“Two years from now, on the nameless, abandoned tomb of your rapacious Europe of exploiters, there would have grown a new Europe, a Europe of workers, who would have easily communicated with Asia through the international language of labor.
“The unwelcome intervention of this pointless natural disaster might bring about the death of both Europes in one go: the one that was dying and the one that was yet to be born.
“The old usurer hasn’t even had time to put her last will in order. But the will – though unwritten – still exists. We are its inheritors, along with your own proletariat. Fate has cast us here, to the metropolises of Europe, to tear the keys from its ossifying hands.”
P’an Tsiang-kuei fell silent. For a moment the only thing audible was the splash of water breaking against the base of the pillars supporting the bridge.
“You are mistaken,” said the professor at last. “Your people are too weak to carry the weight of the inheritance upon your shoulders. If Europe dies, if her intelligentsia dies out, the fruits of her culture and technology will die with her. Then as soon as the one incentive to awake is gone you shall fall back into your age-old coma. Do you seriously believe that our common rabble can really fill that role, that you’ll manage to take over the treasuries of our culture with them as allies? What are those instinct-driven, unenlightened plebs good for, apart from mindless destruction? Without their master employers the ‘working masses’ will find themselves a flock without its shepherd. Pitiably helpless, they’ll fall back into the gloom of barbarity. Incapable of any creative exertion, they won’t be up to the inheritance of even one Paris, and will not be able to protect it from falling into ruin.”
“And yet that’s how things will be, I assure you, and very soon. You’ll have the chance to see for yourself.”
“Nonsense. I’d bet that I won’t.”
“You’re on.”
“Such a wager is too abstract for either of us to stand a chance of winning.”
“We can easily make it more concrete. If, with the current progress of the epidemic, we have not taken Paris within a month, I will consider myself beaten.”
“I accept. One condition: the moment you lose, you will fire a bullet into your head without my assistance.”
“Done.”
“It may occur that I die before our bet concludes. This in no way alters things. The bet carries on just as before.”
“Just as before.”
“And if you win, well, then I promise to put a bullet in my head.”
“Entirely unnecessary,” P’an Tsiang-kuei responded with a smile. “If I win, you are obliged to return to your scientific work and become a loyal director of the laboratory to fight the plague in our proletarian Paris.”
“Done. Deadline – one month. Just in case, in order to obviate any difficulties that might arise in keeping to the conditions of our bet, allow me to offer you my revolver straightaway. It might serve you as a fetish.”
P’an Tsiang-kuei smiled as he tucked the revolver into his pocket.
“From this moment on, you should take scrupulous care of yourself and take every precaution not to fall ill or die. As an honest gambler, you don’t want to prove insolvent. I will ask you for a calling card with your address, so I know who to remind to pay his dues when the moment arrives.”
The professor wrote his address in pencil on a piece of paper and tore it from his notebook.
Under the arcades of the bridge with their feminine curves, black, sparkling water babbled with a million mouths in prayer.
Bells rang from Sacré-Coeur, relentless, tearful, helpless.
In the face of the leveling strickle of death, the people dissolving in the giant vat of the city clung spasmodically, in a blind centrifugal urge, to every aspect of their individuality, crowding together around the temples of their own rituals, like iron shavings around magnesium poles. Like so many lightning rods, the spires of the cathedrals, Orthodox churches, and minarets sent heavenward a magnetic current of separatism that grew with each passing moment, amassing the scattered human herd into self-contained racial and religious complexes.
The first eruption took place in the milieu that was the most distinct – due to the very pigment of its skin – and was without its own lightning-rod temple.
On July 30 a radio station broadcast some incredible news. During the previous night the yellow-skinned inhabitants of the Latin Quarter had held a coup d’état. All the white inhabitants had been pushed to the right bank of the Seine, and the Latin Quarter had been declared an autonomous Chinese republic.
That evening, on the walls of the abandoned Latin Quarter, the first long strips of hieroglyphs appeared: proclamations in Chinese.
The provisional government informed the yellow-skinned residents of Paris that an independent Chinese republic had been established in the area of the former Latin Quarter to act in self-defense against the European plague. The provisional government declared that every white person caught in the territory of the republic would be expelled as a plague-sower. The government further forbade, under penalty of death, any yellow-skinned inhabitants from crossing the borders of their republic. With the aim of tightly fencing it off from the infected city, the republic was surrounded by a new Great Wall of China, this one built of barricades.
In a brief appeal to the people, the provisional government recommended that its citizens safeguard the valuable libraries located on the territory of the republic, which, as inviolable treasuries, were to safeguard the fruits of European culture for future generations.
The proclamation was made in the name of the provisional government, and signed by P’an Tsiang-kuei.
III
In the shadowy depths of the ocean, beyond the reach of the currents, whirlpools and the splash of waves, in the motionless greenish water, still as the water of an aquarium, amidst the forests of gigantic algae, antediluvian sigillaria and liana, lives the flounder fish.
Somewhere, hundreds of feet high above, white-maned waves rush in an eternal, tireless chase, the hulls of massive steamships plow yards of black furrows into the aching surface of the ocean, gelatinous medusas flutter in the murky jelly of the water, and the long, sleek bodies of fish carve through the depths with their scaly daggers like the cool shine of headlights in constant, relentless pursuit.
Down below is silence, cool, hard sand, and orchards of infertile trees, whitish like clouds seen from an airplane. The bottom is like the sky, like a reflection of the sky in a convex, measureless drop of ocean, with a cosmos of its own shifting starfish, of spine-tailed comets – a chilly postmortem refuge for exhausted wayward travelers.
On the bottom lives the flounder fish. Someone took a fish, carved it in half along the spine and placed one half on the sand. The flounder has only one side – the right side. Its left side is the earth, the bottom.
When an organ is unused, the organ disappears. All the flounder’s organs have migrated from the left, non-existent side to the right. And on the right side, a pair of tiny, passionless eyes sit one beside the other, staring always upward.
The eyes always stare upward, both on the same side, monstrous, incredible, bizarre; and the left side – does not exist at all.
In the enormous city of Paris, in a red, speckled house on Rue Pavée, lives Rabbi Eliezar ben Zvi.
Rue Pavée lies in the heart of the Hôtel de Ville district, of little Jewish Paris. It was brought to the center of this international city, to the middle of France, from someplace East, from the arable fields of the Ukraine, from the puddle-filled towns of Galicia, and ran aground here, silting up for a few decades to form a modern ghetto devoid of traditions, durable, insoluble, isolated.