“And what about the lady?”
“It’s not up to the dead.”
“You really think they’ve killed her?”
“In a certain sense, of course. It’s only that sense, however, that decides the misfortune. The little lamb that hands the butcher the knife he’d forgotten is a dead little lamb twice over. — Where should we put it?”
“What?”
“You know, the stiff!”
With great effort, Giggles rose and planted herself on the curb. She was staring at her beautiful legs.
“I hear you,” she said mischievously, “I hear you, but he’s lying. .”
“For now, drive to Rue d’Astorg.”
“No stops?”
“No stops.”
We settled them into the corners, where they more or less stayed. I sat in the middle.
“So they’ll be more secure,” the driver said after taking their arms and placing them around my neck from both sides.
That neighborhood had the malevolent flavor of the Parisian neighborhoods outside the city gates, where majestic and bungled apartment blocks provide useless lessons in hygiene to the hovels, which see right through them. The embittered quarreling of spouses who have decided on divorce and are seeking out pretexts. I didn’t know precisely where we in fact were, but it was easy to anticipate that the closer we got to Rue d’Astorg, which is contained within a single quarter, the more touchy Paris would become in its fixedness. Up till now, the opposite had been true: the farther we had gone, the more plebeian the landscape had become in its rambling. The tidy houses seemed to approach increasingly greater misfortune, and the sheds, flophouses, saloons, and ill-treated pavilions, more scattered than sparse, were becoming an ever-more-stringent rule; they pretended to nothing but an ambition to inspire Utrillos. The farther we went, the more gracelessly were we confronted by yards filled with scrap iron, jealous of its own better days and as prideful as a hidalgo; heaps of lime and charcoal that no one ever starts on; piles of junk that didn’t belong to anybody, that belongs to no one and nevertheless revels in its place in the sun; the brickwork of Minotaurs lowing for liberators to lead them out of the labyrinths where they’d been hardheadedly thrust; and then those sulky and conceited little vegetable gardens, whose sole care is how to get out from behind their neglected palings and give the slip to the gardening equipment, with its efforts on their behalf so fair and so pointless. — In short, I noticed that, instead of getting closer to Rue d’Astorg, we were getting further away. I was, remarkably, of two minds as to whether I should bring this to the driver’s attention, or else to take the detour in its natural course, and it was only when I’d decided that it suddenly occurred to me that Fuld and Giggles, lifeless till now, had come to. Their still-languorous eyes groped around for mine, the same question scurrying around therein. I was aware of it before I even needed to look, whether at him or at her: it arose right in front of me, as distinct as an iceberg in the sun, and I responded with all speed: “No, no, there now. . Mutig’s not here. You’re safe, you’re safe.”
“Too bad,” they answered, as though in a single breath.
The roadway was like a cord. The driver turned and asked, pushing aside the barrier glass, “Rue d’Astorg, isn’t it?”
“Doesn’t matter. Wherever the three of us go together, it’ll be deserted anyway.”
“The three of you?”
“The three of us! — Without our seducer.”
“Without your seducer?”
“Without courage.”
We were now in entirely free territory. Like someplace where nothing had yet been decided. A place from back before the waters were separated from the land. Still a dry shore, but already approaching the waters and rushing after their fragrance like a dachshund hot on the trail. The soil was getting spongier. The road, till now like a cord, negotiated the moors’ beginnings, went around them, begging them for passage— moors are jealous and stingy. We were sent down long detours that, on this crude flatness, seemed like foolish and expensive jokes. We drove fast. On sharp turns Fuld would suddenly fall across me, then Giggles. Again and again I was required to right them, put them in their place. Each time they collapsed as if quizzically, with the incoherent, insistent, and uninquisitive questioning of drunkards. They were hideous to the touch: he, limp the whole time like empty packaging in the tentative shape of the object that’s fallen from it; she, like a new, jointed, as-yet unworn doll. But though they were rather lifeless things, I took notice of them from one moment to the next, the way they were conversing behind my back “with their eyes”—asinine and somehow scattered, plotting something, but not yet knowing what. This unsettled me, or, rather, it twisted me out of shape, but so as not to compromise myself I pretended not to see. — Meanwhile, it had gotten late. It was the full moon, but the darkness was getting the better of it. The sky was full of stars; they shone so much it crackled; you’d say they’re shining, knowing why: they communicate with each other across the systems; there is among them a simple, if voluntary, if coercive fellowship of an unfamiliar nature, and they’ve resigned themselves to it. And I felt a bit of shame that the three of us, though pressed so tightly together, have nothing in common but for our polluted secrecy. Perhaps the driver alone knew precisely what had brought us down — his innuendos, his almost irritably indifferent liberty at the steering wheel — but astonishingly, he was just the one I had unwittingly excluded from our depraved fellowship. It struck me, I no longer know how or why, that it might only be through a demon’s incitement that we introduce so many unknowns into our equations, whereas it might suffice to dig out reserves that are long since calculated. Our prides, however, seem too minute for so noble a task, for what are we to do? Would we then want to finish calculating the mystery of life with these largely unfamiliar equations? — I had started to get it: we were driving along the Seine, downstream. I recognized the hillsides near Saint-Cloud, though they weren’t actually hillsides so much as a sort of horizontal projection of them. That must have been the square beyond the Pont de Saint-Cloud, where there is so much dust in summer. But today it’s all turned to mud. The tavern where the artisans’ wedding parties head to was still there, but the background — the city — forfeited perspectival depth, as if it were a poorly painted theater screen. Le Pavillon Bleu, on the river, was, one would say, enticed irresistibly by the water. The path behind it, leading past the barracks to the park fence, commenced with great care, as if it were particular about its authenticity (anyway, it was authentic): it anxiously avoided the theater screen in the background, whose touch would have enchanted it, and ended in a sort of tunnel. Through the tunnel you could see the garden by Le Nôtre, but the gate by which one enters had disappeared; the garden, too, was merely a projection of itself, and incredibly simplified, summarized somehow. We hadn’t encountered anyone this entire time, and yet we were never free from a sense — how should I put this? — a sense of nearby person-ness. Nor was there anything to be afraid of. I don’t think I was even a little taken aback, having already seen from afar that the tunnel was bustling. Here and there I made out campfires whose glare was reflected in the arch, and where — it seemed to me — halberds glimmered. When we drove into this tunnel — for a long while now, besides their giving each other the eye, Fuld and Giggles hadn’t exhibited the slightest sign of life — I was seized by a powerful, really quite powerful sense of something I had seen once before. And with all speed, as if it had long since been readied within me, I had also already identified that memory: that tunnel, it was the long whitewashed tunnel that led from the park in Písek to Heyduk Street, only it wasn’t pure, but rather — if I can put it this way — mixed up with the vestibule of the town hall in Arles that I had read in the evening papers was used as shelter from the rain. (The tunnel in Písek likewise provided shelter from a rain-soaked promenade.) In no way did I marvel at that symbiosis, for I know Arles; it’s just that I was somehow bugged that that wound hadn’t healed sufficiently well, that is, as I have said, that it provided so unkempt a mixture. Only now did I notice that the underpass was not solid; it broadened in the middle into an open rotunda, and it was just in this sort-of-courtyard that these campfires were blazing, with squires bustling among them. Those squires gave the impression of extras in the theater, awaiting the signal to move onstage, and passing the slow time by pretending that it really was their duty to keep order in a crowd of modernly dressed civilians who were giving off an impression that was the complete opposite of theatrical. Those squires surrounded us — I quipped that they’d been expecting us for a long time— and we understood there was no way to go further. The driver, it seemed to me, had already come to an agreement with them. When I asked why we couldn’t just keep going, they didn’t want to say, but what seemed strange to me wasn’t so much that they didn’t want to say, but the definite ostentatiousness with which they refused me an answer! So, I told the driver to turn around. He, however, folded his arms, while the mercenaries and the crowd started shaking their heads no: a quite tolerant no, but a resolute one. All of a sudden it seemed to me that there would be nothing simpler than to carry Fuld and Giggles through the passage and the grillwork, which was closed (now you couldn’t see anything past the grillwork besides the self-assured darkness, which couldn’t be anything but a black curtain), though the only thing that occurred to me to do was to ask why and where. The squires helped me. When we approached the fence, it turned out there wasn’t a curtain there at all, but rather a gate, and quite a heavy one by the looks of it, but one that yielded as easily as the slatted doors to American saloons. We passed through it and found ourselves in a land that was at once garden, flooded polder, and oyster pits. These pits stretched out of sight and, oddly enough, didn’t overflow. Narrow grassy dikes turned them into a kind of chessboard. Despite their being so narrow, trees had taken root in them here and there, and not just little ones, and some remarkable feat of engineering had managed to run a meandering yet negotiable road along the way, without violating the landscape’s chessboard regularity or its aquatic monotony. Those pits didn’t appear deep, and their water was murky. On the whole, the sense they exuded was rather mournful, though by no means inconsolable, and, as far as that enigmatic road was concerned, it beckoned me with its peculiar, gentle power, which surely stemmed from the now-distant bend in the road, beyond which it then stretched again, straight, ascending conspicuously. Conspicuously, because the land’s contours, so it seemed to me, didn’t correspond with that ascent, and as a matter of fact it was as though the road detached from the ground and led its own upward existence. I decided that we would set out along it, and I felt that this decision of mine was a legitimate countermove to the recent refusal of the crowd and the squires, a countermove that was just as tolerant and resolute. The only thing that confounded me was how it happened that these parts seemed to me to be negotiable, let alone passable. It was all the more astonishing that the road had an altogether dreamlike quality, whereas those low dikes stood out for their almost conspicuous realness. I told myself that the only way to get far there was by vehicle, that it would not do to go on foot. The image of my having to trudge with those puppets along the grassy dikes, among waters that weirdly did not overflow, gave me unbearable vertigo; I must have known that the hollows were shallow. But fortunately, just past those saloon doors in the form of heavy gates, there was a bit of dry space, with the distinctive texture of something that has shunned the rest of the aquatic landscape and formed a whole only unwillingly, when compelled. But to lay the lifeless Fuld and Giggles there without getting them wet was a delicate enterprise, and Fuld actually did slip away from us and fall into the water. I saw that he was aware of this involuntary spa treatment, even if he in no way showed it, neither by opening his eyes, nor with a twitch of the limbs, nor with a grimace. This awareness of his, exhibited by nothing, and of which something testified — perhaps a magnetic current from him to me — was even touching. I had to go into the reservoir after him, the water hardly came up to my knees; I felt its chill, yet none of its wetness. At last, Fuld and Giggles were on terra firma.