It took us a while to find two glasses and a plastic cup, and then time, too, began to disintegrate, and later, the next morning, I wasn’t always able to find the right sounds for the images that had been cropping up before my eyes. I would see, for instance, Ivan Matulić’s grandson sobbing, or his face convulsing into an awful grimace, but his words didn’t reach me, and instead my voice would be monotonously listing the exemplars of prairie flora and fauna, though I don’t remember that we had been talking about that at all; or I would see Daniel Atijas, say, shake his head and speak with incredulity while all I could hear was Ivan Matulić’s grandson’s drunken song, and that in an unfamiliar language. There were, however, also whole fragments, as well as those that, though whole, went on in silence. The only thing lacking was sound fragments in darkness, though that part of the night plunged regularly into darkness and then swam out of it again. Just as the body has no memory of pain, said Daniel Atijas when I mentioned this to him later, so the mind has no memory of darkness. I am not sure that’s so, but I didn’t want to argue, though I did not fail to tell him that I remember certain moments in prairie darkness and that each of them, each of these darknesses, was distinct. Daniel Atijas was adamant. He shot back that those are later memories and that I, as a painter, strove to discover the nuances in something that in fact had no color at all. Now that I think about it, he had struck me from the very start as the type who can be stubborn, though I had not expected him to be so stubborn, which only shows that a person must be considerate of everything, including himself — even more so himself, perhaps, than others, since it is always easier to betray oneself than others.
I said something like that, I remember, in the middle of the night, just when Ivan Matulić’s grandson was throwing up in the bathroom. Before that, a while before that, he was kneeling in front of Daniel Atijas, hugging his knees and trying to peel off his socks, with the intention, he said, of kissing his feet. As Daniel Atijas was pushing him away, an entirely sober look flashed for just a moment in his eyes, but then it faded, and no matter how hard I later tried, I couldn’t find it again. Ivan Matulić’s grandson, and I can say this now, looked totally undignified, spittle dribbling down his chin, his forehead covered in beads of sweat, hiccupping and burping and doing nothing to hide it. He mentioned a secret, something about how he had a secret, how he had stumbled upon the secret, but ever since that moment his life had not been what it was before. He was not able, when I asked him, to say what his life had been before, but he was certain that he would never be able to go back to his earlier self, whatever that meant. There you are, he said, walking along one side of the street, and then, after years and years, he said, you cross over, and nothing is ever the same again. Something like that, he said, had happened with his life, too. He crossed over to the other side, and nothing was the same. He could see things he hadn’t noticed before, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Then he went to the bathroom to throw up, and Daniel Atijas asked me whether I played chess. I told him I would have to think about that for a while because I couldn’t remember, but by the time I finally recalled some moves and even saw the beginning of the Sicilian defense quite clearly, I heard him snoring.
Just then Ivan Matulić’s grandson came out of the bathroom, ashen and rumpled, and just in case, though it was obvious that he was spent, I moved my leg to the side. He raised the bottle, held it up to the night light to gauge how full it was, said that there were two fingers left, one for each of us, he said, and tipped back the bottle and drank down his finger of whiskey. Then I drank my finger’s worth, and then for ages I held the upside-down bottle over my outspread palm, from which I licked the last drops. I put the bottle down on the table and peered at it, and that is the last scene I remember; it was one of the ones that was going on in total silence, though I am certain that somewhere behind me Daniel Atijas was snoring steadily. I woke up in my room on the floor by the bed, fully clothed. My mouth was dry, my lips chapped and crusty, and with every movement, even the slightest, my head threatened to roll off my neck. I do not know how I got to my feet and made it to breakfast, but to my astonishment Daniel Atijas was already there. He was drinking coffee and eating toast, spread with a thin layer of margarine. He would like to have someone tell him, he said, how long a person can go on remembering a country once it is no longer there. Austria-Hungary, for instance, he said — is there anyone left who remembers it? Is there anyone who misses it still? Not as a historical fact, he said, but as a genuine country or, better yet, he said, a country which had been like a father for somebody, or like a mother, either way? He assumed they would, one day, think of his country that way, too, a curiosity of history, an entity defying historical inevitability, a stage created for great and small wartime events, only no one, he said, will speak of the feelings that used to stir in people.
No one cares. People hardly have time for their own feelings, he said, let alone for someone else’s, and least of all for the feelings of someone who does not know what he is feeling, for he doesn’t know what to relate those feelings to or whether he’d even dare to show them at all, since we all know what people think about those who insist on clinging to feelings that differ from other people’s, who are not prepared to accept the new reality, and thereby, he said, are forever reminding others, too, of a reality which maybe never should have been changed after all. He wouldn’t want, he said, for me to think he was the type of person who suffers from irrational grief for something that is not there; he wasn’t grieving for what was lacking, he said, but for what could have been. He knew, he said, that this was only a trick, a ruse he used to bolster his spirits, which, in his case, he said, was another name for reason, but there were moments when it was only by hook or by crook, he said, that he kept going. And besides, he was well aware that prowess lay not in finding, he said. True prowess lay in losing again what had been found, whatever one had sought for a long time, but, this time, losing it the right way, as Nietzsche had written for his Zarathustra — or was it in another book? he said. Nietzsche’s or Kierkegaard’s? Who knew, there were so many, one couldn’t keep track of them all, and for years now, he said, he had been thinking it would be best, though he himself was a writer, to read only one book per lifetime, and even that, he said, might be overdoing it.
Yes, now that he thought about it, he said, a story, one of Borges’s, for instance, or, why not, a poem, one of Rilke’s elegies, say, would do nicely, especially a Rilke, none of which can ever be plumbed, no matter how many times we read it. I replied that the same could be said for paintings, that there were paintings that could replace entire galleries, I said, and that sometimes it would be enough, or, perhaps, better, I said, to look at this one painting, one of Bosch’s canvases or a Dürer graphic, for instance, and not burn oneself out by traipsing through the entire museum, especially since museums are getting larger and their impact is therefore waning, for no one has the stamina to see everything that is on show. And when we stop and think about what will never be shown, said Daniel Atijas, what is stowed away in museum warehouses, only then, it seemed to him, are we forever condemned, he said, to a fragmented being and a fragmented world, to a life that unfolds by sidestepping life. He hastened to add that this probably sounded like the words of an embittered or disappointed person and that he most certainly did not see himself that way, but it was difficult where he lived, given his predicament, to preserve a sense of composure, and even more so, he said, his buoyancy and energy. Where everything was at a standstill, he said, where life was like sludge, everyone was falling apart, no matter how much they were trying to avoid it, to escape the general entropy, by sealing themselves into a hermetic space or in silence — a fitting choice, he said, for a writer. Several years he spent in silence, but he still felt, he said, the moral filth, so sometimes in the shower he would scrub himself for hours in a vain attempt to scrape off the stain he’d picked up from others.