There is silence. She has a headache. Too many heady abstractions, she thinks to herself: a warning from nature.
The chairman glances around. 'Further questions?' he asks.
There are none.
He turns to her. You will hear from us. In due course. Through established channels.'
She is back in the dormitory, lying on her bunk. She would prefer to be sitting, but the bunks are built with raised edges like trays, one cannot sit.
She hates this hot, airless room that has been allotted as her home. She hates the smell, revolts at the touch of the greasy mattress. And the hours here seem to be longer than the hours she is used to, particularly in the middle of the day. How long since she arrived in this place? She has lost track of time. It feels like weeks, even months.
There is a band that emerges on to the square in the afternoons once the worst of the heat has passed. From the ornate bandstand the musicians, in starched white uniforms with peaked caps and lots of gold braid, play Souza marches, Strauss waltzes, popular songs:'Il pipistrello',' Sorrento '. The conductor wears the neat pencil moustache of a small-town Lothario; after each piece he smiles and bows to the applause, while the fat tuba player doffs his cap and wipes his forehead with a scarlet handkerchief.
Exactly, she thinks to herself, what one would expect in an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912. Out of a book, just as the bunkhouse with its straw mattresses and forty-watt bulb is out of a book, and the whole courtroom business too, down to the dozy bailiff. Is it all being mounted for her sake, because she is a writer? Is it someone's idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés? Whatever the case, she ought to be out on the square, not here in the bunkhouse. She could be sitting at one of the tables in the shade amid the murmurings of lovers, with a cold drink before her, waiting for the first touch of the breeze on her cheek. A commonplace among commonplaces, no doubt, but what does that matter any longer? What does it matter if the happiness of the young couples on the square is a feigned happiness, the boredom of the sentry a feigned boredom, the false notes that the cornet player hits in the upper register feigned false notes? That is what life has been since she arrived in this place: an elaborate set of dovetailing commonplaces, including the rattletrap bus with the labouring engine and the suitcases strapped on the roof, including the gate itself with its huge bossed nails. Why not go out and play her part, the part of the traveller cast up in a town she is doomed never to leave?
Yet even as she skulks in the bunkhouse, who is to say she is playing no part? Why should she think that she alone has it in her power to hold herself back from the play? And what would true stubbornness, true grit, consist in anyway but going through with the performance, no matter what? Let the band strike up a dance tune, let the couples bow to each other and step on to the floor, and there, among the dancers, let her be, Elizabeth Costello, the old trouper, in her unsuitable dress, circling in her stiff yet not graceless way And if that is a cliché too – being a professional, playing one's part – then let it be a cliché. What entitles her to shudder at clichés when everyone else seems to embrace them, live by them?
It is the same with the business of belief. I believe in the irrepressible human spirit: that is what she should have told her judges. That would have got her past them, and with foot-stamping applause too. I believe that all humankind is one. Everyone else seems to believe it, believe in it. Even she believes in it, now and then, when the mood takes her. Why can she not, just for once, pretend?
When she was young, in a world now lost and gone, one came across people who still believed in art, or at least in the artist, who tried to follow in the footsteps of the great masters. No matter that God had failed, and Socialism: there was still Dostoevsky to guide one, or Rilke, or Van Gogh with the bandaged ear that stood for passion. Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?
Her first inclination would be to say no. Her books certainly evince no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that lifetime labour of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she , and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. If, in the end, she believes in her books themselves more than she believes in that person, it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel. Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is.
From a change in the air, a change that penetrates even the sluggish space of the dormitory, she knows the sun is declining. She has let the whole afternoon slip by. She has neither gone dancing nor worked on her statement, merely brooded, wasted her time.
In the poky little washroom at the back she freshens up as best she can. When she returns there is a new arrival, a woman younger than herself, slumped on a bunk with her eyes shut. It is someone she has noticed before, on the square, in the company of a man wearing a white straw hat. She took her to be a local. But evidently not. Evidently she is a petitioner too.
Not for the first time, the question occurs to her: Is that what we are, all of us; petitioners awaiting our respective judgements, some new, some, the ones I call locals, long enough here to have settled down, settled in, become part of the scenery?
About the woman on the bunk there is something familiar that she cannot pin down. Even when she first saw her on the square she seemed familiar. But from the beginning there has been something familiar about the square itself, the whole town. It is as though she has been transported to the set of a dimly remembered film. The Polish cleaning woman, for instance, if that is what she is, Polish: where has she seen her before, and why does she associate her with poetry? Is this younger woman a poet too? Is that where she is: not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park, set up to divert her while she waits, with actors made up to look like writers? But if so, why is the make-up so poor? Why is the whole thing not done better?
That is, finally, what is so eerie about this place, or would be eerie if the tempo of life were not so languid: the gap between the actors and the parts they play, between the world it is given her to see and what that world stands for. If the afterlife, if that is what this is, give it that name for the moment – if the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently, not just by a hair's breadth – one could forgive it that – but by a hand's breadth?
It is the same with the Kafka business. The wall, the gate, the sentry, are straight out of Kafka. So is the demand for a confession, so is the courtroom with the dozing bailiff and the panel of old men in their crows' robes pretending to pay attention while she thrashes about in the toils of her own words. Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody.
And why is it Kafka in particular who is trundled out for her? She is no devotee of Kafka. Most of the time she cannot read him without impatience. As he veers between helplessness and lust, between rage and obsequiousness, she too often finds him, or at least his K selves, simply childish. So why is the mise en scène into which she has been hurled so – she dislikes the word but there is no other – so Kafkaesque?
One answer that occurs to her is that the show is put together in this way because it is not her kind of show. You do not like the Kafkaesque, so let us rub your nose in it. Perhaps that is what these border towns are for: to teach pilgrims a lesson. Very well; but why submit to the lesson? Why take it all so seriously? What can these so-called judges do to her except hold her up, day after day after day? And the gate itself, that bars her way: she has seen what lies beyond it. There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league. If they are going to block her from passing through, very well then, basta, let them block her. Let her spend the rest of her life, so to speak, here, idling the daytime hours away on the square and retiring at nightfall to lie in the smell of someone else's sweat. Not the worst of fates. There must be things she could do to pass the time. Who knows, she might even, if she finds a shop that hires out typewriters, take up novel-writing again.
It is morning. She is at her table on the pavement, working on her statement, trying out a new approach. Since she boasts that she is secretary of the invisible, let her concentrate her attention, turn it inward. What voice does she hear from the invisible today?
For the moment, all she hears is the slow thud of the blood in her ears, just as all she feels is the soft touch of the sun on her skin. That at least she does not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster that has been given to her to look after, this shadow turned to flesh that stands on two feet like a bear and laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be, she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies too.
Somehow; but how? How on earth can bodies not only keep themselves clean using blood (blood!) but cogitate upon the mystery of their existence and make utterances about it and now and again even have little ecstasies? Does it count as a belief, whatever property she has that allows her to continue to be this body when she has not the faintest idea how the trick is done? Would they, the bench of judges, the panel of examiners, the tribunal that demands she bare her beliefs – would they be satisfied with this: I believe that I am? I believe that what stands before you today is I? Or would that be too much like philosophy, too much like the seminar room?