What I missed this particular Holy Week was the usual ringing of the bells. I hungered for it. It seemed inconceivable to me that a thinker some decades ago should have praised the big cities of the Communist world on the ground that the “deadly sad Western ringing of bells had been done away with.” The bells were silent. I was not content with the whistling of the wind. Nor with the roaring of the canal down at the rapids. Nor with the monotonously musical electrical purring of the approaching buses. I was reminded of a passage in a writer,of the last century who praised the Roman poet Lucretius, saying that for him the “black pit was infinity itself,” and that his era, extending from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, represented a moment unique in history, “when the gods were dead and Christ had not yet been born, when man alone existed.” During the days when the bells were silent and the wind whistled and the buses purred, or so at least it seemed to me later on, I relived that era.
Yet my experience was rather different from that of the poet Lucretius, allegedly so heroic in his godlessness. It seemed to me as obvious as it was unthinkable that I alone, a human being with death as his goal, existed. Something was lacking, but not Christ and not the gods, and not the immortal soul, but something physicaclass="underline" a sensory organ, the crucial one, without which the whistling of the wind and the purring of the buses remain incomplete.
Often in the past, glancing at a distant mountain ridge, I had seen a procession of climbers without beginning or end, and thought in spite of myself of the famous trek to the gold fields; and in this procession, I, the viewer, was a dark, heavily laden figure among others. However often I looked, that gently rising line, broken by the tops of spruce trees, was uninhabited, orphaned. The lines up and down the pass yielded no human pyramid. How can I give a more accurate picture of the sense that I lacked? Perhaps only Greek has a verb expressing that fusion of perception and imagination (which is essential). On the surface, this verb means only “to notice”; but it carries overtones of “white,” “bright,” “radiance,” “glitter,” “shimmer.” Within me there was an outright longing for this radiance, which is more than any sort of viewing. I shall always long for that kind of seeing, which in Greek is called leukein.
While I waited for the big bells to come back, I conceived an incredible hatred of animals — not so much of birds as of all four- or more-legged animals. The birds with their soaring flight seemed to draw invisible communication lines through the air. But I despised all earthbound animals because, as far as I could see, they gave no thought to any kind of resurrection. They merely huddled, crept, crawled, scurried about, lurked, rutted, or dozed. I almost sympathized with the cruelty of children who kill cats and pull the legs off daddy longlegs.
Yet at the same time it seemed to me that I was reliving the origin of certain Easter rites — when, for instance, I glimpsed the fresh, fleshy white of a horseradish root, dug from deep in the ground; taken together with the lumps of earth clinging to it, that white struck me as a plausible color for life.
All through the weekend I lay stretched out on my bed, incapable of the slightest movement, clenching my teeth and fists, if you can call that lying. Early in the morning, a woman down in the street, who evidently worked in a pastry shop, said: “We’re having a heavy run on Easter eggs.” At noon, the shutters of the supermarket were pulled down for three days. For a long while, in the afternoon, a little bird fluttered up and down outside my window.
With a package tour from somewhere, I landed on the airfield of the moon. From the lobby of the air terminal building, a stairway led down to a restaurant that was jam-packed with Chinese. It was a sinister den, dimly lit and low-ceilinged. In the middle there was a platform — this was the place of slaughter. Naked men with long, curved, two-handed swords flung themselves on other naked but unarmed men. There was no struggle. Nor did the unarmed men run away. They buckled like apes overtaken by a pursuing lion, bared their teeth, and hissed (or rather squeaked) their last cries of terror at the butchers. The soles of the victims’ feet seemed also to buckle and formed high, loudly creaking arches on the platform. A moment later, the whole body was gone. Not only had it been cut into little pieces, but almost simultaneously it had been devoured by the people in the room below. What an instant before had been part of a gesticulating human being was now a chunk of meat vanishing into someone’s gullet. The mouths with these unceasingly active gullets marked, as it were, the innermost core of the Chinese quarter, which at one time had been the hub of all world happening. The slaughter would never end. Time and again, new loads of arms and shoulders were brought in, and in the place of these arms and shoulders there would once again be nothing. We travelers were separated by ropes from the place of slaughter. Bags in hand, we quickly left the airport. The moon was not our final destination; we now went to an elevator at the edge of the airfield, which was to take us back to earth. On the way, we walked under the open sky. Tall acacias rustled in a pale light such as foreshadows a cloudburst. It was not, as one might have expected, easy to walk in the lunar atmosphere — we didn’t hover. From step to step, our limbs grew heavier. I had no difficulty breathing, but felt that I soon would have. It was still a long way to the elevator stop, a windowless, sheet-metal shack, which was ringed by people waiting with suitcases. The only hope was to wake up. But I couldn’t manage to.
At length, the bundle on the bed opened its eyes and sat up. There was a color in the room. It came from the hibiscus plant growing in a large flowerpot next to the wall; a single blossom had opened, carmine against a purple, almost black ground. The pale pink pistil in the middle gleamed like the glass core of a lightbulb, and at the tip were the erect orange-yellow stamens. The flower was within reaching distance, and I held out my hand toward it. I had tried to feel it the day before, but all sense of touch had gone out of my fingers, and I had thought that the still-unfolding flower, as so often with hibiscus flowers, had already shriveled. Now I held a living weight, which cooled my hand and regulated my pulse.