In a basement room, a cello was being played, a heavy, long-drawn-out rumbling, which, in a manner of speaking, gave the whole house a musical foundation. The cello notes made the time pass more slowly; almost everyone who went by the house stopped to listen; and sometimes the players inside suspended their movements, as though for them, under the spell of Orpheus’ voice, things had stopped moving for a while. At the same time it was ship’s music; the library with its paneled ceiling was the salon, and the little oval windows in the gable were the portholes.
The cello fell silent. A bottle of wine was uncorked. The telephone rang in the entrance hall (“Not for me,” said the master of the house, while someone who could not have been an adult ran down the stairs). In the dark garden, the evergreen leaves of a holly tree glistened; the dull-black shape in it was a sleeping blackbird. A single stone lion, no larger than a hare, crouched on a pedestal near the garden gate. Down in the city, people were besieging the one open shop where cigarettes and newspapers were available. The trains at the railroad station looked colorful and massive, like components of the big cities they had come from or were going to; the tracks were a recumbent pyramid. And far from the station, the broken bottles atop the prison wall suggested pyramids of a very different kind.
Our game on the mountainside was fitful. If one player let his thoughts wander, did that suffice to make the others lose interest? Yet we were all serious about the game. I had seldom played so resolutely and I persisted in playing every hand. But there was no joy in it; only a dogged determination to win. And we couldn’t stop. Instead of becoming, as usual, more intimate as the game went on, we became more estranged. None of us could look his partner in the eye. We observed the rules punctiliously, yet our looks and gestures were those of cheats; and to cheat in this way is to play at playing. A lost feeling came over us. We all felt out of place. And in the place where we should have been long ago, “everything was too late.” On the one hand, five lost card players were on the verge of tears; on the other hand, each went on doing, and overdoing, his own thing: the master of the house kept pouring more wine; the painter, at every glance, discovered and exclaimed about some new color in the room (for instance, those spots of mold on the spine of a book); and the priest, in his capacity as a recognized authority on tarok, author of a treatise on the history of the game in the various countries of Europe, surprised the company by invoking weird and unusual exceptions and sub-exceptions to the rules (though these did not always work in his favor).
Only the politician tried, so to speak, to make the wind change. He proceeded as though he were responsible for the evening, which for him was not just another evening but a time of testing. Especially in his leisure hours, he always felt called upon to prove himself, to show that he could handle any situation. He would jump at the slightest opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for immediate action. If a mouse was sighted, he was the one to wake the sleeping cat and put it on the scent; if a glass fell to the floor, he would instantly block off the disaster zone where splinters threatened — and signal like a traffic cop to the person who arrived with dustpan and brush. Where others were panicked or hesitant, he was in his element. At present, to be sure, his determination that every moment should demonstrate his leadership, energy, and competence only made matters worse. He spoke and moved as though trying to take charge in an overcrowded lifeboat: with an enormous display of muscle, he tries to start the dead engine, and succeeds only in flooding it, while at the same time belaboring the faces and bellies of those to the right and left of him with his elbows, until, with all the fumbling and floundering, the boat threatens to capsize. To reconcile the players, he looked for resemblances. For instance, he found a resemblance in the way the master of the house and the painter put their glasses down after every sip; he discovered that the eyeglasses of the priest and of the master of the house were the same strength; and I, “the teacher,” had in common with him, the politician, if not his political party, at least the habit of pounding my cards with my fist instead of picking them up.
But the politician himself was lost, and more visibly than the rest of us, with eyes agape and beads of sweat on his hairline. The worst of it was that he refused to acknowledge his inability to cope with the situation, and kept on trying. Yet it was just this that brought the others together! While, a moment before, they had been staring into space, they now exchanged covert glances and even smiles, and stretched out their legs under the table in relief. Nothing was lacking but the one word that would have saved the day. But then, quite inexplicably, salvation came, brought by someone’s casual remark about the coming of Easter: “In three days, the bells will ring again.” That was the turning point. With a sense of release, we played a last hand and went downstairs to the dining room for dinner.
After the meal, the master of the house suggested making a fire in the fireplace, and each of the card players wanted to light it. The almost white beech logs lay in a disorderly pile in the wide entrance hall. One player after another carried a few of them in and put them down near the fireplace. All this time, a teenager, the son of our host, was standing outside at the hall telephone, with his back to the wood carriers, pressing the phone to his ear without so much as a glance at all the disturbance. (“It’s been going on like this since the beginning of his vacation,” said the boy’s father.)
The table had been cleared, the door was closed, the fire was burning, the card players sat drinking wine, the predicted snow (“the last snow,” someone said) came flying out of the darkness and beat against the windowpanes, which crackled at first, then were silent, as though a tension in the glass had been relieved; the son in the hallway kept mumbling into the telephone. Each one of the downward-swarming snowflakes was a symbol, undefined and undefinable.
I tapped my temples with my fingertips, as though to relieve some pressure or pain, pushed back my chair, and turned to the priest: “Do thresholds occur in the religious tradition?” I asked him. — “Literally or figuratively?” —“Both.”
While the priest pondered, the others said whatever came into their heads.
The master of the house: “Our cat here never runs thoughtlessly over a threshold. It always stops first and carefully sniffs the ground. Sometimes it avoids contact with the threshold and jumps. It’s only when escaping from a dog, for instance, that it loses no time in crossing a threshold; all it wants is to be inside. Then of course it’s the pursuer that hesitates.”
The politician: “I have two sorts of recurrent dreams about thresholds. In the first, I’m in my stocking feet; I slide off the threshold because, regardless of whether it’s wood or stone, it’s exceedingly smooth and rounded at the edges. But I always get to the other side safely, and my fear helps me. In sliding off, I ask myself: Where am I? And precisely because of my fright, I know where I am. In this case, the threshold is something like the take-off board in the broad jump. In the other sort of dream, it’s just the threshold of a room, a mere strip of metal such as you often find in new buildings. But I’m incapable of crossing it. In the whole dream, nothing happens, just that I’m standing by the open door, looking at my face, which is reflected in the metal under me. Once, when I managed to turn around, I saw behind me a glass cage full of simultaneous interpreters, all waiting for me to start making my speech.”
The painter: “Two ancient peoples were such bitter enemies that when one had defeated the other, it smashed the statues in the other’s temples and used the stone for paving its thresholds at home. In some cultures, we find labyrinth designs outside the thresholds; their purpose, we are told, is not so much to protect the threshold as to make intruders stop and consider a detour. To me personally, thresholds are no problem. I’m not mature enough for that. Nevertheless, I’ve sometimes thought: If there are paintings over doorframes, why not build thresholds and make them more recognizable by means of colored forms? We’ll see.”