Unwitting Street

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  “I, King of the Slightly-Slightlies, conqueror of the land of the Scarcely-Scarcelies, etcetera, etcetera, do salute you, Your Enormousness, in your paper land of blue lotuses and do beg your hospitality for myself and for my people, wandering and oppressed Slightly-Slightlies. Be so kind as to grant us for territory the surfaces of your skin, manuscripts, books, and other such grounds. And if . . .”

  I took my ear away and was on the point of replying when the first tremors of my voice blew the King of the Slightly-Slightlies out of sight. I had to rummage around the table for a long time with the magnifying glass before his majesty was found: knocked flat on his back, he got swiftly to his feet and shook out his rumpled coat. I then contrived to cover my honored guest once more with my ear while speaking in a whisper to one side so as to shield him from the gusts.

  “I welcome you,” said I, “Your Slightly-Slightlyness. The pages of my manuscripts, the indents, outdents, and edges of my books, the bindings, bookmarks, cracks, wallpaper flowers, the skins of my paintings, and my own epidermis are at your disposal. In return I ask only this: that you accept me as a subject of your Slightly-Slightly Kingdom.”

  Again there was a rustling in my ear:

  “Oh, Your Exorbitancy, your merits are well known to us: you and your pen have labored much for the great Scarcely-Scarcely cause and the high ideals of Slightly-Slightlydom. Therefore I confer upon you the rank of first vassal of the immortal and noble Kingdom of the Slightly-Slightlies; I grant you the office of First Slightly, protection, and privileges, and enjoin all of my people to serve you, as they do me, so long as I shall live and remain inviolable here, in my new fief. Hey!”

  Rustlings of rushing Slightly-Slightlies at once filled my ear; tickling my skin, up they swarmed at their sovereign’s call, under the edges of my lobe:

  “Take the fief,” the king went on, “every daub in every painting, every letter in every book, every dot in every manuscript. Register all dust motes, great and small. Scarcely-Scarcelies to the demes and phyles,* settle on the wallpaper flowers; conduct elders and senators to the stove’s warm cracks. To work! Count the lashes on the eyelids of His Enormousness: on every lash post a Slightly-Slightly. Assign a command of distinguished Scarcely-Scarcelies to either ear of His Enormousness. And you, my vassal and brother, be so kind as to allow us, in commemoration of this day and meeting, to transform the forged signature on which I stand into a genuine one and to amnesty the unfortunate forger: hey, letter-makers, come here and genuinize this.”

  Now the king, having slightly scratched my earlobe with his crown, proceeded in state along the black line of the signature, as along a red carpet, surrounded by his retinue and escort.

  Amazed, I raised my head; I surveyed the walls, the floor, the ceiling: nothing seemed to have changed, yet everything was transformed and new: the dead, silly-blue lotuses had slightly shifted their brown borders, swathing themselves in a play of glints and gauzy shadows; across the frozen panes crept glassy patterns, their icy stars scattering blue and white sparks; the paintings’ daubs, touched by invisible brushes, revealed new colors and lines; while the words in verticals down the spines of my books had strayed ever so slightly, by scarcely a thought, from their meanings, widening the cracks into other indistinct worlds.

  Suddenly a black dot flickered past my left pupil: one of the Slightly-Slightlies on duty must have fallen off a lash. Clearly, they had already taken up their posts there too because I had only to raise my eyelashes and everything disappeared, returning to yesterday: the blooming lotuses were again petrified, like painted blots; things were edged with borders, and in everything visible and audible it was as if a thousand locks were clicking shut, re-imprisoning those things in deadness and hush.

  Yet I had only to squint, and through my eyelashes again there glimmered new worlds. I looked at the promissory signature—first with my naked eye, then with the magnifying glass. I checked it against a genuine signature: stroke for stroke. I dipped my pen in the inkpot and inserted in my report: “And therefore the signature in text No. 1176 should be deemed autographic and genuine.”

  My heart was turning merry somersaults in my breast. I winked at the flowery sinful signature: another napping Slightly-Slightly fell off a lash and flickered past my pupil.

  “Hardship post,” I laughed.

  As did the sun: merrily threading yellow filaments through the beams and stars frozen to the panes.

  “An amnesty for all,” I whispered with joy and relief, “an amnesty for all things forged, false, counterfeit, feigned, and untrue. Letters, words, thoughts, people, nations, planets, and universes. An amnesty!”

  In the street the barrel organ was still turning on its worn-out pins, repeating its copper rasps. But in my ear the Slightly-Slightlies had already set to work: transforming the rasps into a delicate melody, a wreath of halftones and overtones inaudible to anyone not a subject of Slightly-Slightlydom.

  I wanted to go out, to where streets cross and people run into each other. I dashed open the door and, one hand skimming the railing, set off down the narrow stairs toward the bottom of the well. It was dark: eyes wide, I noticed nothing new. And suddenly, on one of the landings, a door swung open, slashing it with light. Through reflexively squinting lids I saw a woman wavering on the threshold. I recalled that we had already met many times by our building, at the gate and right here, on the stairs: she was plain, freckled, with strands of whitish hair combed behind her ears: most likely a seamstress, or a typist, I don’t know: whenever we met she would look away and cling to the railing, ashamed, I suppose, of her worn dress and wan face. I was usually too lazy even to look at her, but now, oh, now the Slightly-Slightlies posted by my pupils had done their honest part: she was as homely as ever, exactly as the day before, but why had my heart started to pound; as homely as could be, but why was the blood suddenly rushing to my brain?

  She stood, one shabby shoe pressed to the doorsill, and in her face, encircled by the sun, there glimmered something so very sweet, while diaphanous shadows veiled the oval of her cheek and the helpless hollow of her wispy stem-like neck. Seconds passed, then the door closed, curtaining the light, and I went mechanically on, fumbling the stairs with my feet. On and on—down streets of footworn brick to meet a new, seemingly just-born life: what yesterday had been simply “snow” was now myriads of scarcely perceptible, yet remarkable icy crystals; rag-rubbed windows looked on sensibly, like the eyes of people come awake; hosts of imperceptiblenesses, hiding and forever eluding my consciousness, peeked out and protruded from things; the striding verticals of bodies, the spinnings of spokes, the slide and creak of sleigh runners, wind-torn words; hands, feet, and gestures hidden inside wadding and fur, the play of miens and glints—suddenly they had freed themselves, becoming visible and distinct. In me, as well, everything was different: myriads of scarcely discernible thoughts jostled against my frontal bone, my heart burgeoned with premonitions and incipient plans. Thousands of Slightly-Slightlies, driven no doubt by the frosty air into the pores of my skin, were tugging at my veins and capillaries, fiddling in the tangles of nerve threads, creating in my body a new, unexpected body. The excitement made my legs tremble slightly. I leaned my back against the foot-high letters on a playbill pillar and whispered words that I myself found strange. Only the Slightly-Slightlies gathered round my lips could have heard them.

  “I vow,” I whispered, “oh, I vow to serve in life and deed my sovereign, king of the land of the Slightly-Slightlies, and all of his excellent people. And if I, wittingly or unwittingly, should break my vow, then . . . may I die.”

  In my ears chirred the word: “Amen.”

  2

  “But only for a minute . . .”

  A shabby crooked-toed shoe hesitated on the threshold of my room.

  “At least. I know how to treat even minutes.”

  She leaned a palm on the table and squinted at the paper piles scattered all around. I recall that by her gaze, by her suddenly raised eyebrows, it was ob
vious: she had noticed that we weren’t alone. She quailed. We did not speak: oh, now I learned the marvelous technique of those Slightly-Slightlies working in the silence department: their mastery of the keyboard of silence; their subtle command of the chromatic scale from unsaidness to unsaidness; their deft modulation of tonalities in the music of stillness—from silence to hush, from hush to wordlessness.

  My guest’s fingers, pressing against the flat of the table, waited: first I took them by their short nails, then I seized her hand, soon her thin elbows were trembling in my palms, and then my shoulders touched hers and my lips, parting her lips, sought to exchange: breaths, souls, spirit.

  My heart beat against hers. Our eyelashes became entangled, shedding tears. Another instant and . . . And suddenly I saw right by her eye a dirty reddish speck; and next to it another: freckles. Faded skin covered with tiny black dots of pores under a greasy glaze; a whitish pimple on one cheekbone. A bubbly bit of foam on her trembling lip.

  In my bewilderment, my fright almost, I pulled away. And looked: a homely girl, an utterly homely girl, the same one I had often met by the gate, in the street, in the stairwell: under flaccid skin the fish bones of a clavicle; short and narrow cracks of watery eyes; a scrawny long-armed body in an ironed sack dress.

  “Darling . . .”

  But I took a step back:

  “Forgive me. For God’s sake. It’s a misunderstanding . . .”

  She swayed as if in the wind: the fish bones twitched in the narrow neck of her dress, as though trying to break through the skin. And then she went—with small, stumbling steps, as if the way to the threshold were blocked by a hundred doors.

  The door closed. I glanced round the room: the wallpaper was again a waste of dead blue blots edged in brown; the windowpanes were spattered with bits of ice; on the table lay my briefcase stuffed with false names. But then where were the Slightly-Slightlies? Or had they grown lazy, fallen asleep at their posts? Impossible! I grabbed the magnifying glass and began searching through the papers on the table: wherever I looked I saw swarms of tiny little men the size of dust motes. I was ready to rejoice, but then I noticed: the Slightly-Slightlies were strangely agitated and anxious. Peering more closely, I saw: they were all—in crowds like smatterings of dots—descending on one place: at the edge of the table. I brought the glass nearer: sprawled in a damp spot two or three millimeters in diameter (likely the remnants of a drop absorbed by the table cloth) lay a motionless Slightly-Slightly. I peered more closely still—and suddenly the glass began to tremble in my fingers: on the moist fibers of the black cloth, the King of the Slightly-Slightlies lay dead. Now everything was clear: the king, evidently wishing, out of goodness and love for me, to personally oversee my happiness, had ensconced himself at the decisive moment on one of my eyelashes—only to be swept off by a tear and drowned in the salty drink.

  I again picked up the magnifying glass: around the swollen blue corpselet more and more crowds kept massing. My papers sagged and rustled under incursions from all over of rushing Slightly-Slightlies. The ominous rustling and threatening shuffling grew and grew over the alarmed and angry swarms closing in around me. I grabbed a paperweight and raised it up over the table. Straightaway I saw the futility of this contest: the Slightly-Slightlies, after all, were everywhere—in my eyes and ears, probably even in my brain. To destroy them all, every last one, I would have to smash my own head. Dropping the paperweight, I raced to the door. Pulled it open. Yes, I, a silly creature well over six feet tall, was running away from invisible Slightly-Slightlies.

  The whole night I roamed the emptying streets. I too was emptying: I could feel it. Dawn woke the streets. And me. I recalled the words in my vow: “And if I, wittingly or unwittingly . . .” The houses began to sway in my eyes. I quickly returned home.

  My room was quiet and empty: yes, when the Slightly-Slightlies want to exact revenge, they simply abandon the man condemned. That is enough: once one has been with them for even moments, how can one be without them?

  Lotuses in brown borders, after all, are only painted life. And the frozen stars on the panes will—sooner or later—melt from the sun.

  I’ve been working all day: on this. I’m nearly done: the text will go into my briefcase. And I will go: into a blank, black case: it will click shut—and there will be no suns, no themes, no pain, no happiness, no lies, and no truths.

  1922

  THE PLAYED-OUT PLAYER

  ACCORDING to the Daily Telegraph, Mr. Edward Pembroke passed away in the main hall of the Hastings Chess Club on the thirteenth of October 19—, at five o’clock in the afternoon, during the fourth round of the International Chess Tournament. The obituary that appeared, if I’m not mistaken, in the Edinburgh Review described Mr. Pembroke as “an energetic public figure who had ahead of him a promising career in politics which, however, he gave up for chess.” The deceased, the Review concluded, “exchanged the wide arena of political struggle for the confines of a chessboard—he left actions for moves.” (The italics are mine.)

  The death was instantaneous. The deceased was fifty-three years of age. The doctors were hard put to determine the cause of death.

  Yet to those who had been intimates of Mr. Edward Pembroke, the matter was easily explained: Pembroke’s death was his last, albeit somewhat unexpected, move in a match that began, incidentally, not at half past four in the afternoon, as reported in the Chess Bulletin, but somewhat earlier . . . At any rate, the decedent’s game, as specialized periodicals often noted, was always distinguished by a certain idiosyncrasy and propensity to paradox.

  Mr. Pembroke’s history—in chessboard symbols—is told as follows:

  1. e2—e4, e7—e5

  2. Ng1—f3, Nb8—c6

  3. d2—d4, e5 : d4

  4. ?

  Symbols, however, are less evocative; that is to say, expressed in so-called “words,” this history sounds differently.

  Move I

  e2—e4, e7—e5

  There were twenty players. Symmetrically seated either side of a long and narrow table, all twenty were thinking. The soles of their feet, pressed to the light and dark, dark and light squares of parquet, and the pupils of their eyes, drawn to the dark and light, light and dark squares of the chessboards, did not move.

  The long and narrow table—with its players and its tiny carved figures glossy with black and white varnish—was encased in a long and narrow hall with windows in narrow oblong recesses.

  From time to time a hand, cuff showing white, would rise up over the table—now here, now there—and soundlessly move a wooden figure:

  Move II

  Ng1—f3, . . .

  Mr. Pembroke, seated among men bent over chessmen, and playing Black in his match at the long table, was out of sorts.

  While making his first move, he had glanced out a transparent oblong of glass: a frozen garden of bare interlacing branches. It looked as though someone had pressed to the pane’s dull glimmers the map of a vast fantastical city—a tangled web of intersecting roads, streets, lanes, and blind alleys.

  His game was off. A premonition of something that had long sought to be found—of a close and inescapable encounter with a wandering phantasm that had lost its way, perhaps there, in the black-on-red streets of the nonexistent city etched by the play of branches at the window—was troubling his brain.

  “Must be the dusk,” thought Mr. Pembroke and, with an automatic movement, stretched a hand toward the board:

  Nb8—c6

  But the dusk—for now—was otherwise engaged: unbidden, slipping into the hall unheard, it first gingerly touched all the corners, contours, and edges of things. Quietly pressing its gray fingers to window ledges and sills, the corners of the table, the sinuous outlines of men and chessmen, the dusk tried to unsettle them. But the things, sealing up their edges, lines, and corners, resisted. Then the dusk’s gray muscles tensed and contracted, its fine cindery fingers clutched at contours and edges more fiercely and tenaciously. And the fastenings gave
way: dropping lines, ledges, and planes, the shapes of things loomed up, contours swayed, corners came apart, freeing lines: things began to stream and quietly seep into one another. They were not: as of old.

  “Why don’t they give us some light?” the nettled player wondered.

  Move III

  d2—d4, . . .

  replied the dusk. Shuffling a scarcely audible pawn, it advanced glint toward glint: white toward black.

  It was then that the player’s thinking set off down the narrow black streets of the familiar window city, led on by their zigzag course, pausing at their crossings.

  “If I accept an exchange of pawns, the e8—g8 field will open up . . . I could lose 0-0-0 . . . But if Nc6 : d4, then . . .”

  Having passed hundreds of crossroads and glanced down a dozen blind alleys, his thinking stopped at an entrance. With a brief blow of his palm, the player depressed a steel knob on the oval clock—and one of its two hands also stopped. Carefully picking up the hazy white glint on the d4 square, the player tossed the glint into the box: a dead, dull, wooden thump. Then silence.

  Now he gripped the round head of his pawn on e5 with the thumb, index, and middle fingers of his right hand and quickly marched it to the empty black square:

  . . . , e5 : d4

  Having made their move, the fingers began to unclench. In that same instant Mr. Pembroke’s body swayed unnaturally and pitched forward over the board, as if he meant to observe the game more closely, while the hand with half-unclenched fingers fell away, softly but distinctly rapping the edge of the table. In making his last move, Mr. Pembroke had anticipated all possible variations in the further unfolding of this match, except one, one that seemed completely improbable. Mr. Pembroke had not foreseen that in that split second when his hand, after placing his pawn under attack, made to pull away, his soul, the soul of Mr. Pembroke, let fall by his brain, would slip soundlessly down his arm: from his brain to his hand; from his hand to the tips of his fingers; from his unclenching fingertips to the tiny head of his dimly gleaming black pawn.