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"Once
I saw an American gangster movie. In one scene a detective kills a crook and
before he fires the fatal shot he says: see you in hell. He's playing. The
detective is playing and he's deluded. The crook, who meets his gaze and curses
him just before he dies, is also playing and deluded, although his fields of
play and delusion have been reduced to almost zero, since in the next shot he's
going to die. The director of the film is also playing. So is the scriptwriter.
See you at the Nobel. We'll go down in history. We have the gratitude of the
German people. A heroic battle remembered for generations to come. An immortal
love. A name inscribed in marble. The time of the Muses. Even a phrase as
seemingly innocent as
echoes of Greek prose
is all play and delusion.

"Play
and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of
their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no
one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it
flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for
the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural
associations and declaimers of poetry— all aid the forest to grow and hide what
must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since
the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being
reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

"Plagiarism,
you say? Yes, plagiarism, in the sense that all minor works, all works from the
pen of a minor writer, can be nothing but plagiarism of some masterpiece. The
small difference is that here we're talking about
sanctioned
plagiarism.
Plagiarism as camouflage as some wood and canvas scenery as a charade that leads
us, likely as not, into the void.

"In
a word: experience is best. I won't say you can't get experience by hanging
around libraries, but libraries are second to experience. Experience is the
mother of science, it is often said. When I was young and I still thought I
would make a career in the world of letters, I met a great writer. A great
writer who had probably written a single masterpiece, although in my judgment
everything he had written was a masterpiece.

"I won't tell you his
name. It'll do you no good to learn it, nor do you need to know it for the
purposes of this story. Suffice it to say that he was German and one day he
came to
Cologne
to give a few lectures. Of course, I didn't miss a single one of the three he
gave at the university. At the last lecture I got a seat in the front row, and
rather than listen (the truth is he repeated things he'd already said in the
first and second lectures), I spent the time observing him in detail, his
hands, for example, bony and energetic, his old man's neck, like the neck of a
turkey or a plucked rooster, his faintly Slavic cheekbones, his lifeless lips,
lips that one could slash with a knife and from which one could be sure not a
single drop of blood would fall, his gray temples like a stormy sea, and especially
his eyes, deep eyes that at the slightest tilt of his head seemed at times like
two endless tunnels, two abandoned tunnels on the verge of collapse.

"Of
course, once the lecture was over he was mobbed by local worthies and I wasn't
even able to shake his hand and tell him how much I admired him. Time went by.
The writer died, and, as one might expect, I continued to read and reread him.
The day came when I decided to give up literature. I gave it up. This was in no
way traumatic but rather liberating. Between you and me, I'll confess that it
was like losing my virginity. What a relief to give up literature, to give up
writing and simply read!

"But
that's another story. We can discuss it when you return my typewriter. And yet
I couldn't forget the great writer and his visit. Meanwhile, I began to work at
a factory that made optical instruments. I did well for myself. I was a
bachelor, I had money, every week I went to the movies, the theater,
exhibitions, and I also studied English and French and visited bookshops where
I bought whatever books struck my fancy.

"A comfortable
life. But I couldn't shake the memory of the great writer's visit, and what's
more, I realized abruptly that I remembered only the third lecture, and my
memories were limited to the writer's face, as if it was supposed to tell me
something that in the end it didn't. But what? One day, for reasons that are
beside the point, I went with a doctor friend of mine to the university morgue.
I doubt you've ever been there. The morgue is underground and it's a long room
with white-tiled walls and a wooden ceiling. In the middle there's a stage
where autopsies, dissections, and other scientific atrocities are performed.
Then there are two small offices, one for the dean of forensic studies and the other
for another professor. At each end are the refrigerated rooms where the corpses
are stored, the bodies of the destitute or people without papers visited by
death in cheap hotel rooms.

"In
those days I showed a doubtless morbid interest in these facilities and my
doctor friend kindly took it upon himself to give me a detailed tour. We even
attended the last autopsy of the day. Then my friend went into the dean's
office and I was left alone outside in the corridor, waiting for him, as the
students left and a kind of crepuscular lethargy crept from under the doors
like poison gas. After ten minutes of waiting I was startled by a noise from
one of the refrigerated rooms. In those days, I promise you, that was enough to
frighten anyone, but I've never been particularly cowardly and I went to see
what it was.

"When I opened the door a gust of cold air hit me in the
face. At the back of the room, by a stretcher, a man was trying to open one of
the lockers to stow away a corpse, but no matter how hard he struggled, the
door to the locker or cell wouldn't budge. Without moving from the threshold, I
asked whether he needed help. The man straightened up, he was very tall, and
gave me what seemed to me a despairing look. Perhaps it was because I sensed
despair in his gaze that I was emboldened to approach him. As I did, flanked by
corpses, I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves and when I reached him the first
thing I did was offer him another cigarette, perhaps forcing a false
camaraderie.

"Only
then did the morgue worker look at me and it was as if I had gone back in time.
His eyes were exactly like the eyes of the great writer whose
Cologne
lectures I had devoutly attended. I
confess that just then, for a few seconds, I even thought I was going mad. It
was the morgue worker's voice, nothing like the warm voice of the great writer,
that rescued me from my panic. He said: smoking isn't allowed here.

"I
didn't know what to answer. He added: smoke is harmful to the dead. I laughed.
He supplied an explanatory note: smoke interferes with the process of
preservation. I made a noncommittal gesture. He tried a last time: he spoke
about filters, he spoke about moisture levels, he uttered the word
purity.
I
offered him a cigarette again and he announced with resignation that he didn't
smoke. I asked whether he had worked there for a long time. In an impersonal
and somewhat shrill voice, he said he had worked at the university since long
before the 1914 war.

'"Always at
the morgue?' I asked.

"'Here and nowhere else,' he
answered.

"'It's funny,' I said,
'but your face, and especially your eyes, remind me of a great German writer.'
At this point I mentioned the writer's name.

'"I've never
heard of him,' was his response.

"In
earlier days this reply would have outraged me, but thanks God I was living a
new life. I remarked that working at the morgue must surely prompt wise or at
least original reflections on human fate. He looked at me as if I were mocking
him or speaking French. I insisted. These surroundings, I said, with a gesture
that encompassed the whole morgue, are in a certain way the ideal place to
contemplate the brevity of life, the unfathomable fate of mankind, the futility
of earthly strife.

"With
a shudder of horror, I was suddenly aware that I was talking to him as if he were
the great German writer and this was the conversation we'd never had. I don't
have much time, he said. I looked him in the eye again. There could be no doubt
about it: he had the eyes of my idol. And his reply:
I
don't have
much time.
How many doors it opened! How many paths were suddenly cleared,
revealed to me!

"I
don't have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don't have much time, I have to
breathe, eat, drink, sleep. I don't have much time, I have to keep the gears
meshing. I don't have much time, I'm busy living. I don't have much time, I'm
busy dying. As you can imagine, there were no more questions. I helped him open
the locker. I wanted to help him slide the corpse in, but my clumsiness was
such that the sheet slipped and then I saw the face of the corpse and I closed
my eyes and bowed my head and let him work in peace.

"When
my friend came out he watched me from the door in silence. Everything all
right? he asked. I couldn't answer, or didn't know how to answer. Maybe I said:
everything's wrong. But that wasn't what I meant to say."

Before
Archimboldi left, after they'd had a cup of tea, the man who rented him the
typewriter said:

"Jesus
is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to
frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it."

On
one of Archimboldi's many journeys across the city in search of someone who
would rent him a typewriter he once again happened upon the two tramps with
whom he had shared a cellar before he moved to the garret.

Little had changed, it seemed, for his old comrades in misfortune.
The former reporter had tried to get work at the new paper in
Cologne
, where they wouldn't take him because
of his Nazi past. Little by little his cheerfulness and good nature disappeared
as his trials showed no sign of ending and he began to suffer the aches and
pains of old age. The tank veteran, meanwhile, now worked at a motorcycle
repair shop and had joined the Communist Party.

When the two were together in the cellar, they fought constantly.
The tank man took the old reporter to task for his Nazi militancy and
cowardice. The old reporter got down on his knees and swore at the top of his
lungs that yes, he had been a coward, but never a Nazi, not a real Nazi. We
wrote what they told us to write. If we didn't want to be fired, we had to
write what we were told, he whined, but the tank man was unmoved, adding to his
reproaches the undeniable fact that while he and others like him were fighting
in tanks that broke down and caught on fire, the reporter and others like him
were content to write propagandistic lies, ignoring the feelings of the tank
men and the mothers of the tank men and even the fiancees of the tank men.

"For
that," he said, "I will never forgive you, Otto."

"But it isn't
my fault," whined the reporter.

"Snivel,
snivel," said the tank soldier.

"We tried to make poetry," said the reporter, "we
tried to while away the time and stay alive to see what would come next."

"Well, now you've seen what comes next, you filthy
swine," answered the tank man.

Sometimes
the reporter talked about suicide.

"I
don't see any other way out," he said when Archimboldi came to visit them.
"As a reporter, I'm finished. As a factory worker, I'm hopeless. As some
local government clerk, I'll always be marked by my past. As a free agent, I
don't know how to do anything right. So why prolong my suffering?"

"To pay your debt to society, to atone for your lies,"
shouted the tank man, who sat there at the table pretending to be engrossed in
the paper but in fact listening.

"You
don't know what you're saying, Gustav," the reporter answered. "My
only sin, I've told you a million times, has been cowardice and I'm paying
dearly for it."

"You'll
have to pay even more dearly, Otto, even more dearly." During this visit,
Archimboldi suggested to the reporter that perhaps his luck would change if he
moved to another city, a city less devastated than
Cologne
, a smaller city where no one knew
him. This was a possibility that hadn't occurred to the reporter and from that
moment on he gave it serious consideration.

It
took Archimboldi twenty days to type his novel. He made a carbon copy and then,
at the public library, which had just reopened its doors, he searched for the
names of two publishing houses where he might send the manuscript. After long
scrutiny he realized that the houses that published many of his favorite books
had long ago ceased to exist, some because they'd gone bankrupt or because of
the apathy or waning interest of their owners, others because the Nazis had shut
them down or imprisoned their editors and some because they'd been wiped out in
Allied bombing raids.

One
of the librarians, who knew him and knew that he wrote, asked whether he needed
assistance and Archimboldi told her he was looking for literary publishing
houses that were still active. The librarian said she could help. For a while
she rummaged through some papers and then she made a phone call. When this was
done she handed Archimboldi a list of twenty publishing houses, the same as the
number of days he'd spent typing his novel, which was surely a good sign. But
the problem was that he had just the original and one copy of the manuscript,
which meant he could choose only two places. That night, standing at the door
to the bar, he took out the paper every so often and studied it. Never had the
names of publishers struck him as so beautiful, so distinguished, so full of
promise and hope. Still, he decided to be prudent and not let himself be
carried away by enthusiasm. The original he dropped off in person at a
publishing house in
Cologne
.
The advantage of this was that if it was rejected Archimboldi could go pick up
the manuscript himself and send it out straightaway again. The carbon copy he
sent to a house in Hamburg that had published books of the German Left until
1933, when the Nazi government not only shut down the business but also tried
to send its editor, Mr. Jacob Bubis, to a prison camp, which it would have done
if Mr. Bubis hadn't been a step ahead of them and taken the path of exile.