The man says nothing. He is dazed by these words that require no answer, that nullify anything he might say. He recoils a few steps under this verbal assault.
He is standing on the very edge of the cliff, and the void to which he has his back turned stealthily wraps itself round his heels, creeps up his legs, swirls in his knees and surges up to the back of his neck in an icy rush. He has no need to see the void, his whole body can sense it, as it would sense the presence of a wild animal crouched at his heels. He is seized with terror and cannot move. He casts an imploring glance at the woman, not for her to say some tender words at last — he is at that moment well beyond, or well short of, any hope of love. He is incapable of any sentiment, utterly overcome with vertigo, with pure, thoroughly physical panic. All he expects is a gesture, an extended hand to wrest him from the pull of the void. But the woman remains impassive, with her hands in her pockets, and the look she darts at him has the brutality of a slap in the face. Nevertheless he clings to that look, spiteful as it is, it is his only lifeline, helping him to keep his precarious balance.
Has she understood his plea? She turns her head away, lets her gaze wander elsewhere, indifferent. Oh, look, the sea over there has turned a shade of turquoise, and there’s a seagull flying beneath the clouds, screaming its hunger, and there’s a ferry sailing by, a fast-moving little black speck, like a scuttling beetle. She smiles and her smile is carried away by the wind.
She hears a slight sound. She turns round. There is no one there. The man has disappeared. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? A few seconds go by, longer than a lifetime, and another sound can be heard, a distant thud, ghastly in its brevity and flatness.
She walks off, quickening her step so much she is almost running. She is not thinking at all, she refuses to think. She is a rolling stone, and there was another stone that fell, that dropped into the water with a horrible dull sound. Why would she be thinking, or how? She has just shed her humanity.
Sequence
A heath.
KENT: Who’s there, besides foul weather?
GENTALMAN: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.
KENT: I know you. Where’s the king?
GENTALMAN: Contending with the fretful elements;
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,
That things might change or cease…
LEAR: My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself…
FOOL: He that has and a little tiny wit
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain –
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.
William Shakespeare
King Lear, Act III, scenes (ii) and (iii)
Fragment 20
Magnus has told no one of what happened at Peggy’s, and before that on the cliffs of Dover. To Peggy herself he said nothing at the end of that dinner to which Timothy invited himself, like some freakish prompter hidden in his prompt-box supplying the text of a completely different play from the one being staged. When she had finished her impromptu reenactment of the scene forced on her, Peggy sat down and slowly drained her glass. Her features were drawn, there were yellow-tinged rings round her eyes. Then she rose again and began to clear the table. She went to fetch a large plastic bin bag from the kitchen, and threw into it the remains of the meal, the paper plates and crystal glasses. She bundled up the damask cloth and stuffed that into the rubbish bin as well. She seemed to have forgotten her guest, carrying on with tidying the dining room as if she were alone. Magnus dismantled the trestle table and returned the two chairs to the small garden on the other side of the bay window. A very fine rain fell silently, barely wetting the leaves of the bushes. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the plaintive and monotonous hooting of an owl.
When everything was in order, Peggy lit a cigarette which she smoked pacing the empty room. She continued to ignore Magnus’s presence. Then he asked her where she planned to sleep; she couldn’t spend the night in that empty house. She shrugged her shoulders by way of response. As he persisted in staying on she said, ‘Go away now. I don’t need you. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Everything’s ready.’ He left but remained for a long time standing in the street, opposite her house. He saw her come out, put the rubbish bin on the doorstep, lock the door, then walk away. He followed her without her noticing. She walked to a main road, where she hailed a taxi. And she disappeared.
He returned to the house, opened the bin and removed the damask tablecloth stained with wine and sauce. He folded it up and took it away, along with one of the two glasses, the one that was just barely chipped, the other having shattered.
She has been gone five months now. She sent Magnus a postcard with seasonal greetings at the end of the year but giving no details at all of her life in Vienna. Else does not hear much more from her.
The Schmalkers’ house has a new resident, Myriam. She has come to live with her grandparents so she can attend a course at an art school in London, and more importantly to escape the family home where she refuses to take on the role of big sister responsible for helping mother with the younger ones. She gets on better with Hannelore and Lothar than with her parents. They treat her like an only daughter and not as the eldest of a large family. She has moved into the bedroom that used to be Magnus’s, and has fixed up a studio in the basement.
Myriam does not talk much, especially in the presence of strangers. At her first meeting with Magnus she says very little, but she scrutinizes him with an intense gaze. The gaze of a small wild animal, direct and fierce, and at the same time that of some startled creature, keyed with mistrust. Hannelore says of her granddaughter that she is like a ray of sunshine in their house, but a capricious sun that sometimes throws pellets of cold, dark light when her work does not meet with her satisfaction, when it falls short of what she wanted to achieve; then she destroys the work judged to be too feeble, unworthy of the dream that inspired it.
The light of day, meanwhile, is slowly fading from Lothar’s eyes. For some time he has been suffering spells of dizziness, deteriorating eyesight, easily induced breathlessness in his voice. Magnus offers to read to him when he visits. ‘Now,’ says Lothar, ‘I can’t engage with the author of a book by myself, I always need a reader, so there are three of us. The vocal inflections of the intermediary between the author and me reverberate on the text, and then I hear nuances I might not have discerned reading alone in silence. This sometimes produces unusual surprises…’
In order to be surprised better still, he sometimes asks each of his intermediaries to read him the same pages of a book — pages he ends up knowing by heart but in a polyphonic way, and this knowing ‘by heart’ thereby becomes tremulous, swells and fills with unexpected echos, questions, murmurs. He applies this procedure to biblical texts as well as literary texts, to poems and daily newspaper articles, and depending on whether the voice is that of Hannelore, Myriam, Magnus, or some other person, the words resonate differently. Hannelore’s voice almost imperceptibly slows and softens when a passage stirs doubts and anxieties in her. That of Myriam suddenly hammers out abruptly the words of sentences that evidently annoy her, against which she rebels. Magnus’s voice punctuates with infinitesimal pauses the sentences that disturb him, or whose meaning thwarts him, as if he were trying to tame them.