Moving Parts Read online

  Feuchtmeier. That’s what this man is called. His surname, scribbled illegibly in pen on the appropriate line of the hotel form, now appears in the computerized list of guests. The narrator has checked this by calling the front desk from an ancient black windup telephone for house calls only mounted on the wall by the chest full of obsolete red fire extinguishers, umpteen floors beneath the lobby. The key that Feuchtmeier left at the front desk a moment ago is supposedly in a pigeonhole marked with a room number that could also be called, right now even, from the same antique phone, so as to hear the intermittent buzzing sound. But if Feuchtmeier has left his key at reception, he won’t answer the phone.

  His ex-wife is also called Feuchtmeier, like him. But he’s the main user of the name printed on credit cards, engraved on the nameplate at the gate, and appearing on his ID card. Invoked on various occasions, often tossed hurriedly into the middle of a sentence, it has indicated his person in an unambiguous and incontestable way, and for this reason it would be better if, for the woman, along with the surname a first name could be found. As for him, Feuchtmeier sounds good and adequate. It probably does not come from the Fojchtmajers who were owners, let’s say, of the Polish Word publishing house and printing press that was active right up until the outbreak of the second war; but it may have something in common with the easily imaginable, taciturn Captain Feuchtmeier, who wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses and who, without a doubt impeccably dressed, served for example in the navy of the Third Reich. One might mention in passing the captain’s son, a difficult boy who was too much to handle for his aunts as they struggled with the privations of the postwar period. Brought up in orphanages, he did time for auto theft before he settled down. Old age found him the respectable owner of a repair shop, mending crankshafts, arguing with his wife, and watching soccer on television. He took pride in the fact that he never spared the belt, using it on his son to ensure exemplary report cards, which he keeps for old times’ sake in a drawer along with his receipts.

  Feuchtmeier’s thirtieth birthday has long passed, while his fortieth is far enough in the future for him to believe that it will never come – after all, it was no time ago that he was playing basketball for his university team. He probably still meets with his old teammates. They shoot hoops in a local gym one evening a week, after work, and so with no detriment to their careers. Every so often one of them leaps over the heads of the others and, with a glint of madness in his eye, dunks the ball in the basket, rattling the backboard and making the steel rim quiver. Then in the changing room they crack jokes as they pull off their sweaty T-shirts. After the container ship disaster and the distress of the inquiry, which was eventually discontinued, Feuchtmeier changed jobs. In his applications he presented himself as an expert in maritime transportation. A pure formality: His name was known in the business and the circumstances of the disaster had been the subject of rumors circulating around the offices. He does what he was doing before, and again is successful, but now he works for a different company, which has expanded its share of the freightage market thanks to the damage done to its rival’s reputation. Recently he has been tired. He’s been sleeping poorly, and has been dreaming of a container ship split in two and going to the bottom with its cargo of crushed rocks – the image of his marriage. After the game he tends to disappear right away, going back home to the bachelor pad he found in a modernized building close to the head office of his company. One of the shortcomings of this otherwise pleasant apartment is the lack of a convenient parking garage in the neighborhood. Feuchtmeier leaves his silver five-door hatchback with sunroof, whose leather upholstery barely came clean, on the street in front of the building. He ought to reckon with the fact that one of these days it could be stolen. But he doesn’t want to think about the future; he turns on all the lights in the apartment and opens a can of beer from the refrigerator. He falls asleep with it in a hot bath. When he wakes up an hour or so later, the water is cold and the can is lying at the bottom of the tub. Feuchtmeier doesn’t feel like beer anymore; he’ll pour himself a glass of something stronger and, teeth chattering, will go to bed. But he is no longer sleepy. Long after midnight he turns on some music – what kinds of records could Feuchtmeier listen to? – then makes himself some green tea and looks through ads for yachts in a thick advertising catalog. Outside the window the street is dark; the only light comes from signs over doorways and window displays, all without exception in the language of the narrator: Credit Bank, Dental Clinic, Irene Travel Agency. Substantial five-story buildings with rounded corners faced with granite.

  As for the woman, it’s clear from the beginning that the surname will create problems for the narrator. That’s right, precisely that disciplined column of letters under the command of the capital F, falling into line by any predicate imposed by fate, as if it were only a matter of a drill, though they are ready for anything. But not fit for anything. For in the narrator’s language it isn’t possible to bring even the most adroitly mustered Feuchtmeier under the control of the feminine declension; the mechanism grinds to a halt as early as the genitive and does not work even once all the way to the prepositional and the vocative. If one were to beat a retreat and to relinquish all case-endings – Feuchtmeier’s wife would herself prefer such a solution, her unfamiliarity with the narrator’s language rendering her oblivious to its drawbacks – all the sentences through which her character passed would sound equally stilted. In any case she shouldn’t appear under this name unaccompanied by the word ‘Mrs.,’ which in the narrator’s language at least declines, though it’s as unbending as an elderly chaperone when Feuchtmeier himself is absent – he of the expression “the Feuchtmeiers,” who left and moved into a bachelor pad. In the last resort the language allows the conventional feminine form “Feuchtmeierowa,” ordering a subunit of the female auxiliary corps comprising two syllables to reinforce the deployed column. Only with this reinforcement will it be possible to cross the barbwire of the genitive and push on. But such a procedure, mentioned here only for the sake of thoroughness, smacks of abuse, and introduces an unwarrantable excess of familiarity, not to mention untruth. For the feminine form of the name is based on a possessive adjectival form, which expresses perfectly a narrow-minded ideal of possession and belonging, whereas it’s already established that a divorce is in process. The name is a perfect fit, but assuredly for him, not for her. By itself it invariably evokes the image of Feuchtmeier, his jackets and neckties, and so out of necessity let us give the female character some kind of first name. Let’s call her for example Irene, after the blue neon sign of the travel agency; why not? And so Irene Feuchtmeier. Here it might be interjected that a name carries its own weight; it encumbers like a piece of excess baggage. The wife cannot fail to notice that the husband alone has the privilege of traveling with only one item of luggage. If she wished to enjoy the same convenience, for the reasons given above she would have to be content with a first name. In fact, in a pinch the first name alone could suffice for her needs. Such an assumption inheres in the conservative nature of speech patterns, which are indulgent and humbly discreet toward Feuchtmeier, but which, in their well-worn mechanisms, aim at imposing on Irene an exemplary moderation in all things, and at overcoming the individual nature of her avid and frantic desires. Irene now lives with her father, a retired university professor, in a room in which little has changed since her school days. She graduated from ballet school but never became a professional dancer. While she had an undeniable if unexceptional talent, her endlessly practiced pirouettes would not have been rewarded with a solo career; in the best instance she could have looked forward to a regular position in the corps de ballet. Now, it is only occasionally that a dance step sets her body in motion between mirror and wardrobe. From the window of her room a small square can be seen, where women sit with infants in baby carriages – a view utterly devoid of gravity. In the evenings Irene avoids solitude. She goes out, meets with friends, usually drinks a little too much and enjoys herself, though never to the extent t
hat anyone could hold it against her. Nor has it ever happened that a couple of friends or an old acquaintance has not driven her home. Up until now life has spared her from being accosted in the subway and from the equivocal glances of cab drivers. But the very phrase ‘until now’ manages, like a window left ajar, to let in among the words clinging together a gust of air that gives one gooseflesh, and one thinks with a shudder how easily the well-established state of things can change. When Irene comes home, the boy is already asleep under a quilt patterned with small flowers in the former study, which out of necessity has been converted into a child’s bedroom. She tiptoes in and stands for a moment by his cot without turning on the light. She hears his untroubled breathing. She doesn’t think about the ordeals that await the boy in the future; she doesn’t even want to know about the anxiety he was prey to before falling asleep. She leaves his room and goes to bed, but she does not turn out her bedside light. She doesn’t feel sleepy. Sometimes she reads a book, and sometimes she just cries. Over time she even forgets exactly where the grand piano used to stand in that other living room. In a draft, that much was sure. Memory is not essential to her. Forgetting offers more freedom.

  The man often remembers her still, especially at night, when he can’t sleep and he stares through the window at the blue neon sign. But each of his recollections is overshadowed by an event at which he was not present and yet which nevertheless is liable to emerge fresh at any moment from his tormented memory. The shocking scene, bathed in the same blue glow as the corner of the street, is infused with the cold passion of pornographic films – it is there that he has seen the event many times; he knows how it could have come about and how it must have ended. His wife thinks that he would have been better off acting magnanimously; she can’t understand why he chose vindictive obstinacy. If he had been asked about this, he probably would have said that she had no need of his magnanimity, since she had unscrupulously protected herself with deceit. Perhaps she or he still thinks that their first chance encounter will change everything. But what can they really expect? To pass one another at a crowded party, with glass in one hand and plate in the other, amid the murmur of other peoples’ conversations, over which can be heard, for example, a jazz trumpet? When such a meeting finally takes place, it will not occur to either of them that something in their lives is over; rather, they will think with a dull pain that it never existed.

  And that’s all. It’s high time for the words THE END. If the hobo with the earring is still drifting about in the background, looking for an opportunity to play his part, at this point he ought to find out that it’s too late. The narrator hopes that events that have not yet happened will be called off and that he’ll be permitted to forget about the characters left on the margins. After the epilogue he truly cannot imagine what more could be expected of him. He believes he deserves a respite from the affairs of Feuchtmeier, his wife Irene, and the tight-rope walker Mozhe along with his partner, whose name didn’t even manage to surface before the uncomplicated plot came to an end. Because no one could be found who is not thoroughly familiar with this story, told thousands of times before. The parts, always the same ones, wait like traps into which new characters will continue to fall, irrespective of their own wishes, promises, and misgivings. The story runs things with an overwhelming force. It makes the narrator dodge about among floors and passageways until the outline of the plot is given substance. It tosses obstacles beneath his feet. In such a way the narrator comes upon a chest filled with gas masks – a new detail that appears out of nowhere and promises nothing but complications. The masks are piled high; most have no cover, and some are hanging out of the chest, hooked to the pile by their tin respirators. Further on, the hallway leads straight to some stairs, but there’s no sign of an elevator, no sign of a shaft by which an elevator could descend, and no trace of a button by which it could be summoned. The absent elevator spoils the order of the entire paragraph, like the edge of a page torn out along with some of the text – the remaining fragments of sentences suddenly lose their meaning and come face to face with emptiness. In consternation, the narrator understands only that he has to withdraw and try again, but that means he does not understand anything, and it even seems to him for a moment that here there is nothing to understand. Before he collects his thoughts the automatic light switch turns off. The narrator’s job is to push forward no matter what. He does so, illuminating his way with his cigarette lighter; shadows jump ahead of him into dark corners. In this manner he comes to a grille barring the way. In his bunch of keys, none fits the lock: The grille evidently does not belong to this story. Next to it, on either side, there are old hotel sofas piled on top of one another. Their pink stuffing, dirty and wadded, with crumbs of memories sticking to it, pokes out of bursting seams. The narrator averts his gaze in disgust. He looks down the inaccessible hallway and can see nothing unusual in it: On both sides of the grille, in this story and that one, there are the same low ceilings, the same shabby walls, and puddles under the moist joints between pipes. Having satisfied his curiosity, he retreats. He finds it hard now to keep his bearings and to maintain clarity in his weary mind; it is only the familiar sight of the fire extinguishers and the windup telephone that brings temporary relief. The attic filled with old copies of the Financial Times also appears in its former place, and even the window at the head of the stairs; by simply cracking open the trapdoor in the attic floor it’s possible to glance at the terrace, where a restless Feuchtmeier is just on the point of putting his glasses on the edge of the table, and Mozhet is looking up at him in surprise.

  The narrator leaves without waiting for the already familiar continuation. Now he is walking cautiously. Most important is that his gaze should not stray, taking with it the entire series of subsequent sentences; as long as he is passing the dark red fire extinguishers in the cold light of the neon lamps everything is just as it should be. It would seem that it’s simply a matter of attention. Concentration is needed to keep a tight rein on the forces of disorder, to impose the necessary rigor, and to prevent objects from descending into the anarchy to which the unstable criteria of order incline them. But soon the narrator comes upon the chest full of limp, dirty green gas masks. He picks one up and breathes in the smell of perished rubber. A few yards further on, some steps appear; and here once again are those old hotel sofas and the grille, stubbornly blocking the way. The gas mask falls from his hands and hits the ground with a pathetic slap. Now he admits he’s lost; he decides at once to call the front desk from the windup ebonite phone. He recalls the professional smile of the desk clerk and her impeccable diction. Without pleasure he also remembers the good day he was wished, and the jar filled with candies that no one takes. There’s no lack of words – the narrator has at least as many of them on hand as there are candies in the glass jar; but he can find no word with which to start. And for this reason, in the end he doesn’t even reach for the receiver. The condition of the plumbing and wiring indicates that the maintenance staff never visits the lower floors. Not even the maids come down; the gas masks must have been lying here for years, probably since what was once called the Cold War by the papers of the day, which are still moldering in faded and tattered piles against the walls. In the nature of things the daily routine does not reach far; there exist domains outside the responsibility of the hotel management. Nevertheless, the narrator’s mind cannot come to terms with the impossibility of summoning the elevator. Yet that mind, in rebellion against the obvious, has no way out but unconditional capitulation. Having betrayed itself, it will begin to search the memory for an overlooked stretch of the way, wondering for example if the corridor with the fire extinguishers doesn’t lead off from the landing, a dozen or so steps up from where the mind bears a painful scar torn out of space. The memory, prepared against better judgment to consider in all seriousness a solution such as moving the elevator half a floor up, with a suspect alacrity offers the recollection of a dozen or so steps allegedly descended; this remembrance is dim and in
the light of day might well have vanished in the blink of an eye like a badly developed photograph. In the face of a glaring inconsistency bearings are lost and space disintegrates into fragments that do not match. Now the narrator must quite simply climb those steps half a floor to the elevator without which he will be unable to find his way, and which he can locate only outside his field of vision. But after the first few steps, his foot is suspended over a void and his hand freezes on the twisted handrail that suddenly turns downward, from this point accompanying other, invisible stairs that descend into a dark abyss. Water drips into it continuously; the plash can be heard. Too many steps are missing to be able to go on; all he can do is stand in place, without a single thought in his head. For in that head, too, something has caved in, leaving a gap just as vast as the one that has just appeared beneath his feet. Doubt belongs to the present tense and the present tense only; it blossoms upon it like a poisonous lily on the clouded top of a pond. At this point the narrator would do anything he can to extricate himself from the dark well of the present tense. Yet it seems that nothing whatsoever can be done; there’s no sign even of a straw at which a drowning man might clutch. Perhaps the right thing to do would be to plunge into the water, take it into his lungs, and come to rest on the silty bottom – no other course can be seen. But that also is impossible. The balloon of longing keeps the mortally suffocating mind on the surface. From the very beginning, though, the narrator’s position has been so unfavorable that he has nothing to long for. And thus, since he has nothing, he longs for the street cut off by a pane of glass from the hotel lobby; he longs for the country lane that can be seen over the garden fence; he longs for everything that is unattainable. The only thing that this time he has not yet tried is to look for another way out. Picking his steps unsurely, he finds his way to the attic; the old copies of the Financial Times are lying in place beneath the sloping ceiling. Here space is predictable and the ground sure. The narrator descends to the landing. Through the window of the living room he watches out of the corner of his eye as Feuchtmeier desperately tries to stop Irene. She pulls her arm free without looking at him and walks quickly away; in a moment she’ll drive off in the car that is still standing in the driveway in the sun, the keys in the ignition. And she’ll pick up the tightrope walker Mozhe in his striped T-shirt on which a dark red stain is spreading. The narrator’s gaze does not linger on them; everything there is in any case determined in advance. He thinks about jumping out of the kitchen window on the other side of the house and walking away across the fields. The boy is not asleep at all. He knows or does not know about the scene taking place on the terrace; probably he knows, though he certainly would prefer not to. He’s kneeling in the kitchen in a puddle of spilled milk. Covered with chocolate and ketchup, he’s building a tower of innumerable cans of tuna, Strasbourg pâté, tomato paste, and sliced pineapple in syrup. The battery of canned goods is a symbolic image of the plague of excess that has afflicted Feuchtmeier’s home. The boy is rocked by hiccups; evidently the chocolate or the ketchup has disagreed with him. Through the kitchen window a fence can be seen. On the other side of it a man in blue overalls is standing. Standing and waiting. The sunlight shining through the iron fence posts makes the same striped pattern on his clothing and on the ground. A small white cloud passing across the sky darkens the glare only for a moment. Blades of grass sway, while over them flutter colorful butterflies. The man waiting is in no hurry; it’s clear that he has all eternity, and will always be able to reach into his pocket and take out his wallet, in which there is a picture of a little girl taken a long time ago, let’s say somewhere in the Balkans. If he were to be permitted to say all that’s on his mind, in a moment it might turn out that for example the little girl’s mother – her picture is also tucked away in the wallet – remained in those parts with an infant whose picture they unfortunately did not have time to take. Where they are now is not exactly known; in any case they’re in a place from which there is no way out – in some deep pit, amid a host of others lying rigid under lime and earth. The man in the overalls has no intention of asking for pity – he will demand only what in his opinion is his proper due. It does not matter to him that his wishes cannot possibly be granted. The tower of cans comes crashing down. This is the last sound of this sequence, and it is heard on the terrace too. Now everything will start again from the beginning. And so the partner of the tightrope walker Mozhet, whose affairs are connected in an invisible yet fateful way with the scene taking place on the terrace, must once more sit in the dentist’s chair, again with aching heart. Let it be the dental clinic next to the travel agency – why not? No one is presently in the waiting room, and the dentist has lots of time. He likes his patient, so he’s telling her funny stories. In his opinion the damaged molar is dead and cannot hurt while it’s being drilled; that is why a needle with anesthetic has not appeared in his hands. The open drawer of the filing cabinet containing patients’ records reveals that Mozhe’s partner’s last name begins with a T. The door to the waiting room is open to let in a breeze – the day, as already established, has been hot since morning – and if the next patient were waiting, he would see the top of her head with its closely cropped red hair on the headrest of the dentist’s chair. The body must bear a pain it does not understand; nothing should hurt since the tooth is dead. If it were possible to strike from the score the loud crash presaging repetition that sounds in the Feuchtmeiers’ kitchen every time the tower of cans falls down, it would prevent needless suffering. And the dentist would order an X-ray instead of repeating the painful mistake over and again. But did he really not order the X-ray? It’s lying on the table, in an envelope bearing the patient’s name. She is called Touseulement, Yvonne Touseulement. Things could not be otherwise, since her tightrope walker is Mozhe. His name declares his freedom; it announces that maybe he will do one thing or another, but is not forced to do anything. He maybe will appear or disappear; maybe he will leave her. Her name, on the contrary, condemns her to subordination and exclusivity; whatever happens to her, nothing else is possible. Hence for him – maybe her, but for her – only him.