The Book, IV

IV

I RAN to my room. In extreme agitation, my face burning, I began to browse with trembling hands the pages of the fragment. Alas, barely a dozen remained. Not one page of proper text, only advertisements and announcements. Directly after the prophesies of the long-haired Sibyl there followed a page devoted to a miraculous remedy for all ailments and infirmities. This balsam was called Elsa: The Fluid With The Swan, and it worked wonders. The page was full of authenticated testimonials, the moving accounts of those on whom the miracle had been performed.
    There were former convalescents in Transylvania, Slavonia and Bukovina, each ready to affirm in the most moving terms that it been effectual in their case. Bandaged and crook-backed they had come; shaking their now unnecessary crutches, they cast the plasters from their eyes and the bandages from their goitres.
    I saw through those migratrions of cripples, faraway and sad little towns, hardened into the prosaic and the everyday, under a paper-white sky. These were forgotten towns, deep within time, where people were tethered to their little fates, which they never broke free of, even for a moment. The shoemaker was a shoemaker to the core; he was redolent of leather; he had a small and haggered face, and pale, myopic eyes above his sallow, sniffing moustache, and he felt himself to be a shoemaker through and through. And if sores did not ache them, if they broke no bones and dropsy did not consign them to their beds, they were happy, with a colourless, grey happiness, and they smoked cheap tobacco, the yellow Imperial & Royal tobacco, or else they dreamed vacuously before the stalls of lottery ticket vendors.
    Cats ran across their paths, now from the left side, now from the right; they had dreams about a black dog; their palms itched. Sometimes they wrote letters, using a guide to epistolography — they carefully affixed stamps and entrusted them to the letter box, hesitantly and full of misgivings, beating their fists on it as if to awaken it. In their dreams, pigeons flew past with the letters in their tiny beaks, and disappeared into the clouds.
    The following pages rose above the sphere of everyday affairs, into regions of pure poetry.
    Accordians, zithers and harps were there, the instruments of yore of the heavenly hosts, made available today, thanks to the progress of industry, to the common people at popular prices, to God-fearing people, to fortify their hearts and for their wholesome entertainment.
    There were barrel organs, true miracles of technology, full of flutes, valves, pipes and harmonicas hidden inside them, trilling as sweetly as a nest of sobbing nightingales — a treasure beyond price for disabled ex-service men, a lucrative source of income for cripples and generally indispensible in any musical household. And one could see those beautifully decorated barrel organs wandering on the backs of shabby, grey old men whose faces, eaten up by life, appeared thoroughly blurred and encrusted with cobweb — faces with fixed, watering eyes which seeped slowly, faces bereft of life, discoloured, innocent and split like tree bark by all weathers, redolent now only of rain and the sky.
    They had long ago forgotten their names and identities, and, lost in themselves, they shuffled on humble, bended knees, in enormous, heavy boots, along a quite straight and unvarying line, amid the winding and convoluted paths of passers-by.
    On white, sunless mornings, mornings grown stale from the cold, engrossed in the everyday affairs of the day, they imperceptibly disentangled themselves from the crowd and set their barrel organs on trestles at the edge of the street, under a sky of golden streaks crossed with telephone wires, amid people hurrying aimlessly with upturned collars, and they struck up their melody, not from the beginning but at the point where it had broken off the day before, and so they played Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do... while white plumes of smoke billowed from the chimneys. And, strangely enough, this melody, barely begun, jumped at once into the gap which awaited it, into its own place at that hour and in that landscape, as if it had always belonged to that day, pensive and lost in itself, and the thoughts and grey worries of the hurrying people ran in time with it.
    And when it came to an end sometime later, in a long, drawn out whiz torn from the bowels of the barrel organ, which immediateldy started up its next cylinder, all thoughts and worries came to a halt for a moment, and, without thinking, as if a change had been called in a dance, everyone altered their step and began spinning in the opposite direction, in time with the new melody rising from the pipes of the organ: Margaretta, treasure of my soul...
    And in the vacuous indiference of that morning no one even noticed that the meaning of the world had radically changed, that it no longer ran in time with Daisy, Daisy but, at the opposite extreme, with Mar-ga-ret-ta...
    We turn the page again... What’s this? A spring shower falling? No, it is the twittering of little birds, sprinkled onto umbrellas like grey scattershot — for, behold, real Harz Mountain canaries are offered here, cages full of goldfinches and starlings, baskets full of winged singers and talkers. Spindle-shaped and light, as if they were stuffed with cotton wool, hopping incessantly and as nimble as if on finely crafted, squeaking pivots, and chirruping like cuckoo clocks, they were a consolation for solitude; to bachelors they were a replacement for the warm family hearth. They coaxed the joy of maternal feeling from the hardest of hearts, so affecting and nestling were they. And, fading away as the page was turned over them, they went on emitting their enthralling choral twittering.
    But in its later part this wretched script fell headlong into ever deeper ruin. It now proceeded on the pathless terrain of some dubious, charlatan’s divination. For who was this, presenting himself to his audience in a long coat and with his smile half engulfed by his black beard? It was Signor Bosco of Milan, self-styled master of black magic, and he spoke at length and indistinctly, demonstrating something on his fingertips, which did not render matters any the more comprehensible. And although in his own estimation he arrived at astounding conclusions, which he seemed to weigh for a moment between his sensitive fingers, their ethereal meaning would no sooner escepe from them into thin air, and although he implied with subtlety the turns of his dialectic, with an eyebrow raised in forewarning, in preparation for uncommon matters, he was not understood; and what is worse, no one really gave a dam for him, and he was abandoned along with his gesticulations, his hushed tone and his whole gamut of dark smiles. And the last pages, falling apart into shreds, deserved only a cursory glance.
    On those last pages, which had by some means apparently fallen into delirious jabbering, downright nonsense, some gentleman offered his infallible methods of entrepreneurship and resoluteness in decisions, and he spoke at great length about principles and personal qualities. But it was enough merely to turn the page to be utterly disoriented in matters of resoluteness and principles.
    There, with a measured step, the laden train of the dress of one Madame Magda Wang stepped forward, and she declared from the heights of her constrictive décolletage that she sneered at all masculine resoluteness and principles, that her specialism was bringing the most resolute gentlemen to heel. (Here, moving her foot, she rearranged her train on the ground.) There exist methods to accomplish this, she continued through clenched teeth, infallible methods of which she would say nothing more here, referring only to her memoirs, From My Purple Days (Institute of Anthropology, Budapest), where she had contributed the results of her colonial experiences to the field of human training (that phrase with emphasis and an ironic flash of the eye). And a strange thing, that languorous and plain speaking lady seemed assured of the approbation of those she spoke of with such cynicism — and there was, amid peculiar giddiness and flickering, a feeling that the orientation of moral indicators had been strangely displaced and that we were now in another climate, where the compass must be read upside down.
    That was the last word of the Book, which left a taste of strange bewilderment, a mixture of hunger and agitation in the soul.

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