“That’s just beautiful. Born in fifty-three, and he has to ask about the meaning of life! Hasn’t anyone informed you by now, you poor thing, about the meaning of life. Really no one?”
“No one. And I sense that if you don’t tell me, I will never learn and I will die in ignorance.”
“Listen. Life depends on finding the right proportion between work and relaxation. Do you understand? Understand? Or is it too difficult for you?”
“As far as work is concerned, I know more or less what that is… But as far as relaxation is concerned…”
My gaze must have betrayed me. I must have gazed at her for a moment with excessively ostentatious greed, since she shook her head with pity.
“Forgive me, but that is an excessively one-sided conception of relaxation, too exhaustive and, basically, embarrassing. And as for work,” she adopted, after a second of ominous silence, a conciliatory tone, even very conciliatory, “and as for work, what — if I may allow myself the banal question of the enchanted female reader — what is the master working on at the moment?”
“God bless you for that ‘enchantment.’ No writer can resist a friendly load of crap. Especially in such a… especially in your performance. I am composing short stories now. A collection of short stories of a different sort.”
“A novel is less than a novel, but a volume of short stories is more than a volume of stories?” she suddenly blurted out.
“What gibberish,” I thought at the first, “what gibberish are you spouting, you miraculous bitch?” But the first moment had passed; after it a second, a third, and perhaps even a fourth, and in the next one, I don’t know which one, slowly, very slowly—langsam und trübe—it began to dawn on me that, who knows?… Who knows how this blind hen had stumbled upon the secret of my literary workbench.
II
As I now recreate and record our first conversation, I see clearly that literature can never keep pace with life. Even a faithfully recorded exchange of sentences — word for word — says nothing about the heart of the matter. In this instance, the heart of the matter was my terrible paralysis over the fact that The Most Beautiful Woman in the world was chatting with me at all. That’s in the first place. And in the second place, I was paralyzed by the fact that I myself was chatting. After all, greater wizards than I were struck dumb in her presence. And yet, a conversation had occurred: she spoke to me, and I spoke to her; but that’s not all — she gave the impression of listening intently to what I was telling her; then she would answer, then I would answer, then she, then I… Everything, seemingly, was going along just as normally as could be. Seemingly. Very seemingly. For at bottom, our conversation was very much feigned and very fragmentary, and I — a very illusory and very partial I — was taking part in it. With every word spoken, I was immediately panicked by the fact that a word had been spoken. Already when I was approaching her, I was in panic — in amazement and fear — that I was approaching. Oh, f…, I’m approaching her! Oh, f…, I’m close! Oh, f…, I said something! Oh, f…, she glanced at me! Oh, f…, she sees me! Oh, f…, she’s talking to me! I raised such shouts the whole time in my heart of hearts, and they dominated. They were the essence of the thing. In them also lurked the harbinger of tragedy. Instead of concentrating on the operation, I was in permanent triumph over the fact that there even was an operation. That was to be my undoing.
Three of four storms came crashing down on the garden; lightning bolts made it white like winter, thunder claps made it hushed like a silent film. Salads diluted by streams of water began to withdraw from their platters; cold cuts, cheeses, fruits swam the length of table cloths in a torrential stream; waiters soaked to the marrow tried to rescue what they could; the lawn was transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a quagmire; the army of reception-goers, decimated by the gale, tried to storm the buildings of the embassy. The chaos was spreading.
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World disappeared between my one glance at her and the next. When the heavens abruptly darkened, and the rains came down in sheets, I lifted my face; then, with the instinctive thought that one ought somehow to shield the Venus of the Third Republic — perhaps take off my jacket and throw it over her shoulders; by some miracle, produce an umbrella from somewhere; conjure up a cape out of a handkerchief — all this lasted a second, my protective visions didn’t even have time to take on concrete shape; I glanced again in her direction, and she was gone. I think I even glanced instinctively in the direction of the swaying crowns of the trees, but this was a childish instinct.
Apart from everything else — granted, she was The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, she belonged to the top ten, or to the top hundred, of the most beautiful women in the world — but some sort of slender and ethereal beauty she was not. A healthy broad, to tell the truth: six feet tall, a glorious bust, not pumped up with any element lighter than air, massive thighs, and a wrestler’s frame. Just a few years ago, all sorts of abundance had been heaped high on this frame. The story of the trademark diet she had worked out to perfection, and of her shockingly effective loss of weight, was known to the nation just as well as the story of the resurrection of Lord Jesus, and perhaps even better. Now, of course, she was slender and slim like a poplar, but still there wasn’t a chance that the wind would carry her off like a feather to the height of the genuine poplars growing next to the fence.
I searched for her like a madman. I crossed all the rooms of the embassy from the cellars to the attic. I set the entire guard on its feet; they followed me, but at a distance; I was supposedly pale as a corpse, wild gaze, disheveled hair. Water poured from my shoes and pants, since I rushed, time and again, out into the garden, to that place where she had stood motionless for two hours next to a wicker chair. I kept feeling delusional impulses that she was still standing there, and, like a fool, time and again I ran there. The guards followed me, but, as I said, at a distance, since they were operating under the reasonable assumption that they were dealing not with a calculating terrorist, but with an unpredictable madman.
Time and again someone would ask me who I was looking for — I didn’t answer, I didn’t say, I didn’t speak up at all. How could I confess to such boundless stupidity? What was I supposed to say? That I was looking for The Most Beautiful Woman in the World? Let’s say that you were looking into various rooms in deadly panic, searching, let’s say, for Sharon Stone, and let’s say someone were to ask you who you were looking for. What would you answer? I’m looking for Sharon, because she vanished somewhere. An impossible dialogue! A situation that’s beyond all categories! You can’t ask about the whereabouts of beautiful women: vile intentions, even if they don’t betray you, will be ascribed to you. Even if you were I don’t know what sort of famous ascetic. And I wasn’t. I was, however, unprecedentedly desperate, and the circumstances seemed — in spite of everything — propitious.
On account of the collective and instant evacuation of the banquet, which was now drowned by the downpour and bombarded by lightning bolts, the atmosphere became — as it happens when the commoners suddenly take control of the salons — more and more unrestrained. Under the pretext of drinking to get warm, everyone ignored the extraterritoriality of the embassy and drank as is drunk throughout our entire land: one bottle per person. And so it was no wonder that in short order almost everybody was in the same state as the colorless columnist of the so-called “Independence Style” had been from the very beginning. I wasn’t very fond of him, but I couldn’t think about his predatory swilling with anything other than respect. If a person has to be fuddled in the end, it is better that he be more generously fuddled. And so in a pinch, very much in a pinch, I could put together a thin disguise. I could attempt — pretending to be fuddled — to ask someone who was equally plastered (except that they really were), as if for a joke, about the whereabouts of The Most Beautiful Woman in the world.