All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .
I spoke these words with a kind of cold indifference, as if from birth I had been under no illusions as to the nature of this world and life in it, as if the only emotions I knew were disgust and contempt. There was also scorn in my voice, and a certain arrogance. One might have been forgiven for thinking that, instead of reciting verse, I was openly mocking my audience. At each successive age of man I sought out the appropriate age group where it sat in the hall and spoke to them; it was to them that I directed Jaques’s wry little portraits. But behind all this there was a message, and it shone through clearly.
This, more or less, was its gist: Here you are; take a look. This is you. All of you, without exception. But not me. I may have a certain number of years, a certain age, but I fit none of these roles. I’m not a mewling and puking infant. True, no one here is. But neither am I a whining schoolboy with his satchel, creeping unwillingly to school. And the best proof is that I’m standing here now, doing what I’m doing. I’m not a lover sighing like a furnace or a soldier full of strange oaths; I’m certainly not a justice in round belly lined; still less am I slippered or in my second childhood.
Who, then, am I? And why don’t I have a place in this picture?
I have no place in the picture because I am not here. I am merely a mirror that reflects the world: its pupil, its eye. I am pure Irony and Art. And that is something that lies beyond life.
The silence as I spoke the last lines was almost absolute. Not a cough, not even a rustle. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’ve done it, I thought. Whatever they’re thinking, at least they’ve been silenced. Subdued by Shakespeare. I’ve won.
The applause may not have been thunderous (there had, after all, been something insulting in my performance), but it was sincere and respectful. I took a polite bow and was about to leave the stage when the master of ceremonies suddenly rushed in, seized me by the right wrist as if introducing a boxer before a fight, thus preventing my escape, and shouted at the already dispersing public, ‘One moment, ladies and gentlemen, one moment! We haven’t finished yet! There’s still one more surprise, one more wonderful surprise to come!’
What has the idiot come up with now, I wondered, with horrible foreboding. What else does he expect from me?
‘Our great Shakespearean scholar here,’ the master of ceremonies ploughed on, ‘had been awarded another prize – a special, individual prize – funded, ladies and gentlemen, by none other than the chairman of the jury himself, our beloved, incomparable Prospero!’
At this my heart began to beat at a brisker pace, and I even managed an inner smile. An individual prize from S.! Well, well. That was something, even in these miserable circumstances.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ the MC persisted, ‘This is a rare and remarkable event, sure to go down forever in theatrical history. And the prize, ladies and gentlemen . . .’ – he reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket – ‘the prize . . .’ He paused dramatically, raising both hands, one still gripping my wrist and the other clasping the object extracted from his pocket, and screamed, ‘The prize is a RUHLA WATCH!’
‘Rukhla, Rukhla!’ came gleeful shouts from the back of the room. With the heavy guttural consonants, absent from the accepted German pronunciation, the word becomes an obscene verb (in the third person singular, present tense, to be exact); the rabble, of course, exploited this for all it was worth. I felt my knees giving way. But the MC still held my wrist aloft in a tight grip, and this kept me from collapsing in a heap to the ground.
The reasons for my collapse, the full ghastly extent of this horrific, ultimate, murderous blow, will be plain to those who know something about Ruhla watches and their peculiar significance.
The Ruhla watch was manufactured in East Germany (Geedee-arse, as it was popularly known), and was distinguished in those days for being by far the cheapest watch available in Poland. By itself, this would not, of course, have been a point in its disfavour; but its suspicious cheapness went along with unbelievably low quality. Ruhla watches generally stopped working after just a few weeks of use, and during their brief span never once gave the right time: they were always fast or slow, from the moment you bought them. Their unfortunate owners were eternally having to set them forward or back, and to perform a series of complicated calculations whenever they wanted to determine the right time. This, however, was not enough to account for the Ruhla’s reputation: there were a lot of shoddy goods on the market then, but not all of them became objects of ridicule. The Ruhla owed its unique status to the shrill advertising campaigns that insistently extolled its alleged virtues. Radio and television programmes were full of it; on game shows for the masses it was the most frequently awarded prize. A car with a loudspeaker could often be seen making the rounds of the city’s streets, haranguing people with the following jingle, blared out at full volume:
Come and play on Guess-me-Kate;
Win a Ruhla and a date!!
People reacted to this insistent hard sell with verses such as:
A Ruhla watch is rotten luck;
It wouldn’t buy a decent fuck.
To complete the picture, there was the name itself – or rather, its spelling. In Polish it could become a somewhat risqué double entendre, providing material for countless ribald jokes, to the further delight of the populace.
In short, the Ruhla watch was an inexhaustible source of hilarity, and the fact that this miracle of East German technology was now being presented to me in public (not even in a box, mind you; in a little plastic bag stapled at the top) was an unbearable humiliation. Burning with shame and embarrassment and wanting only to disappear from sight, I shoved the wretched thing into my pocket, left the stage and rushed for the exit. At the door, however, an unknown individual with a pockmarked face barred my way. Dragging me aside, he handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘You have to sign for it.’
I scrawled a hasty signature and resumed my flight. As I escaped, I heard an impatient shout, ‘Hey, you, come back here! You’ve forgotten the guarantee!’
I dragged myself home in a state of utter wretchedness, obsessively reliving those final moments. Just when I though the worst was behind me, when I was congratulating myself that by some miracle I had not come off too badly, the real blow had been delivered. It was like something out of a film: just when you think the hero is safe at last, something awful and unexpected happens and he dies after all, from a bullet shot by a bad guy lurking in a dark corner.
I also wondered about S.’s role. What had he intended? Did he consider that, having allowed me to dally with him for a moment on his Olympian heights, he was now duty bound to cast me into the abyss, so that I wouldn’t get ideas above my station? Or was it revenge for that first improvisation of mine, when I had caught him off guard and briefly held the advantage? And did that roguish wink in the theatre foyer already presage the revenge he had in store? I lurched blindly from one wild surmise to another. In the end, I decided his motives had been much simpler. I think he genuinely liked me and, searching for the right gesture, considered that a watch would be a charming allusion to and fitting memento of my late entry for the competition.
