In the next room, panels of butterflies were hung. The gatekeeper showed him how splotchy his hands had become from preparing them. Even so, many butterflies had fallen off the pins that had held them in place; underneath the cases Bloch saw the dust on the floor. He stepped closer and inspected those butterflies that were still held in place by the pins. When the gatekeeper closed the door behind him, something fell to the floor outside his field of vision and pulverized even while it fell. Bloch saw an Emperor moth that seemed almost completely overgrown with a woolly green film. He did not bend forward or step back. He read the labels under the empty pins. Some of the butterflies had changed so much that they could be recognized only by the descriptions. “‘A corpse in the living room,’” recited the gatekeeper, standing in the doorway to the next room. Outside, someone screamed, and an apple hit the ground. Bloch, looking out the window, saw that an empty branch had snapped back. The landlady put the apple that had fallen to the ground on the pile of other damaged apples.

  Later on, a school class from outside the town joined them, and the gatekeeper interrupted his tour to begin it all over again. Bloch took this chance to leave.

  Out on the street, at the stop for the mail bus, he sat on a bench that, as a brass plate on it attested, had been donated by the local savings bank. The houses were so far away that they could hardly be distinguished from each other; when bells began to toll, they could not be seen in the belfry. A plane flew overhead, so high that he could not see it; only once did it glint. Next to him on the bench there was a dried-up snail spoor. The grass under the bench was wet with last night’s dew; the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette box was fogged with mist. To his left he saw … To his right there was … Behind him he saw … He got hungry and walked away.

  Back at the tavern, Bloch ordered the cold plate. The waitress, using an automatic bread-slicer, sliced bread and sausage and brought him the sausage slices on a plate; she had squeezed some mustard on top. Bloch ate; it was getting dark already. Outside, a child had hidden himself so well while playing that he had not been found. Only after the game was over did Bloch see him walk along the deserted street. He pushed the plate aside, pushed the coaster aside as well, pushed the salt shaker away from himself.

  The waitress put the little girl to bed. Later the child came back into the barroom in her nightgown and ran around among the customers. Every so often, moths fluttered up from the floor. After she came back, the landlady carried the child back into the bedroom.

  The curtains were pulled shut and the barroom filled up. Several young men could be seen standing at the bar; every time they laughed, they took one step backward. Next to them stood girls in nylon coats, as if they wanted to leave again immediately. When one of the young men told a story, the others could be seen to stiffen up just before they all screamed with laughter. The people who sat preferred to sit against the wall. The mechanical hand in the juke box could be seen grabbing a record and the tone arm coming down on it, and some people who were waiting for their records could be heard quieting down; it was no use, it didn’t change anything. And it didn’t change anything that you could see the wristwatch slip out from under the sleeve and down to the wrist when the waitress let her arm drop, that the lever on the coffee machine rose slowly, and that you could hear somebody hold a match box to his ear and shake it before opening it. You saw how completely empty glasses were repeatedly brought to the lips, how the waitress lifted a glass to check whether she could take it away, how the young men pummeled each other’s faces in fun. Only when somebody shouted for his check did things become real again.

  Bloch was quite drunk. Everything seemed to be out of his reach. He was so far away from what happened around him that he himself no longer appeared in what he saw and heard. “Like aerial photographs,” he thought while looking at the antlers and horns on the wall. The noises seemed to him like static, like the coughing and clearing of throats during radio broadcasts of church services.

  Later the estate owner’s son came in. He was wearing knickers and hung his coat so close to Bloch that Bloch had to lean to one side.

  The landlady sat down with the estate owner’s son, and could be heard as she asked him, after she had sat down, what he wanted to drink and then shouted the order to the waitress. For a while Bloch saw them both drinking from the same glass; whenever the young man said something, the landlady nudged him in the ribs; and when she wiped the flat of her hand across his face, he could be seen snapping and licking at it. Then the landlady had sat down at another table, where she went on with her routine motions by fingering another young man’s hair. The estate owner’s son had stood up again and reached for his cigarettes in the coat behind Bloch. When Bloch shook his head in answer to a question about whether the coat bothered him, he realized that he had not lifted his eyes from one and the same spot for quite a while. Bloch shouted, “My check!” and everybody seemed to become serious again for a moment. The landlady, whose head was bent backward because she was just opening a bottle of wine, made a sign to the waitress, who was standing behind the bar washing glasses, which she put on the foam-rubber mat that soaked up the water, and the waitress walked toward him, between the young men standing at the bar, and gave him his change, with fingers that were cold, and as he stood up, he put the wet coins in his pocket immediately; a joke, thought Bloch; perhaps the sequence of events seemed so laborious to him because he was drunk.

  He stood up and walked to the door; he opened the door and went outside—everything was all right.

  Just to make sure, he stood there for a while. Every once in a while somebody came out to relieve himself. Others, who were just arriving, started to sing along as soon as they heard the juke box, even when they were still outside. Bloch moved off.

  Back in town; back at the inn; back in his room. “Eleven words altogether,” thought Bloch with relief. He heard bath water draining out overhead; anyway, he heard gurgling and then, finally, a snuffling and smacking.

  He must have just dropped off when he woke up again. For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen out of himself. He realized that he lay in a bed. “Not fit to be moved,” thought Bloch. A cancer. He became aware of himself as if he had suddenly degenerated. He did not matter any more. No matter how still he lay, he was one big wriggling and retching; his lying there was so sharply distinct and glaring that he could not escape into even one picture that he might have compared himself with. The way he lay there, he was something lewd, obscene, inappropriate, thoroughly obnoxious. “Bury it!” thought Bloch. “Prohibit it, remove it!” He thought he was touching himself unpleasantly but realized that his awareness of himself was so intense that he felt it like a sense of touch all over his body; as though his consciousness, as though his thoughts, had become palpable, aggressive, abusive toward himself. Defenseless, incapable of defending himself, he lay there. Nauseatingly his insides turned out; not alien, only repulsively different. It had been a jolt, and with one jolt he had become unnatural, had been torn out of context. He lay there, as impossible as he was real; no comparisons now. His awareness of himself was so strong that he was scared to death. He was sweating. A coin fell on the floor and rolled under the bed: a comparison? Then he had fallen asleep.

  Waking up again. “Two, three, four,” Bloch started to count. His situation had not changed, but he must have grown used to it in his sleep. He pocketed the coin that had fallen under the bed and went downstairs. When he put on an act, one word still nicely yielded the next. A rainy October day; early morning; a dusty windowpane; it worked. He greeted the innkeeper; the innkeeper was just putting the newspapers into their racks; the girl was pushing a tray through the service hatch between the kitchen and dining room: it was still working. If he kept up his guard, it could go on like this, one thing after another; he sat at the table he always sat at; he opened the newspaper he opened every day; he read the paragraph in the paper that said an important lead in the Gerda T. case was being followed into the southern part of the country; the doodles in the margin of the newspaper that had been found in the dead girl’s apartment had furthered the investigation. One sentence yielded the next sentence. And then, and then, and then … For a little while it was possible to look ahead without worrying.

  After a while, although he was still sitting in the dining room listing the things that went on out on the street, Bloch caught himself becoming aware of a sentence, “For he had been idle too long.” Since that sentence looked like a final sentence to Bloch, he thought back to how he had come to it. What had come before it? Oh, yes, earlier he had thought, “Surprised by the shot, he’d let the ball roll right through his legs.” And before this sentence he had thought about the photographers who annoyed him behind the cage. And before that, “Somebody had stopped behind him but had only whistled for his dog.” And before that sentence? Before that sentence he had thought about a woman who had stopped in a park, had turned around, and had looked at something behind him the way one looks at an unruly child. And before that? Before that, the innkeeper had talked about the mute schoolboy, who’d been found dead right near the border. And before the schoolboy he had thought of the ball that had bounced up just in front of the goal line. And before the thought of the ball, he had seen the market woman jump up from her stool on the street and run after a schoolboy. And the market woman had been preceded by a sentence in the paper: “The carpenter was hindered in his pursuit of the thief by the fact that he was still wearing his apron.” But he had read the sentence in the paper just when he thought of how his jacket had been pulled down over his arms during a mugging. And he had come to the mugging when he had bumped his shin painfully against the table. And before that? He could not remember any more what had made him bump his shin against the table. He searched the sequence for a clue about what might have come before: did it have to do with the movement? or with the pain? or with the sound of table and shin? But it did not go any further back. Then he noticed, in the paper in front of him, a picture of an apartment door that, because there was a corpse behind it, had had to be broken open. So, he thought, it all started with this apartment door, until he had brought himself back to the sentence, “He had been idle too long.”

  Everything had gone well for a while after that: the lip movements of the people he talked to coincided with what he heard them say; the houses were not just façades; heavy sacks of flour were being dragged from the loading ramp of the dairy into the storage room; when somebody shouted something far down the street, it sounded as though it actually came from down there. The people walking past on the sidewalk across the street did not appear to have been paid to walk past in the background; the man with the adhesive tape under his eye had a genuine scab; and the rain seemed to fall not just in the foreground of the picture but everywhere. Bloch then found himself under the projecting roof of a church. He must have got there through a side alley and stopped under the roof when it started to rain.

  Inside the church he noticed that it was brighter than he had expected. So, after quickly sitting down on a bench, he could look up at the painted ceiling. After a while he recognized it: it was reproduced in the brochure that was placed in every room at the inn. Bloch, who had brought a copy because it also contained a sketchy map of the town and its vicinity with all its streets and paths, pulled out the brochure and read that different painters had worked on the background and foreground of the picture; the figures in the foreground had been finished long before the other painter had finished filling in the background. Bloch looked from the page up into the vault; because he did not know them, the figures—they probably represented people from the Bible—bored him; still, it was pleasant to look up at the vault while it rained harder and harder outside. The painting stretched all the way across the ceiling of the church. The background represented the sky, almost cloudless and an almost even blue; here and there a few fluffy clouds could be seen; at one spot, quite far above the figures, a bird had been painted. Bloch guessed the exact area the painter had had to fill with paint. Would it have been hard to paint such an even blue? It was a blue that was so light that white had probably been mixed into the color. And in mixing them didn’t you have to be careful that the shade of blue didn’t change from day to day? On the other hand, the blue was not absolutely even but changed within each brush stroke. So you couldn’t just paint the ceiling an even blue but actually had to paint a picture. The background did not become a sky because the paint was blindly slapped on the plaster base—which, moreover, had to be wet —with as big a brush as possible, maybe even with a broom, but, Bloch reflected, the painter had to paint an actual sky with small variations in the blue which, nevertheless, had to be so indistinct that nobody would think they were a mistake in the mixing. In fact, the background did not look like a sky because you were used to imagining a sky in the background but because the sky had been painted there, stroke by stroke. It had been painted with such precision, thought Bloch, that it almost looked drawn; it was much more precise, anyway, than the figures in the foreground. Had he added the bird out of sheer rage? And had he painted the bird right at the start or had he only added it when he was quite finished? Might the background painter have been in some kind of despair? Nothing indicated this, and such an interpretation immediately seemed ridiculous to Bloch. Altogether it seemed to him as if his preoccupation with the painting, as if his walking back and forth, his sitting here and there, his going out, his coming in, were nothing but excuses. He stood up. “No distractions,” he muttered to himself. As if to contradict himself, he went outside, walked straight across the street into an entryway, and stood there defiantly among the empty milk bottles—not that anyone came to ask him to account for his presence there—until it stopped raining. Then he went to a café and sat there for a while with his legs stretched out—not that anyone did him the favor of stumbling over them and starting a fight.

  When he looked out, he saw a segment of the marketplace with the school bus; in the café he saw, to the left and to the right, segments of the walls, one with an unlit stove with a bunch of flowers on it, the one on the other side with a coat rack with an umbrella hanging from it. He noticed another segment with the juke box with a point of light slowly wandering through it before it stopped at the selected number, and next to it a cigarette machine with another bunch of flowers on top; then still another segment with the café owner behind the bar and next to him the waitress for whom he was opening a bottle, which the waitress put on the tray; and, finally, a segment of himself with his legs stretched out, the dirty tips of his wet shoes, and also the huge ashtray on the table and next to it a vase, which was smaller, and the filled wine glass on the next table, where nobody was sitting right now. His angle of vision onto the square corresponded, as he realized now that the school bus had left, almost exactly with the angle on picture postcards; here a segment of the memorial column by the fountain; there, at the edge of the picture, a segment of the bicycle stand.

  Bloch was irritated. Within the segments themselves he saw the details with grating distinctness: as if the parts he saw stood for the whole. Again the details seemed to him like nameplates. “Neon signs,” he thought. So he saw the waitress’s ear with one earring as a sign of the entire person; and a purse on a nearby table, slightly open so that he could recognize a polka-dotted scarf in it, stood for the woman holding the coffee cup who sat behind it and, with her other hand, pausing only now and then at a picture, rapidly leafed through a magazine. A tower of ice-cream dishes dovetailed into each other on the bar seemed a simile for the café owner, and the puddle on the floor by the coat rack represented the umbrella hanging above it. Instead of the heads of the customers, Bloch saw the dirty spots on the wall at the level of their heads. He was so irritated that he looked at the grimy cord that the waitress was just pulling to turn off the wall lights—it had grown brighter outside again—as if the entire lighting arrangement was designed especially to tax his strength. Also, his head hurt because he had been caught in the rain.

  The grating details seemed to stain and completely distort the figures and the surroundings they fitted into. The only defense was to name the things one by one and use those names as insults against the people themselves. The owner behind the bar might be called an ice-cream dish, and you could tell the waitress that she was a hole through the ear lobe. And you also felt like saying to the woman with the magazine, “You Purse, you,” and to the man at the next table, who had finally come out of the back room and, standing up, finished his wine while he paid, “You Spot on Your Pants,” or to shout after him as he set the empty glass on the table and walked out that he was a fingerprint, a doorknob, the slit in the back of his coat, a rain puddle, a bicycle clip, a fender, and so on, until the figure outside had disappeared on his bicycle … Even the conversation and especially the exclamations—“What?” and “I see”—seemed so grating that one wanted to repeat the words out loud, scornfully.

  Bloch went into a butcher shop and bought two salami sandwiches. He did not want to eat at the tavern because his money was running low. He looked over the sausages dangling together from a pole and pointed at the one he wanted the girl to slice. A boy came in with a note in his hand. At first the customs guard thought the schoolboy’s corpse was a mattress that had been washed up, the girl had just said. She took two rolls out of a carton and split them in half without separating them completely. The bread was so stale that Bloch heard them crunch as the knife cut into them. The girl pulled the rolls apart and put the sliced meat inside. Bloch said that he had time and she should take care of the child first. He saw the boy silently holding the note out. The girl leaned forward and read it. Then the chunk she was hacking off the meat slipped off the board and fell on the stone floor. “Plop,” said the child. The chunk had stayed where it had fallen. The girl picked it up, scraped it off with the edge of her knife, and wrapped it up. Outside, Bloch saw the schoolchildren walking by with their umbrellas open, even though it had stopped raining. He opened the door for the boy and watched the girl tear the skin off the sausage end and put the slices inside the second roll.

 

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