Yet I could not reconcile myself to that notion. If that had been my goal, I had committed a huge blunder; I ought to have written something else, a more saleable commodity — a comedy, for example. But that had not been the goal, as I keep on asserting; it had only became that in the course of implementation, without my knowledge or consent, so to say, indeed without my even noticing at all. What did I care about those others for whom I may have written my novel but who did not so much as enter my head while I was writing it?! What kind of chance was it — and even as a chance, what kind of unforeseeable, inconsequential, idiotic chance — if our common business, my novel and their entertainment, happened to chime?! And however absurd, in practice — and purely in practice — that is precisely what I had been striving for; so now I have to declare that I did not achieve my goal — the goal that was never my goal. But in that case, what had been the original sense of my goal, my undertaking? I swear I don’t remember; it could be that I never thought about it; and now I shall never know, because that sense had become mislaid somewhere — who knows where — in the course of the undertaking.
I get up from the table. Almost involuntarily, like an automatic reflex, my feet start moving around the apartment. I cross the room, through the wide-open door into the hallway, strike my right shoulder on the open-door to the bathroom, and reach the end of the apartment. Here I turn about, skirt the open door to the bathroom, strike my right shoulder on the hallway wardrobe, cross the room and reach the window, turn again. A distance of about 23 feet. Relatively commodious for a cage. Up and down, up and down; turn at the front door, turn at the window. This had once been a regular habit of that fellow, the novel writer, the chap with whom once, just a few months ago, I had been identical. Those were the times when his most notable ideas sprang to mind. I didn’t have anything to think about. Yet slowly something nevertheless was taking shape inside me. If I distinguish it from the mild dizziness caused by walking and from other contingent impressions, I discover a definable feeling. I suppose my state of affairs was materialising in it. It would be hard for me to put it into words — and that’s exactly the point: it settles itself in spaces that lie outside of words. It cannot be couched in an assertion, nor in a bald negation either. I cannot say that I don’t exist, as that is not true. The only word with which I could express my state, not to speak of my activity, does not exist. I might approximate it by saying something like ‘I amn’t.” Yes, that’s the right verb, one that would convey my existence and at the same time denote the negative quality of that existence — if, as I say, there were such a verb. But there isn’t. I could say, a bit ruefully, that I have lost my verb.
I have had enough of my walk; I sit down. I snuggle down, nestle deep into the armchair, adopting a curled-up posture as if in some Brobdingnagian womb. Maybe I am hoping I shall never have to emerge from here, never go out into the world. Why should I? And then I am also a bit afraid of the stranger who will nevertheless struggle to his feet out of here in the end. In a certain sense, it will be someone other than the person to whom I have grown accustomed until now. Nor can it be any other way, for he has completed his work, fulfilled his purpose: he had flopped utterly. He had transmuted my person into an object, diluted my stubborn secret into a generality, distilled my inexpressible truth into symbols — transplanting them into a novel I am unable to read; he is alien to me, in just the same way that he alienated from me that raw material — that incomparably important chunk of my own life from which he himself had originated. I shall miss it, and perhaps … why deny it, perhaps I shall also miss the person who brought it all off. Yes, as I sit in the armchair a startling feeling suddenly passes through me: a bleak and chilly feeling of some irrevocable occurrence, a bit like the feeling when the last guest has gone after a big party. I have been left alone. Someone has departed, leaving an almost physical void in my body, and this very instant, with a malicious smirk on his face, is waving a final farewell from the far corner of the room. I stare impotently after him, I do not have the strength to detain him. Nor do I even wish to: I harbour a feeling of mild but firm resentment toward him — let him go to hell, he tricked me …
“That he did,” said the old boy, “that he did, the numbskull!”
“Did you get any work done?”
“Of course.”
New development in the bistro: the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) had made a surprise assault on the bar counter and snatched away the order chits from the spike (checking up on the old boy’s wife) (as to whether, in point of fact, she had passed through the charges for all the meals on her tray) (as if, let us say, she was not always in the habit of doing so) (in proof of which postulate the risible) (and equally futile demonstration could end up showing nothing else than that the old boy’s wife had on this occasion) (as ever) (passed them through).
“If I really wanted to steal,” the old boy’s wife said indignantly, “she could scrabble after my orders as much as she wants. I could carry off half the kitchen under her nose without her noticing it.”
“I’m sure,” the old boy agreed. “So why don’t you do that?” he enquired almost absent-mindedly as he was spooning his soup.
“I don’t know. Because I’m stupid,” his wife said.
In any case (his wife said), that was evidently the sole result of today’s announcement (to the effect that from now onwards she too wanted to work in the evenings); and if one can perhaps also discern in it some explanation for the peculiar (yet for all that by no means logical) logic, as an outcome of her colleague, Mrs. Boda (whose first name was Ilona) recently taking, instead of greeting her, to looking the other way, for the harder (in fact, totally impossible)-to-understand reason why the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) shared that grievance (unless, perhaps, the key to the mystery was to be sought in the bedlam of those wild hours when the Old Biddy would find urgent barrel-tapping and other tasks for the bartender to attend to in the cellar) (right at the height of the evening rush) (at which times, with obvious magnanimity and shrinking from no pains, she herself, in her white coat, would stand in at the bar) (like the captain of a ship at a hurricane-lashed helm) (at which times the colleague who was called Mrs. Boda was obliged, like her other colleagues, to pass through the orders for draught beverages directly to her) (if indeed she passed them through) (the only way of establishing which fact beyond a shadow of doubt would be to snatch the order chits right away from the spike) (the right to do which, however, was the sole prerogative of the Old Biddy — the chief administrator, to give her her official title).
“So that’s why there’s a deficit,” the old boy commented (shrewdly). “They’re pilfering.”
“That may well be,” his wife said.
“I’m going out for a little walk,” the old boy declared later on.
The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet.
It was morning.
(Again.)
He was translating.
He was translating from German (German being the foreign language that he still did not understand the best, relatively speaking, as the old boy was in the habit of saying).
antwortete nicht—the old boy read in the book (from which he was translating).
did not answer—the old boy tapped onto the sheet of paper that had been inserted in his typewriter (onto which he was translating).