Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

He gazed vacantly for a long time, not saying a word, then took a deep breath indicating that he would close the account for the day, and glanced over at the woman, but for her the story had been finished some time ago and she was leaning back against the wall behind the bed, her head having dropped forward, her hair across her face, fast asleep, and Korin hadn’t noticed until now, at the end, that she had had enough of the story, and since there was no need to take elaborate leave he rose carefully from the bed and left the room on tiptoe, returning after a moment’s thought, to look out for a piece of rumpled bedding, an eiderdown left behind for them by the movers, and covered the woman with it, then went to his room and, fully dressed, lay down on his own bed but couldn’t sleep for a long time, and when he did fall asleep it was in an instant so he had no time to undress or draw the blanket over him, the result of which was that he woke the same way the next morning, fully clothed, his whole body shivering, in the dark, and stood at the window gazing at the vaguely glimmering roofs, rubbing his limbs to warm himself, then sat down on the bed again, turned on the laptop, entered the password, checked that everything was still there on his home page, that he hadn’t made any mistakes, any miscellaneous errors, and found no error, so, after performing the few ritual strokes demanded by the format he looked to see the first few sentences of the manuscript on the screen, then turned the computer off, closed it and waited for the eviction to begin, the eviction he said, though it wasn’t an eviction that got under way, he said later, but rather a moving in, if he might put it that way, for moving in was what it most resembled, since boxes and packages kept arriving as he stood in the corner of the kitchen by the door with the woman beside him, gawping at the furious activity of the four movers, the head of the household, the interpreter being nowhere in sight, utterly vanished, as if the ground had swallowed him, and so the movers carried on shifting their endless boxes and packages until they covered every inch of available space, at which point the four workmen got the woman to sign another piece of paper then cleared off while they remained standing by the table in the kitchen staring at the upheaval, understanding nothing, until the woman eventually took the nearest package, tentatively opened it, tore the wrapping paper and discovered a microwave oven; and so she continued through other packages, one after another, Korin joining in and unwrapping, using his hands or else a knife, whatever served the purpose, uncovering a refrigerator, he said, a table, a chandelier, a carpet, a set of cutlery, a bathtub, some saucepans, a hair-dryer, and so on until they were done, the interpreter’s lover walking up and down among the vast gallery of items, treading over mounds of wrapping paper, wringing her hands and darting panicky glances at Korin who did not respond but carried on walking up and down himself, stopping every so often to lean down, examine a chair, a pair of curtains, or some bathroom taps, checking that they really were chairs, curtains and bathroom taps, then went over to the front door where the workmen had left that purple polyester fabric, opened it up, examined it, and read aloud the writing on it saying start over again , and said to himself, this is an enormous length of tape, perhaps it is some sort of game, or prize, since everything was tied round with it, but his remarks meant nothing to the woman who continued marching up and down in the chaos, and this went on until they were both worn out and the woman sat down on the bed and Korin settled beside her as he had done the day before, for it was exactly the same, just as mysterious and worrying as it had been the previous night, or at least, as Korin explained much later, as far as he could judge from the interpreter’s lover’s look of deep anxiety, which was why everything went exactly the same as the night before, the woman leaning back against the wall behind the bed, casting frequent glances at the open door through which she could see the entrance, leafing through the same magazine full of advertisements, while Korin, in an attempt to divert her attention, picked up the story where he had left off last night, for all was ready, he announced, for the last act, the finale, the ending, and this was the important moment when he could reveal what was hidden there, to tell her about the realization that changed everything, the realization that made him alter all his plans and was, for him, a moment of dizzying enlightenment.

There is an order in the sentences: words, punctuation, periods, commas all in place, said Korin, and yet, and he began swiveling his head again, the events that follow in the last chapter may be simply characterized as a series of collapses— collapse, collapse and collapse —for the sentences seemed to have lost their reason, not just growing ever longer and longer but galloping desperately onward in a harum-scarum scramble— crazy rush , said Korin — not that he was one of the those ur-Magyar fast-speaking types, said he, pointing to himself, he was certainly not one of them, though no doubt he had his own problems with gabbling and babbling, trying to say everything at once in a single sentence, in one enormous last deep breath, that he knew all too well, but what the sixth chapter did was something altogether different, for here language simply rebels and refuses to serve, will not do what it was created to do, for once a sentence begins it doesn’t want to stop, not because — let’s put it this way — because it is about to fall off the edge of the world, not in other words as a result of incompetence, but because it is driven by some crazy form of rigor, as if its antithesis — the short sentence — led straight to hell, as indeed it had tended to do with him, but not with the manuscript, for that was a matter of discipline, Korin explained to the woman, meaning that this enormous sentence comes along and starts to egg itself seeking ever more precision, ever more sensitivity, and in so doing it sets out a complete catalogue of the capabilities of language, all that language can do and all it can’t, and the words begin to fill the sentences, leaping over each other, piling up, but not as in some common road accident to be catapulted all over the place, but in a kind of jigsaw puzzle whose completion is of paramount importance, dense, concentrated, enclosed, a suffocating airless throng of pieces, that’s how they are, that’s right, Korin nodded, it was as if— all the sentences —each sentence was of vital importance, a matter of life and death , the whole developing and moving at a dizzy rate, and that which it relates, that which it constructs and supports and conjures is so complicated that, quite honestly, it becomes perfectly incomprehensible, Korin declared, and it’s better that it should be so, and in saying this he had revealed the most important thing about it, for the sixth chapter, set in Rome, was inhuman in its complexity, and that was the point, he said, for once this inhuman complexity sets in the manuscript becomes genuinely unreadable — unreadable and, at the same time, unrivalled in its beauty, which was what he had felt from the very beginning when, as he had already told her, he first discovered the manuscript in that far-off archive in distant Hungary, in the time before the deluge, when he had read it right through for the very first time, and he continued feeling this however often he reread it, still experiencing, even today, how incomprehensible and beautiful it was— inapprehensible and beautiful , as he put it — though the first time he attempted to understand it all he could make out was that they were standing at one of the gates of the walled city of Aurelianus, at the Porta Appia to be precise, already outside the city, perhaps some one hundred meters from the wall, gathered around a small stone shrine and looking down the road, the Via Appia, as it approaches from the south, straight as a die, and they are just standing there, nothing happening, in autumn or early spring, you couldn’t tell which, at the Porta Appia, the door of the Porta being lowered, and, for the moment, just two guards, their faces visible at the arrow-slits of the maneuver room, with the scrub of the plains full of trampled weed on either side of them, a well by the gate with a few cisiarii, or vehicles for hire, ranged about it, and that was all he could make out of the sixth chapter, apart from the fact, Korin made a point of pursing his lips, that everything, but everything, was terrifically complicated.