went back to my bedroom to lie down as well. Once there, with one leg already in bed, I suddenly stood up again: all at once it had struck me that I was forgetting something. I thought about it hard. The sole outcome of which was that I arrived at a tautological semblance of a thought: I won’t remember what it was; that is, the thought that “I’ve forgotten something.” Today I write “tautology,” but then, at first glance, it didn’t seem a tautology. Only after I had constructed a rather subtle logical chain from one half-proposition to the next (a chain I’d hardly be able to follow today) did I succeed in satisfying myself with the conclusion that if I am not able to remember something, I therefore must have forgotten something, and only in this was there some hope that I might still recall that thing which I had forgotten. And, as a result, I immediately remembered that something, while also being aware that this was not yet it. That is, I got a flash of a certain act by Grock, the unforgettable king of clowns. He is aping his partner, who, having readied his fiddle, suddenly can’t remember what it was that he’d wanted to play, so he turns, goes to the piano, and leans his elbow against it (his back to the audience), his fist to his chin, assuming the pose of a man struggling to remember.
But this is where I raised my head, having realized that the thing I couldn’t remember was those astonishing, brief, and rash words of the woman as I was fluffing her pillow; with them, then, was the reason they had vanished—the words, that is.
So now I had remembered both those words and the thing that had overshadowed them in my memory: it was a disproportionately large space suffused with a sense of the incompatibility between the sounds by which I had judged that these two had gotten undressed—sounds that I had heard so clearly, so distinctly, and which were surely not mere reminiscence— and the fact that entering the living room I had found both strangers still quite clothed. But having raised my head with that recollection, I was at the same time confronted with the fact that I was sitting at my writing table, that is, with something quite unexpected. He on one side, she on the other. They were now in their pajamas. They were standing faithfully, the way I was just then imagining Grock’s partner. Or no, they had already given up that posture again; but I inferred—I no longer know why—that they had given it up only just before I’d noticed them. And so it was actually as if I had been sleeping and was awakened only by their having given up that posture. Or else they had their fists to their chins the whole time, yet they contorted their faces symmetrically with mine. The smile that was playing on their lips was remarkable for the light it cast on the recent, albeit already buried, past. In this way it also happened that I again recognized, which is to say I caught up with, what had directly preceded this, that is, that I myself had recently settled into the posture of Grock’s partner, and they had crept quietly in and were aping me good-naturedly, until finally, having readied a smile and turned their heads, they inadvertently induced me to look up.
This, however, is where I gave a start, for he spoke.
“What’s that you’re playing with there?” he said.
Far be it from me to say whether I started out of surprise or because he’d caught me at something I’d prefer to keep to myself. For it was only now that I realized that with my right hand I was massaging one of those pliable puppets they sell in the gallery of the Folies Bergère. If their arms were straight along the body, they’d just be nude, but they have them folded behind the head, which makes them naked; and they are so flexible that they gratify even the most lascivious fantasy. One of those dolls rests upon my writing table. That’s her place. Of the reason behind this whim I can say nothing more than that it’s more or less at the antipode of the reasons why others buy them. However, this time I had taken her into my hand unknowingly.
So I gave a start, and I thrust her away. And something so peculiar happened that my astonishment—if that’s what it was—at the stranger’s unexpected words, or my sheepishness at having been caught in so ambiguous a game (if I indeed regretted it), was all at once as if extinguished. It was oddly discreet; it was imperceptible. All around that modestly amazing phenomenon, however, it was as if everything had been piled up to foster the hope that it would bring about some decisive, universally desired answer that had, so far, been hanging in the background. That from this would come an answer to the questions, events, and matters that had arisen so remarkably this evening, and perhaps even an answer to those two, who surely had to know and, in truth, perhaps did (and thus, perhaps, that smile of theirs); everything, I say, turned toward the sound and listened intently to what would follow. I have said that, having been interrupted by the words “what’s that you’re playing with there,” I thrust the young lady aside. Now, these toys are made of a flexible, very soft, yielding material. Imagine that a ball bouncing off a tabletop were to make a sound like that of a heavy, unyielding body. That’s just what the young lady I’d thrust aside sounded like. I was so surprised that I automatically moved to console her—she weighed no more than before, and she was just as yielding to the touch as usual—but dropped her again. Once more, the same bang, like a Browning going off, you might say. I looked up at the strange woman: she was no longer looking at me; she was staring at the table and stroking her brow embarrassedly. I looked up at the strange man: he did not dodge my gaze. But the impish smile fell from his lips. He was still smiling all right, but in a sort of reproachful way, and he was shaking his head as if at a child who’d done something he shouldn’t have, and it’s a wonder he didn’t get hurt. Without taking his eyes off me, he reached for that young lady himself, picked her up, dropped her, fixing me with his stare. Nothing. Not a sound. She fell the way she should.
“What’s that you’re playing with there?” he asked again.
I looked from one to the other, and suddenly it dawned on me that they resembled someone collectively. It wasn’t like they each resembled a third, and therefore each other. It was as if their combined likenesses gave the likeness of a third, someone I knew. It’s only with difficulty that something like this can be imagined, only barely. I, too, raised this objection, quietly, but in doing so I couldn’t overcome the certainty that their features were merging into those of someone who in fact resembled neither him, nor her. Here it was as if something broke down, and I remembered that if I had been late in coming home today, the blame lay in the episode with Mutig, Giggles, and Fuld.
On that day—it was already dusk—I was playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik on the gramophone. The main theme of the rondo inevitably arouses in me the associative image of a happy, carefree, and obstinate boy who does not appreciate the troubles of the grown-ups, whose experience he regards as a horrid and impenetrable nuisance. The adults advise him, they reason with him. He plays innocent and keeps his schemes to himself. But once they’ve quit their sermon and turned their backs to him, walking away smug and high-mannered, he sticks his tongue out at them and goes back to his prattling. And the theme confesses that this boy has not listened to them; he’d kept quiet as long as they’d encouraged him to, but he’d done so only out of a derisive superiority and because he is impatient—had he talked back, the sermon would never have ended. He is happily, carelessly, and obstinately impatient; he’s racing toward the unknown, the menacing “what’s ahead.” This theme is the master key, with it I get through closed doors; it is the ladder to what cannot be believed; and the difficulty by which it unfurls like a vine loses the name of difficulty, and comes to be called desirability.
When the rondo’s theme had returned for the third time, it whispered to me that if I were to wish to see Fuld today, I would see him, I need only try. For a moment earlier I had, in fact, felt a desire to meet with Fuld. (And thus we see that the rondo’s theme is prescient as well.) I dressed and went to find Fuld at a café in Montparnasse. We had arranged nothing. He never went to that café. That’s precisely why I chose it, for I felt like a meeting with Fuld as though with some unlucky star—I mean that, and not with a lucky star—and why make yourself out to be such a star in a place where such a star cannot be? Meeting someone we wish for like an unlucky star must be unlike any other meeting. Or else it’s better not to do it. Fuld, of course, was not at that café. I was neither surprised, nor annoyed. My failure merely inspired me to look for Fuld at a café by the same name on the Champs Elysées. He didn’t go there, either. But I was driving blindly toward Fuld: that is, I had become dependent upon him; in other words, I was proceeding