You Should Have Left

by Daniel Kehlmann

The cold blue-white of the two glaciers, under them sheer granite, then the woods, which the haze turns into a smooth dark-green surface. The sky is lightly clouded, a cloud has drifted in front of the sun, its frayed white edges are outlined in fire.

The sun has just pushed its way out from behind the cloud, so that the sky is now melting in painful, blazing, magnificent brilliance. Or is that too many metaphors? The sun doesn’t push its way anywhere, the wind pushes the cloud away, and of course the sky by no means melts. But in painful, blazing, magnificent brilliance, not bad.

Someday I’ll write a movie about all this. Long dialogues, lots of flashbacks, no music. It will be called Marriage.

Marriage. The secret is that you love each other anyway. I wouldn’t want to be without her—I’d even miss her actor’s laugh. And she wouldn’t want to be without me. If only we didn’t get on each other’s nerves so much.

Reconciliation is never conceivable as long as the kid is awake.

Slapstick, said Susanna. Things have a life of their own.

I told the students at the film academy last year that you should know everything about your characters, especially where and how they grew up, but I only said it because it’s in the textbooks.

It’s completely quiet now; so quiet that the silence itself seems to be faintly rushing.

Get away. But if not him, then who?

Ovid, she said. Actually Heraclitus’s words, but Ovid puts them in Pythagoras’s mouth: There’s nothing in the world that stays the way it is.

And so we thought together back to what it had been like when we had first met: everything as always, everything as if for the first time, candlelight and narrow glasses and this and that bar, the movies, the theater, finally your apartment and then my apartment and then yours again; everything as usual, everything as never.

Bright grass and even brighter sun, no clouds, the air full of birds whose names I don’t know; I’ve always regretted that I can’t identify birds by name. The way they let the wind carry them, as effortlessly as if flying were the norm, as if it took hard work to stay on the ground.

Get away. Susanna said thank you and held my hand, and I looked into her eyes. They’re not actually blue, more turquoise, with a sprinkling of black.

This is how it is: You have to be completely unimaginative to sit down without fear in a fuel-filled capsule. One second you’re firmly ensconced in everyday life and thinking about dinner and your tax return, the next you’re wedged in deformed metal while the flames devour you, and all that lies between the one state and the other is a clumsy turn of the steering wheel, half a second of inattention. But I didn’t want to be someone who can’t cope with everyday life. People have simply agreed that driving a car is something harmless.

It’s not a pretty village. The houses are low and appear to be cowering.

He was silent, and it wasn’t clear whether he wasn’t saying anything because he didn’t know the answer or because he for some reason didn’t want to answer.

Get away quickly, she said. What? Quickly, she said. Quickly get away.

Get away. He says it like a regrettable cosmic fact, about which there’s nothing to be done.

Only I don’t see myself. In the room in the reflection there’s no one.

Even though it just happened, it seems to me as if it were a long time ago, and I know that in a moment I’ll no longer be sure whether it really happened.

Write it down so that you remember, so that you can never claim it was only your imagination.

Get away get away get away before get away it’s get away too get away late get away

I just wanted to get out. To get away. I wanted to get away so desperately that I said to myself: Get away, get away, get away.

When you’re awake, you know that you’re awake. Am I dreaming? is not a question anyone asks seriously.

Now that you mention it, Susanna said, I do find myself thinking of that movie sometimes. That good movie based on the not-so-good book. Which movie? The one with all the Steadicam shots.

In a movie it’s funny when a life falls apart, because the people say clever things while it’s happening, but in reality it’s only dismal and repugnant.

I stared at the drawings. Something was disconcerting: When you didn’t force your gaze to stay on them, it glided over them as if of its own accord.

If I just picture it, her and him, but I’d better not, that’s the most important thing: that I don’t picture it.

You should have left. Now it’s too late.

Eventually the night will end.

The mountain had so much mass that you felt its gravity, and I realized that all you had to do was jump and your own weight would pull you toward it and nothing would hold you and you would fall.

Who writes this stuff, I thought, how do you keep going, how do you live with yourself when you write things like this?

I seriously asked myself whether I had gone crazy. But how could you know that, how could you figure it out? Wasn’t the very fact that I asked myself the question proof that I hadn’t?

an ant doesn’t know what a cathedral is or a power plant or a volcano.

We were back in the living room. Indeed, we had left the living room, but the door through which we had gone had led us back into the living room.

I had the vague idea that things would settle down somewhat—the way agitated water smooths itself out when you wait a little while.

A better one would be with a creature that is drawn on paper. If it could live, it would live entirely on the paper, on its surface. Now imagine there was a mountain on the paper. If the creature made a circle around the mountain and measured the enclosed area, this wouldn’t help it understand what it had in front of it. There would be much more paper than, according to its reason, could fit in the circle. For this creature it would be a miracle.

I’ll stand up and take Esther’s hand and walk backward toward the door, backward down the corridor, backward out of the house. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that it could help if we walk backward.

If we make it, this is the final entry.

Strange that I used to find the sight of the stars soothing. I once read that a lot of astronomers think the universe might be infinite. Full of stars, full of galaxies, going on and on and on, going on literally forever.

And this infinite universe might be only one of an infinite number of infinite universes, each with different laws. One is unreachable from another, they are strictly separate. Normally.

For a moment the size of the building was completely unclear; it projected far into the distance, pointed and gigantic, but not upward, rather in a direction that I hadn’t suspected existed.

As we walked, I was seized by the image of a woman who would stand at the window in several years or had perhaps stood at a window a long time ago and watched paralyzed with terror as two specters, a man and a child, receded hand in hand into the night.

I sensed her fear, and I knew that she snuggled up to me so tightly because she felt safer with me. The fact that I couldn’t do the slightest thing to protect her was hard to bear.

It’s the place itself. It’s not the house. The house is harmless, it’s simply standing where nothing should stand. I suspect there are more places like this, but the others are probably unreachable, on the sea bottom or in mountain caves in which no one has ever set foot.

The thought makes your head reel—not a fictitious but a real infinity, filled with things and creatures and galaxies and galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters and so on and so on, without an end in either direction. And now and then spots where the substance gets thin. Words. They don’t capture how it really is.

The place isn’t evil, but it’s a trap—like a crevice out of which you could at first climb, but you see the sky above you and think, it’s not dangerous, and so you dawdle and look around because there are interesting crystals there, and when you finally do want to climb out, you realize too late that every movement brings you down deeper.

It’s not easy to put into words. At least not these words. With new words it would be possible. But why bother? If I say that in addition to the three dimensions you have to imagine another three from the other side, or actually from within…But to whom am I supposed to explain this? To the others who are here forever too? They’ve known it for a long time, they already know far more.

I’m still here. So he didn’t get away when he still could, so I stayed.

When we looked at each other, I felt split into two beings. The knowledge that I would never see her and Esther again was unbearable. But at the same time they were both so far away from me that I didn’t know whether I would have even wanted to return to the place to which I could not return.