divine oblivion. That’s just our point: to become oblivious—like God. We unfortunately have far yet to go. – We have so much further to go that we still—still!—are pleased to manufacture proselytes. Candidates for divine oblivion, meanwhile, have a utilitarian craft: they teach altruism . . . –
I: You!
Mutig: Giggles understands me. But what is this understanding? She has the key. But turning it—eh?—that’s something else. Giggles is a teachable pupil. Giggles knows, for example, that the loss of love need not be fatal. Giggles understands why I refute duration.
Fuld: Was that a slip? You don’t refute duration, you exclude its potential. If I’ve heard you right. You exclude, you don’t refute.
Mutig was taken aback, he glanced among the spectators, he greeted them here and there with an actor’s venal smile. Then he scowled like a shamefaced sham-artist, jolted himself, turned to Fuld, and covered his mouth theatrically with his hand the way a simpleton does.
“Did I say that I exclude it?” he posed at last.
His hand shifted slowly from his mouth to his temple; Mutig rested his head and contemplated; when he emerged, a peculiar smile emerged as well; it proceeded impudently across his lips; his hand collapsed inertly on the table. Mutig looked up.
“No! Not exclude. Refute,” he said. (To Giggles, casually:) “And why do I refute?”
Giggles: You refute so as to learn to live without support.
Mutig: That’s it! – And now, please, if you can, square this circle: Giggles gets that one must do away with supports, and Giggles cannot imagine how she could live without holding on to at least one support.
Fuld: Which? Come on, which?
Mutig: It’s all the same which. She needs, let’s say, your respect. Only yesterday she said to me, “Oh, you know, so long as Fuld thinks I’m merely a wretch, and not damned, I haven’t lost everything.”
I glanced over at Fuld, more or less the way Horatio looked at the fratricide gnawing away at Hamlet’s plot. What was I to do! Fuld’s deep wrinkle, I alone could see it from where I was, how it thirsted for sparkly tears, whereas Fuld had forgotten his tears long since. Yet what provocative trigger might Mutig have spotted for him to exclaim so triumphantly:
“But this is what I said to her! This is what I said to her: ‘Is that what you’re counting on?’”
Fuld (in a voice bolstered by his guardian angels, drawing on their last strength): You had no right to that. You lied. – Why did you lie?
Mutig: Because I can’t forget that she was dear to me. Because I want her to be strong—like me. Because I have a duty toward her: you see how little I’m able to forget still. We—myself and those like me—of course we’ll manage to live without support; we rank, however, among the chiefs. But not yet as strict as we’d need to be, not yet as oblivious as our duty would have it. We still—still!—look after even those whose destiny was fulfilled by our having exploited them; we still look down on them later, too, when they’ve served their purpose, when we’ve already cast them away again; we look down on them; we shouldn’t. Imagine it, Fuld: I, for example, would honestly wish that Giggles, too, if only Giggles, could live without support. I’m conducting a dangerous experiment, I know that. But it’s necessary. – Giggles is so very miserable, you know!
Fuld: Have you lost your mind?
Mutig: But I’ve already told you that she doesn’t hear unless I am addressing her directly . . . Giggles is so very miserable, you know, and if you were to snatch the very last support from under her . . .
Fuld (in a voice that sobbed with a cowardice that had revealed itself as wicked): Come, Mutig, a man of your caliber doesn’t mess around with logomachy, does he? Are you forgetting that there is truth, eternal truth? What would be the point in saying I’ve lost my respect for it when I haven’t?
Mutig (with a slowness so willful that what he was saying was more visible than audible: a boa uncoiling into an entrancing slide): But you have lost your respect for it! And how could you esteem a dame who’d just as well “slit her throat” for me, though she knows that to us she’s lower than a footwrap?
Fuld: To all of you?
Giggles: I hear you, my dear, I hear you. Have you erred, since I hear when I shouldn’t hear? Oh my dear, oh my dear, don’t make such cruel jokes.
Fuld (leaning over the table and speaking as if he were reading an invisible inscription there): Giggles, who shouldn’t hear, hears. Giggles, who shouldn’t suffer, does.
Mutig: But she doesn’t hear, it only seems that she does. – Less than a footwrap—to all of us, to all of us, to us who are the meaning of her life, as she says, you know? (Quieter and quieter, and leaning so far across the table that he touches it with his chest): We are having such a beautiful game with her—an innocent game—for her benefit, you know! Voulez-vous jouer avec moi?
What will come next is con sordino. It’s a potpourri of what I know and what I saw, a potpourri con sordino. – A new and dizzyingly rapid change of scenery. The spectators, all of them together, have quietly stood and are leaving in a slow and orderly fashion. At the exit, spectacular demonstrations of courtesy. The hall has emptied out. The air is suffused with ozone. It is no longer so much a hall as a spacious room. It is empty, and a low stool, like that of a shoemaker, has been brought into the middle. There’s a blackamoor sitting on it. He’s almost squatting, his knees spread wide. His teeth are shining, he’s giggling quietly.
Mutig: For her benefit, you know, however much it may seem otherwise: for this game, one might say, is cruel.
At these words, the black man has stood. He’s picked up the stool, he’s moved over. He’s stood next to Mutig—giggling like that all the while—he’s put the stool down, but he hasn’t sat on it again. Mutig puts his arm around his neck like a buddy, and in a tone of light conversation:
“Giggles! What she really is is a corpse, you know. And I can’t drag a corpse through life. It disgusts me, and she terrifies me. And anyway, there are better things to work at than dragging corpses. I have better things to say, by which I of course mean vanities merely of a more splendid variety. – What, she doesn’t quite strike you as a corpse? Then you still don’t know everything. You couldn’t imagine how we treat her, my friends and I. She doesn’t even react anymore. That is, she reacts in her own way: she interprets our scorn merely as a difficult test she’s being put through. Perhaps it really was just a test at first. Not something she was supposed to suffer, the dummy. She was supposed to hold herself high. A test we’ve consented to—oh, the little lamb!—a test we’ve consented to becomes irrevocable, eternal; it solidifies. It’s the solid eternal (now you understand why I refute eternity?), an eternal that is more and more solid. Giggles had nothing left, nothing. We stripped her of everything. That is . . . There was one support, one hope. Just one. – As I told you: ‘As long as Fuld doesn’t think I’m damned . . .’ Are you beginning to understand what I need you for?”
Fuld: I’m hardly a professional killer, am I?
Mutig: And who says that it’s therefore inevitably you who’ll do the killing?
Fuld: If she’s crossed you so bad, you’ll knock her off. Knocking someone off! It’s not so hard. (Hastily.) Are you a Christian? It’s not like you’re a Christian, is it? So then why the pussyfooting around the people we’ve put a button on? You’re too noble. She’s dead, so she’s foul. But you, Mutig, are disproving yourself by remembering; you remember that this dead girl was living through you, right? You don’t want her to be foul, or a dead girl, either. Aren’t you looking for a way to provide her with an opening for rehabilitation? Because she’s your dead girl, right? Killed by you, right? You’re not perfect yet, Mutig, you really aren’t.
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