Moving Parts

THOUGH IT WILL NOT BE A SIMPLE TASK, let us try to imagine the continuation of this tale — for the moment, let’s say, only the next paragraph, which begins with the buzzing of a fly. The buzzing ought scarcely to be audible at first; then it grows louder and louder. Only recently released from the trap that the Feuchtmeiers’ hallway proved to be for it, the fly finds its way to the ceiling of their cellar and taps in vain against the firmly closed vent. Yet even if it breaks out finally into open space, it will not find freedom there, but merely another prison. And so there, too, it will agitate its wings without respite until it enters some open window. The succession of places from which there is no way out, to which open spaces also belong, is brimming with a combination of regret and desire. The world, obviously, does not end with the Feuchtmeier’s cellar; beneath it there extend further floors. And if the narrator claims that he is stuck in the cellar, he is not entirely wrong, though in essence it is not there that he is stuck, but in something significantly larger that is also firmly and hopelessly enclosed. But even if he has been imprisoned in a dead zone of the story, it is only partially. For his being is given continuity by the volatile essence of longing, and not by the sluggish weight of a body that could equally well belong to someone else and be located somewhere else. The level of this essence is evened out in the long series of rooms like an arrangement of linked containers. Whereas if there should be a lack of connections, it must quite simply penetrate through the walls or ceilings. It’s already drifting in places where the narrator has yet to set foot. And in this way the words ‘already’ and ‘yet’ which have no obligation to reckon with anything at all, thus demonstrate their absolute superiority over the substance of concrete and summon accomplished facts into being. And the narrator, who controls virtually nothing here, ought only to note that somewhere beneath the turf of the garden, below the layers of earth in which worms and moles dig their tunnels, lie the platforms of a local rail station. Livid graffiti appear there. Painted on dirty plaster, the initials of last names compete for one’s attention: an elaborate S, which a spray paint wielding Schmidt unknown to the narrator has left stealthily on the wall, and an extravagant B put up by some Braun. They may have been the ones who tried out a new can of paint by adding a blotchy commentary to a film poster pasted up on the platform. In it the narrator recognizes the man’s black sweater and the bright highlights in the woman’s red hair. The film couple, John Maybe and Yvonne Touseulement, is kissing on a steeply sloping roof, beneath a firmament that has come slightly unstuck from its base.