[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.“This is my wife, and these are my three children.This gentleman here is my brother-in-law, Ashok, who lives here together with my sister and their children—which number two.”Nesler looked over the ensemble gathered before him, who all bowed deeply, except for the small children, who gazed up at him in wonder.“So, nine of you live here together?”“Indeed we do.It is very fortunate that my job pays me twenty-thousand rupees a year, for regrettably Ashok is out of work, and I am the one privileged to support us all.”“Yes, that is along the lines of what I have come here to talk to you about.”“Proceed,” the Indian said, becoming suddenly quite serious.“You are aware that we are building, in Switzerland, a great meeting place for the members?”“I most certainly am, and I was delighted to have been able to make a small donation of one-thousand rupees towards defraying the expenses.”“For which we are all of course very grateful.Unfortunately, the sum will not suffice.We are asking for further funds.”“Further funds?”“Naturally.Whatever you have laid away.”“Only a very small amount—a few thousand rupees which I have put aside for my daughter’s dowry,” he said, casting his glance at a thin girl of about twelve who stood shyly off to the side with her hands behind her back.“Fine.That will do to start, and you can donate more when you receive your next wages.”He then climbed back into his rickshaw and went away, the family gazing after him as his driver pedalled on with all of his force, the vehicle bouncing over ruts and then climbing over a rise.The Swiss gentleman still had six more visits to make in the area before dark.XXII.It was fall.The forests below displayed their yellow and bronze leaves and smoke began to rise up from distant chimneys while the sun hung somewhat low in the sky—slowly, clumsily making its way from one side of the horizon to the other.Peter, holding a stack of notebooks under one arm, visited Nachtman in his tent.The latter was lazily smoking a cigarette, gazing dreamily into space while a dying fly buzzed about the room.“I have come to mention something to you,” the young man said.“Mention away.”“Have you ever considered flying buttresses?”The question seemed to awaken the architect from his abstraction.He looked significantly at the other.“Are you in a humorous mood this morning?”“No.Well, you see…I have been doing some calculations…”“Your first mistake.”“…And the changes you have written into your plan—the extra towers and expansion of the dome—will add a significant amount of unexpected weight, especially the great cap stone.The walls might not be able to support this.Flying buttresses would—”“Be both unnecessary and look absurd,” Nachtman interrupted.“It seems to me young man, that you have presumed a great deal too much! You are my assistant, not my advisor.”“I only thought…”“Your second mistake.It is an unpleasant habit which you must learn to repress if you wish to continue working for me.Use your ears and mouth in their proper ratio and you will learn a great deal.But do not advise me.This project is visionary, and I will not move a damned aesthetic centimetre from the path I have set!”Peter bowed his head and, murmuring an apology, made his way from the tent.He walked forward, towards that eccentric mass of walls and scaffolding, that confusion of men and machines which struggled against stone, seemed to be battling with earth and sky in order to achieve something impossible, to fulfil some kind of egotistical dream of which even they were not aware.He looked at all this and felt utterly lost—like one without home or family—like a man with sight living in the Valley of the Blind.He had read Körn and felt stimulated by the man’s intellectualism.But what he saw around him was anything but intellectual.These were people who felt rather than reasoned, who were chained to each other by emotions—by hidden fears and the strange quivering of their subverted egos.He often wished that he too could be so, with faith in the impossible.For astral bodies and pantheons of winged deities did seem to him just that, and when he asked himself truly about the existence of God, about the possibility of the soul voyaging on after death, he had to admit that he was a non-believer.And, though he did not despise those who thought differently, he could not manage to fully align himself with those who believed it all without either reason or pragmatic proof.But this he could forgive if the building, the great structure, were completed—for in the end his religion, his cult, was that of stone and steel, of towers and high-rises, sandblasted aluminium and high-gloss steel.There were however certain things that bothered him.He had done his math and could not help but think that the grand dome that was soon to rise out of the structure proper was being put up on slightly unsound principles.He recalled the words of Fabrizi, about buildings requiring not faith, but science, and found himself suffering from that most terrible of things: doubt.“Trudy would probably not approve of me,” he thought.And he very well might have been correct.XXIII.• Nachtman scurried about in a constant state of excitement, intoxication, sometimes staggering around the structure with a whip in hand, at others wielding a giant bull-horn, into which he would exhale oaths mixed with technical lingo, a vocabulary riveted with screws and armed with hammers.Drunk on both spirits and power, he seemed to have dismissed the fact that he was a mere mortal and stood before the world a deformed titan—a man-eater endowed with proto-cosmic knowledge
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]