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But
the faces Junge was making didn't have anything to do with Sisyphus, thought
Bubis. They resulted instead from an unpleasant facial tic, well, not
highly
unpleasant, but not pleasant either, that he, Bubis, had noted in other
German intellectuals, as if after the war some of them had suffered a nervous
shock that manifested itself in this fashion, or as if during the war they had
been subjected to an unbearable strain that, once the fighting was over, left
this odd and harmless aftereffect.

"What do you
think of Archimboldi?" repeated Bubis.

Junge's
face turned as red as the sunset swelling behind the hill and then as green as
the needles of the pines in the forest.

"Hmm,"
he said, "hmm." And then his eyes drifted toward the little house, as
if he expected inspiration or eloquence or some kind of help to come from it.
"To be frank," he said. And then: "Honestly, my opinion isn't .
. ." And finally: "What can I tell you?"

"Anything,"
said Bubis, "your opinion as a reader, your opinion as a critic."

"Very
well," said Junge. "I have read him, that's a fact."

They
both smiled.

"But
there's something," he went on, "something about him ... I mean, he's
German, no doubt about that, his prose is German, crude but German, what I mean
to say is, he doesn't strike me as a European author."

"American,
perhaps?" suggested Bubis, who at the time was nursing the idea of buying
the rights to three novels by Faulkner.

"No,
not American either, more like African," said Junge, and he made more
faces under the tree branches. "Or rather: Asian," murmured the
critic.

"From what
part of
Asia
?" Bubis asked.

"Who
knows?" said Junge. "Indochina,
Malaya
,
at his best he seems Persian."

"Ah,
the literature of
Persia
,"
said Bubis, who in fact knew nothing about Persian literature.

"Malayan,
Malayan," said Junge.

Then
they went on to talk about other Bubis authors whom the critic held in greater
esteem or who interested him more, and they returned to the garden with its
view of the crimson sky. Soon afterward Bubis and the baroness took their leave
with laughter and friendly words, and those present not only accompanied them
to their car but stood in the street waving goodbye until Bubis's vehicle
disappeared around the first bend.

That
night, after remarking with feigned surprise on the mismatch between Junge and
his little house, just before they went to bed at their hotel in
Frankfurt
, Bubis told the baroness that the critic didn't
like Archimboldi's books.

"Does it matter?" asked the baroness, who in her own
way, independent as she was, loved the publisher and greatly respected his
opinion.

"It
depends," said Bubis in his drawers by the window as he peered out into
the darkness through a tiny parting of the drapes. "To us, it doesn't
really matter. But it matters a great deal to Archimboldi."

The
baroness said something in reply, something Mr. Bubis didn't hear. Outside
everything was dark, he thought, and he parted the drapes a bit more, just a
bit. There was nothing to see. Only his own face, Mr. Bubis's increasingly
sharp and wrinkled face, and more and more darkness.

It
wasn't long before Archimboldi's fourth book arrived at the publishing house.
It was called
Rivers of Europe,
although it was really about only one
river, the
Dnieper
. One might say the
Dnieper
was the protagonist and the other rivers were the
chorus. Mr. Bubis read the book in one sitting, in his office, and his laughter
as he read it could be heard all over the house. This time the advance he sent
Archimboldi was bigger than any previous advance, in fact so large that Martha,
the secretary, before mailing the check to Cologne, brought it into Mr. Bubis's
office and asked (not once but twice) whether the sum was correct, to which Mr.
Bubis answered yes, it was, or it wasn't, what did it matter, a sum, he thought
when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a
correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in
correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them),
numerologists who read one's fortune for next to nothing believed in correct
sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate. Great
physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one
was always feeling one's way in the dark.

Around
this time, during a routine medical checkup, Ingeborg was diagnosed with a
pulmonary condition. At first she didn't say anything to Archimboldi. Instead
she just took the pills prescribed for her by a not very bright doctor, though
only erratically. When she began to cough up blood, Archimboldi dragged her to
the office of an English doctor, who sent her immediately to a German lung
specialist. He told her she had tuberculosis, a common illness in postwar
Germany
.

With
the money obtained for
Rivers of Europe,
Archimboldi, on the
instructions of the specialist, moved them to
Kempten
,
a town in the
Bavarian Alps
, where the cold,
dry climate would help to cure Ingeborg. Ingeborg got sick leave from work and
Archimboldi gave up his job at the bar. Ingeborg's health didn't improve much,
but the days they spent together in
Kempten
were happy.

Ingeborg
had no fear of her tuberculosis because she was sure she wouldn't die of it.
Archimboldi brought his typewriter, and in a month, writing eight pages a day,
he finished his fifth book, which he called
Bifurcaria Bifurcata
and
which was about seaweed, as the title clearly indicated. What most surprised
Ingeborg about this book, on which Archimboldi spent no more than three hours a
day, occasionally four, was the speed with which it was written, or rather how
skillfully Archimboldi handled the typewriter, with the familiarity of a veteran
typist, as if Archimboldi were the reincarnation of Mrs. Dorothea, a secretary
Ingeborg had met as a girl, when she went in with her father one day to the
Berlin offices where he worked, for reasons she no longer remembered.

At
these offices, Ingeborg said to Archimboldi, there were endless rows of
secretaries typing without pause in a very long, narrow room constantly
crisscrossed by a brigade of errand boys dressed in green shirts and brown
shorts, who ran ceaselessly back and forth delivering papers or retrieving
clean copies of documents from the silver trays beside each secretary. And
although each secretary was typing a different document, Ingeborg said to
Archimboldi, the typewriters seemed to have one voice, as if they were all
typing the same thing or all typing at the same speed. Except for one.

Then
Ingeborg explained that there were four rows of desks and their respective
secretaries. And that presiding over the four rows, facing them, was a single
desk, like a manager's desk, although the secretary who sat there wasn't the
manager of anything, she was simply the oldest, the one who had worked the
longest at that office or government ministry where her father had brought her
and where he was probably employed.

And
when she and her father stepped into the room, she drawn by the noise and her
father wanting to satisfy her curiosity or perhaps surprise her, the main desk,
the head desk (although it wasn't a head desk, let me make that clear, said
Ingeborg) was empty and all that could be seen in the room were the secretaries
typing at a brisk pace and the boys in shorts and kneesocks trotting down the
aisles between the rows, and also a big painting that hung from the high
ceiling, at the other end of the room, behind the secretaries' backs, a painting
of Hitler contemplating a bucolic landscape, a Hitler with something futuristic
about him, the chin, the ear, the lock of hair, but above all he was a
Pre-Raphaelite Hitler, and the lights that hung from the ceiling and that,
according to her father, were left on twenty-four hours a day, and the dirty
glass of the skylights that ran the full length of the room, the light from
them not only too faint to type by but too faint for anything else, in fact
good for
nothing,
except as a reminder that outside that room and that
building there was a sky and probably people and houses, and precisely at that
moment, just as Ingeborg and her father had walked all the way down one row and
had turned around and were on their way back, Mrs. Dorothea came in through the
main door, a tiny old woman, dressed in black and wearing slippers hardly
suitable for the cold outside, a little old woman with white hair gathered in a
bun, a little old woman who sat at her desk and bent her head, as if nothing
existed except her and the typists, and just at that moment and in unison, the
typists said good morning, Mrs. Dorothea, all at once, but without looking at
Mrs. Dorothea and still typing, which struck Ingeborg as incredible, whether
incredibly beautiful or incredibly horrible she wasn't sure, but in any case,
after this choral greeting she, the girl Ingeborg, stood as still as if she'd
been struck by lightning or as if she were finally in a real church where the
liturgy and sacraments and pomp were real, where they ached and throbbed like
the ripped-out heart of an Aztec victim, so fiercely that she, the girl
Ingeborg, not only stood still but also brought one hand to her heart, as if it
had been ripped out, and then, just then, Mrs. Dorothea pulled off her cloth
gloves, flexed her translucent hands without looking at them, and with her gaze
fixed on a document or manuscript to one side, began to type.

At that instant, said Ingeborg to Archimboldi, I understood that
there could be music in anything. Mrs. Dorothea's typing was so quick, so
particular, there was so much of Mrs. Dorothea in her typing, that despite the
noise or the clamor or the rhythmic beat of more than sixty typists working at
once, the music that flowed from the oldest secretary's typewriter rose far
above the collective composition of her office mates, without imposing itself
on them, but rather adjusting to them, shepherding them, frolicking with them.
Sometimes it seemed to reach the skylights, other times it wound along at floor
level, brushing the ankles of the visitors and the boys in shorts. Sometimes it
even allowed itself the luxury of slowing down and then Mrs. Dorothea's
typewriter was like a heart, a giant heart beating in the middle of the fog and
chaos. But these moments were scarce. Mrs. Dorothea liked speed and her typing
was usually ahead of the other typing, as if she were blazing a path in the
middle of a dark jungle, said Ingeborg, dark, dark . . .

Mr.
Bubis didn't like
Bifurcaria Bifurcata,
to the extent that he didn't
even finish reading it, although of course he decided to publish it, thinking
maybe that idiot Lothar Junge would like this one.

Before he sent it to the printers, though, he passed it to the
baroness and asked for her honest opinion. Two days later the baroness said she
had fallen asleep and couldn't get past page four, which didn't discourage Mr.
Bubis, who anyway didn't put much stock in the literary judgment of his lovely
wife. Soon after he sent the contract for
Bifurcaria Bifurcata
to
Archimboldi, he received a letter from the writer stating in no uncertain terms
his dissatisfaction with the advance Mr. Bubis intended to pay him. For an
hour, as Mr. Bubis ate alone in a restaurant with views of the estuary, he
thought about how to answer Archimboldi's letter. His first reaction upon
reading it was indignation. Then the letter made him laugh. Finally, it
saddened him, which was in part due to the river, which at that time of day
acquired the hue of old gilt, gold leaf, and everything seemed to crumble, the
river, the boats, the hills, the little stands of trees, each thing going its
own way, toward different times and different spaces.

Nothing lasts, murmured Bubis. Nothing remains with us for very
long. In the letter Archimboldi said he expected to receive an advance
at
least
as big as the advance for
Rivers of
Europe
.
Really, he's right, thought Mr. Bubis: just because a novel bores me
doesn't mean it's bad, it just means I won't be able to sell it and it will
take up precious space in my warehouse. The next day he sent Archimboldi a
slightly larger sum than the latter had received for
Rivers of
Europe
.

Eight
months after their first stay in Kempten, Ingeborg and Archimboldi returned,
but this time the town didn't seem as pretty as it had before, so after two
days, by which time both were on edge, they left in a cart headed to a village
up the mountain.

Fewer
than twenty people lived in the village and it was very near the Austrian
border. They rented a room from a man who kept a dairy and lived alone, because
he had lost his two sons during the war, one in Russia and the other in
Hungary, and his wife had died of sorrow, or so he said, although according to
the villagers the man had pushed her into a ravine.

The
man's name was Fritz Leube and he seemed happy to have guests, although when he
saw that Ingeborg was coughing up blood he was upset, because he thought
tuberculosis was highly contagious. In any case, they didn't see much of each
other. At night, when he came back with the cows, Leube prepared an enormous
pot of soup for himself and his two guests, which lasted a few days. If they
were hungry, there were all kinds of cheeses and cured meats in the kitchen and
cellar, which they could eat whenever they liked. The bread, big round loaves
weighing five or six pounds, he bought from one of the village women or picked
up if he passed through some other village or went down to Kempten.