He can still remember the moment when he imagined for the first time what the white cleft between his bride’s legs must look like, fleshy and firm, and when he spread it apart with his fingers, the tiny red rooster’s comb would appear. Later, when she was his wife, he loved the sounds their two sweaty bodies made when they rubbed together and pulled apart again, slapping and smacking, their mouths, tongues, and lips all flowing together, sucking at one another to transform two formerly separate beings into a single moist concavity of flesh. Flesh, flesh — sometimes the word alone was enough to arouse him. But ever since the night before, when he took the lifeless child from his wife’s arms and laid it back in its cradle, he knows how cold something dead feels, colder than he would have ever expected. He doesn’t know how he can forget this. He, the civil servant, eleventh class, has begotten something dead, and no Confidential Qualification is needed to confirm this.
Sunlight falls on the rough pine floor of the inn where he is sitting. When he arrived before dawn, there were still a couple of Russian deserters lying under the tables asleep. While he was downing his first glass of spirits, and then the second, and the third, they woke up, gathered their bundles, and left in the company of a short, bald-headed man who’d appeared at daybreak, apparently by prearrangement. Neither the bald-headed man nor the others spoke much, nonetheless it was clear that these Russians — a sort you often saw in public houses like this — were men who’d made up their minds not to turn back. After his experience of the night before, the civil servant, eleventh class, finds himself suddenly understanding what it means to cross a border like that, what it means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. It’s as if the top layer were crumbling away from everything he sees and encounters, this layer that had previously gotten in the way of his comprehension, and now, like it or not, he is forced to recognize what lies below and to endure this recognition — but he can’t imagine how.
Sometimes, looking at his baby, he had wondered where it came from, where it had been before its mother conceived it. Now he wishes it made no difference whether the child had appeared — remaining only for the most infinitesimally fleeting bit of time — or had never appeared at all. But no, there was a difference. Using his thumb, he rubs a shiny coat button shiny. Since there was no measurement that applied to the difference between life and death, the dying of this tiny child was as absolute as any other dying. Never before has measuring — his profession, after all — seemed so superfluous to him as on that morning. Should he pull everyday life back on over his head now that he has understood it is nothing more than a garment?
He’d shouted at his wife because — although she’d picked up the baby, trying to comfort it — she hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known any remedy for death, but he had also shouted because he too had known no remedy for death.
He, the civil servant of the lowest possible class, had been no match for Death.
And now?
The short, bald-headed man returns to the pub, sits at a table near the Imperial and Royal civil servant he’d seen there earlier that morning when he came for the Russians, and nods. The civil servant had carelessly tossed his coat with the gold buttons over an empty chair; if it were not for this coat, the bald-headed man wouldn’t have known that this person he saw sitting here ought to have been sitting in an office by this hour. The civil servant is unshaven, the tips of his mustache soiled, he is wearing no necktie, and there is a full glass of spirits before him yet again as he gazes out the window at the street, where some mongrel is running in circles trying to catch its own tail, occasionally sliding on a frozen puddle, the mongrel stumbles around before finding its footing and then goes back to hunting down its own scruffy posterior. The bald man orders a snack — pickled herring along with a beer — and settles down contentedly. He isn’t ruling out the possibility of striking yet another deal here this very morning.
5
It’s true, she is awake, and now there is this next day, and this day, too, she will spend sitting on the footstool. During the night or early that morning, her mother apparently cleared away the bowls of food, untouched by the mourner. She hears someone clattering around in the kitchen, water splashing, something being pushed aside on the table, footsteps crossing the floor, the clink of porcelain. In the baby’s room, in any case, there is nothing left to do. It wasn’t as she had feared yesterday: that while she was sleeping she would forget what had happened and the memory would come crashing down on her with all its weight when she woke up. No, all through her sleep she had known that her child was no longer alive, and when she woke up, she knew it still, sleep had been no more and no less leaden than wakefulness, so she had been spared seeing her worn-out workaday reality collapse once more. When she rises to sit again upon the footstool, everything goes quiet in the kitchen, as if her mother is listening to see what she is up to now that she’s stirring again. Why has life at home become so much like hunting? In the parlor, the miniature grandfather clock strikes six with bright, tinny strokes, then all is perfectly quiet once more. Her husband, it would appear, is still out. Yesterday, when they returned to the house after the funeral and she sat down on the stool, he had tried to lift her up, and when he didn’t succeed, he ran out of the house. She hasn’t seen him since. Will the same thing now happen to her as happened to her mother? When, as a little girl, she tried to imagine where her father might be instead of with his family, she always envisioned someone who had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or in France. But she didn’t believe it. Her mother always spoke of her father’s absence as something definitive, irreversible, never allowing her daughter the faintest hope that he might return home, or even prove to be nearby — in the district capital, for instance, with another wife and new children. Sometimes, introducing herself, she had the impression people were caught off guard when she said her name. In America, her mother said, or in France. But she herself never imagined her father as a living man, neither in America nor France, nor saw him living nearby; she only ever envisioned him as someone who had, for instance, hanged himself; and if anything was nearby, it was the forest where his body had swung, maybe she’d already walked right past the tree he’d tied his noose to.
Do you need anything, her mother asks. Behind her, the sun is shining into the kitchen, which is why her mother looks like a silhouette. The daughter shakes her head. On this second day of sitting, she and her mother don’t say much. No one knows her mother better than she does, and no one knows her better than her mother, so there’s not much to say. She sits there, thinking about the fact that a part of her is now lying in the ground and beginning to rot, then she looks at her skin, which is still surrounded by air, alive. A friend comes to visit, she has more bowls with her, and says: You’ll have a second child, and a third and a fourth. She says: We’ll see. One of the bowls her friend has brought has eggs in it, she knows this is customary, but doesn’t want to eat them. One neighbor doesn’t even knock, she just bursts in, violently weeping, and doesn’t even scrape the snow from her shoes before falling along with her tears at the mourner’s feet, Praised be our sole Judge, she cries, and then gets up again to fling her arms around the neck of the mourner’s mother, sobbing, why oh why, shaking her head, and then she stops saying anything at all because she is weeping so hard her voice is not available for use. Simon, the coachman, comes, he stops just inside the hallway door and says he’s sorry and that he’s brought a bit of soup and that his wife sends her condolences, unfortunately she can’t come herself because she’s so sick. Another of her friends comes and says: Right from the beginning I thought it was pale. Then another: Why didn’t you send for the doctor? Did it really happen that fast? A third: When they’re so young, the slightest little thing is enough to do them in, who knows what the Lord in His infinite greatness was thinking! A fourth: Where in the world is your husband?