At the end of the track, through a strip of tall grass, whose blades seem to bar the way like swords, the gambler enters an open field of rubble, almost without vegetation, surrounded on all sides by bushes and looking like a disk inserted in the meadows on the edge of the city. The only rise is a mound made up of concrete blocks, gravel, and earth. At the side of this mound, the gambler sits down on a stone, looks at the packet of banknotes beside him, and continues his mumbling: “Money, you’ve always been my mainstay. No money, no world. Money, you have not only been my parachute, which up until now has never failed to open, but also my airship, ready to take off in any direction, reliable and crashproof. Money, my last resort and only clear idea. Money, my only ray of hope!” Suddenly he stops and in the same tone of voice addresses a little clump of pale-yellow grass, swaying at eye leveclass="underline" “I must get away from here, no matter where to. To a place where I can grieve and have something to grieve for. To a place where loyalty will again count for something. I need danger. There may be danger here, too, but I don’t feel it. What was that dream I had? I was sitting at the table, I had sat there every evening for ten years, waiting for the others. And when they came, they sat down at other tables, not out of hostility but because nobody knew me. What has become of me? They call me the ‘artist,’ but I’m only the archenemy, the gambler. Instead of embodying the world, I am the point where lovelessness is concentrated. I am the point at the tip of the lance, a bundle of whiplashes. Instead of being many-sided and disarming, I am cutting, sterile, and aggressive. I am so dependent on constant presence of mind that I’m not present at all, neither for anyone else nor for myself. ‘You’re not there!’ All the women I’ve ever loved have said that. Loved? I never loved anyone. They call me the freest of men, but I’m just indifferent, volatile. I say what I like and go where I please, but it gives me no feeling of freedom; I feel only the injustice and privation I’ve suffered. None of them knows how often I say to myself: Shut up and stay put. They call me a king, but I’m just a liar and a hypocrite. My generosity is really condescension, my indulgence and attitude of live and let live is disloyalty, my aloofness contempt. Instead of being the king of life, as they say, I’m an enemy of mankind — a scoundrel when I’m gambling; and when I’m not gambling, a soulless sneak.”
The gambler looks around, taking in the strip of wand-like alders, the stunted silver birches, and the lone spruce sighing in the wind at the edge of the disk; takes two stones from the pile, knocks them together; and, swaying his torso back and forth, carries on with his mumbled singsong: “Make a fresh start. I say that today for the first time, and I’ve never heard anyone say it in earnest. Begin a new life. But if I only say it to myself, I don’t mean it. Nobody hears the things I say to myself, so they don’t count. Love. I’ll take time and let myself be diverted by love. Give me the saving grief that will finally tell me which way to go. Inflict it on me. No longer will the steel pen get stuck between my ribs. Renew the wound each day, dearest, my one and only, whether man or woman. Reject me if need be, but tell me why; scorn me, mock me, make me open up and cease to be alone. Embitter me, make a kernel grow within me, make me fruitful. Spell it out. Give it to me in writing. That’s it. To make me mean what I say, to assure myself that what I say will be heard and will therefore stand fast, I will spell it out and give it to myself in writing. Even if what is sung does not exist, the voice of the singer does.”
Making what he has said true, he writes in his pad with his gold pencil; this he does with such emphasis that his shoulders begin to spin and his whole body to shake. He gets up from his stone and washes his face and hands in one of the many puddles that abound in the scrubland, as though the ground below them were frozen all year long. Near the puddle there is a single clump of grass with broad, flat blades that splay out in all directions like shocks of hair. It is lit up from the side by the first rays of the sun and stirred by the early breeze. The blades are transparent and clearly show their fine ribs running all the way to the tips, and the shadow of one blade falls on the next blade’s trail of light. The longer we look at the clump as it trembles, shakes, and sways, the more sounds converge in it, each connected to the next — the screech of the crow overhead, the train whistle on the horizon, the beating of carpets in the housing development, the rat-tat-tat of the rifle range — and in the end we get the impression that the sounds of a cosmos are being made in the center of the clump, in its roots. The intensified movement that runs through the blades of grass does not result from the wind alone.
In similar light, the old man is standing on a ladder in the garden of the old people’s home. He looks over his shoulder as if he senses that someone is looking at him and he wants to answer the look. His ladder is much too big for the little tree it is leaning against, and the tree bends to one side. With his pruning shears he cuts out the crown. His way of looking around, his quick decision, and his movements show that he is an expert. The branches fall all over him, on the brim of his hat and on his shoulders.
After vanishing into the shed beside the rainbow-colored beehouse, he reappears without his blue apron. His tie and the cape over his shoulders suggest that he is going on a trip. He bends down to the rivulet that runs through the garden and washes his hands in it. Without a stick he makes his way to the gate; the members of the staff greet him when they see him coming. The director, whose car door has just been opened by a subordinate, takes his hat off to the old man and wishes him a pleasant and profitable day in town, speaking as one might to a person of importance, but also, with mock respect, to an old crackpot. It seems likely that they will all exchange smiles behind his back.
Out on the square he turns back to look at the chapel that occupies the central part of the block-long building. One of its double doors is ajar; in the cleft there is nothing but black. While he jots down something in his breviary-like notebook, an elderly couple hobbles past behind him. In the same loud, hard-of-hearing voice, they both say at once: “He’s writing again.”
On a busy street in the center of town the old man stops and squats down over a cracked paving stone. He blows the dust off it and spreads one of the thin, still-empty pages of his notebook over it and starts rubbing with a lead pencil. Little by little the outlines of a letter, then of two more letters, appear on the paper: AVT, a fragment of a Roman inscription, meaning uncertain—“or?”; “but?”; “autumn?” He is oblivious of the onlookers, more and more of whom gather around him, as if he were a famous sidewalk painter; not even the hissing and sparkling of a hot-air balloon hovering over the street distracts their attention.