THE LUTE AND THE SCARS Read Online Free Page B

the way they would have appeared on the canvas of a Dutch master.
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    Here in Amsterdam, in a lonely little street a stone ’ s throw from a canal, the man without a country looked up a fortune-teller one afternoon whose business was attracting attention with its over-the-top advertisements that no one could say were lacking in imagination: “ What awaits you on the morrow? Only God and Satan know. And their pupil, Herr Gottlieb. ” And so forth.
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    He walked through the door, then pushed aside a heavy plush curtain and found himself plunged into reddish twilight emanating from a lamp with a red shade, lying on its side. After he had scanned the room, which seemed empty to him, he felt somewhat disappointed, as if he were experiencing d é j à vu , as if he had already seen all of this somewhere. Above all it was professional curiosity that brought him to this “ premium fortune-teller ” ; he wanted to have a complete mental inventory of the scene in case he should ever need to evoke it. But right away, right at the door, it dawned on him that he should allow this “ soothsayer ” to decide his fate, since he had already exhausted all other means: the advice of friends, priests . . .
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    Now he was seated in a second-class compartment of an express train, thinking about what Mr. Gottlieb, the “ premium fortune-teller, ” had told him. The man ’ s statement reverberated unceasingly in his ears, formulated in passable German: “ Paris is your last chance . . . Yes, yes. The last . . . ” Was he superstitious? No more and no less so than other people. If he had been told this earlier, two or three years ago, he would not have paid any attention to it.
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    Capturing on paper, in haste, and with no explicit, patent goal, these miscreant humans, this freak show, the man without a country was aware of the fact that literature was playing a secondary role here, even as he also tried hard to pretend to himself that his interest was a purely professional one, and involved human phenomena; it will probably, he thought to himself, turn out to be more of an exorcism of some type, part of that phobia that prevented him from entering an elevator, of that dread of the unknown that literature can only make use of as an exorcism. Because, ultimately, if he should need such a figure, it would rise up from his memory, even before he pored over his notebooks and jottings, and what he was doing now was thus serving as a kind of amulet to ward off the evil eye, or malevolent destiny. For he needed health, and he needed life, a healthy and normal life, since his unfinished work still lay before him — everything else was subordinated to that thought. Everything else.
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    The stateless one left his hotel at five. In front of the doors to the building he stopped for a moment and looked first up at the sky and then at his watch. “ The marquise went out at precisely five o ’ clock, ” he noted to himself.
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    The blow came so fast, so unexpectedly, that our apatride couldn ’ t have felt anything save the penetrating pain on the crown of his head; and all at once daybreak lit up all around him, as if a thunderclap had struck in the vicinity; lightning flashed in his mind, illuminating with its fearsome and powerful tongue of fire his whole life, and immediately thereafter darkness must have descended. His limbs separated from his body, as if an invisible force had ripped them from his torso. (We can, by means of analogy, have a presentiment of this horrific sensation of a higher power pulling the limbs from our body: once upon a time you were rocking on a chair and the chair suddenly flipped over, and you found yourself lying with the crown of your head on the concrete floor while for a moment your hands and your feet seemed to be separated from your body, ripped out of their joints, and you lay for several seconds without moving on the ground, incapable of screaming because robbed of your voice.) This rapid flash of light,