The Book, IV

IV

I RAN to my room. With deep 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 real text, nothing but 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. This page was filled with authenticated testimonials, the moving accounts of those upon whom the miracle had been performed.
    From Transylvania, Slavonia and Bukovina had come empassioned convalescents, to recount in the most moving terms the histories of their cases. Bandaged and crook-backed had they gone — shaking their now unnecessary crutches, they cast the plasters from their eyes, the bandages from their goitres.
    Through those migratrions of cripples, sad faraway villages could be discernrd, hardened into the prosaic and the everyday beneath a sky as white as paper. These were forgotten towns, deep within time, where the people were tethered to their tiny fates, from which they never broke free, even for a moment. The shoemaker was a shoemaker to the core. He was redolent of leather; he had a small, haggered face, and pale, myopic eyes above his sallow, sniffing moustache; he felt himself to be a shoemaker through and through. And if sores did not ache them, if they broke no bones, if dropsy did not consign them to their beds, then they were happy, with grey and colourless happiness. 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, and their palms itched. They sometimes wrote letters from a guide to epistolography, and carefully affixed the stamps. And they entrusted them, hesitantly and full of misgivings, to the letter box, beating on it with their fists as if to awaken it. In their dreams, white doves flew past with letters in their tiny beaks, and disappeared into the clouds.
    The next few pages rose above the sphere of everyday affairs, into regions of pure poetry.
    Here were accordians, zithers and harps, the instruments of yore of the heavenly hosts, made available today, thanks to the progress of industry, to common people — to God-fearing people at popular prices, to fortify their hearts and for their wholesome entertainment.
    Here were barrel organs, true miracles of technology, full of hidden flutes, valves, pipes and harmonicas, 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, slowly seeping watery eyes, faces bereft of life, as discoloured as unassuming as tree bark, split by all weathers, and redolent now only of rain and the sky.
    They had long ago forgotten their names and identities, and so, lost in themselves, they shuffled with bent knees, in short, regular steps in their enormous, heavy boots, in a perfectly straight and unvarying line amid the winding and convoluted paths of passers-by.
    On white, sunless mornings, mornings grown stale from the cold, mornings engrossed in the mundane affairs of the day, they disentangled themselves imperceptibly from the crowd and set up 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 a melody, not from the beginning, but at the point where it had broken off the day before. They played Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..., whilst white plumes of smoke billowed from the chimneys. And strangely enough, this melody, barely begun, jumped at once into the gap that had been waiting for it, into its own place at that hour, in that landscape, as if it had always belonged to that lost in thought and self-absorbed day. And the thoughts and grey worries of the hurrying people ran in time with it.
    And when, some time later, it came to an end in a long, drawn out whiz, torn from the bowels of the organ — which immediateldy started up its next cylinder — all thoughts and worries came to a standstill for a moment; and without thinking, as if in response to a change called in a dance, everyone altered their step and began to spin in the opposite direction, in time to the new melody rising from the pipes: Margaretta, treasure of my soul...
    And in the vacuous indifference of that morning, no one even noticed that the meaning of the world had radically altered, that it no longer ran in time with Daisy, Daisy, but, at the opposite extreme, with Mar-ga-ret-ta...
    I turned another page... What was this? A spring shower falling? No, it was the twittering of little birds, sprinkled onto umbrellas like grey scattershot. For behold, real Harz Mountain canaries were being offered there, cages full of goldfinches and starlings, baskets full of winged singers and talkers, spindle-shaped and airy, as if stuffed with cotton wool, hopping incessantly, and nimble, as if standing on finely crafted, squeaking pivots. Chirruping like cuckoo clocks, they were a consolation for solitude. To bachelors, they were a substitute for the warm family hearth; they coaxed from the hardest of hearts the joy of maternal feeling, so affecting and nestling were they. And fading away, they continued to emit their enthralling choral twittering as the page was turned over them.
    But in its latter 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, 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 with his fingertips, which made the matter no more comprehensible. And although he arrived, in his own estimation, at astounding conclusions, which he seemed to weigh for a moment between his sensitive fingers — their ethereal meaning would immediately escape into thin air. And although he implied the turns of his dialectic with subtlety — with one eyebrow raised in forewarning, in preparation for matters of an uncommon kind — no one understood him, and what is more, no one wanted to understand him. He was abandoned along with his gesticulations, his hushed tone and his whole gamut of dark smiles, leaving only the last few pages to skim through, falling apart into shreds.
    On those last pages, which had apparently fallen into delirious jabbering, downright nonsense, some gentleman was offering his infallible methods of entrepreneurship, resoluteness in decision making, and he spoke at great length about principles and personal qualities. But it was enough merely to turn the page to become utterly disoriented in matters of resoluteness and principles.
    There, with a measured step, came forth the laden train of the dress of one Madame Magda Wang, and she declared from the heights of her constrictive décolletage that she sneered at all masculine resoluteness and principles, that her specialism lay in bringing to heel the most resolute of gentlemen. (Here, moving her foot, she rearranged her train on the ground.) There exist certain 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 to the field of human training (that phrase with emphasis and an ironic flash of the eye) the results of her colonial experiences. And a strange thing, that languorous and plain-spoken lady seemed assured of the approbation of those of whom she spoke with such cynicism. And amid peculiar giddiness and flickering, there was a sense that the orientation of moral indicators had been strangely displaced, that I had now reached a different climate, where the compass must be read upside down.
    That was the last word of The Book, and it left a taste of strange bewilderment, a mixture of hunger and arousal in the soul.

> -V- >