Free A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer Page A

there was no shortage of willing employees. He would merely have turned away andpretended not to see. Monsieur Flamin wasn’t easily shocked.

    It was always the same images that haunted Erneste that night, whether awake or tossing to and fro in a state of semiwakefulness. They were and remained identical: two menacing reflections. He would have certainly been rid of them had he managed to turn on the light and get up, but he couldn’t. He didn’t turn on the light or get up, he lay prostrate, so the images persisted, flowing out of him and back again, drifting through him as he drifted through them. He didn’t turn on the light, took no sleeping pill, waited, fell asleep, dreamed, woke up, dreamed again. It was interminable—an interminable, inescapable, exhausting cycle.
    A light was on across the way, he knew. His shadowy neighbor, almost a shadow of himself, was pacing up and down. He knew this although he couldn’t see her. While he was endeavoring to sleep she staunchly remained awake, and he saw two images in his dreams, one of today and one of the old days, both equally motionless, equally distinct, equally cold and crisp, one overlaying and suppressing the other. His soul felt the touch of ice and was touched by it, frozen and petrified.
    One image was of Jakob standing motionless in front of the airliner, an image from his imagination, his imaginary image of that morning: a white airliner againsta dark background. The other was of Jakob and himself. Not an imaginary image but the actual, authentic moment when they touched and kissed for the very first time. It was so close and clear in his mind’s eye, the incident it represented might only just have occurred. He could feel the other tongue in his mouth without being aware of his own, could feel the pressure of the other body and only now became conscious of his own, a cold body, cold but not unfamiliar. The time of intimacy was long past, cold and incalculable, and the tongue in his mouth might have been composed of nothing—of wax. And while the first image might have signified how far apart they’d grown—he himself had never traveled by air—the other was an unmistakable indication that the gap between them hadn’t widened by a millimeter since then. Even though the other body had become unfamiliar to him, it was unfamiliar but close at hand.
    Such were the two images he couldn’t shake off that night, which accompanied him into sleep and wrested him from it once more. He awoke and felt the pressure of his body, fell asleep and continued to feel it, but in either case, whether he was asleep or awake, the images were somber, not warm, not sunny like that summer afternoon in July 1935, but gloomy as the autumnal night that cheerlessly encompassed the town and its inhabitants, his neighbor, himself, and, somewhere or other, Jakob as well. There was darkness around them, darkness in front of the airplane, darkness behind it. Everything was as cold and dreary and confused as his life had been since Jakob’sletter. His life had undergone a minuscule change: sleepy indifference had given way to hectic activity. He could no longer control his thoughts and emotions and hold them in check—couldn’t control them at all. What he had left behind him lay ahead of him once more. It had simply been a comforting illusion to believe that he’d left his time with Jakob behind him; it had never been behind him. He had never left Jakob. Jakob was as present as if he had never gone away; Jakob and he were mutually pervasive. That, at any rate, was what Erneste felt between waking and dreaming in the small hours, after he had opened and read Jakob’s second letter.
    It was somewhat longer than the first and made a confused impression. Jakob seemed to have written in great haste. Erneste didn’t know what to make of it. He knew nothing of America and took no interest in politics, which had so far failed to