B007P4V3G4 EBOK (36 page)

Brose followed him along the plastered corridors; it was as
though they had become just as long as in his dream. He was
astonished that they made it to the admiral's room. The admiral
was sitting at his desk.

'Take a seat, Brose.'

Brose sat down and he marvelled, one way or another, at his
own presence in the air, on earth. The admiral was silent for more
than a minute and looked at Brose's throat incessantly.

'In a few days' time,' he then began, 'the war'll be finished.
Others have discovered that the Beast was going to travel, what
route he would take and which ship. Staking their lives, scores of
agents have been at it for months for this. Their work's unthinkable
without the totality of our intelligence apparatus, which in its turn is
unthinkable without state government. When it comes down to it,
the death of the Beast will be the doing of our entire wretched
nation. But the central role, Brose, is the one you play:

No, thought Brose, the order I was given does that. He managed
to think: but that's my own will - and went on listening.

'One of those agents,' the admiral said, 'met his death, but this
death was not an important one. He could also have got away
with his life. He played a game. We all play a game - except for
you. You are the only one who knows in advance that he will die,
irrevocably.'

I do? thought Brose.

'And this is why you die a different kind of death; not a hero's
death, for you're not doing it voluntarily, but a death with the
force of a law of nature.' The admiral dug his monocle under a nail,
and continued: 'In a few weeks' time we'll all be back home again.
Except for you. Most of us still have a relative somewhere, or a
friend. All of my own family are still alive; I'm a rich man: they
didn't have to die like dogs in the cities, like yours did. But the
one who has nobody any more, he too will find a wife, soon
enough, and have children. Don't get me wrong, Brose. In a few
years' time, probably even sooner, all of us will really have
forgotten the war. This rock will change into a fairy-tale holiday
resort for millionaires. I drew up the plans for this myself and they
have been approved. Further things have been approved. All over the world, plans are being laid for the next war, and when it breaks
out, about twenty years hence, this one will have become completely
pointless: our victory too, the death of the Beast as well. And in
the meantime, we'll all be lying in bed with women again, have
parties, be drunk, earn money, buy cars and go on holiday.'

The admiral looked him in the face and narrowed his eyes a
little.

'But when we think of you, Brose - and very seldom this will
be - it'll be to us as though we're looking into a different world,
and shivers will run down our spines. We will see you, all of
iron, standing in immeasurable space, for ever. In you, I will have
immortalised war, for your soul is unable to go anywhere. And
then we'll put our beautiful cars by the side of the road and for
minutes on end we'll be incapable of driving on. We'll see the
tarmac shimmering and smell the woods - but somewhere you will
exist, made of iron, part of all possible scents, of the wind, beyond
all forests...'

Filled with people, explosives, soundings and messages, the Y253
made its way at a depth of fifteen feet through the ocean to the
area the Beast would travel through. Though no one knew of his
promotion, Brose had eaten with the officers. No last repast: the
usual fare. With the exception of one single officer from the base,
all the faces were unfamiliar to him - incomprehensible, reticent
faces from the fatherland. Little was said. Sailors everywhere stood
with their faces to the walls and checked the instruments among
the pipes and wiring, the nerves and bloodvessels of the vibrating
ship.

At nine o'clock he was given a cup of coffee; he slumped
forwards on to the table and fell asleep. The doctor checked his
pulse and had him taken to his bunk.

From one direction, the convoy of the Beast approached, from
another, at rectangles to it, Brose, in unfathomably deep sleep, five
metres below water, surrounded in iron.

He woke at four in the morning. The officer from the base was
standing in front of his bunk.

Surprised, Brose sat up. He existed. His leather suit hung over a
chair. While he dressed, the officer sat on the bunk, his head in his
hands.

Brose stepped into the trousers and didn't believe a jot of it that he existed. It had to be his imagination. A few times in his life he
had thought about it and had doubted. Now he was sure. The
others were the ones who existed; he did not. Even in the days
when his father was still reciting from the Odyssey, when the
firecrackers and Japanese thunderclaps were lying ready, he had
felt that he didn't exist: that somewhere there must be a world
where he belonged and where he could exist, but that he had lost
it, that losing his way, he had roamed beyond it, and that now he
only existed as an intermediate form, a transition, a thing of the
imagination in between two He went along with the
officer to the commander, a stranger from the fatherland. On a
map, he was shown the spot where they were in the ocean, the
supposed position of the Beast and, one more time, the route he
was to follow when the time had come. Until nine o'clock in the
morning, the Y253 would still be transporting him in the craft, but
then she would be in range of the outermost cordons and would
no longer be able to surface. Not a word was spoken that was not
relevant. While the sailors were helping him get into his straps and
instruments, the vessel began to rise. Brose looked at the commander. He was standing there smoking a cigarette, watching a
dial. He was a component of the submarine. When the iron ladder
slid into view, he saluted, touching his cap, and turned his back.

Silently, the Y253 slipped through the night, on top of the
water, in the warm wind. The darkness lapped softly against the
hull. Five, six sailors ran forwards across the dripping deck and
opened the craft. Hurriedly, they helped him in and fitted the
oxygen hose, but before they were able to close the dome, the
officer from the base, who had come up along with them, began to
shake Brose's hands and to pant incomprehensible words and
sentences, almost invisible in the night, allowing his head to droop,
then tossing it back, mumbling, panting, weeping. And Brose
nodded back, weeping, open-mouthed, all

When the fog in his head dispersed, everything was empty; the
dome was over his head and behind him the steel creature was
twisting down its manhole cover. All of a sudden, he felt the
boundless night around him, the world in which he didn't exist.
And as everything began to rise, left and right, and the water
lapped his dome a moment and then rose above him - in that
silence Brose suddenly knew that man is an animal in space,
dividing gods and joined in battle with them, his mind turning into
machines. With his head in the dome, deep under water already, his teeth began to chatter in the face of the immensity of the
miracle he suddenly saw.

He saw man drop in across the silent earth, full of restlessness,
thoughts and words. In a flash, he saw him live among the animals,
erecting mysterious signs and fires to heaven, and then gradually
he saw the words step forth from his head, phantoms slowly
becoming visible in all the plains and vales as machines, vast
factories, power stations - cryptic, unfathomable extensions to his
body: his legs that thought themselves into being wheels, his arms
into ships, aircraft and cannons, his skin into helmets and bunkers,
his heart into electricity, and his ears and eyes into radar and
telescopes. A smoking, swirling, sparking human body of steel,
stretched out over the earth, in it, under water and tumbling
through the air, his own words like bombs and raining down fire
upon

Open-mouthed, gliding deep through the black water, Brose
looked at the decorated man: standing, legs wide apart, his face turned
to the East, on top of a decomposing monster with wolf's eyes
and Christ-hands, a space for his eyes and a map beneath the roof
of his skull, grown invisible beneath the weapons and tools of his
deep faith, a roaring tree of light, a fire-god of the stake.

'Time is eight hours, forty-nine minutes, twelve seconds. We are
situated at the edge of the convoy's first zone of defence. Its centre
is estimated to be at a distance of nine miles. It's moving in a
North-North-Easterly direction at a speed of fifteen knots. There
are many aircraft in the sky. Your position

Rigid, Brose listens to the voice in his ear. It was hard and dry:
the commander's. His legs were made of blue, transparent ice.

We'll be going about in a hundred and twenty seconds' time. Detach yourself in sixty seconds. Do you read me?

Hoarsely, Brose said:

'Yes:

'Time is eight hours, fifty minutes, four seconds:

Brose began to shake and, listening intently to his headphones,
directed his eyes towards the instruments. The soft noise of metal
on metal already sounded down below. In a moment, the wire
would break: he had no radio on board - it would be too
dangerous. He heard someone walking. Metal continued to tap
against metal.

'Detach yourself in ten seconds.'

All of a sudden he heard shouting and running, to and fro,
disjointed sounds like those of a brawl. He put his foot on the
starter, peered at the chronometer and listened with his whole
head.

'Ah! ... come ... not the . . . - Brose!'

Thumping, groaning: the officer from the base. He wanted to
protest, undo it all, to make the world a better place - 'Ha ha ye ya
lala!' Brose shouted, slamming down the starter. Trembling embraced him and a moment later it was so quiet in his ears as
though an entire solar system had disappeared and got lost.

He dived to a hundred and fifty feet and thought: I could turn
around and blow up the Y253. But the commander would have
borne this in mind. Like an eel, he wriggled and zig-zagged his
way away from him now, into the fathomless space of water - not
to protect himself but his ship - himself. Never would he find him.

But it didn't enter Brose's head to go and find him. His eyes on
his instruments, he shot through the water. It had become lighter,
a soft-blue dusk with many little fish in it. His knuckles were white
clenching the steering wheel. Minutes on end, he roared on. He
didn't exist. He was a figment in the admiral's mind, and another in
the commander's and again another in that of the officer from the
base. In a quarter of an hour's time, for an indivisible moment, he
would be a figment in the cranium of the Beast: a figment of
tearing iron, fire and death. That was the most extreme purpose to
which a human being might grow. Nobody existed any other way
than as thousands of different figments tearing each other to pieces
in the heads of other figments - fata morganas in a desert dream.
Brose breathed agitatedly into the hose and looked wide-eyed at
the gauges. Man builds himself in, in his words, grasps the joystick
and flies through the air or the water like a god, he thought. His
eyes grew large. The craft was his body. He had turned into iron.
With his body he would break open the flowing body of the Beast.
The imagination of the human soul was too large for a bundle of
flesh and blood. It had found itself more spacious accommodation.
In the beginning was the word and the word has become machine.
Somewhere in a clean room, an electronic brain would suddenly
punch out a saving message of redemption for mankind, the
message of the new body and everything would bend its knee to
ex machina.

Brose's head glowed like phosphorus. More and more frequently, he slid underneath hazy, dark patches hanging like thunder clouds above him. He kept away from being beneath them as
much as possible to evade their radar. But he would be a quick,
unknown sea creature to them at most: he, an iron body with
sufficient explosive power to obliterate a metropolis. Suddenly it
began to rain silver before his eyes and for seconds on end fish
drummed against his little dome. When he had passed through the
shoal, the dark patches had greatly increased in number and the sea
was full of hollow pounding.

I'm deep below the convoy, Brose thought. It suspects nothing,
It's a colossal, floating creature, held together internally by wireless
nerves. A signalling aircraft, a train thundering across points, a ship
with people inside: these are creatures of a higher biological order
than a human being. Offices, the cuckoos of singing churches,
smoking factories, cinemas shaking with laughter, are bodies with
forms of consciousness above the comprehension of man, the way
the cells of a body know nothing of the individual they collectively
have formed. Brose thought and thought; he thought so as not to
think. Cities, states, Before his eyes he saw consciousnesses piled up like an inverted pyramid disappearing ever wider
and hazier in a darkness forever darkness. He thought: the entire
earth's becoming a body with a consciousness, and soon the solar
system and then the Milky Way and, after billions of years, all
solar systems in the universe: an omnipresent character grown
from the human soul chased away from house and home - and
then, who knows, other universes worlds where one
belongs ...

Was this still thinking? His brain worked like his razor when
connected to a voltage too high for it. He looked up. The
firmament was choc-a-bloc with threatening, billowing shadows.
The water had changed into ear-splitting thudding. It was nine
hours and four minutes. He had travelled eight miles. Half a minute
later everything above him was suddenly green, empty and quiet
again. Startled, Brose looked at his instruments. Had he gone off
course or had the fleet changed direction? A corpse-white fish
flashed past - the ghost of a fish. Five hundred metres further on, a
small diffuse cloud hovered again. At top speed he shot underneath
it from the side and then ran into the convoy again. He hurled his
steering wheel round, veered back in a sharp bend and reduced
speed.