598
PARTISAN REVIEW
pushed aside, an obstacle, a screen, a minimizing glass, and a different
map of the world came into view; on another scale, not intended for
entering, and certainly not for consuming or putting in your pocket, but
perhaps for a certain kind of measurement-taking-even though, as the
silence persisted, it had promptly faded and shriveled up. He spread his
fingers and let the air blow between them.
He pushed himself away from the counter, several times. Through the
open window, through the bars protecting the little building, came the
smell of the settlement's dusty streets, just sprinkled, which gave him a
whiff of the soaking rain they hadn't had in so long, and at the same
time, swooshing in unexpectedly from beyond the last ring of hedge, a
good Taxham mile away, the smell of the circus, although it had moved
on way back at the beginning of summer.
If
the pharmacist was known at all in the area-for instance by
Andreas Loser and me-it was for his sense of smell. In Loser's case it
was hearing and listening that counted, or, in his words, "moved his
thoughts along," and in my case it was primarily seeing and contem–
plating; but with our distant acquaintance it was simply smelling-not
any special sniffing, but just having something in his nose, without any
special effort, hundreds of things at a time, without confusion, clearly
distinguished. (And obviously the peculiarities of one couldn't always be
separated from those of the other.) Just as some people could see a thing
and keep its image on their retina for months afterward-they had only
to close their eyes-time and again the pharmacist would have a smell
from long ago in his nostrils, still fresh and even stronger than origi–
nally, a smell perhaps snapped up only in passing and long since subject
to the statute of limitations, as it were. And just as those other people
first perceived objects with real clarity and vividness in those residual
images, so it was for the pharmacist with his residual smells.
So along with the wafted-away circus, a leopard or perhaps only a
miniature ape promptly leaps out of the nearest bush. And the pharma–
cist, lost in thought again, climbed onto his lab counter, rolled up his
sleeves, and teetered on tiptoe. Amazing the way shifting your perspec–
tive a bit from the familiar could sometimes shift the gaps, give things a
different twist, rearrange the entire state of affairs . "Wasn't that also
uncanny at times?"
"Nothing was ever uncanny to me," the pharmacist responded, long
after the time when his story takes place: "At least not until that time."
From up there on the counter it could be seen that all the buildings in
the settlement, forming, in that brightness without sunshine, a closed,
wide-curving kraal, offered a perspective very different from the small
