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| The Corridor of Rooms | In
a spare room, beneath a single bulb, on a bare floor, sits an old-fashioned typewriter whose letter K is stuck halfway down, so that its arm stands in the air like an insect. You are not permitted to know who the room belongs to, nor where in space or time it exists. It is not known who K is. Nonetheless, the atmosphere in the room is charged with the aura of K though K is nowhere to be seen. Of course, it is possible that K may not even exist. In the room next door, or perhaps one a little further down the corridor, there is an old metal bedstead with steel springs on which is laid a ticking mattress. Towards one edge lies a heavy leather glove as used by a welder perhaps or a stoker. It is tired, polished and stiffened into the shape of its wearer. It is for a right-hand. Nearby, towards the foot-end there is an old bicycle lamp, khaki-green in colour with its on-off switch like a heavy wing-nut on its topside. The glove lies on its side, like a face half-asleep, dreaming perhaps. The lamp is as pregnant as the light of the world. Across the hall, down which flows a red Indian river, behind a locked door whose key remains on the inside, is a furnished room in a yellowing light. On a table near one wall a Singer sewing machine makes love to a linen table-cloth of enormous size that flows away to lap the skirting board beneath a pair of windows. The view through the left crosses a narrow street to a wall of brick; that to the right looks down a broad high-road littered with possibilities. Outside the door again, one looks to right and left and sees further rooms reaching away towards new corridors and staircases that lead up and down to further floors. How did these rooms come to be occupied? How did they come to exist in the first place? By the grace and divine wisdom of the concierge. |
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