Absence Read online

  During his mother’s speech the soldier keeps his eyes on his surroundings, as though ready to leap. If a ball were suddenly to come flying, he would catch it. During some of the woman’s sentences he glanced over his shoulder at something. For a moment or two a black man on a distant bench came closer. The weak irregular jet of the fountain grew strong and seemed to be the outstanding event of the station area; the fountain became monumental. The letters on the glass door framed the view and the objects in it; a face in the window of a train, a lighted switch at the edge of the tracks, became as palpable as though seen through a telescope.

  Now the waiting room is occupied by other people. The three have gone. The platforms are empty, and so are the many tracks; the rails give off a cold gleam. A last car vanishes around the long curve. After that there are only the high-rise buildings beyond the dead fields, the lighted windows almost as close together as in the old people’s home. This is the time of day when most people are back from their Sunday outings, but few want to be in the dark; countless silhouettes are seen standing in the middle of rooms, motionless except for hands moving up and down with cigarettes.

  The soldier has put his cap on again. Already far from the station, he is walking along the river—alone now—with giant strides, as though flying. In almost every telephone booth a motionless shadow. An arm that seems to have been dangling all day from a car window is pulled back. Three teenage girls are waiting in front of a house; a very small child steps out of the door. Knots of foreign workers are standing around, looking more Slavic than ever with their prominent cheekbones. In response to a homicidal look the soldier salutes, and the saluted person suddenly comes to life.

  On one of the main streets—rows of lighted, yet barred shopwindows—he stands at some distance from a few others, mostly soldiers. While the others engage in conversation and a bit of shadowboxing, he takes a cookie out of his jacket pocket and eats it in a leisurely, almost ceremonious way. There is a church nearby; a poster on the wall of the bus shelter announces PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND.

  In the bus he takes a book from his other pocket and reads. Repeatedly in the course of the trip he looks up—at a pedestrian crossing or at the one good-looking girl on the bus—always for longer than needed to digest what he has been reading. The army camp, way out beyond the expressways, is invisible, recognizable only by the glaring white sentry box in a small birch forest and the barriers on either side of it. The soldier slips through in line with the others.

  It’s deep night. The lights go out on the airfield. A pedestrian light changes; there are no more pedestrians; the stick figures on the light are crooked. A voice comes out of a dark ground-floor window; it starts with a loud, clear word, but then becomes unintelligible, the voice of a sleeper. In the center of town, on the squares, there is hardly anything but animal sounds to be heard: the screeching of cats, the roaring of a bull in a slaughterhouse far away, the scream of a peacock in a zoo. The television sets in a shopwindow all display their test patterns. At one of the scenes of Sunday’s accidents whitish sand is being strewn over blood, which in one place is still discernible, a circular, clotted, pitch-black spot, as though the victim’s heart had drained just there. The light of a streetlamp shines into a café, whose chairs and tables are sharply outlined in the gloom; in one corner a basket full of leftover bread, shrunken, crusts broken, as happens to baked goods only on Sunday evenings; the few men left on the chess board have all tipped over, except the king, who stands proudly erect. A segment of the sky includes the half-moon in the shape of an apothecary’s mortar, prepared to receive the pill that is the single star. A uniform rumbling fills the room, as though the city’s machines had not been fully turned off and were ready to start up again at any moment.

  Only in the gambling establishment have time and the outside world ceased to exist. Fluorescent tubes make it as bright as day, the thick curtains offer no gap through which to look out, and besides, it would never occur to the gamblers to raise their eyes from the cards or dice. In contrast to the depopulated world outside, the large room, the sections of which are separated by pillars, is crowded, literally black with people. Nevertheless, apart from a group of young billiards players, all beginners who have come here only to prove their courage, there is no noise. Hardly anyone speaks; there is little to be heard but the shuffling of cards, the shaking of dice, and the hum of the ventilators, one in each wall. Not a single picture; far and wide only the shimmer of green paint, rubbed dull on the baseboards by the movements of nervous heels. Even the usual plants and lone dog are missing. Cigarette butts fall thick and fast on the tile floor, the players stamp them out without looking. The only decoration in the room is the oval stucco ornament on the high ceiling, the one thing at which one of the players, invariably the loser, to be sure, occasionally takes a quick, furtive look.

  There is a main table, recognizable not by its size but by the number of onlookers standing around it. It is not in the center of the room but in a corner. One of the men sitting at it is the big man; he is not among the losers. He is white-haired and smooth-skinned, as though beardless, while most of the others at the table look unshaved. Like them he is wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and no tie. But over his suit he is wearing an almost floor-length camel’s -hair coat, as though he were cold. Another thing that singles him out is that he is not sitting in a chair like the others but on a backless stool at one corner of the table. There he sits upraised, with his legs folded under him, and keeps the bank. While waiting for bets to be made—some of the apparent onlookers standing around the table turn out to be players—he shakes the dice in a rhythm suggesting an endless drumroll, summoning all present to step up and join in. The emptying of the cup is all the more sudden; a slight flick of the wrist, which sends the dice to the edge of the dice board and bouncing back again. His hands alone seem concerned with what is going on; the one always busy with the dice, the other, after the throw, with jotting down numbers, which his gold pencil seems to inscribe autonomously on a slip of paper. Otherwise, no part of him moves; the cigarette in his mouth, which he never draws on, is always relit by an assiduous henchman at his side, who also rakes in the banknotes for him—the dancing of a coin on this table is unthinkable—smooths them out, and arranges them in piles. And, like most of the gamblers here, he never orders a drink from the manager, who makes his rounds at intervals (but he invariably has a banknote from one of the piles slipped to him). He never says a word. At times he seems even more bleary-eyed and pale than the others; his hands seem to move of their own accord, as though he were asleep under his swollen eyelids. But seen from close up, his pupils are constantly darting this way and that. While shaking the dice, he is equally keeping an eye on the crackling banknotes between the fingers of one of the onlookers and on the game at the next table, where big, pallid, almost hairless fists are clutching very small cards. A blue light shines from below on the face of the solitary player farther back, plying a one-armed bandit. In mid-scream the lone girl in the noisy billiards group feels the gambler’s glance, breaks off, and looks around at her companions as though for protection.

  The dice are rolled again, but then they are left lying on the table. The thrower takes his watch from his vest pocket, signaling the end of the game. Others, too, open their watches. The banker tots up columns of figures, a few banknotes are distributed; he stuffs the lion’s share into his coat pocket and reaches behind him for his cap, which is of the same material as his coat. But then, with his cap already on his head, he remains seated and even leans back against the wall. The others, too, remain in their places, like him almost motionless, pursuing a dream. On all sides of the table, running toward the middle, innumerable fingerprints. Even after standing up, the gambler does not leave at once, but lifts the curtain a little. He looks out into the faint early light and sees a bus loop on the edge of the city—shimmering pre-dawn wires; milk bottles singly or in pairs on the doorsteps of uniform housing-development dwellings.

  The
gambler seems to find no difficulty in passing from one sphere to another. After a brief look back at the black ventilator hole with its fluttering slats, he turns unhesitatingly to face the long, articulated bus whose support bars, as it drives empty into the loop, glitter like an army of spears. He takes the opposite direction from the bus, cuts across the city line, and strikes out across country. Here again, as previously on the road, he keeps looking over his shoulder, not to make sure that no one is following him, but as though expecting to see something behind him. Now and then he even spins about, as though to face an invisible group, which possibly includes the little clumps of birch trees. Making his way through rough scrubland along a rusty, abandoned railroad track, the gambler takes longer and longer strides, even jumping over a tie. Here at last he begins to speak, a mere mumble of unconnected words: “Deformed! … anywhere … on your knees … get caught … water of life … machine tool … prepare … no time … surrounded … adequately … neglected … bunch … fit subject … include … shatter … open up … track down … deluge … outright …” He starts to run, punching himself in the head, sticking a finger down his throat to no effect, or bending the same finger, holding it up to his temple, and going through the motions of shooting himself over and over again. Once he even turns off his path and casually rams his forehead against a tree trunk.

  At the end of the track, through a strip of tall grass, whose blades seem to bar the way like swords, the gambler enters an open field of rubble, almost without vegetation, surrounded on all sides by bushes and looking like a disk inserted in the meadows on the edge of the city. The only rise is a mound made up of concrete blocks, gravel, and earth. At the side of this mound, the gambler sits down on a stone, looks at the packet of banknotes beside him, and continues his mumbling: “Money, you’ve always been my mainstay. No money, no world. Money, you have not only been my parachute, which up until now has never failed to open, but also my airship, ready to take off in any direction, reliable and crashproof. Money, my last resort and only clear idea. Money, my only ray of hope!” Suddenly he stops and in the same tone of voice addresses a little clump of pale-yellow grass, swaying at eye level: “I must get away from here, no matter where to. To a place where I can grieve and have something to grieve for. To a place where loyalty will again count for something. I need danger. There may be danger here, too, but I don’t feel it. What was that dream I had? I was sitting at the table, I had sat there every evening for ten years, waiting for the others. And when they came, they sat down at other tables, not out of hostility but because nobody knew me. What has become of me? They call me the ‘artist,’ but I’m only the archenemy, the gambler. Instead of embodying the world, I am the point where lovelessness is concentrated. I am the point at the tip of the lance, a bundle of whiplashes. Instead of being many-sided and disarming, I am cutting, sterile, and aggressive. I am so dependent on constant presence of mind that I’m not present at all, neither for anyone else nor for myself. ‘You’re not there!’ All the women I’ve ever loved have said that. Loved? I never loved anyone. They call me the freest of men, but I’m just indifferent, volatile. I say what I like and go where I please, but it gives me no feeling of freedom; I feel only the injustice and privation I’ve suffered. None of them knows how often I say to myself: Shut up and stay put. They call me a king, but I’m just a liar and a hypocrite. My generosity is really condescension, my indulgence and attitude of live and let live is disloyalty, my aloofness contempt. Instead of being the king of life, as they say, I’m an enemy of mankind—a scoundrel when I’m gambling; and when I’m not gambling, a soulless sneak.”

  The gambler looks around, taking in the strip of wand-like alders, the stunted silver birches, and the lone spruce sighing in the wind at the edge of the disk; takes two stones from the pile, knocks them together; and, swaying his torso back and forth, carries on with his mumbled singsong: “Make a fresh start. I say that today for the first time, and I’ve never heard anyone say it in earnest. Begin a new life. But if I only say it to myself, I don’t mean it. Nobody hears the things I say to myself, so they don’t count. Love. I’ll take time and let myself be diverted by love. Give me the saving grief that will finally tell me which way to go. Inflict it on me. No longer will the steel pen get stuck between my ribs. Renew the wound each day, dearest, my one and only, whether man or woman. Reject me if need be, but tell me why; scorn me, mock me, make me open up and cease to be alone. Embitter me, make a kernel grow within me, make me fruitful. Spell it out. Give it to me in writing. That’s it. To make me mean what I say, to assure myself that what I say will be heard and will therefore stand fast, I will spell it out and give it to myself in writing. Even if what is sung does not exist, the voice of the singer does.”

  Making what he has said true, he writes in his pad with his gold pencil; this he does with such emphasis that his shoulders begin to spin and his whole body to shake. He gets up from his stone and washes his face and hands in one of the many puddles that abound in the scrubland, as though the ground below them were frozen all year long. Near the puddle there is a single clump of grass with broad, flat blades that splay out in all directions like shocks of hair. It is lit up from the side by the first rays of the sun and stirred by the early breeze. The blades are transparent and clearly show their fine ribs running all the way to the tips, and the shadow of one blade falls on the next blade’s trail of light. The longer we look at the clump as it trembles, shakes, and sways, the more sounds converge in it, each connected to the next—the screech of the crow overhead, the train whistle on the horizon, the beating of carpets in the housing development, the rat-tat-tat of the rifle range —and in the end we get the impression that the sounds of a cosmos are being made in the center of the clump, in its roots. The intensified movement that runs through the blades of grass does not result from the wind alone.

  In similar light, the old man is standing on a ladder in the garden of the old people’s home. He looks over his shoulder as if he senses that someone is looking at him and he wants to answer the look. His ladder is much too big for the little tree it is leaning against, and the tree bends to one side. With his pruning shears he cuts out the crown. His way of looking around, his quick decision, and his movements show that he is an expert. The branches fall all over him, on the brim of his hat and on his shoulders.