The policeman moves on as the streetcar continues its route around the square. How would that rather faded uniform sit on me? Maybe it would pinch under the arms? If I am the policeman, there was a time when I risked my neck in the trenches for the emblem that appears on my cap. Let’s say that in my collarbone I bear a memento of the last war — the vestige of a brief and fortuitous instant of unparalleled heroism that can be recounted over a bottle for the rest of my life. On state holidays I pin a medal to my uniform. The fragment of shrapnel makes itself felt with a shooting pain when the weather’s about to change, especially if rain is on the way. Still quite handsome, I grunt in the bathroom every morning. Then, standing in my long johns in front of a cracked mirror, I soap up my cheeks with a shaving brush. I button up my uniform, which after years of service has grown a little tight around the waist. In the evening my wife, a dozen curlers in her hair, fries up some potatoes and pork rinds, griping all the while, and then stokes the stove with more coal since she still has to put the laundry on. The policeman sits on a kitchen stool in his undershirt, his pants rolled up, and soaks his corns in a basin.
At such moments, as if in a dream, through half-closed eyes he sometimes happens to picture the notary’s maid and a shudder passes through his entire body. In principle, though, he prefers to reflect on bitter and concrete things — his woefully meager wages, and the promotion that passed him by. The endless tedium of writing reports. Day after day that onerous task is put off till the late evening, and then what? A person is even less inclined to do the job, but there’s no getting out of it. His wife, shifting the pots about on the stovetop, has no idea how burdensome it is. The pork rinds sputter in the frying pan, and clouds of smoke fill the kitchen all the way up to the ceiling, which has grown black during all the years they’ve been married. A coating has accumulated on the painted paneling and the yellowed white of the cabinet doors. Every day it’s washed off with a cloth soaked in soapy water. The stale mingled odor of soap and grease lingers in the nooks and crannies. But the policeman is unaware of it, since that is the smell of his entire life.
If I am the notary’s maid, on the second floor of the apartment building at number seven I take the vegetables out of the basket and set about making lunch. I’m not attracted to the policeman whatsoever, but it’s nice to see how, when he spots me, he pulls in his stomach beneath his tight uniform jacket. In any case, he’s too old and he’s married. I like someone else: the law student. Peelings fall into a bucket; all at once the knife slips, and blood drips from a cut on her finger. It’s nothing serious; it’ll heal before her wedding day, as the saying goes. It’s all because of the student. Because of his smart jacket, and especially the sweater that he wears underneath on cold days. At the thought of the sweater her heart skips a beat — it’s hard to believe wool can be so soft. In the evenings the maid sobs into a wet pillow. She does not get her hopes up. He’s always looking the other way when he passes her. And even if he spoke to her, a giggle suppressed by a work-chapped hand would have to suffice for a response. She senses that she knows only words of the lowest quality, those which, like the chicken she is making broth with, have wings that are not made for flight. Other, better words are lacking. What they are, the maid does not know. Something light, easygoing and fanciful, since only words like that can capture the attention of well-dressed bachelors. Words created for eligible young ladies. Beyond a doubt created mostly for them. She would give anything to know what it is that young ladies talk about with the student. Yet she has never seen him with any of them; he’s always alone. He would be walking along the sidewalk beneath the windows overlooking the street, while the young ladies were on the illuminated screen in the dark movie theater, in silk dresses, lovely as butterflies.
While the grammar school custodian is cleaning up the mess by the school railings, cursing the unknown drunk who puked on his sidewalk, the policeman stops outside number three, by the window display of the photographic studio, to cast a dreamy glance in its direction as he does every day. Here everything is in its place; in the middle is a large photograph of a woman in a white fur coat. With the passage of years, she has not aged in the slightest and is still just as beautiful and just as unattainable. She looks absently at the policeman from the depths of a different story — one that is black and white but even so is more attractive and more edifying than this one, which matches the color of the yellowing plaster and twines in a crooked knot round the flower bed in the square. The policeman touches the peak of his cap respectfully, then moves on. Aside from the portrait there is nothing dear to him in the window, which is filled entirely with wedding pictures, including one of him and his wife, rather discolored now. The pairs all look alike — a black tailcoat and a white veil. If the veils were separated from the tailcoats and the halves of pictures shuffled, the newlyweds themselves would probably be unable to find their own likenesses in the mass of almost identical figures. Nevertheless the photographer, at this time of the morning closed up in his darkroom, is developing pictures of infants one after another. These prints, paid for in advance and impatiently awaited, bear witness, on the contrary, to the permanence of the order that joins couples together till death, and even beyond.
At this hour the notary, burdened by his own weight and suffering from insomnia, is just getting out of bed. He blows his nose into a white handkerchief, marking it with dark flecks of congealed blood; he brushes his teeth, leaving streaks of red on the porcelain washbasin. Somehow or other a few dark red specks have even managed to appear on the mirror, right in the middle of the reflection of his bald head. A tense and unpleasant grimace twists his mouth as he wipes the mirror clean. He reaches for the shaving brush, then for his razor. In the reflection, his artery pulses beneath his unprotected skin. If I am the notary, I shave with caution, and my hand never trembles. Before my eyes I can still see the blood I just wiped off the mirror, a reminder that my body is tired and all set to lower its tone. To cheer himself up, the notary hums a popular aria from an operetta in a rather pleasant baritone. He has a hope that things will once again return to the way they used to be; against common sense he believes he will never give in. Yet even if capitulation is inevitable, he has no choice but to endure in wordless resistance as long as his strength permits. What else can he do? Nothing but fasten the buttons on his pants, his shirt, his vest. Slip his watch into its pocket and pin the gold chain across his fat belly.
Before he puts on the jacket of the three-piece suit, he ought to ring for the maid and have her bring him his coffee. But instead he himself quietly enters the kitchen. He sees the maid’s back as she leans over the table, peeling vegetables. He measures her with his gaze from the threshold, and recalls one by one the women he once used to visit. All were better looking than her, and all better dressed. Secretaries, nightclub singers, wealthy widows of his clients. But that is all gone for good. The notary sighs. He walks up to her and places his hands under her apron and her blouse, no more. In order to allow himself such a caprice in his own home, he has to abandon for a moment his role as respectable lawyer, breadwinner, and paterfamilias — or rather, to take advantage of the fact that the real notary is still suspended on the wooden hanger used for the three-piece suit, blind and deaf, sleeves hanging inertly at each side. The thought of doing something behind the real notary’s back always involves a certain risk. At such a moment it’s the easiest thing to fall and dislocate one’s spine, for instance, and thus for the longest time to be unable to return to the point of departure, where there is simply the glint of a wedding ring as the hand raises a cup of coffee to the lips.