Moving Parts (10 page)

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.

It is by no means certain that the Fojchtmajers could have avoided the cataclysm that was hanging over their home and threatening to shatter their emotional and physical wellbeing. After all, they had played an uncompromising and dangerous
game, tied as they were to the course of a story of betrayal pinned on a three-sided frame. Fojchtmajer chose not to bring matters to a head, his wife could not restrain herself, and John Maybe sailed his own course without regard for anyone else. And so it was unclear what fate these three people were actually spared or what they lost when they were forced to abandon a life that had seemed to them entirely comfortable and safe, vulnerable only to the destructive jolts of the outer world. On the dressing table, amid tins of powder and flasks of perfume, the narrator finds a photograph stuck into a thick gild-edged card folded in two. Against a background of flowerbeds in a park Fojchtmajer's wife rests her right hand on his shoulder as he stands smiling in a pale linen suit; long shadows extend at their feet. A third shadow belongs to John Maybe, who, as can be seen from the picture, is black; he stands next to them, the whites of his eyes gleaming, a shiny trumpet in his hands. On his shoulder Fojchtmajer's wife has laid her left hand. The narrator at first is a little taken aback, though he has of course heard of dark characters. The trumpet appears here as a prop in the manner of those emblems by which characters are recognized. The picture was probably taken with Fojchtmajer's camera. By whom? Naturally, by a young woman who does not appear in it. The very person the narrator had in mind when at some point he expressed the opinion that four characters is at least one too many. And indeed it is too many for a well-proportioned triangular frame neatly matching a card of hand
made paper folded in two and still smelling of fresh printer's ink from Fojchtmajer's printing press. Its trademark appears at the bottom on the reverse side. Did Fojchtmajer have to start printing invitations in order to stay in business? He did not; this was rather a favor for a friend and a small gift. So then, Yvonne Touseulement and John Maybe invite you to their wedding, to take place . . . And one need only glance at the wall calendar to see that the wedding has not yet taken place. And since this is the case, it will never come about, because John Maybe will not return. He has hopped on a train with a sudden premonition that it was his last chance to save himself before everything there goes to pieces. At the present time he's already falling asleep in his compartment. The wheels are clacking regularly, and his head is drooping and nodding in time; his body is ever further from the place he left in such haste. He is, it should be understood, safe. None of his former wives would be in any doubt of this if they were to wonder what's going on with him these days. It's easy to figure out that his former wives were black like him, gifted with slightly hoarse alto voices and an infallible sense of rhythm, though this is not enough to make relationships last. Before the date indicated on the invitation, the apartment building in which John Maybe was living will fall apart like a house of cards, leveled by the force of explosions unleashed by a Luftwaffe air raid. Every day the trumpeter will have to wake up in the early afternoon in some fictitious Amsterdam, with a dull headache, a belly full of rotting slime,
and dark, stagnant blood poisoned by the relentless ease of the solutions with which life has presented him. He will swallow an aspirin, spilling cold water on his white T-shirt, and amid the chaos of radio static will listen intently to the
BBC
news, which however will at no point bring him consolation. For the
BBC
will never announce the one news item that truly concerns him. It's not important enough; it would be appropriate at most for a local evening tabloid of the kind despised by Fojchtmajer and his wife. But this news item, which would be meaningful primarily to John Maybe, doesn't appear even there, because the air raid eclipsed all other local sensations. The narrator should note, then, with the policelike scrupulousness proper to newspaper reports of accidents and scandals, that at dusk John Maybe's girlfriend found his door locked, opened it with her own key, perhaps found and read some letter that the trumpeter had left for her on a side table or the chest of drawers, certainly no more than a few lines and a signature. Then she went down to the floor below. She must have noticed earlier the absence of the golden thread spun from the trumpet and strung between the floors, in its lower registers woven into a sturdy safety net. What now will become of her, devoid of the net above which her fate was suspended? Before making any decisions, she rang the Fojchtmajers' doorbell. But no one answered. She started knocking louder and louder at their massive door with its gold nameplate, mahogany veneer, and immaculate varnish. For a moment the knocking turned into a deafening
pounding. The narrator was able to observe her through the round spyhole. He could see her shining eyes and a damp lock of hair falling over her forehead. The principles of rising tension that govern scenes of this kind require that the young woman be pregnant, though the pregnancy is in its early stages and not yet visible. It goes without saying that the birth of a black child in an occupied city in which the most important document will be the German Kennkarte bearing swastikas on its stamps, is improbable in a very obvious way, and the narrator himself realizes that it should not be insisted upon. Hammering at the door ought to have tired her out. But even when she was thoroughly exhausted, the tension in the scene did not let up enough for her to return downstairs and leave on a tram. She had no choice: She went back upstairs, flung the window open, looked down into the street, and then climbed up to the attic where the sheets bearing the letter F were drying. From there she clambered through the opening of the trapdoor onto the steep roof, tearing her stockings in the process. She must have been there once before, naturally not alone. It must have been John Maybe's style to gaze at the lights of the city from high above, beneath the great firmament of the sky, just the two of them. Is that how it was on her first visit? A little giddy, they even harmonized a little, then kissed like crazy, as happens in American musicals just before the final credits. They went down to his apartment only when the evening chill made her shiver. The young woman would have preferred to stick with a
nice role in a musical comedy: Drama she found off-putting and a little frightening. She always thought that if life ever became truly unpleasant, she would slip away without good-byes, as though she were leaving a dull party. But after the trumpeter's departure she did not wait for an opportunity to creep discreetly out. With no regard for anything else, she jumped off the roof, her heart thumping wildly, with the key to his apartment clenched in her fist. And she fell several stories into the void, with nothing but air beneath her feet and the wind whistling in her ears. That is more or less how it must have looked, since she was found lying on the cobblestones where previously a coal cart had stood. She had died instantly, and only a tiny stream of blood ran from the corner of her mouth toward her forehead, crossing the base of her nose.

A few hours of comfort in the abandoned apartment was all the narrator could have counted on now had he been left in peace. A few hours of blessed sleep in the broad double bed before the air raid began. But now the telephone is ringing. It rings insistently and does not seem likely to give up. The narrator finds some scissors and cuts the cord. For a short time he basks in the silence, in which can be heard the soporific buzzing of flies, one, two, three of them, describing hopeless circles beneath the chandelier. But the cut cord is not enough to silence the stubborn ringing of the phone. After a moment it resumes. The narrator finally begins to realize that the call is for him. He ought to pick up if he doesn't wish to burn every
bridge behind him. He who calls the shots, he who summoned the narrator and who neglected for so long to respond to letters and faxes, from time to time remembers unfinished business, from a dripping faucet to banking arrangements. At such moments he digs his cell phone out of his crumpled bedding to deal with these matters one by one.