With the exception of Uncle Sergei, no one laughed, but Herr Tarangolian didn’t seem to have been looking to elicit merriment at all.
“I can’t think of anything more characteristic for Czernopol,” he said. “This joke, filtered through forty dead people, seems like an ideogram of our city — a single image containing all the elements of its spiritual structure. It calls to mind the strange alternative posed by Tildy, by which I mean his either/or—whether the solution is about justice or about a joke. Nowhere is the deadly comic quality of the grossly unjust made so clear as here, but only as a joke, in the moral function of wit, in its lightning-flash illumination of the one true and incontrovertibly genuine reality in the paradox. What does it mean, then: destruction, decomposition, decay? I recall finding a leaf that had decayed down to the veil-like veins of its ribs. And in that state of decomposition it had become uncommonly beautiful, a natural work of art, reduced to its most essential, highly ordered and compacted into an idea. But again, it was only a paradox of itself, in the uselessness of those same ribs that no longer held anything together, the joke of a leaf, so to speak — rather in the way a skeleton is a macabre joke of a human being. And still it seemed to me that the greatest possible justice had been done to the leaf, by the manner of its destruction into this basic sketch …”
Herr Tarangolian studied the intact ash-cone of his cigar, lowered it carefully to the ashtray, and tapped it off.
“Please forgive my boundless chatter,” he said. “I’m letting my emotions get the better of me. Partir, c’est mourir un peu, n’est-ce pas? Because you are always parting from yourself … Perhaps everything I think and say is wrong. Perhaps”—he arched one of his magician’s eyebrows—“my thinking is intentionally wrong and my speech a deliberate lie — in order to deceive myself. I am leaving this city and have to hold myself accountable for the state in which I leave it. Perhaps”—he smiled broadly, so that his all-too-perfect teeth appeared under his blackened mustache—“perhaps I am removing myself from all accountability by claiming that our human idea of order doesn’t exist at all except in our minds, in our thinking, in the artificial sketch — in other words, not in nature but only in art. That leaves it to whim whether we act in one way or another, depending on how serious we are. Because what I truly believe is that we are not capable of comprehending the world, but merely of interpreting it — and, to be sure, the simpler our interpretation, the better. The more resolutely our interpretations vanish into one point, whether it carries the name of God or is merely some symbol for relative nothingness — the more stable the earth is under our feet. It is the privilege of the dumbest as well as the wisest to have firm ground beneath their feet. Both live in the blessed state of simplification. And it makes no difference whether they inhabit the center of this world — which we are told is a sphere — or the outermost surface. After all, this sphere may also be conceived negatively — not imagined, but conceived — so that the periphery may just as well be considered the middle, and the center its surface …”