He did not have much money left. They rarely paid him on time for the reviews he wrote in the magazine. As for that vampire Zubrodjo, he had lost all hope he would pay him what he had promised. To be an editor, thought Piotr Czerny, you needed two basic qualities: a great vocation and little shame. But he had a secret that consoled him for all the rest: up his sleeve he had quantities of quarto-sized laid paper, filled with his minute, meticulous handwriting. Two books of poems, plus a possible memoir. Perhaps later on there would also be a small collection of aphorisms. He would give them to Zubrodjo, of course. Glancing down at his fob watch, Piotr Czerny saw that it was still early, and allowed himself a stroll down by the river before returning home. He peered over the edge of the bridge: the water was churning, creating and dissolving glittering patterns. He walked away from the centre, in search of silence. All of a sudden he imagined the sounds as huge rings with a stark white centre. Silence, he told himself, must be only at the edges, defining the circumference, as fine as it was intangible: you can go through it from the outside or glimpse it from inside, but you can never dwell in it. Piotr Czerny could not be bothered to look for a bench and open his notebook, so he set aside the image until he was comfortably back at home. He concentrated on the cascading water, letting himself be carried along by the inertia of his stroll and a delicious lack of any thoughts.
As he turned the corner into his own street, he noticed something strange in the atmosphere. An unusual number of passers-by were rushing noisily down the street. Feeling too tired to quicken his pace, he tried to sharpen his eyes as he drew near to his building. He soon made out a crowd of people jostling each other on the far pavement, and a red vehicle obstructing the traffic. He realized that the distant siren he had been absent-mindedly hearing for some time belonged to the firemen’s truck pulled up outside his home. Making a painful effort, Piotr Czerny ran the fifty metres that separated him from his block of flats until, seriously out of breath, he was restrained by several policemen, who asked him if he was a resident in the building. Unable to respond, at that moment he saw the porter emerge from the crowd and throw himself on him, shouting wild-eyed: Mr Czerny! Mr Czerny, it’s a disaster! half the building up in flames! if only the firemen had arrived sooner, if only the residents were more careful…! Half the building? Piotr Czerny interrupted him, up to which floor? The porter looked down at the ground, wiped the sweat from his brow and said: Up to the third. Piotr Czerny could barely make out his voice above the uproar; it seemed to him like a distant memory. It looks like the fire started on the first floor, explained the porter, but it had reached the fourth floor before the firemen could bring it under control. Mr Czerny, I’m so sorry, so sorry…! Piotr Czerny felt as if a scimitar had sliced straight through his stomach. Looking up, he saw six balconies, as black as if they had been covered in pitch. It seemed to him his head was whirling. He said: All right, calm down, the important thing is to find out if there are any victims. The policeman who was still standing behind them butted in to inform them that the firemen had evacuated several inhabitants, and that fortunately only a few were slightly hurt or had passed out from the fumes. They were all very lucky, the policeman insisted. Yes, very lucky, agreed Piotr Czerny, staring into the void.
The firemen had given instructions that nobody was to get too close to the building until the smoke had cleared and the debris been removed. The crowd of onlookers that had continued to grow during the operation now began slowly to disperse. Piotr Czerny’s eyes were glued to a certain spot on the third floor. His feet and back were aching, and he could feel a stabbing pain in his stomach as he thought of the sheets of laid paper on his desk. He thought of the care with which he had kept them from his colleagues, his efforts to hide them until he had finished the definitive version. He thought of the last year of hard work and his proverbial poor memory. Trying to summon up the first poem in his unpublished book, he was surprised to find himself unwittingly repeating the second half of Rilke’s “The Captive”: …And you still alive… He looked away, and retraced his steps.
He walked along, his mind a blank. He headed towards Jabetzka Square; went into Central Café II. He searched for an empty table and, as he passed in front of the oval mirror, saw himself in the midst of the stains, hair dishevelled as he fought his way through a sea of occupied tables. While he was getting settled, he thought of ordering a salad and waited for the waiter to come over. He could not think clearly; his ideas slipped away from him. For a moment he even thought he was going to lose consciousness. He tried taking deep breaths. Since they were taking their time attending him, he took out his notebook and his Mont Blanc pen and studied them for some time.
Suddenly, hoping that the waiters had forgotten him, he began to write.
An hour later, having finished both his salad and the outline of a long poem about the ritual of fire and how words are saved, Piotr Czerny felt the electric shock of a conviction. He opened his notebook again at the first page, and wrote in tiny letters: The Absolution. Deep in his guts, he felt a sudden relief.
THE END OF READING
THEY KNOW, Vílchez announced. Tenenbaum turned towards him. He found him gazing out of the office window. Or perhaps studying the pane of glass itself, the trails from past rains, the microscopic scratches which, looked at from close up, were like those of a crashed car. This simile pleased Tenenbaum, who felt a moderate rush of poetic vanity. Rinaldi meanwhile was ignoring both of them, absorbed in the sophisticated mobile phone that invariably demanded his attention whenever he had to share a space with other authors. They know, they know, sighed Vílchez.
Tenenbaum rose to his feet. He stretched out an arm in search of Vílchez’s shoulder, although the other man did not seem to acknowledge this affectionate gesture, or possibly saw it as anything but affectionate. Both options were justified. Tenenbaum did not appreciate Vílchez, just as in truth he did not appreciate any writer of his generation other than himself. And yet he had begun to respect, or at least envy him, which in somebody as secretly insecure as himself amounted to almost the same thing.