Usually I sit at the window and listen to the voice of a woman.
As soon as I said the word “voice,” I immediately remembered that I hadn’t wanted to mention the tapes. But the man didn’t ask any more questions. Instead he looked at my fingers, which were trembling. I placed the coffee cup, which I’d been trying to lift, back on the table.
See this?
He turned the book over and drew my attention to the greasy fingerprints on its back cover.
That doesn’t bother me, I replied, without quite knowing why he was showing me the marks. I opened the book.
When I stared at the two open pages, my eyes were incapable of reading even a single sentence. He asked again:
Did you see the fingerprints?
I closed the book, inspected the marks on its back cover and tried to discover what was special about them. The man’s name was Simon. Although I hadn’t asked him, he told me his name.
Go on reading. After all, you wanted to read the book. I can stay here until you’re finished. But, as I said, I can’t sell you the book, because of the fingerprints.
Once more I studied the form of the five fingertips visible on the red paper. Simon laughed and showed me his right hand. His middle finger was missing.
I read the novel before I lost my middle finger working in a factory, and this is the only image my finger left behind. I don’t even have a photograph of it. That’s why I don’t want to sell you the book.
I opened the book again. It seemed to me as if the voice became quieter when the book was open. I didn’t have the courage to ask Simon whether he, too, could hear this. I couldn’t even ask whether he heard the voice at all. He sat there calmly and went on saying:
Take your time and read the book, all of it. I’ll stay here until you’re finished.
•
An hour passed without my having read anything. I recognized individual letters, but couldn’t make words out of them, as if the book were written in a language I didn’t know. It got dark. I couldn’t bring myself to part from the book; every time I opened it, the voice lost its strength. I wondered if I should ask Simon to visit me every day with the book. But sooner or later he’d have to go home.
Although I couldn’t read the book, I kept flipping through it. I had to be careful not to flip too quickly or too slowly. Otherwise, Simon might have noticed I wasn’t reading at all. Simon sat on a kitchen chair. From time to time he lit a cigarette and smoked with eyes half closed. He held the cigarette between his thumb and ring finger. He held his index finger in the air, pointing meaninglessly in some direction. At some point Simon silently walked over to the sofa, lay down and fell asleep. I closed the curtains and covered his body with a woolen blanket. There were no more street sounds any longer. It was a night with a greenish full moon.
I stood for a while on the balcony looking at the moon. The shadows on its surface could be read neither like numbers nor letters. They resembled no signs known to me. Once I had thought the cycles of the moon determined my sense of life, but now it was a flat shape. Through the window I could already see the first light of dawn. I kept turning pages in the book, playing the role of a passionate reader, although Simon had long since fallen asleep. He wouldn’t have checked to see if I was still reading in any case. He just wanted to give me a chance to see the novel with my own eyes.
When Simon woke up, I had to tell him I hadn’t made any progress reading the book because my eyes couldn’t make words out of the letters. I didn’t know if Simon understood me or not. He only repeated that he would stay until I finished reading the book. He stayed all day. Once he left the house without saying anything, and I thought he wasn’t coming back. But half an hour later he returned with a large plastic bag from which he produced vegetables, bread, cheese, wine and cigarettes. He stayed the next day, too, and the days thereafter.
I had laid the book open on the table in front of me.
The voice from the tape player became weaker every day, but I still couldn’t make any progress reading. My abdomen began to ache. I didn’t know whether or not the pain had anything to do with the disappearance of the voice. At times I hoped Simon would leave the apartment with the book so the voice would return. But just as often I hoped Simon would never leave, so that the book, too, would remain. But then the pain in my abdomen would remain as well, and I might have to go to the doctor. I imagined an ear doctor or gynecologist might be able to invent some reason for my pain.
8
Where are you going? my neighbor asked, not even bothering to say hello first, when I ran into him on the stairs.
I wanted to run down to the pharmacy for some painkillers. For several days now — I wasn’t sure how long — I hadn’t left the apartment, since Simon brought me everything I needed. But the painkillers I wanted to get myself without his knowing; I had never before taken pills of any sort, and it seemed to me almost like a crime.
The neighbor’s question had a threatening ring to it. I couldn’t answer. For a moment the two of us stood there silently on the stairs. His eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses. His dark red shirt looked familiar to me. After a while he extracted a small metal object from his trouser pocket and held it up before my eyes. It was a key. When I tried to seize it, he quickly returned it to his pocket. I started down the stairs and heard him say behind me in a commanding tone: Come see me tonight. I have to talk to you. Seven o’clock.
It had been a long time since I’d spoken with anyone except Simon. I no longer felt the need to visit acquaintances to confirm my acquaintance with them, nor to make the acquaintance of people I didn’t yet know. Whether or not I knew someone no longer had any importance. The author of the novel was the only person whose acquaintance I’d have liked to make. I looked in the phone book and discovered thirteen women with her name. I could have called up all thirteen and asked each of them whether she’d written the novel. This would have been worth the effort if I’d known for certain that one of the thirteen was the author, but it was unlikely that the author and I lived in the same city. Actually I didn’t really want to meet her. I wasn’t interested in the person who had written this boring novel. What aroused my interest was my suspicion that the speaker on the tape was in fact the author. The only series of books-on-tape I knew was called “The Authors Read,” and the reader on the tape seemed too unprofessional to be a trained actress. But I kept thinking about the voice’s owner. I wanted to find her, to hear what the voice sounded like when it came from a body, not an electrical apparatus.
I told Simon about neither my tapes nor my neighbor. Simon probably took me for a lonely woman with no friends in this city who occupied herself only with reading and writing. In reality, I was able neither to read nor write. I sat at my desk, upon which lay a book and a stack of manuscript pages, and did nothing. Since Simon had moved in, I hadn’t been able to write anything at all. It was strange for me to have gone so long without writing. From time to time I distinctly felt the urge simply to set down letters on a sheet of paper, but this urge vanished as soon as I glanced at the open book. I lost my way among its letters as if in a forest. Perhaps I needed the voice from the tape recorder to be able to write again.
When I wasn’t at my desk, I sat with Simon at the window, watching the people who passed by the building. Most of their faces were uninteresting, but a few of them I observed attentively because they could be connected with a particular number. For example, I said to Simon, a boy walking past looked like three, not because he walked stooped over so that his spine formed the shape of this number; nor because he might have answered three out of five questions on his last quiz in school. The mouth of the boy was shaped in such a way as if he were about to pronounce the word “three,” but this wasn’t the reason either. I didn’t tell Simon what the reason was. Simon said I saw the city as a clock, perhaps because I had lost all sense of time.