Melkior pronounced the word himself, inside, his eyes still closed, and repeated it.
“Good morning,” he said without relinquishing his dream. He wished to retreat into the labyrinths of false sounds, the echoes of amicable distances; to let the sleeper go on toying with words; to grant waking the benefit of another morning from the other world … but the voice from the adjoining room was tenaciously repeating its lesson, practicing a difficult language: Citizens, this is not an exercise. What you are hearing is our guns. Our country is under attack. We are at war.
Our guns! heard Melkior with emotion. He sees hardened warriors, our men, intrepid, smiling self-confidently … O-ri-en-ted … by moss, “Listen up, look at him …” disarray in the image of the stable: Caesar’s croup … Nettle; barking at the lightbulb … piss off, I don’t want to see you again, ever …
Early this morning our capital city was … something like a thunderclap covered the voice from the adjoining room. The announcer cleared his throat, composed. “He’s overcome with emotion at the roar of our guns!” Melkior was trying to retrieve the emotion, but the very words disbelieved their own sentence, scoffed at its sweetness.
“That’s anti-aircraft,” could be heard from the street.
They are shooting at Kurt. Melkior sees him up there, high in the sky, “Duty calls, Herr Professor,” keeping an eye on his Cozy Corner around the corner … Well, well! muses the delighted Kurt.
“Call this shooting? The man must be blind!”
“It’s the height, man, the aeroplane’s way too high up. Reconnaissance, he’s not carrying bombs.”
“Of course, he’s carrying bonbons for the little children. What did I tell you — there he is, dropping chocolates, they’ve got chocolate to spare.”
“He’s dropping leaflets, leaflets!” shouted the judge from the window, educating the imbeciles in the street. Why be rude — it might make them go back for real bombs.
“Parcheesi,” said Melkior.
Do not drink the water, the announcer came on again. There is reason to suspect that the water has been poisoned by enemy agents. Do not use water until we have broadcast the laboratory report …
“Utterly ridiculous propaganda!” the lawyer was saying angrily on the landing. “Why, they’ll be here by tomorrow … what do you think they’ll do … poison themselves? Preposterous. Danica, get me a glass of water!”
“Oh, please, Dad, don’t …”
“Get me a glass of water, you ninny! Take a big one from the kitchen!”
“Doctor, perhaps you really shouldn’t …” came the landlady’s anxious voice.
“Shouldn’t nothing,” the lawyer was shouting angrily. “I’ll show you who’s poisoning the population! They poison the water? As if they had nothing better to do … Ptui, this is mineral water! You want me to crack your skull? I said, pour me a glass of water!”
“I was so scared, Daddy …”
Not to fear, daughter, said Melkior to her, your Daddy knows their plans did not include poisoning … Kurt and ATMAN and Dad and Auntie … Viviana … they all knew. Perhaps Don Fernando was right after all …
“There — has anything happened to me?” The lawyer had performed an ad hoc analysis on the landing and achieved the desired effect. The tenants were looking at him with respect as a man knowledgeable about this new thing that was happening …
God knows what else things will come to … They were retreating to their nests; their locks went click … to be on the safe side.
“Poisoned the water, indeed,” the lawyer was yelling after them, “well, just let me see if there’s anyone else to say they did!”
Melkior felt like shouting: yes, there is — I do! But he nevertheless tucked his head under the blanket and fell to gnawing his already well-gnawed bone: O body of mine … In the intimate darkness, erotically, cannibalistically, he sensed the odor of his body. This is presumably what cannibals and women feel when close up to a man … does that mean I wish to eat, and make love to, myself? The bones (he happened to have a kneecap in hand), gnaw the bones, copulate with the shadow.
The self-abusing autophage. The thrilling presence of one’s own body. And (like that night on the train’s hard bench) he fell to exploring his strange structure. So: an undamaged skeleton … ay, thou poor ghost, is still lying here with me. It knows the lever and scale laws and walk, jump, run, get up, lie down, sit down; knows what “we could fall” means when on a sheet of ice, knows what means a polite bow or a kick (with the right foot, or indeed the left, as you wish), what means the hand moving easily across paper, leaving in its wake black, bent, intertwined, broken threads of tortured thoughts. All those pipes, valves, bladders, pumps, membranes, filaments, communications networks; mechanics, optics, acoustics: the world broken down into tones and colors, odors, tastes, into rough and smooth, hard and soft, warm and cold, sweet and bitter. All those laboratories, cabinets, institutes, precision instruments for a fine reading of life’s safety. … In here, lying with me, is this perfect world: wisely ticking its little time in its little darkness … and outside there’s a war on. And that lethal insect has already been released from Essen, homing in on this perfection …
The door opened noisily and somebody burst into the room.
“Ha-ha, will you look at him?” Ugo bared his black fillings. “Worlds colliding outside, and he’s caught up in self-abuse! Hey,” he yanked the blanket off Melkior, “we’re under attack! Sir, there’s a war raging out there!”
“How did you get in?” wondered Melkior pulling the blanket back up to his chin. “Wasn’t the door locked?”
“You failed to take the first precaution for safety in time of war. First you lock the door and only then do you pull the blanket up over your head. This is what the mentally retarded bird known as the ostrich does.”
What the devil brought him here now?
“I’m not in a mood for joking. Leave me alone, let me sleep.”
“Perchance to dream? What about the war then — nothing, a mere joke? Why, this is against mankind!”
Everything’s a joke to him, damn his … Melkior was irritated by the eccentric, irresponsible “Parampionic style” at a time like this …
“Will you for God’s sake leave me in peace!” he finally shouted.
“Wouldn’t that be nice! I, too, would have preferred ‘in peace’ … along with Immanuel Kant, but they won’t let me. Did you hear me: we have been attacked.”
“I know, so what? Shall I set up dominoes for them?”
“Well, that’s not a bad idea in fact … as the first line of defense. You match three to three, five to five, laying them in different directions to confuse things, set up traps … bravo! Tell me, did you see that in a dream?”
Melkior did not answer. Lying on his stomach he was looking over the edge of the bed at his slippers on the floor. Old, faithful, scuffed. There they are, waiting, motionless ever since the night before, patient, indifferent to anything that is not me. They have no idea they have experienced war. And when I descend from the bed they will piously kiss the soles of both my feet and come with me, rustling prayers for the warmth of my feet, for my comfort, for the happiness of my solitude. How I have worn them! O good my Slippers, never before have I noticed your dedicated and quiet life down there on the floor. …
“Come on, Eustachius, get up and let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Why, out, to watch the war. That kind of thing you only get to see once in a lifetime.”