Meditation 29 (a translation of 28)

I want to write a coherent meditation, one that poses a problem and then investigates it like a good detective, turning over the neighbor's rocks to find what lives beneath them, whether lizard or insect. But as I compose my meditations, they fall apart, scatter, perform the entropy that is both addition and subtraction. I never concentrate well, especially not during these days leading inexorably toward pandemic. Near the end of The Door, by Magda Szabo, however, I find a place to pause, to locate meaning, perhaps because the scene is one of meaning losing itself into dust, of history crumbling into the privacy of one woman's memory.

The "writer" whose servant master lives in the adjoining house, never opening her door to anyone, enters the back room after her servant's death. Its contents have been promised to her. They came from a Jewish family whose little girl the servant sheltered from the Nazis; she shows up in the novel as an adult too busy to see her protector for lunch. But we don't yet know who she was. The room comes to her from the distant past, untouched by history, but not by history's wear and tear. The writer begins to examine the furniture. She's warned by the Lieutenant Colonel not to touch: "The covers have perished," he tells her; "the furniture's dead. Everything here is dead, except the clock" (254). But she doesn't listen, and grasps the drawer of a console. It refuses to open to her touch. "Suddenly, everything around me became a vision out of Kafka, or a horror film: the console collapsed. Not with a brutal swiftness but gently, gradually, it began to disintegrate into a river of golden sawdust." Nothing remained but dust. Woodworm was the ostensible villain, but the symbolism of the baroque and guarded room dissolving into dust is clear.

There's always been rot at the heart of the Republic, but usually there were a few good carpenters or re-upholsterers to keep up appearances. If a beam started to fall, someone built a brace. If the roof leaked, someone patched it. If our grammar fractured, we found an orator to speak through it. But during these days of self-quarantine (we are all Thoreau now, even if we can't afford to be), I have the sense that our institutions are little more than dead furniture. We might be able to pipe some virtual furniture in through our computers (the world's museums are offering their wares for free!), but what we see, we know, is not what exists in front of us. Materiality is some consolation to us. But now we're given walls of pixels and asked to remake ourselves in their image, even as the president enacts his racist literalism. "It's 'China flu' because it started in China," he tells us, ignoring the hurt inflicted on Asian Americans. An Indian American woman standing behind him swallows hard.

The Lieutenant Colonel asks the writer if she wants the clock, which is still running, even though the room has evaporated into dust. She didn't want it, or anything. She left the room without looking back, as if she were Lot's wife, and self-disciplined. We are now leaving the room that just a week ago looked old and maybe perfect, out of date, yes, but coherently so. Everything in that room has revealed itself to be rotten at the core. What does that make us? It unmakes us. What we will become is uncertain, but history has broken like an old couch. Put it out for bulk pick-up and hope the removers are still working.

Magda Szabo, The Door. Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix. NYRB Classics. 1987; 2005.