THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

by Adam Thirlwell

  To Mrs. Vera Stojić, who took care of my manuscripts and correspondence, doing so out of love and respect: two crowns.

  To Midhad Šamić, who discovered my sources and interpreted them in terms of erudition and creative impotence: one crown.

  To that professor who gave me a copy of his book of aphorisms for my birthday: a crown (although actually he should give me a crown for having read it). As the old adage goes, a loan oft loses both itself and friend.

  To Nurse Olga, who takes care of me, and who puts fresh flowers in my vase every morning and turns me over in my bed with a light but careful touch.

  And on he went counting like that, to himself, in the quiet of the room filled with artificial light like the evening sun. At first his thoughts followed a chronology, but with the mounting pain (there wasn’t anything specific that ached; rather, everything caused him pain, and life itself hurt) the order became jumbled, the events grew confused, and time lost its way; only now and again did a coherent thought surface, as when the sun plays hide and seek behind the clouds.

  He attempted, using his rosary of insulin drops, a rosary like those made of pearls, to tot up all the many sums he had enumerated so that he could establish the total amount he owed. He would begin and then stop again, then start counting once more with a vague dread, a dread akin to a shudder, that his woeful stipend—of two hundred crowns—would not be enough. He would have to leave somebody out for now; leave them empty-handed; he would have to remain indebted to someone. But whom should he cross off the list, especially when this list comprised only a part of his debts? He tried to reduce the total, to distribute it differently, but at any rate it wasn’t a sum of money that was at issue. Rather it was a sign of consideration, the result of his wish not to remain indebted to anyone in this world, at least insofar as one can settle accounts uniformly with one’s relatives, creditors, benefactors, and nuisances.

  The nurse was sitting in the adjacent room, and through the open door she kept an eye on the monitor where the functions of the patient’s heart were being charted in jagged but evenly spaced waves. In her starched white smock, and with a white ribbon in her hair, she sat sideways at a table, reading a romance novel in Bazaar magazine: she was riding along on the wide blacktop; next to her sat Nick Chester with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his powerful, hairy chest. “Nick had laid his right hand on her taut thigh; the car glided noiselessly along the broad asphalt road in the direction of Colorado. But suddenly, when he turned his head toward her to say those words she had waited so long to hear . . .” The nurse braced herself by pressing her orthopedic sandals against the wall with all her might, as if to prevent the catastrophe that was taking shape in the next line of the text, in the form of a huge eighteen-wheeler; the truck appeared out of a curve and its headlights blinded Nick Chester, who never even got around to uttering the words that his young heart was dictating to him. Glancing up from the pages of Bazaar, where love was being extinguished before her eyes, the nurse directed her sleepy, mournful gaze at the monitor: the waves were growing ever more jagged and a glowing dot, accompanied by a light beep, was skipping across the white horizontal line. It was like the screen of a ping-pong video game (which she had seen two years before in a hotel down in Budva).

  Then her eyes fell upon the sick man, and it seemed to her that he was moving his lips. Knowing that this was an important patient, she abandoned her spot on the seat of the Cadillac for a moment, there to the right of Nick Chester, and went over to the bed.

  The patient looked her straight in the eyes.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Lend me two crowns.”

  His words were quiet, labored, but perfectly intelligible.

  “Excuse me,” the nurse said, leaning over closer to him. “I didn’t quite get that.”

  “I am two crowns shy of being able to settle my debts. I won’t stay indebted to you either, Nurse. I don’t want to remain indebted to anyone. I’ll pay it all back to you, too, right down to the last kreuzer.”

  “Of course. I know you’re good for it. I’ll bring you the money right away.”

  At that point she went over to the adjoining room.

  “Doctor, the patient in No. 5 is asking me to lend him two crowns.”

  “Give them to him, Nurse.”

  “But two crowns, sir?”

  “His mind is wandering, Nurse. Give him two dinars. If his condition worsens, call me. As long as he’s quiet, I don’t want to go in. That might upset him. Go. Do you have the two dinars?”

  “Yes,” said the nurse, taking her change purse out of the pocket of her apron.

  “Here you go,” the nurse said as she laid the coins on the night-stand next to the patient’s bed; they vibrated on the marble top and then the noise abruptly stopped.

  “Doctor! Doctor!” the nurse called out. “He’s stopped breathing. Look at the monitor. His heart’s stopped beating.”

  “Summon the director quickly,” said the doctor. “You, Nurse, you paid the fare for his ride on Charon’s ferry.”

  A AND B

  A

  (The magical place)

  From Kotor (Kotor is located in the Zeta region of Yugoslavia, on the Gulf of Cattaro, a bay off the Adriatic) you must set out at around five in the morning. After an hour of driving up the steep serpentine curves, you have to stop somewhere and wait.

  The day must be clear, but there have to be a few white clouds in the west that are reminiscent of a herd of white elephants.

  Then you have to let your eyes take in the sea, the mountains, the sky.

  And then the sky, the mountains, the sea.

  And you have to know for certain that your father traveled this same stretch of road, either on a bus or in a taxi he had hired in Kotor, and you have to be convinced that he beheld this same sight: the sun popping into view in the west from behind clouds that looked like a herd of white elephants; the high mountains dissolving in mist; the inky dark blue of the water in the bay; the city at the foot of the mountains; the white ship putting in at the jetty; the soap factory where thick smoke gushed into the air from chimneys and enormous windows glowed with fiery light.

  You also have to take note of those chirping crickets (as if a million wristwatches were being wound up), for they are otherwise so easily forgotten, the same way it’s possible not to notice, because of its omnipresence, the smell of sagebrush at the side of the road.

  Then the thing is to forget everything else, and to observe from this godlike vantage point the meeting of the elements: air, earth, water.

  If all of these conditions are met, you will acquire an experience of eternity that Koestler called “oceanic feeling.”

  PS:

  A friend of mine, a press photographer, took pictures, with the permission of the captain, on board a Soviet cruiser that had anchored at Kotor. Afterward, from land, he photographed with a wide lens the ship and the landscape around the bay. When he developed the film, it was as black as night.

  The awareness of eternity, the “oceanic feeling,” yielded, independent of any technique of brouillage, only blots, red, black, or green, insofar as the senses of hearing, smell, and sight were unavailable during the taking of the photographs.

  My father viewed this same scene in 1939 (five years before he disappeared at Auschwitz) and in 1898 so did Mr. Sigmund Freud, who went on to have his famous dream about the three Fates.

  B

  (The worst rathole I visited?)

  From outside:

  The house is obscured on one side by the village administrative building, on the other by a wooden stable, and on the front side by a short beech tree. The house is made of dried mud, the room of darkened tiles that have shattered or slipped in places. The door is small, so that a grown person can enter only by bending at the waist. A window, half a square meter in size, looks out onto the tree, which stands at a distance of about ten meters from the shack. This window opens outward. On the other side, facing the “garden,” where th
e outhouse is located, along with a neglected tract of untilled land, overgrown with weeds, there is a round opening for light built directly into the wall. The pane on it is partially broken and the hole is plugged up with rags.

  From inside:

  The space is divided by a thin mudded wall: the bigger side measures 2 m x 2 m, the smaller one 2 m x 1 m. The first one is called a “bedroom,” the second one a “kitchen.” The walls have been whitewashed with an ochre-colored preparation made by dissolving clay in lukewarm water. The effects of dampness and sunshine are such that this coating blisters or develops cracks that look like scales or the faded canvases of Old Masters. The floor is also of pounded clay that lies several centimeters lower than the surface of the yard. On humid days the clay smells of urine. (A shed for animals once stood here.)

  In the larger room there are two wooden bed frames and two chests of drawers that are pulled out twenty to thirty centimeters from the wall. A rag carpet is stretched diagonally across the floor from the entranceway to the kitchen. In a corner of the kitchen stands a stove made of sheet metal. Two or three pots hang on heavy nails, and a wooden trunk serves as a sleeping platform and a pantry. Next to the stove lies a pile of decaying wet spruce cones for heating. There’s thick smoke in the kitchen, so thick that the people who sit on the chest or on the short wooden stools can barely see. Their voices work their way through the smoke as through water.

  “Here was the alarm clock. On this nail,” I say to the man who brought me here in a car from Budapest. “A drunken Russian sailor took it in 1945.”

  “Someday there will be a plaque here,” the man noted ironically as we were leaving the house. “It will say: HERE LIVED THE YUGOSLAV WRITER DANILO KIŠ FROM 1942 TO 1945.”

  “Fortunately, the house is slated to be torn down,” I say.

  “That’s a shame,” said the man who had brought me here in a car from Budapest. “If I had a camera with me, I’d take some pictures of it.”

  PS:

  Texts A and B are connected to each other by mysterious bonds.

  THE MARATHON RUNNER

  AND THE RACE OFFICIAL

  Although it does not entirely make sense in terms of chronology, I am convinced that it was from the late Leonid Šejka, the painter who referred to himself also as a “classifier,” that I first heard this story. Whether he read Abram Tertz’s book in manuscript form or someone related the story to him verbally, I do not know. But at any rate I’m sure that it was he who first recounted it to me. (He followed the winded runners with his eyes as they jockeyed for position, in the grip of terrible corporeal and mental strain amid an imaginary landscape to which he gave form and color. With three fingers of his right hand pressed together for emphasis, he sought the correct word and the right expression as if testing with the tips of his fingers the smoothness of a pigment or the thickness of a coat of paint; meanwhile his hand remained immobile, strangely still, as if paralyzed: in it a cigarette burns slowly while its ash remains intact, vertical.)

  Here’s the story:

  The marathon runners are warming up for the race in their shorts and tank tops to which bibs with large numbers are affixed. Among them were some who were participating for the first time, but there were also seasoned champions there, as well as one tall bony man, fifty years old, who was a celebrated veteran of many races and a winner many times over in the past, the pride of his nation.

  It’s early autumn or late spring. Above the main square, a banner inscribed with the word “Start” stretches from the baroque town hall to a building housing a restaurant. Ladies are coming out of morning Mass, leading by the hands little boys with carefully combed hair. Young women in long skirts and lace collars are chatting gaily, their white gloves still in place.

  When the race official lowers his flag, the runners take off with feigned unconcern. They have twenty-five kilometers in front of them, and even the neophytes know that they aren’t supposed to put their bodies and minds into high gear until much later.

  And thus off they go, all bunched together, through the streets of the city that are in some places exposed to the sun (at which they pull their visors down over their eyes) and in other places through great polygons of shade, where tall buildings block the light. Office denizens take up positions on the sidewalks and applaud irresolutely; gentlemen brandish their canes, pointing out their favorites; the hairdressers abandon their lathered-up customers for a few minutes; and the apprentices, leaning on their doorposts, follow with a look of nostalgia in their eyes those lucky ones to whom fate has granted a freedom as good as wings, and to one of whom will belong the glorious status of victor.

  They are still running in a pack, and through the thinning applause they can hear only the rhythmic scraping of their shoes and their own breathing. Then the city gradually falls behind them. They pass the smoke-filled slums, the paper mill, and the brewery; the train depot was on their left; now they have crossed the bridge; this is where the fields begin, and the meadows and the thickets of reeds from which the morning sun causes mist and the smell of grass to rise. This smell compels them to press their eyes shut as if the divine power of nature, the Antaeus-like juices of the earth, might thereby flow more easily into lungs and blood through their straining breath.

  The route is marked off with flags, and the motorcycle, sputtering and meandering in front of them, prevents the runners from losing their way. Meanwhile, the compact mass of runners has broken up. Of course at first this is still just a test of their strength or whatever early (and temporary) crises they might experience before the bodies subordinate themselves to the power of will and reason and ambition; or until they give out completely.

  Valdemar D., wearing #25, a tall fellow about thirty years of age, with close-cropped blond hair and long, lean legs, felt how he had finally shaken off his body’s lassitude, and by the time he reached the edge of the woods, he felt he had likewise overcome the sluggishness in his muscles, the indifference of his bones, the laziness of the soles of his feet—and at last overpowered this animal of a body that a saint had once named his donkey. He ran easily and his legs felt fresh, moving like well-oiled pistons. As if the forest smells and the redolent conifers had given him new strength. The sound of chainsaws, the hammering of axe-blows on sonorous tree trunks, the aroma of moist sawdust, reminiscent of urine—these were all distant echoes of his childhood.

  Notwithstanding the agreement with his trainer, now faded and forgotten in his mind, he picked up the pace on a downhill stretch in the woods in what would have been a respectable end-of-race kick, and he worked his way up to the front of the group that was in the lead; the famous veteran was in this group, running as an honorary competitor in his valedictory race. For a moment it seemed to the marathon runner that the veteran was looking at him in bewilderment, and then the veteran shook his head as if to make it clear that this was not the way to do things. It was not yet time to go for the lead since they had just barely cleared the city: the tolling of the bells from the municipal bell tower could still clearly be heard.

  When he came out into open country, Valdemar D. turned around. Behind him he saw the green barrier of the woods and the narrow path, empty of people. (He imagined the others on their way up the last incline deep in the heart of the forest, panting, and finding his footprints in the mud.)

  He knew the lay of the land around here, knew it very well indeed; he’d had the good fortune of training on this same path along which he was now hurtling, propelled by the bracing wind and a sense of rapture that he had long ago forgotten.

  At the six-kilometer mark they splashed a can of water on his face; at seven kilometers someone handed him a bottle and as he ran he drank the liquid that smelled of elderberry and tasted like rainwater; at ten kilometers somebody shouted that he should slow his pace and save his strength for the finish; in the eleventh kilometer he sank up to his ankles in the muck hard by a lake.

  With the astonishment of someone skilled and well-trained—a seasoned runner who
had started off with short distances until he found his real niche, aided by the advice of his coach, in long-distance events where the role of luck is reduced to the absolute minimum but will-power, experience, and preparation are decisive—he realized that he was running the race of his life, that he would win the trophy that hundreds or even thousands of athletes yearned for. Ecstatic at the fact that his body was obeying him without effort or opposition, he attained complete harmony with this corporeal instrument; having broken its resistance, having conquered and subjugated it, he reflected on the biological miracle that had enabled him to overwhelm the inertia of his body, the resistance of matter and gravity—and he thought about how he had succeeded, in the manner of an Indian fakir, to adjust the function of his heart, to control its rhythm. He wondered how this magical harmony, this ideal balancing act of will, strength, years, and days had come to be.

  And now he turned around, but in vain. Behind him were nothing but gently rolling green hills, forested heights, and the red reflection of the lake; not a visual clue or a sound connected with the people in whose company he began this race.

  The sun, passing along its high arc, was his only accompaniment.

  The shiny cross on the village steeple grew ever nearer. From the slates leaning against trees along the route, he followed the passage of the kilometers until he finally discovered, not without amazement, that on one of them—propped up against a telegraph pole—was written the number twelve. A record time even for a five thousand-meter race, he thought, and his heart was filled with joy, a joy that frightened him a little, as if he were witnessing some wondrous and unknown phenomenon bordering on the superhuman, the impossible. For if he felt this fresh here, at the half-way point, then it was only some unexpected misfortune, an awkward fall or a wrenched ankle, that could prevent him from setting a fantastic record that would go down in the annals of sports. A triumph worthy of the Marathon myth.