“It’s kind of sad, being someone’s god.” (This was Paul.)
Andrew stood; he took a sure step toward Mutig and, harshly: “And if she did. Now that she’s ours. . How would you set that up?”
“I don’t know. How would you?”
“It’s so seductive, being a god,” they answered as a single voice.
“Enough,” Mutig exclaimed, and the lights went down in the blackamoor’s chest.
“I never told you,” he continued, “that we didn’t ever reach a resolution, did I? Is a game without rules still a game? Isn’t it rather fate? Why was she letting herself go, why was she staring so?”
“And what part of her were you supposed to demolish?” Fuld inquired, eagerly borrowing from Mutig’s naïve terminology and covering for his own servility, of which he was ashamed, with an insincere, ironic tone.
“Actually, there’s nothing left for me. I was merely a place, the burning bush where. .”
I: “. . God gave his orders. .”
Mutig: “So be it. — And if you like, just think that I’m saying this out of foolish pride.”
Fuld: “There’s nothing left for you, but to me, who is only the sixth, you offer a portion anyway?”
Mutig looked up, amazed.
“A misunderstanding,” he said, like someone who has noted that his speech was in vain. “Or do you assume that we would have worked her over so hard—the five of us — if we hadn’t recognized her as damned?”
“Well then, if she’s damned. .”
“Of course she’s damned — but she has to agree to it, she has to consent to it. Only then can she still be helped; for let us not forget, please, that this is actually for her own good. Pay close attention: she can’t not agree to her own blinding, for she looks up to god, that is, to us, in vain; she can’t not agree to her dumbness, for we do not answer her; she can’t come to terms, for how could such an incorrigible simpleton comprehend that the worst outcasts are the outcasts whom no one is driving away! That one might not be driven away, but is still excluded? She won’t get there, for a god’s wrath proceeds without leaving any footprints.”
“God’s wrath?”
“Ours. . —”
“I hear, I hear,” Giggles choked, but she was choking without tears.
“Is she unhappy? Is she ever! But she presumes she’s innocent. One can live a long life that way, and quite tolerably. So then how would she guess that there are hangmen who perform their executions — how to put this? — who perform their executions cleanly? Who have no need to clear their conscience under the pretext that the condemned man deserved it? They don’t execute him because he’s wicked; he’s wicked because they execute him. She won’t figure this out, no way, but if you rub her nose in it — pardon my putting it this way — what choice will she have but to believe that it is so? But this is why she loves me! Gifting evil to our loved ones does not spur them; it doesn’t seem clean; it smacks of denatured vengeance; but she did not, does not, love you with love. Were you to exile her as well. . You, her last hope, I want to say, the last impediment to her rehabilitation. . Look, here’s a little pin. This won’t hurt much. There. . in her left breast. As a sign that Giggles deserved it, because she’s wicked.”
“She doesn’t hear you?” Fuld asked, leaning in.
“But of course she hears me. So what?” And after a brief silence, “It was you who guaranteed that she would, just a moment ago.”
“I’m the one who guaranteed it?”
“Remember, after all, those pastures. That the only thing she really wants is to withdraw to those pastures — liberated.”
“You were saying that she heard us,” Fuld spoke calculatedly.
“Certainly. And so what? Would you boast of being a gentle executioner?”
“That’s not the point. — But if she hears us, she knows you’ve been leading me astray. Let’s assume that I really do think she’s wicked. If she’s heard you leading me astray, she might think that I’m doing it for payment; for example, because I feel like that sixth part. .”
“What sixth part?”
“Of the power over life and death.”
“Giggles,” Mutig said, turning to that almost-puppet (the Negro had not stopped stroking her hair). “Giggles, do you think that Fuld is two-faced?”
“Fuld, two-faced!”
She sat upright, exerting herself fully, and threw her arms around his neck.
“Giggles,” Mutig said to her jovially, “you don’t really believe that you deserved it, if we’ve treated you so poorly? We! Us!”
“I do.”
“If you disgust us, if you look stupid, worthy of our scorn; if we deceive you, make a fool of you; if we no longer want anything to do with you. . Do you think you deserve it?”
“I do. I’ve earned it with my stupidity, my ineptitude, my pride, my prickliness. .”
“With your wickedness, you strumpet, with your wickedness.”
“Oh no, not with wickedness. How could I love you. . despite everything, if I were wicked? Fuld, am I wicked?”
“Um. .”
“Um. . oh, she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get that wicked is not a synonym for bad. She doesn’t get that to be condemned to love the way she loves is a curse. She doesn’t know— Giggles — she doesn’t know that there is also a wickedness free of blame. The basest of all.
“Redeem her,” and he made a show of handing Fuld the doll.
“Unhappiness is demoralizing, a plague. I cannot stand to look at unhappiness,” Fuld said suddenly, he said it very quickly, and his eyes were popping out at Giggles, as if he were trying, albeit in vain, to take her in visually, as if the span of his universe had suddenly become Giggles, and Giggles alone.
He was looking at Giggles; he was looking at her so extortively that he finally wrested a smile out of her; he was like Job, smiling with the hope that showered upon him, though he knew it was in vain; the smile of a child who dreads a blow that has already fallen, but who, even afterwards, doesn’t let go of the naïve hope for the miracle that would divert that blow from its course. It was a smile that burst through dread ten times every second, though it was restored each time.
Fuld’s posture, which hadn’t changed for a moment since my arrival, was only now reminding me of something. It struck me, that is to say, it struck me as a yelp in the darkness. It struck me that Fuld’s posture was the standard posture of an examining magistrate, it was so pure in its curiosity that you didn’t know whether it had turned sadistic or was merely stern. That’s the posture. But the face, which, try as I might, I could not manage to glimpse but precisely in profile — oh, that face, sorrowful, for real, unto death! — when it was then lit up by the words: Giggles, might I shoulder the rest of your burden?
And the hand of that sadistic examining magistrate with the redemptive face slides slowly along the rubber doll that Mutig is languorously proffering. And toward that hand another is sliding, Giggles’s—: it is holding a fancy needle plucked from the little bonnet (she’d fished it out so smoothly, as if merely fixing a mischievous lock of hair), and behind this needle there creeps an untrusting, almost playful, oft-disrupted and reconstituted smile, dragging along three heavy words: “With what, then?”
In the meantime, the auditorium had filled up again, I don’t know how. The members of the audience sprawled comfortably in their seats; there wasn’t a piehole not gnawing a thick twist packed into the corner of the mouth. Before me, in neat rows, hordes of eyes snooped over my head. No! It’s a single eye: the eye of a fly. I see myself in it, multiplied, but is it actually me? It looks like me, I’m that I, yet somehow topsy-turvy. It’s my worry, it’s my regret, I’m buffeted by a “now or never,” and my teeth are chattering, but the answer I get from the fly’s eye is a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen (for the most part me, topsy-turvy), and it convinces me it’s my mistake, that there is no worry, no regret, no caritas, nothing but the curiosity to see multiplied to the point of inhumanity, to see what this almost redemptive profile of Fuld’s would give us were we to see it from the front. This curiosity grows and grows, it’s already too great, I can’t handle it, I see it, it’s sprung forth from me like a finger puppet from a magician’s box, it has the eye of a fly. It sways on a wavering nudge, it sways forward, back. It has the knavish smile of a scoundrel who’s nicked the wire beneath the acrobat and is delightedly awaiting the consequences; the short, splayed paws of a welcoming little devil from limbo, along with his wicked joviality. He knows he’s bewitched me. He knows, and he’s smiling. He sways more and more, he smiles less and less. And having reached full tilt, he has stretched his arms out like a happy little jester getting into a tangle with a gendarme; the smiling was done; in the fly’s eye, now so near, a tidy mosaic of unfamiliar gentlemen paralyzed by a curiosity that has no name. The nasty biceps of outrageous weightlifters sprouted behind the short paws: curiosity, as burly as a drunken stock-boy, jolted me. Something twanged, crunched, and creaked beneath my feet; I fell on something; for a moment it put up a rough resistance, but all of a sudden it went slack and yielded disgustingly; something awkwardly jagged was left in my arms. The blackamoor vanished; Mutig, livid with furious regret, stood back and carefully examined his lacerated hands; in my arms — Giggles. Facing me head on, however, and, as always, in the posture of a sadistic examining magistrate— Fuld. Fuld? No; something hideous; an expansive, sweet-toothed grimace, like that of someone inexpressibly good trying to polish off everything but his smile, someone as though barely a shadow, who, having realized the pointlessness in due course, has fled, covering his face and bidding me toward this empty disharmony.