Menagerie: Just between us species.

The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.

For the first time ever he had some difficulty getting the key into the ignition and eventually forced it if only because there was no way but force, then he turned the engine which sprang to life and reversed on to the hill road forgetting all about the key problem though he did wonder while still maneuvering whether everything was all right for after all there shouldn’t have been a problem getting the key into the ignition of a car as new as this, but the thought vanished as soon as he started downhill, not a shred of it remaining, and he concentrated on driving in second gear before switching to third then climbing again to reach the highway above the village, the highway that would still be deserted because half past eight was too early for tourists and too late for locals, not that he knew the exact time because when he looked at the car’s clock it showed eight minutes to nine and he thought, oh, better get a move on, and he stepped lightly on the gas while either side of him the branches formed a tent over the winding lane, the whole scene so beautiful with sunbeams penetrating the boughs, the light sprinkling the road, everything trembling, and the highway behind; quite marvelous, he thought, and he could almost smell the scent of the greenery still wet with dew, he now being at the straight part of the road, some three hundred meters leading straight down where the car naturally picked up speed, and he thought it would be nice to have some music, and was just reaching for the car radio when suddenly he saw, some hundred or hundred fifty meters ahead of him, that is to say about half way or two-thirds of the way down the straight, a patch on the road that made him frown and peer trying to guess what it might be — a discarded piece of clothing, a machine part or what? — and it flashed through his mind that it looked exactly like an animal though it had to be a rag of some sort, something thrown from, or dropped from a truck, a rag that had remained curiously tangled, but when he saw that there was something at the side of the road as well as in the middle, he leaned forward on the steering wheel and tried to get a better look at it but couldn’t quite see where one form stopped and the other started so he slowed down just in case because, if there were two of them he didn’t want to drive over either, and it was only once he was very close that he could make them out and was so surprised he could hardly believe his eyes and put his foot down on the brake, since the thing didn’t just look like an animal, it was one, a young dog, a puppy, sitting perfectly still on the white line in the middle of the road, a rather thin creature with a patchy coat and an innocent look there in the middle of the road watching him in the car, quite calmly sitting on its butt, keeping a straight back and what was even more frightening than the fact of its presence was the look in its eyes, the way it didn’t move, the quite incomprehensible way it just sat there despite the big car, whatever the hell it was doing there with the car practically on top of it so you could see it wasn’t going to move even if he or his big car did, because this dog was not interested in the car or its proximity though he was almost touching it; and it was only then he noticed that to the left of the dog sitting on the white line there was another dog at the side of the road, its flattened corpse apparently hit by a car that had sliced it open, and though his own car had reached them the companion of the dead dog — what was the relationship between them? were they companions? — hadn’t moved an inch so he was forced to drive around it very slowly on its right side, his right wheel off the road so he could get by, only just avoiding it by a few centimeters if that, the dog still sitting there straight backed, and now he could look directly into its face though it would have been better if he hadn’t because, having carefully passed it, the dog was slowly following him with its eyes, with its sad eyes that showed no trace of panic or wild fury or of being traumatized by shock, the eyes simply uncomprehending and sad, sadly gazing at the driver of the car moving round and away from him, still not moving from the white line in the middle of the forest road and it didn’t matter whether it was fifteen miles from Los Angeles, eighteen miles from Kyoto or twenty miles to the north of Budapest, it simply sat there, looking sad, watching over its companion, waiting for someone to come along to whom it might explain what had happened or just sitting and waiting for the other to get up at last and make some movement so that the pair of them might vanish from this incomprehensible place.

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He was just a few meters past them and immediately wanted to stop, thinking I can’t leave them here, it was just that his legs refused to move for some reason, to do what he would have them do, and as the car rolled on he watched them through the mirror, the dead one lying half on its side, its internal organs spilled into the street, its four legs stretched stiffly out all parallel, but he could only see the back of the puppy, fragile but ramrod straight, still sitting in the middle of the road as if it could afford to wait for hours, and he worried it too might be struck by a car, and I should stop, he said to himself, but kept rolling on since it was two minutes past nine as he found when he glanced at his watch, what to do, I’ll be late, he fretted, his foot already pressing on the gas, in two minutes I shall be in town, then one bend followed another and he was already past the winding part of the road and it was one minute past nine when he checked his watch, pressing his foot harder down on the gas when for a moment, he remembered the dog again, the way it was watching over its companion, but the image quickly passed and for the next minute he concentrated entirely on driving, picking up speed to just under sixty since there was no one else on the road except a slower vehicle ahead of him, a Skoda he decided as he approached it, fretting because he had to slow right down instead of overtaking it, the possibility of overtaking diminishing as he approached, but I won’t wait, he thought crossly, not behind this ancient Skoda, not for the bend, and because he knew the road well having driven down it a thousand times and realizing there wouldn’t be a chance of overtaking it until they reached the sign for the town, he put his foot right down so as to pass it before the bend when suddenly the Skoda began to swing slowly towards the left right in front of him and everything happened almost at once, he glancing in his mirror to signal that he was about to pass, pulling left on the steering wheel, entering the other lane and starting to overtake, when the other man, having failed to look in his mirror, also swung out left because he wanted to turn off or to turn right round, who knows what, and maybe his left indicator had just started blinking, but only at that moment, as he swung left, by which time it was too late of course and it was no use him slamming on the brakes because the Skoda, being so slow was now practically straddling the road, as if the image of it had frozen and he could neither avoid it nor brake, and in other words, there being no means of stopping it, he crashed into him.

The onset of catastrophe is not signaled by the sense of everything falling through the dark and ending in accidental death: everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure, a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, that is maddeningly complex or must be conceived in quite another manner, one in which the degree of complexity can be articulated only in terms of images that seem impossible to conjure since time has slowed down to the point that the world has become indifferent to circumstances and various terrible preconditions have arrived at a perfect universal conclusion, that being because they are composed of intentions, because the moment is the result of unconscious choices, because a key doesn’t immediately fit into the ignition, because we do not start in third gear then move down to second but because we start in second and move into third as we move down the hill then turn onto a highway above the village, because the distance before us is like looking down a tunnel, because the greenery on the boughs still smells of morning dew, because of the death of a dog and someone’s badly executed maneuver when turning left, that is to say because of one missed choice or another, of more missed choices and still more missed choices ad infinitum, all those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because choice is not simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.

This story was translated by George Szirtes from the Hungarian.

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist. He is the author of five novels, including “War & War,” “The Melancholy of Resistance” and “Satantango,” and of “Animalinside,” a collaboration with the artist Max Neumann.