You think you more or less understand what he means and call the garçon and order a steak for your guest and you ask him if he wasn’t very cold and hungry standing outside, dressed as a metalworker in touch with reality.
“I had spent,” he replies, “three days and nights on endless roads of snow. Finally I reached the place I wanted to get to, Budapest. But no sooner had I set foot in the city than I decided this place was unreachable. So I stopped to think and did so here, in my overalls, in front of the Krúdy. And I thought that, if this was the city I was seeking and I had reached it so easily, then I was an insignificant being. Or else this couldn’t be the place. Perhaps, I now tell myself, it is the place, but I may not have reached it.”
“Allow me to say that your reflections have an air of Kafka about them,” you comment, thus taking revenge for the bit about Dracula.
He behaves as if he hadn’t heard you and carries on talking in a Kafkaesque manner:
“Or perhaps it’s that there’s nobody in this place, and I am simply of the place and in the place. And nobody can reach it.”
A great writer is seated before you and at no point do you forget this. You know that to have someone like this before you is not normal in an age like today’s, which has hardly any great writers. You suddenly recall a book by Hemingway you read years ago, Green Hills of Africa, in which the author, next to the palm trees, in the middle of lion and rhinoceros tracks, abruptly falls to thinking about James Joyce and the days he saw him in Paris, and he writes, “When you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.”
But you’re not in Africa, you’re in the Krúdy, you don’t have Joyce in front of you, you have Musil.
“What was that about Kafka?” he suddenly asks you.
“Oh, nothing.”
“I was thinking about him a lot only today. Were Kafka still in Prague, I would go to this city and ask him to join Action Without Parallel, I’m thinking of gathering my resistance friends in some place in the world.”
You immediately think of the island of Fayal, in the Azores, as an ideal place for this gathering. But you don’t say this to him because you realize in time that you don’t know what kind of resistance he’s talking about, nor do you know what Action Without Parallel might be.
Musil seems to have guessed what you’re wondering.
“Resistance,” he says, “underground people of letters. Fighters against the destruction of literature. I’d like to gather them together and start planting mental bombs against false writers, against the rogues who control the culture industry, against the emissaries of nothingness, against the pigs.”
Instinctively, with great enthusiasm, you think of mental bombs that you would carefully plant in the offices of certain pigs, enemies of the literary. And it brightens your day to dream about the triumph of literature. But you don’t say any of this to Musil, you’re afraid that he considers you too naive or a subversive child, you prefer to hand him the initiative, for him to propose — you’ll soon find out he won’t — that you join Action Without Parallel.
When his steak arrives, you decide to clarify something he told you before and you ask him what exactly he means by “touch of reality.”
Musil stares at you for a good while and finally says:
“What you’re seeing now, that’s exactly what I mean by touch of reality. And what are you seeing now? Well, what you see is a man in overalls preparing to dip into a steak. For unreality, Walser, my friend, is to invent, for example, that today is snowing and is a beautiful day in August 1913; for this and to do those things, we’ve plenty of time,” says Musil.
At which point he dips into his steak.
* * *
You leave Budapest on the following day, without going anywhere near the museum where you displayed your cuckold’s horns, you leave without even going back to the cinema where your life took a detour on to some byroad, you leave Budapest without Musil, whom you lost sight of in the baths of the Geliert Hotel. You leave Budapest and barely ask yourself what can have happened to Rosa these past two months — before now you would ask yourself this from time to time, you would play at imagining that she had given you up for dead in a ditch by some byroad — you leave Budapest for Vienna in a boat that travels along the Danube and reminds you of the vaporetti in Venice; you leave for Vienna and there you take a taxi to Kierling, where you find the building with three floors — once a nursing-home — that Kafka died in.
You reach this modest building at 187 Hauptstrasse, Kierling, a small town near Klosterneuburg. Here, on June 3, 1924, Kafka died when the place was Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium. It is now an apartment building, which you have reached easily, having found the exact address in Danube; the place is more or less as Magris describes it in this book after his visit there in the 1980s. Kafka’s room on the second floor overlooked the garden. It was a room covered in flowers. On that same floor, in the exact space where Kafka died, a very pleasant old lady allows you into her apartment so that you can see the garden below from the balcony. The lady is dressed in a kind of white nightgown embroidered with ivory; it almost seems she had dressed up to receive you. In the garden there is now a wooden shed full of wheelbarrows and sickles. From his rocking chair, Kafka contemplated this garden, it was the last garden he saw. A neighbor’s dog barks, you try to imagine this landscape in winter, the sky gray with ice and snow stains. You’re quite impressed, you’re in the exact place where Kafka took leave of his life. Depending on how you look, you might see what he saw at the end of his days. “He saw,” writes Magris, “the greenness which eluded him, or rather the flowering, the springtime, the sap, everything that was sucked out of his body by paper and ink, desiccating him into a feeling of pure, impotent barrenness.”
“Will you have some tea with me, Mr. Walser?” the pleasant, old lady suggests.
You say, of course you will, and you’re delighted with her hospitality. Kafka died here, you think. And you think that, if you told the lady this, she would tell you that she also plans to die there. And you recall something else Magris wrote about this room: “Here truly, as in the old medieval morality plays, died Everyman.”
When she serves your tea, you ask her if she has read Kafka. If you could, you’d go on to ask her what it’s like living where Kafka died, but this second question seems rather inappropriate to you.
“I don’t read, Mr. Walser,” she replies.
“Don’t you?”
“It’s not a habit of mine, I need to do things with my hands, to keep them busy, you see. Books leave them static. No, I haven’t read Kafka.”
“Don’t you read at all?”
“No, though I admire Stephen Hawking a lot, I adore him; I hear him say amazing things on the TV and also on the radio”—she points to an old Marconi set from the 1950s—“he’s an extraordinary, moving person. I’m fascinated by everything he says, that we live in a universe with thousands of millions of galaxies, which in turn contain thousands of millions of I don’t know what other galaxies, which makes it all infinite…. And all those opinions about God. Believe me, I admire Hawking a lot, he’s an amazing man, he’s like God. The other day, I heard him talking about Ur, in Chaldea. Have you heard of Ur, in Chaldea, Mr. Walser?”
“I must confess I haven’t.”
“In Ur, Hawking says, they already knew about the cubic root and I don’t know what about the square root. That’s right, Mr. Walser. The cubic root! In Ur they already knew about it. Abraham and his lot were aware of it. Isn’t that incredible?”