Gonçalo Tavares: Joseph Walser's Machine

Take notice: the city is still curious, indeed many citizens want to increase their nonessential knowledge while others are being gunned down in the middle of town squares that are right out in the open, not tucked away, out of sight. One of Joseph Walser’s neighbors enrolled in a foreign-language school yesterday. Adult men are seated at proper school desks, meekly learning the first syllables of a language that’s completely unknown to them. And it may not even be the language of the conquering army; sometimes school-learning is obscenely useless: a woman who lives on some street in the city began to learn an esoteric language, from a country with very few inhabitants and of little consequence. If you were to ask this woman why, she would say: curiosity.

Yes, the curiosity of women and men remains intact, which is almost magnificent, a thing of great value in wartime; like a vase that can’t be shattered, curiosity did not break; not curiosity about essential and urgent matters, but rather curiosity about things away in the remote corners of knowledge: more than one woman yesterday enrolled in a class on the consequences of the movements of heavenly bodies. Thus, in the lives of certain people, fighter jets are nothing more than mere obstacles in their field of vision, noisy particles of dust that block their view of what’s going on in the daily life of the cosmos. When you’re ashamed of what you’re not doing, news about events occuring close to you is taken in as if from a distance; one’s entire auditory faculty becomes engaged in the techniques of cynicism, merely feigning interest. There is no formula for indifference; there are many ways to survive, and neutrality is just one of them.

Nevertheless, two lovers kiss each other once more and decide not to put off the wedding. So long as your shadow still reproduces the image of your entire body on the ground, you can rest assured that you’re alive and whole.

Joseph Walser spent all day Sunday in his study, with the door locked, busy with his collection. A lot of Sundays were like that. The room belonged to him alone; he kept the only key.

Margha didn’t even know what was in there. She had the vague notion that her husband’s collection was made up of pieces of metal, but she never really understood. She didn’t ask about it. She didn’t dare go into her husband’s study and only as a last resort would she knock on the door.

“It’s my collection,” Joseph Walser would say, in his crudely simple way.

She had learned to respect her husband’s private domain: it was as though a highly conspicuous secret were being harbored there, as plain as day, in her own home. Joseph Walser was a capable, serious man, and it would be ridiculous for Margha to cause trouble over something that, while it was an obsession, was so harmless and inconsequential.

That room took the place of the bedroom for the children they never wanted to have; it was the nursery, or at least that’s what Margha called it. Joseph spent practically all his free time there, in that room, with the door locked.

“You came home late last night,” said Margha

“Yes,” responded Joseph Walser, “the game went late.”

After work on Tuesday, Joseph Walser didn’t go straight home. He had asked to leave work a little early and headed resolutely to the offices that housed the records of property owners throughout the city.

He had written the street number on a piece of paper, but quickly tore it up. He didn’t need it.

The house from which Joseph Walser saw his wife emerge was number 48 on Krumpfrot Street. He grabbed the list of addresses, telephone numbers, and names, and began to leaf through it. Dorlein Street, Kasch M. Street, Krumpbil Street, Krump Datsch Street, Krumpfrot Street.

Krumpfrot. There it was on the page. With the index finger of his right hand touching the page, he began to go down the page line by line, softly reading aloud the names:

26 Krumpfrot Street: Ortho Dudvik

38 Krumpfrot Street: Bother Blau

46 Krumpfrot Street: Blorghst Vrulbn

48 Krumpfrot Street: Klober Muller.

The game didn’t end as usual on that Saturday night at Fluzst’s house. Soon after Joseph Walser left, the dice stopped rolling. The men started talking about the war; the city was essentially occupied, and had been taken with ease. They mentioned the names of some of the people who’d been killed; others had fled. At one point Fluzst said:

“… a group that could work from here on the inside, like a network of saboteurs. Over time, little disturbances can have important consequences.”

The others remained silent. The door had been shut for some time, there was no chance that Clairie, Fluzst’s wife, could hear them.

“I don’t want my wife to know,” he had said.

There was a guilty silence between them all. Fluzst and Blukvelt were basically the only ones who spoke; the other two fellow players just listened. From time to time someone said: “This is dangerous.”

Fluzst was the one most engaged by the idea.

“We don’t need patience, what we really need is impatience, instigation. Planning and instigation.”

All across the city there was already a fascination with big weapons, with domination by force. Fascination with having an important master; people just feel safer when receiving big, forceful orders than when receiving tiny, weak ones.

“We’re braver when we receive forceful orders,” said one of the four men. “That’s true for most people.”

“We no longer even control our own speech,” said Fluzst. “Yesterday I was reprimanded in the middle of the street for saying a proverb. They said that type of language was inappropriate.”

“There are less phrases being used in the city, which is odd, because there are more people. People are becoming as afraid of mouths willing to speak as they are of the mouths of prostitutes who look ill,” someone added.

This absurd observation got a lot of laughs. They were all nervous.

The four men fell silent a number of times on this night, which never happened when they were playing. During one silent moment someone said:

“We’re missing Walser.”

“I don’t trust him,” replied Fluzst. “We’re not missing anybody.”

He came to work on time. He shook the strong hand of his boss, Klober Muller, with his own strong hand. They looked at each other for a few seconds before Joseph lowered his eyes and looked down at their hands, still engaged in the handshake. The handshake came to an end, as is the habit among the living. Walser was clearly uncomfortable. A few weeks had passed.

“My dear Joseph,” said Klober, “the gravediggers are working with different shovels, they’re increasing the usual speed of their movements, and in that way increasing the average speed of their tools, an innovation proper to these none-too-slow times, my friend. There’s a feeling that those big black plastic bags are heading our way, and many poets are already reading poems about them in dulcet voices — though some of them have already lost their legs. Existence itself, my dear Joseph, is ceasing to exist, which is startling, if you look at it from a certain perspective. The circle is shrinking toward its center until it is reduced to just a dot. Walser, my friend, don’t take this in the same way you might some trivial geometry lesson: everything that’s about to happen will not only be recorded in History books, in their well-documented pages with large photographs; everything that’s about to happen will also be inscribed upon the survivors, because there are always survivors, Walser, and it is in them, as shocking as this may seem, that death is most apparent. The dead die, it’s true, nothing new there. They’re buried, hidden from sight; they quickly disappear; but for the sentimental, disappearances are the most tolerable of events. Who is moved to compassion when faced with a disappearance, when faced with something that is no longer seen, when faced with the invisible? Only the insane are moved to compassion by the invisible, and you, my good sir — just like many other good citizens of this city — don’t want to be thought of as insane. Insanity is a very unpleasant thing, it doesn’t look good in a biography.