Endless Things (28 page)

Kraft looked from the window to the courtyard pavement to the window again. The guide's face shone with something like expectation. This very month, this day maybe, twenty years before.

But Kraft knew that Jan Masaryk had only been the latest, and the poor officials of 1618 not the first, of an age-old series of such ejections in Bohemia. Change here seemed to require a man or men hustled out a high window, looking down shrieking in terror, fingers clinging to the jambs.

Defenestration. Kraft looked up with the others. It was as though the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past or in the future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves from trees and bring down steeples in another.

He thought—looking now out the window of his cell in the converted convent, the illusory castle alight and apparently afloat high up—you have to be on their side, you have to be. On their way into the actual future, still surrounded by brutal utopians. He thought: if I knew the secret laws by which history worked, I could reveal them, whisper them in the ears of this people in their peril, and they would know what to do, and what not to do. But the secret laws can't be known, and if known can't be told. You can only pretend to know them.

Yes! A simple clarity that had escaped him or not visited him in 1937, when he had needed it, was now his, as though an egg he'd thought was marble had now cracked, and a fledgling emerged.

You get power over history, he saw, by uncovering and learning its laws, formulating them, teaching them to others, who get thereby a share of the power you have. You form up your followers into an army, which can impose these irrefutable laws on Time's body; you have earned the power, by your grasp of History's Laws, to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus that in any age the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in Heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth.

So the way to defeat power is to propose new laws, laws conceived in the secrecy of the heart and enacted by the will's fiat: laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutable, and unimposable on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own.

And didn't he, Fellowes Kraft, know very well how to build such a history? He did. He did it for a living. He had the tools and ingredients, and he knew how you used them: with heart's need you mixed pretend conversations, purported facts out of books, likely seeming actions, the light of other days.

The Archons who made the world, and whose shadows continue to rule in it, would have us believe that its laws are immutable, eternal, self-generated, necessary. Perhaps they themselves believe it to be so. Very well: then we confound them by a counterknowing: we know that in fact we have ourselves conceived the laws that make the world as it is, and can change them if we will.

When St. Patrick, servant and missionary of the great archontic church of Rome, which had formulated all the immutable laws of God, asked the Druids of Ireland who it was that made the world, they answered him that the Druids had made it.

Build a new world in the face of power, and make it go; show them how easy it is. His own could of course only be a fiction; so was theirs; but his would appear humbly between covers, unarmed, acknowledged to be false: that was the difference.

O my God, he thought, overcome momentarily with a familiar giddiness, an anticipatory exhaustion. He had come all this way paid to find fabulous treasure or at least the rumor of it, and what had he discovered instead but another novel.

Like a cold old man fallen absurdly in love. He knew the signs well enough, he had only thought that he was never to feel them again.

The next morning there was a bus filled with more happy yakking Czechs (was the nation on holiday or had they just thrown over their make-work jobs and gone out to the country?) to take him up into the mountains to Carlsbad, which was now Karlovy Vary, the Czechs having won the war of place names while losing all the others, so far, so far. Then up to Jáchymov, Joachimsthal when he had gone up there in 1937, in a jouncing truck with two young men—what were their names? He could not remember. Jewish. He remembered that.

It seemed suddenly foolish to have promised Boney he would go there, and dangerous too. He felt certain he would have an accident inside, lose his way or his guide, be unable to return.

Spring was still far off, up in the mountains; the resort was open though, open year round apparently, for the workers assigned vacations here in shifts in every season, and to keep the staff employed, insofar as they were employed. Kraft's room in a beaux arts hotel was huge and cold, the bed a hilly landscape clothed in mysterious stuff repellent to the touch.

He wandered around the stone gaieties of Carlsbad. Single words arose unwilled within him, each seeming capable of generating the new book all by itself. Salvation. Puzzlement. Aflame. A marriage. Urgent. A rose. Naked. Embers. He lay sleepless in the big bed nightlong, invaded by notions, his heart a great switching yard where train cars were shunted from every part of his soul, linked one to one to one in combinations he could not have conceived before and now could never forget.

Before he set out next day—unwashed and sleepless but feeling as though he had fed for hours on rich and satisfying food (he knew this sensation too, it would not last, there were dreadful fasts awaiting him)—he sent a telegram to Boney Rasmussen in the Faraway Hills:

His guide awaited him in the lobby, sunk in one of the swollen armchairs that were the height of Soviet-style
luxe
, digging his toe into the unspeakable carpet. He wore the same shiny shoes and leather coat. It was the first of March, bright calm cold expectant morning; the mountains rose not so high as they had once seemed. And the deep and famous caverns at the end of the journey, where he would find at last nothing but what he himself would put there.

Kraft at his desk in the Faraway Hills put the typescript back into the box from which the blank paper it was typed on had at first come, a box of goldenrod draft paper, Sphinx brand. A book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood. There it would lie, hidden like the purloined letter in plain sight, and Boney would come and search the little house and eventually find it, for Boney was going to live forever just because of his natural unkillable constitution, that was the funny part; he would find it, the thing that Kraft had found, the Stone at the end of the journey. Unfinished, unmade, as all of them are and must be.

For a moment he wept.

All his life he had searched for the words of power that would go beyond mere description, explanation, catalog, to effect transformation. He was modest; he had aspired to that language, that
gematria
, but had never really believed it might be his. Well, it was the other way around. He had aspired to what he already possessed; but he could never have what he despised as common.

Thought can't really encompass the world at all,
pace
Bruno's unresting daemon. It can't limn the world exactly or represent it adequately. Language, thought, conception, can't even cross the gap between the soul and the world; it may even constitute that unbridgeable gap. All that language can do is to transform.

Give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. It was easy: all the old alchemists said it was. It was simply not as great an art as those unachievable others: as encompassment, as true representation. Transformation was what language could do. It was what language could do best. It was all that it could do.

He bent and rested his cheek against the cool bare brow of his Remington.

The power of transformation, which he and everyone had sought as the goal. It had of course been all along right in his own backyard, a magic small and white, but as necessary to the heart (to his heart, but not only to his) as its own beating.

O get up, he urged himself, walk to town. Keep moving, he ordered himself, an Arctic traveler facing a long dark night. Which he did face,
una eterna nox dormienda
, as Catullus had it, one everlasting night's sleep. Boney had been quite taken with that chilling little phrase.

He rose and breathed, looked at the clock. There was a high-school boy he paid to truck him around, take him shopping, rake his lawn or mow it in season. Hauls my ashes too, he joked or choked to no listener, old flaccid satyr. Anyway the boy had apparently forgotten today, youth forgets, no matter.

He put on a straw hat and took a stick from an urn of them by the door; the choice would once have occupied a minute or two of pleasurable fussing, no more now the games that you liked to play.

He got no farther than the garden. Stood in its midst astonished at how late the year had grown, had autumn come early? No, it was September; there was nothing unlikely in the leaves fallen amid the wild asters and the larkspur, the last daisies drooping, their leaves aged and eaten. Pitiful how it had gone unattended. Some sort of vine with star-shaped leaves was clambering over the rhododendrons, he hadn't even noticed it, but now it had blushed deep red and he saw it.

It was in this season that his mother had died, not so many years back that he could not still be filled with pointless grief on hot colored brambly days like this. She hadn't told him how ill she was, of course, she who hardly distinguished between illness and being alive. But then she decided to check herself into a hospital, and after a quick consultation with a doctor had elected to have a prolonged and risky surgery, get at this once and for all or die under the knife—he was sure that was how she had conceived of it, not even having a firm opinion as to which she would prefer. The operation had gone badly, complications, she had neither been killed nor cured, only lingered in awful discomfort and longing while more dreadful things were done to her.

He had gone back and forth to the city over hills and valleys caught in the glamor of golden stasis, September, this time of hastening transformation that always seems so perfect and changeless. Sat by her long hours as she lay suffering, and learned at last how you could believe, how you could be grateful for being able to believe, that really truly there was someone inside the integuments of suffering flesh, someone who could never be touched, never hurt, who only waited patiently in bondage to be freed.

And now that time was come again, once again. Unfolding tirelessly and willingly as it always had, always would. The older he grew and the faster the seasons came around the more permanent and inescapable they seemed, even though in fact he hurtled through them toward escape, his own escape.

He wasn't afraid of dying, never had been. He was uncomfortably, childishly afraid of being dead, in his grave, gone down into the underworld. Maybe because of living so long in that basement apartment. No afterlife had ever been convincing to him except that commonwealth beneath the earth, Pluto's realm, and none had ever seemed quite so dreadful either. It was going to be like that, it was; at any rate he
feared
it was going to be like that, which came to the same thing; after he was truly dead he did not expect to fear that or anything.

What he thought was that when Hermes came for him, to guide him down into the dark land (oh he could see his kind uncaring face), he would try to beguile him. That god had a special fondness for writers, wordsmiths as the papers called them; so Kraft thought he would ask him to listen, before they departed for that gate, to a story he had written in his honor. And if the god did not remember his own history, which probably a god never forgot, he might work on Hermes the trick Hermes had once worked on hundred-eyed Argus, to escape his vigilance: tell him a tale so involving, so long, so tedious finally, that his eyes would close, and he would sleep, well before the end was reached.

Which Kraft was not going to get to anyway.

He didn't grieve for himself, as good as a ghost already; he grieved for those others, men and women of flesh and blood, real people still caught in the machineries of history, whom he had toiled to release, and now must abandon.

Rabbi David ben-Loew, the Great Rabbi of Prague, who made or didn't make the golem, often repeated the saying of Rabbi Tarphon, that we are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. He meant the work of saving the fragments of divinity, sparks of life lost in the dark world of suffering matter, so that God could be healed. We redeem them by our prayers and our religious duties, the rabbis said. Dr. Pons had said that it was by Knowing. Dr. Pons said Knowing was salvation. But though knowing might be salvation, it was not release, it was harder than not knowing, it was only a more intense, a clearer suffering.

He wiped the tears from his face, with his own kerchief, his own. Better to labor than to sleep. We who have spent ourselves in the labor of making the Stone, or saving it from the dark matrix wherein it has been caught: we call the work a game, a walk in the woods, a play, a
ludus
, a
ludibrium
, a joke: and that is because the only way to make the Stone is by the action of the Stone. In other words by means of that lesser art, transformation: his own art, wherein he had spent himself. So at the end of life we turn homeward, weary, and with the work far from finished, but our own task anyway is done. And surely, surely turning homeward will not be climbing
down into
, but
up out of:
up out of a dark mine into the ordinary air, the surface of the earth, where we can wash and rest. He would believe it to be so, if he could.