An excerpt

Chapter 7, pages 175-180

One Sunday morning I had to be in by 8:00 because we were hosting an event, which on that day happened to be a morning concert. On such occasions security guards have to be at the Gallery earlier anyway because they have to set up the chairs, put away the tables, or move the screens, do whatever Mr. Németh had told them to do, since he didn’t always take part in these events. But this time the ensemble wanted to rehearse a bit before the concert, so the person in charge of the program, who at the time was basically the director’s right hand man, told me ahead of time to be there no later than 8:00, and he added that he would try to be there as early as possible too. I told him I would be sure to be there by 8:00, so two days later I went in to work at 8:00. The night watchman let me in.

I had been in the Gallery for about an hour-and-a-half when the intercom rang. I knew it had to be the musicians. And it was, for when I reached the main entry I could see through the little window in the door men and women, both young and old, standing in front of the building holding instruments. I opened the door. “Good morning,” I said, and I indicated that I had been expecting them. They nodded, some of them greeted me, and they began to come inside the building. As I held the door to let them file in somehow the director’s right hand man suddenly was standing right beside me. But I did not have a chance to greet him, because one of the violinists suddenly said, “Good morning! Do you recognize me?” A twenty-year-old girl was smiling at me. I didn’t entirely understand her question, I think, and I didn’t look directly at her. “You taught me for four years, you don’t remember? We even sung a serenade at your place!” Then I acted as if I were beginning to recall something, though I still didn’t know who this violinist was, I knew only that she must have been one of my pupils. Then the director’s right-hand man turned towards me and said, “You were my teacher too!” I looked at him and asked, “I was your teacher?” “Yes,” he said, laughing. “And where was I your teacher?” I asked. “At the vocational school.”

Then P. knows what’s up with me, I thought, he must know quite well. He had been able to observe and assess me. As indeed he must have done over the course of the past months. He had had many chances. He might well have drawn very clear conclusions on the basis of my mien. If anyone among my acquaintances had had a chance to see the state I had been in for some time, it was him. And then it dawned on me, or rather a shudder ran threw me, that perhaps this was why he had been so friendly with me from the start, because he knew,

he knew. And I had thought there was some other reason. It had even occurred to me that perhaps he had a natural warmth and familiarity because he was not a curator or an art historian, but an exhibition organizer. I had never put him in the same group as the others, and not just because when he asked something of me he always said “please”. Or “thank you” if I came behind him carrying chairs. Or if I took the catalogs to the storeroom he always said something, like oh don’t bother, we don’t need that many. Or if he asked me to check the bathrooms before a big opening he would always hastily note that in principle it wasn’t my responsibility. Or if for whatever reason I had to take paintings from one exhibition room to the other he always added something like “if you have time.” But I had not recognized him, though we had worked together for months. And only ten years earlier he had been in one of our theater performances. If I recall correctly, he had had to escape from a tattered bird cage, since on the night in question he had played a flightless bird.

This had happened at the time when one of the visitors to the Gallery had asked Mrs. Garda, “who is the man in the other room who is sleeping hunched over on the table?” She had replied that the man was a security guard, and she had added that she simply could not understand how someone could sleep at work. Our new ticket seller recounted all this to me, since I had not overheard it myself: “Imagine, Lady Blue Hair told one of the art lovers that you were asleep, you should have seen the face she made.” Namáté was the new ticket seller, he replaced Mrs. László, since Mrs. László herself had had to concede that she could no longer handle that kind of work, especially the weekend rushes, when she had to sell several thousand tickets. But they hadn’t made her quit. The director came up with a new job for her in a matter of days, something that was actually necessary, because we hadn’t actually had anyone to work the cloakroom, and she also was given the kitchen to use as a refreshment bar. We had always used it as a refreshment bar when there were exhibition openings, but now the director made that official. Namáté was keen observer. I had never noticed that at a certain stage of the day Mrs. Garda’s hair was blue, but it was, it was blue.

I couldn’t sleep. I don’t really remember what was up with me that day, or what had happened before, but I couldn’t sleep, that is quite certain. Now I think the whole thing most resembled what happened before I left for Geneva, which wasn’t right before I left, but rather a good month earlier, around the time when I was finishing the Manuscripts. The sharpness, this is what they had in common. The sharpness, about which I don’t really know what to say, except that on that April morning, when I suddenly began to feel dizzy, I did not yet know that when it hit me, this state, I must not drink. On that April morning when it had first come over me I had stood up from the table where I had been arranging various things and had gone down into the Little Hoof, where I had had two unicums with two beers. I had thought that I would regain my balance. But I hadn’t. Even though later I had spent part of the day sleeping. In the afternoon it happened again, or rather it continued, and in the

evening, because it hadn’t stopped, I went to Wichmann, where the bartender had once asked me, “why does someone with no voice drink?” I thought about this question for hours at the bar, or more precisely, all of a sudden I realized that I had been thinking about this question for some time, I don’t even know what made me realize, but I realized that I must have been pondering this question for hours. And slowly it began to come back to me, what had happened. My head began to clear, and finally I grasped that I knew nothing of what I had done for a period of at least two hours, I did not even know how I had come down from the studio apartment, but I managed to collect myself, at least enough to know what I was doing at that moment. And then it occurred to me wonder, perhaps I was not the person who had asked for the drinks, the drinks that for a short time had made the whole thing seem more bearable. But this occurred to me later, I could not have thought of it then, in Wichmann at 9:10, or if I had, I would not have been able to ascertain what I only began to think much later, and what I later was also unable to understand, because clearly there wasn’t anything to understand. If you are in it, you cannot follow certain things, and you do not even realize what is happening to you, even if you think you have. But I do remember this: at some point I left Wichmann and called my daughter from a payphone. I called her because of the test, because while classes were still in session at the university she nonetheless had had an exam that day, and I remembered this, because it had preoccupied me earlier. You must call that woman’s number, the woman you divorced twenty-some years ago, with whom you have not spoken for years, you must call her, because your daughter lives with her, of course she lives with her, because twenty-some years ago you left her. She picked up the phone on the other end and spoke. It was quite clearly my daughter, though I heard a different voice, an entirely different voice, and this other voice, which perhaps was not my daughter’s voice, but rather my daughter’s mother’s voice, said, “your daughter has passed with highest marks,” which is to say that this voice told me that the person about whom I was inquiring had taken the exam and done splendidly, and then I knew that I have a daughter whom I have raised for years in my own manner, something on which she has had her own views ever since becoming a teenager, but at that moment I knew, precisely because of this, that I was myself, that I was me, because I knew that I was the person who always contradicts, and whom others always contradict, and I knew who had been standing in front of the bar earlier, and who had asked for the beer with unicum, because I knew that I had asked for the beer with unicum, and I said this to myself too as I was exiting the telephone booth, you asked for the drinks, you asked for the beer with unicum, and I was also the person who was waiting for the beer with unicum by the bar, the person who had wondered who is that person raising the question, “who is that person raising the question,” the person who was asking “who is raising the question,” or the person who is not asking the question, “who is raising the question,” but rather is remaining silent, for the moment simply remaining silent. A few days later, when I sought out the psychiatrist in her office, I told her nothing of this, though I had prepared myself to do so.

In any event, on this April night, or rather morning, after I had begun to feel a bit better, having drunk the two beers with unicum, I sensed, but mostly I simply knew that in the matter of a fraction of a fraction of a second I could be back where I had been before, that I was still on the border of that state, the state that I must characterize simply as a sense of sharpness. This is why I should not have had anything to drink, but at 6:20 I drank again, this time in my studio apartment, since I had taken a few things back with me from the Little Hoof. Over the course of the morning I had to open the refrigerator two more times, and this is when it began, after I opened the refrigerator the second time. This time I held onto the wall. I leaned against it with both hands, pressing on it as hard as I could, my legs growing weaker all the while, and then suddenly I understood that this time it would be completely different than what had happened before, and what I remember of what happened next, I can assert that it was indeed different, much as what came over me that day in the exhibition room was also different, though I was much better able to maintain control of myself. At such a moment you cannot look at anyone, you cannot look at anything, which of course is impossible, but that’s what you have to try to do. And you have to take care, lest others look at you. Because of Lady Blue Hair and Mrs. László, I was not safe from the outset. They could come in anytime, as they had sometimes done ever since the time we stuffed the envelopes. You never know. You think that others see nothing, but anything is possible, at any time, and involving anyone.

Though by that point I had put many, many kilometers behind me, and I had had time to guage the place where I found myself, to know who my friends were, and to know the rules of the game in that 340 square meters where I spent eight or even ten hours a day. 340 because my territory was precisely 340 square meters. I had succeeded in persuading Mr. Németh to allow me to have the room that looked out onto the street, a decision to which Birdie had not objected presumably simply because she knew that she would soon leave the Gallery. As indeed one day she did, though she later often came in to see her sibling. “We guard the works of fart!?” She would regularly yell this, and we regularly had to tell her to be quiet, please, can’t you see that there are visitors to the Gallery? But this didn’t really concern her.

I had not quite learned the rules of the game at that time. But I was learning them, much as I was also learning when I had to do what, when I was allowed or forbidden to approach the visitors to the Gallery, when I was allowed or forbidden to approach the Not Just Anyones, who were also visitors to the Gallery, but different. And of course I also learned what I had to say to the people and how to say it. There was a great deal that I only came to understand much later.

But all the while there were fundamental things that I was not able to assess accurately. For instance sometimes I thought that there was nothing wrong with me at all, that I was, indeed, at least almost quite sound, indeed sometimes I concluded that there was nothing particularly unusual about my case. Others might well have found themselves where I had found myself, I thought, as without doubt many people did and do, but that didn’t mean that I had to be the person they thought me to be. Yes, people didn’t necessarily have to think that I was doomed, that I was doomed once and for all, because this had befallen me.

If in some situation you happen to think that someone else happens to think something of you that you do not want to think of yourself, or if you should happen to think that this person thinks precisely the same thing of you that you happen, in the end, to think of yourself, then you can more easily suppose that in time this other person will not necessarily be of this opinion, will not necessarily cling to this supposition, and if this is not the case, it will give cause for further conjecture, or at least reflection, with which you win time. At that time I did not have any strength, I had no strength at all, and from time to time I continued to believe that there was nothing really terribly wrong with me.

There was.

Translated by Thomas Cooper