An icy chill on the back of the notary’s neck reminded him it was too late for anything now. His skin prickled, and a moment later he felt a pain in the vicinity of his heart. So he returned home, dragging his feet. On the stairs he stopped at every few steps and clung tightly to the balustrade. When he finally made it to the second floor, he ought to have said at least a word to his alarmed wife. But he lacked the strength; he merely took a wad of banknotes from his wallet and ordered the maid to stockpile supplies. Then, for the longest time he fiddled with the dials of the radio. Other than commentaries from far off in foreign languages, eloquent and uninformative, he found nothing but hissing and crackling. If I am the notary, by now everything has started to bother me. My shoes pinch, my collar chafes against my neck, and the daylight dazzles me. I pull down the blinds and turn on the night-light. The new turn of events, which might have seemed unexpected, had in fact for weeks and even months been in the background as an unpalatable but likely possibility. As frequently happens, life had gone calmly on, right alongside a particularly ominous eventuality. If it only failed to materialize as fact, the cost of precautionary steps taken against it would afterwards seem excessive, and the immoderate, pathetic decisions made by the notary would be said to have been driven by panic. Yet what if, on the contrary, with the passage of time it transpires that the greatest and most unforgivable error was a lack of caution? Whatever course of action one takes, one always emerges either a spineless prevaricator safeguarding himself from the worst or an irresponsible risk taker; it’s terribly hard to avoid extremes, not because of a person’s own nature but because life is so poorly balanced. The burden of responsibility for the well-being of oneself and one’s family is the burden of questions without answers. It all arises from the fact that in matters of the greatest weight, only guessing is possible. Up till yesterday certain special ways out were still available; certain loopholes were still open for those most worried. Now, however, they have suddenly been closed, slamming shut all at once with a thud. And in this way the notary and his family have found themselves in a trap.
The student lay impassively on the made-up bed in his cramped attic, smoking a cigarette and blowing perfect pale blue smoke rings towards the ceiling. He too had a radio and was hearing the same hissing and crackling, but in his view it seemed perfectly natural and indicated a desirable turn of events. Having just finished a substantial breakfast, he was not worried about flour or sugar; he gazed at the clear sky through the skylight, confident that he would also be able to eat his fill in the future, which only now was starting to be truly promising. The student must have had a sense that whatever awaited others, the thread of his own story would find itself on top, like a strong cord just right for tying all the rest into a bundle.
Foodstuffs quickly ran out in the local stores. With the help of the concierge, the notary’s maid carried home the last sack of flour, a hundredweight of potatoes, and a slab of lard. For those who had not been quick enough, a black market sprang readily into being with all its extortionate prices. The props that ended up there, all those extra, previously unanticipated sacks of flour and sugar, were prepared in haste, as it were, under pressure of circumstances that were getting out of hand. Those whose job it was to fill the sacks hurriedly reached for plaster and sand, this time in wholesale quantities, in the hope that before the truth emerged, subsequent events would render it unimportant.
The notary asks himself why he failed for so long to take any action, since he was one of those most alarmed. His heart utterly refuses to obey him, now faltering, now pounding away. Why had he not gotten rid of those damned government bonds in time, even at a loss? Why had he not closed up his practice, placed his capital in Swiss francs, and liquidated ahead of time the apartment on the second floor of number seven? He’s already managed to forget certain crucial circumstances, and so he is unable to comprehend how, as one who bears responsibility for the welfare of his family and for his children’s future, he could have permitted himself such a risky delay when he knew all along what needed to be done. He never intended to flee to the frozen north, rather to the warm south. And it all came to nothing precisely because he would have had to order a lightweight, bright-colored suit suitable for a lightweight life in bright southern lands. He put the whole matter off till later, until the time when in the place of the movie theater they would open a new fashion store with off-the-rack clothing. The local inhabitants did not understand that this was not possible. If it had been permissible to choose one’s attire according to one’s own preferences, to be one thing or another as one wished, the story would have fallen apart the moment it began.
As early as ten fifteen, when he took the first telephone call in the café, the notary was asking himself why life was so hard. Hard, and at the same time without meaning, and furthermore cruel, because carrying its weight served no purpose. Since it was without meaning, why could it not be made easier? The notary sensed that the moment was approaching when he would be forced to accept conditions of surrender, and would cease wiping flecks of blood from the bathroom mirror. It was only desires, like half-crazed soldiers assigned to an impossible position by a staff error, that were resisting the invincible forces of inertia, when the whole rest of the army was in retreat.
The suit jacket is already back on the wooden hanger, its sleeves hanging limply at its sides. The notary pulls off his shoes and his necktie. In this manner his office moves further away and vanishes for good. He has just remembered something and has rung for the maid. He wants to know if his son has come back home. He has not. And what about his wife, is she up yet? She’s sitting by the window in her dressing gown, watching out for their son, from time to time wiping the steamed-up window with her handkerchief, as if the mist from her own breath were keeping him from view. His wife is being overly dramatic, so the notary believes. The boy has long outgrown his soft cotton baby clothes, and now he needs his independence so as not to become a victim of fate. If I am the notary, in times long gone I too became the victim of fate, for no more profound reason than the softness of cotton and the cut of clothing that my mother continued to regard as suitable when even younger children were dressed in a more grown-up fashion. The memory of that ancient embarrassment, like other memories, was assigned to the notary along with his top-quality wardrobe; it was sewn into it like the stiffener in a shirt collar. Unfortunately, it always reemerges at the sight of his son with his round glasses and his hesitant smile. It does not make the wielding of paternal authority any the easier. Bringing up a little girl is a lot more enjoyable.
So what is the girl up to? She’s fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room, tired after a long cry. For some unknown reason, the maid delivered this information in a disagreeable and resentful tone before returning to her work. To minding the pots. To the personals in last week’s newspaper. She reads them furtively, ready at any moment to hide the paper from her mistress. She’s ashamed of wanting a better fate for herself. Her eyes swollen, she struggles through the tiny print, her index finger pushing the sluggish syllables along. She would get married at the drop of a hat, before dinner even. She would leave the pots on the stove — let them burn. The miraculously acquired provisions, gotten by dint of long waits in long lines, she would abandon just like that, leaving them where they lay in the pantry. She’s had enough of the life that fell to her lot along with the linen apron. There’s no lack of lawyers. They don’t have to be notaries. Some are judges; others, more handsome, are attorneys. She doesn’t aim so high; in the columns of advertisements, she’s looking, for example, for a sign from a modest law clerk who doesn’t have to be well off. He needs only to be seeking an honest and thrifty partner; prosperity will follow in due course. The maid forgets too easily that she is lacking the most important thing: the right costume, which is indispensable if her fate is to change.