562
PARTISAN REVIEW
is no cover when you're burdened with love and the patrol is after you.
There is no way out. You are being led to the altar to be sacrificed. They
push you on, you can't turn back, your head hangs low.
His head hangs low as he waits to hear whether the noise will devel–
op into a challenge, a cry of surprise, a death command. But he hears
nothing more, nor has anyone seen him. He slowly turns and, keeping his
eyes glued to the asphalt walkway, goes back to the passage. If he can slip
through it unimpeded, he will avoid the apartment, the home, the trap, and
direct his steps in the opposite direction, the stairs. He will run down the
stairs to the street and freedom. He may even catch another glimpse of the
pedestrian or the beautiful woman.
He does not, of course. They have disappeared in the interim, swal–
lowed by the crowd, or perhaps they are still there but no longer
recognizable. People look different when you are on a level with them.
The proportions of their bodies change. The relation of one part to anoth–
er.
Formerly conspicuous curves-foreheads, noses, breasts,
shoulders-flatten out, and limbs scarcely visible from above jut in all
directions. New conditions of light, new reflections affect hair color, eye
color, skin color. Clothes seem to hang differently, the new angle accentu–
ating certain wrinkles and shadows while attenuating others. From above,
a person's gait looks light and easy; at eye level, it is heavier, involving
effort, with one foot always pressed to the ground. From below, it is clear
that people are not propelled by an unknown force, not pulled on a trans–
parent string by a concealed hand; they move by contracting their leg
muscles and shifting the weight of their bodies in the direction they wish
to go. Their connection with the earth is obvious. True, they push away
from it, stand erect, but it remains part of them and to it they will return.
At eye level, too, their variety-infant, girl, graybeard-arouses curiosity,
but the progress of infant and girl and graybeard can be charted from start
to finish and their mysteries unraveled.
The man who appears before Blam to have his mystery unraveled is a
real estate agent by the name of Leon Funkenstein. Blam sees him while
standing in front of the Mercury surveying the far side of the square from
the cathedral to the Avala Cinema. The area is full of parked cars because
the street beginning behind the Avala and once called Jew Street is now
sealed off at the other end by New Boulevard and thus closed to traffic.
It
is the destination of many idle strollers like Blam.
Seeing Funkenstein, however, Blam interrupts his stroll. He has no
reason to avoid him, though he did go out to be alone or, rather, to escape
the manhunt, his private term for the onslaught of present and past
