Natsume Sōseki — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

I had taken to sitting each morning in the same corner of the Café Livonia, not from any settled affection for the place but because the pull of habit, once it has fastened upon a man living alone in a foreign capital, exercises a tyranny far exceeding that of any landlord or any wife. My work—if one may dignify with that word the sending and receiving of documents through a glowing rectangle, the attending of meetings in which six faces occupy six small boxes and none of them quite meets one's eye—required no particular room, no particular city even; I might have discharged my duties from a cellar in Yokohama with equal competence. And yet I had chosen Vienna, or rather Vienna had chosen me, the way a stray cat chooses a doorstep: without consultation, and with the clear intention of staying.

The café's mirror hung behind the pastry counter, gilt-framed, mercury gone soft and brown at the edges like an old photograph left too near a stove, and running from the upper corner to somewhere below the sightline of a seated man there was a single hairline fracture. I do not know when I first noticed it. One does not notice cracks; one arrives already noticing them, as though the eye had been briefed in advance by some higher office of Fate, Melancholy Division. What I can report is that once seen, it could not be unseen, and thereafter my own reflected face, sipping its Melange with the gravity of a man performing a rite whose meaning he has forgotten, appeared subtly doubled—cloven, one might say, along a line that did not correspond to any crease of flesh, but which nonetheless suggested that the self reflected there was not quite continuous with the self doing the reflecting.

"You are staring at yourself again," said a voice, "which is either philosophy or vanity, and in my experience the two are rarely distinguishable."

This was Herr Brandtner, though I never established whether Brandtner was his true name or merely the one he had settled on for transactions with foreigners, myself among them. He appeared most mornings at the next table with a newspaper he did not read and an appetite for conversation he did not trouble to disguise, and he had about him the particular sheen of a man who has made a profession of being present precisely where something might be extracted—information, a coffee, an introduction, a loan never quite repaid.

"I was contemplating the mirror," I said, "not myself. There is a crack in it."

"There is a crack in everything old," he said, "which is why the modern world prefers glass that shatters cleanly into a thousand pieces rather than glass that merely thinks about it for a hundred years first."

"That is either wisdom or advertising copy."

"In this century," said Brandtner, folding his newspaper with the satisfaction of a man closing a ledger in his own favor, "the two have become indistinguishable, and I do not see why we should mourn the fact more than any other."

I confess I found myself unable to answer this at once, and instead permitted my gaze to travel once more along that fracture in the glass, following it as one follows a river on an old map to see where it disappears off the page's edge. It occurred to me that the mirror had likely witnessed the passage of some three or four generations of café society—the officials of an empire that no longer existed, murmuring over documents no committee would now recognize; the poets who had come here to be poor together, more efficiently than they could manage alone; the chess players whose feuds outlasted several governments; and now myself, an outlander conducting the business of a firm on the far side of the earth through a screen the width of two hands, present in body and absent in nearly every other particular. The mirror had absorbed all of this without complaint, and had cracked, if my theory holds any water, from the accumulated weight not of blows but of witnessing.

"You are the sort of man," Brandtner said, watching me with the frank calculation of an appraiser, "who will sit here every day and feel that the crack means something. I am the sort of man who will simply sell you a larger one, framed, at a very reasonable price, should you ever wish to take a piece of this place home with you."

"I have not yet decided," I said, "whether the crack means anything at all."

"Then we are exactly matched," he said, with what I can only describe as professional satisfaction, "for neither, dear friend, have I."

He did not, in the end, sell me that mirror. What he sold me, some three weeks later, was a small brass letter-opener purportedly salvaged from the estate of a countess whose name he could not quite recall under direct questioning, though he recalled it readily enough whenever the price required embellishment. I bought it not from credulity but from a kind of fatigue with my own skepticism, the way a man will finally give the beggar his coin not because he believes the story of the sick child but because he has grown weary of not believing it. The letter-opener sits now on my desk beside the laptop, where it performs no function whatever, there being no letters in this century that require opening by anything sharper than a fingernail.

"You will notice," Brandtner said on the morning after the transaction, settling into his chair with the particular contentment of a man who has recently improved his circumstances at another's expense, "that I did not attempt to sell you the mirror itself. That would have been dishonest."

"Because the mirror is not yours to sell."

"Because the mirror is not for sale," he corrected, "which is a different matter entirely, and rather more interesting philosophically, though I grant you it amounts to the same thing in my pocket."

I had, by then, developed something like a private inventory of the café's fixtures, the sort of list a man compiles when he has too much solitude and too little occasion to speak it aloud: the mirror with its fracture; the brass rail along the counter, worn to a dull gleam precisely where four generations of elbows had rested while their owners waited for coffee and, presumably, for news of empires; the clock above the door, ten minutes fast, which no one had troubled to correct since—by Brandtner's account, offered with the confidence of a man inventing history as needed—the day it was set wrong by a jealous waiter wishing to hurry a rival's shift along; and the chess table by the window, its board worn pale in a diagonal line from bishop's opening to bishop's opening, repeated by players long dead into something like a groove in wood, which is perhaps the only afterlife available to habit. I offer this catalogue not because it explains anything but because it is easier to enumerate a room than to say plainly that I had begun, in my sixth month of exile, to prefer the company of furniture to the company of the six small boxes on my screen, in which faces I had once known well now arranged themselves into rectangles of diminishing familiarity.

"You are quiet this morning," Brandtner observed, in the tone of a physician noting a symptom he does not intend to treat.

"I am attending a meeting," I said, gesturing at the laptop, where indeed my colleagues were assembled in their small frames, discussing a matter of some consequence to the firm and none whatever, I suspected, to the future of the world. "In Tokyo it is already evening. Here it is not yet noon. We meet at the hour convenient to no one, which is the only democracy the modern office has achieved."

"And do they know," Brandtner asked, nodding at the screen, "that you are also here, drinking Melange, discussing the sale of countesses' letter-openers with a man of no fixed profession?"

"They know that I am present," I said. "Whether I am here is a separate question, and one I have stopped asking myself, for the same reason a man stops touching a bruise—not because it has healed, but because he has learned the exact shape of the pain and no longer requires new information."

He laughed at this, not unkindly, and returned to his newspaper, which he still did not read, folding and unfolding it as another man might turn a rosary.

I paid my bill and rose, and in passing the counter permitted myself one final survey of the mirror, its fracture catching the window light at an angle that made it, for a moment, almost beautiful—a thin bright seam, like a scar that has stopped apologizing for itself. My own reflection crossed it as I moved, divided cleanly for the half-second it takes a man to walk past his own image, and I found that I no longer minded the division, or minded it only in the manner one minds the weather: an established fact, neither hostile nor consoling, merely present, as I was present, in a city I had not chosen and could not quite call home, before a mirror that had outlasted several empires and would very likely outlast my contract as well.

"Tomorrow, then," Brandtner said, not looking up.

"Tomorrow," I agreed, and left it at that, for what else, after all, was there to conclude.