In front of him Bloch saw three men walk diagonally across the street, two in uniform and the one in the middle in a black Sunday suit with a tie hanging over his shoulder, where it had been blown either by the wind or by fast running. He watched as the policemen led the gypsy into the police station. They walked next to each other as far as the door, and the gypsy, it seemed, moved easily and willingly between the two policemen and talked with them; when one of the policemen pushed open the door, the other did not grab the gypsy but just touched his elbow lightly from behind. The gypsy looked back over his shoulder at the policeman and gave a friendly smile; the collar under the knot of the gypsy’s tie was open. It seemed to Bloch as if the gypsy was so deeply trapped that all he could do when he was touched on the arm was look at the policemen with helpless friendliness.
Bloch followed them into the building, which also housed the post office; for just a moment he believed that if anybody saw him eating a sandwich out in public, they could not possibly think that he was involved in anything. “Involved”? He could not even let himself think that he had to justify his presence here, while they were bringing in the gypsy, by any action such as, say, eating salami sandwiches. He could justify himself only when he was questioned
and accused of something; and because he had to avoid even thinking that he might be questioned, he also could not let himself think about how to prepare justifications in advance for this possibility—this possibility did not even exist. So if he was asked whether he had watched while the gypsy was being brought in, he would not have to deny it and pretend that he had been distracted because he was eating a sandwich but could admit that he had witnessed the event. “Witnessed”? Bloch interrupted himself while he waited in the post office for his phone connection; “admit”? What did these words have to do with this event, which fur him was of no significance. Didn’t they give it a significance he was making every effort to deny? “Deny”? Bloch interrupted himself again. He had to keep his guard up against words that transformed what he wanted to say into some kind of statement.
His call had gone through. Absorbed in avoiding the impression that he was prepared to make a statement, he caught himself wrapping a handkerchief over the receiver. Slightly disconcerted, he put the handkerchief back in his pocket. How had he come from the thought of unguarded talk to the handkerchief? He was told that the friend he was calling had to stay quartered with his team in a training camp until the important match on Sunday and
could not be reached by phone. Bloch gave the postmistress another number. She asked him to pay for the first call first. Bloch paid and sat on a bench to wait for the second call. The phone rang and he stood up. But it was only a birthday telegram arriving. The postmistress wrote it down and confirmed it word by word. Bloch walked back and forth. One of the mailmen had returned from his route and was now loudly reporting to the girl. Bloch sat down. Outside on the street, now that it was early afternoon, there was no distraction. Bloch had become impatient but did not show it. He heard the mailman say that the gypsy had been hiding all this time near the border in one of those lean-to shelters the cups-toms guards used. “Anyone can say that,” said Bloch. The mailman turned toward him and stopped talking. What he claimed to be the latest news, Bloch went on, anybody could have read yesterday, the day before yesterday, even the day before the day before yesterday, in the papers. What he said didn’t mean anything, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever. The mailman had turned his back to Bloch even while Bloch was still talking and was now speaking quietly with the postmistress, in a murmur that sounded to Bloch like those passages in foreign films that are left untranslated because they are supposed to be incomprehensible anyway. Bloch couldn’t reach them any more with his remark. All at once the fact
that it was in a post office that he “couldn’t reach anybody any more” seemed to him not like a fact at all but like a bad joke, like one of those word games that, say, sportswriters play, which he had always loathed. Even the mailman’s story about the gypsy had seemed to him crudely suggestive, a clumsy insinuation, like the birthday telegram, whose words were so commonplace that they simply could not mean what they said. And it wasn’t only the conversation that was insinuating; everything around him was also meant to suggest something to him. “As though they winked and made signs at me,” thought Bloch. For what was it supposed to mean that the lid of the inkwell lay right next to the well on the blotter and that the blotter on the desk had obviously been replaced just today, so only a few impressions were legible on it? And wouldn’t it be more proper to say “so that” instead of “so”?
So that
the impressions would therefore be legible. And now the postmistress picked up the phone and spelled out the birthday telegram letter by letter. What was she hinting at by that? What was behind her dictating “All the best,” “With kind regards”: what was that supposed to mean? Who was behind the cover name “your loving grandparents”? Even that morning Bloch had instantly recognized the short slogan “Why not phone?” as a trap.
It seemed to him as if the mailman and the postmistress
were in the know. “The postmistress and the mailman,” he corrected himself. Now the loathsome word-game sickness had struck even him, and in broad daylight. “Broad daylight”? He must have hit on that phrase somehow. That expression seemed witty to him, in an unpleasant way. But were the other words in the sentence any better? If you said the word “sickness” to yourself, after a few repetitions you couldn’t help laughing at it. “A sickness strikes me”: silly. “I am stricken by a sickness”: just as silly. “The postmistress and the mailman”; “the mailman and the postmistress”; “the postmistress and the mailman”: one big joke. Have you heard the one about the mailman and the postmistress? “Everything seems like a heading,” thought Bloch: “THE BIRTHDAY TELEGRAM,” “THE INKWELL LID,” “THE SCRAPS OF BLOTTER ON THE FLOOR.” The rack where the various rubber stamps hung looked as if it had been sketched. He looked at it for a long time but did not figure out what was supposed to be funny about the stand. On the other hand, there had to be a joke in it: otherwise, why should it look sketched to him? Or was it another trap? Was the thing there so that he would make a slip of the tongue? Bloch looked somewhere else, looked at another place, and looked somewhere else again. Does this ink pad mean anything to you? What do you think of when
you see this filled-out check? What do you associate with that drawer’s being open? It seemed to Bloch that he should take inventory of the room, so that the objects he paused at or that he left out during his count could serve as evidence. The mailman hit the flat of his hand against the big bag that was still hanging from his shoulder. “The mailman hits the bag and takes it off,” thought Bloch, word for word. “Now he puts it on the table and walks into the package room.” He described the events to himself like a radio announcer to the public, as if this was the only way he could see them for himself. After a while it helped.
He stopped pacing because the phone rang. As always when the phone rang, he felt he had known it would a moment before it did. The postmistress picked up the phone and then pointed to the booth. Already inside the booth, he asked himself whether perhaps he had misunderstood her gesture, if perhaps it had been meant for no one in particular. He picked up the receiver and asked his ex-wife, who had started by giving only her first name, as though she knew it was him, to send some money to general delivery. A peculiar silence followed. Bloch heard some whispering that wasn’t meant for him. “Where are you?” the woman asked. He’d got cold feet and now he was high and dry, Bloch said and laughed
as though he had said something extremely witty. The woman didn’t answer. Bloch heard more whispering. It was very difficult, said the woman. Why? asked Bloch. She hadn’t been talking to him, answered the woman. “Where should I send the money?” His pockets would be empty soon if she didn’t give him a hand, Bloch said. The woman kept quiet. Then the phone was hung up at her end.
“The snows of yesteryear,” Bloch thought, unexpectedly, as he came out of the booth. What was that supposed to mean? In fact, he had heard that the underbrush was so tangled and thick at the border that patches of snow could be found at certain spots even during the early summer. But that was not what he had meant. Besides, people had no business in the underbrush. “No business”? How did he mean that? “The way I said it,” thought Bloch.
At the savings bank he traded in the American dollar bill he had carried with him for a long time. He also tried to exchange a Brazilian bill, but the bank did not trade that currency; besides, they didn’t know the exchange rate.
When Bloch came in, the bank teller was counting out coins, wrapping them up in rolls, and stretching rubber bands around the rolls. Bloch put the dollar bill on the counter. Next to it there was a music box;
only when he gave it a second look did Bloch recognize it as a contribution box for some charity. The teller looked up but went on counting. Before he had been asked to, Bloch slid the bill under the partition through to the other side. The teller was lining up the rolls in a single row next to him. Bloch bent down and blew the bill in front of the teller, and the teller unfolded the bill, smoothed it with the edge of his hand, and ran his fingertips over it. Bloch saw that his fingertips were quite black. Another teller came out of the back room; to witness something, thought Bloch. He asked to have the change —in which there was not even one bill—put in an envelope and shoved the coins back under the partition. The official, in the same way he had lined up the piles earlier, stuffed the coins into an envelope and pushed the envelope back to Bloch. Bloch thought that if everybody asked to have their money put in envelopes, the savings bank would eventually go broke. They could do the same thing with everything they bought: maybe the heavy demand for packaging would slowly but surely drive businesses bankrupt? Anyway, it was fun to think about.
In a stationery store Bloch bought a tourist map of the region and had it well wrapped. He also bought a pencil; the pencil he asked to have put in a paper bag. With the rolled-up map in his hand, he walked
on; he felt more harmless now than before, when his hands had been empty.
Outside the town, at a spot where he had a full view of the area, he sat down on a bench and, using the pencil, compared the details on the map with the items in the landscape in front of him. Key to the symbols: these circles meant a deciduous forest, those triangles a coniferous one, and when you looked up from the map, you were astonished that it was true. Over there, the terrain had to be swampy; over there, there had to be a wayside shrine; over there, there had to be a railroad crossing. If you walked along this dirt road, you had to cross a bridge here, then had to come across a wagon trail, then had to walk up a steep incline, where, since somebody might be waiting on top, you had to turn off the path and run across this field, had to run toward this forest—luckily, a coniferous forest—but someone might possibly come at you out of the forest, so that you had to double back and then run down this slope toward this farmhouse, had to run past this shed, then run along this brook, had to leap over it at this spot because a jeep might come at you here, then zigzag across this field, slip through this hedge onto the street where a truck was just going by, which you could stop and then you were safe. Bloch stopped short. “If it’s a question of murder,
your mind jumps from one thing to another,” he had heard somebody say in a movie.
He was relieved to discover a square on the map that he could not find in the landscape: the house that had to be there wasn’t there, and the street that curved at this spot was in reality straight. It seemed to Bloch that this discrepancy might be helpful to him.
He watched a dog running toward a man in a field; then he realized that he was not watching the dog any more but the man, who was moving like somebody trying to block somebody else’s way. Now he saw a little boy standing behind the man, and he realized that he was not watching the man and the dog, as would have been expected, but the boy, who, from this distance, seemed to be fidgeting; but then he realized that it was the boy’s screaming that seemed like fidgeting to him. In the meantime, the man had grabbed the dog by the collar and all three, dog, man, and boy, had walked off in the same direction. “Who was that meant for?” thought Bloch.
On the ground in front of him a different picture: ants approaching a crumb of bread. He realized once again that he wasn’t watching the ants but, on the contrary, the fly sitting on the bread crumb.
Everything he saw was conspicuous. The pictures did not seem natural but looked as if they had been
made specifically for the occasion. They served some purpose. As you looked at them, they jumped out at you. “Like call letters,” thought Bloch. Like commands. When he closed his eyes and looked again afterwards, everything seemed to be different. The segments that could be seen seemed to glimmer and tremble at their edges.
From a sitting position, Bloch, without really getting up, had immediately walked away. After a while he stopped, then immediately broke into a run from a standing position. He-got off to a quick start, suddenly stopped short, changed direction, ran at a steady pace, then changed his step, changed his step again, stopped short, then ran backward, turned around while running backward, ran forward again, again turned around to run backward, went black-ward, turned around to run forward, after a few steps changed to a sprint, stopped short, sat down on a curbstone, and immediately went back to running from a sitting position.
When he stopped and then walked on, the pictures seemed to dim from the edges; finally they had turned completely black except for a circle in the middle. “Like when somebody in a movie looks through a telescope,” he thought. He wiped the sweat off his legs with his trousers. He walked past a cellar where, because the cellar door was half open, tea
leaves shimmered in a peculiar way. “Like potatoes,” Bloch thought.