Magdalena Tulli - Dreams and Stones

In yet another place an excess of clay has accumulated. Every year after winter the apartment buildings subside into the miry earth. The lowest floors were the first to disappear. The inhabitants realized that there was no hope for them there and moved to suburban villas with ivy-covered turrets. In this way the swamp ceased forever to pose a threat to them. But it swallowed a living part of the city which — like rebellious tissue — began to grow downward. Hoists bring clay up to the surface to make room for successive floors. Apartments, stores, shops and parking garages wait to be occupied by those who are unable to find their place. Spent light bulbs burn there. Lathes without blades, sewing machines without needles and cranes without pulleys operate day and night.

The most dangerous emergencies cannot be eliminated, nor can further disasters be avoided. Yet the city will grow accustomed to anything. The sky of movable clouds drops lower every year, but till it starts to crush the roofs no one spares it a thought. It is not inconceivable that even the most important part of the machinery, that which turns the sky of fixed stars and above it the sky of suns and moons, is nothing but a pile of junk. It is not known exactly what it was made of or how. It may be that the plans are still stored in the archives, but there is no one who is able to decipher them. It can only be very roughly guessed which installations were set in motion overhead above the rooftops and which were put in underground. To this day some of those who mixed the mortar, carried the bricks and bent the pipes are still alive. But they know nothing except that in the beginning they labored hard and did not spare themselves. One or another of them can even show a hand missing fingers that were cut off by a chainsaw, the stump of a leg crushed by a block of stone, a scarred hole in the skull. They remember only themselves, in scraps of memories, scurrying about sun-drenched building sites in pants spattered with lime.

If they were to build the city again the main thoroughfares perhaps would run through the admissions room of a hospital, the halls of train stations would contain immense dormitories, and trams would drive along their tracks into the river. For there is no one here who could control the chaos of the countercity, no one who knows the laws that give truly accurate estimates, no one who knows how to prop the sky up, no one who could tell the bricklayers and architects what to do. There exists no knowledge better than ours, no building materials better than ours, and no way out better than the worst. The belief that the city could be different was not borne out. The juices that gave it life at the beginning of the season of vegetation have dried up. The choral songs have sounded their last and have fallen silent. No brick is passed any longer from hand to hand; the lenses of the twin-lens reflex cameras with which the sunny building sites were once photographed are covered with dust and have clouded over in dark drawers, useless because they no longer let in light. In these days of the world’s old age everyone here is alone, and everyone has their own city which showers them with crumbling plaster, dead leaves and the dust of worn-out words.

On cold sleepy mornings blood stops flowing in the veins, the eyes can barely see and people lack the strength to take the next step. Nurses, seamstresses, fitters and chauffeurs, barely alive, doze off on the stairs holding onto the banister. At times someone opens their eyes all of a sudden and begins to look around, finding nothing familiar anywhere and amazed at how close it is from the youth of the world to its old age. And they cannot understand where the mistakes of youth have gone to, the outbursts of feeling, the songs. What has become of the new path of life: Could it possibly have turned into this exhausting, steep, lonely, cobweb-strewn path up and down the stairs? Where is the joy of the parents whose infant sat up in the baby carriage for the first time one warm afternoon, now, all these years later, when everything is already known about advancements, promotions, accidents, divorces and funerals?

The work of creation would have remained incomplete had it not been rounded off with a flood. The countercity had long ago burst its dams. Like a stormy sea that in a single instant pours over the laboriously reclaimed polders, it inundated the entire city from its foundations to its rooftops. When did the leaks begin? No one remembers. It may have been in the first minute after construction began. The river that flows through the city, bearing shattered, glittering reflections of soaring bell towers and steep roofs, merges its waves with the stagnant green waters of memory. And both waters, the one and the other, dissolve like a single droplet in the sea in the black waters of oblivion. For the countercity no water is ever too green or too black. That bottomless ocean receives it all unconditionally, always and in any amount, to the last drop.

Some blame everything on the fine palace that stands in the center of the city. They say it is too tall and that its needle made the first scratch on the sky. Yet in the kitchens that can be seen from its highest floors, no one complains any longer. They are deserted, as if they had been emptied by the plague. At times in the night someone will pass through them and briefly turn on a light. Those who once believed that what is pure will be ever purer and later discovered that purity turns into dirt now rebel against the requirement of absolute impermeability. They whisper that nothing is dirty only when nothing is pure. They want to allow everything that for years with the greatest effort was removed beyond the dome of the sky to mingle with the substance of the city. They assert that if the desire for perfection is only abandoned, then permeability will cease forever to threaten us.

Then the upper and lower waters, once separated, will join together again; the upper waters will cease pouring down on roofs while the lower waters will cease washing away foundations. At that time too, calm will come to the great stormy ocean, on whose waves the sailors of brick-built ships fight for their lives and drown and sink to the bottom like stones, not knowing that life cannot be lost. Drowning sailors do not remember which port they were headed for. Relinquishing unrealistic goals, they can give themselves entirely to the waves and know relief. One way or another all of them — including those who have already come to rest on the bottom — will return safely home.

It is said that neither more beautiful dreams nor another easier life will be of any use to us. It may be that all we need is an even greater turmoil of ever more ardent desires, ever more troubling questions and ever more vapid answers, whose random selection like gambling without prizes brings only torment. Yet torment too cannot last forever: It always moves toward breaking point. There is hope that the glare from which the eye loses all ability to distinguish colors and shapes will turn into the banal image of a street corner, a sign above a store, lace curtains in a window: a sight from which nothing transpires. The uproar from which the ear loses all ability to distinguish sounds will be transformed into the mild silence of waking life, the same silence that endures inside stones. The crushing pressure of thoughts that make the head throb with pain will in the end reveal a light, transparent void.

May that void unfold inside every brick and permeate everything in the world: buildings, sun and stars, clouds in the sky, air in the lungs and the lungs themselves. Only then will the palm begin to fit the handle of the tool, the hat fit the head and the rib cage cease to separate the heart from the rest of the world. Then it will be easier to accept the obvious truth that the burden oppressing us weighs nothing at all. The city to which the tree of the world gave birth at the beginning of this story is not real, just like the tree and like us ourselves. But the life of stones, which has no care for the past or the future, existed and will continue to exist: a steadfast endurance free of any name.