Calling things by their names helps only briefly. Everything named also falls into oblivion, because tomorrow each word will be needed again for something else. Events for which words escape everyone will fall into oblivion first. Faded definitions are like lost deposit slips — the recollections to which they refer can no longer be retrieved. Oblivion wipes away gestures and grimaces; it wipes away chased clouds, raindrops on windows, gusts of wind. Inhabitants of the city try to create new words that will be more convenient than the old ones — but they try in vain. The new words are no improvement, and just like the old ones they obey no one’s will. The city of changes was created by memory in search of needles in haystacks. It is utterly dependent on recollections, those castles in the sand washed away by tidewaters. Harried by the waves of oblivion, it requires inhabitants that bear within themselves thoughts, questions and desires in which city landscapes are embedded — so that the city might remember itself.
The eyes of passersby gaze every day upon underground passageways, marketplaces and police stations. They gaze upon inscriptions on walls and in stairwells. The hand resting on the banister feels beneath its fingers the old chipped enamel. It is in this way that everyday thoughts are recovered. These are for the most part small and hard morning thoughts that contain the tiniest possible questions or no questions whatsoever. They hide in clothing, in objects, in furniture, differently from evening thoughts, whose sharp little needles are stuck beneath skulls for memory’s sake. The walls of stairwells are marked by streaks and stains, each one from something different, some already very old. Certain thoughts for which there was no room elsewhere can be so completely absorbed into the shape of a stain that one encounters them every time one climbs or descends the stairs. Thanks to this they endure, saved for some time yet from oblivion. Later it transpires that the same stain has come to mean something else. The language of stains is impoverished and slipshod. The same shapes have to convey contradictory meanings. But these meanings themselves are so slipshod and impoverished that the shapes of the stains seem only too good for them.
Though this is not a rule, more significant thoughts may take on the shape of a large object, for instance a tram standing at a stop. At such times they drive off with the tram, leaving memory with the impossible task of searching for them. And it is only this task that keeps together the round billion of dark red bricks. The city of changes, constructed by memory and destroyed by oblivion, is a city of death.
The tide of death spares only the stone bricklayers and foundrymen in their stone clothing, gazing at the traffic with stone eyes from their alcoves. For the kind of life they have within themselves is not subject to destruction even in floods, fires or the demolition of buildings. A broken-off stone head can continue to exist; it is no more motionless than when it was attached to a neck. An isolated hand remains as inactive as when fastened to a forearm. An index finger remains the same even at the bottom of the river, half-buried in mud and entwined with algae. Even crushed stone spread on roads has its weight and volume and its position in space.
The life of stones is entirely free of coercion. When they lose support they fall down. Having fallen they lie there. True, they have no influence over the form they are given; but they accept it with absolute indifference. With the same indifference they endure or crumble. Whatever happens they will never add anything from themselves. They never contribute the slightest effort to any undertaking. They are never pleased and never worried, nor can they ever be persuaded of anything. They are imperturbable, because they are not afraid of suffering. Light-bulbs too do not weep when they are switched off; cables do not attempt to avoid short circuits and firewood does not flee from the flames.
The inhabitants of the city might well envy the stones their freedom, if they were capable of perceiving it. Yet they too, though they do not know it and do not wish to, besides the ephemeral life of their bodies and minds, contain within themselves the indestructible life of stones. Whereas that which they themselves call their life turns out to be a fever eating away at their thoughts, which are tormented by the perpetual movements of sand, the powerlessness of clay, and the troubling plash of water. The inhabitants of the city want nothing to do with the life of stones, the only life that is in fact given to them. They are repelled by the stony calm of walls, and especially the certainty of the stone hand, which never trembles; by the firmness of features that never know sorrow and by the cold indifference of the monolith. The world of silence that endures inside the stones and the bricks, a world devoid of thoughts, feelings or desires, astounds and frightens them. And life without desires seems even more unbearable than the life without fulfillments that is experienced every day by many an inhabitant of the city.
Stupefied by the muddle of signs covering the walls, they miss the questions that dwell within the walls themselves. Those to which any answer is sufficient yet that nevertheless must remain unanswered, since they are stacked upon one another, forever joined by the cement of convictions. The answers to the questions that appear in the posters are attached to them with string, like a label on an item for sale secured additionally by a lead seal. The greatest number of questions are imprisoned within a desire. They ride up and down, like an elevator rattling the cage of its shaft. Or they roll along between two sidewalks like an abandoned ball, bouncing first one way then another, ever more slowly. Those that are light as down float in the air and are blown away on the wind. Everywhere there are multitudes of them, though no one needs them. But there is a shortage of questions that easily cut through space in search of answers. The city built of questions that have lost their momentum, and of routine answers, contains nothing that surprises or captures the attention. It is obvious that memory has nothing to latch on to here.
Each route is driven by trams bearing now one number, now another. In the middle of the street there suddenly appears a scrap-metal warehouse with boarded-up windows. It sometimes happens that the same place cannot be found twice, because the layout of streets has changed overnight. An elegant passage may suddenly become a foul-smelling blind alley; a luxury hotel will turn into a homeless shelter. This city is so dislocated that its Paris — a place about which all that is known is that they cannot make silk purses out of sows’ ears there — has been transformed into a trash heap combed by hobos. An old umbrella with twisted spokes juts from it instead of the Eiffel Tower.
But in a city like this, even if it were made of gold and platinum and encrusted with diamonds, every precious building would still be merely a repository of disquiet; columns of wrongly posed questions would support arches of unserviceable answers and every door, without exception, could turn out to be the worst possible exit. And even if the city were constructed entirely of brand-new bricks and fresh plaster, pipes without a trace of rust, spotless windows and sidewalks glistening like mirrors, it would still remain a cage and a prison.
Like the countless reflections of an invisible dust mote in a kaleidoscope, there will multiply the numbers of Left Bank Parisian bistros in which girls in low-cut dresses lean over cups of black coffee with French novels in their hand. Red lightbulbs will shine over a street corner evidently detached from the Soho district of London, with garishly lit signs in English. In place of the pissoirs there appears a smoke-filled pub in which Irish poets drink, sing and play darts, while fanatical terrorists in army jackets plant time bombs. The place of the post office is taken by a New York drugstore where at four in the morning a pale theater critic suffering from a migraine will call in for sleeping pills. In the closed-down stocking repair shop there can be found a Palermo ice cream parlor in which taciturn men in shades will stare for hours at the glass door, pistols thrust beneath their jackets. At the newspaper kiosk brightly colored paper lanterns will light up while inside there will appear long rows of tables covered with tablecloths, on which dishes of snake and monkey meat will be served. Forever trapped in this city and occupying within it less space than a bookmark, Palermo, Belfast and Hong Kong also go to rack and ruin, and fragments of them are found in ever different and more unexpected places.