Richard Weiner: The Game for Real

“Cochin’s answering. She’s there.”

“What?”

“But. . really?”

“What?”

The fellow on the phone hung up.

“Apparently she keeps saying: It wasn’t him, it wasn’t him.”

“Huh?” came the protest from behind the stretched-out evening paper.

“Huh!” and this time it was the sergeant’s voice. “Well I’ll be damned, Dusseldorf won.”

The station clustered together. But the sergeant’s arm dispersed them again. His chair groaned.

“You’re in luck. . She jumped in herself. . Next time— next time — yes, people like you should know it’s better not to get mixed up with strange dames.”

“I do know her,” he said, for the light was dazzling him unbearably. It was so quick that the entire station was on him like a swarm of mayflies.

“What’s that you say?”

“I do know her,” he said.

“There it is!” said the sergeant. “So it’s for the commissioner to clear up. What a help.”

One cop, quietly:

“You idiot. Why’d you say that? You could have been out already.”

“But I do know her,” he said grumpily, and he added by way of apology, “if I know her. . don’t I?” And he smiled a smile before which the station withdrew distrustfully. It was only there where the station had withdrawn that a bit of self-confidence accumulated, at just the moment when was said:

“If you didn’t throw her in. . if she says herself that you didn’t throw her in. . what do you know her for? Blockhead, why know someone who bothers us? You’re the first person to acknowledge someone it would be better not to acknowledge. Now what’s the commissioner going to say?”

“The commissioner is a friend of mine.”

“Oh yeah? And now we might have some lunatic to boot.”

“I do know her.” And he said it as though he were placing an obstinate period.

“Fine,” said the cagy Christian cop, “but if you know her, there has to be somebody who knows you as well. In other words. . Someone other than the drowning victim.”

“Yes.”

“But who? — You know, it’s a matter of having character witnesses — and for a person like yourself! Two witnesses, you know. . two, at least two.”

“Our porter.”

“Oh, porters!. .”

“Then there’s this Mr. Steel fellow. A highly respected industrialist. Mr. Steel, Vesta gas heating system installation, 305 Rue Saint-Lazare.”

“We’ll see. — It’ll be day in a while.”

“In a while the sun will come out.”

Day: that meant eight o’clock in the morning. It was another four hours to eight. Those hours were running away; you could see them running away. They afforded a diversion, and so it seemed they boiled down to too little.

At eight sharp, the commissioner, but before him something like an invisible footman who announced him, a footman so commanding that our fellow stood and straightened up. — With the commissioner a sandy-blond burst of light entered as well, a light more mature than accorded with the early winter hour. The commissioner stopped in the middle of the luminous room, which is like saying in the middle of that shimmering light (for it was shimmering). He was standing like someone who’s promised to do so, or who’s promised it to himself , but still like someone who couldn’t do otherwise. He stood erect. In his drooping hand he held a hat. And one would say that the hat didn’t belong to him, that he was carrying it only out of an affectedly sensitive courteousness, not wanting to stand out too much. For when he took it off, as he did now, his crop of hair was splendidly ruffled, and one would call it radiance.

The policemen formed a semicircle around him. The sergeant came forward and hastily buckled his belt.

“This is the fellow. .”

“I know,” the commissioner cut him off, collapsing into a small armchair. His morning hot chocolate was already steaming on the table in front of him. He dipped a scrap of brioche into it; he chewed. His eyes glazed over. But it was suddenly as though lightning got into them: an instant. — The flash of lightning shed light on the fact that the commissioner was in fact a commissioner, an officially appointed commissioner, nothing more, but in particular it shed light on the fact that the commissioner felt sorry about his rough response to the sergeant, whose eyes were just then sinking in the commissioner’s curt severity. But the ginger-headed person in the small armchair ordered them to present themselves anew; he was looking into them again, and in such a way as to protect them from sinking.

“Cochin called, they say the drowned woman is blahblahing, ‘it wasn’t him,’” the sergeant uttered, reading over the commissioner’s shoulder the boldfaced headline on the first page of the morning paper (and still not done buckling his belt), “but then he claims he knows her.”

“What a moron,” and the commissioner, like it was nothing, smoothed out the crumpled page of his daybook. “And does he have papers?”

“None.”

“Does he at least have references?”

“A certain Mr. Steel, central heating, 305 Rue Saint-Lazare.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Good day, Commissioner, sir.”

Eight in the morning is promising, even at police stations, and even in winter. It has so much potential that it attires even the naked, chilly, wearied light crumbling through its sooty transoms.

That fellow was kneading his cap, looking into it, not as though he were reckoning the broken possibilities within it, but rather as though he might spot reserve possibilities there, and in this way he wanted to entice them to speed up their development.

Eight in the morning has promise, but the thing is to wait for it lying down, rather than with one’s torso vertical. At eight in the morning even the zeroes hold the rank of decimal places, and assured defeats dream of the microscopic difference that they’ve missed, having thus missed the opportunity to become an imperialist trump card. At eight in the morning, even homeless people might hope that by evening some of them will become the lords of the palaces that are only to be finished that day; at eight in the morning we calculate down to the millimeter where to go and when, so as to run into the dear people we’ve lost and miss and would encounter today by the grace of God, but for the fact that we were incapable of remaining innocent, that is, of avoiding ruses, fast ones, and the seductions of the wee hours, the marvelous hours that think of nothing else than of how to steer us so that we lose our way and miss our salvation. Eight in the morning is the hour of Good Advice, about which it is a given that no one will ever listen. He was kneading his cap. The sleepless night remained somewhere far behind him, so far it was as though it hadn’t been at all. He was kneading his thoroughly greasy cap, looking into its underside, where a miracle happened: everything that was supposed to be was there, just as though it had been fulfilled, and more real than if it had actually been fulfilled. Only it wasn’t welcome: a roll-your-own spit to the ground. He saw that things had occurred the previous night that one would be amazed by or that one would fear, but he had found neither amazement, nor fear. And yet, if there is amazement, then it’s at the fact that his sojourn on this plank bed, worn down by innumerable, anonymous backsides, didn’t mortify him. He knew he was the victim of puffed-up falsity, but his touchiness, otherwise so inflamed, didn’t bristle. On the contrary: God knows where it came from within him, this patrician, self-confident certainty that freedom is near: so long as he makes a move toward the revolt that was germinating within him (but prudently, methodically, not with foolhardy impetuousness), so long as he gladly renders unto the devil what is the devil’s, so long as he holds his breath one more time, swimming under the last low arch in the reeking sewer — and then, and then in no time he’ll reach open waters, unrestricted, salty, stinking of primordial life.