•

Naturally, I said none of these things at Schwab’s flower hill. They merely passed through my mind while I said something totally different. What? I don’t even know anymore. And it made no difference at all, whatever it was. For I hadn’t noticed that a microphone was hidden by Schwab’s presumable head in his new condition as a flowery hedge. Without realizing it, I spoke right into the microphone, and even though I spoke softly, my voice boomed a hundred, a thousand times louder through the cremation temple, bellowing into the paraboloid vaults and thundering and crashing back upon itself—an acoustic pandemonium, deafening every eardrum in the place. Afterward, Carlotta told me that her ears kept ringing for hours.

I kept my concluding statement as short as possible and then, quickly as I could, returned to my penitent’s stool.

•

Meanwhile, however, the black-and-white pastor-blossom had ambulated over to Schwab in his new condition; perceptively, he stationed himself at the putative feet, far away from the microphone, and now he chewed a small portion of consecrating verbal gruel. At almost the same time, the downtrodden cousin twice removed began to play the organ; and while he made a steep fugue of pipe tones rise into the vault, I saw—first with terror, then with mounting delight—that Schwab was sinking into the pit from which he had been looming, and I saw two curving walls at his flanks, and they closed over him, forming a small barrel.

He had passed into his element.

CAIN

The Last Manuscript

Translated by David Dollenmayer

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

THERE IS no basis for the claim that the finder of the manuscript presented here knew what it was the minute he laid eyes on it. Although the attorney Dr. Fritz Engelhardt appears to be an astute reader of my books, his knowledge of them presumably doesn’t go beyond the Tales of Maghrebinia, and it is doubtful that the names occurring in the pages he discovered—Schwab, Scherping, Nagel, Witte, etc.—would have led him to guess their connection to The Death of My Brother Abel. Only the preface by the producer Wohlfahrt—which was meant to be an introduction but by accident was stuck in at the end of the folder instead of the beginning—must have suggested that a happy chance had put into his hand Folder C of the manuscripts of Aristides Subicz (or rather, Schwab), which had been missing and thought lost for almost thirty years. (Folders A and B were published in The Death of My Brother Abel.)