Once Sanyi had "finally" finished, he looked to see what effect he had had on his sister's "dumb mug"; she was practically in tears with this unexpected burst of happiness, though she knew from bitter experience that crying was not an advisable course with her brother.
... He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity ... and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself--utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home
... Green mildew covered the cracked and peeling walls, but the clothes in the cupboard, a cupboard that was regularly cleaned, were also mildewed, as were the towels and all the bedding, and a couple of weeks was all it took for the cutlery saved in the drawer for special occasions to develop a coating of rust, and what with the legs of the big lace-covered table having worked loose, the curtains having yellowed and the lightbulb having gone out, they decided one day to move into the kitchen and stay there, and since there was nothing they could do to stop it happening anyway, they left the room to be colonized by spiders and mice.
... Quietly, continually, the rain fell and the inconsolable wind that died then was forever resurrected ruffled the still surfaces of puddles so lightly it failed to disturb the delicate dead skin that had covered them during the night so that instead of recovering the previous day's tired glitter they increasingly and remorselessly absorbed the light that swam slowly out of the east.
... Outside the water rushed, unobstructed, from the tiles, in a hard, straight line and beat at the earth by the walls of the Horgos farm, forming an ever-deeper moat, as if every individual drop of rain were the product of some hidden intent, first to isolate the house and maroon its occupants, then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, to soak through the mud to the foundation stones beneath and so wash away the whole thing; so that, in the unremittingly brief time allowed for the purpose, the walls might crack, the windows shift and the doors be forced from their frames; so that the chimney might lean and collapse, the nails might fall from the crumbling walls, and the mirrors hanging from them might darken; so that the whole shambles of a house with its cheap patchwork might vanish under water like a ship that had sprung a leak sadly proclaiming the pointlessness of the miserable war between rain, earth, and man's fragile best intentions, a roof being no defense
... In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.
... But as soon as the clerks got to the part relating to Mrs. Schmidt, they immediately found themselves in the deepest difficulty, because they didn't know how to formulate such vulgar expressions as stupid, big-mouth, and cow--how to retain the import of these crude concepts so that the document should be true to itself while at the same time retaining the language of their profession. After some discussion they settled on 'intellectually weak female person primarily concerned with her sexuality' but they hardly had time to draw breath because next they came across the expression cheap whore in all its awful attendant crudity. For lack of precision they had to abandon the idea of 'a female person of dubious reputation,' of 'a woman of the demimonde' and 'a painted woman' and a mass of other euphemisms that seemed alluringly attractive at first glance; they drummed impatient fingers on the writing desk across which they faced each other, painfully avoiding each other's eyes, finally settling on the formula 'a woman who offers her body freely,' which was not perfect but would have to do.
I didn’t want to be anywhere at all. I shut my eyes, but it takes more than that; I was still there, it’s automatic when you’re alive... Monsieur Hamil is right when he says that nobody has understood anything for centuries and one can only stand amazed.
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They told me the whole thing could be run off in reverse from the end to the beginning, “right back to the earthly paradise,” but added: “unfortunately when it starts up again it’s always the same
.
This sense of something nebulous, forever on the point of taking form verbally, but never quite doing so, is one that comes back to me even now from time to time, allowing me to taste again the pleasant sensation I often had back then of drifting aimlessly yet enjoyably through the days.
