Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

“It can’t be anywhere but on the washbasin, and it’s not on the washbasin. It’s not here.”

She was, in her suspicion, as if on a chain, which she was tugging angrily, but she did not recoil.

Mr. Steel was reciting, “But this is an unpleasant business,” and he had faith in this as in an incantation that might put him on the right track.

“And what of the girls, then?” he ventured at last, suspicious, having determined beyond all doubt that they suspected him, “they were helping, after all.”

Out of the blue he noticed not only that he was no longer alone with Mr. and Mrs. Steel, but that he had not been noticing that he had not been alone with them for quite some time already. He learned this, and from this he coolly inferred that he was somehow not himself. And hard on its heels, there was already a second alarm: he recognized the innkeeper, he recognized the maidservants, the cook, Mrs. Steel’s sister, and several lodgers, and all of them distinctly; they were so conspicuously themselves that they were no longer in fact themselves; they were so disproportionately themselves that it had estranged him from them. Both the people and all the objects domesticated in the last forty-eight hours had been coated over, as though in a tight, translucent membrane. And the mayday rang out now for the third time, with the sudden authority of the light of day: it disagreed with the late hour. And the fourth notice: the thought-provoking memory of Tiemen sort of suddenly leveled off; it went ambiguous. . And hardly had it split in two like this than a shiver ran through him; that is, he discerned that he was keeping his left hand in his pants pocket, and he remembered that that’s where he felt the bracelet. .

All at once he was at the stairs, not knowing how it happened that they’d allowed him to get that far. The only thing he remembered — and backwards somehow — was that he had made a point of walking slowly, and that, despite some unmaterialized barking that unnerved his calves, this had worked out for him relatively well. So he was at the stairs and descending, one foot in front of the other. “Could I be whistling to myself?” He no longer remembered whether he had been whistling or not, but his right hand was now flying instinctively toward his lips to stop up his compromising mouth. “Whistling to yourself! What an idea! As if they hadn’t long since discovered that the only people who whistle to themselves are those who are afraid.” He turned around, the weight lifted from his shoulders. No one there. From upstairs, a hue and cry like knocked-down bowling pins, but it was derailed at the bend of the stairs and made it no further. On the stairs, no one; on the stairs, nothing. These stairs inspired such confidence — he was already on the last step, from which one had a view out to the yard. There, too, nothing but three hens pecking around: an existence somehow so rarified that the emptiness of the yard was overcome by it. The light had pressed close to its hour, as if you’d taken the smoking lamp back down: it was a natural twilight.

“Only to want, only to want,” he said to himself, walking slowly through the yard, and his raggedness was becoming whole, causing such metaphysical pleasure that he didn’t resist the casual temptation to attack it willfully (he knew it wouldn’t work out): “Only to want? But you never wanted. It happened. Happened. Impersonally. A moment ago you were still relishing how it wasn’t you who’d done it, that it merely happened.” — “But all the better, if it happened beyond me,” he countered obligingly, “it happened through me all the same. If I had considered. . who knows. . Deliberation is the enemy of action. If only Tiemen could see me! But there is something to that: gesture sets you free.”

The tables had already been set, but there was no one around. From the open kitchen you could hear butter frying; nothing more than your hearing told you there was no one in the kitchen, either. A sort of heartening security was wafting in from there. — The stream ran along the southern side of the yard like a hem. He knew that at this very moment it would already be pitch black, and that the water’s specific gravity had suddenly risen remarkably: material materializing — so seductive; black blackening — so tempting. He walked past the shed, which was open to the yard, past the defunct millhouse. There was an automobile parked there. Their automobile. It was parked on the threshing floor. An automobile on a threshing floor is lovely; a threshing floor beneath the tires of a powerful sports car is lovely. And one with the other is beautiful, like an incomprehensible, occult conciliation.

He stopped in at the shed. He penetrated the reproaching shadow. The awareness that he was not the one who had done something, so much as that through which something had happened, incarnated; actually, it had assumed an incarnation. It was standing next to him, it was struggling: it was stripping him, scrubbing him. Stripping him of function, scrubbing away his individuality. As a make-up artist does to an actor when he’s finished his role. It was a degradation, admirable; a degradation during which his chest unwittingly swelled. Not with pride, but with the certainty of a strange, unselfish freedom. He caught sight of it so clearly that he was dazzled by it, but with a bedazzlement he couldn’t tire of, that what merely is — and thus him, too — is nothing; being is only that which happens . — He felt the bracelet in his pocket; he withdrew his hand. What had he actually stolen? Is it valuable? Is it plunder? It matters little. He hadn’t looked, and he wouldn’t. He narrowed his eyes, he let the bracelet fall; with his foot he felt that it had dropped next to the running board. He turned, looked around; over the empty yard the last flakes of mica swept up that evening were twinkling, there was quiet all around. He went out, sat down at the table, turned to his reading. He read for a while, then clapped: “What about supper?” — –

But hold on, hold on, something’s happening. Let’s get our wits about us, let’s not lose control. There had been euphoria here not long ago: he was becoming absorbed by it, he was flailing around in it. It had been like this (he showed how much of it there was), now its level had dropped a bit. Oh, delight that is starting to drain away, you’ll know it in an instant; we’re as sensitive to it as to a lukewarm bath that is likewise draining away. Fine. Suddenly things are a little less fine by him than they’d only just been. Why? And above all: why had it been so fine by him a moment ago? Why, because he was reveling in his reminiscence of yesterday, “when he had triumphed over the innkeeper and the Steels.” When he had triumphed so gloriously over his slanderers. He reminisced about it and saw it. He reminisced about it and saw it precisely, as starkly as if he were looking through the untinted crystal of the beatitude he’d attained. And the thing he was reminiscing about so precisely corresponded with what he was simultaneously seeing so starkly. It corresponded so accurately that it aroused a tranquil, calculating delight. Aha! — he’d just said it: he saw as though through an untinted crystal, and this crystal immediately — how to express this? — became sort of smoky. That’s not it; that doesn’t put it quite right. Not like the starkness had been blurred; no; more like the covering had been shifted. Yes, the memory of the beatified yesterday and its optical transcript had split apart somehow, just like an inscription beneath birefractive calcite. That’s why the bath flows with delight — hee hee! But where that birefraction came from, which is waxing so much that between the memory and its vision there’s now even a — — but of course! These are the meadow and the overgrown banks of the stream and the alder groves, from which several village rooftops peer out. .