So he spread his arms. — He felt the innkeeper’s paws upon him. He could spread his arms. He could. He could. .
But yesterday had imparted something to him after alclass="underline"
To think that he had just succeeded, during this flanking sortie, to amass a brief moment of freedom (a second? a minute? an hour?), the likes of which he had never experienced! What the others would have given for his discovery from yesterday! The freedom, that is, when in the sudden unlit brightening he recognized himself beyond what was subordinate — and everything that occurred in that moment, everything he noticed in that moment, that he got wind of, everything that at that moment he could reach with his senses, was in fact merely subordinate — that is to say, he was all alone with duration. Or maybe in duration? Or else maybe beside it? Today he no longer knows precisely, only that (for how could he forget it?) yesterday, and it was just yesterday, he had penetrated to where time had an appearance. An appearance, hard to say of what. Maybe something sort of like space, but a space that knows itself; externally; a space marveling at itself and disengaged from itself. It was weird, a weird moment, when time let him go. . Yes, that’s how to put it: time let him go.
If he thinks that the moment has come for him to notice, I’ll say notice for real, something that he had forgotten in his past, forgotten in time, and that he has arrived at the point of being allowed to arrive there — he remembers: the innkeeper had just been digging around in his pockets — that he could bring it back to himself: the past to the present. The piercing cry from the yard, which he heard while knowing with dazzling certainty that it was a cry that had already subsided, this piercing cry with which there resonated something admittedly merely incidental, but that was firmly protesting that it had nothing to do with what was going on here in the room: Blanche (the second servant girl), whose shoulders started at this cry (this is also the past transposed); Zinaida, who, as if it were a signal, quickly left; heads lifting toward the sky, one after another, but so weirdly, so otherly. Somebody’s bellowing, it’s somewhere in the corridor, the powerful slam of a window, and immediately after that a stumbling cascade of other windows closing quickly (he said: “The windows have been reprimanded”); the imperious entrance of an unforeseen tidal rush and its even more unforeseen abatement (he said: “They’ve squeezed it in the door”); and outside, a stifled groan (he said: “Abandoned orphans, paid off with some great sweeps of a broom”) and the frolicsome thieves’ lanterns that had shone on this payoff. It was precisely with these lanterns that he started to get his bearings: these lanterns told him that the lackeys were bustling behind them preparing for the storm. And then he also got his bearings with regard to the storm’s having burst, that within it the solitude around the mill was increasing threefold, and with it there was a threefold increase, too, of the self-assurance of his threefold tragic position; the mill, in its God-knows-how-many-fold, downpour-wired cage, was where he would have to hurry up and work out a brand-new, slightly operetta-ish constitution for the storm: for himself, with all the bells and whistles.
And he who was closing in on all these events, and then having closed in on them was hastily sorting them out, quite calmly took into account the quite quotidian phenomenon (for it was a quotidian phenomenon) that everything he was seeing and hearing was projected into the present from the past, where it still partially lingered, which is to say that it was storming, but that it had already been storming a good while without him suspecting it, and it occurred to him that between the revolution, which legitimated the operetta-ish constitution of this “state of exception,” and the episode with the bracelet, there was perhaps some relation. He seized upon the notion that they were perhaps both the clumsy joke of fellow diners who’d overindulged, but hardly had he seized upon this than he’d already brushed it off, just like a drowning man holding fast to the edge of a dinghy, whose knuckles they beat with the oars.
So he brushed it off, he brushed it off with a gallows “now I’m in it.” It was like a ransom to the racketeer, and the racketeer was his dread. He was behaving like a desperate, drowning man, without having fallen into the delusion that he might actually drown; yet he was still getting hopelessly soaked; he was dissolving, melting into the muddy, nattering shapelessness of the earth’s saturated, humiliated crust, which had to put up with it, too, which was also struck by it, which was also defenseless. Out of the blue, he had become fascinated by the image of the puddles into which the downpour blasted, puddles pitted as though with smallpox dimples and puddles fundamentally unclean because they are neither only water, nor only soil. They harass the operetta’s empire, closer and closer, they’re all around, the mill is retreating from their unclean contact. But how else can one retreat before the concentric encroachment of a flanking circle than by flattening out? The mill is flattening out, it’s flatter and flatter: now it’s actually just two-dimensional. Where, within the tissue-paper thinness, was there room enough for his shame, and for the spitefulness of those to whom it was spectacle; where will he fit here with his robbing, on which he has swelled like a toadstool after rain? Where could one find in here everything the scum had robbed him of, which they knew they were robbing from him, and by which they nevertheless succeeded in appearing indistinguishable from the righteous? How did that geodetic surface accommodate so many earthly events and things so convincingly three-dimensionaclass="underline" now, for example, him, a person, and now his misery, and now his ignominy?
He caught sight of the innkeeper from such a dizzying proximity (he was so short that he had to look up even at him, who was not tall); he caught sight of the innkeeper — yet no longer so much his crude remorse as his moronic helplessness. But he, instead of fuming, instead of striking him, strayed right back into the dread and humiliation with which they were chasing him, and because he had, after all, been driven off those bitter lands he was surveying them so appreciatively and with such servile fondness (he saw himself; he sees himself) that he detested himself. For he knew, he knew where that gratitude and fondness had come from; the fact that he was increasingly certain that the moronic, helpless innkeeper had not found it, that he had not slid the long-since-discovered bracelet into his pocket. The innkeeper dug into his pockets honestly; the innkeeper really had suspected him; what a superb person he was. Why disparage him, why strike him if he was so kind and. . didn’t find anything. .? How affable, how friendly a base suspicion appears to be when the jig is up! But he whose name has been cleared feels someone tugging at his sleeve; he whose name has been cleared closes his eyes, so not to see; if only he could plug up his ears as well, so not to hear, and his mouth, so to be incapable of a reply: