I considered nonchalantly carrying the mousetrap down. The thing would speak for itself!
On the stairs, however, it occurred to me how embittered people become if proven wrong, especially since a mouse is not supposed to be found in a room in a hotel in which “there simply are no” mice! I considered, moreover, that my aura of a man without luggage, with two pairs of socks, two bottles of slivovitz, a book entitled What the Day Brings, and who already claims to see mice every night, would, thereby, be considerably shaken, and I would immediately have been relegated to the disagreeable category of complaining and altogether ordinary transient guests. Consequently, I disposed of the mouse in a place rather well suited for such purposes, and once again set the empty trap on the floor of my little room.
From then on I was treated with even greater deference, under no circumstances was I to be upset, and they catered to my needs as to a sickly child. When finally I checked out, my departure was met with the friendliest expression of sympathy and devotion, even though my luggage consisted exclusively of two pairs of socks, two empty slivovitz bottles and a mousetrap!
The Hotel Room
At three A.M. the birds started quietly chirping, suggestively. My worries grew and grew. It started in the brain, as if with a little rolling stone, tore all the joys of hopefulness along with it, the joys that brighten your life, swelled into a sweeping avalanche, burying under the ability to endure the day and the merciless commanding hour! To rise to happenstance! A quiet storm brewed in the branches before my window. For no reason, for absolutely no reason I had burned and bothered the life of sweet Ms. J. And one of my benefactors cut off his modest monthly largesse as of next month. He’d heard something or other about me and my views. They were too radical for him, too uncharitable. My aesthetic ideal, Ms. W., belongs now to those who can pay her. I who pursued the “mystic cult of beauty” was always too inelegantly dressed for her, too incomprehensible and too altogether mad. When I sank to my knees before her, deeply, so deeply stirred by her noble bodily perfection, she said I had perverse inclinations, it wasn’t her fault! My hotel room is lighting up, my soul is darkening. Morning is breaking.
The song of the birds in the treetops grows clearer with shreds of simple melody. Quiet storms disseminate the scent of meadows. It would be the perfect hour to hang myself from the window box—.
Elevator
The elevator is still a great mystery to me.
I am not so dumb as to spoil the thrill of the blessings of modern culture by allowing myself to get too accustomed to them!
I still feel it as something wonderful, this secret stair-transcendence, this preservation of my knee joints, of my heart, of my oh! by no means costly time.
The door of my elevator closes slowly, automatically, which proves to be downright annoying to people with packages or baskets, albeit rather pleasant for a writer.
I have no idea by what mechanical devices my elevator dangles. I am merely informed every now and then by the super that something’s not quite right today and that the electrical fitter is there. And while I don’t understand just what kind of catastrophe was in the making, or what an electrical fitter does, both seem to be linked to a possibly life-threatening situation.
It’s awful to ride up with a stranger. You feel compelled to initiate a conversation and obsess on it from one floor to another. You suffer a delayed tension like that of the baccalaureate exam. Your face takes on a frozen glower. Finally you say: “Goodbye!” with a kind of intonation as if you you’d just ended a friendship for life. That’s why, so as to sidestep all these unpleasantries, I never get home before six in the morning. At that hour the elevator isn’t up and running yet.
Visit
He rode up to her in an open cast-iron elevator. It was like a wondrous cage, like a pierced parrot house. Upstairs there was a little white hall with white lacquered walls. The hall wafted with the scent of fine women’s garments and Violette de Parme.
The woman stood there in a very small room which was rather warm.
“It really is a little cage—,” she said to the man. “Make yourself comfortable. Feel free to smoke—.”
“What are you looking at?” she said. “Oh, back into my youth. That one there on the wall is a picture of the room in which I grew up. It’s a big homeland, even if it looks very small.”
“A big homeland?!” remarked the tattered Tartar.
“That’s right. My guardian loved me—. So did his son. His wife’s name was Evelyn and she always sat in an easy chair under fruit trees that didn’t give off much shade. She only really needed the sun, and the shade of the fruit trees was superfluous. One time she said to me: ‘Anita—.’ And then she paused. Then she said: ‘My husband loves you and my son loves you and I love you. I’ve never read novels. What’s the use of novels? But I’m reading one now and I can’t quite get the hang of it.’ She expressed herself so sensitively about these complicated matters that were tearing her up inside. No one can explain what happened next. Do you find this boring?! I fled from my guardian, my guiding star, whom I loved, that’s right, I fled, even though he wanted to share his life with me. But I held back my life and fled from his.”
Pause.
“Are you comfortable in that chair?” said the woman to the tattered Tartar. “You can fetch yourself a pillow. Go ahead, take these white silken ones. It makes no difference.”
Then she continued: “After that, the bank director said to me: ‘Anita, I love you, I’d like to take care of you—.’ ‘What for, am I sick—?!’ I said. ‘Just about—,’ he said. So I accepted my gentle caretaker. He protected my somewhat fragile body like a holy thing, so that a soul could blossom in it, a soul that did not always sing his chosen hymns—. The noble man!”
Pause.
“And Evelyn and the son?” asked the Tartar.
“They shriveled up, I think. It may be that they both betook themselves to the fruit trees in the sun and let the dappled shade and sun spots do them in.”
“And did the beloved guardian never kiss you?!”
“Of course he did. That’s what it was. A guiding star that starts burning instead of glowing! Why did he reject Evelyn, the guardian of us all, our guiding star?!”
The tattered Tartar thought: “Your love sank down to your waistline, Anita, splendid gazelle! You were the very incarnation of my notion of those souls that slip down to the waistline and have to stop here. The soul does not endure the ‘sacred transformation’ to the bodily, it does not release itself unto the ‘blessed delirium,’ but, rather, grows and grows into itself and never comes to an end. And finally it transforms you into an impassioned poet who is always enamored of someone, sings sweet hymns and has wondrous dreams. Love is never condensed into the ‘physical act,’ there is no physical mode of expression, no instrument for the music of living on which the soul could cry itself out, sing its heart out, set itself free! The mystery of ‘sexual release’ plays no role in the love of the sonorous, self-expressive, self-redemptive soul! Just as the word formed in the throat of the carnal, the sonorous, the revelatory, in the love that flows in bodily release, is a loose translation of the redemptive thought!
“Everything stayed inside you, Anita, and grew inward into the source of mysterious deeds! Of such love a symphony is born, an external score as with the man Beethoven, an internal score for the child-virgin. Never does a little baby blossom from such love, never can you expel it from your tired loins and set it out on your lap as a whole little person. It will always keep welling up and cooling back down again in you in luminous clouds. Woman, you’re like a fantastic protoplasm, without the ‘holy becoming’ and the peace! You’re like an artist’s soul in perpetual motion, like Beethoven and the sea!”