Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

He searched for the most secure place possible in the room then, taking the interpreter’s advice, took the remaining money out of his coat lining, attached it to a string and stuffed it nice and deep between the bedsprings, folded the mattress back over it and smoothed out the bedclothes, checking from a variety of viewpoints, some standing, some squatting, to ensure that there should be nothing there to catch a stranger’s eye; and this being taken care of, he was ready to get on with other things, for he had decided that between five in the afternoon and three in the morning, when, the interpreter had warned him, the single telephone line would be unavailable for working on the computer, he would start exploring the town in order that he might have some idea of where things were in relation to where he was, and in what particular corner of the city he now found himself, or, to put it another way, to discover what he had achieved in picking the center of the world, New York, as the most appropriate setting for the execution of his plan to comprehend the eternal truth and die, which was why, he told the woman in the kitchen, he now had to orient himself in it by walking everywhere until he got to know the place, which he did on the day after he had bought the computer and started to learn to use it, shortly after five o’clock when he descended the stairs, left the house and started walking down the street, just a couple of hundred yards and back at first, then repeating the exercise several times, glancing over his shoulder to ensure that he would know the buildings again by sight and later, after a good hour had passed, venturing down as far as the subway on the corner of 159th and Washington Avenue, where he took a long time studying the subway map without daring to buy a token, board a train or explore any further that day, though he had gathered courage enough by the next to purchase a token and board the first available train, riding down as far as Times Square because the name had a familiar ring to it, then walking along Broadway until he was perfectly exhausted by the effort; and this is what he did, day after day, always returning either on the bus the interpreter had recommended or on the subway, the result being that after a week of these ever more intrepid ventures, he had begun to learn to live in the city and no longer felt a mortal fear of traveling or of making a purchase at the Vietnamese store on the corner, and, more importantly, was no longer fearful of each and every individual who happened to stand next to him on the bus or pass him in the street: and all this he learned and it made a genuine difference, though one thing hadn’t changed, not even after a week, and that was his high anxiety level, the anxiety, that is, of knowing that despite all he had so painstakingly learned he still understood nothing of it, and that, because of this, the intensity of his feelings had not abated, and that he was still in thrall to the state of mind he first experienced on that unforgettable first taxi ride, the feeling that, among all these enormous buildings, he should be seeing something, but that however he peered and strained his eyes, he was failing to see it, and he continued to feel this every moment of his various journeys from Times Square to the East Village, from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, in Central Park, downtown, Chinatown and Greenwich Village, and the feeling was gnawing away at him, so that whatever he looked at reminded him with a ferocious intensity of something else, but what that was he had no idea, not a solitary inkling, he told the woman who continued to stand silently with her back to him at the stove, cooking something in a gray saucepan, so that Korin had courage enough to talk to her but not to address her directly nor tactfully to compel her to turn around for once and say something herself, which meant he was restricted to talking to her, genuinely talking to her, on those regular occasions they met in the kitchen at noon, telling her anything that came to his mind, hoping in this way to discover a way of engaging her in conversation or understanding why she never spoke, for he felt instinctively drawn to her, more, at any rate, than to anyone else in the building, and it was plain from his daily noontime exertions that he was seeking to establish some favor with her, talking to her all the time, every noon, telling her about everything from his experiences with the computer to his feelings about skyscrapers, staring at her bent back by the stove, at the greasy hair hanging in bunches over her thin shoulders, at the straps dangling at the sides of the blue apron covering her bony hips, and watching how she used a dishtowel to lift the hot pan from the fire then vanish from the kitchen into her room without a word, her eyes averted, as if she were permanently frightened of something.

He had become quite a different person in America, Korin told her after a week, no longer the person he had been, by which he didn’t mean that something essential in him had been destroyed or mended, but that little details, which for him were not so little after all, his forgetfulness, for example, had utterly vanished after two days, that is if you can talk about forgetfulness vanishing like that, though in his case, said Korin, it really was a matter of vanishing, since he had noticed a couple of days ago that he really had stopped forgetting, that he actually remembered things that happened to him, they stayed in his head, and he no longer had to rummage through a mass of material to find whatever he had lost, though it was true, he said, that he had precious little material to rummage through, nevertheless he could now be sure of finding what he had lost, in fact he no longer had even to look, which hadn’t been the case before when he used to forget anything that happened by the next day, for now he had a perfect recollection of what had happened, where he had been and what he had seen, specific faces, particular stores, some buildings, they all came immediately to mind, and to what could he attribute this, said Korin, if not to America, where, the very air was probably different, and not only the air, but the water too for all he knew, but whatever it was, something was radically different, for he too was different, nor was his neck or shoulder giving him the trouble they had before at home, which must mean that the permanent state of anxiety to which he was prey must have diminished, so he could forget the anxiety about losing his head, and that was truly a relief for it left the way open for him to pursue his necessary goal, and he wondered whether he had told the young lady, Korin enquired in the kitchen, that the entire notion of America had, ultimately, come about as a result of his decision to put an end to his life, and while he was absolutely certain that he should do so he didn’t actually know what means to adopt to this purpose, for all he knew when he first formulated the idea was that he should quietly disappear from this world, collect his thoughts and vanish, nor did he think any different now really, since he wasn’t here to seek fame by devising some peculiarly ingenious way of disposing of himself, advertising himself as the unselfish self-sacrificing sort, the kind we see so many of nowadays, he was by no means one of them, no, that was the last thing on his mind, because what he was interested in was something altogether different, something — and here he recalled the terrible grace of fate that set these thoughts off in his head, and wondered how should he put it, then decided, he said, to put it like this — that from the moment when it was his luck to make the discovery of the manuscript he was no longer just a man determined to die, as until then he had had every right to believe, a fated figure, as the phrase has it, the sort of person who already has death in his heart, but someone who continues working, let us say, in his garden, watering, planting, digging, then suddenly discovers an object in the ground that catches his eye, a discoverer, you see, that’s how the young lady too should imagine it, said Korin, for that is what happened to him, for, from that time on, whatever happened it was all the same to the man working in his garden because the object that glimmered there before him had settled matters, and that’s just what had happened to him in a manner of speaking of course, in a manner of speaking, for he had discovered something in the records office where he had been working, a manuscript for which he could find no source, no provenance, no author, and what was strangest of all, Korin raised a warning finger, without a clear purpose, something that would never have a purpose, and therefore not the kind of manuscript he’d rush to show the director of the institution, though that is what he should have done, but one that made him do something an archivist should never do: he took it away, and by doing so he knew, knew in his bones, that from that moment on he had ceased being a true archivist, because by taking it he had become a common thief, the document being the one genuinely important item he had ever handled in all his years as an archivist, the one undeniable treasure that meant so much to him he felt he couldn’t rightly keep it to himself, as one kind of thief would, but, like a different kind of thief, had to let the whole world know of its existence, not the world of the present, he had decided, since that was wholly unfit to receive it, nor the world of the future since that would certainly be unfit, not even the world of the past which had long lost its dignity, but eternity: it was eternity that should receive the gift of this mysterious artifact, and that meant, as he realized, that he had to find a form appropriate to eternity, and it was following the conversation in the restaurant that the idea suddenly came to him, that he should lodge the manuscript among the millions of pieces of information stored by computers which, following the general loss of human memory, would become a momentary isle of eternity, and now it didn’t matter, he wanted most firmly to emphasize this, it really didn’t matter how long computers preserved it, the essential thing was, Korin explained to the woman in the kitchen, that the thing should be done just once, and that all the extraordinary mass of computers that had once been interconnected, or so he suspected, a suspicion confirmed by much subsequent thought on the matter, would, all together, have given birth to, produced between themselves, a space in the imagination that was related not only or exclusively to eternal truth, and that this was the right place in which to deposit the material he had found, since he believed, or that was the opinion he had arrived at, that once he connected one eternal object with the world of eternity it didn’t matter what happened next, it was all the same where he ended his life, whether it was in darkness, in the mire, Korin dropped his voice, on a footpath, by a canal or in a cold and empty room, it made no difference to him, nor did it matter how he chose to end it, with a gun or by some other means, the important thing was to begin and complete the task he had set himself, here at the center of the world, to pass on that which, if it didn’t sound too portentous to put it like this, had been bestowed on him, to plant this heartbreaking account, of which he could say nothing valuable at this stage since it would be on display on the Internet in any case, other than that, crudely speaking, it concerned an earth on which there were no more angels, that it was set in the theoretical heart of the world of ideas, and that once he had accomplished his mission, once he had finished, it didn’t matter where he ended up, whether that was in mire or in darkness.