Moving Parts

The narrator goes into the bedroom and opens the wardrobes; on the shelves he finds Fojchtmajer’s silk shirts and underwear, all ironed and folded in neat piles. He checks the springs of the top-quality mattress on the large double bed, sits on the armchairs that stand nearby in bright covers, and feels the incomparable softness for which they were chosen. They may not have been happy, but they didn’t complain; the softness of their armchairs reconciled them with their life, though not entirely and only up to a certain moment: After all, they had begun to look for a way out. In a framed photograph mounted over one of the armchairs Fojchtmajer is smoking a cigarette — the umpteenth in succession. His wife has no idea either how many he has smoked since morning — she makes no effort to count. She’s staring into space from over the other armchair; she has her own frame matching the one opposite, and in it she is smiling at her own thoughts. But no one will believe that she does nothing but smile the whole time. It’s possible to imagine them turning on the bedside light at three in the morning, resigned to the fact that they aren’t going to get back to sleep. In recent days especially they must have been tormented by insomnia: On the nightstands on either side of the bed there are empty phials of sleeping draught. They would make some tea and sit in the armchairs, teacups in hand, discussing the worrying suspicion that they would have to relinquish their polished floors and their phonograph and record collection, and they continually cast doubt on something that was blindingly obvious given the ineluctable way in which the future tense turns into the past. They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves that they were safely beyond the reach of grammar. And so in the end, exhausted by the anticipation of leaving and by visions of an uncertain future, they changed the subject, returning to a certain betrayal, because betrayal was at least something they were capable of understanding; to certain letters that he had once read though he shouldn’t have; and to lies that she could have spared him. They touched on the affairs of the Polish Word publishing house, which was stagnating below the break-even point, engaged in the hopeless resistance to particular ideas that were advancing victoriously across the entire continent; and the stock-market dealings that for many years now had absorbed all the available energy of his mind and heart, at the cost of love, naturally; and though she had to admit that up till now he had had good fortune, it had brought nothing but money. But was the income he could count on as a publisher sufficient, for example, to pay for her fur coat? Actually, never mind the fur coat — was it enough to pay the workers? In the end they fell silent, having no more to say. The man smoked a cigarette and once again considered the possibility that she may have been betraying him from the very beginning and that she had never stopped doing so; the woman was sobbing, holding a handkerchief to her eyes; and each returned separately to their solitary visions of the future. Perhaps the man was thinking that he would rather put a bullet through his brain than humiliate himself by seeking salvation at any cost. In the woman’s view such a way out would be madness. And so she thought that she didn’t want to know anything ahead of time. Whatever awaits her, she prefers to be taken by surprise by the course of events at the moment when there is no way out; this will spare her the need for overly difficult decisions. The Fojchtmajers had no wish to exchange well-being for hardship; she would have agreed with him that life is not worth it. What use to them is survival without comforts and entertainment? But at this point in their thinking there must have appeared a crack that was dangerous for the entire structure. Because if there are children, she thought — and he would have agreed with her — the struggle for survival is an obligation that cannot be neglected. Both of them, wife and husband, have to swallow it all, to the end, to the last drop of bitterness, without a glimmer of hope. Arrogance is not permissible here. It’s quite another matter with Fojchtmajer’s father-in-law, grammar-school teacher, lover of the quiet life and of good manners, veteran of the Great War, which the narrator is entitled to call the first, though in this way he also creates a second lying in wait behind the sentences. In his room, on the desk lies an obituary clipped from the newspaper: He departed just in time, readily taking advantage of the opportunity provided by a weak heart. Former grammar-school students gaze down from the walls as the narrator reads the rather wordy obituary, no doubt the work of one of them. They are lined up together, crammed forty to a frame, the first rows sitting while the back rows stand on benches. The photographs are also lined up, one year after another. All of a sudden one year tumbles to the floor with a crash. The pupils lie face down amid broken glass like fallen soldiers; on the wall nothing is left of them but a pale rectangle. A shock wave of future explosions radiates like ripples on water, reaching backwards into syntactical structures, causing them to quake. The arm of the phonograph slides off the record with a scraping sound and the turntable stops revolving. The narrator realizes that the apartment is unsuitable for him. The Fojchtmajers’ children, a boy and a girl, in a costly frame under glass, do not look frightened. They still lack the experience that would help now in evaluating the situation. But pastels respond badly to shocks; the irises turn imperceptibly paler, and a tiny amount of colorful dust settles on the glass, obscuring the outlines of eyelids and cheeks. John Maybe won’t wait until the walls come crashing down. He has too many crazy desires to be happy living in the ruins. Upstairs a door slams and his shoes clatter on the stairway: He’s running down, taking the steps two at a time. He has an American passport in his pocket and the chance of a contract, say, in Amsterdam; he carries his tuxedo in a metal-bound suitcase and his trumpet in its case; he falls asleep in trains immediately after they set off and dreams of nothing at all. He’ll toss the key to the apartment through the window hatch of the concierge’s lodge. There is also another key; it lies in a handbag belonging to his girlfriend, a budding chanteuse whose name — things cannot be otherwise — starts with a T.