If on a winter's night a traveler (30 page)

of an answer. 'I have understood my limitations,' he said to me. 'In reading, something happens over which I have no power.' I could have told him that this is the limit that even the most omnipotent police force cannot broach. We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read...."

"And what became of him?" you ask with a concern perhaps no longer dictated by rivalry, but by solidarity and understanding.

"The man was finished; we could do what we liked with him: send him to forced labor or give him a routine job in our special service. Instead ..."

"Instead..."

"I allowed him to escape. A fake escape, a fake clandestine expatriation, and his trail was lost again. I believe I recognize his hand, every now and then, in material I happen to see.... His quality has improved.... Now he practices mystification for mystification's sake.... Our power now has no more effect on him. Luckily..."

"Luckily?"

"Something must always remain that eludes us.... For power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues.... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman...."

Rapidly you wrest from your mind the inappropriate superimposition of the images of the Director General and Ludmilla, to enjoy the apotheosis of the Other Reader, radiant vision that rises from the disenchanted words of Arkadian Porphyrich, and you savor the certainty, con-

firmed by the omniscient Director, that between her and you there no longer exist obstacles or mysteries, whereas of the Cagliostro, your rival, only a pathetic shadow remains, more and more distant....

But your satisfaction cannot be complete until the spell of the interrupted readings is broken. Here, too, you try to broach the subject with Arkadian Porphyrich. "As a contribution to your collection, we would have liked to offer you one of the banned books most in demand in Ataguitania —
Around an empty grave
by Calixto Bandera—but in an excess of zeal, our police sent the entire printing to be pulped. We have been informed, however, that an Ircanian translation of this novel is circulating secretly in your country, in a clandestine, mimeographed edition. Do you know anything about it?"

Arkadian Porphyrich gets up to consult a file. "By Calixto Bandera, did you say? Here it is: at the moment it doesn't seem to be available. But if you will be so patient as to wait a week, or two at most, I have an exquisite surprise in store for you. Our informers report that one of our most important banned authors, Anatoly Anatolin, has been working for some time on a version of Bandera's novel in an Ircanian setting. From other sources we know that Anatolin is about to finish a new novel entitled
What story down there awaits its end?,
for whose confiscation we have already arranged a surprise police action, so as to prevent the work from entering underground circulation. As soon as we have seized it, I will have a copy prepared for you urgently, and you will be able to decide for yourself whether it is the book you are hunting for."

In a trice you hatch your plan. You have ways of getting in contact directly with Anatoly Anatolin; you must beat the agents of Arkadian Porphyrich to the draw, gain possession of the manuscript before them, save it from confiscation, carry it to safety, and carry yourself also to

safety, from both the Ircanian police and the Ataguitanian....

That night you have a dream. You are in a train, a long train, which is crossing Ircania. All the travelers are reading thick bound volumes, something that happens more easily in countries where newspapers and periodicals are not very attractive. You get the idea that some of the travelers, or all, are reading one of the novels you have had to break off, indeed, that all those novels are to be found there in the compartment, translated into a language unknown to you. You make an effort to read what is written on the spine of the bindings, though you know it is useless, because for you the writing is undecipherable.

One traveler steps into the passage and leaves his volume on his seat to show it is occupied; there is a bookmark in the pages. The moment he has gone out, you reach both hands for the book, you skim through it, you are convinced it is the one you seek. At that moment you realize that all the other travelers are looking at you, their eyes filled with menacing disapproval of your indiscreet behavior.

To conceal your embarrassment, you stand up and lean out of the window, still holding the volume in your hand. The train has stopped amid tracks and signal poles, perhaps at a switch point outside some remote station. There is fog and snow, nothing can be seen. On the next track another train has stopped, headed in the opposite direction, all its windows frosted. At the window opposite yours, the circular movement of a gloved hand restores to the pane some of its transparency: a woman's form emerges, in a cloud of furs. "Ludmilla..." you call her. "Ludmilla, the book..." you try to tell her, more with gestures than with your voice, "the book you're looking for... I've found it, it's here...." And you struggle to lower the window to pass it to her through the hard fringe of the ice that covers the train in a thick crust.

"The book I'm looking for," says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, "is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."

"That's not so!" you shout, and you hunt in the incomprehensible book for a sentence that can contradict Ludmilla's words. But the two trains depart, move off in opposite directions.

An icy wind sweeps the public gardens of the capital of Ircania. You are seated on a bench waiting for Anatoly Anatolin, who is to deliver to you the manuscript of his new novel,
What story down there awaits its end?
A young man with a long blond beard, a long black coat, and an oilcloth cap sits down beside you. "Act natural. The gardens are always under close observation."

A hedge protects you from alien eyes. A little bundle of pages passes from the inside pocket of Anatoly's long overcoat to the inside pocket of your short pea jacket. Anatoly Anatolin takes out more pages from the inside pocket of his jacket. "I had to divide the pages among my various pockets, so that the bulging wouldn't attract attention," he says, extracting a roll of pages from an inside pocket of his vest. The wind whips a page from his fingers; he rushes to retrieve it. He is about to produce another pack of pages from the rear pocket of his trousers, but two agents in civilian clothes spring from the hedge and arrest him.

What story down there awaits its end?

Walking along the great Prospect of our city, I mentally erase the elements I have decided not to take into consideration. I pass a ministry building, whose façade is laden with caryatids, columns, balustrades, plinths, brackets, metopes; and I feel the need to reduce it to a smooth vertical surface, a slab of opaque glass, a partition that defines space without imposing itself on one's sight. But even simplified like this, the building still oppresses me: I decide to do away with it completely; in its place a milky sky rises over the bare ground. Similarly, I erase five more ministries, three banks, and a couple of skyscraper headquarters of big companies. The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.

In the bustle of the Prospect I keep meeting people the sight of whom, for various reasons, is unpleasant to me: my superiors, because they remind me of my inferior position; my inferiors, because I hate to feel possessed of an authority I consider petty, as petty as the envy, servility, and bitterness it inspires. I erase both categories,

without any hesitation; out of the corner of my eye, I see them shrink and vanish in a faint wisp of fog.

In this operation I am careful to spare passersby, outsiders, strangers who have never bothered me; indeed, the faces of some of them, if I observe them objectively, seem worthy of sincere interest. But when a crowd of strangers is all that remains from the world surrounding me, I suddenly feel lonely and disoriented, so better to erase them as well, the whole lot, and forget it.

In a simplified world I have greater probabilities of meeting the few people I like to meet: Franziska, for example. Franziska is a friend, and when I run into her, I feel a great joy. We exchange witticisms, we laugh, we tell each other things, ordinary events but perhaps ones we do not tell other people, and when we discuss them together, they prove interesting to both of us, and before saying good-bye, we both insist we must meet again as soon as possible. Then months pass, until we run into each other in the street, by chance: festive cries, laughter, promises to get together again soon, but neither of us ever does anything to bring about a meeting; perhaps because we know that it would no longer be the same thing. In a reduced and simplified world, now that the air has been cleared of all those pre-established situations which would make the fact of my seeing Franziska more often suggest a relationship between us somehow requiring definition, perhaps eventual marriage, or, in any event, our being considered a couple, assuming a bond possibly extending to our respective families, to our forebears and descendants, to siblings and cousins, and a bond between the environment of our joint lives and our attachments in the sphere of incomes and possessions; now, having achieved the disappearance of these conditions which, all around us, silently, weighed on us and on our conversations, causing them never to last more than a few minutes, my meeting Franziska should be even more beautiful and

enjoyable. So it is natural for me to try to create the circumstances most favorable to a crossing of our paths, such as the abolition of all young women wearing a pale fur like the one she wore last time, so that if I see her from a distance, I can be sure it is she, without any risk of misunderstandings or disappointments, and then the abolition of all young men who look as if they might be friends of Franziska and might conceivably be about to meet her, maybe intentionally, and delay her in pleasant conversation just when I should be the one to meet her, by chance.

I have gone into details of a personal nature, but this should not lead anyone to believe that my abolitions are inspired primarily by my own immediate, private interests; on the contrary, I try to act in the interest of the whole (and hence also my own, but indirectly). True, to begin somewhere, I made all the public buildings that occurred within my range disappear, with their broad steps and columned entrances and their corridors and waiting rooms, and files and circulars and dossiers, but also with their division chiefs, their director-generals, their vice-inspectors, their acting heads, their permanent and temporary staff; but I did this because I believe their existence is damaging or superfluous to the harmony of the whole.

It is that time of day when droves of employees leave the overheated offices, button up their overcoats with their fake-fur collars, and pile into buses. I blink, and they have vanished: only some scattered passersby can be discerned, far off, in the deserted streets from which I have also scrupulously eliminated automobiles and trucks and buses. I like to see the surface of the street bare and smooth as a bowling alley.

Then I abolish barracks, guard houses, police stations: all people in uniform vanish as if they had never existed. Perhaps I've let things get out of hand; I realize that firemen have suffered the same fate, and postmen, municipal

streetcleaners, and other categories that might deservedly have hoped for a different treatment; but what's done is done: no use splitting hairs. To avoid trouble, I quickly abolish fires, garbage, and also mail, which after all never brings anything but problems.

I check to make sure that hospitals, clinics, rest homes have not been left standing: to erase doctors, nurses, patients seems to me the only possible health. Then courts, with their complement of magistrates, lawyers, defendants and injured parties; prisons, with prisoners and guards inside. Then I erase the university with the entire faculty, the academy of sciences, letters, and arts, the museum, the library, monuments and curators, theaters, movies, televisions, newspapers. If they think respect for culture is going to stop me, they're wrong.

Then come the economic structures, which for too long a time have continued to enforce their outrageous claim to decide our lives. What do they think
they
are? One by one, I dissolve all shops, beginning with the ones selling prime necessities and ending with those selling superfluities, luxuries: first I clear the display windows of goods, then I erase the counters, shelves, salesgirls, cashiers, floorwalkers. The crowd of customers is momentarily bewildered, hands extended into the void, as shopping carts evaporate; then the customers themselves are also swallowed up by the vacuum. From consumer I work back to producer: I abolish all industry, light and heavy, I wipe out raw materials and sources of energy. What about agriculture? Away with that, too! And to keep anyone from saying I want to regress toward primitive societies, I also eliminate hunting and fishing.

Nature... Aha! Don't think I haven't caught on. This nature business is another fine fraud: kill it! A layer of the earth's crust is all that has to remain, solid enough underfoot, and everywhere else, nothingness.

I continue my walk along the Prospect, which now can-

not be distinguished from the endless plain, deserted and frozen. There are no more walls as far as the eye can see, no mountains or hills; not a river or a lake or a sea: only a flat, gray expanse of ice, as compact as basalt. Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world. There is a wind grazing the ground, dragging with flurries of fine snow the last residue of the vanished world: a bunch of ripe grapes which seems just picked from the vine, an infant's woolen bootee, a well-oiled hinge, a page that seems torn from a novel written in Spanish, with a woman's name: Amaranta. Was it a few seconds ago that everything ceased to exist, or many centuries? I've already lost any sense of time.