This is a key. It locks and unlocks a door, the door to apartment 2-1 of
the building at 43 Pradinestrade in the Old North Quarter of the city of
Krasnoy. The apartment is enviable, having a kitchen with saucepans,
dislicloths, spoons and all that is necessary, and two bedrooms, one of which
is now used as a sitting room, with chairs, books, papers and all that is
necessary, as well as a view from the window between other buildings of a
short section of the Molsen River. The river at this moment is lead-colored and
the trees above it are bare and black. The apartment is unlighted and empty.
When they left, Bruna Fabbre locked the door and dropped the key, which is
on a steel ring along with the key to her desk at the lyceum and the key to her
sister Bendikaтs apartment in the Trasfiuve, into her small imitation leather
handbag, which is getting shabby at the corners, and snapped the handbag
shut. Brunaтs daughter Stefana has a copy of the key in her jeans pocket, tied
on a bit of braided cord along with the key to the closet in her room in
dormitory G of the University of Krasnoy, where she is a graduate student in
the department of Orsinian and Slavic Literature, working for a degree in the
field of early romantic poetry. She never locks the closet. The two women walk
down Pradinestrade three blocks and wait a few minutes at the corner for the
number 18 bus, which runs on Bulvard Settentre from North Krasnoy to the
center of the city.
Pressed in the crowded interior of the handbag and the tight warmth of
the jeans pocket, the key and its copy are inert, silent, forgotten. All a key can
do is lock and unlock its door; thatтs all the function it has, all the meaning; it
has a responsibility but no rights. It can lock or unlock. It can be found or
thrown away.
This is history. Once upon a time, in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918,
in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and
hearts, too; hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the
hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to
the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine
guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the
pigeons fell. Thereтs a kind of red stone called pigeon blood, a ruby. The red
stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them
or let the rain fall and theyтre gray again, lead-gray, common stones. Only
now and then, in certain years, they have flown, and turned to rubies.
This is a bus. Nothing to do with fairy tales and not romantic; certainly
realistic; though, in a way, in principle, in fact, it is highly idealistic. A city bus,
crowded with people, in a city street in central Europe on a November
afternoon and itтs stalled. What else? Oh, dear. Oh, damn. But no, it hasnтt
stalled; the engine, for a wonder, hasnтt broken down; itтs just that it canтt go
any farther. Why not? Because thereтs a bus stopped in front of it, and another
one stopped in front of that one at the cross street, and it looks like everything
has stopped. Nobody on this bus has heard the word gridlock, the name of an
