Moment of True Feeling Read Online Free PDF Page B

struck him as fakes. Even they, he thought, are only acting as if. The truth is that they’re absolutely fed up with their preposterous baby existence! When he saw an animal, he was amazed that it wasn’t doing its business at that particular moment. Once he
thought: if anybody speaks to me now, I’ll crack his skull for him. If anyone so much as looked at him, Keuschnig said to him in his thoughts: Watch your step! (Nevertheless, he couldn’t see why no one spoke to him. When a Frenchman from the provinces asked him the way to the RUE DE L’ORIENT, he was grateful to be able to direct him, and his next few steps were winged.)
    To everything that crossed his path he wanted to say: Don’t show yourself again! And instantly whatever it was did show itself again, in another form but with the same loathsome substance. He didn’t catch sight of things; they showed themselves. He walked quickly for fear that someone would notice his ruthlessness. Yet when a woman with a conspicuously low-cut dress came toward him, he stared brazenly in an attempt to spy her nipples.—Everything seemed taken care of, as though in a game of puss-in-the-corner the last player had found a place and there was no further need for a supernumerary to be standing around. How boring he seemed to himself; how alone!
    The sweet familiar after-feeling in his member, which ordinarily stayed with him long after he had been with Beatrice, had soon left him. Now he looked only at the ground. A peach stone that someone had just thrown away lay damp on the sidewalk; looking at it, Keuschnig suddenly realized that it was summer, and this became strangely important. A good omen, he thought, and after that he was able to walk more slowly. Perhaps there would be more such signs. The plate-glass windows of a café that had closed for the summer were whitened on the inside … The wheels of a bicycle on top of a passing car flashed as they turned. The smell of shellfish came to him from the market stalls that
had closed in the meantime, and he breathed deeply, as though that smell had power to heal.
    When at the foot of the hill he stepped out into the Place Blanche, there was suddenly so much space around him that he stopped still. “San Diego.” Had he heard that or only thought it?—In either case, no sooner had SAN DIEGO entered his head than he clenched his fists and thought: Who said the world has already been discovered?
    In the next moment, while standing motionless on the Place Blanche, he wanted to leave Paris immediately. But then he realized that though a journey might at one time have made some difference, it wouldn’t any more. From this thing that had hit him, there was no possibility of flight. Besides, it hadn’t hit him—it had just happened. It had long been due. San Diego and his fist clenching—both meant he would stay in Paris and not give himself up for lost. I’ll show you yet! he thought.—Even so, the sound of a typewriter coming out of a travel bureau filled him with envy and yearning; the keys were being struck hesitantly—now one letter, now another—as though someone were typing the difficult name of some city beyond the sea. And then the click of a calculator—as though the waiting customer’s bill for the plane fare and his stay in the faraway city were being made out.
    A couple were standing on the sidewalk, both decrepit with age. The man rested his trembling head on the woman’s shoulder, not as a momentary gesture but because he couldn’t hold it up. With one hand the woman pressed his head against her shoulder, and thus inseparable they slowly crossed the square. Like man and wife, Keuschnig thought contemptuously, and yet for a moment he was
mollified by an intimation of something else. “You’re not the world,” he said to himself, feeling strangely proud of the couple.—But when he stepped into a cab a moment later the