Wigrum

Contents

An Office on the Moon—Chapter One

Sebastian Wigrum, Ordinary Collector—Foreword

Instructions to the Reader

Collection

Wigrum and Stepniac—Afterword

Excerpts from Patience—Postscript

Inventory of the Succession—Index

Acknowledgements

1944

AN OFFICE ON THE MOON

Chapter One

The shrill of the bombs has calmed. The fog sets in. London resumes its routines. Time for a walk in the Unreal City.

Sebastian Wigrum considers his features in the hallway mirror. An oval portrait looks back at him, as if from some ghost story. There are days when he feels he is becoming his own ancestor, as though he has left himself far behind and will never again recognize his own face. Fortunately, though time has webbed a maze of wrinkles around his eyes and powdered the tip of his nose with rouge, it has spared the colour of his eyes — our eyes remind us that somewhere deep inside we retain a true image of what we think we are. Who, actually, knows where?

Wigrum is not that old. He runs his hand through his hair, feels the terrain of his cranium. Can phrenologists help but contemplate their own psyches when styling their hair? In aging, his hair has become more and more diaphanous and wild. When he was young, his chestnut brown locks used to lighten in the sun. In the summer, he would become as blond as the child he once was. Tonight, an old image masks the evidence of his reflection. He remembers that dawn, far from London, when he woke to discover, in the depth of another mirror, his left temple lined with grey. Terror, jolting through the nervous system, can spread to the hair tips and explode in greyness. Of what exactly had he been so afraid? He only remembers being at the breaking point, that the night and his thoughts seemed to offer no way out. Apparently, the left hemisphere rules rational thought. The difficulty is in admitting it; he’d only been afraid of himself after all. Today, Britain shook. Wigrum’s eyes meet his reflection and he wonders: Was it this self, now looking at my former self across the span of time, who had so frightened me?

Bah, don’t be so hard on yourself, Sebastian! After all, no one knows what time is really made of. The grey at his temples makes him look like a spy. Women love it, let’s face it. Wigrum takes his eyes away from his reflection, erases it. He leans over, grabs his black umbrella, reappears in the glass bearing his hat. In his fog-coloured overcoat, he cuts a fine figure.

Goodbye, old face, wherever you may be. Tonight, Wigrum will once again join the shadowy shapes coming and going in the labyrinth of ten thousand streets. Outside, men sleepwalk, their footsteps clicking on the cobblestones, their features darkened then lit by the light and smoke of cigarettes. They pass each other without a word, abandoning themselves to their ghostly fates between islets of streetlamps and charcoal-coloured building facades. Are they actually headed somewhere?

Wigrum is convinced that these crowds of men do not walk aimlessly. Any one of them could figure as a character in a novel. The difficulty is finding someone capable of writing it. It’s your turn to play, Sebastian. He takes his eyes away from his reflection and leaves in a rustle of raincoat, rush of umbrella, parting the fog.

Seen from the air, London reflects a fragmented image. The city resembles a constellation fallen to earth, a luminous animal not yet named, collapsed to the foot of the firmament, eager to take back the place we refuse it. Every dropped bomb lights up, momentarily, a new point of light at the heart of the immense nebula enveloping southern England from its capital to the shores of Great Britain. The anti-aircraft battery counters the assault by firing shooting stars. After the tumult and turmoil, London’s light is no less amorphous. Images, in their supremely impassive beauty, only show contempt for human suffering.

Wigrum never neglects to peek into the window of the bookshop at 42a. It is not uncommon for Clara to be up late in tea-coloured light, a book in her hands, lulling her insomnia by the glow of the pages. At the bottom of a teacup, mint leaves recall our common fates. He would like her to lift her face at the exact moment he turns his head towards the window, for their eyes to meet and a thought instil itself in them as proof.

SEBASTIAN: What are you reading, my dear?

CLARA: The Man Who Hid Between the Lines.

The rumbling of bombs changes nothing in a woman’s beauty. Enough daydreaming, Sebastian. Your work awaits. Tonight, no one sits up behind the darkened window. Upstairs, Clara must be sleeping alone under a flowered counterpane, in silk sheets, satin pajamas, scent of vanilla; William gone again to South America to visit his rubber plantations. He’s not a bad chap. English leisure — golf and tennis balls, Dunlop tires, French letters — has secured his fortune. A good sport, and who could deny, when he arrives on Clara’s arm in his handsome white linen suit, that he’s a man of taste and refinement? He can even wear a stain with the elegance of a rose.

Passing by Clara’s, Wigrum remembers, without fail, that summer afternoon just before the war, at Conrad’s, where he shared a banana blitz with William.¹ He had spattered ice cream on his left lapel, the stain shaped like Tobago. Wigrum no longer listens to his friend when he offers him the future. He is thinking of his laundry, due to arrive from Paris today, wrapped in finely crafted brown paper. Every month, he entrusts it to Agata, the Hungarian washerwoman who worked as a domestic at the manor where his father had been the gardener. There is the colonial white, Sebastian, and there is the Hungarian white.

Can you pass the salt? (I must ask Agata about this idea of putting salt on stains.) Have no fear, we’ll take care of you. What is he going on about now? Wigrum pushes the salt shaker towards William. All tastes exist in nature. Do you find the almond tartlet too sweet? William drops the salt shaker, bends down to pick it up from under the table, comes back up and winks. It fell on your side. Wigrum bends down. At his feet, an airmail envelope. Comes back up and places the envelope before William. If you will allow me… a grey hair. William reaches his hand to Wigrum’s shoulder. Pouf! Look at this. The salt shaker has reappeared on the envelope. Each time William grabs an object with his hand, it’s as though he’s getting ready to move a piece on a chessboard. It’s for you, for your work. You don’t owe me anything, truly. The envelope, the first of the ones he will find, on the fifteenth day of every month, slipped into a book in his bookcase, a jacket pocket, at the back of a drawer, behind a mirror, under the teapot or pillow, is stuffed with money. He wonders if William puts on the immaculate gloves of a butler or thief and slips into his house in his handsome white suit, or if, to hide the envelopes, he dons a burglar’s black suit, becoming the negative image of himself.

I’m buying you your freedom, that’s all. Every payday, Wigrum notices that one more object is missing from the back shop clutter, at the centre of which reigns the solid oak desk where his father worked before him. You should take better care of your business. Wigrum begins to record, in a little black notebook that never leaves his person, using double entry bookkeeping, the offences of his interlocutor and their exchange value. In marginal notes, muddling the clarity of the accounting tables, he wonders if William loves these objects as much as he does; if he reveres the object for itself or gets carried away in his act by his enormous taste for acquiring, or simply the pleasure of the game. Often, our real motives escape us. In the back pages of the notebook, Wigrum assesses the correlations and similarities between the petty thefts. He sets up rules and plays the other’s game, speculating on subsequent thefts. He draws graphs, concocts timelines, invents a future for his collection. Time is punctured, and each thing in turn scores the memory of the world with its absence. Wigrum formulates an indemonstrable syllogism: There exists a point equidistant from all the things we have lost. It is possible to conceive of this point, but impossible to locate it. This point, then, is the best hiding place in the world.

Lifting his eyes from his notebook, he selects one of the objects amassed on the shelves covering the walls of the back shop, carefully draws it, then begins to imagine a hiding place perfectly suited to its nature. He becomes so skilled at this exercise, hiding the objects in increasingly obscure and narrow recesses, that he loses track of some possessions. When, weeks or months later, Wigrum finds an object he believed to be lost, he asks himself if the theft actually happened, or if William the burglar is simply a character he invented in order to learn how to live with himself. Yet the envelopes and the money they contain are very real, and his salary increases the more he applies himself to hiding his treasures.

There is no foolish trade, only foolish obligations and foolish maxims. One long-gone afternoon, William, in his handsome white suit, set down a salt shaker like a chess player moving the first pawn. Your turn, Sebastian. Wigrum insists on paying for the banana blitz. His friend plays well. Wigrum has no doubt that William understands the sentiments they share. After all, he’s not a man to refuse a stolen kiss. As long as he amuses himself, nothing worries him. Life is a sleight of hand. Watch carefully and pouf! The salt shaker vanishes into William’s sleeve. Who could hold anything against him? Oh, Clara.

How to pay back the world in kind? Every chance he gets, Joseph shows up at Wigrum’s door. The young boy taps the code, the twelve dramatic knocks that his elder taught him. I want to know everything. I want to read all the books. These are his first words. The tiny pupils behind his glasses are dilated with an undeniable need. Wigrum believes him and invites him in. At school, Joseph can no longer read the blackboard. A doctor has prescribed him thick glasses. He pretends he can adjust how the world looks as easily as a radio antenna. The bombs rain on London. Buildings collapse. People die. Joseph has trouble measuring a ball’s trajectory.

Don’t be sad, boy, something different slips out of every grasp. Wigrum assures him that myopia encourages abstraction. After all, the eyes are an excrescence of the nervous system. Sometimes, he asks the boy to remove his glasses and describe what he sees through the baffling filter which keeps him at a minute distance from reality. He places objects before Joseph, urging him to size them up. An egg becomes itself only once cooked, once it finds its aroma. Through a myope’s eyes, only the tick-tock of a watch saves time from its erasure. Keys lose their teeth; soft locks become necessary. Under the magnifying glass appears the fibrous grain of a blank page. It’s up to each of us to overcome our thoughts.

At Wigrum’s request, the boy stations himself across from the window of Midsummer’s Antiquarian Bookshop and describes the passersby, the appearance of Clara’s shadow, behind her tea-coloured curtains. As night falls, the city dissolves into a foggy enchantment. Nobody is more than themselves. The buildings waver like reflections on the water’s surface. Luminous streaks and splashes drift through the drizzle. Childhood is closer to the secret of matter, although it forgets it by growing up. Eyes half-open, the world resembles more what it could be than what it is. Growing up, you will see the spectrum of possibilities shrink. Remember that.

In exchange for his myopic images, Wigrum tells Joseph about the world and books. He lends him works, asks his opinion. You must also tell me of all you’ve read. One day in 1944, Wigrum recounts to him how, in a secret laboratory in the English countryside, artificial brains calculate counter-thoughts. Experts in this new science claim that all input can be conceived as information and counter information. In Poland, a country always caught in the middle of nowhere and others’ conflicts, the scientists of the Resistance have invented a machine they’ve baptized the Bombe. It can control an explosion of information, quietly infiltrate behind the iron curtain of the enemy’s consciousness to turn them against themselves. The Americans have built computers the size of buildings, giant bird brains that think circularly by counting to ten and lose the thread of their reasoning as casually as flipping a switch. Our future somewhat resembles these machines, yet smaller, more remote. They will think with us at a faster and faster rate, more and more often. Their inventors might not know it, but they have declared war on time and thought. Since we are nothing more than ourselves, this war is lost from the start.

Joseph, who doesn’t get much from this, invents his own stories out of what Wigrum tells him. Left with fragments and images, he silently ponders them behind the bastion of his myopia. With time, the stories will alter and shift, yet live on inerasable from his memory. When men from the future offer to give you back your gaze, refuse it. Wigrum continues his tale. Machines similar to those in Berlin, which calculate the bombs’ trajectory, compile, in an English manor, tables for counteracting the enemy fire. They resemble those artificial brains in Poland. But nothing is exactly as it seems. The enemy has cipher machines, resembling strange typewriters, that translate German into code. Our machines retranslate the encrypted German into a decrypted English. The machines are twins. We are human. Don’t forget it. Not these machines, or their language, can provide exact equivalents to our souls. The machines can well exhaust themselves in calculations. We should interrupt, decide. You will not know everything. You will not read all the books. But you will understand later. It is our images that save us from having to know everything, my dear colleague.

As a child, Wigrum would dream that he was effortlessly falling from the moon to his hometown. He would bounce off the electrical wires and propel back up into the firmament, his head turned towards the stars. His rebounds, sadly, would inscribe shorter and shorter arcs, and eventually he’d have to resign himself, touch his two feet on the ground and walk up the road to his house. Then he’d notice that he was still wearing his pajamas. Careful not to wake his father, he’d gently open his bedroom door, return