Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

“Eh?” says Mr. Steel.

“Nothing. It’s not here.”

And he runs around like a lapdog through his own filth.

He had obeyed. Up to this point, only like a Doubting Thomas. Maybe they were merely playing with him? But a fleeting, circling glance was enough to set him straight: “No, they’re not playing. This is for real.” — But was it possible that they were doing a poor job of their search? Might they have skipped some pocket? — He started digging around himself. Feverishly. A sort of ticklish and unfamiliar delight was passing through him like an inductive current. He understood: he was infected; he now suspected himself. But he didn’t find it, either, and the current as if melted away. It left an emptiness, and for a long time nothing filled it in. This emptiness, as though a glass sphere: so thin-walled that it wasn’t actually there anymore either.

“What will invade me?” the emptiness frets.

And all of a sudden, a break, a catastrophe so unostentatious that it’s less a catastrophe than a previously agreed-upon change of antagonists, a rapid and smooth rending of something unseen. The third dimension now overwhelmed the flat, operetta-ish empire, and the confusion, the strangely logical confusion that had reigned within it till now, became cloudy with dust — as if it were a dream deferred, flushed with a bright, yet unilluminated, radiance. This was not merely a subjective impression; all the others, too, looked around, bewildered by this new reality; he saw it. This new reality? A dead deluge (as he’d caught the beginning of the storm not long ago, only when it had already been raging for a while, so too did he now come to know that the deep, nocturnal quiet which suddenly struck his fancy had been delighting him for a while already, before he was aware of it), and footsteps. And the footsteps in particular: for it was they that had awakened the new reality, it was growing behind them, it built itself up of its own accord from booming footfalls planted all in single strokes, like ashlars. And the steps, whose acoustic reality grew into that booming as though into their own super-imaginary reality, with these steps the imagery filled in with an actuality so convincing that everyone, without looking (it was pitch-black outside anyway), saw two uniformed men marching along the road, each with a rifle en bandoulière , that they had extinguished pipes, that a few minutes earlier they had still been talking about the aftergrass, but that now they were moving in casual silence, each along one edge and in such a way that it was as though they were miming a reunion with each odd step and a farewell with each even. You could hear that they were walking rather quickly, but this reality was also overgrown as if with its own esoteric actuality, and so to those listening it was like the gendarmes were sauntering, despite their ears telling them that they were walking rather quickly.

All at once he was left alone with the Steels. He realized this while seeing the innkeeper leave. As far as the rest were concerned, he was prepared to accept not that they had simply gone so much as that they had miraculously disappeared. Mr. Steel was walking around the room and fiddling with keys. Mrs. Steel was seated, on the alert, and something about her hand at rest, caught on her necklace (but for that the hand would have fallen into her lap), recalled how a short time before it had still been fiddling with the necklace. Someone said “the lot of you!” — He was certain that someone said “the lot of you,” yet he doubted that he had actually heard it, too. He had started to suspect himself (as to whether he had said “the lot of you”), but he couldn’t be sure. But surely “the lot of you” had been spoken, for it was only for that reason that Mr. Steel came to a halt, and it was only for that reason as well that the hand of Mrs. Steel awoke. Nothing more. — He’s mistaken: there was something else after all: those steps outside had stopped. If he had anticipated that the night’s quiet would set in as a consequence of their sudden stopping — still more hollow before it had set in, while those steps resounded within it as though in a baby’s rattle — he would have been disappointed. If he had anticipated that the steps in the baby’s rattle would be replaced by specific, coarsely processed, and incomprehensible “voices in the night,” he would have been no less disappointed. It just happened that he anticipated the very thing that happened: the steps stopped as though smothered by the rhythmic whisper of the voices, which he heard not so much through them alone, but through the punctuation provided by the trees, which were drizzling.

Then the footsteps again, but this time on the stairs. They were the footsteps of a single person, but already upon the first listen they were the footsteps from one of that pair. Because they lacked the comrades’ syncopated procession, they sounded hard and impoverished. A gendarme came with them, ascending compulsorily and treading like a seaman. So too, in fact, did he enter. He was projecting, God knows how, that he already knew; he was even projecting that he knew this as well: “. . only we found nothing, neither in his room, nor on him.” It was clear as day that the gendarme coming in was of the “called-for-no-reason-whatever” variety, but this gendarme, deprived of magic, went right up to our man with an official, overcast air.

“So it’s you then, is it? Your papers.”

He felt a dry ache on his calf as if from a chop of the hand.

“Officer. .”

“Your papers.”

He knew where they were — they were in order — he dug around in his scattered things, and all at once he sees. He sees some straightforward, simple, definite thing that was liberating itself from something else, and what it was liberating itself from was, by chance, the very nostalgia for something straightforward, simple, definite, the nostalgia that dwelled within him without his actually being aware of it till now. A peculiar, liberating look; a look/repose. — He stared again, still, he felt he had to tilt his head to see better, to revel in this pattern the way he should, and here, look: he sees that he’s guilty. — He sees that he hasn’t pilfered the bracelet; he sees that he has evaded the snares, all the snares; he sees that nothing more can happen to him ; in particular, he sees that he is guilty. But it isn’t enough for him to see that he is guilty. He’s searching for a why. He looks still closer. Might he spot that why as well? And, in fact, he has already found it: he sees that he is guilty for just the relief of the certainty that nothing more can happen to him.

He stood with his back turned away, but the new, mute breakdown commanded by the affair at his back entered with such pussyfooting brutality that he got wind of it even without seeing how deeply it had deformed faces, things, and atmosphere. He knew this breakdown, in fact, still sooner than its cause, that is, it was the voice that shot from the yard and fell immediately at his feet.

“It’s been found! It’s been found!”

How quickly it happened then: The person bringing the bracelet had already run in (“In the shed. — Under the running board of the automobile.” — “It must have slipped,” a gendarme’s ill-tempered baritone added authoritatively), but our fellow had not, as yet, turned from the dresser. He overheard some strange, shrill shouting (this time he didn’t search long for its source: he immediately knew that it was him), in which he found the words: “And you had the nerve. .,” and he found them right alongside his cool surprise that he was standing right next to Mr. Steel, not knowing how so sudden, so close.

Afterwards he remembers it better: