On sunny days, the street reminded one of transparent sea shallows in which the spine of a slender fish flashes, like a silver exclamation mark.
Parallel with this street, some hundred yards away, runs the city’s main street. Cars once sped there, electric trams clanged. The inhabitants of the city hurried loudly by. As it passed over the shady courtyards and old-fashioned façades, the noise was transformed into the sounds of an aquarium.
There are no curtains on the windows of our bedroom. The room is filled all day long with the shade of the north side. In the morning, our eyes are not hurt by the sharp light of the rising sun. In the evening we are not concerned that someone might be watching us from the hospital as we move about the room lit by electric light. The blinds are down over there. Besides, patients have their own inner windows and they lean over them as over their illness.
Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I remember the dwarf, the way you remember a stranger who knocked on your door and asked you to look after some trifle for him for a while. He promised he would come and fetch it. Time passes and he does not come.
What he left does not take up much space or demand attention. But, as time goes by, the germ of someone else’s secret settles in it. At any moment it can come to rest definitively on your tiredness.
If I were to tell him now about the dwarf, the bedroom and the north side, it would seem like an inappropriate confession. All the more so since I would be quoting someone who had seemed like a failed clown. Although, with clowns, I respect their reasons for sadness. But why mention such reasons over breakfast?
He would look at me enquiringly and sternly. And say that left-over stories should be thrown out with the morning rubbish.
In the evening I would pack up the refuse that accumulated during the day. I put it in a black plastic bag beside the front door. He left the house first. He dashed down the steps with the bag. He didn’t so much as glance at it. Still without looking at the bag of rubbish, he hurled it, with an energetic swing of his arm, into the metal skip. He glanced towards our window and waved to me. Then he crossed back to this side of the street, I didn’t know whether his reasons were the same as mine. I have avoided the other side since the day we moved into the new apartment.
On this side, exactly opposite the hospital gate, was a shop selling fruit and vegetables. The large window was full of boxes of oranges and lemons. There was never any seasonal fruit. Customers came only on Sundays when they were visiting patients and bringing them offerings. Then they were served by a girl with narrow green eyes. When there were no customers, she sat and read. Once it happened that she caught sight of me as I was passing with plastic bags full of succulent produce purchased in the colourful market. She closed her book, looking first at my bags then at my face. She looked at me as if I was an enemy. The calculations and reasons had yet to be established.
But, life was still order that had not yet begun to disintegrate. It lay in drawers with folded white bed linen and little bags of dried lavender. It was still all-of-a-piece, even if it was sometimes disrupted in the morning by the disagreeable sound of the alarm-clock. On one such morning the north-facing room acquired a new secret. I woke up before dawn in order to take an antibiotic. Replacing the bottle from which I had tipped a red and yellow tablet onto my hand, I caught sight of a bright, swaying blot that I had never seen in this room before. It was trembling on the spine of the large book I had been reading the previous evening. That is how I discovered that in the early morning a little ray of sunlight manages to penetrate into the room that faces north.
I didn’t tell him about this either, when he woke up. Remedies sometimes lose their beneficial effect when you pronounce their name.
We wake up too late or else that rare ray of sunlight penetrates into our room too early. But on that day, when I put on my rubber gloves, I had believed that it was enough to remove all the traces of strangers from our new apartment so that nothing would catch us of guard.
Nevertheless, over breakfast, he noticed something unusual in my face. With the tip of his knife he spread a layer of butter over his piece of toast and said:
‘Has something happened?’
At that moment the glass sugar bowl I was reaching for tipped over. But that happened to me regularly, almost every morning. I brushed the sugar that had spilled onto the tablecloth onto my hand, carefully and patiently, every last tiny crystal. I shook it out into the sink, turned on the tap and watched the jet of cold water wash the remaining crystals from my hand. Dissolving in the water, the sugar disappeared down the waste pipe.
‘Are you sweetening the river again?’
Every time I did this, he asked me the same thing. I didn’t reply. I drank my unsweetened tea. The taste of the tea in the warm liquid is stronger that way. In the perfect layer of butter in front of him there were already traces of his teeth. When we finished breakfast, I hurried to clear the remnants from the table. I washed the china cups, the spoons and knives. Once, we had been staying with the Konrads. When we came back, I wrote on a piece of paper torn out of the boy’s notebook:
‘What was on the table at the Konrads? Five coffee cups. With dried brown dregs in them. Three large glasses with various patterns round their rim. In one of them were the crusty dregs of yoghurt. A blue and white box of Gingavil-C, biological gel for massaging the gums, made by Galenik, 15 grams. An open packet of little sticks for cleaning the ears. One little stick outside the packet. Unused. A newspaper. A headline: “Double Dilemma”. A half-completed crossword. In blue ball-point. The word “picado” written in green. A cat.’
The piece of paper lay for a long time beside the telephone , where we leave little notes and messages. In a different-coloured pen, but I believe in the same hand, down the length of the piece of paper was written: The Secret of Kaspar Hauser.
Perhaps he had wanted to remind me that there was a film of that title showing. In that case he would usually have noted the time it would be screened with three exclamation marks. But after the words ‘The Secret of Kaspar Hauser’ there wasn’t even a full-stop. Just a tiny, washed out orange blot. Perhaps the scrap of paper would have gone on lying beside the telephone for a long time had he not noticed it one afternoon when he was repeatedly, but unsuccessfully trying to get through to some important number. Between two attempts he glanced at the piece of paper and asked:
‘Is this a shopping list? Is it done with?’
He crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into an ashtray. It vanished with the cigarette ends into the black plastic rubbish bag. The next morning he dashed down the steps, and it was already too late to ask him. I watched from the window as he threw the bag into the skip. And drew back before he was able to glance up in my direction.
Some months later, a colleague at the editorial office, doing a crossword over a morning coffee, asked:
‘Who was Kaspar Hauser?’
‘Hauser turned up in Nuremberg in 1828, saying hardly more than a few words, unable to write anything apart from his name, and eating nothing but bread, drinking nothing but water. At first it was assumed he was a tramp, and then he was thrown into gaol and became an attraction for scholars ... ‘
‘Come on, your coffee’s getting cold ... Did you have an encyclopaedia for breakfast? And what’s the name of that green fruit which ... ‘
I didn’t reply. Just as I had not replied that morning to the question:
‘Has something happened?’
The question mark at the end of his question had slipped away while I was engaged in my daily ritual with the spilled sugar. When I came back to the table, he was already bending over the dish of boiled eggs. He chose the smallest and tapped its end with a little silver spoon. When he did this he neither saw nor heard me. Maybe since the day the boy had asked us:
‘Are there boiled chicks in boiled eggs?’
The city is surrounded and things have begun to vanish, the precious props of our mornings. The little silver spoon remains but eggs and nicely packag
ed tea-bags have disappeared. Sometimes, in the place where the brightly-coloured market used to be, I find two or three eggs. I pay a lot, as much as all twelve little silver spoons had cost. I keep the eggs for the boy. Before he eats them boiled, he draws on the top of each of them with a coloured pencil. He does not mention the chick, but still, while he eats the egg, he has a regretful expression on his face.
The glass bowl remains, but with no sugar in it.
‘What we need now is that sweetened river you worked on so assiduously for months.’
There is no water in the tap either. We fetch water from another part of town and bring it back in plastic containers. When that source dries up, we look for a new tap in some other part of the city. The door of the shop where the girl with the narrow green eyes used to sit is broken and its frame swings when the wind blows or shells fall. Inside it is empty apart from occasional stray dogs and street cats.
The boy rarely goes out now. A thousand and one dangers lie in wait for children in the besieged city. He stands by the bedroom window, gazing longingly at the hospital garden. The exotic trees still flower and make fruit. If you bit into them, they would take over your blood supply. Perhaps you would then shrink and be able to fit into a jar of formalin. In a besieged city it is not bad to rest in the secret cool of a hospital larder. When you wake up, you become a secret, a riddle, an attraction for scholars.
They take the wounded to the hospital. Sometimes they are only bloody trunks with no arms or legs. And yet, everything still seems remote. Painful, but remote.
And then that side came for this one. He was injured somewhere in the main street. They took him to the hospital, cleaned and dressed his wound. He arrived in the evening. In the hospital they told him that the wound was half an inch away from where it could have been fatal. Whoever said this must have been tapping his spectacles against his palm as he spoke. He needed to take antibiotics but in the besieged city there were none, not even for the seriously hurt.
He fell asleep lying on his side. So as to protect the wounded place. He moaned dully and sorrowfully. I did not manage to fall asleep until just before dawn. I woke half an hour later and found him lying on his back, so that he was pressing on the wound. Not only was he no longer moaning, it seemed as though he was not even breathing any more. His face was tranquil and distant as though he was on his way somewhere where there was no room for anyone apart from himself. And he was so close that I was touching his side.
If I looked in the other direction, perhaps I’d delay his departure, I thought. The green book with silver letters was lying over there, and on its spine was that trembling blot of light I had seen once before. If I was quick and quiet, perhaps I’d catch it.
I know that light is not sensitive to touch or sound. But still, I edged towards it as though it were a live butterfly. I lowered my hand onto the spine of the green book and now the blot was trembling on the back of my hand, like a transparent, asymmetric butterfly. Turning my palm up, I moved back to the bed. I knelt on one knee, supporting myself my other leg, as though I no longer had any strength in my arms. I pushed him with my free hand and when the place on his pyjamas which covered the wound came into view, I carefully laid the hand that had touched the light against it. I pushed him hard and succeeded in turning him onto his side. He woke up.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I’m seeing whether it hurts.’
‘And ... does it?’
That morning we breakfasted on thin slices of bread spread with a barely perceptible layer of margarine. We drank, both of us this time, unsweetened tea, or rather tepid water into which we had lowered a tea bag which had already been used several times. If such tea was spilled on the tablecloth it left no trace. Just dampness that dried quickly.
‘While they were cleaning and dressing my wound yesterday, I looked at our bedroom windows. Exactly opposite. ... I saw you go in and out of the room twice. You opened the wardrobe. It seemed as though you were cold, very cold. You wrapped yourself in something. ‘
‘And ... was I cold?’
We looked at each other across the table. We leaned our elbows on its surface, with our hands forming goblets, we held our little china cups at the level of our mouths. Now, now I’d tell him why our bedroom faced north. And I’d tell him about the little ray of light that this morning had spared me a few fractions of a second of his departure.
‘Do you know why our bedroom faces north?’
I tapped a little silver spoon against the palm of my hand and in the cup that he had put down I saw concentric circles that reminded me of somebody’s eyes.
‘Does it?’
He plunged his spoon into the tea. In the colourless liquid without a single sugar crystal, it looked like a hook cast there with no hope of success. Somewhere far away there must have been that great river, where all the tiny crystals from my palm had ended up.
I put my cup down too. Now there was a silver hook in it as well. When we looked at each other across the table again, the question marks had slipped away from our questions. Before the boy woke up I’d remove the crumbs from the tablecloth and shake them onto the window sill where the birds landed. I’d put away the cups and spoons. All that would be left would be the white tablecloth that I spread over the table every morning and put jealously away after breakfast. This time there would not even be a trace of spilled tea on it. If the two of us were to disappear at this moment, if a large wave were to wash over us, if a volcano we were unaware of were unexpectedly to erupt, and if some time, a hundred years later, someone were to discover under its cooled deposits the traces of our former life, nothing would be written down. Nothing could be counted and listed down under the question: What was on the table?
And yet, even on blank paper, it was always possible to write with any kind of pen, without even a question mark, exclamation mark or full stop:
The secret of Kaspar Hauser
In Nuremberg, the clerk of the Great Council had placed two dots after these words. One above the other, as though anticipating a list. Then the clerk had raised his pen from the paper. He held his pen solemnly at the level of his chest, ready to lower it in an instant. He waited. He waited! He waited for the honoured gentlemen, with scalpels in their hands, to complete their important work. They were looking for the answer in Kaspar Hauser’s open skull, after he had been violently killed.
The brain in front of them looked like a cauliflower drenched in blood. Or an enormous walnut in raspberry juice. Or ... just like every other brain they had ever had under their hands and scalpels.
But in this one they were looking for an answer. They were looking for something different, special. Something that would be an explanation. Something that would explain the secret tormenting them.
The clerk could already feel his hand growing numb in the air. But, solemn and conscientious, he continued to hold his pen ready and listen for what the gentlemen would s a y.
But in the end the wise men laid down their bloody scalpels. They wiped their hands on linen cloths. One of them thought that the blood on his hands was somehow particularly greasy.
The clerk was still ready and those three words were waiting for a list.
But the serious members of the Great Council simply shook their heads thoughtfully. The scribe was already supporting his numb hand with the other.
There was nothing there!
THIRST IN NUMBER NINE
‘Christ is born!’
I knew it! I had guessed it. Just as I had felt for days, for months, as I passed this shabby, grey door, that a face with blue eyes lived behind it.
I never knocked on it. Nor on any door in this entrance, apart from the one in the basement. On that one there was a large plastic name plate bearing the inscription CARETAKER in flowery lettering.
In the doorway: the caretaker and his three children, as though they had always been there and would be forever. One on the father’s left. Two on the right. If the father were to step away and the
children move closer together, each would come up to the next one’s ear or eyebrow.
The smallest one, on the left, was holding onto his father’s trousers with one hand. In the other he had a piece of dry cake. It was unusually large, fatefully large.
As I greeted the caretaker and shyly introduced myself, the tiny face behind the large piece of cake was already clenched in a painful mask.
‘If I have understood correctly ...’
I did not manage to hear the caretaker’s question to the end, already quite overcome with anxiety. Might the child choke? It quickly put down the remaining piece of cake, gave a sad sigh and began to hiccup. Whenever I opened my mouth to say something, it hiccupped. My throat was dry. As though suddenly and irrevocably all the tiny, delicate folds of mucus had straightened out, forming a painful, tight membrane. If it went on, the mucus might have leapt right out. Like the taut, transparent bubble that appears when you cut into fresh fish. But I had no fns. Just helplessly dangling hands and in one of them, in my clenched, sweaty fist, the piece of paper I was supposed to give to the caretaker. The paper confirmed that new tenants had moved into staircase number nine: the holder of residence rights with two members of his household. Under the seven short, typed sentences, there were two signatures in blue and a stamp. But the caretaker was thorough and slow. He scrutinised the form attentively, and then, as though comparing something, studied my face, arms, legs. He spoke solemnly while the smallest child pressed itself still more firmly against his trousers.
During this time, the second child was indifferently munching the remaining piece of cake. Again a painful spasm and hiccups. Then it was the third child’s turn. It chewed calmly and indifferently. The sound that came from the depths of its chest was the loudest in this newly formed trio. The youngest child looked sternly at me. Were they expecting something from me? And I had knocked on the door quite unprepared!
The father coughed. Just as solemnly as he had spoken. He was holding my sheet of paper in one hand, in the other a grey folder. He told me that it was extremely nice (... and very timely...) that the arrival of the new tenants had coincided with a time when important decisions were to be made about entrance number nine. The tenants’ council in number nine had decided to react energetically to the frequent, unwelcome visits of unknown and irresponsible nocturnal passers-by. They would often come into this entrance, and here the caretaker coughed painfully and, leaning confidingly towards me (I could see that his dry cheeks were touched with pink), he whispered: to urinate. He had himself proposed that a new lock be bought and keys issued to all the tenants. Entrance number nine would be locked at night. The proposal had already been voted on and the new tenants had simply to agree ... or ... perhaps they wouldn’t?! The flushed cheeks of the proposer turned pale and his lips trembled. His voice betrayed his potential disappointment.
Death in the Museum of Modern Art Page 4