Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

“We’ve already removed him, he’s in his coffin, we’ve been holding the funeral until you came to receive what he’s bequeathed you.”

“So what did he bequeath me?”

“He’s bequeathed you his face.”

“But which one, since he had two?”

“Oh,” she said, slightly offended, “you mustn’t choose. Take the one that’s there. You’ll make do.”

“But how am I supposed to take such a bequest with me?”

“We’ve already inquired about that. All you have to do is kiss him.”

At that very moment we ran into Fuld’s room. He was, in fact, lying in a coffin. It was an amazingly unwistful, unmoving sight. And everything happened so fast, like it was on fire. I leaned over and gave him a sort of kiss, like picking up a parcel forgotten in haste, and returned for in greater haste still.

And I galloped back out again, marveling only at how indifferent I was in my soul, and with a thought to nothing but my running.

I stopped in front of the building, as if this had been arranged, and in fact now the streets and roads, the city, the buildings and landscapes had broken into a canter. I stood there waiting for my building to run by. I already saw it from a distance. But the closer it was, the realer everything somehow became, and the spectacle of the world’s becoming-real — if I can put it that way — was quite thrilling, quite absorbing. Most absorbing of all, however, was the question of where that notion of becoming-real had emerged from within me, to whom everything past already seemed equally real, but I didn’t dwell at all on the question of its reality. “Is there something more real than reality?” I made quite a point of saying “than reality,” as opposed to “than an apparent reality.”

At last our building ran by — and verily, the convincingness of the phenomenal world reached such a level that there was no resisting it: the “it’s true” that I said to myself I said sort of in the way one probes the thing that is most beyond doubt — not to say the only thing beyond doubt — like saying, in certain instances, “I love.” — At last, then, our building ran by, it was morning, the porter’s wife was standing at the front door, she was shaking out the mat. I greeted her and walked past. She called after me:

“And where, may I ask, are you going?”

“How’s that?” I turned.

“I’m asking, where are you going?”

“But Mrs. — ,” and I kept walking.

“Joking aside,” she said after me. “Where are you going?”

So I took up the ironic joke and said with a bow:

“To Mr. — ’s,” and I said my own name.

“Mr. — is not at home,” she replied.

Under such circumstances, life is no plaything.

On top of that, at the last minute we learn that Fuld, whom I have not seen for several months now, has died.

(November 1929–March 1930–March 1931)

He had already covered such an infinitude that the one that lay before him was no cause for alarm. From the futility of the effort he’d expended he drew comfort for the futility to come. He was swimming through a subterranean tunnel and against a foul current. He was struggling with a courageous and resolute crawl, not against the flow — for it was a slow sewer — so much as against its, as though material, nastiness. The archway lowered so much in places that he had to immerse his head to swim through. Repulsive things touched his face. He was disgusted with himself and grew angry. After all, no one had instructed him to look after his own skull. Why, then, did he keep worrying about it? The only thing they’d directed him to do was to swim against this reeking stream; nothing more. He was supposed to be content with this. Like a laborer disabused of enthusiasm, he promised himself that next time he’d no longer worry about his head, and, what’s more, he was done with this work. For he hated his head, he knew it’s a workshop for manufacturing poisons to counter counterpoisons. But as soon as the lowered archway posed the next threat, he immersed his head again. He was somehow figuring out why, after all, even in this filth with no end in sight, he felt like remaining alive for as long as he had strength to. It was out of curiosity, which he despised. And the more futilely he checked it, the more he despised it: he was curious about what it could be, the twinkling point of light the size of a pinhead somewhere in the distance before him, this pinhead that seemed to have grown each time he surfaced, though he denied that it had really grown. But the curiosity was stronger than faith, stronger than loathing, and when he weighed it out he was compelled toward the bitter admission that, though he despised it, he could do nothing but swim, despite his spite. He got as far as denial: there’s no twinkling pinhead; he was swimming through darkness and into darkness. But hardly had he denied it than it grew markedly, and he inferred that it had grown so much merely because he had placed so much hope in its growth. One more powerful crawl, one more dive, which he so detested, just a little more, a little more effort (what’s this, against everything he has already overcome?), one more little half-stroke — oh, light!

Someone’s eyes have opened. Timidly at first. But then enough that, between the still half-caked lashes, a ray of light got through. The eyes, rolled back beneath their lids, tasted it. And having ascertained that it was a ray of light from the actual day, they smashed through the barriers. The emerging sun was throwing the bed into disarray. On the bed, a man. His eyes were open. You could see that they were longing for that brightness, that they were enchanted by it, that they clung to it greedily. You could also see that they were shyly, silently suspicious of it. Keen observers such as yourselves would miss neither that enthusiastic greed, nor that dusky suspicion. They would have discerned that it was an old suspicion, a suspicion that had been coddled, weaned on a subtle flaw and fattened on it; overfed on a flaw burrowed deep like a tapeworm. Keen observers such as yourselves would discern that that look says to the sun: “You’re cheating on me, too, because I love you.”

That’s you, the keen ones. He, however, is not keen. He has only joy and, for that reason, fear. But fear only smolders. In the meantime, all we have here is a roused sleeper who’s gained his sight. He’d gained it quite well, for the first thing he’d spotted was the king bird-of-paradise with the iridescent and alluringly curled tail. The broad-shouldered palm frond— upon which the bird is perched so lightly that it seems as if it were holding itself up — is aware of the lovely spiral of the bird-of-paradise’s tail and has grown beautiful for it, God knows how. That spiral’s musical loveliness pursues the neighboring bird along a pink liana; it also inspired the branch of “little hearts,” a vestige of the mercy (let us say, of the good fortune) that alighted upon the embarrassment of the artist who designed this wallpaper. There’s the bird-of-paradise, there’s the liana, there’s the branch of little hearts, but there are such throngs of them, and their relations are governed by a rhythm so inexorably regular, that a universe arises within the universe. The new, encouraging, personal, and exclusive universe of a man only just awakened. And it happens that disinterested gravitational laws had just then felt like pouring brightness into what was nothing more and nothing other than a metrical universe of birds-of-paradise, lianas, and little hearts. Everything else is still in non-being. The cheap wallpaper, however, is , significantly and unproblematically.

On the bed lies an isolated person, a nameless person. And rightly so, since his name is Shame, and that’s no name for a human being. But he doesn’t know yet what his name is, for he’s hardly woken up. That means that, regardless of the fact that he’s already forgotten the land he’s returning from, where people never have any shame, because the only thing they have there is the high-minded wisdom of animals and objects, he hasn’t yet thought back on himself. It’s no longer, and not yet, real; it’s the most beautiful moment he could ask of waking.