Absence Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman is sitting on a suitcase in the attitude she had taken as a child when sitting on the linen chest in her bedroom. Just as silent, hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed, she stares into space, blind to her surroundings. Instead of being worn in a pigtail, her hair hangs loose, and instead of a dress with enormous buttons, she is wearing a tailored suit. Silent, yes, but with frequent interruptions. As though at predetermined intervals, she honors the outside world with an outburst which may be serious and may be playacting: “You people! Always telling
me to change. But I don’t want to change … But I don’t want to work. Work would only destroy me. Work makes people stupid. And you, too … But I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to go to museums, and I don’t want to learn a foreign language. I like to see pictures by chance, without planning to, no matter where, and I can only be myself and act like myself in my own language. I can’t love in a foreign language. Knowledge would destroy me the same as work, it would make me cold and stupid. When I was a child, the moment you people started lecturing me I stopped my ears. One reason why I was never able to read your books of knowledge was the way the sentences are constructed; all I could get out of them was the droning of the lecturer. You lecturers are sucking my blood. Your knowledge shouldn’t be allowed. Your knowledge is taboo. Admittance to knowledge should be prohibited. You clever people should keep quiet about your knowledge and come out with it only in cases of urgency, and then in the form of poems or songs … But I don’t want to go out. What should I do out of doors? I need my ambience and it’s here that I can have it. Walk, run, ride, travel. With the words ‘walk’ and ‘out of doors,’ you’ve always driven me into the farthermost corner of the room, behind the folding screen. Every time I went on a trip with my parents I fell asleep the moment I sat down in the car, and I don’t remember one thing about any trip except an Eskimo pie somewhere or a seatless toilet in some gas station. Trains stink even if they’re called Loreley; and even if airplanes are called Trans World and fly across the international dateline, all they can do is take me to a concrete runway, where the skyline of the identical city will only make me homesick. I have no
desire whatever to see your Tristan da Cunha or your Antarctic or your river What’s-its-name, where Plato is supposed to have taken a walk. I don’t believe in foreign wonders. All your sacred springs and grottoes and trees should be turned into playgrounds with paper boats and flashlights shining into every oracle cleft. And don’t bother me with the grandeur of nature. Even the words—‘linden,’ ‘rose,’ ‘fleecy clouds’—stick in my craw, for one thing because they were done to death in the rubbish we used to write in our poetry albums … Only for love would I leave here; only for love would I travel day and night, climb mountains, ride horseback, swim, always in a straight line, straight ahead, without any of your detours …”
    The last part of her declaration is addressed to a fly on the back of her hand. She jumps up and lets the fly out the window. In so doing, she catches sight of a taxi in front of the building. It seems to have been waiting there for some time; the driver, standing beside it smoking, reaches through the open window and blows the horn emphatically. The woman runs into the living room, where she consults the video horoscope for the day: “This is your day of decision. Don’t miss the favorable moment. Make up your own mind. Accept help only in the event of a crisis. A crisis is more than a bind that you can get out of unaided. You will know it’s a crisis when you try as usual to get help from the first person who happens to be