I remembered that I had been scared in the very same manner already once today, it was just as I was inspecting the dining room and it occurred to me that I was not particularly astonished at the stranger behind the door, and that it wasn’t okay for me not to be astonished. I recoiled at my not feeling horror. Who knows, maybe that’s just the sort of horror that makes us sweat whenever, out of nowhere, we’ve run into ourselves, as I did today when I ran into my apartment; who knows, maybe there is constantly residing within us this sort of unexpected eternal visitation, from which we recoil only when it occurs to us that it’s like we’d been looking the other way all this time. Only we seldom run into ourselves: we rattle the keys, we cough, we drag our feet across the floor, we do what we might so that the thief will make it out the window in the meantime. There’s no merit in being robbed; the merit is in putting up with the sight of the burglar — putting up with him as if he were an old acquaintance.
At last, silence. Utter. It bumped up against one of those sort-of-fleeting rustles that jacks make when raked together, and then it spilled away, silent as a swamp. I identified it immediately, that rustle — it was her amber necklace tossed onto the marble mantelpiece. It, that rustle, was the threshold of voicelessness, but at the same time it was the wake-up call of her presence. It was like the click in a stereopticon just before the photographs are replaced; the “view” replaced by a “view” just as smoothly, fluidly, and with the same almost violent suppleness as with a “peep box,” and no matter that none of the preceding images had announced this one, no matter that there was no precedent for this one among those past, no matter that it had clicked in as if sent down, here it was like something that could not be — it was here as the sole thing that was, indisputably, and upon which one had to gaze: the imagined “fine acquaintances with whom I had returned from the theater” had withdrawn and been replaced by the image of “these two, so strangely familiar.” And the transcendent, unfortunate, solicitous horror, which I (without actually feeling it) caught wind of by feeling my shirt sweaty against my back, was absorbed by the picture called “these two, so strangely familiar,” and faded markedly. — It might have seemed that the phrase “as a graveyard” should follow “silent,” so deep was the silence that followed. But no. Rather, it resembled the silence that washes through an apartment wherein a harmonious family is at its ease. I was pierced with so powerful a sense of intimacy (with those two) that it formed a sweet knot in my throat. A muted light still shone in the living room. From that I judged that those two were not yet asleep; I got a cheery taste for playing host; I went out to them to see whether they needed anything.
When I entered, it struck me that they were both still dressed. That confused me a bit, and my bliss lost some of its depth. Admittedly, they weren’t asleep yet, but they were already nodding off. He was sitting in the armchair under the lamp. I was turned toward him, which is to say he was giving me that face of a goody-goody gourmand, about which I have already spoken, and which reminded me so much of Fuld. His half-open eyes did dampen this impression somewhat, but it was still distinctly there. His head turned a little, his mouth slightly open, and his hands, which he had raised to his head (where they now remained) as if at the height of despair, aroused the impression that he would have long since cried out had it been physically possible for him to have done so (thus entirely different than if this cry were to have appeased his will). Despite this, however, he did not look like he was desperate; amazingly, he didn’t even seem sorrowful. His features rather reflected, as it were, the animal irritation of people whose slumber is hindered by some physical defect. I understood that what ailed him were his upraised hands. I took them and slowly placed them in his lap. He looked up sleepily, with the grateful expression of a child when we’ve gotten him all nice and snug. All this time, then, she had been tensely watching what I was doing, and seeing how attentive I was being to him she smiled understandingly, you might say conspiratorially — with that indulgent superiority of older sisters who know their little brothers’ weaknesses and urge a strange man not to think poorly of them and to indulge them as well. Against expectation, however, the smile ended by plunging into her mouth’s left corner, which twisted. And it was as if this had thrown her into embarrassment: again, that tugging at the skirt, though this time in the manner of a movingly strange gesture. She sought to extricate herself from this new embarrassment, making as if she were awkwardly positioned and looking for a better spot on the sofa. I approached so as to fluff her pillow. As I bent down, I heard at first a whistling, a kind of admonitory rebuke, and right after that, words.
“Take him off my hands! I hate him. Take him off my hands.”
I straightened up, surprised.
“Who?” I eventually muttered.
Was it because she couldn’t stand my gaze? Was it a sign, her averting her eyes? Toward him, it seemed to me. I followed them, and they indeed came to rest on him. I got the sense that she was eyeing us uncomfortably. When I turned again to settle things with her with my eyes, she had already lowered her eyelids again and resembled a young lady who “knows how to sleep.”
I went back to my bedroom to lie down as well. Once there, with one leg already in bed, I suddenly stood up again: all at once it had struck me that I was forgetting something. I thought about it hard. The sole outcome of which was that I arrived at a tautological semblance of a thought: I won’t remember what it was; that is, the thought that “I’ve forgotten something.” Today I write “tautology,” but then, at first glance, it didn’t seem a tautology. Only after I had constructed a rather subtle logical chain from one half-proposition to the next (a chain I’d hardly be able to follow today) did I succeed in satisfying myself with the conclusion that if I am not able to remember something, I therefore must have forgotten something, and only in this was there some hope that I might still recall that thing which I had forgotten. And, as a result, I immediately remembered that something, while also being aware that this was not yet it. That is, I got a flash of a certain act by Grock, the unforgettable king of clowns. He is aping his partner, who, having readied his fiddle, suddenly can’t remember what it was that he’d wanted to play, so he turns, goes to the piano, and leans his elbow against it (his back to the audience), his fist to his chin, assuming the pose of a man struggling to remember.
But this is where I raised my head, having realized that the thing I couldn’t remember was those astonishing, brief, and rash words of the woman as I was fluffing her pillow; with them, then, was the reason they had vanished — the words, that is.
So now I had remembered both those words and the thing that had overshadowed them in my memory: it was a disproportionately large space suffused with a sense of the incompatibility between the sounds by which I had judged that these two had gotten undressed — sounds that I had heard so clearly, so distinctly, and which were surely not mere reminiscence— and the fact that entering the living room I had found both strangers still quite clothed. But having raised my head with that recollection, I was at the same time confronted with the fact that I was sitting at my writing table, that is, with something quite unexpected. He on one side, she on the other. They were now in their pajamas. They were standing faithfully, the way I was just then imagining Grock’s partner. Or no, they had already given up that posture again; but I inferred — I no longer know why — that they had given it up only just before I’d noticed them. And so it was actually as if I had been sleeping and was awakened only by their having given up that posture. Or else they had their fists to their chins the whole time, yet they contorted their faces symmetrically with mine. The smile that was playing on their lips was remarkable for the light it cast on the recent, albeit already buried, past. In this way it also happened that I again recognized, which is to say I caught up with, what had directly preceded this, that is, that I myself had recently settled into the posture of Grock’s partner, and they had crept quietly in and were aping me good-naturedly, until finally, having readied a smile and turned their heads, they inadvertently induced me to look up.