of considerate guests who are afraid of disturbing you. You can hear them removing their clothes: the absent punctuation to their whispering. Not long ago I would offer my hospitality to friends, to couples. We’d spend an evening at the theater. Upon returning we would converse for a short time longer, then I would leave them and go get undressed. Like today. Then, too, one could hear the call of things that had been put off: affable dots, accent marks, and semicolons set my guests’ whispering to music—a whispering in no way mysterious, a whispering that told all. It was having a cozy time in the silent womb of my apartment, in the spacious silence. Here and there a distinct word slipped through the slightly open door, as if to assure me that I had a share even in that which I did not discern. Those words spun out like a rosary, dense at first, then less and less frequent. After which nothing but whispers and the chatty punctuation of things. – I pay close, but cool, attention. Yes, it’s entirely like the other day, after the theater. The friendly idyll before sleep. – What am I saying, like back then? What a fool I am! It is the other day after the theater. Next door are my recent guests. That is, today is not so long ago, what with not so long ago having been today. We came back from the theater. We had a bit of conversation. That before retiring we might hit upon something. That we might find some pretext for falling asleep beneath a baldachin of laughter: we’ll chat—chat like tossing a ball, any which way—so, then, what might we chat about? About the waiter, who got a bit tongue-tied; or how we laughed ourselves silly at the usherette who offered us the programs, displaying them like they were tablets of law; at our gesture of refusal she’d shrugged her shoulders as if regretting that we did not want to submit to the law, and worried that we might thus be risking our salvation. We solemnly vow that tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a place, and we go to sleep bursting with laughter, because we have unwittingly revealed to each other that we don’t think it matters. –
Yes, but it was precisely out of this cheerful laughter that my fear prolapsed. It alerted me that they were cowering here somewhere. It alerted through the sweaty shirt sticking to my back. It was a strange fear: I didn’t have it, but I was aware of it. As if it had appeared to me. I knew that it and I were face-to-face, so close I couldn’t see it. So close it wasn’t there to see. A peculiar fear. Unexcited, reflective, and imploring. Imploring me to shelter it within myself, to take it in. It looked so unhappy, it looked particularly unhappy. One evening—I was quite young at the time—an older man had stopped me on the street, and he said to me: “Take me with you.” I looked at him, one would say, as befit the circumstances, well, with revulsion. He broke into tears: “Take me with you, no one wants to take me with him.” I wasn’t afraid, for I clearly saw that he was suffocating on the tenderness with which everyone was thrusting him away. I was certain that he wouldn’t harm me, that he had nothing to harm me with . . . I wasn’t afraid, I say, and yet I was seized by horror, and I know precisely where it had come from: it was the horror of being infected with misfortune. With his misfortune, for this man was unhappy the way others fall ill. I took to my heels, but he came after me, quietly calling, “Don’t be afraid, you big ninny, don’t be afraid of being unhappy.” But I fled, I fled, for unfortunates like these pose a greater threat to us than Jack the Ripper. In like manner was the unsightly and piteous fear that was confronting and courting me here not my own fear, it was beyond me, without my having actually beheld it; and yet I knew it was here, and I feared it as I would someone with an infectious disease: i.e., its horror.
I remembered that I had been scared in the very same manner already once today, it was just as I was inspecting the dining room and it occurred to me that I was not particularly astonished at the stranger behind the door, and that it wasn’t okay for me not to be astonished. I recoiled at my not feeling horror. Who knows, maybe that’s just the sort of horror that makes us sweat whenever, out of nowhere, we’ve run into ourselves, as I did today when I ran into my apartment; who knows, maybe there is constantly residing within us this sort of unexpected eternal visitation, from which we recoil only when it occurs to us that it’s like we’d been looking the other way all this time. Only we seldom run into ourselves: we rattle the keys, we cough, we drag our feet across the floor, we do what we might so that the thief will make it out the window in the meantime. There’s no merit in being robbed; the merit is in putting up with the sight of the burglar—putting up with him as if he were an old acquaintance.
At last, silence. Utter. It bumped up against one of those sort-of-fleeting rustles that jacks make when raked together, and then it spilled away, silent as a swamp. I identified it immediately, that rustle—it was her amber necklace tossed onto the marble mantelpiece. It, that rustle, was the threshold of voicelessness, but at the same time it was the wake-up call of her presence. It was like the click in a stereopticon just before the photographs are replaced; the “view” replaced by a “view” just as smoothly, fluidly, and with the same almost violent suppleness as with a “peep box,” and no matter that none of the preceding images had announced this one, no matter that there was no precedent for this one among those past, no matter that it had clicked in as if sent down, here it was like something that could not be—it was here as the sole thing that was, indisputably, and upon which one had to gaze: the imagined “fine acquaintances with whom I had returned from the theater” had withdrawn and been replaced by the image of “these two, so strangely familiar.” And the transcendent, unfortunate, solicitous horror, which I (without actually feeling it) caught wind of by feeling my shirt sweaty against my back, was absorbed by the picture called “these two, so strangely familiar,” and faded markedly. – It might have seemed that the phrase “as a graveyard” should follow “silent,” so deep was the silence that followed. But no. Rather, it resembled the silence that washes through an apartment wherein a harmonious family is at its ease. I was pierced with so powerful a sense of intimacy (with those two) that it formed a sweet knot in my throat. A muted light still shone in the living room. From that I judged that those two were not yet asleep; I got a cheery taste for playing host; I went out to them to see whether they needed anything.
When I entered, it struck me that they were both still dressed. That confused me a bit, and my bliss lost some of its depth. Admittedly, they weren’t asleep yet, but they were already nodding off. He was sitting in the armchair under the lamp. I was turned toward him, which is to say he was giving me that face of a goody-goody gourmand, about which I have already spoken, and which reminded me so much of Fuld. His half-open eyes did dampen this impression somewhat, but it was still distinctly there. His head turned a little, his mouth slightly open, and his hands, which he had raised to his head (where they now remained) as if at the height of despair, aroused the impression that he would have long since cried out had it been physically possible for him to have done so (thus entirely different than if this cry were to have appeased his will). Despite this, however, he did not look like he was desperate; amazingly, he didn’t even seem sorrowful. His features rather reflected, as it were, the animal irritation of people whose slumber is hindered by some physical defect. I understood that what ailed him were his upraised hands. I took them and slowly placed them in his lap. He looked up sleepily, with the grateful expression of a child when we’ve gotten him all nice and snug. All this time, then, she had been tensely watching what I was doing, and seeing how attentive I was being to him she smiled understandingly, you might say conspiratorially—with that indulgent superiority of older sisters who know their little brothers’ weaknesses and urge a strange man not to think poorly of them and to indulge them as well. Against expectation, however, the smile ended by plunging into her mouth’s left corner, which twisted. And it was as if this had thrown her into embarrassment: again, that tugging at the skirt, though this time in the manner of a movingly strange gesture. She sought to extricate herself from this new embarrassment, making as if she were awkwardly positioned and looking for a better spot on the sofa. I approached so as to fluff her pillow. As I bent down, I heard at first a whistling, a kind of admonitory rebuke, and right after that, words.
“Take him off my hands! I hate him. Take him off my hands.”
I straightened up, surprised.
“Who?” I eventually muttered.
Was it because she couldn’t stand my gaze? Was it a sign, her averting her eyes? Toward him, it seemed to me. I followed them, and they indeed came to rest on him. I got the sense that she was eyeing us uncomfortably. When I turned again to settle things with