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had become as superfluous as primitive tools down in the square. The mute feelings of Bruno’s parents were dangerously condensed, and there was no release. Their faces wore expressions of acute distress, of pleading, of passion, and finally—of terror and loss. They held hands, and for a moment were carried away from the commotion in the square, as together they tried to clear a path for themselves. His mother’s breasts heaved with yearning, and their movement outlined the missing rhyme of an old forgotten ballad; in some imperceptible way, dizzy scenes were projected out of his father’s mind, the reflections of his troubled soul, together with a sprinkling of pleas for help and pleas for understanding. But this time Henrietta was clearly not able to help. She smiled helplessly and slowly retreated, waving in apology, swallowed by the crowd. At that moment—and I could sense this even from afar—an invisible thread which must have been stretched between them broke with a twang.

“They never did understand each other,” mused Bruno sadly, with lowered head. Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, next to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, happier events were in progress: Edzio, the young cripple, swinging his muscular torso on crutches, finally met Adela face to face. Stout Edzio, whose cruel parents took his crutches away at night, and who dragged himself like a dog every night to Adela’s window, to press his deformed face against the pane, and watch the lovely servant girl deep in slumber, sprawling naked and moist for columns of bedbugs, wandering through the wilderness of sleep … He saw her, and she, without opening her eyes, saw him. And a small spark passed between them, with a trembling that shook the people all around. And they stood and stared at each other, and for a moment Adela’s eyes were opened: a thin white film—like the film over a parrot’s eye—was lifted, and light flashed, like a magnesium bulb. She saw his soul, understood the full force of his tragedy. She read the story of his nightly vigil over her dreams and felt the column of bedbugs turn to fingers of desire between her thighs. She contracted with pain and pleasure, and let him kiss her, in his thoughts, for the first time. She blushed deeply all over when she realized he hadn’t moved from his place at all, and that her lips had remained parted in a dream, and yet she had been kissed, wildly and passionately kissed, and she would never know such a kiss again …

“What’s happening there?” I demanded to know. “What are you doing to them, Bruno?”

He looked at me with disappointment. “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? The Messiah has come. My Messiah. And they’re forgetting. And nothing that used to help in the sad illusion of their former lives can avail them now. They have only what they have here—and that’s more than enough,” he said, indicating Edzio and Adela, who though standing in the crowd were off by themselves, enveloped by thin fibers of brightness. “They’re turning into artists, Shloma, great creators! Great as the stature of man!”

“Artists? All I see here are miserable wretches whose lives are falling apart!”

“Ah, that’s only because they haven’t understood what’s required of them yet, and what they’re capable of doing,” Bruno reassured me, swimming like a tiny fish through the room, gaily swishing his tail, rolling over on his back and returning to stand beside me. “Creationin the fullest sense of the word. In all its splendor. Oh, Shloma, this is the Age of Genius we’ve always dreamed of, I in my writing and you in your prison. Very shortly you, too, will come to understand that the thousands of years of existence that preceded this were only drafts, the tentative, early gropings of evolution …”

Groups were breaking up below into their various components: families separated in bewilderment with a mild pang of regret, wondering why nothing was holding them together anymore, or whether anything ever had. The two esteemed drawing teachers who were engrossed in a lively conversation about the marvelous poet Jachimowitz stopped talking in the middle of a sentence: their hands still traced complicated arguments in the air, but the furnace that had forged their enthusiasm into words was now extinguished. They stood facing each other, studying their still-darting hands, and then went their different ways without regret, trying with what was left of their old thinking to remember how they used to be able to get so excited about words and frozen rhymes.

“They have no literature.” Bruno glowed. “No science, no religion, no tradition, even Edzio and Adela have already forgotten each other …”

He was right: the two had drawn apart to opposite sides of the square, and on their faces there was not a sign that they missed each other. “There’s no longing for the past,” Bruno continued, “only a passion for the future; there are no immortal works; there are no eternal values except for the value of creation itself, which is not a value at all but a biological drive, as powerful as any other; look at them, Shloma—they don’t remember anything beyond this moment, only this moment in the world of the square is not a single chime of the church clock; it is, shall we say, a time crystal containing one experience only, which can last a year or an instant, yes, my Shloma”—Bruno continued, and now he looked like a real fish, swimming delightedly across the water-soaked green folio that floated beneath us in the abyss—“these are people without memory, firsthand souls, who in order to continue to exist must re-create language and love and each coming moment anew, and to sew the knots that burst from—”

“But this is so cruel, Bruno, so terribly cruel!” I screamed and gulped water. “You can’t do this to people! Not everyone is made of the same—hah—original stuff! Some of us actually need an orderly framework, for law, for continu—Oh, Lord! Look over