Illusions

Exodus

• ...seeing the other person in the way you only see another person once in your life, in the fleeting second between seeing and perceiving: up close, exposed, wide open, untouched by experience, judgement or routine, infinitely extended, yielding to all possibilities - a new face, a moment plunged in the light of perception and already lost as she stood up too hastily to preserve it...

Dismissal

• ...lately she had begun to think at the wrong moment about how she'd managed to never make a misstep, because she'd wanted to keep doing precisely the same thing, rather like someone who, on account of some vexing internal shift, abruptly starts asking himself what leg he uses to get out of bed in the morning, how he should wash himself and so forth, neck first? Arm?
• Things that had never needed to be jotted down, had never been forgotten, were slipping through the tight weave of notes in her calendar - wordless instructions, routine matters that weren't lost entirely but had run together in her subconscious into a fermenting mass that exhaled a poisonous fog of confusion.
• ...and suddenly, in one of the uncleared basements between the rows of new buildings, an abyss opened up, dragging her, by the thread of the smell, step by step towards its source. It was calling out to her, to her memories, to the street on which she was standing, while out of the rubble the house in which she'd resided back then rose up again, swift and silent. The hose loomed in the night, for it had become night, and she was responsible for it, there was no version of Gertrud Schramm who was not responsible, the air-raid warden was in the hospital and she was his deputy.

Clarion

• ...He had no need for feelings. What he had was an infinite need to be alone, to be left in peace...
• Onlookers - always he imagined there were onlookers...
• Really and truly, life for him was an encumbrance.
• For one effervescent second, he was filled to the brim with something that couldn't be named, something he had experienced once before. But when? Where? His nerves leaped up and his skin felt tight, much too tight, too narrowly tailored for the sudden expansion - a distension, a straining, a hunger, a thirst for ejaculations that had never been satisfied. A cry reached him from the false depths of the poster and, to his astonishment, he possessed the answer. Without even needing his cooperation, the word punctured through the years of debris with the sharpness of a pointed spear: Clarion! Piercing. Shattering.
• Hesitantly, he dangled the word into the startled swarm of his memories as a sort of hook, a lure, a sound, and he listened, he waited, he held himself stiff and still in the ebb and flow of traffic, a piece of driftwood lifted up and snared by the shores of the stream, until finally,, from far away, he could make out Mark's voice: 'They call it a clarion, it's a kind of bugle.' And then Mark whispering again, very close to his ear...
• Yet even still, something of his excitement remained in the atmosphere, some inner tremor that had been communicated to his eyes and seemed, through his eyes, to seize the street, whose façades, flowing together in their everyday familiarity, suddenly began to flicker as though something lay behind them, as though they had been awakened and wanted out, wanted to walk alongside him to accompany him, whether he turned left or right...

The Clique

• ...forgetting the office so completely it was like she'd only dreamed it.
• ...not a trace of anything, as though the affair with Charles had never happened, as thought the whole scandal when it finally came out were nothing more than a soap bubble popping in the air.
• If you do not think about it, she thought, then it simply did not happen...
• ...she could see the Saturday afternoon splitting in two on the strip of pavement in front of her and flowing in different directions.
• If only you could split yourself like an earthworm and go in two directions at once, but no one has figured that one out; Therese had no choice but to be a single entity, or pretend to be a single entity, and that was actually her problem, that was why she couldn't cope with her strange life, which had a tendency to split into different compartments when she would have preferred to experience them all at once.
• The trouble was just - she stirred her espresso contemplatively - that she belonged everywhere more or less, or perhaps a bit less than more, she considered with amusement. That she was always on the edge of things.
• ...she felt as though she were outside the moment, as though she were too big a loop in a net that was already loosely woven, the faces to her left and right became alien to her, she wondered how she had ended up here, why she wasn't somewhere else, on her way home, in her pad, in the office, in her apartment or somewhere in between.
• ...in reality, she thought, all the workers who were typing so zealously, who were taking notes in shorthand, who were telephoning and running around with their files, they were all dangling in the middle of nowhere: a thousand meters under the sea.
• How could you explain to him that nothing was there, nothing sinful or tragic, nothing depraved or immoral, 'It just happens that way, Papa, I don't do anything about it, I have the feeling I'm not even there,' she had said, 'It means nothing to me. Do I look depraved to you?'
• As she turned away, the apartment, the red balloon, emerged more clearly in her vision - a side stage that was in the shadows before, yanked suddenly to the front and illuminated with hidden spotlights.

The First Dress

• -

Vanishing Points

• ...everyone Westermann had ever known, everyone including the people in his office, in the shops, in trams and neighboring apartments, seemed to disintegrate into loosely bundled prisms with no core or substance, circling one another, refracting one another, blindingly iridescent like some material whose base color is indeterminable.
• ...as though it were all a distant memory, almost untrue, transformed into mere anecdote through the magic of someone paying attention.
• This was Mark's great gift, the ease of his chatter, his perspective, his ability to exalt images out of the grey stream of everyday life, the feeling of being free to do this, that, whatever you pleased.

The Apartment

• -

Dreamlight

• As fragments of headlines, leads, reviews and advertisements assembled into strange, slightly grotesque and senseless combinations at the surface of her perception, a deeper layer of her consciousness wrestled doggedly, with tenacious strength, to identify a connection between everything, to locate a causal source for the chain of fatal accidents that had befallen her over the past twenty-four hours, to find the trespass on which everything could be strung, the mistake that must be hiding somewhere in plain sight.
• Suddenly, as though the proper temperature and pressure level had finally been reached or the proper catalyst finally activated, the scattered components of her anxieties knitted together and took shape. A visible target was now offered, and the vague formless indignation that had borne her forwards since her dreary awakening began speeding in circles like the needle of some delicate instrument, signaling at a single point.
• ...she remembered exactly where it had been in the paper, the article that was forcing itself into her memory...

Homeward Bound

• The image sank deep inside him, singed itself painfully into his flesh, mingling in the depths with everything else that had left him behind and was perpetually leaving him behind...
• And if someone tells you he would've written poems, would've painted pictures, would've made music if only life gave him time, then you laugh right in his face and explain that if nothing comes out, there's nothing inside, and if there's nothing inside, nothing comes out. Everybody is what they do, and what they do is what they are, and that's all there is to it.

The Second Dress

• She sends out her feelers into the timeless room and, with a bold decisiveness, declares it to be summer, declares it to be the Côte du Midi, and already she can feel, with the aid of reactivated memories, the gently caress of sand between her naked toes, the shimmering play of sunbeams upon eyelashes that are opening hesitantly...
• ...how ridiculous it was to love books when there were such better things to love...
• ...everything on the brink, everything near enough and far enough to be touched but not injured, to be isolated but not shut off.
• She saw applause in the glances of the people walking by and detached herself from herself - all part of the game - to approach herself from their vantage, smiling and filled with admiration.
• Everything was just like this time. But 'this time' had changed in the meanwhile, it had beautifully transformed, it had emerged perfectly round, perfectly gleaming out of a pool of wishful dreams. Each day of the three hundred and sixty-five intervening days had woven new threads into it, had woven more blue into the sky, more gold into the sand, more splendor into the encounter.
• She downed the rosé like medicine and observed how an intoxication began to rise, cloudily and foggily, into the gap that had opened up between herself and her performance. Already her memories were being coated with a light mould of imprecision.

Family

• ...feeling that she was a being of lesser density than them, a being of looser structure...
• Obediently she closed her eyes, she emptied her mind and let everything run through her like a sieve...
• ... Even Therese, who understood none of it and never got around to understanding anything because her senses were so entirely absorbed by the intoxication of feelings that were contradictory yet mysteriously mingles, that were dissolved yet connected, that were small yet comprehensive, that were empty yet fulfilled.
• ...down to the rotten cores that she knew were there, she was so certain of it they might as well be her own core, only she didn't make so much effort to pretend everything was okay.
• And maybe she would have formulated it more seriously if another Therese hadn't been standing behind a column over there, sniggering and whispering to her: 'Look at that, the floozy found religion, one Sunday without a rendezvous and she drops in the lap of the Lord.' She said the words anyway, yet nothing happened...
• The other Therese was suddenly beside her again, she was standing behind the gate with eyebrows raised, the corners of her mouth drooping mockingly, saying, 'Aw, poor you. What did you expect?'
• ...you needed to take a certain attitude towards life, you needed a tough shell to protect you from self-exposure. You couldn't just show you cared about something. What was the point of anything in the end?
• Nobody stopped her from going where she wanted; the problem was that she didn't know where she wanted to go, and so she remained standing where she was, she'd just as well stand there as someplace else...

Wrong Turns

• ...and as she coasted along blindly in the taxi she didn't coast down streets, under the heavens, on the earth or among people, but all alone in the tunnel of her idée fixe, split off from everything.
• ...groped through the tangle of her thoughts to located the thread that would unravel everything. But she couldn't find anything tangible, no beginning, no sequence of events, no ending, only a formless mass of circling fog that, with a clap, gave way to the boss entering the hallway...