Free Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Claudio Magris

his dazed condition. I’d like to see Struensee, even bloodied; there’s no reason to fear the dead, only the living can do you any harm and in fact they do the most they can. Outsidethe door some knocking is heard, then the voice of the tall man telling Struensee to go to King George of England, at night, so that perhaps Christian VII’s madness might be passed on to him. In addition to the rapping and the words, an imprecation is heard from Count Bernstorff, he must have hurt his leg banging it against the table.
    Sounds, voices, a murmuring, something, nothing. Who’s speaking in there? Even now, Doctor, who is it who every so often speaks in that recorder, when you interrupt me and press a button? There, in the corridor of the Royal Palace, it’s me, okay; I left the workshop and hid behind a column near the door to the room, I listen but I don’t know who it is, this voice coming from inside—inside of me, inside the room, no one ever knows where a voice is coming from. I talk and talk, yet in my entire life, even now, I’ve done nothing but listen and repeat what was said to me. Pistorius read us those verses in which Odysseus invokes the shades of Hades. To listen to the dead, to make them talk and repeat what they say, there must be blood—Struensee’s was shed twenty years ago, it still flows, blood flows forever.
    There, the ghost re-emerges, summoned by that blood, raps on the table, whispers in the ear of the tall, dark man who repeats his words; I too repeat them, huddled behind the door, my eye glued to the keyhole. The dark corridor expands, a great shadowy void, an increasingly loud murmuring, I repeat those words before they disappear. The darkness is rent like a thick velvet curtain ripped by a sabre and light bursts in. Struensee, it must be him, imposing, blinded by that light, like during that dance when everything ended suddenly, the lights were lit, scores of lamps and torches burned—“Silence!” he shouted, but what can you know about that evening, the flaming crystal globes in the salon trembled shook and swung,Caroline Matilda, the queen, was a fiery gaze behind a mask, pearls of dark fire ablaze like the torches, the wine caught fire in the goblets—I shook hands released them shook others, everyone wanted to shake my hand, let me tell it, Doctor—the chandelier above me was a globe, the world that I made turn in my hands, I, the all-powerful minister, master of the King, his State and his bed ... Caroline Matilda’s eyes sparkled flashed and darted away, shooting stars, they engulfed me, I almost didn’t realize it when the guards grabbed me and carried me off, I thought they were gentlemen in costume like the others, I shouted: “How dare you, you’ll pay with your head! You’re all crazy, I’ll have you put in chains, in a straitjacket,” but they paid no attention to what I was shouting, I felt like I was still dancing as I struggled in the arms of those scoundrels, a vortex was sucking me under, gusts of wind on every side tore Caroline Matilda away from me, away forever, I thought, transfixed by that word as by the dazzling light of a crystal piercing my head, I felt it inside, an extremely sharp pain, my hands reached out to her, the circles of light were the edge of her dress, I had lost all restraint, I would have torn that dress off of her, I would have kissed her on the mouth and thrown her to the floor before the entire court, like so many times in that silent room beneath the tower, so many evenings, a single drawn-out evening—I don’t remember how I ended up on the executioner’s platform, in twenty years you forget a lot of things ...
    A whirlwind of words, inside, outside of me, others that fade away, a wisp of fog dissolves, the sky is empty. In the room someone blows his nose, a scurrilous trumpet of judgment, you can hear a chair fall; when they come out—luckily I had already fled to the clock workshop—Count von Hessen’s face is all red, like that