Richard Weiner: The Game for Real

It was no different with my uninvited guests. They were strangers to me; they were estranged from me all at once, but not as much so as my own apartment, albeit still familiar and unaltered to my eyes. They were somehow more real than it was. They were strangers, unfamiliar, and yet theirs was an assigned unfamiliarity, promised; only I didn’t know “where to put them.”

And that pointless, telling game with the skirt, again and again! It was sort of like the rhythmic incantation of voiceless conversations. It was a measure; but this measure turned into gesture, and in turn the gesture was becoming eternal. This meter was unstable: at the outset, I would say, it was moving toward the key of shabbily artful ploys, then it passed unnoticed to the slower meter of a trapped pickpocket’s indifference, after which it settled into the time of the woman’s embarrassment. This embarrassment: it struck an irritating contrast with her makeup, with her posture and attire, but it was remarkably sincere; indeed, it was gripping. And despite her brazen eyes, which, no, did not cease their efforts to arrive artfully at an understanding with that other fellow. We were each playing a false card, but we didn’t make a show of it, since each of us had caught the other and knew the false cards of his opponents. The alertness of us three, of which two would alternate as two against the third, created a homey atmosphere where one could breathe easy. We were frauds so cynically unashamed that we felt righteous about it. I switched seats— to her feet. I looked at her, to see if I could figure out “where to put her.” I looked into her eyes, she into mine. Both of us so nonchalantly, so unsheepishly, as if we were each just an object to the other. — He would pace; he would stop; then he stepped toward us, smiled shyly, and shrugged his shoulders (“how silly of me to have been frightened by such a thing!”). He shifted boyishly to the side, turned on his heel, started pacing again. That boyish turn I found particularly striking, for he was no longer quite young. A stranger would have taken us for acquaintances who had overstayed, no longer had anything to say, and were sheepishly keeping quiet.

Out of the blue, I felt like doing something as yet undefined (her eyes, without turning from me, flickered under this caprice, as if seeking a balance they’d momentarily lost), and before I know it I’m seeing my own hand reach for her hair and tug at it feebly. He was standing right next to us. He caught sight of the end of that touch and turned to meet my eyes once again. Amiably and tactfully, he gave them an approving, impish, and encouraging smile. Pulling her hair, I heard and felt a weak snap. She smiled. She put her hands under her chin and raised it slightly. It was an obliging gesture that reminded me, I don’t know why, of the gesture of a shopkeeper explaining how to work a toy you’ve purchased. Under that pressure, her head slipped out a little. It revealed on her neck the kind of groove you see on poseable dolls. When she’d shown this, her hands again withdrew, and her head fell with a faint click.

He, seeing this, slapped his hips like a man who’s “having a laugh,” turned my chin so that I’d pay attention, and seized the woman by the arm. She rose up, and when he let her go she fell with a faint click, just as her head had. The woman sighed, but as if she’d done no more than the thing with her skirt.

He doubled over as if seized by impudent laughter, which was bizarre, for his face remained impassive. Or no, it was rather sad. He doubled over like a good prankster who’s pulled off a joke, then he performed a hasty “now watch” gesture and did a tumble like a little clown. His aspect, however, in no way fit this apparently boisterous move: it remained sad the whole time; in fact, now it was quite desolate. This lasted for a while. I watched attentively, stiffly, with interest, but like at a spectacle I’d deliberately come for.

Then he sat down on the sofa as well, at her head. He started to stroke her tenderly. I can’t say how ghostly, yet in no way frightening, was the suddenness by which he passed to those tender displays immediately following that quiet and crazy footwork. So sensuous and chaste were his caresses! I saw him exactly in profile. It was the profile of an impenetrable ascetic. That’s how it struck me. For until then he had always shown me his full face, whereas from that point on he had the look of an eager goody-goody — eager for temptation. Two different people. I was reminded of my friend Fuld, whom I hadn’t seen for several months. Fuld’s head, too, was a sort of Janus head (we ascribed this to the peculiar configuration of his upper lip). This one here was like Fuld, but it was not Fuld — it could not be Fuld. And it was just then, in the thought that it was literally “as if it were Fuld,” though it couldn’t really be Fuld, it was just then that I was chilled, and immediately after, I was chilled again, because that’s when I first realized that the anxiety had arrived precisely with my Fuldian memory. But it was with that double trembling that I’d caught the trail of “where to put them.” It had been so indistinct till then, who could say it was a trail. More like you’d woken up in a strange land, but on a road that suggested an almost overbearing certainty that it led precisely to where you had to go, though you yourself have no idea where that is.

It struck me how great an error it was to think that — as if all journeys end — and I smiled. Fortunately, however, no one would ever see that smile. I then caught sight of it unwittingly, in them, they’d suddenly become like mirrors. And my apartment indulgently resolved to return to the axis from which he had dislodged it.

Not for long. — I left them with a silent “goodnight” and made for bed. It was late, time to go to sleep. Yet, as I was crossing the threshold, everything was again knocked off its axis. — In the frame of the door, a kind of obstruction. I didn’t see it, I didn’t feel it, and still, an obstruction. Nothing to be torn down, nothing to chop through, nothing to vault over, and still, an obstruction. That is, something that demands that it be overcome. Nothing in the bedroom had been touched. In my mind, I repeated to myself: “And yet (I said ‘and yet’), and yet nothing in here has been touched,” and I quickly got stuck. I was stuck on that “and yet,” and suddenly I understood how very ponderous it was. And I knew: I knew that that “and yet” had been dispatched by a heretofore underground impulse that had already revealed, though concealing it from me, that in the bedroom it only appeared that nothing had been touched. It wanted to conceal from me that the order I was seeing with my eyes was a momentary, desperate, slapdash order, the likes of which are thrown together in towns shattered by earthquake, so that the lord who has announced his tour of compassion not encounter devastation — unwashed, unbrushed, unshaven. Here was this bedroom, where it appeared that nothing had been moved. This ambiguous, evil bedroom, this stupid bedroom that wanted to deceive me with its Potemkin order. No change, then? Who are you kidding, you disaster smoothed over with hasty rakes of sham sympathy? You want to confound me! Me!

So there’s this bedroom where nothing appears to have been touched. — Order? By all means! — But not the usual kind. — Order? By all means! But after the revolution that broke out whilst I was sojourning far away, that triumphed, that, in the meantime, settled in and blocks my view of where it was really heading, what it has achieved, what its point had been. This bedroom had been my atelier, where I’d hack away my wasted days. — But this bedroom was changed, albeit without appearing that anything had been touched. Only now I know, now I know what that unfeelable thing is, that invisible obstruction in the doorframe — it is the cumulative resistance of all the wasted days to come: they’ve mutinied against the hack; they’ll no longer allow themselves to be done up; they won’t be a party to masquerades; they’re resolved not to lie and not to be duped. They will strictly be what they will be. In the doorframe, there stood not future time, but future tense — it leaned on a knotty cane, for it was an old man, and asked not to be a party to my hack masquerades. And that resistance of the future tense had the shape and range of a truly immeasurable silence. Which, once I’d recognized it, drew aside, let me in, and I crossed the threshold.