Magdalena Tulli: Moving Parts

Determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost, the narrator sighs and sets to. From the drawer of the nightstand he takes out some scraps of paper covered in handwriting. The writing is smudged and the text illegible. Water has dissolved the glue; nevertheless, out of the fragments with their torn edges it’s possible to assemble the shape of an envelope, like a jigsaw puzzle. Stamp and franks in the upper right-hand corner. And so it’s only an envelope. The letter is missing. The narrator never saw it. Addresses contribute little; the substance that was to move the story forward is lacking. Disappointed and angry, he pushes the torn pieces of paper aside. Yet one way or another he has been provided with nothing else, so he must reach for them again. Excessive damp has washed away the shapes of the letters; a magnifying glass merely enlarges their ambiguity. It lingers on the misshapen splotch of the letter F beginning the surname of the addressee, then moves over the short name of the sender, from the capital M to the point where it disappears in confusion and indistinctness beneath the imprint of a wet finger. One can be sure now that the addressee and the sender will appear again, willfully running rampant amid the scenery. Just a moment ago the narrator was counting on the story fading away of its own accord, like a lightbulb cut off from the electricity, or a car engine deprived of gasoline. But the stubborn letters M and F have achieved their end and have dragged the plot toward themselves; now there is no hope they will give up easily. The initials will not suffice, for they cannot be declined grammatically, and without this it won’t be possible to keep up with the characters. And so the narrator tries to decipher the rest of the sender’s name, the one that begins with M . It would probably have been simpler to read it from the circus posters, on which all the letters maintain their places in a row like trained animals. But the narrator hasn’t seen these posters either. And so he tries to make it out: Is it Mozhe, or Mozhet? The name looks to have been hauled from some out-of-the-way corner of Eastern Europe, from the sign-board of some pharmacy, barber shop, or grocer’s that hasn’t existed for a hundred years. Could the first homeland of these couple of syllables have been the Cyrillic script? The ending of the addressee’s name is much more clearly preserved. Accustomed for generations to the angularity of Gothic script, it can easily be imagined on the moss-covered headstones of a Protestant cemetery down a country lane. But the middle part can no longer be deciphered; at least the envelope will be of no help in this regard. The first names have become no more than ink blots; the shape of one of them recalls a circus tent, while the other looks more like a ship. The one thing that at this point seems more or less certain is that Mozhet’s and F-meier’s ancestors in their day shot at one another, trapped in damp trenches, the same ones that for peace of mind the narrator would rather pass over in silence. Unshaven and exhausted, they remained at their posts, living on hardtack and jam. Then their time came to an end, and all was for nothing. All the same it is not entirely out of the question that F-meier and Mozhet, who are as alike as two peas in a pod, are by a curious coincidence related. Blood becomes mixed beyond the broken front lines, when soldiers seek a woman’s warmth. After all, an argument against kinship cannot be the anonymous bullet that one of those ancestors fired almost a hundred years ago, and that may have struck the body of the other.

The narrator reaches for the bunch of keys now lying on the round side table. One of them will unlock a narrow door in the corner of the room that might have led to a bathroom, but in fact opens onto a dingy landing. Here, sure enough, the faded image of a gentleman appears on a further door, behind which one can be certain of a cracked urinal, white tiles and age-old cobwebs hanging from the ceiling; and opposite the door with the sign, a wire grille conceals the shaft of a freight elevator. Let us leave unspoken the inevitable question of whether the narrator avails himself of the urinal. A thick layer of dust covers all the surfaces; numerous tracks of the narrator’s shoes indicate that he has stood on the landing before, and has even paced back and forth across it. The elevator arrives squeaking and juddering and slowly comes to a halt with a deafening clatter. It’s enough to open the metal door with its cracked glass pane and take a step forward, and one is standing in the rickety cage. In the dim light of a dirty electric bulb a button can be chosen from which the number of the floor has worn right off. Now the elevator begins to descend, and along with it the sentence in which it appeared, and the next, and the one after that. If this handful of sentences were tied together with a decent length of rope, suspended from a pulley and lowered many floors down, from the narrator’s point of view the result would be the same. In the end he leaves the cage of the freight elevator, slamming the metal door behind him. He knows what to do in the darkness that surrounds him. Flicking on his cigarette lighter, he finds the light switch — and everything immediately resumes its place in the cold, quivering glow of neon lighting: forking passageways, their walls, ceilings, and floors. The walls are plastered in a slapdash manner, the ceilings low, the floors hidden beneath a dense coating of dust, which here and there has turned into mud. In places there are even puddles; drops of rust-colored water hang over them from the joints between pipes: When one drop falls, another instantly takes its place. The narrator looks unsurely down the different passageways, though in fact he has nothing to think about: Both floor and course are imposed upon him. Naturally, various routes are possible, given the innumerable combinations of floors and directions, which cause the heads of clueless narrators to spin. Those who are more worldly-wise realize that of all possible paths there is always only one that is accessible; the others are closed, and the bunch of keys rattling in one’s pocket most certainly does not include any that would open their locks. So nothing remains but to walk down the passageway before the automatic light switch turns off. At the end of the passageway the narrator will pass a pile of red fire extinguishers, no doubt past their expiration date, and with a long key he’ll open a room filled with old copies of the Financial Times piled high against sloping walls — this must be an attic. He won’t tarry there a moment longer than is needed to open a trapdoor in the floor. He climbs down a decrepit ladder and stumbles over a rubber ball lying in his way. The ball rolls down the stairs to the first floor, out onto the terrace and into the garden, with high, light bounces. From the top of the staircase it will be visible through a window, a patch of color against the grass. Through the window the narrator will see the central point of his story and its entire gold, green, and blue luster, focused in one happy place — a brightness that did not suffice for the less privileged days of the year, for the passageways moldering in shadow and confined between bars, for cramped recesses where colors darken with the same everyday grayness. The garden, then, in the middle of a warm summer. A green lawn and a sunny terrace beneath a blue sky. The air has been growing hotter since morning; in it the yellow blooms in the flower beds seem to glow with their own light till nightfall, when it grows completely dark, though only while the summer heat wave continues. Then their time comes to an end. This is the only flaw in the dazzling scenery. F-meier appears as its owner. His wedding ring still gleams on his finger. He leans against a garden chair, in a light-colored linen jacket that he can wear to work during the few short weeks of summer. He is smiling, but already looking at his watch; he’s just about to drive off in the car standing in the driveway. Mozhet or Mozhe, in a striped sailor T-shirt, is taking more coffee. He has no office he must go to; the morning belongs to him, today and every day, and this gives him an unimaginable advantage over F-meier. So he exercises his privileges while he still can. On one of the evenings mentioned in his contract it may suddenly transpire that he paid for them dearly. The time, clearly, is too early for a visit; Mozhet’s clothes are rather homely. It’s easy to figure out that he has been staying in the guest room upstairs. Nothing can be heard, yet certain words are said. They accompany the look that the woman exchanges with F-meier over the table. Her hair is dyed red; the highlights catch the sun. Smiling, she exchanges the same look with Mozhet; more words are uttered. Never mind the words — it’s obvious that nothing here depends on them. F-meier takes a packet of cigarettes from the table and looks around for his lighter, which the woman — his wife — finds under a newspaper. She throws it to him, and he catches it deftly in midair, puts it in his pocket and gives a bow of acknowledgment with which his slightly ironic necktie is in perfect harmony.