Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

If he were to describe their reaction, Korin ventured, simply as indescribable , it would be only an overused, hackneyed form of speech that the young lady should not take literally, for the manuscript was particularly sensitive and precise on the subject of Kasser’s disappointment, dealing with it in great detail, and not only with that but with the whole morning after the exchange with the driver, at the conclusion of which they understood, not without considerable difficulty, that one purpose of the dawn message was to let them know that Mastemann did not envisage continuing the journey with them — and this was the point, explained Korin, this sensitivity, this refined eye, this proliferation of precise detail, the way the manuscript had suddenly become extremely precise , as a result of which an even stranger situation confronted him, for now, because of the valedictory at the end of the third chapter, it wasn’t events at the inn at Padua following the appearance of the peculiarly well-prepared driver with his peculiar mission that he wanted to tell her about, but the description and its extraordinary quality, in other words not about how, having understood the matter, Kasser and his companions themselves considered the idea of continuing their journey with Mastemann to be out of the question, since according to the thirteenth part of the message the road to Venice that they had so desired to take, either with Mastemann or with anyone else, meant nothing to them now, not about that but about all those apparently insignificant events and movements that had now become extremely important, or to put it as simply as he could, said Korin to the woman in an effort to clear the matter up, it was as if the manuscript had suddenly recoiled in shock, surveyed the scene and registered every person, object, condition, relationship and circumstance individually while utterly blurring the distinction between significance and insignificance, dissolving it, annihilating it: for while events of obvious significance continued to pile up, such as that Kasser and his companions continued to sit at the table facing the driver until he rose, bowed and left to start preparations for the departure of the carriage, to secure the luggage, to check the straps and examine the axles, following this, if such a thing was at all possible, the narration focused entirely on minute particulars of utter apparent insignificance such as the effect of the sunlight as it poured through the window, the objects it illuminated and the objects it left in shadow, the sound of the dogs and the quality of their barking, their appearance, their numbers and how they fell silent, on what the servants were doing in the rooms upstairs and throughout the whole house right down to the cellars, on what the wine left in the jug from the previous night tasted like, all this, the important and the unimportant, the essential and the inessential , catalogued indiscriminately together, next to each other, one above another, the lot building up into a single mass whose task it was to represent a condition, the essence of which was that there was literally nothing negligible in the facts that comprised it — and this, basically, was the only way that he could give her some idea, said Korin, of the fundamental change that overcame the manuscript, while all the time the reader, Korin raised his voice, carried on without noticing how he had come to accept and realize Kasser’s disappointment and bitterness, though it was only by registering this disappointment and bitterness that he could foresee what still lay ahead, for of course, much still did lie ahead, he said, the chapter leading to Venice would not abandon its readers at this point, only once Mastemann himself appeared at the turn of the stairs wearing a long dark-blue velvet cloak, his face stiff and ashen, and marched down to the ground floor, dropped a few ducats in the palm of the bowing landlord, then, without casting a glance at the travelers’ table, left the building, got into the carriage and galloped off along the bank of the Brenta while they remained at the table, and once the innkeeper came and placed a small white canvas package in front of them, explaining that the noble gentleman from Trento had commanded him to pass this on, after his departure, to the man they said was wounded, and once they opened the package and established the fact that what it contained was the finest powdered zinc for the healing of wounds, only once that had been recounted did the third chapter end, said Korin standing up, preparing to return to his room, with this mysterious gesture of Mastemann’s, then with their own settling of bills with the landlord, and, he hesitated in the doorway, with their farewells to him as they stepped through the gate into the brilliant morning light.

All is of equal gravity, everything equally urgent, said Korin to the woman at noon the next day, no longer concealing the fact that something had happened to him and that he was on the edge of despair, not sitting down in his accustomed chair but walking up and down in the kitchen, declaring that either it was all nonsense, all of it, that is to say everything he was thinking and doing here, or that he had reached a critical point and was on the threshold of some decisive perception, then he rushed back into his room and for several days did not appear at all, not in the morning, not at five, not even in the evening, so on the third day it was up to the interpreter’s lover to open his door and with an anxious look on her face enquire, It’s oil right? or Okay? for nothing like this had happened before — not even to stick his head out of the door, for after all anything might have happened, but Korin answered with a simple, Yes, it’s all right, rose from the bed where he was lying fully dressed, smiled at the woman, then, in an entirely new and relaxed manner, told her that he would spend one more day thinking, but tomorrow, about eleven or so, he would appear in the kitchen again and tell her everything that had happened, but that wouldn’t be until tomorrow, having said which he practically pushed the woman out of the room, repeating, “about eleven,” and “most certainly,” then the lock clicked shut as he closed the door behind her.

Well then, all is of equal gravity, everything equally urgent , Korin declared the next day at precisely eleven o’clock, taking a long time to pronounce the words and holding his silence for a good while, at the end of which silence, having said all he had to say, he simply repeated, significantly: Equal, young lady, and of the utmost importance.

They took the wardrobe down first, the big one they used for clothes in the back room, and it wasn’t clear for some time why they were doing so, who had sent them or at first what they wanted, but they went about it, gripping their caps in their hands, gabbling away in a completely incomprehensible pigeon English, showing the woman a piece of paper with the interpreter’s signature on it then pushing their way into the apartment and getting to work at something that seemed to mean nothing in particular, tramping up and down through the rooms, hemming and hawing, taking the odd measurement, nudging to one side any object that happened to be in their way, in other words clearly taking stock, making lists, arranging the contents of the apartment — from the refrigerator to the dishcloth, the paper lampshade to the blankets used for curtains — into a sort of order, stringing the items together on some invisible thread then classifying them by some specific criterion, but betraying nothing about that criterion, assuming it was known to them, so that, by the end, with an ostentatious look at the clock and a your-obedient-servant look at the inhabitants, all four of them sat down on the kitchen floor and started eating their breakfasts, while both the frightened woman shrinking into the background, and Korin who had been roused from his work at the computer and was now staring this way and that wide-eyed, were too startled to say a word, both remaining in their original states, the first of frightened confusion, the second of idiotically gaping, the interpreter being nowhere to be found and therefore unable to offer an explanation; and nor was he available the next day, so even though they grasped the fact that he must have consented to the process they had not the foggiest idea why the four men, having finished their breakfast, mumbling away in their incomprehensible mother tongue and throwing the odd word at them, began removing all the movable objects in the apartment and loading them onto a truck waiting outside the house: the gas-fire, the kitchen table, the sewing machine, everything down to the last cracked salt cellar, in other words systematically removing every last item from the apartment; nor did they understand the next morning, after the men had ruthlessly taken away the beds they had left the night before, what they wanted when they rang the bell again and threw a huge roll of tape made of some synthetic material down in the corner, and, screwing their caps up in their hands, chorused a brief morning , then continued the previous day’s nightmarish activity, but this time in reverse, removing from the truck parked in front of the block countless numbers of wooden and cardboard boxes, among them certain heavy large items they could only manage between two or even occasionally four of them, using straps, dragging them upstairs for hours on end so that by noon the containers had piled up head high and there was nowhere to lie or sit or even move much, and the interpreter’s lover and Korin stood beside each other, squeezed into a corner of the kitchen, staring at the extraordinary upheaval until, at about four o’clock, the men departed and suddenly there was silence in the apartment, at which point, seeking an explanation, they began tentatively to open the boxes.