He wondered how such an idea had lodged itself in his head. He stared for a moment at the corner of the bay window. He didn’t know why, but he vaguely imagined that that was where the bullet meant for him would come from.
Maybe he ought to take that picture down? At least until his boss had got tired of talking about his trip to Spain.
He couldn’t get his mind off what the locksmith had just told him about robberies. It was as if in the locksmith’s mind that was the principal approach to understanding world history. Just as some people had tried to explain history exclusively in terms of the role of women.
Banditry flourished from the very start of the monarchy, he thought in a daze, going over the locksmith’s account. All the same his eye kept going back to that spot on the windowpane through which, he imagined, a bullet could get him. The fantasy grew so powerful that he ended up imagining the lead slug fluttering around the studio like a trapped bird.
The Voskopoja painters, he dreamed, would perhaps be the first to paint his portrait…. Painting a wound is easier than almost anything else. But what a lot of nonsense! he thought. He’d better have a little rest. Talking to that locksmith had left him completely drained, so it seemed. All that great sea of thieving … So much murderous criminality, he wanted to say.
Two or three times he wondered why he had found the subject so affecting. But his brain was drawn toward evil, so to speak, and was rushing headlong in the wrong direction. He wasn’t often given to such mental ramblings; maybe he was having a bout of fever. He was aware that if that was so, the best thing was to offer no resistance…. He should just let himself go until he was exhausted, let himself sink to the bottom of the sea of dreams….
Nonetheless he felt a shiver, just as he had done a few days previously. His recently rediscovered fascination with police work was an ill wind…. All this cop stuff… He recalled once again that awful afternoon with his father, when they had quarreled over his choice of career. That look in his father’s eye. That lonely look in a police officer’s face… Mark, said his instructor, what is this peculiar drawing? It’s nothing, sir, nothing at all, I don’t know what came over me….
Mark’s father had given way in the end, but the afternoon of their quarrel had left deep scars. Or rather, it had implanted a kind of hidden virus that flared up in a bout of fever every now and again. After the Fourth Artists’ Plenum, just before the arrest of Gentian, he repented the choice he had made. The other choice, working for the police, however humiliating it might have been, was the only other path he had ever considered following. And for that reason it was the only career he ever thought of as his unrealized potential.
Later, when the TV news came on, with items on left-wing and right-wing demonstrators fighting hand to hand with the forces of law and order, he could not rid his mind of the thought that at that very moment on the screen it could have been him out there, down in the square….
For some time now he had felt constrained by this second life, parallel to the one he was leading. He smiled about it, to be sure, but he had to wonder how high he would have risen by now if he had joined the police. Maybe he would be an assistant chief of police in some desolate backwater just like this one.
Two days before, when he had heard the story of the now-famous holdup of the National Bank, he had caught himself grinning, just as a rake who hears talk of women prides himself on being the expert in the field.
He was both ashamed and jubilant. No matter: he felt that he had jumped, of his own accord, into a pool of inanity, and could no longer climb out. His attitude was that of an obligation toward his second life, rather as he might feel obligated toward a long-abandoned girlfriend.
In recent times his second life — which for so many-years had existed as a silent parallel — had not, as anticipated, dwindled to nothing but rather had seemed to reassert itself ever more firmly. It sometimes weighed upon him so much that he imagined, that his police uniform was right there, waiting for him. At the back of the studio he had an old chest that he was afraid to open because he feared his uniform was already inside it.
It was no accident that the Gentian affair and the story of the snakeskin had both had such a strong impact on him.
He had presumably gotten himself tangled up in one of those gauzelike webs that lie in wait almost everywhere, but which people of normal sensitivity are unable to see or feel Maybe he would get free of the sticky threads when the time came (a time long ago determined) for his parallel life as a policeman to be cut short, scythed by a gangster’s bullet.
Then he would feel free, that’s for sure.
Sometimes he told himself to be thankfuclass="underline" at least he didn’t have to cope with a third or a fourth life! He didn’t dare broach the subject with his girlfriend, afraid she would think him out of his mind. All the same, he imagined talking it over with her: You’re lucky not to be afraid of that, he might say. You know, there are people who, for one reason or another, maybe just because things turned out that way, come up to the surface, as if they were climbing out of a deep hole, after they’ve been lost… how can I say… in another universe, in a different system. Just as it must be with black holes in space. Can you imagine coming to the edge of a black hole? Time slows down, then comes to a stop…. But then, at that point, when you’ve fallen in, you reappear in a different space … a different system… a new state of being…. Obviously no one has actually been inside a black hole … except that snake in the old legend.
He had another nightmare, that of seeing millions of people taking leave of their own lives, in some general decomposition of the universe, so as to take possession of others; but he managed to keep that mad fear at bay. Pythagoras must surely have thought about it carefully, but, in sheer horror, had never described it anywhere.
In the context of such impending chaos, his own tumbling fall into a second life sometimes seemed no more than natural to him. As did his fascination with unsolved mysteries. With the secret of the pyramids, for instance. He had always been curious about the pillaging of the pyramids. But such things were relatively close at hand, located in the suburbs of human history. The thefts of biblical times were more distant, and beyond them, after a yawning chasm of time, the celestial region began. That was where the really great plundering must have taken place: maybe even the mother of all burglaries, or at any rate, the essence of theft.
You’re off your rocker! he told himself But that didn’t stop him from summoning up the image of Prometheus as he had drawn him at the School of Fine Arts, scuttling away from Mount Olympus with fire clutched under his cloak. His instructor had pulled a long face at the drawing: That’s not Prometheus, lad! That’s just a common pickpocket!
The locksmith was probably right. Civilization began with a robbery. Yet it was a fact that no one wanted to acknowledge. Out of shame, presumably; or maybe not?
Mark jumped off the bed and went to the shelf where he kept his books. He leafed through the Dictionary of Mythology, to P … Pr … Pro … Prometheus. His quarrel with Zeus … the theft of fire. Aha! he cried. The theft of fire was the second robbery carried out on Olympus. The first was the theft of immortality.
He browsed through the pages and ended up finding what he was looking for. It seemed he had always known this, but maybe he had forgotten it in the meanwhile. He drank in these few lines once, then again, shaking his head, not fully satisfied. It was obscure and poorly explained, like a ruined building in the dark. That’s what accounted for his lapse of memory.
Under the thief’s name, Tantalus, he found nothing further. A theft committed on a dark night… the proof of immortality implemented through a mortal. Tantalus caught in flagrante delicto. The punishment he suffered …