Gustav Herre stood by the window looking down at the street below; he often did, although there wasn’t much to see – it was a quiet street in a quiet part of town. He looked toward the windows opposite also, but with his head bowed, so that the neighbors across the way would not take him for a Peeping Tom.
He had never seen anything of consequence, neither behind the windows nor on the street. And what he saw on this September afternoon, at around four o’clock, was itself highly inconsequential: a dark-skinned man in his sixties, with a slight stoop, who was lame in one leg, a defect that made him easy to recognize. Gustav Herre had seen him before, from his third-storey window, but without it giving rise to any reaction or reflection.
He viewed himself, with some satisfaction, as a dispassionate man, and his reaction now, although not strong, surprised him. He thought: poor man, so far away from where he would rather be, so far from his country, its landscape and language.
Gustav Herre watched the man until he disappeared from view by the hairdresser’s on the corner, then returned to his desk further into the room to continue work on his essay “Modernism as Liberation and Pretext.” He sat looking at what he had already written and soon realized he was not going to get much more work done today after all.
He checked his watch; to his mild irritation, he found he was already waiting for the woman who had called earlier that day and said she could come over if he wanted her to.
A few hours later she was there, in his bed. He lay awhile looking at her – at her forehead, hair, one visible ear, cheek, and nose. She had closed her eyes. Then he got up and covered her with the duvet.
Do you feel like shrimp? he said.
Lovely, she said.
He set the table, put out the shrimp, bread, butter, mayonnaise and a bottle of white wine. He drank a glass of brandy.
She came out of the bathroom and told him she could not stay late because her husband would be back early the next morning. Gustav Herre said that that was mean of him.
Yes, she said.
She asked if he was jealous.
No, he said, should I be?
She made no reply.
They sat down at the table. He filled their glasses. They ate shrimp and drank wine. Gustav Herre apologized that there was no roe in the shrimp, however she actually preferred that.
Gradually the wine enlivened them. She mentioned, in relation to something or other, how she sometimes derived satisfaction from throwing away chocolate wrappers or the like on the sidewalk; The funny thing is, she said, it gives me a bad conscience.
Gustav Herre viewed that as quite natural, after all she obviously did it in order to be disobedient; In our world, he said, throwing away paper on the street on purpose was an immoral act and a protest against the established order.
She laughed.
That’s a bit lofty, she said.
Gustav Herre poured more wine into the glasses.
Aesthetics elevates or reduces to morality, he said, an empty cigarette packet or an empty cola can on a pavement; all of a sudden what is otherwise acceptable becomes unacceptable because it’s in the wrong place.
I’ve always been interested in that, he continued, when I was around nineteen or twenty I went through a phase of planting different objects in places where they didn’t belong.
He laughed.
It started, he said, when he came across an old broken frame in the attic, the kind one put family photos in. The glass was intact and when he had made a reasonable job of fixing the frame, he placed a picture in it, which he had cut out of a magazine or periodical; it was a detail from an old painting, probably from the 17th century; it showed an old couple, both blind, welcoming home their son, who was also blind, and the father was biting the son on the cheek.
Or something like that, he said, he could not remember exactly, but it was a powerful, distressing image that he had had his reasons for liking.
Then he had taken the picture to one of the forests outside of town and nailed it up on a tree trunk some fifteen or twenty meters from the trail.
Why? she said.
So that someone would find it and not understand why it was hanging there, Gustav Herre said: Jesus, I was young…
He poured wine into their glasses while he searched for something to say.
What a stupid story, she said.
Yes, he said.