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

there’s nothing, only crude primitive beliefs, damnatio memoriae for those who came before. And yet that brilliant stranger—an immigrant in Australia, himself a displaced person—had already discovered everything by then, even at that time he was able to make us all immortal, sheep men and diploids; even then he in fact sentenced me to the eternalpunishment of living. My parents, I think, could not have children and he, thinking he was doing something good ...
    O death, where is thy sting? The double-helix cross has blunted it; it’s only fitting that a cross, it doesn’t matter which one, should be victorious over death—and over us, the dead called back to life, seamen who have finally fallen asleep in a tavern and are suddenly roused by the press gang bursting into the joint looking for hands for His Majesty’s crew, rudely awakened and forced, perhaps with a cudgel, to get up, drag themselves onto the ship—like they did to me that time in Southampton—and clamber up the shrouds again, swab the deck, hold the course, once again beset by storms and cannon fire. Why awaken those who are sleeping? I would have been so happy if they had let me rest in peace; it’s horrible, that idea of having to wake up all together, on the last day, a joyful last day that instead becomes a wretched first day, the beginning of eternity, of that Lager that will never end ...

6
    SO THEN CHILDHOOD , childhoods, I’m getting there, it’s all written here, all you have to do is read it. That wing of the Danish Royal Palace, in Christiansborg, is empty and silent, aside from the ticking of the clocks in my father’s adjoining workshop and the rich voice of Magister Pistorius when he is giving lessons to me and my brother. On days when the Supreme Court is in session, the judges pass through the long corridors in their red togas, led by the guards. The corridors are dark, an occasional shaft of light filters through the few tightly shuttered windows, and the halberds, passing through those beams, flash for an instant like lightning in the night, then flicker and die out in the shadows. Almost like those little windows that I open and close quickly, when I follow them with the arrow on the screen, in order to enter that childhood palace ...—The antechamber door, beyond which lies the courtroom, closes behind the silent procession. The commander of the Lager also comes by with his henchmen, as we line up silently, high walls separating us from the world—we ourselves are the dead stones of that wall. In Dachau and Goli Otok, outdoors under the sky, it was darker than in the palace corridors. Gilas and Kardelj too, when they came to visit the Gulag, passed between our ranks, our walls of darkness,like those judges in the red togas. Every court wears the colour of blood—but this was later, a long time after the end of childhood.
    You pay dearly for red. Uncle Albestee, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court, who had the reddest and finest toga, died because he was dining with the King and did not consider it decorous to get up to go urinate. He writhed with the utmost dignity through increasingly unbearable pangs until his bladder burst, he fell sullying that deep red toga with vomit. Even our red flag, which we held high, though stained with our blood and that of others, fell into a puddle of winey puke.
    Childhood. Darkness, silence, Pistorius’ voice as he has us do rhetoric exercises, describe the amazement of a farmer who sees his first ship, the impious
Argo
, more treacherous than the treacherous elements it is the first to brave, and who wonders what it can be, a monster spewed up from the abyss, thrashing about furiously wounded, stirring up the water dark as gushing blood, an enormous bird gripped by some huge fish, flailing its great white wings to flee but unable to release itself from the fierce hold and take flight, a cloud pursued and bumped along by the wind, the foamy crest of an immense wave, God’s wrath