The first thing to come alive for him in that face was the slightly protruding upper lip, which, by casting a
faint shadow on the closed mouth, made it seem open: in any case, Sorger saw it, not as mute, but as prepared to speak. Without fuss or pretense those lips would find the right words to say to someone, and even when done speaking, they would remain eloquent for that person. There was nothing unusual about her cheeks (in inventing this face, his unreservedly receptive glance found nothing more that was striking in it) except that they seemed firm, thus giving Sorger a momentary impression of spaciousness, which he could not hold fast but had to conjure up over and over again. And how helpful were the eyes (they too, with nothing unusual about them, solely as a living fact), darkened by shadow and all-understanding in their mere “darkness”; and how needful of protection the mere fact of the high forehead (calling upon him to act and bring the drama to its conclusion), this sensitively shimmering, one might have said bonelessly vulnerable, ever-luminous curvature. At length Sorger became something more than a self-forgetful beholder of happenings in someone else's face; an overpoweringly gentle manipulation had incorporated his limited personal life into the face of mankind, in whose openness it would go on forever.
All the while, he had been sitting at the table playing chess with the husband, while the wife was reading. Now he stood up and wandered about the house, removing himself from the face, which nevertheless remained close to him. And then from a distance, in the increasing shadow under the lamplight, this woman (just as the people in the darkened shuttle buses had appeared to him as embodiments of “sleeping” or “waking”) became a “contemporary,” an impression substantiated by the slight double chin resulting from the lowering of her head: “We come from the same region.” On the throat a small circle
of light: “Strong enough for two”; and though her hand seemed to hover in midair, one finger of it rested firmly on her book: “As down to earth as you.”
Sorger resumed his place at the table and, instead of moving his chessman, began to speak. Himself almost invisible, he looked into the faces of the others, as though already separated from them, not by a leap, but by a very gradual lapse of time, which (as he spoke) carried him away, and which, as he told his story, he experienced as an unchangingly gentle contact; and thus, while circumspectly talking himself free, he thought: What I have thought to myself at any time is nothing; I am only what I have succeeded in saying to you.
For another little while the children's laughter in the next room; then the distant cry of gulls. By then Sorger was calm enough to tell them quite simply how space had been “taken away” on his imaginary “pass.” “Suddenly one of my faculties failed me, I lost my special sense for earth forms. From one minute to the next, my forms ceased to be namable or even worth naming.” At that point he managed to raise his voice and say: “Listen to me. I don't want to perish. At the moment of losing all that, I longed to return, not only to a country, not only to a certain region, but to the house where I was born. And yet I wanted to go on living abroad, in the company of a few people who are not too close to me. I know I'm not a scoundrel. I don't want to be an outsider. I see myself walking in the midst of the crowd, and I believe I am just. I have friendly dreams, even about people who have wished me dead, and I often feel the strength for lasting reconciliation. Is it presumptuous of me to want harmony, synthesis, and serenity? Are completion and perfection an obsession with me? I regard it as a duty to become a better man, a better myself. I would
like to be good. Sometimes I feel the need to be wicked, and then I am pursued by the thought of punishment; but then again I feel the need of eternal purity. Today I thought of salvation, but it wasn't God that came to mind, it was culture. I have no culture; I shall continue to have no culture as long as I am incapable of crying out; as long as I whimper my complaint instead of shouting it out loud. I don't want to languish with my grievances, I want to be mighty in my outcries. My cry is: I need you! But whom am I talking to? I must find my fellows. But who is my fellow? In what country? In what time? I need the certainty of being myself and being responsible for others. I am capable of living! I feel the power to Say how it Is; yet I would like to be nothing at all and to say nothing at all: to be known to everyone and no one; pervasively Alive. Yes, at times I feel entitled to a cosmos. And my time is Now; now is Our Time. I therefore lay claim to the world and to this centuryâbecause it is my world and my century.”
Sorger saw himself move his head like a ludicrous but proud animal (and at the same time pump his elbows in a pathetic attempt to flap his wings). After his long speech he craved something sweet, and the lady of the house brought him a piece of strudel. He wanted music to go with it, and then he asked his neighbors to tell him their story. Probably to show they were on his side, they began with their mishaps, but soon dropped that, and finallyâserene narrative gradually turning into excited dialogue, each playing his part and frequently interrupting the otherâtold him how they had come together. Sorger thanked them for the “hot meal” and added: “Please don't forget me.”
Afterwards, as he was leaving (with nothing particular in mind, he took the shortest way through the woods to
the beach), it occurred to him that they had laughed at his last words, as though to ridicule the very idea. And so he added, speaking to himself: “I would like to sit under your lampshade soon again.”
The night was warm, without fog. While still among the trees, he enjoyed the feel of the sea sand under his feet. Swarms of leaves blew through the pine woods, clung to the grass as to a wire fence, and turned out to be dried seaweed. A bicycle sound in the sand was made by a running dog. The wind roared in the stunted pines as in a forest of tall trees. Sorger had a sensation of air on his face, as though he had rediscovered realityâthe air of happiness.
Suddenly, as he rounded a jutting dune (it might have been a street corner), the ocean roared up at him in a white wave. The spray, flung high into the night sky, seemed for a moment to stand still and only then, mingling with new, lighter-colored foam, fell to the ground in brownish flakes. A moment later the ocean, along with the moon and the wave-skimming gulls, resumed its customary aspect; its crashing and pounding made Sorger think of a factory as he walked along. He didn't so much as glance at the water, but looked only at his feet, which plodded over the sand far below him, as though in bird's-eye view. “Shut the doors of your senses.”
He began to run; closing his eyes, he ran for a while; then, still with closed eyes, he walked more and more slowly. A streetcar passed through the surf with an old-fashioned screeching of rails. As Sorger went on, the ocean sound changed from the clatter of an old-time farm wagon to the noises of his past. Boards were being unloaded in a thudding, screeching sawmill; heedless moving men were handling heavy furniture. The sounds were
irregular, broken now and then by an almost blissful silence, evidently meant to last, within which one could detect only the sounds of a peaceful household, milk rising to a boil, boiling water, the click of knitting needles. But then the handle of a bucket fell off. (As though the sea could be gathered in a saucepan.) Then someone dove into a swimming pool, and someone's face was slapped. Amid the rising street noise, a muffled shot was heard, and a body hit the ground. Cans of milk were loaded onto a platform. A brief clinking of censers, then the screams of the wounded. The rumbling of tanks; a crashing and splintering; a moment of war. Then the stillness of peace; or was it? Sorger opened his eyes, and before them an antique colonnade stretched across the sea into the horizon.
Behind the last column the moon was going down, and for a brief moment there was a moonset sky, a cloud field lit from below, the color of ironstone; and then the whole sky was black, except for the stars vaguely twinkling in the sea mist.
Sorger felt the ocean at the back of his head, which became a large, very cold place. The crests of foam were snow-covered mountain ranges. The air brought him a smell of fire, and for the first time on the coast he had a feeling of autumn. Ocean, autumn, and colonnade: the world was growing old again. There he stood as though the season were his destination. His body became perceptible through the threefold dividing line between earth, water, and air, and he experienced something he had not known for a long time, desire in the form of an enormous longing to escape from his own heart and lungs; while at the same time he looked forward to his bed.
He hurried back to his house. In the neighbors' empty bedroom the bedside lamps had been on since early evening.
Husband and wife were sitting in the half-darkened living room; the husband was holding his wife's fingers. The river of return; in the warmth of Sorger's bloodstream, the Indian woman, quivering smoothness, approached. A tiredness came over him in which he wanted only to lie in the dark and listen. A ticking clock sounded like a cat scratching its neck; and then the fabled black-and-white beast filled the countryside with its purring.
Sorger lay down and, while the beam of the Land's End lighthouse flashed regularly into the room, waited without impatience for the ideas that come with dreams. He even ventured to think of his child, something he had been unable to do in all these years; at the first attempt, his head had turned to stone. Now only his face felt heavy; it had a hot clenched fist in it. But his self-pity didn't trouble him; for in it he sensed a desire for a faith that would give him form and enable him to think for more than brief moments of what he loved. “When I see her again, I shall worship her.”
Gratefully he pulled up the blanket. Women and children were what made him real. In his sleep, a foam-born woman arose out of the sea and lay down with him. All night they lay side by side, eye to eye, mouth to mouth.
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“A few sunrises later” (that indeed is the impression these last few days on the West Coast made on him) Sorger saw himself packing his suitcase in the glow of a still-autumnal morning. He was about to leave for Europe. The house was almost empty, the curtains and carpets were gone; one room still had a wooden table and a folding chair in it, the other just the bed, which had been moved catty-cornered. Sorger had thrown many, and given a few, things away; into his suitcase, along with the carefully stacked photograph albums and notebooks
of the last few years, went the few objects of daily use that were dear to him. He began to dress for the trip: a linen shirt frayed with age, which fitted soothingly around his wrists; a solemn-blue “European” worsted suit, the trousers of which clung slightly at the knees; and thin woolen socks, which warmed him pleasantly from bottom to top; and his laced boots from the North. Looking down, he made a speech of thanksgiving to his faithful garments.
The air was fresh and clear: “A fine morning, an American morning.” The sun shone on the floor of the emptied room as in the lounge of a ship, and the passenger stood beside his packed suitcase, reading his last mail and casting an occasional look at the house next door, where there was movement in every room. The children were getting ready for school, the husband for the office. With all the hectic excitement, there were moments of perfect calm: the husband bent over the papers he had spread out on a slanting desk like a missal; his wife sipped tea with an elegance that was almost grotesque; and the children, with their school bags already on their backs, stood hypnotized by a top that was spinning on the table.
Lauffer wrote that the river was frozen, that at first he had worn a woolen helmet but had then taken to going about with his shirt unbuttoned like the Indians; that his paper was “amazing” him “more and more” (that he felt obliged to explore every bypath that presented itself, and invariably it stretched out ad infinitum), that he saw himself engaged in a kind of ideal competition with Sorger, since Sorger's aim was to get away from matter and his to increase and enhance it; that his problem, accordingly, was too much “speech,” while Sorger was threatened with “speechlessness”; and finally, that the
cat was becoming “increasingly regal and unapproachable” and would soon be uttering its first word.
Clouds, which Sorger did not look up at, drifted along with the prospective traveler as he sat at the table reading a book; the crowns of the pine trees swayed as if they were already somewhere else. Meanwhile, behind his back, people who had been sent by an agency strolled about inspecting the house that was up for sale. Not once did he look around at them.
Next door, only the neighbor woman was moving about. Some white cloths draped over her arm shone bright when she passed the spots that were in sunlight. Once she saw him and waved with a carefree, untroubled movement, as though he were already far away; and then she seemed to forget him and herself in a game that she played from room to room.
He was reading a Roman naturalist's two-thousand-year-old attempt to explain the world, the language of which retained the “mild, transitional” quality of a poem. “Therefore solid matter can be eternal, whereas other forms of matter disintegrate.”
The Law
I
n the plane a deeper roar, remote from death. This was also a flight inside himself. How easy it was to speak; how easy life was altogether. An instantaneous idea: “Something new is beginning in me.” The West Coast city on its peninsula receded quickly.
Sorger was flying with the time, and with it, little by little, came daydreams “as changing as the faces of the moon.” It was snowing when the plane put down at Mile-High City on the eastern slope of the Rockies. Though booked through, Sorger took his suitcase, left the plane, and boarded an already overcrowded bus which carried him over a snowy highway, through a deserted countryside where he had never been before.
The flakes touched the windshield lightly and flew away. Sorger's radiant daydreams went deeper and deeper. To drive beyond his inner limits: that was his way of thinking of others. He didn't conjure them up explicitly, they came to mind as he gave his imagination free rein.
In the distance, a snow-covered horse stood motionless beside a dead willow tree, the slanting trunk of which had sunk deep into the ground. Schoolchildren pulled up the zippers of their parkas as they got out of the bus; snow blew in through the open door and even on warm
hands took a moment to melt. After that, the bus was full of adult silence.
Sorger's daydream produced a face with round, wide-set eyes, from which wrinkles emanated like rays. Now he was sure; he would stop for the night in the mountain village where the bus was going, and surprise his old schoolmate, who was a skiing instructor there.
He remembered him as he had seen him most recently, one summer on the West Coast: the nakedness of his face, with its open mouth as in his schooldays, and its lower lip, which he kept thrusting forward even when he was not talking (but which, when he was talking, spewed words like a milling machine).
Even when at rest, the skiing instructor looked strained, as though trying to get a better grasp of something. He spoke too loudly, but never quite distinctly. Often his speech consisted entirely of exclamations, and then there was a note of fear in his voice. If he trusted you, he would assail you with “ultimate questions” and expect categorical answers. If someone tried seriously to give him such answers, the proud skiing instructor would become that person's servant; and in the summer months, when he was without work, he visited not his “friends” but his “masters” and was only too glad to help them with their household chores. He had no children and had been waiting for years for the woman of his life (whom he could describe with precision); but even the women who at first liked him were soon put off by his weirdness.
In his daydream, Sorger saw the skiing instructor as a man despised for his innocence, and imagined how he would embrace him at their meeting; he saw the man's thick neck, his wide silver belt, and his thin legs between which he always hid his hands when he sat down. Dusk
fell on the moving bus, the skiing instructor's Adam's apple bobbed up and down, bunches of dry grass rolled over the snow, and parched corn leaves stood horizontal in the wind.
The bus drove through an area where no snow had yet fallen, nor did anything else seem to be happening there. Later it began to snow, more quietly and with larger flakes. The mountains with their drainage ditches disappeared. Now nothing could be seen but the fallow fields nearby and a solitary herd of buffalo, breathing steam from their nostrils and nibbling at yellowish blades of grass; white fountains rose from the cars, which passed slowly as though engaged in some solemn journey, and clods of muddy snow rolled after their rear wheels. The only human forms on the road were occasional joggers; after a while it seemed to Sorger that they must be in training for a world war.
There were chunks of snow on the floor of the hotel elevator. The hotel was built in the style of an Alpine inn, with a wooden balcony, painted window frames, and a sundial. In his paneled room, with the lights of the great plain far below him, Sorger picked up the newspaper, the name of which was framed in a sketch of the region's mountain peaks. He leafed through it, and almost immediately his eye fell on the skiing instructor's name. He read the item through; it was an obituary. Without thinking, he read the names that followed, and heard a roaring from the shower.
The obituary had been put in by the skiing school. It described him as a “staff member of long standing”; apart from that, it supplied only the address and the hours of the undertaking establishment, here referred to as a “chapel.”
Sorger went at once to the chapel, which had long
since closed for the night. Sorger looked through the lace curtains of the gableless row house into the lighted empty rooms: lamps with fabric shades on dark little tables; on the one larger table, a glass ashtray; beside it, an ivory-white telephone. The building was three stories high and had an elevator; the elevator, also lit, was on the ground floor, empty. The wide double door of the building had no handle on the outside. It was a cold, windy evening. The windshield wipers on the passing cars scraped like shovels. Sorger's steps in the snow brought back the sound of meadow grass being mowed. Then he heard nasal Western voices and knew where he was.
He went back to the hotel, his skin numb from the snow. The bones of his face ached. He drank and made merry. He held his wineglass in both hands like a bowl and bared his teeth.
That night he dreamed of the dead man. They were walking together in the country. But then the skiing instructor became shapeless and vanished, and Sorger was alone when he woke up. He saw the deceased in a blue apron; his eyes were sealed with shiny black lacquer. Then Sorger had wonderfully senseless thoughts and fell asleep again, filled with longing for an invented world that would permeate the real world and incorporate it in one vast invention.
In the morning, the sun shone on an empty wooden clock case standing in one corner of the room. Sorger visited the corpse in the mortuary. The skiing instructor lay like a doll in his coffin. The folds of his eyelids extended to his temples; one eye, which was not entirely closed, glistened. He was wearing the woolen cap in which he had almost always been seen, with the inscription: Heavenly Valley; a turquoise amulet hung from his neck.
Sorger stood on the sidewalk outside the building. The porter, in a uniform with brass buttons, was walking back and forth outside the gate; all over the street his discarded cigarette butts were smoking. Over his head hung an American flag; beside it the windblown shoots of a dark-green trailing plant flapped against the wall. A large drum of cable was rolled past. Clearly delineated clouds were piled on other, vaporous clouds, near and at the same time far.
Outside the village, Sorger took a funicular that went up into the mountains. The car swayed as people got in, their ski boots crackled underfoot like burning faggots. Still, there were good faces in this crowd. Out in the snow, children were running around; when they fell, they picked themselves up and ran on, moving like cheerful little wheels.
When he arrived at the top, Sorger attached himself to a group of strangers for no other reason than that they were all wearing light-colored fur coats; but after a while he went on alone. No one had been there since the snowfall. The air was warm but the snow was not melting. It was deep but so powdery that the ground could be seen here and there.
Sorger climbed until there was nothing to be heard. After crossing a ridge, he saw the Rockies proper; they were a dull reddish-yellow, and beyond them a white cloud bank was drifting past. He ran up the slope until his face was plastered with pine needles, then stopped as though he had come to a forbidden precinct. No bird song; only the still-distant Indian shapes of the mountaintops. Ahead of him, at the edge of a deep gully, stood a solitary mountain pine; beside it scrub oak, with snowflakes whirling between the dry leaves. Though there was
nothing whatever to be seen, the tree gave off a sound: a faint but distinct whirring, which went on for a while and started up again after a silence. And then the whirring was heard for the third time, not from the same tree, but from another solitary pine far down in the gully. In the next moment, plunging vertically, a flock of shrill, white-bellied birds landed on both trees.
Sorger stood in the deep snow as in an extra pair of boots and looked down into the great, yellow-misty plain, which from the foot of the mountains extended eastward for thousands of miles. In this landscape there would never be a war. He washed his face in the snow and began to whistle monotonously. He put snow in his mouth, but only whistled the louder. He coughed and he sobbed. Then he bowed his head and grieved for the dead man (and the other dead).
When he looked up, he had the impression that the dead were laughing uproariously at him. He laughed with them. The present blazed and the past glittered. The thought of not-being-around-anymore gave him profound pleasure. He had a vision of the thicket on the riverbank. “No ecstasy!” (Never again.) To conjure up ecstasy, he looked about for a landmark. In the snow-covered, sunlit gully he distinguished a shimmering furrowâthe most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Involuntarily he cried out, and a faint echo came back at him from a bush. He was overcome with melancholy and lust.
Again, on the way back to Mile-High City, bunches of hard grass rolling over the frozen snow. A single bush cast an enormous shadow on the bare plain. Fervid expectation. But even if nothing happened, that would be what he expected. That would enable him to play a game: everything is (perfectly) possible, and just as an earthquake
gave rise to a human dance, meaningless being-alive engendered a meaningful game.
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Was there no one else in the plane that carried you farther east that night? Your row of seats was empty, and the backrests in front of you were upright in the dim light reflected from the roof of the cabin.âThe even hum in the deep, half-darkened cavern provided a background music that preserved the passenger's connection with the past few hours. He thought of “his people” and made plans to see them soon; he was determined never to be late again. The dead skiing instructor brought the members of Sorger's own family alive for him. Once upon a time he had felt responsible for his brother and sister. There had been a bond between them that linked them all in a circle. Of late they had had little opportunity for a language in common (they hadn't lost it, but it had become a kind of memory exercise that they just reeled off). Brother and sister had embraced for the first time at the death of their parents. That, at least, was how it looked to the daydreamer, who saw the lights of the towns below him as paths in a cemetery and then as constellations. Then they had fallen silent for many years, at first in indifference, then in hostility. Each regarded the others as lost. When his brother and sister came to Sorger's mind, it was in the form of a sudden death notice (and they too, he felt sure, expected nothing more of their brother than the news of his death). True, they often appeared in his dreams, sometimes talking to each other as they had never done in reality; but more often they were malignant corpses, lying around the house where they were born, impossible to get rid of. Because they had never become explicit enemies, there was no possibility of reconciliation.
It didn't even occur to Sorger that his relations with them might become “as before.” He wanted only to be as clear as he was now that the outside world had become a living dynamic space behind his foreheadâthen perhaps different social forms would be self-evident. After that, he saw the other villagers, most of whom he had hitherto regarded as a group of people malevolently looking forward to his death; and now he knew that the opposite was trueâthey had always sided with him in spite of his going away; they had thought he was in the right.
He wrote mental letters to his brother and sister and added friendly insults. Question: “Aren't these plans too contrived?” And the self-assured answer: “I'll just have to make them come true.”
The sound of the plane changed. The traveler's exhilaration left him; and he went on speaking in silence (putting down each word in his thoughts, as though writing it): “What of it? If there is no universal law for me, I shall gradually give myself a personal law that I shall have to observe. Before the day is out, I shall frame its first article.”
Clouds puffed past the window, and then at the edge of his field of vision the City of Cities emerged from the gray of dawn like a field burned over and still dimly glowing here and there, while the plane circled over the vacant stormy ocean and the sun rose above the sea mist. When the wheels touched down, the lights went on in the cabin and some of the passengers clapped their hands. In applause for the landing or for the city? And then it came to Sorger that he had not been traveling alone.
The man ahead of him on the way out looked familiar. The man turned around, both nodded, and only then did they realize that they were unknown to each other.
At the exit the stranger stopped Sorger, made a slight bow, and invited him to share a cab with him. It turned out that they came from the same country. “Actually, I was intending to go straight on to Europe,” said Sorger. But then he followed the man as if that were a part of his law. In the cab, he looked up at the relaxed faces in the buses alongside, and thought: Actually, I'd rather have ⦠The man looked him in the eye: “Forgive me. Have you a little time for me? I need your goodwill. You look so available.”