Moving Parts

Determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost, the narrator sighs and sets to. From the drawer of the nightstand he takes out some scraps of paper covered in handwriting. The writing is smudged and the text illegible. Water has dissolved the glue; nevertheless, out of the fragments with their torn edges it’s possible to assemble the shape of an envelope, like a jigsaw puzzle. Stamp and franks in the upper right-hand corner. And so it’s only an envelope. The letter is missing. The narrator never saw it. Addresses contribute little; the substance that was to move the story forward is lacking. Disappointed and angry, he pushes the torn pieces of paper aside. Yet one way or another he has been provided with nothing else, so he must reach for them again. Excessive damp has washed away the shapes of the letters; a magnifying glass merely enlarges their ambiguity. It lingers on the misshapen splotch of the letter F beginning the surname of the addressee, then moves over the short name of the sender, from the capital M to the point where it disappears in confusion and indistinctness beneath the imprint of a wet finger. One can be sure now that the addressee and the sender will appear again, willfully running rampant amid the scenery. Just a moment ago the narrator was counting on the story fading away of its own accord, like a lightbulb cut off from the electricity, or a car engine deprived of gasoline. But the stubborn letters M and F have achieved their end and have dragged the plot toward themselves; now there is no hope they will give up easily. The initials will not suffice, for they cannot be declined grammatically, and without this it won’t be possible to keep up with the characters. And so the narrator tries to decipher the rest of the sender’s name, the one that begins with M. It would probably have been simpler to read it from the circus posters, on which all the letters maintain their places in a row like trained animals. But the narrator hasn’t seen these posters either. And so he tries to make it out: Is it Mozhe, or Mozhet? The name looks to have been hauled from some out-of-the-way corner of Eastern Europe, from the sign-board of some pharmacy, barber shop, or grocer’s that hasn’t existed for a hundred years. Could the first homeland of these couple of syllables have been the Cyrillic script? The ending of the addressee’s name is much more clearly preserved. Accustomed for generations to the angularity of Gothic script, it can easily be imagined on the moss-covered headstones of a Protestant cemetery down a country lane. But the middle part can no longer be deciphered; at least the envelope will be of no help in this regard. The first names have become no more than ink blots; the shape of one of them recalls a circus tent, while the other looks more like a ship. The one thing that at this point seems more or less certain is that Mozhet’s and F-meier’s ancestors in their day shot at one another, trapped in damp trenches, the same ones that for peace of mind the narrator would rather pass over in silence. Unshaven and exhausted, they remained at their posts, living on hardtack and jam. Then their time came to an end, and all was for nothing. All the same it is not entirely out of the question that F-meier and Mozhet, who are as alike as two peas in a pod, are by a curious coincidence related. Blood becomes mixed beyond the broken front lines, when soldiers seek a woman’s warmth. After all, an argument against kinship cannot be the anonymous bullet that one of those ancestors fired almost a hundred years ago, and that may have struck the body of the other.