Free Adventures In Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher Page A

next, constantly
seeing new things, yet never understanding them. The fact that I could move, that I
was alive, was merely a matter of chance, a senseless adventure, because just as I
existed inside the display case I could exist outside it and with the same pale
cheeks, the same eyes, the same lackluster hair that made such a sketchy, bizarre,
unfathomable image in the mirror.
    I thus received a number of signs from without aimed at immobilizing me and cutting
me off from everyday understanding. I was dumbfounded by them, pulled up short: they
encapsulated the vanity of the world. Whenever one came, I sensed chaos all around
me. It was like listening to a brass band with your hands over your ears: when you
opened your fingers for a second, what had been music became pure noise.
    I would spend days wandering about the fairgrounds and adjacent fields where the
freaks and performers from the booths gathered around a pot of porridge, dirty and
unkempt, having descended from their exotic sets and shed their nocturnal acrobatic
existence of bodiless women and sirens for the common mush, the incurable misery of
their humanity. What in front of the booths seemed admirable, jaunty, even pompous,
here behind them, in the light of day, retreated into a petty laxity devoid of
interest, the laxity of the world as a whole.
    One day I attended the funeral of the child of one of the itinerant photographers.
The door of the booth was ajar to reveal an open coffin resting on two chairs before
the cloth backdrop. The backdrop showed a magnificent park with an Italian-style
terrace and marble columns. In this dreamlike setting the tiny corpse, dressed in
Sunday suit with silver-threaded button holes, hands folded over chest, seemed
submerged in ineffable bliss. The child’s parents and assorted women surrounded the
coffin weeping disconsolately, while the circus band, lent free of charge by the
ringmaster, played the serenade from “Intermezzo,” the saddest piece in its
repertory. During moments such as these—in the intimacy of the profound peace, in
the infinite silence of the plane trees—the corpse was doubtless happy and serene.
Before long, however, it was snatched from the solemnity in which it lay and loaded
onto a cart to be taken to the cemetery and the cold, wet grave that was its
destiny. Thereafter the park was all desolation and void.
    At fairs, therefore, even death took on sham, nostalgic-ridden backdrops, as if the
fair were a world of its own, its purpose being to illustrate the boundless
melancholy of artificial ornamentation from the beginning of a life to its end as
exemplified by the pallid lives lived in the waxworks’ sifted light or in the
otherworldly beauty of the photographer’s infinite panoramas. Thus for me the fair
was a desert island awash in sad haloes similar to the nebulous yet limpid world
into which my childhood crises plunged me.

Chapter Six
    The upper story of the Weber house, which I often visited
after Etla Weber died of old age, was like nothing so much as a genuine waxworks.
All afternoon its rooms were bathed in sun, and dust and heat floated along windows
full of antiquated junk that had been tossed onto shelves at random. The beds had
been moved to the ground floor, leaving the bedrooms empty. Samuel Weber (Mercantile
Agency) together with his two sons, Paul and Ozy, had moved downstairs as well.
    The front room, however, was still occupied by the office. It had a musty smell and
was crammed with ledgers and envelopes of grain samples. The walls were papered with
out-of-date fly-spotted posters, several of which, having held on for years, formed
an integral part of family life.
    One, an advertisement for mineral water hanging above the safe, showed a tall, svelte
woman in diaphanous veils pouring the curative elixir over the ailing creatures at
her feet. Ozy Weber, he of the flute-like arms and the turkey-breastbone of a hump
emerging from his clothes, must have drunk from this miraculous