Moving Parts

To the question of why it does not stop at the next floor, where the narrator might run across the welders capable of averting a disaster, the answer should be that all floors are of equal worth. It is known that from the very beginning the elevator did not stop at every one. Nobody here could see beyond what is visible; the narrator is subject to the same limitation. It doesn’t seem as if the stops of the freight elevator are governed by someone’s will. They are decided rather by the tangle of wires tumbling out of an instrument panel, arbitrary electrical impulses that follow various paths in their own particular order. In this way the Warsaw Uprising does not break out and is not suppressed, and there do not appear drunken officers of the Soviet secret police hammering their fists on the table. There are no cheering crowds with red banners, nor mass songs, nor tanks driving out onto sleeping streets in a snowbound winter. Selecting a floor, the elevator regulates the movement of adverbial phrases, while they in turn trim the story lines short; restricting time and place, they dwell on manner and pass over cause in silence. They reduce the plot to a minimum. But it is not they who are the essence of the invisible structure, just as it is not the ropes strung over the abyss, nor the ocean currents, nor the precipitous lines of the graphs of market reports in the Financial Times. Its core and foundation may turn out to be the predicates of sentences, which as a rule are unfeeling and, like judicial sentences, irreversible. No one knows where they come from; the narrator does not know either. They become visible only when they are firmly fixed in tenses; they take the space of the sentences into their possession. And when they pass on, a void is left behind.

The elevator stops with an unimaginable clatter at the train station. At the end of the platform, far in the distance, there can even be seen the colorful splash of a poster with a couple kissing on a steep rooftop; the image can barely be made out in the foreshortened perspective. The rails rumble; it is the train, traveling in a circle so that the madman with the starting pistol can continue to bully the old man in the red dressing gown and humiliate the hobo, all in the presence of the girl with the provocative makeup. Beyond the door of the elevator there open up expanses of possibilities that will never be fully explored. But the narrator is not curious about them. He guesses that he ought not to leave the elevator as it stops at successive floors. At most, at the next one he’ll block the door with his foot, lean out and, holding up a cigarette lighter — a commemorative gift, though not for him, and never mind who it was from — he will see a perished gas mask abandoned by the door. Things will return to their places: the shoddily plastered walls, the low ceilings, the dust-covered floors with puddles here and there over which droplets of rusty water hang from joints in the piping — if one falls, another will immediately take its place. Straining one’s ears, one might hear the tower of cans crashing down in the house with the garden. Many floors above, the dingy landing remains in place, seemingly inaccessible; yet the elevator in fact stops there too, opposite the familiar door marked with a half-effaced figure of a man, as if in a dream. The external world puts up no more resistance. If the unexpectedly happy ending does not arouse the narrator’s suspicions it is only because he is collapsing from exhaustion. But he is already on the landing; he discards the map scribbled on the back of the form, and the elevator takes it away, back into the depths of the dark shaft. The narrator isn’t even sure if at this exact moment the lower floors still exist. On the upper floors this can never be known for certain. And if the lower floors have already caved in, that means the remaining floors are now the last, in the grip of fever and commotion. But in a place where leather sofas exude the cool tranquility of affluence, it can be believed to the very end that the upper floors will never become the lower ones. The narrator, too, wishes to believe this. He looks for his keys. Where have they gone? Were they left down below, along with his jacket? He has them. They’re not lost — he’s found them in the pocket of his pants. He doesn’t know if he should first open the room with the balcony or the door to the bathroom. He opens the room. He immediately becomes aware of a sizeable dark object on the bed. A little evening light falls on the object from the balcony window; it looks like an instrument case. The figure seated in the armchair the narrator notices only after a moment. So someone must have been waiting for him to come back, for goodness knows how many hours, till finally he fell asleep. His hunched back can be seen. A hand hanging over the arm of the chair is almost touching the floor. The hand is black.