THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

by Adam Thirlwell

  (This passage, unchanged, could have formed part of a Postscript to The Encyclopedia of the Dead. It was probably written with that goal in mind.)

  In manuscript form among Kiš’s papers were preserved seven tables of contents of a book of stories that would be published in 1983 under the title The Encyclopedia of the Dead. The first two, which we can trace without difficulty to the year 1980, included the title “Ödön von Horváth,” with a notation of the number of pages envisioned (ten in the first table of contents, and eight in the second). Both of the tables were written out by hand on half-sheets of typewriter paper. A remnant of cellophane tape attests to the fact that the list of titles (as if it were some literary duty) had been hung up in plain view somewhere. No tale involving Ödön von Horváth under any title, however, is to be found on the other five tables of contents, all of which were typed and which contain the titles of finished stories. We did, however, find forty-seven typed pages in Kiš’s papers belonging to a “topic for a story” about the life and death of an apatride. One of them bears the title “APATRIDE/MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY,” typed in all capitals, and below that, in parentheses, “OUR HOMELAND IS THE MIND.” We used the first, underlined word as the title of the story, regarding the other two titles as variants. Among the forty-seven mostly uncorrected pages, we were able to discern two entities; their relationship to each other was one of first and second versions. The first consists of fourteen numbered pages, with traces of corrections, apparently carried out in one sitting, with a fine-point black pen. The story of the stateless man, now bearing the name Egon von Németh (the exchange of the surname Horváth for Németh, aside from purely literary concerns, which lie outside the scope of these notes, is interesting in its own right: one common family name used to designate Hungarians living along the borders to Croatian areas has been traded for an equally common family name for Hungarians from border areas next to German-speaking territory), flows continuously in this version, without any kind of breaks, even among sections that are chronologically very far apart. In the text, however, there are fragments, designated by numbers and circled in the same black pen, that later, with almost no changes, appear in the second version of eight pages.

  This second version comprises fifteen numbered sections. There is no title on the first page, something that could mean that this version served above all as an investigation of the suitability of the form: the fragment as a structural unit is being put to the test. The question of structure is again of the greatest importance: the sequence of sections (“the texture of events”), their dimensions, the relationship between their relative lengths, interruption in the course of the narrative, and the nature of their graphic representations (characteristic here is the absence of long passages: every section has the semantic density of a stanza of poetry). At the top of the first and second sections there are, in addition, typed sentences taken word for word from scientific texts. A possible function of these quotes: the contribution to a sense of compression; but they have another, more important function: it is as if the author of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich wanted, through them, to say the following: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, what my starting point is, and look what it gives rise to, no matter how ‘carefully’ I exercise my ‘creativity.’”

  What about the contents of the remaining twenty-five pages? For the most part unpaginated, they are largely variants of the passages included in the two versions already mentioned. But there are those that show “first-hand” traces of events from the life of the apatride that encompass his entire history. We took it upon ourselves, not without trepidation, to piece the story together (the fragmentary character of the second version made our work easier). We found justification in our desire to defy the irreversible.

  Textual Notes:

  entirely vague and pointless: Sentence incomplete.

  And so forth: A passage for which we could unfortunately find no place in the unified and recomposed “variant,” given its similarity to this section/fragment, but could no more dispense with, on account of its function in the course of the narrative, is reproduced in its entirety here:

  Here, in Amsterdam, in an isolated street a stone’s throw from a canal, our stateless man would suddenly find himself among his characters, a word that he used, not without attendant irony, every time his eye was drawn to those human creatures who bore on their faces or their bodies signs of rack and ruin, either patent or hidden. When night had begun its descent onto the streets, around the corner there would suddenly appear women, all dolled up, leaning against the wall in their tight, clingy dresses.

  No more and no less so than other people. If he had been told this earlier, two or three years ago, he would not have paid any attention to it: These two sentences were omitted from the first publication of the story (Srpski književni glasnik, 1, 1992).

  Jurij Golec

  In the last three of the seven tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, the titles “Jurij Golec” and “The Lute and the Scars” both appear, in this order. In the seventh table of contents, both titles are crossed out by hand. Why were both removed, even though they dovetail with the basic theme of the book (both find their “metaphysical bearings” in love and death)? The reason (the only reason for which material evidence can be adduced) should perhaps be sought in the radical shift in style that comes from adjusting to their autobiographical, non-fictional character. In their stead “Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture” appeared at the last minute. We say “last minute” because the title of this other story is not found in any of the tables of contents, something that indicates that it was added to the manuscript just before it was turned over to the publisher. This piece of “fantasy” combines the worlds of the two stories while hewing more closely to the style of the whole Encyclopedia. Whether or not the inclusion of “Stamps” necessitated the exclusion of the other two stories for purely literary reasons is a question of another order, and one that does not lie within the scope of these notes.

  The story “Jurij Golec” is preserved in manuscript form in four versions (not counting the layers of “palimpsests” created by revisions in the author’s hand), totaling one hundred and nineteen typed pages, to which should be added fifty-five additional pieces of paper with variations on individual passages or notes and sketches. The sequence of the versions can be established with little difficulty. The first comprises twenty-six pages and has the title “The Actor”; the second, untitled version is forty pages long. Both of these versions contain only the first half of the story. The third version, and the fourth, definitive one, both bearing the title “Jurij Golec,” are of almost equal length (27 and 26 pp.). The fundamental differences between the four versions are the visible reduction in text and the replacement of real personal names with fictitious names or initials. The basic technical issue, which is the main reason that multiple versions exist, is how to depict dialogue without narrative lulls or awkwardness. The customary forms “she said,” “he said,” or “I said,” and so forth, are reduced to an absolute minimum (and in the final text are only used when needed for rhythm or comprehension). The basic events, characters, and situations, however, remained unchanged.

  In view of the fact that this story was planned to be a part of The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Kiš wrote a note that was supposed to be included in a general postscript, which we have appended to the story in this volume, rather than place here among the notes. It was our view that the subsequent revelation of the hero’s identity retrospectively underscored the nonfictional nature of the story, whereas the typical novelistic feature of a “note” would broaden to too great a degree the world of the basic narrative. In terms of form, we find this is justified by the fact that the story “The Short Biography of A.A. Darmolatov” (in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) concludes with an italicized postscript.

  The Lute and the Scars

  “The Lute and the Scars” was also conceived as part of The Encyclopedia of the Dead. We have already made mention (see previous not
e) of some of our hypotheses about the reasons this story, as was the case with “Jurij Golec,” did not make it into the collection. Two versions are preserved in manuscript form: the first, without a title, contains seventeen typed pages (fifteen of which are sequentially paginated, though among them are inserted two pages with the designations “2a” and “6a”); the second, entitled “The Lute and the Scars,” consists of fourteen unfilled pages. Versions of the introductory section of the story make up most of the content of another sixteen pages. And, again, it is to the story itself that we attached the “note” that was foreseen as a general postscript. In this case we acted with much greater hesitation than with “Jurij Golec.” The reasons were that this note has primarily a theoretical and meta-textual function: it specifies the genre (creative nonfiction), with an additional reference to the story “Jurij Golec.” The gulf between Kiš’s narration and his commentary is much wider here. The fact is, however, that the word “note” itself seems intended to strengthen, even to guarantee, the truthfulness of the story (even, if nothing else, by comparison with the foregoing story, in which the inclusion of the fictional was a kind of obligation).

  Let us now shift our attention to the thematic uniqueness of this story in the context of Kiš’s literary oeuvre: this is the only piece that one could label a “Belgrade story.” The piece was written at the start of 1983, as a late look back at his own younger years, with a double distancing from the objects he is describing: in terms of space, since at that time Kiš was living in Paris, and likewise at a chronological remove (the story takes place during the 1950s, with one episode from the end of the 1960s). Everything in the piece is tied up with a quintessential story of emigration, the roots of which reach back to the Russian Revolution. And it is precisely this aspect of the story that links it, along with “The Book of Kings and Fools” (from The Encyclopedia of the Dead), to the world of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. The reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not simply part and parcel of Kiš’s memories of his youth (and an indirect reference to two treatments of the subject that Kiš penned much earlier, both published in the newspaper Ovdje (Here): “On Céline” from April 1971 and “Anti-Semitism as a Way of Looking at the World” from June of the same year), but also a representation of the subtle affinities between these two stories. (For example, the profession of the hero of “The Book of Kings and Fools,” Belogortsev—a forestry engineer—along with a few other details that the attentive reader will unearth.)

  The Poet

  Although the title “The Poet” is not mentioned in any of the tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, one handwritten fragment, found among texts that can with certainty be linked to that book, shows us to be justified in placing the story into this context. This is the fragment:

  A story about a professor who writes a

  sonnet against Tito and the Party.

  After years of a sentence of hard labor,

  this sonnet has been reworked into

  a paean.

  They bring Ranković to see him, etc.

  Two sonnets.

  On the back of one page of notes to “Jurij Golec” we find the following written by hand:

  For the story:

  1. The mayor destroys the park.

  2. Sonnet (of a reactionary)

  The manuscript of “The Poet” consists of thirteen continuously paginated typed pages. Corrections were made in three rounds: with a pencil and with fine blue and black ballpoint pens. There are no other related papers: the story came into existence in one sitting, with only superficial changes.

  The appearance of this story among Kiš’s short fiction is not, however, accidental. Traces of his reflections on the postwar years are to be seen in his notes, in his sketches of imaginative literary subjects, and in fragmentary autobiographical notes relating to the Cetinje period of the author’s life. From among the large number of such notes we will reproduce here a few that correspond to this story:

  “[P]arty spirit” in literature; the revolution isn’t for young ladies; terror in school: tight pants (“knickerbockers”), haircut, etc. . . . morale; Lenin-Stalin in physics, history, math, etc; language: the manner of speech of politicians and peasants; warehouses belonging to government ministries.

  In addition, we include a short character sketch:

  Cetinje: secret policeman/tennis player: he has an odd way of walking, not peasantlike, or clumsy, not at all, but rather a gait that you couldn’t help but watch (even though a gait cannot be viewed or seen): it was, how shall I say, the walk of a peasant who is walking as if he were middle class, who thinks he is walking as if he were a middle-class person who plays tennis.

  Subsequent to the first publication of this story in the initial edition of the collection The Lute and the Scars, we found amid some newspaper clippings a bundle of Kiš’s papers that contained several relevant items, including a bibliography that the author undoubtedly composed in the course of preparing his collected works. On one sheet from this bundle we found the following note that indicates the “sources” of this story, its nonfictional background:

  People told me a story about a man somewhere who was arrested after the war on account of some subversive poetry. They threw him into prison and forgot about him. Then someone remembered he was there and ordered him the opportunity to clean up the mess himself: in place of his subversive poem (semiliterate slapdash work) he must write a poem with the opposite content. The man accepted the offer. They gave him a distant, very distant deadline, provided him with paper and a pencil: and said write, and erase, until it is first-rate. From time to time they summoned him and he read aloud his panegyric. “It could be better, more sincere!” they told him. People from the most prominent circles of the police force visited him and read through his variations. After ten years someone told him: “Well, see, now it is first-rate. The poem is sincere.” And—they let him go.

  (So much for needing to research the relationship between an anecdote and a piece of fiction . . .)

  The Debt

  The story “The Debt” is preserved among Kiš’s manuscript papers on a total of seventeen typewritten pages. The complete manuscript of the version we provide here contains twelve numbered pages; in the middle of the first is the typed title “The Debt.” Four of the additional pages present what is in all likelihood a second version of the beginning of the story, in this case with no title indicated. On a separate page, on which the title is also to be found, there are simply five lines, which can be regarded as another variant of the start of the story.

  Corrections on the twelve-page manuscript were carried out with a pencil throughout the entire text, with the majority of these occurring in the introductory section that precedes the enumeration of the “debts.” These corrections, judging by their apparent uniformity, were carried out in a single reading of the manuscript. The other corrections, decidedly fewer in number, were made in fine blue ballpoint pen (the story therefore seems most likely to have gone through only two revisions). The unfinished nature of certain sentences, which we encounter from the first pages of the story, along with superficial corrections that seem to be “final touches”—these all demonstrate that Kiš’s opinion of the introductory section was that it was only a temporary resolution. In the portion of the story where the enumerations occur, there are virtually no corrections of any kind, which shows that the frame-narrative was what caused the most problems for Kiš; once the list begins, the only narrative events are those concerned with the debts, and the underlying concept that life is passing before the protagonist’s eyes by means of this inventory, all of which was drafted without the least difficulty or deficiency (the process of enumeration that was so dear to Kiš). To judge by the large number of sentences beginning on one page and concluding on the next, we could even say that the story was produced in one session.

  The title “The Debt” does not figure in any of the seven extant tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, which
would seem to indicate that the story was written after 1983. The reader will probably recognize the great Bosnian author Ivo Andrić in the character of “the debtor.” And this identification, among other things, leads us to take 1986 as the year of origin for the story: at that time Kiš was writing the foreword to the French edition of Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo. Although arising in connection with this special occasion, Kiš’s repeated focus on Andrić could also have been the stimulus for the production of this type of homage to that other writer, one of the closest relatives in Kiš’s “literary family tree.” Even the fact that the story remained unfinished validates our view that its genesis should be associated with the aforementioned year, before the end of which Kiš’s illness had manifested itself.

  Nearly all the persons mentioned in this story are connected with Andrić’s early life (his schooling, his start as a writer, his first years in the diplomatic service) and Kiš located information about them in Miroslav Karaulac’s book Rani Andrić (The Early Andrić, Prosveta/Svjetlost, 1980), which he even mentions right at the beginning of the French foreword. Singling them out from the abundance of persons who come up in Karaulac’s study, he transformed them into character-paradigms via a process of extreme fictional compression, that essential hallmark of his prose. “Andrić is undoubtedly a moralist,” Kiš would go on to write, assessing the former’s literary works (“A Foreword to The Woman from Sarajevo,” in Život, literatura, Svjetlost, 1990); thus both his selection of facts and his formulation of statements (often in the form of maxims) are made according to principles that might be ascribed to a writer-moralist. The story, however, functions as a double portrait (the portrait and the vase), for Kiš is also taking moral stock of his own experiences and inclinations (the delicate terrain of good deeds and gratitude). And we believe that readers will have an easy time identifying points of contact between the characters in this “double exposition.” (The last will and testament of Eugène Ionesco, published in Le Figaro littéraire after that writer’s death, was written in the form of a life reviewed as a balance sheet of debts; when compared with the story “The Debt,” which was written nearly a decade earlier, Ionesco’s will can serve as evidence that even literature knows something about wondrous coincidences and the affinities of kinship.)