The telephone went dead, and a few moments later the door bell went. Should I answer it I thought or try to get the call back? Perhaps they will go away, but the redial failed, the mobile signal had disappeared.
Crossing point – Uncle Wally who was rippling at my side would call this an instance of fragmented causation. Does history work any more I longed to ask him: your words were written down in notebooks long ago in your cramped handwriting, some left in bundles on dusty shelves in a Paris and Berlin academies, others in boxes in friend’s or fellow writer’s apartment, and then found a generation later, every scrap brought together and made into a collection, is this what you intended?
Hello, is there anybody there? I heard the man’s plaintive voice. I was naked. It was another fine Indian Summer day, perhaps the very last, and I like to strip off this time of year to enjoy the last warmth of the sun. If I lie still perhaps he will go away, I thought, but he didn’t, going on rapping at the door and asking again and again.
I didn’t know the meaning of the plaintive either: the knock on the door and summons in his voice, perhaps he had come to read the electricity meter, or was it to make some other demand, I asked, my bared body ready to be mutilated, riddled.
How wild is the wildest, and how tame is the tamest? I went on asking myself, and no wonder these days of late summer sunshine we liked to attend to the effects the ripples of Uncle Wally’s words have on our bodies, and the pleasure and at the same time burning stroke of his phrases and quotations, breaking them off from the pages where they are found to drop them into our own sentences, queer.
But in this instance I had preferred some words by FK: “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it”. I took the phrase from the frontispiece of Satantango, the book written by Kraznahorkai some 20 years ago for a seven hour film by Bela Tarr in 1994, and recently translated by George Szirtes into English.