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The scars have closed and left only a cold, icy expression. They have sealed every emotion and every regret at the bottom of the soul; they have hardened the skin until it became as rigid as leather, insensitive to pain, to blows, to insults, to spit.
It cannot be two children who speak to us. Their lucidity and coldness is something unhealthy, unnatural, frightening. They are two nameless twin puppets. Faceless. Nothing can touch or hurt them. Self-taught, they learn themselves to avoid pain, becoming its cause and/or victims, without feeling anything anymore.
"It doesn't hurt."
"It doesn't hurt."
They no longer cry. They speak simultaneously. They write everything in their "Big Notebook." They prune, bring everything to the essential; they save only what must be remembered. They are two solitudes that complete each other perfectly: an impenetrable organism even to those who generated it. Homicidal puppets, they write for the future.
..And the future will come upon them. It will scatter the facts, cloud the vision: vision will replace the dream, lies will numb the tongue, what was once true will be discovered as farce. Or not.
"The Trilogy of the City of K." is a merciless story, narrated with just enough light to illuminate the few essential traits. The Second World War; some Eastern European country, perhaps. The characters are barely outlined with a few rough and dry words. They are driven by a hatred that seems ancestral, heavy, eternal. Everything is pervaded by a deafening, catatonic calm. There are no details, no tension: the lash comes silently, unpredictable, and, silently, after a few lines, it disappears.
Dry, essential, rhythmic: Kristof's prose is the shaky skeleton on which the story is held, the scaffolding of a miniature building constructed with wire. It is a drop, falling from a sky swollen with omens. Then another, and another, and another.. A mute and exhausting shower of facts. Corrosive. The sentences pull one with the other, becoming the branches on which this handful of misfortunes moves.
"One must leave behind the lies of literature and choose words in their poor sincerity."
There is a subtle electricity between the pages of this story, barely palpable. It is a wool scarf, electrified, ready to give its little shock; so unexpected it makes you jump. It is a slow descent towards the end of everything.
You remain silent, first bewildered, then inert, watching.
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