The edifice, which reached as high as the clouds, on certain frosty days resembled a glass mountain crowned by a needle with an icy sheen. On foggy days passersby would be startled when it loomed unexpectedly out of the whiteness and revealed itself for a moment, very close, immense, immense, and then just as suddenly disappeared. Though efforts were made to prevent other buildings from concealing it, due to the changeability of the weather and the light it could not always be in plain view. But it was this building that was the heart of the city. In the evening it grew completely deserted and was locked up, in this way isolating the heart from the rest of the organism. It may be that at night the city did not require a heart. Because what would a heart be, in the machinery of the city, if not its principal pump and central valve, a place where the pressure of the flow of what is necessary and what is unnecessary is regulated? It would seem that at night, when the city slept, there was no flow and all movement ceased.
At the moment when the centrally located palace was locked up shoals of fifteen-watt lightbulbs could be observed from its heights. By their wan light it would have been possible to see, all set out carefully as in a doll’s house, dressers painted with oil paints, grayish laundry drying on clotheslines strung from the ceiling, rust-colored patches of damp on the walls, packages wrapped in greasy paper and jars of pickled cucumbers hidden from the sight of the tenants across the way, behind lace curtains fastened with tacks to the lower sections of the windows. Above all one would have seen, through billows of steam rising from kettles, unshaven men in undershirts and women in dressing gowns. Who were these people and where had they come from? If someone had looked closely they might have recognized them. But the top floor, from which such an extensive and curious sight was to be observed, remained unoccupied.
The builders did not live there. They were above the everyday; they had no need of kettles, dressers or lace curtains and had no use for clotheslines or for jars of pickled cucumbers. In all probability they lived nowhere. Or rather they lived everywhere, but only in the way that music lives in a concert hall, filling the entire space with its existence. It was they who were lit up in the electric lightbulbs, who fluttered in pennants, and who ticked inside clocks. It was they who, hanging on the walls and looking down keenly through framed glass, thrust the countercity from the city with the power of their gaze. Beneath their eyes cleaning women cleaned, clerks filed documents and mechanics scrubbed and oiled machines. It was precisely for this that the mechanics, clerks, cleaners and all the others rose from their beds every day and donned their assigned outfits. It was for this that the seamstresses sewed, and the bakers baked rolls for them; for this the tram drivers drove their trams, and the bricklayers constructed buildings for them. All the while the children of all these people learned in kindergarten to tie and untie their shoelaces and ate their porridge and milk, waving their spoons about, in order to grow up without delay and reinforce the ranks of those who made sure order was maintained.
Cleaning and repairing, repairing and cleaning, laborious efforts to keep the chaos on the outside, the daily repulsing of the countercity — all this utterly filled the lives of the inhabitants, even though they themselves might imagine they were doing something else, earning money to live on or trying to overcome the hardships of life. And even if the city was equipped with some kinds of special devices to remove what was unnecessary, they had no interest in this, confident that the appropriate office would take care of them.
It was for this race of people with straightforward, cheerful minds that the beautiful streets, squares and gardens were meant; for them were the floors of marble and sandstone and even the mirrors in their gilded frames. It was for them that those times were opened wide toward the broad expanses of the future, toward its boundless plateaus where there rose higher and higher chimneys and further on chimneys higher than the highest ones and others even higher; it seemed that in the future there would be no limit to the height of chimneys. It was precisely the beauty of chimneys that was associated with the captivating charm of the future, that distant realm extending always a little up and to the left-hand side, toward which rose the hopeful gaze of the bricklayer and the steelworker on posters tacked up on the fences around the building sites.
In the beginning the reserves of faith and strength seemed as inexhaustible as the deposits of coal. These reserves, like the coal, lay somewhere down below, underneath the feet of steelworker and bricklayer — feet planted widely as a sign of conviction. Thus, simply through the feet’s contact with the ground faith and strength filled the hearts of the simple, brave people as they stared at that place up there to the left.
The builders gave unstintingly of hands, with thousands of them at their disposal. It may be that they yielded to the temptation to create beauty as well as order, to impose enchantment alongside obedience. Despite the enormous labors required to set the world in motion and to maintain its order painstaking ornamental work was undertaken. Fanciful grates and gutters were made, though beauty served no practical purpose. Thanks to the overabundance of faith and strength, façades were adorned with attics and bas-reliefs, and statues appeared in the recesses of walls. These figures of stone were clad in stone aprons, stone shirts with rolled-up sleeves and stone pants. Their stance was imperturbable; they had protruding eyes without pupils and held a bricklayer’s trowel or carried a pickax over their shoulder. They were a hard-handed race who wore clothes sewn by stone seamstresses and ate loaves of stone; the ablest of the master craftsmen who at the beginning of the world, out of bricks, sheet metal and plaster created all the wonders of that world. Inside their stone pockets were stone documents with a photograph and a stamp from the residence office, stone certificates and stone letters of recommendation. But these cannot be seen, because for us stones have only a surface. The solid interior of the stone belongs to another world: a world in which unity of substance prevails. Ligaments and muscles are as hard as shirt and apron. There is no boundary between the heart and the document in the breast pocket; none between head and cap or between hand and tool.
The unimaginable homogeneity of the stone was an object of wonder, a matchless model and example. For each of the bricklayers made of stone there were dozens of living ones, shock workers on the building sites, yet on whose hands blisters appeared from the handling of bricks and whose documents — while they themselves were beating records on the scaffolding — lay under lock and key in the manager’s desk at the workers’ hostel as security for the blankets they had borrowed from the storeroom; otherwise they could have taken the blankets with them, quitting their job without reason. Fate had presented these people with tasks that were great and important or petty and inconsequential. For each exalted one there were a hundred others imitating every movement of his hands, and a thousand more who had only once ever had the opportunity to see him from a distance, craning their necks as they stood in the crowd.
So that the labor should not be forgotten, and its goal properly understood by the benign sea of heads covered in herringbone caps, a watch was awarded to the hand that laid the first hundred bricks, the one that poured the first steel, and the one that set the first lathe in motion. Photographs were taken of front teeth bared in a smile and tight-fitting jackets decorated with sashes that bore an appropriate inscription. And beneath the jackets was the calm, even, synchronized beating of dark red hearts that were not prone to arrhythmia or pain or even fatigue and kept on pumping blood to the bulging blue veins on work-worn hands. This was how the age of commemorative watches began and also the age of commemorative teapots and irons, an age of ever new inscriptions on sashes, ever new faces in photographs and challenge trophies which were constantly being given and taken away, whereas the cut of the jackets, the rhythm of the hearts and the shape of veins in the hands did not change in the slightest. At its rapturous peak this age was ablaze with crimson plush and gilding, instinct with the trembling of countless rows of seats facing a stage enfolded in draperies and bearing a magnificent presidial table. There resounded torrents of speeches and especially thunderous cascades of applause filling the concert halls in place of music, which none of them needed any longer, even operettas. The echo of shoes creaking in the hallways, the whispers, the coughs and especially the clatter of tin spoons in the snack bar — all this disappeared without a trace in the background.