It was fetched from the dead woman’s apartment. It stood empty for a few days, empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones, the heavy ones. In doing so, I let in the netherworld. Something rose from underneath, slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury. Your head couldn’t turn away.
The dark volumes, closed faces. They are like Algerians who stood at the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint and waited for the Volkspolizei to examine their passports. My own passport has long since lain among the glass cages. And the haze of Berlin in those days is also inside the bookcase. An old despair tastes of Passchendaele and the Versailles Peace, tastes even older. The dark heavy tomes—I come back to them—are in reality a kind of passport, thick from having collected so many stamps through the centuries. Evidently you cannot travel with enough heavy baggage, now when you set off, when you at last . . .
All the old historians are there, they rise up and look into our family. Nothing is heard but their lips are always moving behind the glass (“Passchendaele . . .” ). It makes you think of an aged civil service department (a pure ghost story follows), a building where portraits of long-since-dead men hang behind glass until one morning vapor appears inside the glass. They began to breathe during the night.
The bookcase is still more powerful. The glances straight across the border! A gleaming membrane, the gleaming membrane on a dark river the room must see itself in. And you cannot turn your head away.