The soldier has put his cap on again. Already far from the station, he is walking along the river — alone now — with giant strides, as though flying. In almost every telephone booth a motionless shadow. An arm that seems to have been dangling all day from a car window is pulled back. Three teenage girls are waiting in front of a house; a very small child steps out of the door. Knots of foreign workers are standing around, looking more Slavic than ever with their prominent cheekbones. In response to a homicidal look the soldier salutes, and the saluted person suddenly comes to life.
On one of the main streets — rows of lighted, yet barred shopwindows — he stands at some distance from a few others, mostly soldiers. While the others engage in conversation and a bit of shadowboxing, he takes a cookie out of his jacket pocket and eats it in a leisurely, almost ceremonious way. There is a church nearby; a poster on the wall of the bus shelter announces PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND.
In the bus he takes a book from his other pocket and reads. Repeatedly in the course of the trip he looks up — at a pedestrian crossing or at the one good-looking girl on the bus — always for longer than needed to digest what he has been reading. The army camp, way out beyond the expressways, is invisible, recognizable only by the glaring white sentry box in a small birch forest and the barriers on either side of it. The soldier slips through in line with the others.
It’s deep night. The lights go out on the airfield. A pedestrian light changes; there are no more pedestrians; the stick figures on the light are crooked. A voice comes out of a dark ground-floor window; it starts with a loud, clear word, but then becomes unintelligible, the voice of a sleeper. In the center of town, on the squares, there is hardly anything but animal sounds to be heard: the screeching of cats, the roaring of a bull in a slaughterhouse far away, the scream of a peacock in a zoo. The television sets in a shopwindow all display their test patterns. At one of the scenes of Sunday’s accidents whitish sand is being strewn over blood, which in one place is still discernible, a circular, clotted, pitch-black spot, as though the victim’s heart had drained just there. The light of a streetlamp shines into a café, whose chairs and tables are sharply outlined in the gloom; in one corner a basket full of leftover bread, shrunken, crusts broken, as happens to baked goods only on Sunday evenings; the few men left on the chess board have all tipped over, except the king, who stands proudly erect. A segment of the sky includes the half-moon in the shape of an apothecary’s mortar, prepared to receive the pill that is the single star. A uniform rumbling fills the room, as though the city’s machines had not been fully turned off and were ready to start up again at any moment.
Only in the gambling establishment have time and the outside world ceased to exist. Fluorescent tubes make it as bright as day, the thick curtains offer no gap through which to look out, and besides, it would never occur to the gamblers to raise their eyes from the cards or dice. In contrast to the depopulated world outside, the large room, the sections of which are separated by pillars, is crowded, literally black with people. Nevertheless, apart from a group of young billiards players, all beginners who have come here only to prove their courage, there is no noise. Hardly anyone speaks; there is little to be heard but the shuffling of cards, the shaking of dice, and the hum of the ventilators, one in each wall. Not a single picture; far and wide only the shimmer of green paint, rubbed dull on the baseboards by the movements of nervous heels. Even the usual plants and lone dog are missing. Cigarette butts fall thick and fast on the tile floor, the players stamp them out without looking. The only decoration in the room is the oval stucco ornament on the high ceiling, the one thing at which one of the players, invariably the loser, to be sure, occasionally takes a quick, furtive look.
There is a main table, recognizable not by its size but by the number of onlookers standing around it. It is not in the center of the room but in a corner. One of the men sitting at it is the big man; he is not among the losers. He is white-haired and smooth-skinned, as though beardless, while most of the others at the table look unshaved. Like them he is wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and no tie. But over his suit he is wearing an almost floor-length camel’s — hair coat, as though he were cold. Another thing that singles him out is that he is not sitting in a chair like the others but on a backless stool at one corner of the table. There he sits upraised, with his legs folded under him, and keeps the bank. While waiting for bets to be made — some of the apparent onlookers standing around the table turn out to be players — he shakes the dice in a rhythm suggesting an endless drumroll, summoning all present to step up and join in. The emptying of the cup is all the more sudden; a slight flick of the wrist, which sends the dice to the edge of the dice board and bouncing back again. His hands alone seem concerned with what is going on; the one always busy with the dice, the other, after the throw, with jotting down numbers, which his gold pencil seems to inscribe autonomously on a slip of paper. Otherwise, no part of him moves; the cigarette in his mouth, which he never draws on, is always relit by an assiduous henchman at his side, who also rakes in the banknotes for him — the dancing of a coin on this table is unthinkable — smooths them out, and arranges them in piles. And, like most of the gamblers here, he never orders a drink from the manager, who makes his rounds at intervals (but he invariably has a banknote from one of the piles slipped to him). He never says a word. At times he seems even more bleary-eyed and pale than the others; his hands seem to move of their own accord, as though he were asleep under his swollen eyelids. But seen from close up, his pupils are constantly darting this way and that. While shaking the dice, he is equally keeping an eye on the crackling banknotes between the fingers of one of the onlookers and on the game at the next table, where big, pallid, almost hairless fists are clutching very small cards. A blue light shines from below on the face of the solitary player farther back, plying a one-armed bandit. In mid-scream the lone girl in the noisy billiards group feels the gambler’s glance, breaks off, and looks around at her companions as though for protection.
The dice are rolled again, but then they are left lying on the table. The thrower takes his watch from his vest pocket, signaling the end of the game. Others, too, open their watches. The banker tots up columns of figures, a few banknotes are distributed; he stuffs the lion’s share into his coat pocket and reaches behind him for his cap, which is of the same material as his coat. But then, with his cap already on his head, he remains seated and even leans back against the wall. The others, too, remain in their places, like him almost motionless, pursuing a dream. On all sides of the table, running toward the middle, innumerable fingerprints. Even after standing up, the gambler does not leave at once, but lifts the curtain a little. He looks out into the faint early light and sees a bus loop on the edge of the city — shimmering pre-dawn wires; milk bottles singly or in pairs on the doorsteps of uniform housing-development dwellings.
The gambler seems to find no difficulty in passing from one sphere to another. After a brief look back at the black ventilator hole with its fluttering slats, he turns unhesitatingly to face the long, articulated bus whose support bars, as it drives empty into the loop, glitter like an army of spears. He takes the opposite direction from the bus, cuts across the city line, and strikes out across country. Here again, as previously on the road, he keeps looking over his shoulder, not to make sure that no one is following him, but as though expecting to see something behind him. Now and then he even spins about, as though to face an invisible group, which possibly includes the little clumps of birch trees. Making his way through rough scrubland along a rusty, abandoned railroad track, the gambler takes longer and longer strides, even jumping over a tie. Here at last he begins to speak, a mere mumble of unconnected words: “Deformed! … anywhere … on your knees … get caught … water of life … machine tool … prepare … no time … surrounded … adequately … neglected … bunch … fit subject … include … shatter … open up … track down … deluge … outright …” He starts to run, punching himself in the head, sticking a finger down his throat to no effect, or bending the same finger, holding it up to his temple, and going through the motions of shooting himself over and over again. Once he even turns off his path and casually rams his forehead against a tree trunk.