Anyone who joins in debate with you — I mean an honest debate — not only cannot win, but also, by acknowledging your arbitrary power, confirms the feeling of superiority that
power brings. What does a book or a play mean to you — or any work, no matter how brilliant? What does an artist who is debating with you mean? You have him exactly where you— and those who have nominated you — want him: at your feet, and you let him stay there as long as possible. You let him tremble, let him squirm, let him grovel, let him write requests which you are only too happy to fill your waste-basket with. You enjoy his humiliation. After all, you are beyond reach.
So where is your vulnerable spot?
Of course, your body, just as your entire being, can be replaced, traded in for another one at any time. But what cannot be traded in and replaced is the world that you and those who appointed you have created for yourselves. It is an artificial world that you declare to be the only real one, for in it the only laws that count are the laws that you have made, and truth is only what you declare it to be. You are vulnerable only to a power which can disrupt the unity of your world, and thus make you visible to people.
That power, Mr K., lies in stories. In stories from the real world. You may throw a hundred appeals for justice out with the garbage and no heart will tremble, but you cannot silence a hundred stories. These stories, no matter what they say, if they are carried by love, by suffering or by tenderness, will always throw into relief your contemptible and empty work. In the end, they will wound you and you will fall from your apparently unconquerable height back into the nothingness from which you emerged. I would only hope that, as you fall, at least you will understand that these stories will outlive you.
With regards
K. (Surveyor's Assistant)
Cemeteries
THE GIRL from the stationers was wearing black.
Her mother's story was a simple one. She worked for twenty years in a factory, mostly in shipping. The work was badly paid, but it seemed safe. Her husband was a warehouse manager. With his job he got a two-room company flat in a housing estate. They had two children.
The girl didn't know what more she could say about her mother. Sometimes on Sundays after lunch, when time allowed, they would go together to visit Grandma. On the train, her mother would unwrap sweet buns or breaded pork cutlets. Sometimes, in the evening, they would watch television together. The television set was so old that the picture was always fading. The father was seldom home; he spent his evenings in bars and would come back drunk, but he was kind, never shouted at anyone, and never beat them.
They didn't go on holidays. The children spent part of their vacation at a young pioneers camp, and part of it with their grandmother near the cement factory.
But the mother had promised that one day they would all go to the seaside together. She reckoned that when she went over to work in the aniline department, she could save up enough in two years to take the whole family to
Bulgaria. The father did not object; he never objected to anything. But several weeks before they were to go, he packed his things and moved in with some slut. The girl in the stationery shop was fourteen when this happened, her brother was ten. Their mother took them to Bulgaria all the same. There was numbing heat on the Golden Sands and crowds of people. Mother didn't know how to swim, so she lay on the beach and the first day got so badly burned that she cried for two nights in pain. On the third day they all got a bowel infection, and when they began to feel better, the weather changed and the sea became so rough no one was allowed to go in.
So the mother went for a walk, at least, along the beach. She saw an enormous white bird she didn't know the name of. It hovered just above the waves, and it even landed on the crest of one wave as though it were the deck of a ship. The mother stared at it transfixed, then ran for the children. But by the time they had come back to the sea, the remarkable bird was gone.
The mother worked in the aniline department for another three years, then went back to shipping. Last year she had begun to pass blood, but she told no one about it, and was afraid to see a doctor. Just ten weeks ago they had taken her to the hospital, and by that time, it was too late for a cure.
The girl had been to visit her mother three times during that period. On the third visit, her mother didn't recognize her. She'd been given morphine. Her eyes were tightly closed, her breathing slow and laboured. But the girl thought that she was smiling, and perhaps she really was. Perhaps she felt herself slipping away from suffering, or perhaps she had already glimpsed something that none of
us will see in this world. Perhaps it was some extraterrestrial being; perhaps it was that enormous white bird. The mother died that night and the hospital notified the girl by telegram. The funeral was tomorrow, at home and then in the cemetery just past the cement works. The dust doesn't bother the dead, though the flowers turn grey and have to be replaced frequently.
The village with the cement plant did not lie within the area we were surveying. We had, however, often been in cemeteries simply because they were usually next to churches where our benchmarks were.
The surveyor had to call on the priests or the vergers in their crumbling houses, to determine whether anything had been shifted or altered, particularly on the steeple or the dome, since the last survey. Sometimes I would see them in the doorway, old men with white collars, shaking their heads, confirming that no, the church had not been repaired. Sometimes they would invite him inside to complain about just that, that their church was deteriorating.
Meanwhile I would go to the cemetery, which was always open. Immediately I walked through the gate, I found myself in a different world. The graves seemed to be competing to see which could display the greatest variety and number of flowers, and if they were covered with grass, the green was not marred by a single weed. Something of the old values, customs and usages that have been forgotten everywhere else had survived here. Even in the most thinly populated villages, there would almost always be someone with a shovel or a rake or a watering can, tending a grave. And if they were not working, then they would stand in contemplation, or in silent prayer.
Just beyond the wall of one cemetery, there were two stone pillars and we worked on them until dusk. A cluster of children watched us from a distance. The moon came out over the low village roofs and when it appeared, so did the local priest. He had come to ask us if we'd like some refreshment.
He brought us out some coffee, and as we drank it he told us the story of an old farmer who had hidden in the mortuary in the 1950s. His friends had warned him that 'they' were coming to arrest him. The mortuary was locked, having been disused for years. People died in hospitals, after all, or they laid them out at home until the funeral. Only the sexton and the priest had the keys, and they brought the farmer food. The voluntary prisoner was given the third key so that he could leave this house of the dead whenever he had to. Fortunately, the lock worked both from inside and outside, although given the original purpose of the place, that should have been unnecessary. The cemetery was a good place to hide since, as we must have noticed, it was surrounded by a high wall and could only be seen from the steeple. It had its own water supply, and a compost heap in the corner right behind the mortuary.