“Over so plucky a tie, one holds his head high!”
Someone had taken him by the chin and pulled him down. Right in front of him: two pressing eyes. Behind the encouraging smile, a malicious curiosity hunkers within them as to how it’s going, and it’s going badly.
“Well, and all the postcard allusions to vacation troubles. .”
He’d come here for a pre-arranged meeting, the first autumn gathering with the gang. With his buddies, with his pals: both those eyes! — These eyes, already feasting in advance on what they didn’t yet know but were already familiar with— this familiarity: how it dances within them — these foreigner’s eyes. How is it that it’s never occurred to him till now that he’s foreign to them? And how is it that he’s not amazed at this unexpected discovery?
He’s appalled by the foxy correspondence between these eyes; with a horror thinned out by the café’s radiant “happy hour” into a kind of noncommittal flirtation — so strained it was breaking — with dread. He sees eyes that are looking him over like those performing a dissection look over their subject: for knowledge and nothing else, but there was something still worse than indifference, there was the shame spun from the certainty (it was a very fine and biting thread of depleted horror that had spun it) that they weren’t looking him over like this for the first time (and he hadn’t known!). That they had never looked at him; that they only ever looked him over. They’d known him for a long time, he who didn’t know them. They knew him better than he’d ever known himself. They’d prepped him with scalpels and tongs, which they availed themselves of remorselessly, and holding nothing back, just where it hurt most, while he only hacked away at himself, within himself, bypassing the painful spots. He had begun hating them, like a failed, faint-hearted experimenter hates an intrepid experimenter, but behind the magnanimous jealousy billowed the mindless malice of the robbed man who has suddenly arrived at the fact that, in his foolhardiness, he’s left everything open for the burglar, even his most secret drawers, and not even out of fear, but out of a raving masochism.
And he who was coming here with a sealed promise that he “would give them a rest with these stories”! He who reads in the foxily imploring eyes that all they care about are his stories! That they don’t care about anything else than the symptoms of “his case”! Their friendship? To his trust, a doctor’s observant “ah, now that’s interesting.” — What advantage does this coalition of four have over him now that he recognizes that he has never been their fifth?
Three sentences: “Oh, see who’s here?” — “Over so plucky a tie. .” — “And all your postcard illusions?” — Three cleverly aimed blows, and beneath each a piece crumbled away from his fateful silence. So what if they then defame him. And the more dilapidated his demolished hideout was, the more eagerly he would oblige them, so that no stone would remain on another. They drew him in among them. It looks like a friendly chat, but it’s a prison escort, cramped and compact as an asylum jerkin. The elbows are wide apart on the table, jovially wide apart, so wide you’d say: grateful listeners of the hunter’s yarn. A trick! Indeed, they are not sitting; they’re above, a conclave, they’re looking down at him. Their eyes were passing through the café, measuredly measuring up this guy, that guy, saying hello, laughing at acquaintances. A trick! To mislead him that they weren’t letting him down, that they were looking after him. Monosyllabic questions, easygoing words: clever investigating judges coaxing a confession. Stay away from these careless hands: that they’re caressing the paper? That they’ve pushed the paperweight aside? A trick! — These are hands lying in wait, setting a trap for you. Absent-minded words, futile questions: they’ve landed, and already it’s as though they’d never been: look out for this synthetically woven net! Here and there, a skimpy burst of laughter; you’d say nothing more than a trickle spurting out because of an oversight, which you’ll stop up with your heeclass="underline" look out! it’s a pebble calculatedly cast through a little window, into a lookout, into a dormer — like nobody’s business, and the glass rains down: aha! Aha! So that’s where it’s from, that’s where this frosty draft of non-participation is coming from! How it blows! His powerlessness is chilling. He’s trying to warm up, he’s rubbing his hands together, and right away it’s a little warmer, right away this selling of oneself is easier again. — Really, as a matter of fact it’s not so difficult, selling yourself for a hill of beans; being subject to little words, questions, and the rattling rain of laughter right in your face: child’s play! On the contrary, it’s somehow comforting and encouraging, like a pelican’s acts of fatherly love: for what else would these scrawny kids of curiosity do against the brawny athlete, against his usurpation of misfortune, against this misfortune, as basic as rye bread?
He empties the drawers. What would he save, what would he withhold? In the drawers, it’s all the same old junk. The goods, the goods are not to be found. They’re his, his forever. –
He’s drinking; drunkenness drags itself in from all sides; it’s not drunkenness from drinking. What’s intoxicating is this rapid alpine huntsmen’s march banged out on that xylophone and its rather harsh tones. The harsh tones! Each of them so self-confident, so distinct, as though tipped out of a mold. With such sharp contours you’d say they’d been minted. Who’s that playing the xylophone? No one. It plays itself. Red, white, yellow, opal glasses on the tables, like nobody’s business: a sham! The blistering alpine huntsmen’s march on the xylophone is their pied piper. It’s the music of the spheres; and the music of the spheres is too substantial to be consumed by the ear. Or don’t you see it? Or else wouldn’t you see it if the colored quality of the aperitif glasses were to take wing? Listen! Don’t you see the red, gold, brownish, and opal sounds, see them rushing, see them jostling on the glass bridges, so not to miss the rally? Look! Don’t you hear the heads of their unfurled offensive lines twist suddenly, charmingly, skirting a kind of magnetic focal point, languidly and in vain? The eccentric courage of the spirals they’ve initiated is slowly mounting. Only that still higher, ecstatic self-confidence, and behold, from the spirals, unprotected and open to foreign incursions, delicate orbs. The alpine huntsmen’s march had been straightforward, but now it’s swerved angrily away from the straightforward. It’s swerved into the voiceless quadrille of whirling milky orbs, do you see them? Do you hear the revolts of the seven lights breaking out within them, in long, unhurried intervals? The advertising globes of steamship companies. A quadrille, hasty as mayhem and hurried as discipline. A quadrille of spinning orbs skewed toward a common ecliptic, along which they are sliding smoothly toward a still quieter and more spirited iridescent orb, which devours them. It rises charmingly, you’d say it was spherical lightning. Look, it’s over their table, over the table of the efficacious vivisection. It floats neutrally, like an air bladder tossed in an evening dance hall. It spins every which way with nose-diving apathy.
His confessors are here: with carefree casualness, self-confidently composed people, whose metaphysical bread and butter had been confronted by the coziness of the armchairs at the club; theirs had patronizingly consented to start resembling the exceptionally iffy chairs of cafés: the discreet overtone of professional Spartanism suits these upper-crustily spoiled judges, and a judge’s prestige awaits them. Their aloofness, the imperious sangfroid of their grudge, their icy and patient curiosity are as tidy as cultivated, though already domesticated, plants. He was encircled by the unwitting solidarity of the four researchers immersed in a common problem, they’re keeping a close guard on him, like guards around a post-mortem specimen dearly acquired, and anaesthetizing him with a narcotic of alternating and rhythmic “dear friend,” “friend,” “oh!” “how very odd!” “really?” “can it be?” “how could you?” –