A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg

FOR A MAN who had seen a candle serenely burning inside a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles streaming upward from its flame, who had been present in Zurich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Dargomyzhsky’s In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon with Manet’s Olympia speaking from a cheap print I’d thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as I had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuckles into her cheeks and scream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of the winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sands of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomenal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobia.

The balloon had shot aloft at Bittersfeld while with handsome Corsican flourishes and frisky rat-a-tat on the drum a silver cornet band diminishing below us to a spatter of brass and gold played The Bear Went Over the Mountain.

Cassirer lashed the anchor to the wicker taffrail and cried auf Wiedersehen to the shrinking figures below, ladies in leghorn bonnets, an engineer in a blue smock, an alderman waving his top hat, a Lutheran minister holding his bible like a brick that he had just been tossed, and little boys in caps and knee socks who envied our gauntlets, goggles, plaid mufflers, and telescope with fanatic eyes.

The winds into which we rose were as cold as mountain springs. Tattered wisps of clouds like frozen smoke hung around us. Unless you looked, you could not tell whether you sailed past the clouds or the clouds past you, and even then the Effect of Mach confused the eye, for the earth seemed to flow beneath the still gondola until this illusion could be dispelled, as when you look at a line drawing of a cube and sometimes see its far side as its front, Mach, who leaned over bridges and waited for the flip-flop of reality whereby he knew he was on a swift bridge flying down an immobile river, and none of us knows whether our train or the one beside us is sliding out of the station.

Cassirer turned and shook hands, gauntlet to gauntlet. I returned his toothy, Rooseveltian smile, though butterflies swarmed in my stomach, and a kitten tried to catch its tail.

Cassirer, able soul, adjusted blocks in tackle. Pink and violet clouds sank past us.

The balloon, O gorgeous memory, was as gaily painted as a Greek krater. An equatorial band paraded the signs of the zodiac around it. Red lozenges and green asterisks wreathed the top and neck. Ribbons streamed from the nacelle. The first ballast of sand was pouring down on the earth with the untroubled spill of an hourglass. Our shadow flowed over a red tile roof, a barn, three Holstein cows, a railroad track.

There was a dust of ice in the February wind into which we rose swinging like a pendulum.

When the perspective cube swaps its front plane for its back, have we not seen Einstein’s Relativitätstheorie with our own eyes? Or do we see the cube this way with one skill of the brain and that way with another? The left of the brain, where intuitions leap like lightning, controls the dextrous right hand, logic, speech, our sense of space. The right of the brain, where reason stands alert, controls the awkward left hand, suspicion, primal fear, our sense of time.

— Thus, Cassirer continued with a shout, the animal man is a chiasmus of complementary and contradictory functions.

This conversation had been going on for days. People used to talk to each other, back then, as I now talk to myself. But you are there, ich bitte tausendmal um Verzeihung! Can you hear, in this wind, the F-dur Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft anf den Lande? I can. Cassirer kept up a conversation as it bobbed into his head, while descending from a train, at a urinal, in his hip bath, from outside my bedroom door in the middle of the night.

— Our minds combine the hysteria of a monkey, he said, with the level intellect of an English explorer.

I cupped my ear to hear in the emptiness of the wind.

— Irrational faith, he said while upending a sack of sand, holds faithless reason above the waves.

I looked down at the plats of fields, villages, and roads. I felt the weight of my body drain away. My fingers clutching the wicker of the gondola were as strengthless as worms.

— You are white, he shouted.

— Vertigo, I shouted back.

— Now you are green.

— Das Schwindelgefühl!

— Brandywine? he offered, handing me a chill flask.

Ach, das Jungsein! Now that I have passed through them, I know that there are no middle years. I have gone from adolescence to old age. There is a photograph of me as a goggled aeronaut. I looked like an acrobat from the époque bleue et rose of that charming rascal Picasso. If only der Graf Rufzeichen could have seen me then! It would have been a shock worth arranging to confront the adlig old horse’s behind with his melancholy butler at such an altitude.

Lisa would have screamed, and Herr Benjamenta of the Institute would have frowned his frown, rumpling the wrinkles of a vegetable marrow into his pedagogical brow.

Knolls, canals, fields, farms, slid below us. We were like Zeus in the Ilias when he surveys the earth from the mare’s milk drinkers beyond the Oxus to the convivial herdsmen of Ethiopia.

— Altdorfer! Cassirer shouted. Dürer! Is this not, mein geliebt Walser, the view of beroofed and steepled Northern Europe you see from Brueghel’s Tower of Babel? The splendor of it! Look at that haystack, that windmill, that Schloss. You can see greenhouses. Have you ever been taken so by the paralleleity of light?

We saw red and gold circus wagons on the turnpike, followed by elephants, each holding the tail of the next with its trunk.

Did Nietzsche go up in a balloon? After Nietzsche, as the wag said, there had to be Walser. Did Buonaparte? I tried to feel like each in turn, to lounge like Nietzsche, blind and postured, with some lines of Empedokles for Fräulein Lou, to pout my corporation like the Empereur, pocket my fingers in my weskit, and think Caesar.

But, O Himmel, it was Count Rufzeichen I wanted as a ravaged and outraged witness to my Ballonfahrt. It was as an orphan under his roof that I came nearest to belonging anywhere at all, except here, perhaps. Perhaps.

I arrived at his estate sneezing and ruffled a wild blustery day that had reddened my ears and rolled my stovepipe hat before me. Why Benjamenta had specified a stovepipe hat for going off to one’s first position will be known only at the opening of the seals. To catch my hat I abandoned my cardboard suitcase to the mercy of the rain, which went for its seams. In the hat was my diploma, signed and sealed, from Herr Benjamenta’s Institute for Butlers, Footmen, and Gentlemen’s Gentlemen. My umbrella was the sort Droschkenkutscher saw their fares safely to shelter with, copious enough to keep dry a lady in bombazeen, bustle, and extensive fichu even if she were escorted by an ukrainischer Befehlshaber in court dress. The wind played kite with it.

My hat had hopped, leaving rings of its blacking on the gleaming wet of the flagstones. My umbrella tugged and swiveled, jerked and pushed. I ran one way for the suitcase, another for the stovepipe hat. Were anyone looking from the stately mansion, it was the grandfather of all umbrellas on two legs tiptoeing like a gryllus after a skating hat across a sheet of shining water they would see.

The cook Claribel had seen, and would allude to it thereafter as a sight that gave her pause.

Unsettled as my affiliation with the morose Count Rufzeichen had been, it was a masonic sodality compared with my and Claribel’s crosscurrent encounters. Our disasters had been born in the stars.

It was she who met me at the door, challenge and hoot in her hen’s eyes.

— Is this, I shouted over the wind, Schloss Dambrau?

To this she made no reply.

— I am Monsieur Robert, I said, the new butler.

She studied me and the weather, trying to decide which was the greater affront to remark upon.

— As you can see, she finally said, there is no butler here to answer the door. A cook, the which I am, can make her own meals, but a butler, like the new one you are, ja? cannot answer himself knocking at the door, fast nie.

I agreed to all of this.

— Would you guess I am Silesian? she next offered. Frau Claribel you may address me as. Why the last butler had to leave is not for one of my sex and respectability to say, I’m sure. What were you doing running in a crouch all over the drive? Furl your umbrella. Come in out of the wind, come in out of the rain.

I marched to my quarters, past a cast-iron Siegfried in the foyer, preceded by Frau Claribel with the mounted, cockaded Hessians, royal drum rolls, and jouncing flag of Haydn’s Symphonie militaire, which came all adenoidal violins and tinny brass from a gramophone beyond a wall.

— Der Graf is very cultivated, she said of the music. He has tone, as you will see, Herr Robehr.

I approved of the Lakedaimonian bed in my room. And of the antique table where I was to spend so many hours by my candle, warming my stiff hands at a brazier. All my rooms have been like this, cramped cells for saint or criminal. Or patient. The chamberpot was decorated with a sepia and pink view of Vesuvius.

O Claribel, Claribel. No memory of her can elude for long our first contretemps. That is too bookish a word. Our wreck.

It was only the third day after my installment, just when the Count and I were blocking out the routine that would lead, from the very beginning, to my eventual banishment to a room above the Temperance Society of Biel for eight years, while archdukes died with bombs in their laps, ten million men were slaughtered, six million maimed, and all the money in the world five times over was borrowed at compound interest from banks. Solemn, hushed, sacred banks.

On my way in haste down the carpeted hall to answer the Count’s bell, I would prance into a cakewalk, strutting with backward tail feather and forward toe. I would hunch my elbows into my side, as if to the sass of a cornet in a jazz band I would tip a straw hat to the house. And just before the library door I would do the war dance of Crazy Horse. Then, with a shudder to transform myself into a graduate of the Benjamenta Institute, I would turn the knob with one hand, smooth my hair with the other, and enter a supercilious butler deferential and cool.

— You rang, Herr Graf?

The old geezer would have to swivel around in his chair, an effect I could get by pausing at the periphery of his vision, a nice adjustment between being wholly out of sight and the full view of an indecorous frontal address.

— I rang, by Jove, didn’t I? I wonder why.

— I could not say, Sir.

— Strange.

— You rang, Sir, unless by some inadvertence your hand jerked the bell cord, either out of force of habit, or prematurely, before the desire that would have prompted the call had formed itself coherently in your mind.

Count Rufzeichen thought this over.

— You heard the bell, did you, there in the recess?

— Positively, Sir.

— Didn’t imagine it, I suppose, what?

— No, Sir.

— I’m damned, the Count said, gazing at his feet. Go away and let me think why I called you.

— If, Sir, you would jot down on a pad the reason for my summons, you would not forget it before my arrival.

— Get out!

— Very good, Sir.

We played such scenes throughout the day. I had just had some such mumpery with him before the first entanglement with Claribel’s withered luck.

She, barefoot for scrubbing the stone steps down to her domain, had forked a lid off the stove onto the floor to pop on a stick of firewood, and as the best piece in the box was longish, Claribel stepped back the better to fit it in, putting a foot both naked and wet on the hot lid, and cried out for Jesus to damn it for a bugger and a shit britches.

I, meanwhile, coming belowstairs and hastening to see what her howl was about, stepped on the cake of soap riding there on the steps in a wash of suds. My foot slid out and up in a kick so thorough that I missed by a minim marking the ceiling with a soapy footprint.

My other foot, dancing for balance, dashed the bucket of water forward toward the hopping Claribel, where its long spill hissed when it flowed around the lid at about the same time that I, soaring as if from a catapult, rammed her in a collision that knocked us breathless and upside-down through the kitchen door and into a dogcart drawn by a goat which was backed up to the steps for a convenient unloading of cowflop to mulch the rhododendrons.

Startled, the goat bleated and bolted, taking us through the kitchen garden, across the drive, into and out of the roses, around the well, by the stables, and as far as the chicken run, where a yellow wheel, unused to such velocities and textures of terrain, parted from the axle and went on its own to roll past backing pigs, a cat who mounted a tree at its coming, a cow who swallowed her cud, and after some delirious circles, wobbled and lay among the wasps and winey apples in the orchard.

Claribel and I, tilted out by the departure of the wheel, sat leg over leg in the compost of manure, Claribel screaming, I silent.

THIS WAY. The bracken is very fine a little farther on. Trajectory is all. I was born on Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday the year the bicycle suddenly became popular all over the world, the seventh of eight. My father ran a toy shop in which you could also buy hair oil, boot blacking, and china eggs. My mother died when I was sixteen, after two years of believing that she was a porcupine that had been crowned the queen of Bulgaria, the first sign that I was to end up here.

My brother Ernst, grown enough to be teaching school while I was still in rompers, began to think that he was being hunted by malevolent marksmen. Schizophrenia. He died in 1916, Hermann, a geographer in Bern, in 1919. Fanny and Lisa are well placed, Oskar works with money. Karl is the success in the family. God knows how he can stomach Berlin.

I was at Waldau before I came here, into the silence. And before that—look at the rabbit standing on its hind legs!—I was variously a student, a bank clerk, an actor, a poet, a sign painter, a soldier—I have seen those white butterflies as thick as snow over clover—an insurance salesman, a waiter, a vendor of puppets, a bill sticker, a janitor, a traveling salesman for a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs, a novelist, a butler, an archivist for the canton of Bern, and a distributor of temperance tracts. I’ve always belonged decidedly to the tribe of Whittington, but of course the bells rang when I couldn’t hear them, and when a cat was to be invested I had none. Franklin was of the tribe, and Lipton the British merchant, and Mungo Park, and Lincoln and Shakespeare. I got as far as being a servant. Diogenes and Aesop were slaves.

Freedom is a choice of prisons. One life, one death. We are an animal that has been told too much, we could have done with far less. The way up and the way down are indeed the same, and Heraklit had been wiser to add that rising is an upward fall.

I often put myself to sleep by wondering if there could be a mountain road so steep and yet so zigzag of surface that in seeming to go down an incline one is actually going up?

How do they put themselves to sleep, Mann of the field marshal’s face and Hesse with his gurus and Himalayan Sunday Schools? Imagine being interested like Hesse in the Hindu mind! Once in Berlin I talked to an Indian from Calcutta or Poona or Cooch. Chitter chitter, he said. Mann is also interested in these little brown monkey men with women’s hands.

— What is the meaning of life? the little Hindu asked me for an opener.

I had the distinct impression that he was switching his tail and flouncing his cheek ruff. Soon he would be searching for lice in my hair.

— You do not know! In the west you are materialistic, rational, scientific. You listen too much to the mind, too little to the soul. You are children in spirit. You have not karma.

We stood nose to nose, toe to toe.

— You have not deep wisdom from meditation a long time reaching back to ages already old when Pletto and Aristettle were babbies in arms.

— Indeed not, I said.

— You admit! the Hindu squealed, showing a gold tooth and a black. Of course you admit for you know it is true ancient Indian wisdom is universal transcendental thought as studied by Toolstoy in Russia, yes, H. B. Stove and Thorough in United States.

He chittered on, something about God and man being like a mother cat with a kitten in her teeth and man and God being like a monkey and its infant holding on, and something about emptying the mind when what I wanted to empty was my bladder.

O glide of eye and sizzle of tongue! And Rathenau found me a job in German Samoa. And he was shot, like a mad dog, because, as his assassin Oberleutnant Kern explained, he was the finest man of our age, combining all that is most valuable of thought, honor, and spirit, and I couldn’t bear it. I told this to the doctor here, in an unguarded moment, and he asked me why I was obsessed by such violence. Cruelty, I replied, is sentimentality carried to its logical conclusion.

— Ah! he said.

The psychiatric ah.

— We can never talk, I said, for all my ideas are symptoms for you to diagnose. Your science is suspicion dressed in a tacky dignity.

— Herr Walser, Herr Walser! You promised me you would not be hostile.

They are interested in nothing, these doctors. They walk in their sleep, looking with the curiosity of cows at those of us who are awake even in our dreams.

A moth slept flat on my wall. I watched its feelers, speckled feathers as remote from my world as I from the stars, sheepsilver wings eyed with apricot and flecked with tin. It had dashed at the bulb of my lamp. Its fury was like a banker’s after money. And now it was weary and utterly still. Did it dream? The Englander Haldane had written of its enzymes without killing a single moth, and wore bedbugs in a celluloid pod on his leg to drink his blood.

It is in Das Evangelium the brother of rust and thieves. Surely its sleep is like that of fish, an alert sloth.

Now it has fluttered onto the map above my desk, an old woodcut map from a book, the river Euphrates running up through it in a dark fullness of rich veins, the Garden of Eden below, the stout mountains of Armenia sprinkled along the top, a great tower and swallow-tailed pennon to mark Babylon, trees as formal as pine cones at the terrestrial paradise, with Adam and Eve as naked as light bulbs except for Akkadian skirts of tobacco sheaves, Greek and Hebrew names among Latin like flowers among leaves, a lion to the northwest sitting in Armenia and bigger than a mountain, a beast rich in horns and hair stepping west from the Caspian Sea, a route pompous with Alexander’s cities, brick walls and fig groves of Scripture, Caiphat up from the Gulf of Persia, which Sindbad gazed upon and where bdellium is to be had, Bahrim Insula a pearl fishery, Eden with its four rivers green and as straight as canals, a grove of cypress that was felled to build the Ark, purple Mousal, Babylon a city of brick and a hundred temples to gods with wings like aeroplanes, with Picassoid eyes and Leonardonian beards, Ur of the Chaldees with its porched and gabled house of Abraham, Noah’s city Chome Thamanon, Omar’s Island, with mosque, the Naarda of Ptolemy where is a famous school of the Jews, Ararat’s cone, Colchis with its fleece of gold, Phasis the country of pheasants, Cappadocia, Assyria, Damascus under an umbrella of date palms.

And then I saw that the moth was inside the light bulb.

BECAUSE, I said when asked why I am here, the world was in defiance of its own laws.

At the foot of Herr Rufzeichen’s grand stairs stood a cast-iron Siegfried braced with a boar-sticker and buckler outsinging a surge of Wagnerian wind that tilted his horns, butted his beard, and froze his knees. Did he have to be dusted? Thoroughly, thoroughly. Beyond him, in steep gloom, rose the stairs in a curve of crimson and oak.

On a stepladder, flipping the face of iron Siegfried with a turkey duster, I, remembering that if you stare through a window into a snowfall the room will rise and the snow stand still, as when down front close to a theater curtain, the audience sinks grandly, to trumpets, discovering below a red Tannhäuser kneeling beside an embroidered Venus singing Zu viel, Zu viel, O dass ich nun erwachte! saw Count Rufzeichen gliding from the library with his nose in a book and Claribel the cook backing toward him, the mock orange in her arms. The precision with which they would collide was inevitable and perverse.

— Zu viel! I cried.

Rammed from behind, Claribel screamed, heaved the mock orange upward, and sat.

I tottered, embraced Siegfried, and lost the ladder under my dancing toes.

The mock orange fell upside down on Count Rufzeichen, filling his lap with earth and roots. It was as if an allegory of Horticulture, with Donor, had fallen out of a picture onto the museum floor.

The ladder completed its fall across Rufzeichen’s shins, inciting him into a jumping-jack flip over Claribel, transferring the mock orange’s empty bucket from his head to hers, which made her screams now sound hollow, as if from the depths of a well.

GLIDING OVER the firelit carpet with velvet steps, placing the tureen before my lord, who touches his napkin to his moustache, I can savor again the condition of my well-being, along with the aroma of leek and broth that steams up when I remove the lid with a gesture worthy of the dancers of Bali, namely that Rufzeichen has put me back together, suave foot, accurate hand, impeccable diction.

Genius is time.

There was, I knew, and remembered with fondness, a professor at the Sorbonne who electrocuted himself while lecturing, or electrocuted himself so nearly that he found that he was suddenly in a corner just under the ceiling, light as a Chagall bridegroom full of champagne. And yet he could see himself still lecturing below, calmly, giving no indication that an ox’s weight of lightning had crashed through his body.

Then he realized that his feet, shod and gaitered, were on opposite sills. His torso was in orbit around the lamp. His left arm was in the cloakroom nervously fingering a galosh, his right caressed a periodic table of the elements. His rich, musically modulated voice lectured on about ohms and circuits, resistance and watts.

It was my own parable. I had searched for wisdom about the slump of my soul and the sootiness of my spirit in the accounts of vastations by the American Jameses, father and son, who suffered terrible New England moments when all significance drained from the world, when the immediate fortune of life was despair, disease, death. In utter futility shone the sun, man squandered the little time he had alive, a sweet Tuesday here, a golden autumn Sunday there, grubbing for money to pay the butcher, the landlord, and the tailor. The butcher slaughtered innocent animals who were incapable of sin and folly, of ambition or lies, so that one could, by way of a cook enslaved for a pittance and a wife enslaved for naught, gnaw its flesh and after a period of indigestion and indolence from overfeeding, squat over a champerpot and drop turds and piss for a servant to carry, holding his nose, to the lime pit.

I had thought my despair was Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death that pleasure cloys and pain corrodes. But, no, it was rather the Sorbonne professor’s shock. One came to pieces. One used the very words. You had to pull yourself together again.

Feeding the pages of three novels into the fire in Berlin, standing in the rain at my father’s grave, writing my thousandth feuilleton, climbing the dark stairs to any of the forty rooms I’ve rented: no one movement of foot or heart muscle was the hobbler, no one man’s evasion the estranger.

— Another pig’s foot, your lordship?

— And a little more suet, thank you kindly, Robert.

White tile, thermometers, blood-pressure charts, urine specimens, and spasms in the radiator pipes; what color and tone there had been at Rufzeichen’s! The carpet, a late Jugendstil pattern of compact circles in lenticular overply, rusty orange, Austrian brown, and the blue of Wermacht lapels, had dash, and the furniture was Mackintosh, smartly modern in its severity while recalling the heaviest tradition of knightly chairs and ladylike settles, sideboards as large as wains and a desk at which the Kaiser could plan a dress parade. My eye appreciated the dull books around him, china shepherdesses, views of Florence and Rome, a sepia reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, crossed cavalry sabers, a teakwood dragon in a rage, candlesticks held aloft by fat babies tiptoe on the noses of dolphins, a loud clock.

An iron elk stood in a dim recess beyond double doors in the far wall.

AND THEN, pigeon-toed and watching the ground before him as if backtracking for something lost, there was the new patient, Fomich, as his wife or sister called him. The first time I saw him I did not like his silly smile. The mad smile in their own way, as puppets step, with a jerk rather than civilized deliberation. The smile of Fomich was that of the imp, of the red goblin in the corner of Füssli’s Titania und Bottom. Smirk and scowl together it was.

It was the outward concession of inner reserve, two proud men meeting, each believing the other to be of higher rank.

— Kak tsiganye! he complained to his sister or wife.

And then I saw the muscles bunched in his shoulders that had strained the threads of the armscye apart, the heft of his chest, the improbable narrowness of his hips. Hero, with wing, grounded.

They took a walk together every morning and afternoon, solicitous woman and elfin man. Sometimes he would stop, put his heels together, flex his knees, and pass his hands in a sweep from one hip to the other.

One day, to my disbelieving gaze, he jumped over a rose bush without so much as a running start. Faces appeared at windows to watch.

He jumped back over the rose bush, his eyes sleepy and sad.

IT WAS LIKE striding over a sea of gelatin, that bell-stroke swing of our nacelle through the rack of the upper air on elastic wicker, wind thrumming the trapping with the elation of Schumann strings allegro molto vivace.

We talked by cupping hands and shouting into each other’s ears. Benjamin Franklin, Cassirer said, had wanted a balloon for moving about the streets of Philadelphia, rooftop high above the Quakers and Indians. He was to have hitched it to horses, a godlike man indeed.

— Ach, les Montgolfier, Joseph and Etienne! In those days they thought smoke was a gas, as right as they were wrong, as with all knowledge. A transparent blue October day they bundled the physicist Pilâtre de Rozier into the basket of their hot-air balloon and cheered him aloft over the Bois de Boulogne. There, anchored twenty-five meters above the Jardin de la Muette, he looked down on autumn and Lilliputians flapping handkerchiefs. He fed the stove that kept him up there a truss of straw, scanned the horizon with a telescope, took a barometric reading.

— The next month he and the Marquis d’Arlandes went up without a tether, floated across Paris for half an hour, and came down at La Butte-aux-Cailles, where wind had carried them. Peasants were waiting to kill the balloon with scythes and shovels.

History is a dream that strays into innocent sleep.

And everything is an incongruity if you study it well. When, wind plucking my nose and fetching the moment back, I was sent on an errand one day by Herr Benjamenta to buy pen nibs from the stationer and three pounds of Brussels sprouts from the greengrocer, the latter to energize us for writing a round and legible hand with the former, the morning being summery and fine, what should I see straightway, so wonderful is the world, but the handle of a sweep’s broom tipping the hat of a stout and grizzly old party into the bucket of a passing house painter, where it bobbed and lolled in a creamy distemper, while, as if miracles hadn’t grown scarce in our time, a grackle with determined eye swooped down and snatched off the same old party’s curly red wig, taking it over a roof before the street could frame a single sentence of articulate consternation.

— His hat is in the bucket, a little girl said to her nurse.

— Yes, said the nurse, there it goes.

— That grackle, said a bearded gentleman, took off his wig.

The nurse acknowledged the gentleman’s remark by blushing. The little girl did him a curtsy. I stood as in a dream.

The old party, meanwhile, stopped dumbfounded, his hands to his naked head, where a fringe of reddish hair enwreathed his occipital salience. It pleased me that he had not chosen so red a wig without cause.

— The man is distracted, explained the nurse to her charge. See how he rolls his eyes and chews his moustache.

— Yes, said the little girl. This is something I can tell to Ermintrude. She will be beside herself with jealousy.

Whereupon, weeping with such feeling that both cheeks shone like glass, the old party hugged himself so furiously that his coat split down the back. The sound of this was that of a dry limb cracked by wind from a tree, and he went limber as if unstrung.

The left half of his coat slid, sleeve and all, onto the sidewalk, followed by the right half, sleeve and all.

The collar, I considered, drawing closer, should have held the two halves together, but no, upon inspection, I saw that it was a coat, Moravian or Sephardic, of the kind that has no collar.

A scarf, which even now, as the old party was running back and forth imploring God and the gendarmerie to witness that he was a victim of some untoward fracture of natural law, snagged on the spike of an area railing and whipped away with an elastic flounce, never to be seen on this earth by its owner again.

The waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

The old party sat down on the sidewalk and wept into his hands. The gentleman with the beard came to his aid, prefacing his remarks by saying kindly that he had seen all that had happened. Here the old party gasped, alluded to his heart, and fell backward.

— I do believe, said the nurse, that he is having some sort of fit.

— Zu hilfe! Zu hilfe! cried the bearded gentleman.

— I will do an imitation of this, said the little girl, rolling back her eyes and grabbing her throat, that will make Ermintrude hate herself for a week.

— Remember that you are in public, said the nurse.

— So is he, said the little girl.

— And it is ill-bred in both of you, said the nurse, to make a spectacle on a city street.

A crowd gathered, from which a slender man in dark glasses, explaining that his uncle was a pharmacist in Lichtenstein, advised that the old party’s waistcoat be undone. Deftly the gentleman undid fourteen buttons, disclosing trousers that came up to the armpits in the manner of the English. The flies of these were undone as far as the navel, fourteen more buttons, and indeed the old party groaned and breathed more freely, it seemed.

— Polizei! screamed the nurse.

The laces of his boots should be untied, the Lichtenstein pharmacist’s nephew said, and the suspenders of his stockings loosened, for circulation’s sake.

— I will, said the bearded gentleman, take his watch, wallet, tie pin, and ring for safekeeping, lest they tempt someone here in the crowd.

— My watch! squealed the old party, kicking with such indignation that both boots leapt off his feet. A dog got one and made off with the agility of a weasel. The other bounced into the gutter, where it lay forlorn and strange in the brief moment before a policeman arriving on the trot shot it along the curbing to drop into a drain. We could all hear it bumping on its way through gurgling water to the river Aar.

— Let us see if his name is written inside his shirt, said the policeman, lifting the old party by the armpits and taking off his waistcoat.

— What is this? he exclaimed, peeling a mustard plaster from the old party’s back.

— That, said the pharmacist’s nephew, is probably the cause of his fit. It is a poultice of asafoetida, mustard, and kerosene such as country doctors prescribe for pulmonary and liver complaints. It is too strong, as you can smell, and has induced an apoplexy. Take off his shirt and undervest to air his back.

Struggling to arrange the old party, the bearded gentleman inadvertently stood on both his loose stocking suspenders, anchoring them, so that as the body was dragged backward the better to extract the long shirt tail from inside the seat of the trousers, the elastic suspenders stretched their limit, snapped, flipped, and catapulted themselves and stockings together off the old party’s feet, one flying into my face. And, O, how I was gratified to have joined the event with something of my own, and I sneezed, casting stocking and suspender into the shopping basket of a cook who, later and at home, dropped them into her stove, making a hex. The other was got from the air by a dog who had envied his fellow the previous shoe.

At this moment, crazed with fury and mindless with disbelief, the old party fought his way up to choke the policeman, losing trousers and drawers as he stood.

— Attack the law, will you! the policeman said.

— Where am I? the old party cried. Who am I? What has happened?

He was as naked as the minute he was born, minus, of course, an umbilical cord.

— Scheisse und verdammt! It comes back to me that I am Brigadegeneral Schmalbeet. That’s who I am! General Schmalbeet!

With this he gave the policeman a kick in the groin that doubled him over.

Then he fell backward, an arc of urine following him down. Everyone backed away. When I peeped around the first corner I had turned, I saw the policeman wetting a pencil with his tongue while opening a notebook, and a dog dragging away the old party’s trousers, and another throwing his drawers into the air and barking.

MANET’S OLYMPIA, thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, told me about the world’s first painting executed en plein air. This was the work of her creator’s Doppelgänger Monet, Manet with an omega.

— I am confused already, said I. But talk on, for it adds purpose to my staring at you, at your complacent Parisian eyes, your dangling mule, your hand so decorously audacious.

— Étes-vous phallocrate?

— L’homme est un miroir omnigénérique, tantôt plan, tantôt convexe, tantôt concave ou cylindrique, donnant à l’objet réfléchi des dimensions variées.

— Vous êtes phallocrate.

— Suis-je donc?

— Ce ne fait rien.

Her Ionic shoulders rose an ironic trifle. There was the wisp of a smile in the corners of her mouth, the merest hint of laughter in her eyes.

— When, she said, in the pellucid green air of Fontainebleau, Claude Monet had posed his model and touched his brush to the world’s first plein air canvas, he was hit on the back of the head by a discus and knocked senseless.

Her expression did not change as she made this statement.

— A discus?

— Un disque.

— The discobolus, she continued, who presently appeared on the anxious trot to ask the bloody impressionist and the screaming Madame Monet if they had seen his quoit was a bassetted and spatted Englishman whose carp’s mouth and plaid knickerbockers sprang from the pages of Jerome K. Jerome.

Count Rufzeichen, anglophile and sportsman, dressed so. It was his sedulous imitation of the English that had driven him to hire a butler, and thus I came to tread his soft carpets, never tiring of their luxurious silence, or of the rose fragrance of English tea, or of making Herr Rufzeichen shake his wattles.

One way was to be deaf to his summons, letting the butler’s bell jangle in vain. After awhile, the old apteryx would come puffing and snuffling along, looking into rooms. Finding me in the greenhouse, he would splay his fingers and shout.

— What in the name of God are you doing?

— Sir, I am observing nature, I would reply. I see, however, that in lending my attention to the limpidity of the air, the melodiousness of the cuckoo and the lowing of the horned cattle I have fallen into negligence.

— Into sloth, said Herr Rufzeichen.

— The cows made a kind of bass for the treble of the cuckoo.

— Into impudence.

— Your worship rang?

— To little purpose, to no purpose, Monsieur Robert. Whatever I wanted you for before, it’s a liver attack I’m having at the moment.

The Count trembled into a chair.

— Would you wish a glass of Perrier, Sir?

— Doppelkohlensaures Natron.

The Count pulled a pocket handkerchief big as a map of Europe from his sleeve, wadded it with both hands, and wiped away the sweat that had beaded on his forehead.

I held the soda on a silver salver under his nose. The draught drunk, hiccups set in. After the third hiccup, a belch baritone and froggy.

OUTSIDE the asylum gates a brass band huffed and thumped with brazen sneezes, silver whiffets, thundering sonorities and a detonating drum, the descant hitched together by a fat woman in a Tyrolese hat and the Erlkönig’s longcoat that flocked upon her hips as she squeezed and pulled a Polish accordion as big as a sheep, dipping her knees on the saltarelli and rolling her eyes in a clown’s gloat.

The man Fomich danced around his pleased sister, seesawing his shoulders in a backward monkeyshine of steps, and as he shot into the air right over his sister’s head, pausing there awhile as if all the clocks in the world had stopped, a lunatic shouted that Hitler is the seventh disaster in Nostradamus and invited all within hearing to join the Brotherhood of the Illuminati without further delay.

— Quite gay, is it not? I said to the attendant, tears in my eyes.

The band was charging with piston gallop through something rhapsodic, Hungarian, and tacky.

Who was this franion? There was a grivoiserie about him that smacked of Berlin, and of things brooded on in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Apollinaire.

— Literature, I said to the listless woman beside me on the bench, has become a branch of psychology, of politics, of power, of persuasion, of housekeeping. In ancient times . . .

— When Jesu was a little boy, she said, taking interest and joining her hands on her knees.

— In ancient times literature was a story for people to hear. And the person who heard it could tell it to another. Now everything is on paper, too complex to remember.

— Do you love Jesu? she asked.

— One does not write in this terrible age. We do not make chairs, we make money. We do not make shoes, we make money. They sniff it, banker and shopkeeper alike, as gallants used to inhale the perfume of a mistress’s handkerchief. They goggle when they see it, they are willing and eager to throw boys into the spew of machine guns and fogs of cyanide gas, they are abustle to marry their daughters to toothless bankers, to halitosic financiers with hernias the size of a baby’s head. Francs, yen, shillings, pesos, kronen, dollars, lire, money is the beauty of the world. They suck shekels and play with themselves.

— Jesu would not like that, she said mournfully.

— After all, I said, what a beautiful thing it is, not to be, but to have been a genius.

The dancer had collapsed across the way, was weeping and was being consoled by his sister.

— Does God come to you in the night, she asked, with a lamp and a puppy for you to hold?

— God, I said, is the opposite of Rodin.

— The eyes of God are as beautiful as a cow’s.

— Everything else has gone wrong, but not money. Everything, everything is spoiled, halved, rotted, robbed of grace and splendor. Our cities are vanishing from the face of the earth. Big chunks of nothing are taking up the space once occupied by houses and palaces.

— You are very serious, she said.

— Money precludes mercy.

— Did you have money and lose it? Jesu would not mind that.

— I have always been poorer than the poor.

Attendants had come to take the man Fomich back to his cell. He was saying terrible things about man’s sexuality, so that the woman beside me stopped her ears. I could hear something about the hot haunches of goats and wild girls in Arcadia kissing something and something mad with music.

If I could talk again with Olympia, she would tell me. She would know.

IS IT NOT preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot?

AND ON A fine English day in the high Victorian year 1868, the year of the first bicycle race and the Trades Union Congress at Manchester, of The Moonstone and The Ring and the Book and of the siege of Magdala, four men gathered at Ashley House in London, a house leafy with Virginia creeper, its interior harmoniously dark and bright, like an English forest, dark with corners and doors and halls, with mahogany and teak and drapes as red as cherries, bright with windows, Indian brass, and lamps like moons, Lord Lindsay pollskepped with the hatchels of a cassowary, Lord Adare whose face looked like a silver teapot, and the galliard Captain Wynne.

They stood Englishly around a bandy-legged Scot with a thrummy beard. His name was Home. Daniel Douglas Home.

— Tack a wheen heed, he said, throwing back his neck and arms as if throttled by an angel from above.

In contempt of gravity, then, he raised his left leg and his right, and lay out flat on the empty air.

— Stap my vitals! swore Captain Wynne. The bugger’s floating!

Lord Lindsay held up Lord Adare, Lord Adare Lord Lindsay.

— Meet me, gasped the horizontal Scot, in the tither room.

With a hunch to get started, he slid forward before their paralyzed gaze, jerking a whit on the first slide, and then floated smoothly, silently out the window.

A distant chime of church bells: which no one heard.

— I think I shall cat, said Lord Lindsay.

— I have peed myself, said Lord Adare.

The feet of D. D. Home appeared in the next window: he had turned right. His sturdy Glaswegian trousers next, his plaid waistcoat, his arms hanging down slightly, fingers spread, his heroic Adam’s apple, eyes staring upward.

His shadow three stories below flowed over rose bushes, over rolled grass as level as water, a sundial, the body of a gardener who had looked up, commended his soul to God, and passed out.

Lords and captain bestirred themselves, dashed into each other, and ran down the hall on uncooperative legs. Only the door to a room on the other side of the house was open, and into this they stumbled, breathing like rabbits. Adare screamed as he saw Home entering the window feet first, calm as a corpse.

Midroom he hung in the air, chuckling.

Then he tilted downward and stood as proud as Punch.

— Bewitched, by the Lord! said Captain Wynne. We are all bewitched.

Lord Lindsay’s hair had turned white.

Yet all three signed depositions that they had witnessed a human Scot float out the window of Ashley House and in again from the other side.

Home died soon after.

— And now, I said to Herr Rufzeichen, how shall we ever know otherwise?

— Englishmen, said Rufzeichen, of all people! Sort of thing that goes on every day in India, I believe?

AT THE BENJAMENTA INSTITUTE I was like a cuckoo in a nest of wrens. I had failed at just about everything and the other students of the art of butlering had failed only predestination, and even that wasn’t certain, for we were told daily that Joseph was a butler in Egypt and Daniel one in Babylon. Their slain and risen god was Dick Whittington. The rotten stockings they darned in the evenings were Whittington’s, their cold beds were Whittington’s, their slivers of soap, their piecemeal and unmatching shoe laces, their red ears and round shoulders.

A feature of failure is having to do over again what the successful sailed through once. My adolescence has been waiting for me when my feet hit the floor every morning these seventy years. My God, what a prospect! An education, a job, a wife, daughters to admire, sons to counsel, vacations at Ostend, retirement, grandchildren, banquets in my honor, statesmen and a mountain of flowers at my funeral, my sepulcher listed in the tourist guide to the cemetery.

And in middle age I was enrolled in a school for butlers.

The dormitory was upstairs, a long room with too many beds too close together. It was neither military in its effect nor schoolish, neither neat nor messy. It was a picture of despair and of making do.

I remember it all as a dream in which confusion had seeped into the grain of reality. I remember yellow-haired Hans, and defeated Töffel, of the bitten fingernails and wetted bed, the clever Kraus and his intolerable and boring cynicism, the flippant and windy Fuchs who cried under the covers at night. We all led secret lives in full view of each other.

Herr and Frau Benjamenta, accomplished frauds, came and went like attendants in a hospital. All day we heard homilies and half-finished sentences from retired Gymnasium teachers and had lessons in ironing trousers and setting tables. We heard Scripture at dawn and before bedtime. Of all this I made my novel Jakob von Gunten, a new kind of book, and except for a few of the essays I wrote for newspapers, essays written with Olympia’s full gaze upon my back, the best thing that I leave the world. Mann stole it, and Kafka stole it, and Hesse stole it, and were talked about. I have been invisible all my life.

I have heard that Kafka mentioned me in the cafés of Prague. I dare say.

You cannot know, O Leser, how long it is possible to sit on the side of a bed staring at the floor.

DOKTOR ZWIEBEL looked me dead in the eye. He had the nose of Urbino. Somewhere, deep in his ancestry, back before time began to tick in seconds, when all the earth was a forest of ferns growing in Lake Tchad, there had been a rhinoceros.

— Tell me, Herr Weisel, he began.

— Walser, said I.

— Just so, said Doktor Zwiebel, looking down at the folder before him. Tell me, Herr Walser, you have never I see been married?

— Never, said I, but almost.

I sighed, the doctor sighed.

— How do you mean, almost? Remember that anything you tell me goes no further than my files. You are free, indeed I urge you, to tell me all.

— Fräulein Mermet, I said. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I fell in love with her. She regarded me kindly.

— Pfring! Pfring! sang the telephone on the desk.

— Ja? Zwiebel hier. Seasick? Promethazine hydrochloride and dextroamphetamine sulfate in a little lemon juice. Yes, that is correct. I will look in later. Goodbye. That was the duty officer. She says a patient who thinks he is Napoleon has run into rough weather off Alexandria. Do you know, Herr Weisel . . .

— Walser.

— . . . that an alarming number of attendants at sanatoria end up as patients? You may know Aufwartender Futter, with a remarkably long head and three moles in a line across his forehead? Just so! He was a patient here for some months, paranoid schizophrenic, thought that everybody in Switzerland was turning into money. He convinced his ward attendant of it, who announced to me one day that he wanted to be put in the bank so as to be drawing interest. Futter thought this was so funny that he emerged from his fantasy, and the two exchanged places, Futter having been fired from his job on the Exchange. Excellent arrangement. Now where were we? You were telling me about your wife, I believe.

— But I didn’t marry her.

— Didn’t marry who? If she was your wife . . .

— I was about to answer your question, Herr Doktor. You had asked how I was almost married. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I loved her and I believed that she loved me. We wrote many letters to each other. We spent Sunday afternoons in the park. She would fall against my arm laughing for no reason at all. Macaroons . . .

— How many brothers and sisters have you, Herr Weisel?

— Two sisters, Fanny and Lisa, four brothers, Ernst, Hermann, Oskar, and Karl, who is the noted painter and illustrator. He lives in Berlin.

— Your last position seems to have been that of Archivist for the Canton of Bern. Why, may I ask, did you leave?

— I resigned.

— You did not find the pay sufficient or the work congenial?

— We had a difference of opinion as to whether Guinea is in Africa or South America. My superior said I had insulted him. I tied his shoelaces together when he was asleep at his desk one afternoon.

Doktor Zwiebel made a note and fixed it to the folder with a paper clip. Something caught his attention that made him jump. He looked more closely and then glared at me.

— It says here that you have previously been treated for neuroses by one Dr. Gachet, to whom you were recommended by Vincent Van Gogh, and by Dr. Raspail on the advice of V. Hugo. What does this mean? Did you give this information to the attendant who filled out these forms?

— Jawohl, Herr Doktor.

— Then there are Van Goghs still alive? Of the great painter’s family?

— Oh, yes, most certainly. The nephew is very like his uncle, carrot-haired, sensitif, very Dutch.

— And the Hugo here is descended from the noted French poet?

— That is right.

— And Gachet and Raspail, they are French or Swiss psychiatrists?

— French.

— How long were you under treatment by them?

POLITICIAN, with rump. Statesman, with nose. Banker, with eye. You shuffle francs, and stack them, as a priest shifts and settles Gospel and Graal upon the altar. The clerks at their sacred books, compounding interest, the vice-presidents, first, second, and third, all who know the combination of the safe, the tellers with their sponges, rubber stamps, and bells, these are the only hierophants left whose rites are unquestioned and unquestionable, whose sanctions can be laid upon orphan and Kaiser alike, upon factory and church. Here the shepherd’s only ewe and the widow’s last pfennig are demanded, and received, with perfect comfort of conscience and thrill of rectitude surpassing the adoration of Abraham honing his knife.

In 1892, when I was fourteen, I left the Gymnasium and applied for the post of teller in a bank. In this journey my dog surprised a young kid, and seized upon it, and I, running in to take hold of it, caught it and saved it alive from the dog. A letter I sent in reply to a notice in the Züricher Zeitung included a phrase from Vergil, the noted Mantuan, and listed as references Hetty Green and J. Pierpont Morgan. I was nevertheless instructed by return post to appear for an interview. I had a great mind to bring it home if I could; for I had often been musing whether it might be possible to get a kid or two and so raise a breed of tame goats, which might supply me when my powder and shot should be all spent.

At the bank I was taken in hand by a kind of assistant priest and put in a gorgeous room to wait for my interview. I had never seen such a carpet, such high windows, or so polished an inkstand.

A door opened. A man in a Roman helmet, leaning on a bamboo cane, limped in. He had cut himself shaving and a sticking plaster, blood at its edges, ran the length of his cheek.

— You are Robert Walser? he asked, reading from a card.

I said I was.

— We are in Albania, he intoned, near the slopes of Ararat. I am the Third Vice-President. Our cellars are full of gold, silver, stocks, notes. As there is a God . . .

And then the door was filled with people, a man with lots of whiskers, clerks, bald men wringing their hands.

— Get him! said Whiskers. Take him to my office. Schmidt, I have told you and told you!

They took the Third Vice-President away, with some effort, leaving me to the gaze of a man who looked at me from top to toe, with disapproval.

— Those shoes, he said, will never do.

RUFZEICHEN in alpine hat, tweed jacket, plus fours, Austrian walking shoes with shredded and tasseled tongues, a stout stick, cigar, monocle, green knit gloves. I came behind in my black English butler’s suit, bowler and umbrella, carrying a picnic basket and a plaid rug.

The count held up his hand without looking back.

— Here, he said.

I spread the rug over meadow flowers and laid the count a place. The silverware tinkled strangely in the fine emptiness of the out of doors. The wineglass would not sit straight. Gnats assembled around the count.

I stood at a respectful distance.

— I tell you, Robert, he said through a mouthful of sandwich, these things did not happen before you came. No, I assure you, they did not, decidedly did not. Our cook Claribel is, I believe, possessed.

— Possessed, your lordship?

— Salt in my coffee, eggshells in the omelet, a glove in the soup . . .

— Most distressing.

— It is mad.

It occurred to me then, who could say why, that the dinosaurs I had been reading the count about from a British magazine were not great lizards but chickens as large as a Lutheran church. No one has seen their skins, or, as it may be, their feathers. Only bones survive. They had three toes, long necks, beaks, dainty forelegs which were possibly wings as useless as a dodo’s. It may have been the count’s savaging of a chicken wing that supplied the idea.

I mentioned the possibility to him, by way of conversation. We were, after all, the only living creatures in miles, give or take a remote eagle and a swarm of gnats.

He gave me a very strange look.

HUMAN NATURE cannot write. Ich schrieb das Buch, weil sie mir nicht gestattete, meine Tage in ihrer Nähe zu verbringen, mich ihr zu widmen, was ich mit wahrer Lust getan hätte. And in the irony of money all ironies are lost.

Potina, Roman deity altarless and distracted, had, in the way of the gods, neither watch, calendar, nor sense of time. She dropped down into the streets of Bern one day, in front of a trolley which almost struck her. Her dress was a thousand years out of fashion, a white wool smock brown with age and riddled hem to yoke by moths who had nibbled the diapered stole of Julia Domna and the stockings of Victoria. Her duty among the immortals was the digestion by infants of their first spoonful of pabulum, whether Ashanti mothers chewing sago and letting it into their babies’ mouths, Eskimo matrons poking blubber down pink gullets, or Helvetian mamas spooning into lips open as wide as an eaglet’s goat cheese and honey.

Whatever, whenever, wherever she was, Dea Potina rubbed her eyes. These dark places behind doors, these wagons that rolled without oxen: these people had married into the gods. She smelled lightning everywhere and saw lamps burning inside crystal fruit, without air to feed the flame. Apollon! she prayed, spell me those written words. And the old voice with the cave echo in it, and the snake hiss, told her that the words said, all of them, one way or another, coin.

But that building is surely a temple. In truth, said Apollon. They are all temples, and all built to hold coins. Then, she said, I am in the country of the dead, and yet I see smiling children, and I smell lightning, which is never of the underrealm. It is the fashion now, Apollon said, to live as if all were Domos Hades. Some ages fancied the ways of the Olympian gods, some the Syrian Mother, some the wastes of Poseidon, some the living gold of wheat and light and children.

Now they have cut from Dis’s realm his gleaming metals and his black slime, his sulphur and salts and poisons, murderous things that they seem to enjoy. But most of all they fancy coin.

EINE ANSICHTSKARTE (Manet’s Monet in His Studio Boat) from Olympia: Yesterday I saw a woman on the streetcar with her little boy who had his head stuck in his chamber pot and was being taken to the doctor to have it pried off. It was over his eyes and ears, and all you could see of him was his mouth open and howling. His mama was in tears, as was her son, though it was probably pipi she kept wiping away. Herzlich, Ollie.

IN THE ETERNAL July of Egypt a scribe once wrote on papyrus she was more comely in her body than all the other women in this world—a FEATHER, ah, and a COIL OF ROPE, oo, she, a SHEPHERD’S CROOK and a LOAF, sett, was, a LUTE, ASP, and MOUTH, nefer, comely, an OWL, m, in, a TWISTED ROPE, LOAF, ARM, SHOULDER, THREE, SEATED WOMAN, SHEPHERD’S CROOK and LOAF, hatset, her body, MOUTH, er, than, BOLT, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, set, more than, VAGINA, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, khemt, woman, BOWL and LOAF, nebt, any, WATER, LOAF, and DUALITY, enti, who, OWL, m, in, DUCK, pa, the, LAND, ta, world, GRAIL, MOUTH, and ASP, terf, entire.

He wrote, sighed, and passed the leaf to a binder, who stitched it to the next leaf and rolled it around a stick. An anu read the line various evenings to the dash of a seshsesh and the indolent whine of a sa, and lords listened, their brown hands on their square knees, and ladies listened, a hen of flowers in their hair, and the shadow of Neb whom the children of darkness call the Sphinx slid from west to east three hundred and sixty-five thousand times and again as many, and again, and who then could read the writing of the scribe?

THUNDER underground began to boom at midnight on the ninth of January 1784 like a hundred batteries of cannon beneath the silver city of Guanaxuato in Mexico, continuing like a ripening summer storm, clap and drum roll, like the hoofbeats of Visigoth cavalry under Alaric coming upon Rome when a havoc of light in midday blue had signaled Vortumna and the Arvals that the hill gods were turning their shoulders from Roman flour and Roman flower, an angry, angled slender crack of fire and a sizzling split through the air and Rome was no longer under the ax and stick pack and eagle and wolf but under the Crow, a sound like high promontories breaking away from a headland and falling into a raging sea. Which awful noise lasted until the middle of February. When, after the third day, no earthquake followed the persistent subterranean thunder, el cabildo kept the people inside the city, ringing it with militia, for fear that thieves would come and steal their silver, not an ingot of which shivered in that incongruous stillness and steadfastly detonating tumult.

Yet it was a land where a tall cathedral might suddenly ring all its bells and sink out of sight into a crevice open so briefly that, having swallowed an orchard, a mule train, the church, a sleeping hog, and the local astrologer, it could close again neatly enough to catch a hen by both feet in the pavement of the Calle San Domingo.

Der Graf Rufzeichen sat listening to these details from von Humboldt’s Cosmos with glassy eyes.

— Avenues of trees, I went on, become displaced in an earthquake without being uprooted. Fragments of cultivated ground of very different kinds mutually displace each other.

— Erstaunlich!

— A still more remarkable and complicated phenomenon is the discovery of utensils belonging to one house in the ruins of another at a great distance, a circumstance that has given rise to lawsuits.

— Earthquakes, is it, you’re reading me about? asked the Count. My God. I once came all over dizzy while out riding, for no cause except perhaps the game I’d had at old Fuchtel’s might have been a touch high, and saw two of everything, and keeled over out of the saddle, stars everywhere. Do you think that was earthquake?

— Did anyone else note a tremor? I asked him.

— How could they? said the Count with some indignation. They weren’t there.

— Earthquakes are fairly extensive. They cover quite an area, I believe.

— Couldn’t have been a small one there under my horse?

The Count milked his moustache and stared into the corner of the room.

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a Swiss valley, there was born to an honest couple a baby that had a jack-o’-lantern for a head. The parents were sure their grief and horror were the greatest ever felt, and yet the infant suckled and cried, slept and burbled, like any other. Its eyelets were elfin in outline, the neat small triangular nostrils were not really repulsive, and the round hole of a mouth took in its mother’s milk with a will and let out boisterous cries that for timbre and volume were the equal of any baby in Switzerland.

For months it was kept hidden. Its parents had come to adore it, as a child sees the greatest winsomeness and charm in a doll that has buttons for eyes, whose mouth is stitched onto cheesecloth, and whose hair is thread. They ventured to show it to its grandparents, who collapsed in fear and loathing, but who eventually were won over, and loved to dandle little Klaus on their knees.

One by one the neighbors fell down breathless, their eyes rolled back in their heads, at the sight of the little chap and his pumpkin grin, and one by one they got used to him. In no time at all the whole village thought nothing at all of Klaus, and in due course he became a model little boy, quick to learn in school, gratifyingly pious in church, and a fine fellow to all his friends, of whom he had many.

It was then only the rare tinker or traveler who, passing through, caught sight of him and fell screaming into a fit or froze as still as stone and had to be revived with slaps and brandy.

Kafka stole his cockroach from that story. He has, I admit, improved upon it, and seen it from a dark angle. I meant that we are all monsters: by fate and by character. Fate and character are bow and string. What happens to us is what our character invites, guides in, challenges. All that ought to matter is that we are alive, which turns out, I’ve found, to be our last consideration. What does a banker care whether he is living or dead, so long as he has a shilling to kiss, a franc to lick?

And of life we can ask but continuity. That, as I explain to my doctors, is my neurosis. I have been, I am, I shall be, for awhile, but off and on, like a firefly.

I confuse my doctors. When they say I am mistaken about reality it is they who are mistaken. They say I cannot distinguish, cannot sort fact from fiction.

How solemnly their empty chairs listened to them, and the portraits of Freud and Jung on the wall! The lamps, and especially the fire in the grate, listened to these strange words with dismay. To think that the custodians of the spirit should have prepared for me a categorical prison.

— Consider! I said.

They looked at each other, Doktor Vogel and Doktor Hassenfuss.

It says in the pages of Mach that the mind is nothing but a continuity of consciousness. It is not itself a thing, it is its contents, like an eye and what it sees, a hand and what it holds. Mach’s continuity, like Heraklit’s river, defines itself by its flow.

Doktor Vogel looked at Hassenfuss.

— A charming poetic image, he said.

— It is so obvious, I persisted, once you have seen it. The mind is what it knows! It is nothing else at all, at all.

I RESOLVED to hold fast by a piece of the rock and so to hold my breath, if possible, till the wave went back; now as the waves were not so high as at first, being near land, I held my hold till the wave abated, and then fetched another run, which brought me so near the shore that the next wave, though it went over me, yet did not swallow me up as to carry me away, and the next run I took, I got to the mainland, where, to my great comfort, I clambered up the clifts of the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger, and quite out of the reach of the water.

Commit a word to paper and God knows what you have done. They will read it in Angoulême, in Anchorage, and Hippo. Spiritual crockery for missionary tables in the Cameroons serves quite as well a Mandarin palate. The sheik of Aqbar gathers his twenty sons around him, his five wives and twelve daughters, and reads them the Encyclopedia Britannica, a page where it says that phoronids, which comprise the phylum Phoronida, are little-known marine invertebrate animals characterized by an elongated, nonsegmented body that is topped by a tuft of tentacles. Each adult lives within a membranous tube to which sand particles, shells, and other materials may adhere. A king will read a baker’s proverbs who could not be invited to supper by the meanest file clerk of the Fish and Vegetables Revenue Branch.

The black hunchback Aesop would never be allowed to stump on his crutch into this library, nor shaggy blind barefoot Homer leaning on a boy, nor staggering Li Po in his dragon silks, nor honest Benjamin Franklin could I introduce into this library without getting fired for exposing der Graf to the Gadarene hog. Yet here were their books, bound in red leather.

Weder antik Fisch noch spartanisch Athlet.

— Mad, aren’t they? Herr Rufzeichen asked of the ceiling, blowing loops of cigar smoke upward.

— Mad, your lordship?

— These book writers, Robert, that you read me. They are all peculiar, to you and me I mean, wouldn’t you say?

STEEP WIND at my throat, my gaze on dizzy shires and canals below, I heard with one ear the tympany of our cold oscillation through crowding gusts and with the other the Eroica. You do not, Meng Tse said, climb trees to look for fish. Nor discover weight with a yardstick or length with a scales. Why were Cassirer and I floating across Europe in a balloon?

— Hsing! Cassirer said.

A carp by Hokusai, a spray of maple red as wine, sao shu dropping like wistaria down the print. It is hsing, Cassirer said by the stove, to desire a wife, plum brandy, gingko jam, and water chestnuts. Hsing is internal, justice and mercy external, nei wei.

In China as in Greece the epic known in every house and assembly, he explained, is of Wanderung. The manner of a people’s foraging becomes the Heldenfahrt of the Kollektivunbewusste. A hero without a journey is like a saint without a vision. Tripitaka and Monkey through a persimmon forest under blue humps of mountains. Herakles mothernaked raising his mouseburrow ox arm in grace to a frisking centaur, wolfwary Ulysses offering his lie to the meerstrandbewohnend Phaiakischhof, Cassirer the image peddler and Walser the Nachnietzschischprosaschriftsteller aloft in a balloon drifting to the Baltic sands: heroes in our day must take to the ice wastes of the poles, the depths of the sea, the air. We are not certain whether von Moltke’s heroism is in his railroad tracks, his invention of general orders, or his translating Gibbon.

He talked of Nietzsche and Semmelweis. The one exhorted us to dream of barefoot Greeks dancing in masks before the enigmas of fermentation and electricity, the other taught us to wash our hands when delivering babies.

Here, in the snow, which would I prefer to walk with me, as if I could heed another ghost, or if Seelig, kind Seelig, were not enough? A man’s quality might well be in the sort of misery he has seen with pity. In that case, Semmelweis. Or was it rather Nietzsche? And both were maddened by stupidity. Not I.

I wander out every afternoon, the same way, and have my walk. Every day now for twenty-seven years. Could I once have written books? Once drifted across Europe in a balloon? Once been a butler in Silesia? Was I once a boy?

I watch the linnet, the buck hare, the mountains pink and grey above level mist that lies out from the property wall like a lake of clouds, like the mind’s surface before a warmth of thought, light, melts that haze of ghost wool, incertitude of fear.

I ASK AN ATTENDANT who the man is who dances around the grounds and has such anguish in his eyes. He tells me it is the great Nijinsky, schizophrenic paranoid.

— He thinks he is a horse.

WHY SHOULD THIS wild whirl of snow keep us from our walk? It reminds me of the toys in my father’s shop, pigeon-breasted Switzers with halberds and cockades, milkmaids in porcelain aprons, shepherds with mouse-faced sheep. O ravelment and shindy of snow on the toy shop’s windows! There was an enameled staffetta I coveted with real lust: he had a leather hat, a coat as red as cherries, and saddlebags stamped with the arms of the canton.

A rabbit! See him tease a casualness into his fear. Don’t move. I can think, as still as he, snow raining upon us both, of a battalion of red soldiers on my father’s shelves, of a mandarin poet rolling along the Great Wall in a cart, of Robinson Crusoe conversing with his parrot. But what moves in his mind, the rabbit? Is the image of me on his retina all that he sees, an old man with a face as wrinkled as a pocket handkerchief used for a month? Can he see cabbages and carrots and blackberries? His doe?

It was a day this cold that I saw a lady with a panache of pheasant and egret jutting from a swirl of scarlet silk around her hat, and felt my little man suffuse with benevolence, grow long and rise. The colors of coats and scarves in shops, of signs and stone, of tramway and light became splendid. It takes the animal in us to lead the spirit a dance.

Schicksal, Zeit, Unfall: the important thing is to tie one’s shoelaces, sew back the parted button, and look the world in the eye.

But the rabbit can think without disregarding all that is characteristic of life, for the infinity of qualifications arising from our thoughts of death is nowhere in his green brain. Yet he is as fearful as if I were a banker, a philanthropist, or a psychiatrist. He lasts, we wear. He leaps, we endure.

The past, I have known for years, is the future. All that has mattered is a few moments, uncongenial while they happened, that turned to gold in the waves of time. February light, that for all its debility might have come from the daytime moon as much as from a red sun beyond a texture of bamboo and chinaberry, fell cold on a wall that bore a French print of a flatfish, a map of the Hebrides, a bust of T. Pomponius Atticus, a Madagascan parrot whose green eye glowed like an opal, and a speckled mirror that reflected on so dull an afternoon nothing except some elemental neutrality of light and dark, vicinity, and patience.

I am most inside outside. Once Olympia said from her repose on the wall that Monsieur Manet was a man women liked. He put them at ease by paying the right kind of attention. He stayed inside himself and looked out. He did not even know how to come outside himself. You could always feel that. It is a comfort to a woman, she said, to see a man so unconsciously himself. A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.

The snow is a kind of music. Were I ever to write again, perhaps a poem as deft and transparent as one by a Chinese, I would like to witness to the beauty of the snow.

And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other. I try not to bore them with an old man’s talk when they come, the few who want to ask me about writing, about the time before both the wars, about Berlin. I do not tell them how much of all that misery was caused by writers, by men who said they were writers. I do not tell them that I quit writing because I had nothing at all, any more, to say.

There are the tracks of the rabbit. I think they said at the table that today is Christmas. I do not know.

But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order.