Fear made me switch off the desk lamp and light a candle… though sitting by candlelight made me uneasy, a constant reminder of the air raids, when we were nearly always left without power. A vile, sneaky movement below the ceiling seemed to roil the swathes of smoke, and I moved nervously to the kitchen, sweeping ancient bundles of newspapers from the blue-and-white checked oilcloth that covered the table, noisome, nauseating, spittle-covered newspapers, stuck together and rendered illegible by the liquor from tomatoes rotted to black… I always bought lots of tomatoes, those so-called love apples, which I devoured with great pleasure on good days; but now they’d all gone sour on me, gone soft, gone bad… and from their detritus too-dark vapors seemed to rise. There were noises on the street as though shots were being fired… at the same time I felt that a sluggish unrest had erupted in the lurking night outside the window, that down there the weary tread of many feet was shuffling, stumbling in one common direction. — There’s nothing behind the smoke on the ceiling, nothing, I said to myself. Nothing, just that cripple with cancer upstairs, whose mortal fear had made him move into the garret room, sitting up there, unyielding on his chair, day and night, staring over the roofs that ring the yard at the open country from where idiocy is closing in on him; the man whose old mother, with a wooden leg, tirelessly washed and fed him in years past, but now all the females have vanished from town. — Nothing, I said, and rested my cheek on the soothingly cool oilcloth covering the table, where the skin of my face immediately stuck to the tacky scab of liquid residues. At that moment I knew that this, and this alone, was the reason for my fear, the only solid reason: the nothingness, the void caused my eerie feeling, and against nothingness I was impotent.
The nothingness that frightened me was that I did nothing, nothing but breathe the horror of the night. I didn’t even move as I breathed. Once, a week ago, two weeks, a letter had come, evidently for me and evidently from my mother, but I hadn’t dared to open it; it was buried somewhere beneath the trash I’d piled up in the apartment. Now, all at once, I was tormented by the fear that the letter had been to announce her return… that suddenly, any moment now, the door might open and my mother might come in. She’d start shouting, throwing up her hands, without even an empty chair to collapse on. — I didn’t have time, I was writing… so, shouting too, I’d attempt to explain the chaos. It would have been a lie, cruel self-mockery; for I’d written nothing, but once again I’d blame my writing for every evil that arose around me, I’d blame the sickness of my language, which would confirm my mother’s position. Though she wouldn’t even ask for proof of my claim; she never wasted a word on the subject, even when I was writing she condemned my pastime to scorn, and she was right to condemn me, for my writing was achieved at the price of filth and disorder, while I smoked and drank vast amounts of coffee. — You’ll destroy yourself, she said, soon enough you’ll see where this gets you, you’ll destroy yourself and the lives of the people around you. — But she never told me what to live for… I was past forty, and so far she’d kept that a secret from me… though she’d gone to the trouble to lug the madly shrieking bundle that I was in the last years of the war through the howling racket of the nighttime air raids, dragging me down into the bomb shelter; no, she hadn’t just tossed me by the wayside, though no one would ever have noticed. — Ah, and the state hadn’t tossed me away either… though it also failed to explain what to live for, if not just to serve it and increase the population it owned; to the state it seemed obvious that I owed it boundless, eternal gratitude. For ultimately it had created me… oh, there’d been a progenetive act of incredible intensity: outstretched in sincerest devotion my mother had let Father State bestride her in all the vigor of his beauty; the grandiose symbol of rebuilding rose precipitously before her and plunged into her body, and to celebrate how she’d been favored, a sea of flags unfurled, the Party’s young guards waved them over the rite of this clean coitus; I was immaculately conceived and stood spotless amid the life that was being rebuilt, my brow was steeled, I appeared in the shape of hope… but then that one summer inflamed this brow. Oh, only later did I dare to be jealous of that pure act. Generalissimo Stalin, the friend of all good people, had created me; I had the honor of owing my life to him; I obeyed, and there was a weeping in the world, and tears on my mother’s face as he departed from us. And I was scared to death… but desolate blazing summers inflamed me, and sweat flowed from my eyes. I closed my eyes, I must have fallen asleep… and woke up again in a terrible unbelief.
Waking up so late was one more cause for panic. — That night, after long sleepless rambles through the stifling apartment, back and forth between my room and the kitchen, after several failed attempts to fall asleep in my sweaty bed, I was revisited by a dream I’d dreamed often and with little variation. This time the dream was not interrupted by a signal rapped out above the room’s ceiling, this time I dreamed the dream to its disturbing end, when its scenes, drained of color, faded into diffusion, into an unformed void where I was lost in indescribable fear. — This dream, which afflicted me only on nights when my mother was gone and I was defenseless, had always fled, leaving no memory, when the crutch of the cripple in the room above jabbed at the floorboards, imperiously demanding my silence; it seemed to disturb him when I cried out in my sleep, it scared him up from the immobility that made him one with the night’s dull pulse that ebbed in the first hour of the new day, presaging his approaching death. Upon waking, all I ever knew was that I’d dreamed the words I love you or Madam, I love you, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d cried the words out loud, as my cries had never startled me from sleep. — I knew that if the cripple still had any feelings for the things that were lost, these words had to drive him mad; yet for some time now I’d felt far more certain of hell than he.
One time I’d meant to go up and discuss that future in hell with him. — Probably I was mistaken even about that; it hadn’t happened, I’d merely dreamed that intention too. Now, evidently, it was too late to act on it—I was horrified by the thought that that had nearly provoked me to go upstairs to the cripple to assail him with my envy, which might have been fatal for him. I’d escaped that fate, because now, presumably, he was dead. He’d gone and died when all the females left town… never again could I slink upstairs and listen at the door of his garret room to hear the halting dribble of his urine in a tin pot, the coughing when his mother lit his cigarette and he greedily sucked in the first drafts of smoke, the curses with which she admonished him for his impatience. — Now it was quiet up there, nothing to be heard but the summer’s hum and crackle; amid the soft mass of yellow heat his gray face, with the bared teeth and the tip of his bitten tongue stuck between them—that mask that even in death seemed blinded by the sunbeam from the roof hatch—would slowly dry up. No, he wasn’t in hell; even in the second when his heart finally stopped he’d had to fend off the sun, it wasn’t in the night that his half-closed eyes grew dim, and what he saw wasn’t the infernal plains of insurmountable garbage dumps with their flickering blood-red fires from which black locust swarms of charred paper whirled up, wasn’t those hills and valleys of ash where a madman stumbled through the trash in search of a few long-rotted pages containing, in green ink, a few indecipherable instructions for the implementation of love. He was seven years older than I, born before the war, and must have felt a source of warmth, fed to him by his memory, throughout all the time of his misfortune… but I lacked anything of that nature, I lacked some tiny indefinable thing, a point I failed to find within myself, an incandescent filament; something had been withheld from me, in a moment of carelessness or hurry that lay inconceivably far in the past someone had forgotten to imbue me with a faint breath, a vague thing that for anyone else would lack all significance, a tiny tickle as from a chance strand of hair carelessly touched for the fraction of a second, yet a thing that could never be made up for, and the lack of that pitiful droplet irrevocably condemned me to a future in hell. — This is what I’d wanted to ask him: What is it, where does it come from…? You must have experienced it, for you’re still alive despite your pain, your paralysis, the smell of your purple metastases, you must know it, how can it be installed within me? Where can I find it, and what will happen to me if I don’t, if I can’t fill the absence? Will this needle-thin drill-hole rupture within me, will this barely perceptible cavity burst to an insane, gigantic size, swallowing me up, will it kill me… will I, doomed to be evil, end up in the purgatorial fires? Isn’t the destructive phase of madness said to return you to the playgrounds of your childhood; will I end up in a concentration camp? Or in the cancer ward, amid barbed wire… or will my hand feel nothing until it touches the lever of the torturer’s machinery? —