Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher

Author:Max Blecher [Blecher, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Romanian Literature, Classics, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780811217606
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1936-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 The walls were papered with out-of-date fly-spotted posters, several of which, having held on for years, formed an integral part of family life.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 spring in the deep dark hours of night.

Another was a poster for a shipping establishment, and its steamer, plying the whorly waves, rounded off the image of Samuel Weber by supplying the third maritime element to his captain’s hat and thick-lensed spectacles. When old salt Samuel closed a ledger, placed it under the press, and twisted the iron bar, he really did seem to be piloting a ship through unknown waters, and the pink cotton he stuffed into his ears, its long strands dangling, seemed a clever hedge against the ocean currents.

Ozy, ensconced in an armchair in the room next door, read popular novels, holding the volume high enough to catch the feeble light making its way in from the street. The screen of an enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark corner, and the mirror on the wall reflected an eerie grayish square, a ghost-like reminder of the day outside.

I went to see Ozy much as dogs wander into courtyards: because the gate is open and there is no one to chase them away. What took me there mostly was a peculiar game I don’t know which of us invented or in what circumstances. It consisted in making up dialogues and delivering them with the utmost gravity. We had to remain straight-faced till the end, avoiding all indication that the things we were talking about had no basis in reality. I would enter and Ozy—dry as dust, never taking his eyes off his book—would say, “That pill I took last night to help me breathe has given me a frightful cough. I tossed and turned until daybreak. Matilda came just now at long last (there is no Matilda) and gave me a rubdown.”

The things Ozy came up with were so stupid, so absurd that they were like hard hammer blows to the head. I should perhaps have left the

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