The last week of the vacation began. He was less and less able to explain why, once the dentist had given him his provisional tooth, he hadn’t gone on to Greece as he’d originally planned. He was sitting out the loveliest days of July, or sleeping them away in stuffy pensiones, dawdling them away in lanes that seemed ever narrower, ever dingier.
His feeling of wretchedness on waking intensified by the day, so that he would often stay in bed till eleven, twelve or even two o’clock and wait till he felt better. The only effect of so much brooding and drowsing was to make his head and body feel even heavier. Then he would have the sensation of lying in a lukewarm pond, wreathed in creeping plants, impassively waiting for decomposition to set in.
He didn’t think of Magda often. His attacks of aggressive pining for her became less frequent. His wife seemed almost as remote to him as the dog that had bitten him two years previously, in the course of a hike in the Bernese Oberland.
School felt equally remote. Classes were due to resume in under a week. Unimaginable. Unimaginable, the idea of speaking, having to speak in the teeth of his deep desire to remain silent. – Good morning, everyone, I hope you enjoyed your holidays. Right, as we’re all fresh and well-rested and tanned, let’s get cracking on the Thirty Years’ War, shall we?
And to be sitting in the common room again, little conversations lapping all around him, little murmurs of news. His right ear picks up: A willing pupil, not exactly the sharpest tool in the box, but willing. – His left ear picks up: Stress is just a word. – His right picks up: I tell you, no one grills meat like the Yugoslavs. – His left hears: According to Duden, the dative is permissible.
Unimaginable.
And to be back in Schmocker’s building! The daily gauntlet of the stairwell. The Lustenbergers’ fixation with Brussels sprouts. Schmocker junior’s nightly trumpet practice. Last thing at night: Magda laying the table for breakfast. Late edition of the news: homeopathic doses of the day’s brutalities. Cleaning his teeth. One last flush, and to read for the ten thousandth time: your toilet seat is not screwed down but stuck on, in the interests of efficient cleaning.
Unimaginable.