Spurious

With, Not Alone

Appelfeld's For Every Sin. A series of encounters, that's all. We know the protagonist's name - Theo - but not the names of those he meets. And we know what he wants: to pare down relations. To simplify. Even to achieve the absolute, the severing of relations, whether of dependency or trust.

And isn't that what I want when I select a book to read from the shelf? I want, in the opening paragraphs, to be reduced - to what? Simplicity - a few simple sentences like a cup of water. And to read of others who would be so reduced. Why did I pick For Every Sin rather than To The Cattails or The Healer? Because it begins not with a family, not with mother said, or father said, but with a single character, a simple protagonist. And a merciful simplicity of prose, just one clean line after another.

But this is also a book in which such mercy is denied me. As if a book could be a retreat, a turning from the world. But unto what does this book turn me? Why, as I read, am I urging Theo the refugee on, urging him to make his way across the hillcrests, avoiding the valleys where there are others?

A series of encounters, one after another. And a series of escapes. Theo's attempt to move, to free himself. And then, in the end, the lesson that such freedom is a lie, and that he belongs with the others. I feel the book is teaching me. I read it quickly enough, but it refused to settle back inside me. Refused - and so I couldn't begin the next book I borrowed from the library.

I had to write, instead. How pitiful! To write - to follow again the course of For Every Sin. To follow it, just that, and then to learn. But what is this lesson? Appelfeld is the simplest of writers. And as I read, as I write of what I read, I feel I become the simplest of readers. Only one, now, who has not turned from the world in order to read, but the opposite: to read is to turn back to the world. To be turned, just as Theo had to redescend into the valleys from the hillcrests.

Now the time has come to separate. This being together weakens us. One mustn't be together. A man in the field is brave. But with others he's swept along like a beast.

Theo, just liberated from a hard labour camp, dreams of 'inner order'. He found himself in a deserted army outpost, where everything has its place. He'd separated himself from the others, from the refugees, and gone North. But somehow a stranger called Mina, another refugee, has found him, and it is to her he is speaking.

We mustn't be together. Everyone for himself. In that way you can also maintain your inner order. This room, for example, shows inner order. They retreated calmly. They left everything in its place.

Inner order. On the wall, a map on which he has plotted his journey back to his hometown. He shows Mina. That is where he will have to go. Alone, of course. But he doesn't leave, not yet. Mina has taken to bed. She drowses. Later, she shows him her wounds. She apologises for doing so. Theo says, 'a person must show others and demand help'. Then he speaks, letting lose 'a confined stream of words'. Reported speech:

He spoke of the need to live a full and proud life. A person who doesn't live a full and proud life is like an insect. The Jews never taught their children how to live, to struggle, to demand their due; in times of need, to unsheathe the sword and stand face to face against evil.

What polemic! But what war is he fighting? What sword is to be unsheathed? He was alone in the army outpost. He admires its order. You could stay there a whole year, he muses; there's plenty of food. But meanwhile, there's Mina. Earlier, Theo had offered Mina coffee and cigarettes. She said:

A cup of coffee and a cigarette. Who imagined such gifts? We've already been in the world of truth, and we've come back from there. It's interesting to come back from there, isn't it?

Truth: the camps. Why that? Why truth? Like Theo, Mina has left the others in the shed with whom she was confined. They were good to her, she remembers, and later, Theo will also remember the goodness of the others. Now Theo's monologue on order. And Mina says, 'I am not so tidy. In all my school report cards it says, "Not Orderly"'. That's how it was for Theo. But now he's to be orderly. You can learn one thing from the retreating army: order. They left everything in its place.

Order: but Mina is wounded. She shows Theo her wounds. And just as stubbornly as he speaks of his desire to move, to walk home, he speaks in praise of those who ask for help. That too is what it means to live a full and proud life. Now we understand: everyone is to be alone, but unafraid to ask for help. Alone, and coming to others only to ask for help, or to offer it. But everyone alone, untogether.

He goes out to find fresh food and a doctor. He returns having found none. Mina is not there. Where is she? He looks out over the hilltops.

Theo raised his head and looked out through the screened window, as though seeking that part of his being which had remained in the hills.

That's where he would be: walking across the hilltops, steadily advancing. But he does not resent his obligation. He is obligated by Mina, by her wounds. he calls her name. The day passes. Earlier, Theo notes to himself he sees his mother's features in Mina's. Now he is afraid: his memory is emptying out. He leaves, going south. He'd headed north, to be away from the refugees, but now he is heading south. Courage again: if he only follows this course, he will be home.

But a voice, asking him for a cigarette, surprises him. There is a man sprawled at his feet. 'Theo fell to his knees and gave the man a light'. Now Theo sees refugees everywhere below. The man with him says he wants to escape them, too. They remind him of the camps. Theo is frightened that Mina is one of the refugee tents, 'surrounded by people feeding her sardines and drilling it into her that she had to be with everyone, that in every generation the Jews were together, and now too they must not abandon the community'.

This thought horrifies him. Should he return to the cabin, the deserted army post? Order, simplicity. But he remembers that he came to the other refugees to search for Mina. Is this true? The narrator had not told us this. Still, he cannot find her, and his face has drifted from his memory: he will not recognise her even if he does find her.

Another encounter. 'Do you have a cigarette?' Yes, Theo does. He recognises the accent: 'You're from Vienna, aren't you?' Yes. The man says he has forgotten everything, and asks Theo where he intends to go. 'Home, straight home'. 'You're right, you're right', says the man, and then Theo sees in the delicate face of his interlocutor a vanished capacity to deliberate and order; in its place 'a kind of hesitant wonderment'. The man is lost in his loss. Theo asserts, 'First a person must get home, isn't that so?'' the man agrees 'with great submission'. Home: is that where order will be found?

The refugees keep informers prisoner, beating their feet. They wail.

Theo wanted to get up and approach them, but they were too sunk into themselves. It was as though they had just grasped that for them the war wasn't over, for them it was continuing. He felt a kind of closeness with them.

A closeness? If he lies down, he will become like them. He will not lie down. He walks, but then he collapses. Another man is lying on the ground near him and addresses him 'with an annoying Jewish voice'; they speak. Evening comes. Voices all around them. Theo is furious: he wants silence. He rises and goes close to a fire. He asks for coffee, and receives a cup of coffee from a woman with trembling hands.

Now he remembers Mina again, and calls out her name. He dreams of Mina. He speaks with her. She expresses concern about the informers. Theo is angry. When he wakes, back to the woman with trembling hands for more coffee. They speak. Is she religious? She is not religious. Her husband was a communist, and opposed to all religion. It seems to Theo she is religious, but she is not religious. What else can she do but serve coffee?, she says. It keeps her sane.

Now Theo tells her he intends to go to a monastery. It is news to us, the readers. To a monastery?  He wants quiet and music. He suffers from the noise. The words go mute in him; he withdraws. He remembers Mina's face. He calls it lovely now. It is clear to him that she has entered a convent. Silence and music.

He sits in the darkness. Another refugee comes to him and tells Theo he must eat. Theo is angry. Who is he to be told? Again he speaks of separation, only this time he acts on his impulse and leaves.

A sharp fragrance of mown clover stood in the air. Apparently the wind came from a distance. Here, there was not a living soul. Green darkness lay beneath the tree trunks, and the silence was heavy and undisturbed. "I'm on my way," he said to himself.

Memories fill him. His mother, his father. The chapter passes, a new one begins. Again he meets the refugees. Again he is given coffee. He speaks to someone who reminds him of an Uncle, and announces his intention to convert. His interlocutor seems angry. 'It isn't anger, it's strangulation'. The other man grabs Theo's coat; Theo pushes him away; the man falls. The man is unconscious. Theo is surrounded and accused of violence.

That evening, he sets out again. Alone again. Memories come again. Theo confusedly supposes he murdered the man. Another encounter: a full figured woman who had hidden among the peasant folk for the war years, the cows letting her suck milk from their udders. They drink coffee together, Theo and her. Then off he goes again, imagining there are pursuers after him to bring him to trial for murder.

He wanders. Memories again. His mother's love of coffee. He calls out for coffee 'in his mother's voice'. Another encounter: a woman and her daughter. They are frightened of him. He gives them cigarettes. They've lost their supplies - a man stole them from them. Theo will help them, he says, but they disappear in the night.

Later, as he drinks coffee, another man approaches him. His interlocutor tells Theo of his own conversion, in the war years. He thought it would save him from the fate of the others; it does not. But in the camps, he has discovered a kind of faith. The man was a violinist, a concertmaster. Now he's no desire to play again. 'Nor to sing again in the synagogue?', asks Theo.

'Jewish prayer is the essence of simplicity. One takes a prayerbook in his hands and prays'. - 'You've given up music?' -'Our camp was full of classical music. The commander of the camp was mad about Mozart'.

This after Theo's memories of his mother's love of Mozart. She would listen to the music coming from the church, Theo had told his interlocutor. 'All during the war the music was within me. Now I'm afraid to lose it'.

Another encounter, then another - a woman whose pleasure is to serve coffee to everyone, from her plentiful supplies. She'll stay there forever, she says, when Theo tells her he is going home. The bodies of her younger sister and her daughters lie in the woods nearby. She will stay there.

Theo moves on, still imagining he is being followed. He dreams. Then he dreams of Mendel Dorf, one of his shedmates in the camp. Mendel rose early to pray; he had faith; he angers the other prisoners; the worst, according to Theo, comes when Mendel is accused of behaving like a Christian, rather than a Jew. The worst: but all Theo can remember is Mendel's face, 'round in its simplicity'.

Now he wanders again across the hillcrests, dreaming of home. His feet are light again; in two and a half weeks I will be home again, he tells himself. But now again the refugees, many of them, crowded togther. The smell of coffee: he is in a transit camp. 'Transit to where?', he asks. 'I don't know', says a woman. Now he curses himself. If he had stayed on the hillcrests, he would have been alright. This is what he tells the woman. Here, the valley can be blocked by enemies; it is necessary to scatter, so as not to make a target.

More informers, kept in a pit, but who are given steaming mugs of coffee. Theo feels guilty: isn't it he who should be in the pit instead of them? His interlocutor is educated; they continue to talk. Isn't she frightened?, Theo asks. Every refugee is a precious person, she says. She has learnt to love them; she listens to their stories. Theo tells her of his desire to convert. She would never do that, she says. And not now, above all.

He rises to his feet. He must depart. Then another man, who, like him, was once a student. He is stranded in the transit camp, he tells Theo, who speaks once again of the hillcrests. Now Theo climbs out of the valley. A waking dream of Mendel. He argues in his dream for his conversion.

'I'm going to the place where Bach dwells. The place where Bach dwells is like a temple. I have no other place in the world. Now I'm making a pilgrimage to him'.

He tells himself he left the labour camps, his shedmates, his allies in the war years to leave Yiddish behind. His mother's punctilious German. His father's syntactical precision. But now he realises that language has deserted him. A cup of coffee, he says in his mother's voice. He feels frightened. 'At the inn I'll buy cigarettes', he tells himself. And remembers his mother's last words, as she got into the railroad car with the others. 'I don't like this hurly burly'.

The last encounter. He has been two days without coffee and cigarettes. He comes to a low shed, full of refugees. Come in, he is invited. They have coffee and cigarettes. But Theo says he doesn't want to come in. He's going home, he says.

'You know very well that no one is waiting for us at home. Tkae one of the sick people and bring him to a safe place. That will be your reward'.

Now Theo remembers his own deportation. He and his father, with the others, being marched through his hometown. The burning synagogue. Now his interlocutor says:

'There are some weak people among us whom we mustn't abandon now. We haven't lost the semblance of humanity. We must do what is incumbent upon us. Isn't that so?'

Open and simple words: the brethren are scattered on deserted roads. The weak must be watched over. Then it comes: Theo realises he will never go home, that his mother's language is lost to him. Now and forever it will be the language of the camps. His interlocutor says:

'Thought is forbidden to us. Thought dribes one mad. We must do as much good as possible'.

Words close to those of the educated woman he met in the previous chapter. And to woman with trembling hands who served coffee to all. The novel ends with Theo asleep, as after a long, desperate quarrel, having gulped down mug after mug of coffee.

Appelfeld's For Every Sin. A series of encounters, that's all. We know the protagonist's name - Theo - but not the names of those he meets. And we know what he wants: to pare down relations. To simplify. Even to achieve the absolute, the severing of relations, whether of dependency or trust.

And isn't that what I want when I select a book to read from the shelf? I want, in the opening paragraphs, to be reduced - to what? Simplicity - a few simple sentences like a cup of water. And to read of others who would be so reduced. Why did I pick For Every Sin rather than To The Cattails or The Healer? Because it begins not with a family, not with mother said, or father said, but with a single character, a simple protagonist. And a merciful simplicity of prose, just one clean line after another.

But this is also a book in which such mercy is denied me. As if a book could be a retreat, a turning from the world. But unto what does this book turn me? Why, as I read, am I urging Theo the refugee on, urging him to make his way across the hillcrests, avoiding the valleys where there are others?

A series of encounters, one after another. And a series of escapes. Theo's attempt to move, to free himself. And then, in the end, the lesson that such freedom is a lie, and that he belongs with the others. I feel the book is teaching me. I read it quickly enough, but it refused to settle back inside me. Refused - and so I couldn't begin the next book I borrowed from the library.

I had to write, instead. How pitiful! To write - to follow again the course of For Every Sin. To follow it, just that, and then to learn. But what is this lesson? Appelfeld is the simplest of writers. And as I read, as I write of what I read, I feel I become the simplest of readers. Only one, now, who has not turned from the world in order to read, but the opposite: to read is to turn back to the world. To be turned, just as Theo had to redescend into the valleys from the hillcrests.

Now the time has come to separate. This being together weakens us. One mustn't be together. A man in the field is brave. But with others he's swept along like a beast.

Theo, just liberated from a hard labour camp, dreams of 'inner order'. He found himself in a deserted army outpost, where everything has its place. He'd separated himself from the others, from the refugees, and gone North. But somehow a stranger called Mina, another refugee, has found him, and it is to her he is speaking.

We mustn't be together. Everyone for himself. In that way you can also maintain your inner order. This room, for example, shows inner order. They retreated calmly. They left everything in its place.

Inner order. On the wall, a map on which he has plotted his journey back to his hometown. He shows Mina. That is where he will have to go. Alone, of course. But he doesn't leave, not yet. Mina has taken to bed. She drowses. Later, she shows him her wounds. She apologises for doing so. Theo says, 'a person must show others and demand help'. Then he speaks, letting lose 'a confined stream of words'. Reported speech:

He spoke of the need to live a full and proud life. A person who doesn't live a full and proud life is like an insect. The Jews never taught their children how to live, to struggle, to demand their due; in times of need, to unsheathe the sword and stand face to face against evil.

What polemic! But what war is he fighting? What sword is to be unsheathed? He was alone in the army outpost. He admires its order. You could stay there a whole year, he muses; there's plenty of food. But meanwhile, there's Mina. Earlier, Theo had offered Mina coffee and cigarettes. She said:

A cup of coffee and a cigarette. Who imagined such gifts? We've already been in the world of truth, and we've come back from there. It's interesting to come back from there, isn't it?

Truth: the camps. Why that? Why truth? Like Theo, Mina has left the others in the shed with whom she was confined. They were good to her, she remembers, and later, Theo will also remember the goodness of the others. Now Theo's monologue on order. And Mina says, 'I am not so tidy. In all my school report cards it says, "Not Orderly"'. That's how it was for Theo. But now he's to be orderly. You can learn one thing from the retreating army: order. They left everything in its place.

Order: but Mina is wounded. She shows Theo her wounds. And just as stubbornly as he speaks of his desire to move, to walk home, he speaks in praise of those who ask for help. That too is what it means to live a full and proud life. Now we understand: everyone is to be alone, but unafraid to ask for help. Alone, and coming to others only to ask for help, or to offer it. But everyone alone, untogether.

He goes out to find fresh food and a doctor. He returns having found none. Mina is not there. Where is she? He looks out over the hilltops.

Theo raised his head and looked out through the screened window, as though seeking that part of his being which had remained in the hills.

That's where he would be: walking across the hilltops, steadily advancing. But he does not resent his obligation. He is obligated by Mina, by her wounds. he calls her name. The day passes. Earlier, Theo notes to himself he sees his mother's features in Mina's. Now he is afraid: his memory is emptying out. He leaves, going south. He'd headed north, to be away from the refugees, but now he is heading south. Courage again: if he only follows this course, he will be home.

But a voice, asking him for a cigarette, surprises him. There is a man sprawled at his feet. 'Theo fell to his knees and gave the man a light'. Now Theo sees refugees everywhere below. The man with him says he wants to escape them, too. They remind him of the camps. Theo is frightened that Mina is one of the refugee tents, 'surrounded by people feeding her sardines and drilling it into her that she had to be with everyone, that in every generation the Jews were together, and now too they must not abandon the community'.

This thought horrifies him. Should he return to the cabin, the deserted army post? Order, simplicity. But he remembers that he came to the other refugees to search for Mina. Is this true? The narrator had not told us this. Still, he cannot find her, and his face has drifted from his memory: he will not recognise her even if he does find her.

Another encounter. 'Do you have a cigarette?' Yes, Theo does. He recognises the accent: 'You're from Vienna, aren't you?' Yes. The man says he has forgotten everything, and asks Theo where he intends to go. 'Home, straight home'. 'You're right, you're right', says the man, and then Theo sees in the delicate face of his interlocutor a vanished capacity to deliberate and order; in its place 'a kind of hesitant wonderment'. The man is lost in his loss. Theo asserts, 'First a person must get home, isn't that so?'' the man agrees 'with great submission'. Home: is that where order will be found?

The refugees keep informers prisoner, beating their feet. They wail.

Theo wanted to get up and approach them, but they were too sunk into themselves. It was as though they had just grasped that for them the war wasn't over, for them it was continuing. He felt a kind of closeness with them.

A closeness? If he lies down, he will become like them. He will not lie down. He walks, but then he collapses. Another man is lying on the ground near him and addresses him 'with an annoying Jewish voice'; they speak. Evening comes. Voices all around them. Theo is furious: he wants silence. He rises and goes close to a fire. He asks for coffee, and receives a cup of coffee from a woman with trembling hands.

Now he remembers Mina again, and calls out her name. He dreams of Mina. He speaks with her. She expresses concern about the informers. Theo is angry. When he wakes, back to the woman with trembling hands for more coffee. They speak. Is she religious? She is not religious. Her husband was a communist, and opposed to all religion. It seems to Theo she is religious, but she is not religious. What else can she do but serve coffee?, she says. It keeps her sane.

Now Theo tells her he intends to go to a monastery. It is news to us, the readers. To a monastery?  He wants quiet and music. He suffers from the noise. The words go mute in him; he withdraws. He remembers Mina's face. He calls it lovely now. It is clear to him that she has entered a convent. Silence and music.

He sits in the darkness. Another refugee comes to him and tells Theo he must eat. Theo is angry. Who is he to be told? Again he speaks of separation, only this time he acts on his impulse and leaves.

A sharp fragrance of mown clover stood in the air. Apparently the wind came from a distance. Here, there was not a living soul. Green darkness lay beneath the tree trunks, and the silence was heavy and undisturbed. "I'm on my way," he said to himself.

Memories fill him. His mother, his father. The chapter passes, a new one begins. Again he meets the refugees. Again he is given coffee. He speaks to someone who reminds him of an Uncle, and announces his intention to convert. His interlocutor seems angry. 'It isn't anger, it's strangulation'. The other man grabs Theo's coat; Theo pushes him away; the man falls. The man is unconscious. Theo is surrounded and accused of violence.

That evening, he sets out again. Alone again. Memories come again. Theo confusedly supposes he murdered the man. Another encounter: a full figured woman who had hidden among the peasant folk for the war years, the cows letting her suck milk from their udders. They drink coffee together, Theo and her. Then off he goes again, imagining there are pursuers after him to bring him to trial for murder.

He wanders. Memories again. His mother's love of coffee. He calls out for coffee 'in his mother's voice'. Another encounter: a woman and her daughter. They are frightened of him. He gives them cigarettes. They've lost their supplies - a man stole them from them. Theo will help them, he says, but they disappear in the night.

Later, as he drinks coffee, another man approaches him. His interlocutor tells Theo of his own conversion, in the war years. He thought it would save him from the fate of the others; it does not. But in the camps, he has discovered a kind of faith. The man was a violinist, a concertmaster. Now he's no desire to play again. 'Nor to sing again in the synagogue?', asks Theo.

'Jewish prayer is the essence of simplicity. One takes a prayerbook in his hands and prays'. - 'You've given up music?' -'Our camp was full of classical music. The commander of the camp was mad about Mozart'.

This after Theo's memories of his mother's love of Mozart. She would listen to the music coming from the church, Theo had told his interlocutor. 'All during the war the music was within me. Now I'm afraid to lose it'.

Another encounter, then another - a woman whose pleasure is to serve coffee to everyone, from her plentiful supplies. She'll stay there forever, she says, when Theo tells her he is going home. The bodies of her younger sister and her daughters lie in the woods nearby. She will stay there.

Theo moves on, still imagining he is being followed. He dreams. Then he dreams of Mendel Dorf, one of his shedmates in the camp. Mendel rose early to pray; he had faith; he angers the other prisoners; the worst, according to Theo, comes when Mendel is accused of behaving like a Christian, rather than a Jew. The worst: but all Theo can remember is Mendel's face, 'round in its simplicity'.

Now he wanders again across the hillcrests, dreaming of home. His feet are light again; in two and a half weeks I will be home again, he tells himself. But now again the refugees, many of them, crowded togther. The smell of coffee: he is in a transit camp. 'Transit to where?', he asks. 'I don't know', says a woman. Now he curses himself. If he had stayed on the hillcrests, he would have been alright. This is what he tells the woman. Here, the valley can be blocked by enemies; it is necessary to scatter, so as not to make a target.

More informers, kept in a pit, but who are given steaming mugs of coffee. Theo feels guilty: isn't it he who should be in the pit instead of them? His interlocutor is educated; they continue to talk. Isn't she frightened?, Theo asks. Every refugee is a precious person, she says. She has learnt to love them; she listens to their stories. Theo tells her of his desire to convert. She would never do that, she says. And not now, above all.

He rises to his feet. He must depart. Then another man, who, like him, was once a student. He is stranded in the transit camp, he tells Theo, who speaks once again of the hillcrests. Now Theo climbs out of the valley. A waking dream of Mendel. He argues in his dream for his conversion.

'I'm going to the place where Bach dwells. The place where Bach dwells is like a temple. I have no other place in the world. Now I'm making a pilgrimage to him'.

He tells himself he left the labour camps, his shedmates, his allies in the war years to leave Yiddish behind. His mother's punctilious German. His father's syntactical precision. But now he realises that language has deserted him. A cup of coffee, he says in his mother's voice. He feels frightened. 'At the inn I'll buy cigarettes', he tells himself. And remembers his mother's last words, as she got into the railroad car with the others. 'I don't like this hurly burly'.

The last encounter. He has been two days without coffee and cigarettes. He comes to a low shed, full of refugees. Come in, he is invited. They have coffee and cigarettes. But Theo says he doesn't want to come in. He's going home, he says.

'You know very well that no one is waiting for us at home. Tkae one of the sick people and bring him to a safe place. That will be your reward'.

Now Theo remembers his own deportation. He and his father, with the others, being marched through his hometown. The burning synagogue. Now his interlocutor says:

'There are some weak people among us whom we mustn't abandon now. We haven't lost the semblance of humanity. We must do what is incumbent upon us. Isn't that so?'

Open and simple words: the brethren are scattered on deserted roads. The weak must be watched over. Then it comes: Theo realises he will never go home, that his mother's language is lost to him. Now and forever it will be the language of the camps. His interlocutor says:

'Thought is forbidden to us. Thought dribes one mad. We must do as much good as possible'.

Words close to those of the educated woman he met in the previous chapter. And to woman with trembling hands who served coffee to all. The novel ends with Theo asleep, as after a long, desperate quarrel, having gulped down mug after mug of coffee.

Yeast

W. was impressed at my recent depression. It's a sign of your seriousness, he says, or that even an idiot like you cannot escape seriousness. These are desperate times, says W., even you must have a sense of that. W.'s always admired my whining, 'like a sad chimp, at the limits of its intelligence', but my depression took me beyond that, didn't it? You were silent for once, W. says. I didn't ring him, or respond to emails ... No chatter from me: that's when he knew things were really bad, says W.

Of course, I put my depression down to yeast, W. notes. Yeast! Some psychotherapist you'd make, says W. '"Doctor, I want to kill myself'." - "stop eating yeast" - "Doctor, my wife just hung herself." - "It was the YEAST!"' Of course, it has nothing to do with yeast, and everything to do with the great crises of the world, which even I have woken up to, W. says.

Colds Come From China

Colds come from China, says W. They spread West across the mountains and the steppes. It's a tremendous journey, he says. From China to Plymouth, but a cold's reached him nonetheless, although he calls it a flu, but he's always been prone to exaggeration.

I'm in bed, he tells me on the phone, shivering and coughing up phlegm, and thinking only of the great crises that have gripped the world.

In W.'s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it's the key to great thoughts, W. muses, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that. Still, he's disappointed that not one thought has come to him, not one, especially as it would pertain to the great crises that have gripped the world.

Widow Twankey

W,'s ill and I'm ill, and it's his fault since I caught it from him. My thighs ache, I tell W. on the phone. I'm staggering around like Widow Twankey. So do his, W. says, but he's unable to rise at all. He's bedridden, he says, and all he can see is the rain streaming down his windows.

These are the End Times, he sighs. His End Times, and the End Times of the world. What will become of us? Oh I'll be okay - I'm robust in my idiocy, he says, but he probably won't be, coughing up green phlegm and internally haemorrhaging as the financial markets of the world haemorrhage.

Luckily, he has Sal to look after him, who pays no heed to what he says about his End Times, or the End Times of the world, W. says.

Ivan Brunetti Wants to Die

Ivan Brunetti wants to kill himself. That's what he's wanted for some time now - to take his own life. To end it all - what could be better. Imagine the peace! Imagine it, no longer having to write, to work - there'd be no deadlines, no demands from editors. To die - and then to curl up in a quiet place for eternity.

But meanwhile, Ivan Brunetti has to write. The issue's due at the end of the year. He works page by page - no more long stories, not anymore. Not the long stories that began the first three issues of Schizo. A page at a time, that's enough. Who could plan for longer than a page? And besides, he's working all day, he has a day job. He's busy enough! He has enough to do, especially at this time of year, when it's getting dark so early, and its so cold.

A page at a time - so Schizo 4 is made up of pages, of complete strips. One page, then another. One page - in the evening, or across a series of evenings, and at the weekend. Damn it, it's too much. He phones his editor for a deadline. I want a deadline, he explains. I need something to aim towards. He's accomplished little enough so far, he explains. He's done little enough. Just give me a deadline.

Ivan Brunetti wants to die. He's tired of living, because living means work. He hasn't got it in him to work. He takes it so seriously! He takes it more seriously than anything else, working. His whole life is full of work. There's the day job - and the job at night. Drawing, writing, inking in. And there's his anthology work. And the teaching he does for the university. Jesus, it's too much.

So he writes about dying. He endlessly rehearses his own death. He draws pictures of suicides, suiciding. He draws himself with limbs chopped away and his face trampled away, stabbed and shot and kicked and beaten, Ivan Brunetti at the bottom of the world, Ivan Brunetti still alive, God help him.

Ivan Brunetti's got a death-drive, there's no question of that. It's the most obvious thing in the world! But it went wrong somewhere, it took a wrong turning, and now like Kafka's Gracchus, he's lost his death, he cannot keep his appointment. It took a wrong turn for Ivan Brunetti. Death led him elsewhere.

It's the promise at the end of the page. At the end of the page, at the end of the issue: the promise of cessation. But then it begins again, the old engine putters back into life, the propellor's turning, off he has to go, a shaky old plane on the runway. Up to the skies, off he goes again, when he wants only to lie down like a dead man, the sky passing over him. When he wants only peace, peace and death like a cool flannel on his forehead.

Ivan Brunetti's lost his death and doesn't know where to find it. It's gone off without him, and taken his life with it. Off it's gone with his life, with his sense of the limits of life and the limits of work. Off it's gone, the end, the clear dark line at the end, the eternal horizon he would sail towards.

But it'll never come closer, not now. Ivan Brunetti's off in his deathship. There it is, the eternal mirage: the final line, the place where he can lie down and die, the sky streaming above him. But meanwhile - the eternal meanwhile - there's a page to draw, to write, and then another page, and then another ...

Licking the Barrel

I like nothing better than applying for jobs, W. notes. I like the whole process - rewriting my CV, composing a letter - it takes me weeks, W. notes, and involves massive amounts of time and IQ. You like abasing yourself, W. says. How can abase myself today?, that's the first question you ask in the morning, W. says. 

On the other hand, I'm the person to whom W. turns when he has to write an application. I make him feel a sense of urgency, the sense that everything's about to end, and his life, his very life, depends upon his application. I always feel the world's about to end, that's what he likes about me, says W. I always think I'm about to be found out and shot. I always want to lick the gun barrel I think is pointed towards me, W. says, which is why I'm such a good administrator.

But this apocalypticism is the reason I've succeeded to the extent that I have, W. reflects. Whereas I'm all apocalypticism, W. says, he's all messianism: he's always full of joy and serene indifference to the world. What I suffer, he laughs at as the most extreme folly.

It's all mad, he says, the world went mad some time ago. But you take it too seriously, he says. In the end, I want only to be spoken to gently and soothingly, like a wounded animal, a dog run over at the side of the road. But that's how they talk when they're about to shoot you, W. says, and they are going to shoot you, no matter how much you lick the barrel.

Perhaps I want to be shot, W. muses. Perhaps that would be the kindest thing that could be done for me. But he has an application to write, that's why he's phoning me, he says. Give me a sense of urgency, he says. Give me a sense the world's about to end.

Phelgm

W. has been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. You need to get it all out. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

W. hasn't had a thought while he was ill, he tells me. He always thinks he will. It worked for Kafka, didn't it? And what about Blanchot? But W.'s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

The Slump

I am a sullen drinker, W. says. Not for the whole evening, he admits - not even for most of it, but the time always comes when I refuse to say anything at all and slump down in my chair. That's when your immense belly becomes visible, says W. During the slump. It's like Moby Dick, says W. Vast and white and rarely seen. But there it is in the slump. It always amazes him, says W. It amazes everyone.

I'm not like him, W. notes, for whom every conversation is on the verge of becoming messianic. W. likes to journey with his interlocutor through the apocalyptic and towards the messianic, he says. He believes in his interlocutor, not like me. He believes in conversation. You're slumped, drunk and silent at one end of the table, W. says, while he is waiting for the messiah at the other.

The Threshold

Clearing my throat to say - what? At the threshold of writing, but what to write? And now dream instead of a writing that remains at the threshold, that reports nothing, or, by way of that reportage only announces the simple fact that it was possible.

At the threshold: a crowded office. The Arbus book arrives, another Xmas present. And with it, a letter from Corwood. There's a new Jandek album being packaged: Skirting the Edge: the 60th? the 61st?

Then cardboard packaging, remnants from lunch, jumpers for the cold weather, anti-bacterial cleaner. Sun Kil Moon playing again: 'Lost Verses': wasn't I going to write about that? Wasn't I going to make it my 'song of the year'? Laughter.

Beside me the manuscript with its crossings out and annotations. I haven't worked on it for a while - for how long? There's no time. Or rather, the time you get is so short, too short for anything except standing at the threshold.

Clearing my throat - but to say - what? What was it you wanted to write? To achieve by writing? No matter. What's left: to mark the moment when you could begin, when you drew the day around you and made a space to begin. To begin - and then to end immediately. That's what the day permitted. That's what it took away.

December 12th. Five years ago (nearly five years ...) I began writing here. Five years ago to mark a threshold, the same one I'm marking here. Not to say anything. No communication. Except: it was possible to write. Except: I wanted to write and I wrote.

In the office: six bottles of wine in a cardboard carrier. A post of Neal's Yard moisturiser. An El Vez poster from that shop in Knoxville, peeling from the wall. And this to say: what? That the day and this space could be gathered here. That the day folded itself into a place in which I could write. And then, almost instantaneously, could no longer write.

Empty Pages

Unable to write, or to write anything that would convince me. Which is to say that would have its own kind of life, apart from mine. December 10th - is that the date? Don't I have a deadline for something or another? Two cranes on the skyline. A bright, clear day. I can see all the way to the clouds along the coast.

The office is too big. Too big today, when nothing happens here, when it's all for nothing. Too big - as though it were held up and exposed to something, judged - by the whole sky. I have a manuscript to work on. But it's not really a manuscript, not quite. I want to push it to that stage, when it has its own life, when it is something, apart from me. Only it's not there yet, not close. A few pages with crossings out and annotations. A few dog-eared pages, with scrawlings in pencil and pen.

But there's nothing I can say here that I haven't said better before. Nearly five years since I began - haven't I said it all? Didn't I say it better another time, a year ago, or two years ago? In truth, it's only limping along. In truth, there's nothing new to write, nothing that I haven't done before and better, which is not to say well.

Five years ago ... what was happening then? A different office, three floors down. I was more solitary. No one could have lived that way for long. And now, my new life? A lack of belief in writing. An inability to join word to word. I begin and then stop. Nothing new to be said. Or nothing that does not echo in the direction of something already said, already done.

Why waste time? Why bother? And that 'why bother' disjoins word from word and sentence from sentence. It's too late, it's gone, it's finished. That Bergman Archive book open on the table in my mausoleum-office. I have the money now to buy what I would have visited a bookshop a hundred times to look through. But now I can buy it and open it there on my desk to read, to be read.

The open sky is reading. The space of the office reads. It was a Christmas present, very early. Why did I ask for it? Why did I want it? To want again what I wanted once. To let it flame up in me again, some kind of ardency, some desire. That was one with my desire to make something - a book, perhaps. A 'something' to hold out before me like a torch. Only there's no torch now. The darkness of the manuscript instead. Darkness of printed words in 12 point and crossings out and annotations.

Why bother? Why join sentence to sentence? Nothing to be done. Nothing to be said. Sometimes I read books that sweep me before them. That push me ahead of themselves like terminal moraine. And I feel I can write, that it's possible for me. That sentence might link to sentence and lead somewhere. A torch burns.

And now? Today? I'm not reading any such book. The sky reads Bergman. The near-empty office reads him. I can't read a page. 'Lost Verses' by Sun Kil Moon playing. Didn't I want to write about that, about that song, that album? Laughter: but you won't write about anything. You don't believe in writing. You can't lend it your substance.

Once you were a ghost to writing, and now? No desire to write. Only a desire to desire, to begin again. Only the dream of a reading that would carry you forward, that would give you the strength. To what? To write? You: to write? Laughter. Five years ... although it's fallen away lately. In truth, it's been falling away for a while. You do not deserve an anniversary.

You fell before the line. You crashed down. You didn't last. Your only chance: to read a book that is stronger than you. A succession of books. To give you the strength. To bind sentence to sentence. Faith, belief - that's what you lack, isn't it? The substance of writing? Its content?

When's 2666 going to arrive? When's it going to appear? Because you need it, don't you? A book to believe for you. A book to believe in writing. But when's it going to come? Tomorrow? The day after? And meanwhile, the sky reads you. Meanwhile you are open, empty pages, for the day to turn through.