Moving Parts (11 page)

The voice at the other end of the line informs the narrator dryly of his dissatisfaction, supposedly arising from the fact that up to this point there have been nothing but muddled descriptions of scenery, presented moreover from the wrong side: not from the front but from behind, without the slightest effort to conceal the joins between wood and pasteboard, the running paint, the drab canvas, the braces made from untreated beams that shore up the structure. Who cares if the world exists? Let it look as if it does. The deceptive impression of reality – that is what is expected of the narrator by his taskmaster. A story, like anything else, ought to flow smoothly from beginning to end, never once straying from its course. The Fojchtmajers! How did they get in here? Who gave permission to open the veneered door with their name on the plate? And to do so, what's more, using the key to the house with the garden. True, it happened to fit here, too; there's any number of doors that key will open, are there not? After all, this is a story about betrayal, and betrayal lies in human nature. The task was an easy one; there was no shortage of words, and with words anything at all can be set in motion. The narrator was to tell an uncomplicated plot
culminating in the violent moment in the garden. Omitting that final scene was an unpardonable blunder, shouts the voice. But he included what happened in the garden, the narrator tries to interject; he didn't omit a thing! He suddenly realizes with astonishment that his interlocutor, so self-assured in his authority, is hopelessly misinformed. He missed the ending; a critical episode escaped his notice. And so it was his inattention that brought about the confusion. Story lines got mixed up. That's why they are now proceeding unchecked through train station and bar, headed goodness knows where. But the narrator doesn't manage to say a word; he's interrupted by the voice at the other end of the line, which knows what it knows and has its own lines to deliver. The voice asks rather arrogantly if it can count on the story being put in order, pronto. Yes or no. The narrator isn't able to answer succinctly. Stumbling over his words, he mentions the torn-up envelope he was given without a letter; the disarray in which elevators and hallways go missing without a trace; and all the instances of negligence over which he had no control. The voice calls him an utter moron, period. What negligence, whose negligence? Did the narrator expect that everything would be done for him? Has he completely lost his marbles? This question, posed in a sharp tone, could have been regarded as rhetorical, had the voice not insistently and implacably demanded an answer. The narrator will finally stammer one out in absolute humiliation, but then it will transpire that he didn't get it right, as often happens in an examination,
when the candidate attempts in vain to guess what is wanted of him, and performs worse and worse. Fury seethes at the other end of the line. The narrator's interlocutor now demands explanations: Who in fact is he, a garden-variety bungler, or perhaps he's actually a saboteur, a reprobate. Yes, once again he is categorically demanding a reply. A returning wave of anger sweeps the narrator up; he starts accusing the supreme authority of sleeping through the ending, and mentions the neglectfulness and sloppiness that are the cause of the whole mess. And all this is nothing compared to the unfeeling way in which he has been cheated by being assigned a cookie-cutter story, a trite divorce tale devoid of any deeper meaning. His speech ends abruptly and is followed by an ominous silence. At last, after a long pause, the voice at the other end of the line begins to spit out words one by one: The story deserves to be told with feeling; he who pays the piper calls the tune. No one forks out for something he could do himself. There is a crash; at the other end of the line the call has been terminated. The bang of the receiver being slammed down by the narrator concludes this pathetic scene.

Yet there was something wrong with the contract from the very beginning; a hidden catch was only to have been suspected. The smell of coffee, the softness of pink stuffing, and an envelope full of money – all this in exchange for simply being present, for a scrap of testimony, almost as a gift? Since either way the narrator had no choice, they could have insisted on
much more from him. And so it was not for his presence alone that he was given so many splendid promises, but for the torment of responsibility, for a burden beyond the endurance of a front man, for the inevitability of a failure in which he had gradually become embroiled. But the powers that be, it seems, have already ceased to associate any plans with his person. He still has the safety of the Fojchtmajers' apartment; he paces the hallway from wall to wall, with clenched fists, kicking the suitcases lying abandoned in the middle of the floor. Of the mirror in a gilt frame, not a word will be said. The narrator turns his gaze away from it in vexation. The rubber ball gets in his way, bumping into the abandoned luggage and bouncing against it time and again. It has to be held firmly underfoot and punctured with the scissors; the air escapes with a heavy sigh. Powerless anger, as is common knowledge, turns to doubt and despair. In the end the narrator sits on one of the suitcases. The situation offers no prospects for him other than those furnished by false contrition. In his pocket he has a notebook with telephone numbers. He's just about to reach for the receiver when his gaze falls on the severed cord. If even this doesn't prevent him from making a connection, the deciding factor will be a busy signal: He who allotted him his task is not waiting for his call but is already talking with someone else about something else. It gradually becomes evident that the narrator's position has undergone a change. It has worsened, considerably so, though only a few paragraphs earlier he believed it could get no worse.
Overcome by concern for his own skin, he even considers running away, at first not entirely seriously; to test the waters, he imagines searching for another hiding place after leaving the comfortable apartment, the address of which must surely be known to those up there, just as they have the phone number. And what if it isn't a story about betrayal? A frightening thought. From one moment to the next, escape increasingly seems to him the only sensible solution. Without his documents, left in the hotel room with the balcony, without money, without plans for the future, without much in the way of hope, he tries one more time to retreat across the attic filled with white bed sheets hung out to dry and through the dark back rooms of the bar, the same route by which he came here from the train station. But the trapdoor leads invariably to the roof. Below, the doctor from the ambulance is pushing his way through a crowd of onlookers to write the death certificate; here and there can be seen the dark blue uniforms of the prewar Polish police. The narrator gingerly makes his way to the opposite side of the roof. Looking down over the eaves, he notices a car, a silver hatchback, which at this very moment is pulling up with a screech of brakes in front of the apartment building. It must be said that they didn't make him wait long. The car mounts the sidewalk with one wheel; out of it jump two men in gray-green uniform jackets thrown straight over blue denim overalls. With a disconcerting emblem on their caps, and with cocked guns, they hesitate in front of the
entrance. It's clear that this is the first time they have appeared in these military outfits, and they've not had time to figure out how they should behave. The sergeant accompanying them is the last to get out of the car. For a moment he juggles an opalescent marble in his hand as if he were still making up his mind about something; then he steps forward. In the premature colors of the Wehrmacht they run up the unseen stairs. Evidently there were not enough dark blue uniforms to go round, as they were needed at the same time to complete the picture of confusion on the other side. For a long time they search the unlocked, deserted apartment; in the end they burst into the attic, amid the bed sheets blocking their view. They drag them off the clotheslines and trample them underfoot in their hobnailed boots. They poke into every corner. In the meantime a police captain is calmly studying the windowsills in the trumpeter's apartment with a magnifying glass, looking in vain for a trace of a woman's heel. He has gone through the handbag she left behind and has found her purse, compact, notebook, and a card from the dentist's. The dentist has been located immediately and brought to the scene of the accident to confirm the identity of the victim. Concealed on the roof, the narrator cannot see what is happening on both sides at the same time; this is prevented by the ridge of the roof, which divides the space in two. And so on one side there is a five-door silver-gray hatchback with sunroof, on the other the dark blue police. Sounds come from both places at once, but do not inter-mingle.
On one side is a diffuse hum of voices, on the other the shouts of the soldiers, the clatter of boots and the sudden report of a gun. But there is no tunnel by which the sound of the shot could reach the other side of the story and be heard by the plainclothes police captain and the dark blue policemen bustling about there. One of the privates in gray-green opens the trapdoor and looks around on the roof. It's not clear whether he has missed what he was sent for, or whether for some reason he would rather pretend not to have seen anything. A long time passes before they reappear on the street, dragging the gramophone to the car. The sergeant gives them an earful and urges them to get a move on. They go back inside, bring out the suitcases that had been abandoned in the hallway, and return once more for the portrait of the children, perhaps because of its valuable frame. The sergeant carries it out carefully, since pastels don't respond well to shocks; while the two privates follow behind with armfuls of Fojchtmajer's silk underwear and shirts. Now they're getting into the car. They turn on the engine but don't set off at once; first they help themselves to some chocolates from the pink chocolate box. They can be seen through the open roof of the car, passing the box around. Where will they go? Before the car disappears around the corner of the street, the sergeant in the army cap will turn back and without taking aim – nonchalance is permitted, since here nothing depends on meticulousness – will fire his pistol in the direction of the chimney from behind
which the narrator is peering out. A dry crack is heard; the narrator's body suddenly jerks as if struck by a whip. The bottle of brandy he has taken falls from under his arm. It rolls down the tin roof and shatters loudly on the cobblestones somewhere below.

This could not have been foreseen. There wasn't meant to be a gunshot wound in the story the narrator was telling, especially one that he himself would sustain. But he has in fact been wounded. He acknowledges this reluctantly, because the fact of the injury points unambiguously to a body; it proves that the narrator possesses one. He has a beating heart, sensitive kidneys and liver, soft skin, delicate muscles and dark red blood – everything that, not without a certain disquiet, can be studied on the pages of anatomical atlases. The suggestion that things are otherwise, present in the background from the very first paragraphs and fed by what was left unsaid, all at once loses its convenient, noncommittal quality and acquires the ordinariness of that which is spoken outright, the inertia of concrete statements, heavy as bricks. Suddenly filled with substance, the illusion loses balance and falls over. In this way the discreet insinuations of the narrator turn into brazen lies. This unexpected turn of events, shedding light on a troublesome issue, lends his earlier intimations the quality of playacting and exposes them to ridicule.

The narrator bears a body – like every one of the characters, like the hurrying passers-by carrying their burden along the
sidewalks. He hid this fact doggedly, not shrinking from barefaced prevarication. Now he would like to say something in his own defense but cannot, somewhat dazed as he is, and lying spread-eagled on the steep roof. The body, barely grazed, is bleeding unrestrainedly. The body has its own weight and is afraid that if it grows weaker, it will follow the bottle and slip off the roof. It's drenched in cold sweat; the pain does not give it a moment's respite. It sees no escape, no future beyond bleeding, no hope of anything better than a slow demise. The body realizes in despair that it was permitted to relish the smell of coffee, to experience the softness of sofas and the caress of soap and warm water, only up to the point at which the world pulled the ground from under its feet and the air from its lungs. Vulnerable and cowardly, always with something to lose and always prepared to yield to pressure, sell itself, abase itself, to pay any price to be saved, it was unable to prevent a thing. While it still stood on its feet, it tried to negotiate favorable conditions for itself. Yet the time will come when this aching body will have nothing more to offer, and its concessions will prove worthless. And it will have to give everything back; it will be left only with whatever space in the world it manages to gather beneath itself as it lies insensate.

But when the moment passes and it becomes clear that it was not yet its last, the heart gradually calms down and the body already starts to look for something better. If the narrator were to drag himself downstairs, he could probably have his
wound dressed by the doctor from the ambulance; but the dark blue police would not spare him their official questions and sensational hypotheses, not to mention their habit of checking documents. He squeezes through the opening of the trapdoor; with his good hand he pulls a monogrammed sheet from one of the clotheslines and, with the aid of his teeth, he fashions a makeshift bandage. The loose sleeve of his jacket dangles at his side; beneath its open tail his arm hangs inertly. Somewhere round the corner there must be a doctor's office. The narrator decides to look for it, disregarding the fact that he has no wallet. In any case, the banknotes it contained would have been useless here. On the far side of the attic there is a wide-open door with its lock shot off, a memento of the recent presence of the three figures wearing German uniforms. He reaches the door, staggering and bumping into the beams of the sloping ceiling. Beyond the door another attic can be seen. From there one can access the staircase of the neighboring apartment building, which is decorated in marble, with an elevator lined with mirrors. The narrator touches the buttons of the elevator, doubting whether any of them are meant for him. Certainly there exist first-aid stations for the wounded, for those shot by the soldiers in the gray-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht. Frenetic surgeries where no one asks any questions. But the nearest such place is undoubtedly situated many floors beneath the foundations of the apartment building; for the heavier the burden of life, the lower it descends. The narrator, who has
grown familiar with the way of things, can imagine the confusion, the stale air, and the uproar that reign there. He selects a button marked First Floor. The mirrors surround him on all sides; this time he has nowhere to retreat in protest at their idle inquisitiveness. Here he will no longer be able to evade the awkward question of his reflection. Everything can be seen in the mirrors: the parting on the top of his head; the white collar, no longer fresh; the knot of the necktie. The tie is crooked, and the narrator straightens it with his good hand. Above the tie, gold-rimmed glasses. The discolored fingers of a smoker rake through his hair. That's right. There's no sense denying it: The features, silhouette, and gestures are easily recognizable. In general, the narrator is embittered by the lack of privileges that he ought to enjoy; he is touched to the quick by the supercilious way in which his privacy has been invaded. He would prefer to remain silent, but since certain inconvenient details have come to light, he is forced to admit that the body does not belong to him alone. It was issued to him, like a hospital gown or an army greatcoat. He can only speculate as to where this appearance came from, and guess whose image was the basis for all the copies in circulation.