Grim Tales (11 page)

Some there were who claimed that the camera steals the souls of those it photographs. Were their detractors able to see the ghosts that flee the rolls of exposed negatives, they would not have jeered. But spirits are invisible in the darkroom, even under a red light; and the shriek they habitually utter is beyond human audition.

The man loved to look at old photographs, especially of people he did know, taken long before in places he had never visited. While looking at a picture of the 1914 graduates of a small business college, he was stunned to see himself there on the marble staircase, under a swag of patriotic bunting, his finger touching the knot of his tie. Too late he dropped the picture onto the flea-market table. Already, he was adjusting the knot of his tie, nervously, while the owner of the Groningen Tractor Manufacturing Company, who had hired him yesterday, began to climb the staircase toward him.

There was one photograph among those he received from the lab that he had not taken: of a woman of unearthly beauty. Seeing it, he was lost to her – her eyes, the intensity of their gaze. He spent the next five years in search of her. It was as if she had been able to enthrall him with a single look. Because he could not forget her, he forgot everything else that had mattered to him: wife, child, house, job. Forgetting them, he lost them all. In the fifth year of his search, he found her. She was not what he had expected. She was five years older. But more than this, she had not the photograph's power to possess him. Her eyes – in it so entrancing – would, after a moment, slide off his in embarrassment. He was broken. But he married her in spite of his disenchantment in order to “justify himself.” It was a marriage he bitterly regretted.

For a rope to become a snake, a snake a rope – there is nothing marvelous in these. But for a man to become a rope or snake – it is truly a marvel. There was a man with this gift. While a rope, he strangled his friend. While a snake, he poisoned his wife. The two were lovers and happy to die together in one another's arms. Did they not tell him they could not live a moment longer without each other?

Her completely innocent remark to her husband at breakfast, that he was not himself today, severed the slender attachment he had not only to her but also to himself – his identity. If not himself, then who? He left the house that same morning, never to return. It was only natural that, in a barroom close by the docks, he should take the first identity that came to hand and kill the sailor who had given him offense. After having assumed in the most casual way this new and homicidal self, it was inevitable that he became, for a time, the most hunted criminal in the city in which once he had lived so peaceably. He was sentenced to death in the presence of witnesses able to verify without the slightest doubt his identity as a murderer.

To lose one's mind is tragic; but to find it again inside someone else – this was the catastrophe that sent him, raving, to his death.

He no longer knew how to live. In what way, so as to be happy and good. But of this he was certain: to remain in the city would be his doom. So he determined to leave it – leave everything by which he was known. His wife, his children, his dog, his job of courtroom usher, his clothes, the pipes and tobacco enjoyed by him each evening in the small garden he had made for himself behind the house – everything. I must begin again, he whispered. It's the only way to become what I must become next. One morning when the house was empty, he wrote his letters of farewell and of resignation. He ruined his usher's uniform and broke his pipe stems as a sign to himself there could be no turning back. Finally, he took his memories one by one, and as if they were clean shirts bearing the heat yet from his wife's iron, he folded them and laid them neatly in a drawer of oblivion, for which he had no key. (Yes, there is such a drawer. But one must have traveled far from oneself to have found it.) Nothing of what used to be his life would go with him into what was to be, for him now, his new life. He closed the bedroom door, softly, almost regretfully and started down the stairs. Halfway down, he tripped – on a toy belonging to one of his children, on one of his wife's shoes dropped there by the dog, or on a lace of his own shoe that had come undone – it doesn't matter what sent him headlong to the bottom of the stair. He was not to leave, is all. No, it was impossible, really, to begin again in despite of all that claimed him. He ought to have known that.

In the street, he stooped to pick up a dime only to find, as if in a dream, coin after coin, one after the other, which he followed, absorbedly – this trail of silver that led him irresistibly to an open manhole.

They ought not to have burned Newton – his great
Principia
. The fire undid the laws that bind men and matter to earth. “Everything that was not nailed down” flew off into night, while the pages blackened and curled. Blackened and turned to ashes scattering among the stars. The stars, too, broke their strings. The stars fizzled, died, were extinguished – “like lights in a house being put out one by one,” until there was only night and the one who is writing this down, afraid to go outside, not wanting to leave his room and fly off into blackness.

In another story, it is
The Interpretation of Dreams
they were burning, the book burners in their polished boots and stiff caps. When the book was burnt utterly so that not a single word was left, not even a syllable that one might intone in the way of an incantation – then the streets ran with beasts and madmen. Everywhere boys destroyed their fathers and took their mothers against their will or not. So was infamy let out from where it had been hidden, “like something unclean hiding itself under a rock.” But here and there, some men flew through windows into rooms where women slept and dreamed of flying men or of horses galloping over an endless plain.