He decided, too, to follow immediately the advice Ino had given him; he threw the part-written book in the dustbin, shortly afterwards abandoned in his Prague flat all books and papers with notes and extracts on the subject, and left the country. He settled in Paris because it seemed to him that this was a place where one could easily lose oneself, and this he wished to do. It was not his intention to become a clochard; he wished to live in a foreign city and try again to be faithful to the void he had once betrayed, to wait for a glimpse of new motions as nonsensical and marvellous as the hymn about the embryology of being he had composed on the dusty streets around Prague and in country pubs.
As he walked the wastelands of the great city, as the faces of men and women unknown to him floated past in the streets like so many incurious fish, as his gaze wandered the facades of buildings and climbed through windows into flats whose furniture was angular and hostile, as he felt on his cheeks the cooling mask of a wind saturated in incomprehensible smells both foul and fine, a new joy was born within him. He changed his job often: he was a messenger and a gallery attendant, a custodian in a museum, a sales assistant. He glimpsed nothing that promised to be the germ of some kind of task; he took joy from the purity of emptiness, from its great airy halls, which he passed through light-footedly. He realized that the most important thing was not the task — a task born, perhaps, out of the emptiness, whose fineness and fragrance it preserved in itself — but the tranquil shelter of waiting for nothing. In this shelter a note of happiness was sounded and gained in strength. Perhaps his task in the great game was to make this realization.
One evening as he was dining in a cheap Chinese bistro in Montparnasse’s Rue d’Odessa, a familiar face appeared in the mirror in front of which he was sitting. It belonged to an associate professor from the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Prague when he was still working at the university. They talked for a while, and then the associate professor remembered that he was looking for someone to translate into French selected essays by Jan Mukařovský. Baumgarten thought the offer over for a while, and in the end he agreed to take the job on. This marked the beginning of his Paris career. After publication of the Mukařovský anthology he went on to edit his own anthologies of Czech structuralism, to which he wrote extensive introductions. He himself began to teach Aesthetics at the Sorbonne. He married a Frenchwoman and they had a son; they lived in a large penthouse on one of the great boulevards. The royal castle of emptiness dissolved. He never wrote the book he had intended to write in Prague. Only rarely did he remember the larva-like motions of being, the lost fragments of the Origins of Beauty and the period of his solitary walks on the fringes of Prague.
The roofs of Paris
As their fifteenth wedding anniversary approached he went to a jeweller’s and bought his wife a valuable diamond necklace. It was January; his wife and son were skiing in the Savoy Alps and would be returning in three days’ time. That day he worked in his room through the evening and deep into the night. Before going to bed he opened the window to air the room of his cigarette smoke. For a while he watched the snowflakes, whirling madly and illuminated by the light of the room, and the fresh snow on the sloping roof into which the window was set. Then he switched off the light and went to bed.
A light sleeper, he was woken by a faint rustling coming from the next room. Through the half-open door, in the weak light reflected from the snow he made out the slim figure of a woman. She was wearing black overalls, their pockets swelling in a number of places. Above her head — which was covered with a black mask with three holes in it (two for the eyes and one for the nose) — the cold air entering through the open window caused the white curtain to ripple. The woman in black was leaning over the jewellery box into which that evening he had placed the necklace; carefully yet briefly she felt around inside it. When she withdrew her black hand Baumgarten saw a thin, glittering string dangling from the leather-clad fingers. What he was watching reminded him of a scene from a bad thriller. He took his revolver from the drawer of his bedside table; then he jumped out of bed. Catching sight of him, the woman slipped the necklace into one of her pockets, jumped up onto the windowsill and then out of view. Baumgarten grabbed his dressing gown from the armchair next to his bed and quickly pulled it on over his pyjamas. He put his bare feet into his shoes before climbing out of the window and onto the sloping, snow-covered roof.
To his right the yellow light of invisible street lamps rose from the abyss of the boulevard like sulphur emitted by the crater of a volcano; to his left, in the darkness and through the blizzard he could just make out a black forest of aerials on the ridge of the roof; in front of him, light from the window of his sleepless neighbour spilled out on to the snow. The black-clad figure was dashing through the high, fresh snow. Baumgarten was angered by the thief’s sheer cheek. He pursued her in spite of the danger to himself: in his low shoes he might easily have slipped and taken a dive into the boulevard. And now the sensation of being in a cheap thriller was stronger — and more embarrassing — still; he even caught himself making moves that characters in pursuit over roofs were wont to make in such films.
A short while later the thief in black reached the end of the roof. The adjacent building was that of a department store. Beneath the sloping roof of Baumgarten’s building there began a narrow ledge on which the legend Galeries Lafayette burned in big letters. The violet neon flooded the snow, throwing the outlines of the thief’s footprints into sharp relief. Now the woman would have to climb along the narrow, snow-covered ledge with the neon lettering. Baumgarten saw the figure in black take hold with both hands of the upper arc of the letter “G” before carefully placing the tip of her right shoe into the shallow bowl at the bottom of the letter, where the neon was buried in snow that radiated violet. On the narrow, horizontal stroke that split the lower arc of the “G,” the thief sat down, as if in a snow-covered chair, before letting go of the letter’s top and grabbing with her right hand the upper arc of the lower-case “a,” which was reaching out to her like the beak of an inquisitive, snowbound bird.
Baumgarten took the revolver out of the pocket of his dressing gown; he fired it to scare the thief. He aimed at the upper tip of the “G” and to his satisfaction saw that he really managed to hit it: the letter flickered and then went out, sending from its crest a small avalanche down on the thief’s head. She grabbed the “l,” which, under her weight, took a perilous tip forward over the boulevard and sent down another cap of snow, this time into her face. Seemingly she was blinded for a few moments: she had to use one hand to wipe her eyes. But the letter held and the woman succeeded in grasping the horizontal line of the central “e,” which appeared quite firm. She slid across the face of the “e” and reached for the horn of the “r” as if it were some kind of handle.
By this time Baumgarten, too, had reached the lettering. He stuffed the revolver back into his pocket so as to keep his hands free, then made for the first word. As he was gingerly touching the extinguished “G,” the thief was overcoming with ease the “i,” “e,” and “s,” thus reaching the word’s end. Then she stopped for a few moments; it seemed she was making up her mind how to bridge the gap between the two words. In the meantime Baumgarten found that his crawl along the word “Galeries,” with its extinguished initial capital, was made easier by the footmarks the thief had left; there was no need for him to grope beneath the snow for the outlines of the letters, so he moved more quickly than she. The distance between them was closing. He was heavier than she, however, and under his weight the letters tipped and creaked ominously, the damaged “l” in particular. This tilted yet further forward and its upper end worked itself free of the wall, revealing some cables and producing a flash. Now the letter was unlit and it jutted out like a black pole without its flag from the building into the snowstorm. This was a highly unpleasant course to take. Baumgarten was blinded by the violet light of the letters and the blizzard was beating against his face; his pyjama bottoms were soaked through, their legs ice-cold and heavy.