Absence Read Free

don’t know the name of the mountain on the horizon, or of the river outside my window, or where the trains on the bridge out there are coming from and where they are going; he says the only place-name known to me in this city is that of the street I live on; he says the points
of the compass are all the same to me, that the word ‘south’ means nothing to me but sea and sunshine, that if anyone mentions north or west I crinkle my nose and look bored. He says my reaction to any form of knowledge is to panic, as if someone were threatening to push me into a hostile element. He says I have no time for any person or thing other than myself, that however beautiful a thing may be, I barely take note of it and never look at it, and that as a result my conception of beauty or ugliness is unforgivably superficial; he thinks it outrageous that I find nothing worth looking at or listening to. And from this follows the worst thing of all, that with me no stability is possible—and without stability there’s no everyday life. Nevertheless, he says, he has discovered that some part of me is good and great. But it shows itself only on the fringes, and I give it neither time nor space. So, he says, I should finally forget my dream of becoming part of a couple, and in that connection he quotes Parzifal and King Lear to me: ‘A person of breeding does not speak of love.’ And ‘Love, and be silent.’”
    Along with her monologue, the woman has concluded her from-start-to-finish indecipherable writing, in which only the often double and triple exclamation points and underlinings are clear: her reply. She rises, not abruptly, but with graceful vigor. Her pen and paper fall to the floor. She squats down, looks at them, but leaves them where they are. The room with its army of lamps and disorderly piles of television magazines distills the slightly subdued atmosphere of a Sunday evening. With wide-open eyes the woman stands in front of the large mirror. Quarreling voices are heard from an adjoining apartment. Her absent look and crouching posture give the figure in the mirror the air
of an animal that has strayed into a high rise. Then suddenly she looks back over her shoulder and laughs into the void, a carefree laugh that might have been addressed to someone on the street. Lightly she slips into the other room; dressing and doing her face, she flits gracefully back and forth between the two rooms, which thanks to her parading take on the character of a grandiose suite. In no time at all she is in the doorway, ready to go out. There, to be sure, she drops her handbag and has to bend down to pick up its scattered contents. Rising to her full height, she stands for a long moment, letting herself be looked at, so to speak: no longer a displaced animal but a star. Finally, with a toss of the chin, she says to her audience: “Don’t bother me with your everyday life. No one else can give you people the pleasure I give you. You all need me. And so do you!”
    Â 
    Outside a movie house displaying posters of entirely different stars stands a soldier in street uniform and tilted cap. He is flanked by a middle-aged couple outfitted for travel—umbrella in fair weather, hats. His mother has taken his arm; his father, at some distance, is covertly watching the other two from the side. The movie house is across from the railroad station; they have only stopped there for a moment, and now they are crossing the square. Here the Sunday evening is betokened by the old newspapers blowing over the asphalt or filling the trash cans to overflowing and by the fact that the handful of travelers in the station hall are far outnumbered by drunks sleeping or bellowing and groups of foreign workers in the corners. The three cross the platform to a waiting room, a separate structure situated on an island between the tracks which, though hardly bigger
than a hut, has a marble doorway. The interior is rather like a