Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

They were proceeding along the West Side Elevated Highway, all four in apparently very good spirits, yesterday’s catrafuse , the Romanian for loot, being of immeasurable importance to them, a really big deal, they repeated to each other, slapping each other on the back, regularly breaking into laughter in the driver’s cab, the process of sneaking off with the bozgors ’ or that bozo’s gear, and rather than delivering it all to the agreed garbage dump squirreling it away at their pad behind Greenpoint, having gone much smoother than they had imagined it would, since the fake certificate of dumping went unnoticed by everyone, for who the hell would have noticed, since the catrafuse was of the kind that would have been chucked away in any case, and as for Mister Manea, their benefactor as they referred to him, he was unlikely to be interested in such things, or so they told each other, and now they had everything they needed, beds, tables, a wardrobe, chairs, stove and a mass of other little items, enough to furnish a complete apartment, which was nothing to be sneezed at, including coffee cups and shoe brushes, the lot, and all for a single dime that Vasile had thrown out of the cab in superstition as they were leaving, and to throw all this away at the dump, such a wardrobe, such a bed, such a table and chair and stove and coffee cup and shoe brush was out of the question, they had decided, no, they would neatly take it home and no one would have the faintest idea where that was, the point being to spirit the stuff away, and indeed why not do so in Greenpoint for that matter, and fit out the entire apartment of a completely vacant block overlooking Newtown Creek with it, their own apartment, not to put too fine a point on it, the one that, following their arrival in the New World a bare two weeks ago, Mister Manea had offered them for seven hundred and fifty dollars a week, that is to say one hundred and eighty-eight each, on top of the employment, a deal they immediately accepted the day before yesterday when they took stock of the load they were to carry, decided there and then, and began to haul the stuff downstairs, stuff that was to be their own, the tenants of the apartment counting for nothing, not for a moment, Mā bozgoroaicã curvā împutitã , they said with a courteous smile at the woman, and Dāte la o parte bosgor împutit , they said to the man with a sideways glance, and it would have been great to laugh out loud, but they didn’t, just carried on shifting the stuff and left the laughing till later in the evening, when fully loaded up they set off toward Greenpoint, and then again now, when having got over their day of excitement, wondering whether they would be apprehended but weren’t, nobody asking or checking anything, enquiring where they were really taking the catrafuse , no one at all, they could happily drive down the West Side Elevated Highway, leaving behind the horrendous traffic of Twelfth Avenue, in other words after, and only after all this, could they allow themselves to laugh as they sat in the driver’s cab and laughed, after which they left off laughing for a while and stared out of the window, their eyes bright and their mouths wide open with astonishment at the blaze of headlights, their hands in their laps, three pairs of hands with fingers that could not be straightened, thirty terminally crooked fingers from the endless fetching and carrying; three pairs in their laps and one pair, Vasile’s, turning the steering wheel now left, now right, as they cut their way through the unknown, terrifying core of the city that was the frozen center of all their hopes.

They’ve gone, said Korin to the woman on the evening of the first day of the upheaval, and looked terribly sad in the empty apartment, indeed more than sad: broken, defeated, exhausted, and, at the same time, highly tense, continually rubbing his neck, turning his head this way and that, going into his room then coming out again, and repeating this several times, clearly unable to stay in one place, in-out, in-out all the time, and whenever he reached the kitchen he looked through the gap left by the open door into the back room to see the woman sitting immobile on the bed, waiting, then he immediately looked away and moved on, until the evening when he finally plunged in and entered and sat down beside her but carefully so as to reassure her, not frighten her, nor did he talk about the subject he had first thought to talk about, about the discovery in the landing toilet, or about what they should do should they find themselves evicted, since, for his part, he took it for granted that this wasn’t about eviction, so no, he didn’t want to talk about such things, he explained to someone else later, but — and this would be genuinely reassuring — about the three long chapters he would now have to recount in one big go, though he would happily leave them aside or quickly pass over them and not mention them at all, but he couldn’t do this because then it would not be plain, clear, he said, that thing he had promised earlier to explain, and he couldn’t just skip over those three great chapters, three chapters , himself these last few days, nor could he simply say, OK, now everything is absolutely clear , the devil take it, and I won’t write up another line of it, though he might have said it because everything did in fact become absolutely clear , but he still had to finish it and not just abandon it like that, for an archivist does not leave things half done simply because he happens suddenly to have solved the puzzle, the rebus , for what actually happened was that he did in fact suddenly solve the puzzle, only once he had read through the entire material, that was true, but solve it he did and this led him to a comprehensive revaluation of his plans, in other words changed everything, though before he gets on to that, he declared, before he reveals what this is all about, he would say but one word: Corstopitum, that’s it, and just Gibraltar, and just Rome, for whatever happened he had to get back to where he had left off, for it was only the actual sequence of events as always, in every case, that made it possible to understand something, it being a matter solely and exclusively of Continuous Understanding , he said, seeking out the most appropriate phrase in his notebook, which is why he must refer back to Corstopitum and the terrible weather there, for it was truly terrible, this melancholy realm of eternal drizzle, terrible, an enormity , this constantly droning, bone-penetrating zero domain of icy wind, though more terrible still, he added, was the superhuman effort of the manuscript to provide descriptions of Corstopitum, followed by Gibraltar and Rome, for from this point on beyond the fourth chapter it was no longer a matter of the established practice of minutely cataloguing selected facts and circumstances, but of the ever deeper and ever more intensive exploration of selected facts and circumstances, which the young lady should try imagining, he told her, though what she was listening to with such nervous intensity was not him but to noises outside while he was leafing through a black and white notebook on his lap so that, for example, he noted the chapter began with four mentions of Segedunum, that is the say the mouth of the Tyne, and moved west to the fourth (!) manned passing place, then, from there on to the road that led to Corstopitum, four times in a row, four times the same thing (!), only filling it out every so often with an extra clause or so, but usually just with some adjective or adverb to drive the point home, as if somehow it were four distinct acts of breathing he wanted to describe, and with it of course everything concerning the journey through fog and rain that could be contained in four breaths, and thus repeating four times the experience of traveling the army communication route to the Heavenly Vallum, four times the story of how they changed horses at Condercum, of what first impression Kasser and his companions formed of the Vallum fortifications, of the forests and the military posts along the way, and of how they were stopped six miles before Vindolava where it was only the energetic intervention of the commander of the troop and the providing of a pass by the Praefectus Fabrum that persuaded the centurion in charge of the fort to allow them to continue toward Vindolava, though he could say the same of the Gibraltar episode where the repetition of the descriptions took a different form, such that it kept referring back to the extraordinarily precise picture it had drawn, and by continually keeping that picture in front of the reader it etched the image of the whole ineradicably on his mind, for example how, in the fifth section, it preserved the spectacle witnessed by Kasser and the others when, having reached Calpe by the mainland route they arrived at an enormous inn with the name of Albergueria and having settled into their rooms there they went downstairs to exchange some money and looked out of the window to catch a first glimpse of the spectral gathering of galleons, frigates and corvettes, naviguelas, caravelles and a variety of hulks below in the fog-bound bay: craft from Venice, Genoa, Castile, Brittany, Algeria, Florence, Vizcaya, Pisa, Lisbon and who knows how many others kinds of vessels in that absolute graveyard stillness, that immediately declared what happens when you get a spell of calma chicha , the sea becalmed, said Korin, among the dangerously narrow, fatal straits of Gibraltar, and this was what confronted the mind of the reader, such an image and other images like it, drawn in lines of ever greater depth, and confronted him too when, between the writing of the fourth and fifth chapters the beginnings of an understanding burst upon him and he realized that this was how he should express the matter, as regards what still remained to understand.