Malina

by Ingeborg Bachmann

While we’re working things out so effortlessly, the carnage continues in the city — insufferable remarks, commentaries and scraps of gossip circulate in restaurants, at parties, in apartments, at the Jordans’, the Altenwyls’, the Wantschuras’ or else they’re distributed for the more needy in magazines, newspapers, in movies and books where things are discussed in such a way that they depart, retreat into themselves, and withdraw into us, and each wants to stand there naked, eager to undress the others to the bone, every secret disappears, forced open like a locked drawer, but where no secret existed nothing shall ever be found, and the helplessness increases following the break-ins, the strippings, the searches and the interrogations: there is no burning bush, nor is even the smallest light illumined, not in ecstatic delirium, not in fanatic sobriety, and the law of the world lies upon everyone, more misunderstood than ever before.