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PARTISAN REVI EW
"My daughter just asked me the same thing, even my wife. My voice
sounded as if it were coming from a deep well, one of them said, from
down a manhole, said the other. "
On this day the last thing the pharmacist did was practice throwing:
the chess pieces into their box, which he moved a bit farther away for
each toss.
Perhaps it was his dried mushrooms, of which he bit off some pieces,
perhaps not: At any rate, that night he had two dreams that took place
without him, beyond his person. In one of them, adjacent to the small
cellar in his house were suites of underground rooms, one grand hall
leading to the other, all sumptuously decorated, festively lit, yet all of
them empty, as if in expectation, awaiting a splendid, perhaps also ter–
rible event, and not just recently, but since time immemorial.
In the second dream, the hedge barriers to the neighboring properties
were suddenly gone, removed by force or simply fallen away, and peo–
ple could see into each other's gardens and onto each other's terraces,
and not merely onto them, but also into every corner of their houses,
now suddenly laid bare, and likewise one neighbor could see the other,
which in the first moments caused immense mutua l embarrassment and
shame, but then gradually gave way to a kind of relief, almost pleasure.
(It
should also be noted that all these hedgeless houses appeared as pole
or moor dwellings, each one with a boat tied up down below.)
But after that came, quite unexpectedly-was it still a dream? a
blackness, and then there was nothing but this blackness, no action, no
film, just the end of the film, the end, quite simply, of any kind of "I
am," "you are," "he is," "they are," "you people are," a blackness that
filled every inch of space so completely that it jolted the pharmacist out
of his sleep; yet it didn't dissipate at that point; it remained.
"I'd actually forgotten," he said, "that a few days earlier I'd had a
small black growth on my skin removed, and the lab results were due
soon."
Had he slept all night on his back this way, with his legs crossed?
Now and then, through the wide-open window, the seemingly tipped–
over waning moon had appeared for just a moment, in a rapidly
swelling wall of cloud, with its face pointing down.
Translated
by
Krishna Winston
