Seen from a great distance, the two events that took place in the heavens seemed almost simultaneous. But if you look more closely, you see that the scandal of immortality was prior to the theft of fire. To be sure, they were closer together than, say, the pillaging of the pyramids and the holdup at the bank of B—. That’s why he had lost his grasp of it all.
Nonetheless, in the fire business, some of the circumstances were known: Prometheuse visit to the workshop of He-phaistos, where fire was kept, the seizure of a burning coal or torch, the flight over the earth with his booty hidden in his breast, and the gift that he made of it to men. But absolutely nothing was known about the theft of immortality: neither when nor where it had happened; in what shape it was held to exist; how it could have come to be stolen, and, in the event, transported by its thief….
He shook his head again and again. No, the event had not been rubbed out by forgetting. It was just that it had never been properly explained. The human mind had stopped short on the threshold of the mystery. The mind that gives way to no obstacle, had, in this instance, recognized its own impotence. It had gone too far, come too close to the frozen wastes at the very frontier of the impossible, and had been forced to turn back.
With his hands clasped at the back of his neck as if they were needed to hold his head up straight to withstand the shock, Mark recalled the fragments of the myth of the theft of immortality. One pitch-black night, a messenger of Death knocks at the door of a thoroughly ordinary mortal. “Who goes there?” To which Death’s emissary gives his customary reply: “Open up, I am the envoy of Death.” From behind the closed door, the mortal answers: “Go back whence thou came, I have nothing to do with you.”
Mark smiled to himself. He hadn’t indulged in such idle dreams for a long while. He had even felt hurt by imagining himself no longer capable of such reveries. Lazily, in the way you sip and savor a delicious summer drink, he tried to reconstruct the smallest details of the long-buried event. But something was stopping him. He got up, paced up and down the room, looked out of his bay window at the poplars lining the street, then at the low clouds, and he realized that a different story had woven itself in his mind into the one he was trying to recall. You thought you had become a great painter, didn’t you? You thought you had become an immortal artist, like people say, and so you wouldn’t have anything to do with us anymore? Isn’t that what you thought?
That’s what the interrogator had said to Gentian, and what Gentian had reported to him as soon as they let him out of prison. If he were to live a thousand years, Mark knew that he would never snuff out the memory of his terror during that stifling summer in Tirana. Gentian hadn’t yet been hauled in, but the threat was palpable, hovering in the air. As soon as the Fourth Plenum was over, there had been meetings all the time at the Writers’ and Artists’ Union. The heat was unbearable, and for some reason Mark imagined that it would somehow help to mitigate the disaster. Maybe the authorities would remember that holidays and beaches and seasides also existed. And if they had forgotten, then their wives and children would remind them. So maybe they would put off all those meetings until September.
But no, nobody seemed to be thinking of ordinary life that summer. Quite the opposite: yet more sessions were planned. Some of them were to be closed sessions. Others were to be public hearings. And yet others half open and half closed. They all seemed to be the same, and yet they weren’t. People also whispered about extra-special meetings that were to be declared to have taken place when they hadn’t, and others that would really be held but would be said to have never happened.
Whenever he heard rumors of this kind, Mark put them down initially to the mental muddle fostered by the psychotic atmosphere of the times, but on second thought, they seemed to be perfectly coherent assumptions. It was obvious that not everybody would be summoned to appear at public meetings, and that closed sessions would be designed to allow fear-inducing rumors to leak out. Otherwise, what was the point?
He was almost certain that his turn would come, after Gentian’s. Once his friend’s flat had been searched and his paintings confiscated by the police, Mark fully expected he would be arrested in short order. He felt the same terror when other painters were summoned to appear before the tribunal to give evidence against the suspect. Later on, Gentian told him that in all there had been twenty-six witnesses for the prosecution. After the regular informers, who had amended their statements two or three times each, they had summoned quality witnesses, people who had not yet been “grilled,” which showed how important the case against Gentian was considered. Then they called the officials of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union themselves, then the officials of the Art Museum, then the café waiters from both places, then one of Gentian’s neighbors, who happened to be a veteran of the national liberation struggle of ‘45, then the girls who had posed nude for him, and last of all they heard testimony from local prostitutes. “Gentian asked me to shave the hair on both sides of my pubic area because, apparently, it is the fashion in the West.” “Vermin! Cardsharp!” the magistrate yelled at the painter. That insult took Gentian by surprise, who hardly had time to reflect on the model’s turpitude. He’d never played cards, and he took the magistrate’s outburst as a random taunt — but a few days later, when they began to confront him with notorious gamblers, he guessed that a new case was being prepared even while the initial charges against him were being maintained. On some days he was questioned about the decadent nature of his canvases, and on other days about his newfound vice of gambling. He supposed they would eventually decide under which of the two heads he was to be judged, but the magistrates kept on switching from one to the other. Apparently they were waiting for an order from above. The decision would hang on various external factors, maybe on international relations, or the discovery of new oil fields, or even on the next annual report of Amnesty International.
“You thought you had become an immortal painter and would thus have nothing more to do with us? So you started gambling, you need money that badly?”
Mark got up in a start and went back to leafing through his dictionary of mythology. He stared at the one illustration that went with the text, an image of Tantalus in his eternal suffering. Above and beneath him, but just out of his reach, were water to slake his thirst and apples to quell his hunger. A strange sentence, quite inappropriate to the incomparably more serious crime that he had committed. It looked more like the punishment of a glutton who had allowed his fellow men to go hungry and thirsty.
True enough, it’s always the same old story, Mark thought. Maybe Tantalus also had two cases against him? In the end, Gentian had been found guilty of decadent tendencies in his art, but the vice of gambling was also mentioned in an appendix to the main charge. It seems that Tantalus had had the opposite result. Since it couldn’t be entirely erased, the theft of immortality had been tacked on as a minor count, to be taken into consideration. Anyway, there was no proof, no testimony about it. That had presumably been done to rub it out more easily later, since it would be held to have been a charge unproven — a mere supposition, maybe just an optical illusion. The theft of immortality was to be erased from the memory of men as from the memory of the gods.
Mark lay down again. Somehow or other he felt that in order to imagine the most mysterious event in the history of the universe, which is what he was now sure it was, he would have to be physically absent, on the outside, so to speak, in some kind of exile.