Moving Parts Page 10

  Stretchers glide by bearing discolored fatigues, school uniforms, pure wool suits riddled with bullet holes, flowery cretonne frocks. With an infallible eye the orderly tells life from death and points the bodies in the appropriate direction. One of the stretcher bearers limps as if he were dancing. He miraculously managed to save his walkman and headphones and he himself also miraculously survived, plucked out of some African backwater from which no one else emerged alive. The other stretcher bearer steps behind the first, seeing nothing, clinging to the stretcher. From the plight he found himself in, probably somewhere in the Caucasus, he saved everything except his sight, and now he raises his feet high, afraid of stumbling. They go back and forth; at a certain moment they will bring in Fojchtmajer’s wife with a round hole in the back of her head, dragged by a military policeman from a cart full of people and shot to death on the spot. The children are riding on among strangers. The narrator will find it hardest to conclude the matter of the children. Since the Fojchtmajers stopped at nothing, accepting every kind of humiliation, willing to bear anything for their sake, the children ought to be spared. But the lowest floors of the hotel know no pity. Here no one has the time or the inclination to worry about individual fates. There is no way of counting how many women have passed through the place, each with a round hole in the back of her head, taken from buses and trains in which their children continued on. In the lobby there is a feverish commotion: The center of the room must be cleared, right away. The walking wounded hurriedly push the last mattresses against the wall, for those lying on them are delirious from fever and cannot help. Gazes stray upward and are lost beneath a ceiling so high it cannot be seen. But they at least latch onto a dark shape gradually descending ever lower. A substantial hull can already be made out. The orderly makes a call, trying to arrange something; he shouts into the receiver, but at the other end of the line it seems he cannot be heard. A German gunboat slowly drops onto the floor, a rusty white waterline on its side; it is full of dead sailors in navy blue uniforms and round caps bearing the inscription Kriegsmarine. The boat settles with a groan and tilts over, creaking at its seams. The captain, immaculately dressed, is still on the bridge; his wide-open eyes no longer see anything through his gold-rimmed glasses.

  Here the story branches off in every direction; the hallways leading from the lobby seem to have no end and one can imagine innumerable further branches, just as overcrowded and stinking just the same of disinfectant; they gradually enter the territories occupied by the mortuary and governed by its laws. The transitional zone includes the resting place for instance of unshaven Russian prisoners of war staring with glazed eyes into the void. Accustomed since childhood to sleeping in gray underwear, to wretched canteens, and to rules and regulations that outlaw expressions of freedom, they shouldn’t complain about their captivity, even if they have died from hunger and cold. No more mass parades await them and they lack for nothing. Their rest is shared by German prisoners of war, who were fortunate enough to survive the confusion of battle and then froze in the ice and snow of Kamchatka. They set off for the east when the grass was probably still green. It was only in the newsreels that it turned out to be gray. Clouds swirling like high seas chase across the sky. Somewhere outside the frame is concealed a symphony orchestra; the bombastic rumble of timpani and the crash of cymbals sound the loudest. The stiffened bodies no longer hear anything now. They melt slowly; at times a transparent tear flows from beneath an eyelid and down a cheek. The story has no sharp boundaries. That is why it must include so many dead. Neither the prisoners of war nor the civilians have been granted the reprieve of an easy death. Their spilled blood soaks into the earth, and with it despair. Wounded feelings do not decompose quickly; their traces contaminate the soil for years afterward,like a fatal deposit of lead. Mention should be made of all the stories of walls and ceilings, weighing down like an inconsolable sense of wrong. Of the torment of unutterable boredom from which there is no longer any escape. Chance passers-by, torn by the flashes of explosions from crowds pressing along shopping streets, lie in black plastic bags stacked in layers. The dead, caught in the trap of the same story as always, in the end are left with nothing but their bodies, dispossessed of all rights. All are made of the same clay, with the same parting on the top of their heads and fingers yellowed from smoking. They are distinguished by their memories, but the memories are inaccessible. The body is like a millstone with which dreams are weighed down so they will drown once and for all. Unimaginably lonely narrators would never be permitted to have a say in anything except grammatical forms; it was their lot to bear responsibility without a trace of influence on the course of events, and now they are filling cellars the length and breadth of the world, all the way to the seas: the Blue, the Green, the Yellow, and even the White – all resembling the Dead. The waters do not mix. The bodies rest on the bottom, tangled in seaweed.

  The narrator sees that the story has slipped out of his hands, or so it seems to him. From the beginning it pulled in its own direction; everything in it was determined ahead of time. He has run out of strength and hope; he has a desire to fall asleep with his head resting against the wall, nothing more. Instead of which he will become a messenger. He thrusts into his pocket a plan penciled on the back of an unused form. Apparently up there, on the next floor, it’s possible to get a better night’s sleep in a vacant camp bed with real sheets. In the meantime the orderly is sounding the floor and gazing at the doctor. Neither of them expects the floor beams to hold out much longer. A team of welders must be found immediately to cut open the hull of the sunken gunboat. Underneath there is nothing else, no foundations, only a bottomless chasm; and if the thin floor gives away, battered mattresses and hospital screens will go flying in disarray into the chasm of these lower heavens, and with them surgical instruments, used bandages, and slop buckets splashing their contents about in the mad rush. The map consists of a sketched fragment of the labyrinth of hallways, with an arrow indicating the place where the addressee of the message, dressed in blue overalls, should be sought. A second arrow shows the location of the promised camp bed. The outer door of the freight elevator closes behind the narrator. In the wan light of a dusty bulb any button can be selected – naturally it has no significance whatever. The narrator recognizes the cracked pane of the inner door. Now the elevator moves upwards, and along with it the sentence in which it appeared for the first time, and the last one in which it was rediscovered by chance.

  To the question of why it does not stop at the next floor, where the narrator might run across the welders capable of averting a disaster, the answer should be that all floors are of equal worth. It is known that from the very beginning the elevator did not stop at every one. Nobody here could see beyond what is visible; the narrator is subject to the same limitation. It doesn’t seem as if the stops of the freight elevator are governed by someone’s will. They are decided rather by the tangle of wires tumbling out of an instrument panel, arbitrary electrical impulses that follow various paths in their own particular order. In this way the Warsaw Uprising does not break out and is not suppressed, and there do not appear drunken officers of the Soviet secret police hammering their fists on the table. There are no cheering crowds with red banners, nor mass songs, nor tanks driving out onto sleeping streets in a snowbound winter. Selecting a floor, the elevator regulates the movement of adverbial phrases, while they in turn trim the story lines short; restricting time and place, they dwell on manner and pass over cause in silence. They reduce the plot to a minimum. But it is not they who are the essence of the invisible structure, just as it is not the ropes strung over the abyss, nor the ocean currents, nor the precipitous lines of the graphs of market reports in the Financial Times. Its core and foundation may turn out to be the predicates of sentences, which as a rule are unfeeling and, like judicial sentences, irreversible. No one knows where they come from; the narrator does not know either. They become visible only when they are firmly fixed in tenses; they take the space of the sente
nces into their possession. And when they pass on, a void is left behind.

  The elevator stops with an unimaginable clatter at the train station. At the end of the platform, far in the distance, there can even be seen the colorful splash of a poster with a couple kissing on a steep rooftop; the image can barely be made out in the foreshortened perspective. The rails rumble; it is the train, traveling in a circle so that the madman with the starting pistol can continue to bully the old man in the red dressing gown and humiliate the hobo, all in the presence of the girl with the provocative makeup. Beyond the door of the elevator there open up expanses of possibilities that will never be fully explored. But the narrator is not curious about them. He guesses that he ought not to leave the elevator as it stops at successive floors. At most, at the next one he’ll block the door with his foot, lean out and, holding up a cigarette lighter – a commemorative gift, though not for him, and never mind who it was from – he will see a perished gas mask abandoned by the door. Things will return to their places: the shoddily plastered walls, the low ceilings, the dust-covered floors with puddles here and there over which droplets of rusty water hang from joints in the piping – if one falls, another will immediately take its place. Straining one’s ears, one might hear the tower of cans crashing down in the house with the garden. Many floors above, the dingy landing remains in place, seemingly inaccessible; yet the elevator in fact stops there too, opposite the familiar door marked with a half-effaced figure of a man, as if in a dream. The external world puts up no more resistance. If the unexpectedly happy ending does not arouse the narrator’s suspicions it is only because he is collapsing from exhaustion. But he is already on the landing; he discards the map scribbled on the back of the form, and the elevator takes it away, back into the depths of the dark shaft. The narrator isn’t even sure if at this exact moment the lower floors still exist. On the upper floors this can never be known for certain. And if the lower floors have already caved in, that means the remaining floors are now the last, in the grip of fever and commotion. But in a place where leather sofas exude the cool tranquility of affluence, it can be believed to the very end that the upper floors will never become the lower ones. The narrator, too, wishes to believe this. He looks for his keys. Where have they gone? Were they left down below, along with his jacket? He has them. They’re not lost – he’s found them in the pocket of his pants. He doesn’t know if he should first open the room with the balcony or the door to the bathroom. He opens the room. He immediately becomes aware of a sizeable dark object on the bed. A little evening light falls on the object from the balcony window; it looks like an instrument case. The figure seated in the armchair the narrator notices only after a moment. So someone must have been waiting for him to come back, for goodness knows how many hours, till finally he fell asleep. His hunched back can be seen. A hand hanging over the arm of the chair is almost touching the floor. The hand is black.

  It’s John Maybe, a hardened alcoholic. He has not known happiness in life, that much is evident. He’s burdened by his wasted talent, by the torments of loneliness, and by the indis-position he has suffered in the mornings for many years, and which aspirin no longer alleviates. He is wearing an overcoat bought from a thief at a flea market; the sleeves are too short. The narrator recognizes the coat. He even knows that the lining has gray stripes and that the marble is no longer in the pocket. John Maybe would no doubt like the narrator to change something in his past; he believes that the story has not treated him fairly and that he deserves at least one more chance. He believes that a minor revision will not cause any trouble. All that needs to be done is to cancel the departure of a certain train, for example on the pretext of the strained political situation. Every word of his is predictable, even the rancorous tone that accompanies the presumed beginning of his speech; at its end, which there is no need to cite, it would turn to bitter sarcasm. The narrator withdraws quietly so as not to wake the intruder. He should now inform the front desk that some stranger has broken into his room from the balcony, and no more. He could go down there right away – he’ll just quickly unlock with a grating sound the door marked with the faded figure of a man. The bathroom, undoubtedly as dilapidated as the landing, would spare no one the sight of its antiquated white tiles and cracked urinal, but the light bulb has burned out. Sure, the narrator uses the urinal; did he even deny it? He couldn’t have. He’s entered many bathrooms since he left his room in the permanent residents’ wing this morning: the one on the first floor of the house with the garden and the one in the back room of the bar. He was in a handsome bathroom with a window and a china tub. And even in the hell of the field hospital located on the lowest floor of the hotel he went behind a screen where there was a stinking bucket. Would it not be easier to live without a constantly refilling bladder, without that painful discomfort, ridiculous in its repetitiveness, and familiar to the point of tedium to all the characters? The urinal, then. The narrator finds his way in the dark without difficulty, but his fly gets stuck. His wounded arm is of no use now. But the other has managed somehow to unfasten the button, and all would be well were it not for the darkness, were it not for the vague anxiety that exudes from it, intensifying from one moment to the next. The narrator knows the rules and at this point could already predict that he will never return to the room with the balcony. He ought to come to terms with the loss of his comfortable bed, together with his pajamas, which – this much is certain – will fall into the hands of the black trumpeter. With one hand it’s harder to fasten one’s pants than to unfasten them. The narrator struggles for a long time with the loop of the button. Hurry up, we’re on in a minute, someone whispers in his ear, planting an oversized bowler hat on his head.

  The narrator’s heart sinks. Whose arm is leading him? All around there is a blinding glare, but the bowler hat has slipped down over his eyes. Nothing can be seen. Yet drumrolls are heard. The band plays a flourish. The other sound, resembling the roar of foaming waves, is applause. A moist whisper at his ear informs him that the tightrope walkers’ act has just finished. Mozhet has recently been working with Irene. Yvonne was better, but what of it, since she’s dead. So which of them was eating breakfast with him in the hotel? Bright, cheerful makeup hurriedly paints a broad crimson smile on the narrator’s cheeks. In his memory the name of Irene Feuchtmeier is lit up, originating from a blue neon sign; the narrator should admit that the news has taken him by surprise. But he cannot linger over it even for a moment. Propelled toward the lights, he’d like at the very least to have his fly fastened. But this can’t be done. He trips over something soft. It’s his guide’s leg, held out deliberately. The narrator flips over and lands on his nose in the yellow sawdust, losing his glasses. A burst of laughter rings out. The echo gives an indication of the size of the place; it’s rather large. The guide’s helpful hand sticks the bowler hat back on his head as he struggles to his knees, brushing sawdust from under his collar. He gropes his way to his feet, his crimson grin stretching from ear to ear; then he falls down once again. This time the guide has stepped on his pants leg and given him a clownish boot up the backside. The narrator has no choice but to get up again, this time without his pants. Despite the shame it’s easier this way; the hand that had to hold the pants up is now freed and has already managed to straighten the battered bowler hat in a gesture closely resembling an obsequious bow. Bewildered, he stands in his checkered boxer shorts amid the whistles and the applause. The perimeter of the ring extends around him. Beyond it are rows of seats, and in the seats the audience, all lined up. Nearby the wise guy in the studded leather jacket is prowling around – the one who apparently once botched a job and was given his marching orders – a man of all work whose powers are not entirely clear. It seems he has finally been forgiven the two unnecessary corpses; it was evidently hard to get by without his brisk resourcefulness, devoid of any scruples. He was the one who put the bowler hat over the narrator’s eyes in the bathroom. Now, making faces for the audience, he makes a show of bringing in a
chair. Sure enough, the narrator is to climb onto the chair to retrieve his glasses, which are hanging from a wire, their gold rims glinting. When he is up there he will suddenly remember something. A monologue? Who would have need of a monologue? Entirely sufficient are the shrill exclamations with which the wise guy gladly takes over his part – signs of comic terror that the narrator refuses the audience when the chair is pulled out from under him. The wise guy applauds him enthusiastically: bravo, bravo! He’s obviously enjoying the game; he can’t stop, and is already dragging in a rickety stepladder. To the delight of the audience the narrator now falls from the stepladder, waving his arms in every direction. Battered and bruised, but still wearing his garish crimson smile, he places the recovered glasses on his nose. Now he can see clearly. In the front row sits the retired professor with the small boy; next to him is Feuchtmeier, yawning and surreptitiously reading a newspaper, undoubtedly the Financial Times. The boy can’t sit still; he’s fidgeting restlessly, picking wads of fluffy pink stuffing from his quilted vest. He’s probably a handful in preschool, too. Gusts of wind whisk away the pink stuffing and lift it overhead in streaks of light toward the realms of shadow. There it disappears without a trace, in the blink of an eye transformed into a dark fleecy dust. There’s nothing more full of promise than fragrant pink stuffing, and nothing more hopeless than a ball of dust trodden underfoot.