War & War (37 page)

I haven’t gone mad
—some light flashed in Korin’s ditch-gray eyes—
but I see as clearly as if I were mad.

And furthermore, he added, ever since he had started seeing clearly his brain has had to be strapped in place, figuratively speaking of course, only figuratively, but because he saw everything so clearly now he felt these straps could break at any moment, and that was why he hardly moved his head, but held it as still as he could, as long as possible without the slightest movement, and he meant this very head, this one here, for, no doubt, the other could see how stiffly he held it, not that this was of the least importance, said he, suddenly dropping the subject with a touch of annoyance in his voice, no, he couldn’t see why he even brought the subject up, for it really wasn’t like him to stray off the subject he had set himself and it must be that he was drunk, a fact he couldn’t deny, for it must clearly have been his drunkenness that suddenly got the better of him, because the important thing was that he should be able to describe the true course of events as clearly, as unambiguously, as graphically as possible and to state as plainly as he could that, when it came to the question, the vitally important question, of why things had turned out like this, he was utterly unable to explain, because, personally, he hadn’t a clue why greatness had passed from the world, how the great and noble had managed to vanish, where the exceptional, outstanding ones had gone, not the faintest idea, for how should he have a clue, the whole thing was utterly incomprehensible and that was why no one could understand it, and, as ever, when someone finds things to be incomprehensible it is usually his most acute personal sense of hurt he looks to for answers, and he had looked there himself but it hadn’t got him anywhere because wherever he looked he finished up at the same place, he said, with a drab set of dull ideas and dull explanations, and though occasionally he had thought he was going the right way, along the right path, the end was still dull, infintely dull, for this disappearance or extinction, whatever he called it, was such a mysterious phenomenon that it was beyond him to understand it and, he imagined, beyond everyone else too, the only thing certain being that this was one of the greatest of human enigmas, the appearance and disappearance of greatness in history, or, more accurately, the appearance and disappearance of greatness despite history, from which one might, one just might venture to conclude that history, about which, once again, one could only speak in metaphors, and from now on in metaphors only to a certain extent, was an endless series of running battles and street fights, perhaps even one single continuous running battle or street fight, but this history, despite its extraordinary range, despite all its apparently ungovernable effects, was not entirely to be identified with all the implications of the human condition. To begin with, he said, take the example of the man in the street, that now sanguinary, now cowardly, creature adapted by nature to the street fight, who, as he crawls on through that remarkable mother of all street fights, making his way from cover to cover, possesses one, at least one, characteristic that is not in thrall to history, that being his shadow, which is not, said Korin, subject to the power of history, and so, irrespective of that which endows him with his shadow, whether it be day or night, this shadow, so to speak, escapes the infinitely complex web of the conflict, escapes, in other words, the power of history, because, just consider this—Korin waved his empty glass at the man who still gave no sign of having noticed him, or indeed of having noticed anything at all—think it over: do you think it’s possible to hit this shadow with a gun? no chance, Korin answered sharply, a bullet is not going to cut down a shadow, and he was sure, he declared, that the other man would have no difficulty granting this, just as he, that is to say Korin, knew a thing or two, and had got this right in any case, the bullet wouldn’t touch it and that’s that! that’s more than enough to show that a man’s shadow was no part, no part at all, of history’s surpassingly seamless and apparently all-comprehending mechanism; that, to put it in a nutshell, was the state of affairs and there was no point trying to pick holes in it, this was the way it was, end of the story, period, it was all that could be said on the subject of this shadow, and the only thing that might name or describe this shadow and in naming and describing it attempt to give it some narrative function was, naturally, said Korin, using his empty glass once more in the hope of attracting the barman’s attention, though the barman was somehow stranded there behind the counter beyond the orbit of this blindingly bright night and never looked likely to re-enter it, that thing, said Korin, was poetry. Poetry and shadows he said, his voice louder again, and by raising the issue he wished only to emphasize the fact that there existed something whose mode of being was independent of even history, something that, in its way, negated what, strictly speaking, we should regard as the present version of history, the version that has triumphed by stealth, and it was this thing alone, the existence of the noble, the great, the transcendent that mattered, because it was only the concept of what was noble, what was transcendent, what was truly great that was capable of definition, or rather could be defined as the antithesis of this version of history, for the remarkable reason that it was only the noble, the great and the transcendent whose existence could not be predicated as the product of such a historical process because that historical process, said Korin, required nothing of the sort, because the existence of such things depended entirely on the establishment of nobility as a concept, and that in turn required a better balanced kind of history to come into being, which was all the more necessary so that the historical process should not take on the absolute character it took on now, a character it took on precisely because, tragically, it lacked the concept of nobility, trapped as it was in the tangled maze of vulgar expediency, in which maze it was bound to career on unhindered, so that its triumph was perfectly obvious even to itself, as witness its own repulsive progenitors, and there it remained, in the maze, polishing and burnishing the trophies of its victory until it finally arrived at a state of unimaginable perfection. The cigarette in the man’s hand had burned right down and since he had not only not taken a puff but had not moved it in the slightest the ash continued to lengthen, its own weight bending it in a gentle arc from the filter down over the waiting ashtray. In order for this state of affairs to be maintained the man naturally had very carefully to raise it millimeter by millimeter until it approached an almost horizontal position. And this was what he had been doing all the time, raising the cigarette ever nearer the horizontal, doing so moreover at precisely the rate it was burning, until it had burned right down and the ash stood in one piece suspended over the ashtray, having reached which position it had nowhere else to go, so he had to lower it and tap it in order to avoid it falling off of its own accord, something he clearly did not wish to happen, which was why he lowered it and flicked the ash into the ashtray, so that the ash might gather force and be dashed and immediately disperse and only faintly suggest its earlier form, the once-straight line of the cigarette, and, later, the arc of curving ash that had resolved itself into mere powder and fallen to pieces. Then he threw away the remaining filter, immediately took out a fresh cigarette and lit it. Once more he drew on it deeply, very deeply, drawing the smoke into his lungs, and kept it there a long time. He drew just the once, very deeply and kept it there so long he almost burst. Then he started to blow the smoke out very slowly in one exceedingly thin wisp, exactly as he had done the first time and while the smoke covered his face for a second or two, obscuring it from Korin, it soon shifted again and his face was once more exposed so he could raise his eyes and direct his gaze at the edge of the counter as if there were something there to look at, something drawing his eyes, something not particularly significant, some scratch, some wound, or rather, just the usual thing, that is to say nothing, just a faint band of light.

Mind and enlightenment,
said Korin.

And what he meant by this, he continued unremittingly, was that it was the conflict between the irresistible power of the mind and the enlightenment that unavoidably followed from it with uncanny force; it was the clash of this irresistibility and unavoidability, in his opinion, that led directly to the conditions obtaining today. He couldn’t know what had actually happened of course, for how could someone like him, a mere local historian from the back of beyond, hope to find an answer to a question that lay so far beyond his capabilities, but it was exhausting just to think of those good few centuries of nightmarish triumphal march whereby the mind ruthlessly, step by step, eliminated everything that was deemed not to exist and stripped humanity of anything it had mistakenly but understandably posited as existing, in other words ruthlessly stripped bare the entire world until suddenly there was nothing but the naked world with the hitherto unimaginable creations of the mind on the one side and the enlightenment with its killer’s instinct for destruction on the other, for if one agreed that the creations of the mind were unimaginably great one had all the more reason to grant that the enlightenment’s capacity for destruction was laced with a killer’s instinct, since the storm that broke over the mind truly swept everything away, every support on which the world had until then depended, simply wrecked the foundations of the world and in a way that proclaimed that such foundations did not exist, nor, it added, had they ever existed and there was no chance of them being resurrected from non-existence at some vainly hoped-for point in the vague and distant future. The loss, according to Korin, was immense: immense, unimaginable and impossible to recover from. Everything and everyone that was noble, great and transcendent could do nothing but stand by, if he might so put it, stand at this point where one could have no idea of the true impenetrable depth of the moment, and try to comprehend all that did not exist, that had never existed. They had to understand this and accept as a first principle that—to begin at the top—there was no god, no gods: this was what the noble, great and transcendent had to grasp and resign themselves to before anything else, said Korin, though they of course were incapable of this, simply could not understand it—believe it, yes; accept it yes; but understand it, never—and so they just stood there, uncomprehending, not accepting, long after they should have taken the next step, that being, to use an old formula, he said, to declare that if there is no god, if there are no gods, then there could be no goodness or transcendence either, but they did not take it because, or so Korin imagined it, without a god or gods they were simply incapable of moving, right up until eventually—possibly because the storm that raged around the mind drove them to it—they finally shifted and immediately did realize that without a god or gods there was nothing good or transcendent, at which point they also realized that if these really no longer existed, then neither did they themselves! His feeling, said Korin, was that this might have been the moment they disappeared from history, or rather that from the historical point of view this might have been the time from which we must acknowledge their slow passing, for that was what actually happened, they gradually passed away, he said, like a fire left to burn by itself and turn to ashes at the bottom of a garden, and the result of all this, from this image of the garden that suddenly appeared before him, was that he was now troubled by a terrible feeling that it was not so much a matter of a continuous process of appearing then gradually disappearing but of simple appearance and disappearance, but who knows what precisely happened, he asked, no one, at least not him, though he was as certain as could be about how the current holders of power had slowly and determinedly come to occupy their positions of power because that process had a kind of symmetry, a kind of infernal parasitic symmetry: for as one order slowly faded and decomposed until eventually it vanished, so the other gained strength, assumed a shape and finally gained complete control; while one retreated step by step into mystery so the other became ever more overt; as one continually lost so the other continually gained, and so it went on, defeat and triumph, defeat and triumph, and that was the way of things, said Korin, that was how one order disappeared without trace and how the repulsive other took possession of the throne, and he himself had life to realize, he said, that he had been mistaken, gravely mistaken, in believing that there hadn’t been nor could there be some revolutionary moment in life, for such a revolution, he had come to see that day, had happened, had undeniably taken place. The old beggar in the nook behind him let go of the old woman’s hand. But only for a moment because he immediately drew closer to her, body to body, and began passionately to kiss her cracked lips. The old woman’s expression showed neither acceptance nor rejection of this advance: she put up no resistance but did not respond either. It seemed to be more that she simply had no strength left, that she was some kind of wounded bird that a shot had brought down, her head thrown back, her eyes wide open, her two arms, like wings, hanging helplessly, in other words as if she had collapsed into the other’s embrace, her coat gathered round her neck to form a curious shape as the old man seized her. It was curious but all it meant was that the sudden movement had forced the coat, which was in any case too big for her, to ride up, the collar rising above her head, the effect of the embrace being to more or less wrap her head up in the cloth while the rest of her body took on the appearance of a package, a package in a coat, so from a distance it looked as if the old man were hugging a coat, for the only evidence of a body was the crown of hair rising above a thin hollow face that had quite collapsed in the blinding light, or rather its cheek as the old man’s tongue flickered feverishly over it.