called upon solely to make allowances?
Fuld (eagerly): Explain. Please, explain.
Mutig: Gladly. Let’s suppose that they’ve died within us. Let’s suppose that Giggles here is, for example, at this moment, dead. Dead within me, that is, for herself and in general. Giggles, who knows me—who has been allowed to know me—won’t say, “Mutig has repudiated me,” so much as . . . What will you say, Giggles?
Giggles: I’ll say, “Mutig still hasn’t come back to me,” “Mutig still despises me.”
Mutig (with triumphant glee): Did you catch the nuance? – And what else, Giggles?
Giggles (reciting): Mutig doesn’t know, but he remembers. He remembers that I have made many allowances for him; that I was making allowances as I faded away; that he endured it, and thus he loved me; that there are many creatures that must allow, because that is the law; that there are few creatures that allow as they are fading away, because that is a rare credit; that is to say, he made me this way; that is, I made myself this way out of love; that it is therefore to my credit; that I may therefore give in to the hope that Mutig has not tired of me as his sla—
Mutig (he waved his hand and snuffed out the last word): You’re golden! That will do! (To Fuld:) And do I recall that it wasn’t so long ago that she wanted to jump out a window because I had cast her off? – What did I teach you when you wanted to jump out the window?
Giggles: You taught me that with you there was hope, because you had repudiated the word “forevermore.”
Mutig (he corrects with playful pedantry): Because, taking no account of duration, I make no distinction between “now” and “forevermore.” Inconsequentiality is a great virtue. Inconsequentiality is the holy name of the act without genealogy. – It’s odd, but doesn’t it seem to you that our allegedly cynical ethics is wondrously similar to caritas?
I: Givers of death and life. Depending on whether you accept or reject your loved one as sacrifice.
Mutig: My dear, that’s rhetoric. Just remember how much stock was put in Yahweh finding the sacrifice pleasing.
I: That was God.
Mutig: And we are the givers of life and death; that’s why we set afire; that is, we burn. –
There was a silence. It had the flavor of a prearranged silence. An entr’acte, you’d say, and we were switching the scenery. All at once, and as if on command, the spectators drew fat cigars from their breast pockets and started to smoke. They whispered, pointing their fingers at us, though their heads were turned away. A moment later the expansive space was filled with smoke. I felt a light breeze. The smoke started to accumulate. Bands started to form, they trailed toward Giggles, they circled around, enveloping her like a mummy’s wrappings. Giggles smiled. Then everything went quiet again, the spectators straightened up in their seats, assuming dignified poses; many of them folded their hands in their laps. Thumbs twiddled.
Mutig: Fundamentally evil, that’s what they call us. But what, in point of fact, is the fundamental evil of moralists? Nothing but divine oblivion. That’s just our point: to become oblivious—like God. We unfortunately have far yet to go. – We have so much further to go that we still—still!—are pleased to manufacture proselytes. Candidates for divine oblivion, meanwhile, have a utilitarian craft: they teach altruism . . . –
I: You!
Mutig: Giggles understands me. But what is this understanding? She has the key. But turning it—eh?—that’s something else. Giggles is a teachable pupil. Giggles knows, for example, that the loss of love need not be fatal. Giggles understands why I refute duration.
Fuld: Was that a slip? You don’t refute duration, you exclude its potential. If I’ve heard you right. You exclude, you don’t refute.
Mutig was taken aback, he glanced among the spectators, he greeted them here and there with an actor’s venal smile. Then he scowled like a shamefaced sham-artist, jolted himself, turned to Fuld, and covered his mouth theatrically with his hand the way a simpleton does.
“Did I say that I exclude it?” he posed at last.
His hand shifted slowly from his mouth to his temple; Mutig rested his head and contemplated; when he emerged, a peculiar smile emerged as well; it proceeded impudently across his lips; his hand collapsed inertly on the table. Mutig looked up.
“No! Not exclude. Refute,” he said. (To Giggles, casually:) “And why do I refute?”
Giggles: You refute so as to learn to live without support.
Mutig: That’s it! – And now, please, if you can, square this circle: Giggles gets that one must do away with supports, and Giggles cannot imagine how she could live without holding on to at least one support.
Fuld: Which? Come on, which?
Mutig: It’s all the same which. She needs, let’s say, your respect. Only yesterday she said to me, “Oh, you know, so long as Fuld thinks I’m merely a wretch, and not damned, I haven’t lost everything.”
I glanced over at Fuld, more or less the way Horatio looked at the fratricide gnawing away at Hamlet’s plot. What was I to do! Fuld’s deep wrinkle, I alone could see it from where I was, how it thirsted for sparkly tears, whereas Fuld had forgotten his tears long since. Yet what provocative trigger might Mutig have spotted for him to exclaim so triumphantly:
“But this is what I said to her! This is what I said to her: ‘Is that what you’re counting on?’”
Fuld (in a voice bolstered by his guardian angels, drawing on their last strength): You had no right to that. You lied. – Why did you lie?
Mutig: Because I can’t forget that she was dear to me. Because I want her to be strong—like me. Because I have a duty toward her: you see how little I’m able to forget still. We—myself and those like me—of course we’ll manage to live without support; we rank, however, among the chiefs. But not yet as strict as we’d need to be, not yet as oblivious as our duty would have it. We still—still!—look after even those whose destiny was fulfilled by our having exploited them; we still look down on them later, too, when they’ve served their purpose, when we’ve already cast them away again; we look down on them; we shouldn’t. Imagine it, Fuld: I, for example, would honestly wish that Giggles, too, if only Giggles, could live without support. I’m conducting a dangerous experiment, I know that. But it’s necessary. – Giggles is so very miserable, you know!
Fuld: Have you lost your mind?
Mutig: But I’ve already told you that she doesn’t hear unless I am addressing her directly . . . Giggles is so very miserable, you know, and if you were to snatch the very last support from under her . . .
Fuld (in a voice that sobbed with a cowardice that had revealed itself as wicked): Come, Mutig, a man of your caliber doesn’t mess around with logomachy, does he? Are you forgetting that there is truth, eternal truth? What would be the point in saying I’ve lost my respect for it when I haven’t?
Mutig (with a slowness so willful that what he was saying was more visible than audible: a boa uncoiling into an entrancing slide): But you have lost your respect for it! And how could you esteem a dame who’d just as well “slit her throat” for me, though she knows that to us she’s lower than a footwrap?
Fuld:
