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She continued on her way: her right ear was assaulted by a tide of music, the rhythmic thumping of percussion instruments surging from shops, beauty parlors, restaurants; her left ear picked up the sounds of the road: the composite hum of cars, the grinding rattle of a bus pulling away from a stop. Then the sharp sound of a motorcycle cut through her. She couldn't help but try to find the source of this physical
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pain: a girl in jeans, with long black hair blowing behind her, sat on a small motorcycle as rigidly as if she were sitting behind a typewriter; the muffler had been removed and the bike made a terrible noise.
Agnes recalled the young woman who had entered the sauna a few hours earlier and, in order to introduce her self, and to force it upon others, had announced the moment she walked through the door that she hated hot showers and modesty. Agnes was certain that it was exactly the same impulse that led the black-haired girl to remove the muffler from her motorcycle. It wasn't the machine that made the noise, it was the self of the black-haired girl; in order to be heard, in order to penetrate the consciousness of others, she attached the noisy exhaust of the engine to her soul. Agnes watched the flowing hair of that blaring soul and she realized that she yearned intensely for the girl's death. If at that moment a bus had run her over, leaving her lying in a bloody pool on the road, Agnes would have felt neither horror nor sorrow, but only satisfaction.
Suddenly frightened by her hatred, she said to herself: the world is at some sort of border; if it is crossed, everything will turn to madness: people will walk the streets holding forget-me-nots or kill one another on sight. And it will take very little for the glass to overflow, perhaps just one drop: perhaps just one car too many, or one person, or one decibel. There is a certain quantitative border that must not be crossed, yet no one stands guard over it and perhaps no one even realizes that it exists.
She kept walking. The sidewalk was becoming more and more crowded and nobody bothered to move out of her way, so she stepped off the curb and continued to make her way between the edge of the sidewalk and the oncoming traffic. She had been used to doing this for a long time: people didn't get out of her way. She was aware of it, she felt it to be her misfortune and often tried to overcome it: she tried to gather courage, to walk bravely ahead, to stick to her path and force the oncoming person to give way, but she never succeeded. In this everyday, banal test of power she was always the loser. Once, a child of about seven had walked straight at her; Agnes tried not to swerve from her path, but in the end she had no choice if she didn't wish to collide with
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A memory came to her mind: when she was about ten years old, she went with both her parents for a walk in the mountains. As they strolled down a broad forest path, they came upon two village boys standing with their arms and legs spread wide; one of them held a stick sideways, as if to bar their way. "This is a private road! You must pay a toll!" he shouted and lightly touched Father's chest with his stick.
It was probably just a childish prank and all that was needed was to push the boys aside. Or it was their way of begging and Father only needed to pull a coin out of his pocket. But Father turned aside and chose to continue along a different path. In truth, it really made very little difference, since they were strolling aimlessly and didn't care where they were going, but nevertheless Mother was angry at Father and couldn't keep from remarking, "He even gives in to a couple of twelve-year-olds!" Agnes, too, was somewhat disappointed by Father's behavior.
A new assault of noise interrupted the recollection: some men wearing hardhats were pounding the asphalt with pneumatic drills. Into this racket, from somewhere overhead, as if from heaven, came a piano rendition of a Bach fugue. Someone on a top floor had evidently opened a window and turned up the volume all the way, so that Bach's severe beauty sounded a warning to a world that had gone awry. However, Bach's fugue was no match for the pneumatic drills and cars; on the contrary, cars and drills appropriated Bach as part of their own fugue, so that Agnes had to cover her ears with her hands and continued to walk like that down the street.
At that moment a passerby coming in the opposite direction gave her an angry glance and tapped his forehead, which in the international language of gestures says that you are crazy, scatterbrained, or weak in the head. Agnes caught that glance, that hatred, and was seized by a furious anger. She stopped. She wanted to throw herself at that person. She wanted to strike him. But she couldn't; the crowd was already pushing him along and somebody bumped into her, because on the sidewalk it was impossible to stop for more than three seconds.
She had to keep walking, but she couldn't stop thinking of him: both of them were caught up in the same noise and yet he found it necessary to make her understand that she had no reason and perhaps not even
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any right to cover her ears. That man was censuring her for the trespass of her gesture. It was equality itself that reprimanded her for refusing to undergo what everyone must undergo. It was equality itself that forbade her to disagree with the world in which all of us live.
The longing to kill that man was not just a fleeting reaction. Even after the immediate excitement had passed, that longing remained, though it was joined by her surprise that she was capable of such hatred. The image of a person tapping his forehead floated in her innards like a fish full of poison, slowly decaying and impossible to spew out.
The memory of Father came back to her. Ever since shohad seen him retreat from those twelve-year-old boys she often imagined him in this situation: he is on a sinking ship; there are only a few lifeboats and there isn't room for everyone; there is a furious stampede on deck. At first Father rushes along with the others, but when he sees how they all push and shove, ready to trample each other underfoot, and a wild-eyed woman strikes him with her fist because he is in her way, he suddenly stops and steps aside. And in the end he merely watches the overloaded lifeboats as they are slowly lowered amid shouts and curses, toward the raging waves.
What name to give this attitude? Cowardice? No. Cowards are afraid of dying and will fight to survive. Nobility? Undoubtedly, if he had acted out of regard for his fellows. But Agnes did not believe this was his motive. What was it then? She couldn't say. Only one thing seemed certain: on a sinking ship where it was necessary to fight in order to board a lifeboat, Father would have been condemned in advance.
Yes, that much was certain. The question that arises is this: had Father hated the people on the ship, just as she now hates the motorcyclist and the man who mocked her because she covered her ears? No, Agnes cannot imagine that Father was capable of hatred. Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other. Agnes was sure: it was precisely this kind of intimacy that Father found repugnant. The melee on the ship filled him with such disgust that he preferred to
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drown. The physical contaa with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.
The memory of Father began to deliver her from the hatred that had possessed her. Little by little, the poisonous image of a man tapping his forehead disappeared, and in its place a phrase came into her mind: I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
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GNES owes the fact that she isn't German to Hitler's defeat in the war. For the first time in history, the defeated were not allowed a scrap of glory: not even the painful glory of the shipwrecked. The victor was not satisfied with mere victory but decided to judge the defeated and judge the entire nation, so that at that time it was not at all easy to speak German or to be German.
Agnes's forebears on her mother's side were farmers living in the borderland between the German and French parts of Switzerland. Thus, even though from an administrative viewpoint the
y were French Swiss, they spoke both languages equally well. Father's parents were Germans living in Hungary. As a young man Father studied in Paris, where he learned to speak passable French; after his marriage, however, German naturally became the couple's common language. It was only after the war that Mother recalled the official language of her parents, and Agnes was sent to a French lyce'e. Father was permitted only a single Germanic pleasure: to recite to his elder daughter, in the original, Goethe's poetry.
This is the most famous German poem ever written, one which all German children must learn by heart:
On all hilltops
There is peace,
In all trectops
You will hear
Hardly a breath.
Birds in the woods are silent.
Just wait, soon
You too will rest.
The idea of the poem is simple: in the woods everything is asleep, and you will sleep too. The purpose of the poetry is not to try to dazzle
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us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
In a literal translation the poem loses everything. You will recognize how beautiful it is only when you read it in German:
Uber alien Gipfeln
IstRuh,
In alien Wipfeln
Sparest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die VSgelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Every line has a different number of syllables, there is an alternation of trochees, iambs, dactyls, the sixth line is oddly longer than the others, and even though the poem consists of two couplets, the first grammatical sentence ends asymmetrically in the fifth line, which creates a melody that had never existed before, in any poem, as magnificent as it is ordinary.
Agnes's father learned it while still in Hungary, where he attended German public schools, and the first time Agnes heard it from him she was the same age he had been then. They recited it in the course of their strolls together, exaggerating all the accents and trying to march to the rhythm of the poem. In view of the irregularity of the meter this was not at all simple, and they succeeded only when they got to the last two lines: War-te nur—bal-de—ru-hest du—auch /They always shouted the last word so loudly that it could be heard for miles around: auch!
The last time Father recited the little poem to her was two or three days before his death. At first she thought that he was trying to return to his mother tongue and his childhood; then she noticed that he was gazing into her eyes in an eloquent, intimate way and it occurred to her that he wanted to remind her of their happy strolls of long ago; then at last she realized that the poem speaks of death: he wanted to tell her that he was dying and that he knew it. It had never occurred to her before that those innocent lines, so good for schoolchildren, might have this meaning. Father was lying in bed, his forehead damp with
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fever, and she grasped his hand; trying to master her tears, she whispered along with him: Wane nur, balde rtthest du auch. Soon you too will rest. And she recognized the voice of Father's approaching death: it was the calm of silent birds in the treetops.
After his death, calm did indeed begin to reign. That calm was in her soul and it was beautiful; let me repeat: it was the calm of silent birds in the treetops. And as time went on, Father's last message sounded more and more distinctly in that silence, like a hunter's horn sounding from the depths of a forest. What did he wish to tell her with his gift? To be free. To live as she wished to live, to go where she wished to go. He himself had never dared to do so. That is why he had given his daughter all the means she needed to dare.
From the moment she got married Agnes lost all the pleasures of solitude: at work she spent eight hours a day in one room with two colleagues; then she returned home, to a four-room apartment. Not a single one of the rooms was hers: there was a large living room, a bedroom for the parents, a room for Brigitte, and Paul's small study. When she complained, Paul suggested that she consider the living room her own room and he promised her (with undoubted sincerity) that neither he nor Brigitte would disturb her there. But how could she feel at home in a room with a dining table and eight chairs used only for dinner guests?
It is probably clear by now why that morning she felt so happy in'the bed that Paul had just left a moment before, and why she passed so quietly through the hall so as not to attract Brigitte's attention. She even welcomed the capricious elevator, because it permitted her a few moments of solitude. She looked forward to the drive, too, because in the car nobody talked to her and nobody looked at her. Yes, the most important thing was that nobody looked at her. Solitude: a sweet absence of looks. Once, both of her colleagues were off sick and she worked for two weeks all alone in the office. She was surprised to notice that she was far less tired at the end of the day. Since then she knew that looks were like weights that pressed her down to the ground, or like kisses that sucked her strength; that looks were needles that etched the wrinkles in her face.
In the morning, as she was waking up, she heard a news broadcast
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about a young woman who in the course of a completely minor operation died because of a carelessly administered anesthetic. Three doctors had been brought to trial and a consumer-protection organization had proposed that in future all operations should be filmed and the films permanently filed. Everyone applauded this proposal! Every day, we are stabbed by thousands of looks, but this is not enough: in the end one single stare will be instituted that will not leave us for a moment, will follow us in the street, in the woods, at the doctor's, on the operating table, in bed; pictures of our life, down to the last detail, will be filed away to be used at any time, in court proceedings or in the interest of public curiosity.
These thoughts reawakened in her a longing for Switzerland. Actually, she had been going there two or three times a year ever since Father's death. Paul and Brigitte spoke with indulgent smiles of her hygienic-sentimental needs: she goes there to sweep leaves offFather's grave and to breathe fresh air by the wide-open window of a Swiss hotel. But they were wrong: even though she had no lover there, Switzerland was the one deep and systematic act of betrayal she committed against them. Switzerland: the song of birds in the treetops. She dreamed about staying there someday and never coming back. Several times she went so far as to look at Swiss apartments for sale or for rent, and even drafted a letter in her mind in which she announced to her daughter and husband that although she still loved them she had decided to live alone, without them. She begged them, however, to let her hear from them from time to time, because she wanted to be sure that nothing bad had happened to them. This was the most difficult thing to express and to explain: that she needed to know how they were, even though at the same time she had no desire whatever to see them or to be with them.
Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests; her father stood on one of them, smiling and inviting her to join him.
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GNES SAT in an armchair, waiting for Paul. Ahead of them was a dinner of the kind the French call diner en ville. Because she hadn't eaten all day she felt tired, and so to relax she thumbed through a thick magazine. She did not have the strength to read the text but merely looked at the photographs, which were all in color, page after page. In the middle of the magazine there was a report on a catastrophe that had occurred in the course of an air show. A burning plane had crashed into a crowd of onlookers. The photographs were large, each one a full page. They showed terrified people fleeing in all directions, charred clothing, burned s
kin, flames rising from bodies; Agnes could not help staring at the pictures, and she thought of the wild joy of the photographer who had been bored watching the banal spectacle and suddenly saw that luck was falling his way from the sky in the shape of a burning airplane!
She turned a few pages and saw nude people on a beach, and in big letters the headline These pictures won't be included in a Buckingham Palace album! and a short text ending with the sentence "... a photographer was there, and once again the Princess finds herself at center stage, thanks to her dangerous liaisons." A photographer was there. A photographer is everywhere. A photographer hidden in the shrubbery. A photographer disguised as a lame beggar. The eye is everywhere. The lens is everywhere.
Agnes recalled that once as a child, she was dazzled by the thought that God sees her and that he was seeing her all the time. That was perhaps the first time that she experienced the pleasure, the strange delight that people feel when they are being watched, watched against their will, watched in intimate moments, violated by the looks to which
they are exposed. Her mother, who was a believer, told her, "God sees you," and this is how she wanted to teach her to stop lying, biting her nails, and picking her nose, but something else happened: precisely at those times when she was indulging in her bad habits, or during physically intimate moments, Agnes imagined God and performed for his benefit.
She thought of the Queen's sister and told herself that nowadays God's eye has been replaced by a camera. The eye of one has been replaced by the eyes of all. Life has changed into one vast orgy in which everyone takes part. Everyone can see an English princess celebrating her birthday in the nude on a subtropical beach. The camera is seemingly interested only in famous people, but it is enough for a jet to crash near you, your shirt goes up in flames and in an instant you too have become famous and are included in the universal orgy, which has nothing to do with delight but merely serves solemn notice to all that they have nowhere to hide and that everyone is at the mercy of everyone else.