Max Blecher - Adventures In Immediate Irreality

After Grandfather’s death the upstairs fell apart piece by piece, object by object. He died in the tiny, humid room facing the courtyard, having chosen it to shelter his old age and unwilling to abandon it but for the final journey. It was there I went to see him every day as death approached; it was there I attended the last rites, at which he himself said the prayers, his voice trembling but completely emotionless, after putting on a new white shirt to make them more solemn; and it was there, several days later, that I saw him on a tinplate table waiting to be laid out.

Grandfather had a brother who was several years younger than he and his spitting image: they both had the same perfect sphere for a head, the same shiny white mane, the same lively, penetrating eyes, the same beard with hair as sparse as a foam full of holes. Now this great-uncle of mine requested the honor of washing the deceased and, old and infirm that he was, took to the task with great gusto. Trembling from head to toe, he carried buckets of water from the courtyard pump to the kitchen for heating. When the water was hot, he took it into the room and began washing the corpse with detergent dipped in straw. Rubbing away, he choked back his tears and, as if Grandfather could hear what he was saying, talked to him in a whisper punctuated by bitter sighs: “So this is what I’ve come to. This is what old age brings. You are dead, and here I am washing you. Woe is me! To think I’ve lived to see so sad a sight. .” And after wiping his cheeks and wet beard with his coat sleeve, he resumed his task with even greater vigor.

So alike were the two brothers — the one dead, the other rubbing — that they made a hallucinatory picture. The men from the cemetery, who usually saw to the washing of the corpse and collected tips from every member in the family for their pains, stood in a corner smoking, spitting all over the floor, and looking on scornfully at this intruder who was usurping their vocation. When after an hour or so Grandfather had completed the task, the corpse lay face down on the table.

“Are you done?” one of the men asked, cracking his fingers nervously. He was a little man with a red goatee and a malicious look about him.

“I am,” the brother of the deceased answered. “Now let’s get his clothes on.”

“Aha! So you’re done,” the little man said, his voice dripping with irony. “Is that what you call done? Is that any way to put a man in the ground? Filthy like that?”

The old man stood there amazed, a batch of straw in his hand, looking around the room in a mute plea for one or another of us to come to his defense. He was certain he had done a good job and did not deserve the insult.

“And now let me show you why you shouldn’t do what you’ve got no business doing,” the man said cockily and, snatching the straw out of the old man’s hand, he stalked over to the table, inserted it into the dead man’s anus with a sure twist, and came out with a large piece of excrement.

“Now you see you don’t know how to wash a corpse?” he said. “You’d have buried him with that filth inside him!”

Grandfather’s brother gave a violent shudder and burst into tears.

The funeral took place on a sultry summer day. There can be nothing so sad or solemn as a funeral in the heat of the day and the rays of the sun, when the vapor makes people and things appear a bit larger than life, as if under a magnifying glass. What else can people do on such a day but bury their dead?

In the torpid, searing air their every move seemed to have been made hundreds of years before — the same as then, the same as always. The grave sucked the dead man into its dark, damp cold, which doubtless imbued him with supreme happiness. Then lumps of earth fell heavy on the coffin and the tired, sweaty men in dusty coats went on living the only lives they knew.

Several days after Grandfather’s funeral Paul Weber was married. Though a bit tired at the wedding, he kept smiling a sad, forced smile containing the seeds of devotion. His bare, red neck twisted and turned in the wing collar, his trousers seemed longer and tighter than usual, and the tails of his frock coat dangled like a clown’s. All the absurd gravity of the ceremony was concentrated in his person. I represented a more secret, intimate absurdity: I was the little clown nobody sees.

The bride was waiting in an armchair on a dais in the back of the room. Her face was covered with a white veil, and it was not until she came back from the canopy and lifted it that I saw the face for the first time.

The tables for the guests stretched in a series of white patches along the courtyard; all the town’s vagabonds had gathered at the gate; the sky was an indecisive hue of clay yellow; the pale maids of honor in dresses of blue and pink silk were handing out small sweets wrapped in silver: it was a wedding. The musicians scraped away at a sad old waltz, which occasionally swelled and grew and seemed to be coming to life but then lost the momentum of its melody and grew thinner and thinner until in the end all that remained was the metallic thread of the single flute.

It was a terribly long day, too long for a wedding. I was the only one at the far end of the courtyard near the hotel stables. I observed the proceedings from afar, standing on a mound and surrounded by chickens as they pecked for grains among the blades of grass and the strains of the sad waltz from the courtyard intermingling with the fresh smell of wet hay from the stables. From my post I could see Paul talking to Ozy. He must have told him a joke or some such thing, because the invalid began to laugh and, turning purple, all but choked under the bulging dickey of his starched shirt.

Night finally came. The few trees in the courtyard sank into darkness, scooping a mysterious, invisible park out of the gloom. The bride was still standing next to Paul on the dais of the dimly lit hall, cocking her head in his direction whenever he whispered something to her and yielding her soft arm to his fingers, which caressed it along the white gloves.

Several cakes were brought out. The most impressive was a monumental castle complete with pink-frosting ramparts and buttresses. The sugar florets topping it all gave off a dull, oily glow. Each time a knife pierced a rose, it crunched under the blade, breaking into dozens of tiny splinters like glass. The old ladies made a majestic promenade of their velvet dresses and the jewels on their breasts and fingers, advancing slowly and solemnly like walking altars. Little by little the room clouded over and everything I saw looked fuzzier and more and more absurd. . I fell asleep looking down at my burning red hands.

The room in which I woke up smelled of acrid smoke. A mirror opposite the window reflected the dawn as a perfect square of blue silk. I was lying on an unmade bed strewn with pillows. There was a dim noise in my ears like the whoosh in a shell, and wisps of smoke still floated through the air. When I tried to sit up, my hand slipped into one of the bed’s wooden sculptures, some of which seemed made for my fingers, while others stuck out from the bed, growing in the pale light of the room and burrowing into endless crenels, holes, and jagged patches of mildew. In a few moments the room filled with all sorts of curlicues, which, though incorporeal, I had to push through to make my way to the door. My head still throbbed with the whoosh, which all the caves in the air now seemed to take up. The white light in the corridor gave my cheeks a bracing wash and roused me once and for all. I ran across a man in a long nightgown, who gave me a nasty scowl as if to reproach me for being dressed so early in the morning.

There was no one else present. The tables had remained in the courtyard, their spruce boards now exposed. The dawn was sullen and cold. The wind blew the colored chocolate wrappers through the deserted yard. How had Paul’s bride held her head? Had she leaned it on his shoulder? Some waxworks had female figures with a device that enabled them to bend their heads to one side and close their eyes.