Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

They were waiting by the shrine to Mercury, about a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards from the Porta Appia, Bengazza sitting down, Falke standing and Toót with his right foot on a stone, his arms folded and propped on his knee — nothing else happening, the very image of expectancy— expectancy in the heart of things , said Korin, for when the text was examined in greater detail it seemed that time had ceased and history itself had come to an end, so whatever appeared in those huge inflated sentences, whatever new element entered them, none of it led anywhere or prepared the way for anything, it was neither preamble nor closure, neither cause nor effect, simply one glimpsed element of a picture moving at unprecedented speed, a detail, a cell, a chunk, a working part of an indescribably complex whole that stood immobile in those gigantic sentences, to put it another way, said Korin, if he was not mistaken — and he did not wish to mislead — the sixth chapter was ultimately nothing but an enormous inventory, there was no other way to describe it, and the contradictions in it had, from beginning to end, always unnerved him, for what was he to do with those mutually exclusive statements, that were both true yet impossible, and no, no, no he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere with it yet that’s how it was, he said with a slight smile, the three of them standing there without Kasser, at one end of the Via Appia, watching the road as it approached them from the south, and, as they stand there, the monstrous inventory begins, from Roma Quadrata to the Temple of Vesta, from the Via Sacra to Aqua Claudia, and in one way it really does work, but in another, said Korin, his eyes beginning to burn, it really doesn’t, it really does not work at all.

He got up, left the room, then returned a moment later with a big wad of paper, sat down beside the woman, picked up the manuscript and searched through it for a while, then, begging her pardon for just this once having to have the text in front of him, chose a few pages, glancing over them and continued from where he had left off last time, at Rome, and how the road to Rome was filled with slaves, the libertus and the tenuirs , with makers of staircases and makers of women’s shoes, with smelters of copper, blowers of glass, with bakers and workers at brick ovens, with Pisan weavers of wool and potters from Arretium, with tanners, barbers, quack-doctors, water-bearers, knights, senators, and fast on their heels, accenti, viators, praeca and librarii , then ludimagisteri, grammatici and rhetors, flower-sellers, capsarii and pastry-cooks, followed by innkeepers, gladiators, pilgrims and, bringing up the rear, delators , with libitinarii, vespiilons and dissignatori all coming their way, or rather they had come their way for they were no longer actually coming, said Bengazza looking up the deserted road, while Falke agreed, saying no, because there’s no Farum , no Palatinus , no Capital , no Campus Martius , nor is there a Saepta , an Emporium on the banks of the Tiber, no gorgeous Harti Caesaris , no Camitum and no Cura , nor is there an Arx, a Tabularium, a Regia and no shrine of Cybele ; no more marvelous temples such as those of Saturnus or Augustus, or Jupiter or Diana, for grass covers the Calasseum and the Pantheon too; nor is there a Senate to bring in laws, nor is there a Caesar in place, and so on and so forth ad infinitum , Korin explained; they just went on saying these things, one picking up where the other left off, the words pouring from them, words about the immeasurable quantity of gifts the earth had bestowed on them, for it brought forth corn, continued Toót, and it gave us firewood and stump-wood by way of the Vicus Materarius and honey, fruits, flowers and precious stones by way of the Via Sacra , cattle for the Forum Baarium , and swine for the Farum Suarium , fishes for the Piscatarium , vegetables for the Halitorium , and oil, wine, papyrus and herbs to the foot of Aventinus and the banks of the Tiber, but there is no incentive for this infinite store of earthly goods to flow in our direction, Bengazza took over, for there is no more life, no more festival, and never again will there be chariot races, or Saturnalia , for Ceres and Flora are forgotten; and there is no Ludi Ramani to organize, nor Ludi Victariae Sullanae either, for the baths are in ruins, the thermals at Caracalla and Diacletians are wrecks, and the pipes to carry the water are dry, dry as the Aqua Appia , empty as the Aqua Marcia , and who cares, said Toót, where Catullus, or Cicero or Augustus once lived, and who cares where those vast, imposing, peerless palaces used to stand or what wine they used to drink there, the Falernian , the Massilion , the Chiasi and the Aquileian , it’s all the same now, no longer interesting; they no longer exist, no longer flow, nor is there any reason for them to, and that’s the mad way it goes on from page to page, said Korin, leafing through a little helplessly, and he, of course, he added, was quite incapable of conveying the tight discipline that drove the whole thing, since it wasn’t just a case of one thing after another, because, he should explain, alongside the inventory there was a sense of a thousand other incidental details, for, say a man reading about what the cisiarii were doing with their coaches between the Farum Baarium and the Caracalla Thermae , or some guards closing the gate — the iron bars and the wooden panels — at the Parta , then, for example, a pile of ceramic figures in relief glittering between the Aquae , the Saturnaliae and the Holitorium , and the dust settling on the leaves of cypresses, pines, acanthus and mulberry bushes on either side of the Via Appia, and, yes, that’s precisely it, sighed Korin, details all and yet all part of a single thing, some cipher engraved in the heart of each long list, so you see, young lady, it isn’t just a simple sequence, a row of items on a list, say, of the crowds flowing into Rome, followed by, let us say, the dust on the cypresses and then an endless catalogue of the goods arriving at their depots, and then, for example the cisiarii , no, it’s not that, but the fact that these are all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you, so you begin with one thing, but then a second thing comes along and then a third, and then the sentence returns to the first thing again, and so on, so the reader’s hopes are continually raised, said Korin glancing at the interpreter’s lover, so that he thinks he has got some kind of hold on the text, believe me when I say, as I said before, he said, that the whole thing is unreadable, insane!!! and Korin trusted that the young lady understood by now that the whole thing was extraordinarily beautiful, and in fact moved him to an extraordinary degree every time he read through it, moved him deeply, until, about three or so days ago he got to this sixth chapter, until he arrived here, just a few days ago as he was typing up, by which time he had believed that it was finished, that the whole thing was doomed to remain obscure, when, ah yes, then, said Korin, his eyes shining, having typed the first few sentences of the sixth chapter, the manuscript — and there was no other way to put it — opened up before him, for how else could it have been that three or so days earlier he simply found himself with an open door in front of him, and that, wholly unexpectedly, after so much reading, astonishment, effort and agony, he should understand it, and it was as if the room were suddenly filled with a blinding light, and he leapt off the bed into the light and started walking up and down in his excitement, and he kept leaping and walking and understood everything.