Solitude
EVER SINCE I have been able to go into town, it has been a considerable relief to me. But for how long did I not leave my room! Those were bitter months and years.
I can find no way to explain the fact that this is my old room from childhood, the last room on the corridor, rarely visited even then, and still forgotten, as if it were not part of our apartment. I no longer remember how I came to be here. It seems to me that it was on a bright night, a watery-white and moonless night. I could see every detail in that grey light. The bed was unmade, as if someone had only just left it. I listened closely in the silence — could I not hear someone, asleep and breathing? Who could be breathing here? From that time onward, I have lived here. And here I sit, growing bored, year after year. If only I had thought earlier of laying in supplies! Ah, you who yet may do so, you to whom is still given the natural span for it — lay in supplies, be thrifty with your grain, your good and nourishing, sweet grain! For there will come a great winter, there will come lean and hungry years, and the earth will yield a poor crop in the country of Egypt. Alas, I was not like the diligent hamster. I was like the flippant field mouse. I lived from day to day without a care about tomorrow, overconfident in my talent for gluttony. Like a mouse, I thought to myself: What is hunger to me? If needs be I can even gnaw a tree, or rend paper into tiny peices with my little snout. A grey church mouse, the poorest of animals, coming after all others in the Book of Creation, I can live on nothing. And thus do I live, on nothing, in this dead room. The flies perished here long ago. I put my ear to wood — isn’t there a worm scratching deep inside? Silence like the grave. Only I, the immortal mouse, the lonely epigone, rustle in this dead room. I run endlessly along the table, the étagère and the chairs. I glide rather like Aunt Tekla in her long grey dress that reaches to the ground — nimble, quick and small, dragging my rustling tail behind me. Now, in broad daylight, I sit unmoving on the table, as if stuffed, my eyes bulging and shining like two beads. Only the tip of my snout twitches, barely perceptibly, subtly chewing, out of habit.
Naturally, this is all to be understood metaphorically. I am a pensioner, not a mouse at all. One of the properties of my existence is that I parasitise metaphors. I am given so readily to falling for the first, handiest metaphor. Having gone too far in that respect, I can only struggle to call myself back, returning slowly to my senses.
How do I appear? I sometimes catch sight of myself in the mirror — a strange, comical, sorrowful thing! Shameful to confess. I never see myself en face, straight on. But a little deeper, a little further, there I stand, far inside the mirror, turned a little to the side, almost in profile. I stand lost in thought and looking to the side. There I stand unmoving, looking aslant, almost looking at my own back. Our eyes have ceased to meet. When I move, he moves too, but with his back half turned, as if he doesn’t know I am here, as if he has gone beyond a great many mirrors, and can no longer return. Sorrow grips my heart when I see him so estranged and indifferent. It is you, after all, I want to cry out — you who were my faithful reflection. For so many years you attended on me, and now you don’t even recognise me! My God! There you stand, unfamiliar and looking somewhere to the side, and you seem to be listening to something, something deep within. You await some word — but from there, from those glassy depths. You obey another. You await orders from somewhere else.
So I sit at the table, and browse through my old and yellowed college books — my only reading.
I look at the faded and decayed curtain. I see how it swells lightly from a cold breath at the window. I could do gymnastics on that curtain pole. What a trapeze! In this sterile air, consumed so many times already, I could so easily do somersaults on it — an elastic salto mortale, executed almost casually, dispassionately, without inner participation — purely speculatively, as it were. Standing in perfect equilibrium on that bar, on the tips of one’s toes, one’s head touching the ceiling, one has the feeling that it is slightly warmer in those heights. One has the barely perceptible illusion of gentler weather. Since childhood I have liked to look at a room from that angle, in bird’s-eye perspective.
I sit and listen to the silence. The room has been bleached plain with lime. At some time, chicken’s feet of scratches have shot across the white ceiling. At some time, flakes of plaster have come down with a rustle. Am I to reveal that my room has been bricked up? What’s that? Bricked up? However could I find my way out? Here’s how the matter really stands:
There is no barrier to determination; nothing can resist adamant wilfullness. I need only imagine a door, a fine old door, like in the kitchen of my childhood, with its iron handle and bolt. There is no room so bricked up that such a trusted door will not open — if only one can keep believing it is there.