroughfare, blocking the way for the trams and buses full of people on their way to work. It may be that Tartar warriors will start slaying passersby with blows of their spiked clubs. But they too will be unable to prevent the collapse of the whole.
There is no one who might know what to do with the damaged construction. It has become clear that the polishing of floors, the cleaning of sidewalks, the spraying of water on the asphalt on hot days or even the painting of walls with oil paint – none of this was sufficient; but the inhabitants of the city did not know how to do more. Disheartened they neglect their duties, which are of an ancillary nature and of little significance. The essence of the city was and remains incomprehensible; if the city planners had some vision of it they kept it to themselves, perhaps in the hope that this knowledge would never be needed. The inhabitants of the city know how to repair only that which can be touched. They are unable to touch that which cannot be seen and yet is most impaired, and that which has an indirect influence on the condition of the whole, since it controls the flow of nouns, adjectives, verbs, affirmative and negative sentences. The true indicators of urban solutions are the utterly unknown rules of joining sentences and creating stories, the principles of linking ideas with other ideas and of assigning weight to questions and answers.
In the current state of affairs streams of groundwaters, strata of clay, and sandbanks are a constant threat to the city. If purity is to be maintained in the enclosed region of happiness that the city was meant to be – this bastion of order holding back the stormy ocean of chaos – then sentences and stories must be removed to the outside day and night, as is done by the municipal sewers, so that in the city there should not remain a speck of dust, not a puddle, not an ounce of trash on the squared paper
of the sidewalk. Even words need to be removed. But then that which remained in the city would be dispersed in a single instant in the waters of the countercity, like a flotilla of ships that have lost their anchors.
The inhabitants feel they have been cheated. Irked and embittered, they ask why the creators of the plans did not ensure that the foundations were properly separated from the bedrock: in other words why they were not placed in the air, far from any sources of rot and decay. But the creators of the plans say nothing. Is it possible that they too have been swallowed up by oblivion? Is it possible that they never really existed? Then whose will and whose views are imprinted in the framework of the city? No one knows. Those who ask must seek an answer on their own. One possible answer declares that attempts were indeed made to put the foundations in the air, but that the inertia of liquid concrete proved an obstacle: its boundless indifference and the fact that for its part it did nothing to support order. The stubborn passivity of building materials is responsible for the fact that the city could not realize the hopes placed in it.
The greater the regularity and harmony beneath the sealed dome of the sky covering the buildings and streets, the greater the confusion on its far side. There in the blue depths, whirling in disorder, is all that was ever successfully removed from the city: faulty castings, chipped sandstone slabs, fragments of red brick, umbrellas snatched away by the wind, wood shavings and sawdust, empty cigarette packets and mountains of butts, streams of engine oil, moldering herringbone caps, rags, potato peelings, roiling clouds, excrement, and even the twisted spans of bridges. And though the dome of the sky protects the city from a meteor storm or an inundation of trash, it still finds its way into the groundwaters and by this route returns.
Just as unattainable as absolute airtightness, it seems, is complete purification. In essence it is necessary to remove thoughts before they even arise. For in this city there are no thoughts other than confused ones, nor any events but accidental ones. It is never clear which thought was the source of things that happen, or how it managed to move the mechanical components of the world to set the event in motion. There is no way to determine whether thoughts are the consequence of accomplished facts or their cause, the product of a familiar machinery or that which lends direction to the movement of its cogs.
Unfortunately nothing is known about how the cogs themselves are made or of what, well hidden as they are from sight. Initial confidence in their high quality was so great on the building sites that they were installed without being inspected. It was quite another story with the lime that was mixed on the spot: Anyone could see that it was lumpy. Those who employed it relied on the perfection of the principal construction, believing that it could withstand anything. They counted on its boilers, engines and gears being without exception of the finest quality; they were simply indestructible. With use it became apparent that the unseen components of the world had also been made carelessly and of low-grade materials, worse even than the defective bricks with which the inhabitants of the city had raised their shaky edifices.
The special mechanisms separating good from bad became completely overgrown with the de-aeration and purification machinery that worked exclusively to serve their needs. It was said that these mechanisms themselves created more chaos than they were able to pump out beyond the dome of the sky. When the authors of the idea of cutting off the city from the countercity reduced all problems to the matter of the power supply for the mechanisms, they could not have foreseen how costly it would prove to continually remove all disorder from the world. For is the world not composed of disorder?
With the passage of years the artificially stretched thoroughfares of the city began to droop. Gaps and concrescences began to appear, and even stress fractures in all kinds of installations, including the most important ones, those involved in the removal of the countercity. Filth accumulated in the city. Soot stuck to the plaster, a wooly substance gathered in the seams of the inhabitants’ clothing and the window ledges and cornices were covered with bird droppings. Cats tore mice to pieces in shadowy corners. Stairwells acquired the cat-and-mouse smell of that which is dark, random and cruel. All objects turned gray, just like the Ws and As in the name of the city. At some unknown moment the glints in windowpanes vanished. Crystal chandeliers lost their luster. Though in fact the majority of them had been taken down when they became hazardous. Gilding peeled from the frames of mirrors, the plush upholstery of armchairs grew worn and even the red of the tramcars faded. The sides of canals were coated with a greasy slime. Walls subsided; pavements collapsed.
Here for example is a street on which it is always raining. No one knows what pipe runs above it or why it burst. Streams of water pour onto the roofs of the apartment buildings, flow down the windows and gather far below between the façades. Cars move along the roadway as if it were the bottom of a deep canal, where it is dark and greenish and umbrellas sprout like algae. The passersby find it hard to breathe, as happens under water. Mothers drag small children on their daily route from store to playground. Not inclined to sentimentality before dinner is ready, they no longer pay any attention to the suffering of their own lungs, accustomed to the fact that everything immersed in this water manages to go on living. At dusk the tenants sail away on the current to distant bodies of water that only they know. Their thoughts begin to tip one way and then the other, unstable boats without a crew. No one maintains these boats; every one of them has something missing, and the brightly colored fish of coral reefs swim amongst wrecks that are already lying on the ocean floor. At times a sea horse swims up to a window ledge, working its little snout, or a wave carries some fish behind a wardrobe.
There is also a street that is enveloped in cold separated from heat, the way that in other places ravines are enveloped in morning mist. The cold separated from the heat turns into ice all around – ice that is so icy that all the coal in the world would not be enough to melt it. On the perpetually frost-covered windowpanes there grow together and then descend toward the ice-strewn roadway soaring gates, magnificent ice arches, sky blue, purple and white galleries, hanging bridges and glassy mountains that fill the entire space of the street. The delicate yet strong construction enwraps roofs and gutters and eats into the walls of buildings. For this reason the street is closed to traffic and special road signs direct drivers to a detour. But the inhabitants of the ice-bound apartments fall into a profound sleep right after dinner and dream that they have frozen to death.
The heat separated from the cold must also gather somewhere. An excess of heat makes the underground installations boil over. Thus there is a street in the city on which high temperatures have not ceased even for a moment for many years. The grass there has dried up and turned to dust that is blown into clouds by the torrid wind. Dust specks fly into people’s eyes, making the whites bloodshot; this in turn gives their faces an expression of suppressed rage. Sand gets everywhere, ruining clocks and sewing machines. At night shouts are heard and the red glow of cigarettes flares in the entranceways of buildings. It is so hot that no one is able to fall asleep. Some there have gone for years without slumber, growing ever more irritable. Under every street lamp there stands a drunk and a prostitute and every ten minutes an ambulance or fire truck goes by, its siren wailing. In kitchens cabbage fried in lard is burned to the pan; children run in front of trams; young women put garish lipstick on mouths black with curses; burglars escaping over the rooftops fall onto the sidewalk and smash their skulls. Later, during the autopsies sand is found in their hearts.
In yet another place an excess of clay has accumulated. Every year after winter the apartment buildings subside into the miry earth. The lowest floors were the first to disappear. The inhabitants realized that there was no hope for them there and moved to suburban villas with ivy-covered turrets. In this way the swamp ceased forever to pose a threat to them. But it swallowed a living part of the city which – like rebellious tissue – began to grow downward. Hoists bring clay up to the surface to make room f
or successive floors. Apartments, stores, shops and parking garages wait to be occupied by those who are unable to find their place. Spent light bulbs burn there. Lathes without blades, sewing machines without needles and cranes without pulleys operate day and night.
The most dangerous emergencies cannot be eliminated, nor can further disasters be avoided. Yet the city will grow accustomed to anything. The sky of movable clouds drops lower every year, but till it starts to crush the roofs no one spares it a thought. It is not inconceivable that even the most important part of the machinery, that which turns the sky of fixed stars and above it the sky of suns and moons, is nothing but a pile of junk. It is not known exactly what it was made of or how. It may be that the plans are still stored in the archives, but there is no one who is able to decipher them. It can only be very roughly guessed which installations were set in motion overhead above the rooftops and which were put in underground. To this day some of those who mixed the mortar, carried the bricks and bent the pipes are still alive. But they know nothing except that in the beginning they labored hard and did not spare themselves. One or another of them can even show a hand missing fingers that were cut off by a chainsaw, the stump of a leg crushed by a block of stone, a scarred hole in the skull. They remember only themselves, in scraps of memories, scurrying about sun-drenched building sites in pants spattered with lime.
If they were to build the city again the main thoroughfares perhaps would run through the admissions room of a hospital, the halls of train stations would contain immense dormitories, and trams would drive along their tracks into the river. For there is no one here who could control the chaos of the countercity, no one who knows the laws that give truly accurate estimates, no one who knows how to prop the sky up, no one who could tell the bricklayers and architects what to do. There exists no knowledge better than ours, no building materials better than ours, and no way out better than the worst. The belief that the city could be different was not borne out. The juices that gave it life at the beginning of the season of vegetation have dried up. The choral songs have sounded their last and have fallen silent. No brick is passed any longer from hand to hand; the lenses of the twin-lens reflex cameras with which the sunny building sites were once photographed are covered with dust and have clouded over in dark drawers, useless because they no longer let in light. In these days of the world’s old age everyone here is alone, and everyone has their own city which showers them with crumbling plaster, dead leaves and the dust of worn-out words.
Dreams and Stones Page 8