Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  He thought of Kafka’s shortest prose piece, “For we are like tree trunks in the snow, which the lightest push could topple; but look again, even that is an illusion,” and decided to walk a bit farther before returning. The path was blocked by spiderwebs, in which sat huge black-and-orange spiders. Yigal gently pushed them aside with a fallen branch and stepped around them. Under the needles he could still feel the stones. He took off his sandals and dug down with his toes until they touched the warm slate, which had stored the heat of the noon sun under its blanket of dry straw. He crept forward, listening closely, and heard a car pass on the road behind him. Then the trees unlocked their arms, the sky was visible overhead, and Yigal found himself facing an immense granite obelisk, surrounded by shaggy green grass, on which a voluminous text was printed in German, French, English, and Italian. He stood before the English side, which faced the sun, relieved to know English so well, since the French side, on the north, was indecipherable under a layer of moss that was presently in bloom, raising tiny wet cups to the sun and sheltering a puddle filled with tadpoles and liverwort. He began to read:

  NEAR THIS SPOT

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1956

  ROBERT WALSER

  POET OF LOVE, OF LONG WALKS

  AND OF THE WHITE-COLLAR PROLETARIAT

  WAS FOUND DEAD IN THE SNOW

  AFTER TWENTY-THREE YEARS IN HERISAU’S

  PUBLIC HOSPITAL

  FEIGNING CATATONIA AND WRITING IN SECRET

  TO SAVE MONEY

  IN 1914 HE RECEIVED

  THE AWARD OF THE WOMEN’S SOCIETY

  FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE POETRY

  OF THE RHINELAND—THIS STONE IS RAISED

  TO HIS MEMORY BY THE WOMEN’S SOCIETY FOR

  THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE POETRY OF THE RHINELAND

  ON THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

  APRIL 15, 1978

  — HONORED SIRS! —

  I AM A POOR, YOUNG, UNEMPLOYED CLERK NAMED WENZEL, IN SEARCH OF AN APPROPRIATE POSITION AND HEREBY TAKE THE LIBERTY OF ASKING POLITELY IF PERHAPS IN YOUR AIRY, BRIGHT, FRIENDLY OFFICES THERE MIGHT BE SUCH A THING AS AN OPENING. KNOWING THAT YOUR ESTEEMED FIRM IS LARGE, OLD, PROUD, AND RICH, I CAN’T HELP BUT THINK THAT YOU MUST HAVE SOME EASY, PLEASANT, ATTRACTIVE LITTLE SPOT INTO WHICH I, AS INTO A SORT OF WARM CUBBYHOLE, MIGHT SLIP UNNOTICED. I AM ESPECIALLY WELL SUITED, IF YOU MUST KNOW, TO OCCUPY EXACTLY SUCH A SOFT, WARM HIDING PLACE AS IT WERE, FOR MY NATURE IS DELICATE, AND MY ENTIRE BEING IS THAT OF A QUIET, MANNERLY, AND ABSENT-MINDED CHILD, EAGER TO ENJOY THE HAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS THAT OTHERS THINK IT DEMANDS LITTLE, WANTING ONLY TO BE PERMITTED TO TAKE TEMPORARY POSSESSION OF SOME INSIGNIFICANT CORNER OF THE WORLD WHERE, IN ITS SMALL WAY, IT MAY PROVE ITSELF USEFUL AND COME TO FEEL SOME VAGUE SENSE OF SATISFACTION. A SWEET, QUIET, TINY PLACE IN THE SHADE HAS BEEN MY LIFE’S CONSISTENT AND NOBLE DREAM FROM EARLY YOUTH, AND IF THE ILLUSIONS WHICH I NOW ENTERTAIN WITH REGARD TO YOUR WEALTHY FIRM ARE NOW GROWN SO STRONG THAT I MIGHT HOPE FOR THE DELIGHTFUL LIVING FULFILLMENT OF MY OLD YET ETERNALLY RENEWED DREAM, YOU WILL FIND IN ME THE MOST DEVOTED SERVANT POSSIBLE, WHOSE CONSCIENCE WILL NOT REST UNTIL EACH OF THE TRIVIAL OBLIGATIONS YOU LAY UPON HIM IS COMPLETED PRECISELY AND PUNCTUALLY. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT I CANNOT TAKE ON SIGNIFICANT OR DIFFICULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND DUTIES OF A WIDE-RANGING NATURE WOULD TAX MY BRAIN UNDULY. I AM NOT ESPECIALLY INTELLIGENT—BUT MORE IMPORTANT, I PREFER NOT TO CALL ON MY INTELLIGENCE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. I AM, AS IT WERE, MORE A DREAMER THAN A THINKER, MORE A ZERO THAN AN ACHIEVER, MORE STUPID THAN CLEVER. BUT SURELY IN THE MANY BRANCHES OF YOUR IMMENSE INSTITUTION, IN WHICH I IMAGINE VAST COMPLEXES OF UNOCCUPIED DESKS, THERE EXISTS SOME SORT OF WORK THAT CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED WHILE DAYDREAMING. I AM, TO SAY IT OPENLY, A CHINESE, A PERSON WHO PREFERS THINGS TO WEAR A SMALL, MODEST, UNFRIGHTENING ASPECT OF LOVELY SWEETNESS, AND TO WHOM ALL THINGS LARGE OR OVERLY DEMANDING APPEAR HORRIBLE AND TERRIFYING. I KNOW ONLY ONE NEED—TO FEEL SECURE ENOUGH SO THAT I MAY SAFELY THANK GOD EACH DAY FOR THIS DEAR, BLESSED EXISTENCE. I HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED THE DESIRE TO SHINE PUBLICLY. THE DESERTS OF AFRICA COULD NOT BE MORE FOREIGN TO ME. MY HANDWRITING, AS YOU CAN SEE, IS QUITE FLUID AND DELICATE, AND YOU DON’T NEED TO IMAGINE ME AS BEING COMPLETELY WITHOUT INTELLECT. MY MIND IS QUITE CLEAR; IT MERELY HESITATES TO TAKE HOLD OF TOO MANY THINGS AT ONCE—ABHORS IT, IN FACT. I AM HONEST, BUT I RECOGNIZE JUST HOW LITTLE THAT MEANS IN THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN, AND HEREWITH, ESTEEMED SIRS, I WILL CLOSE, IN ORDER TO AWAIT YOUR RESPONSE, FAITHFULLY DROWNING IN DEVOTION AND REVERENCE,

  —WENZEL

  The path circled around the monument and led downhill. He followed it down a few stone steps to a sort of pit where a spring was indicated by a pipe sticking out of a crumbling brick culvert, and took a drink. At eye level he saw something like a hand sticking out of the leaf mold and debris. There was a bronze statue of a man, Robert Walser he supposed, lying facedown at full length with its left hand stretched toward the spring. The model was young, with a high forehead and full lips, and was depicted fully clothed, in a crudely patched tweed suit with army boots and a Tyrolean hat. The eyes were cut deep to look intelligent and expressive, while the smile seemed deliberately weak and silly. The face was creased with premature wrinkles as from suffering and worry and bad food. There was no signature and the statue did not appear to have been touched in a long time. A tree root had grown around a trailing shoelace, and the statue was tilted awkwardly as though it might eventually fall into the spring. Yigal gave it a good hard push to make sure it was still bolted down, and walked into Herisau to get some lunch.

  The memorial to Walser actually had nothing to do with the Women’s Society, etc., but was placed there by his daughter, who lives now on Panorama Street in Haifa—in fact, she is Shats’ neighbor, and sometimes sees him on Saturdays at the Arab kiosk when he goes out for milk. She walks very slowly, with a cane, and he always says hello when walking up behind her, so as not to startle her. Her mother, a married Pomeranian Jew, met Robert Walser in Berlin in 1912. They were together several times in his apartment at No. 1 Spandauer Berg, Charlottenburg. By the time this book is published, she will have died, never having told anyone the secret, which she discovered while reading her mother’s diary in 1960, four years after both her mother and Robert Walser were dead.

  Robert Walser is my absolutely, totally and completely favorite writer, whose works I despair of translating, though I’m pretty pleased with my rendition of “The Cover Letter,” loose as it is. I’ve stopped recommending him to people who don’t read German. Even the snobbiest Knopf edition, with the introduction by Susan Sontag, has painful errors in first lines, and somehow everyone got the idea that he was a dark and pained expressionist, probably by seeing the misleading movie (Institute Benjamenta) of his uncharacteristic first novel (Jakob von Gunten), so that they turn his pleasing and delightful coinages into portmanteaus that remind me mostly of A Spaniard in the Works. Like Shats, he worked as a clerk and had beautiful handwriting.

  The public library in Herisau had two first editions by Walser, Jakob von Gunten and Die Rose, lying with a photograph in a glass case. They had been placed there in 1978 and never disturbed since. The photograph showed a dog belonging to the owner of Herisau’s pub. The dog’s name was Brahms. He died in 1985.

  “Where’s the nearest casino?” Yigal asked the librarian. She advised him to go to Bern. He took a flyer for a weaving course off the windowsill, read several words, and dropped it in the umbrella stand as he left the library.

  As a young man, Yigal had often remembered Kafka’s assessment of the four main components of the resting mind, “Hatred, Rage, Shame, and Torture,” with a sense of their perfect appropriateness. But as Yigal had aged, he had lost the capacity for hatred. Even when he killed a man, he felt only a sort of mild disgust. His rages had become stereotyped, one so much like another, and all so like his father’s, that one day they had just stopped, choked off by the friction of tedium. He had lost all sense of shame, sometimes not looking in the mirror for days at a time, and, far from tort
uring himself, he was likely to eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream at a sitting. His habit of visiting casinos stemmed from a mature preference he called, by way of contrast, “Whores, Gambling, and Cocaine.” Generally it meant having a few drinks and watching people he didn’t know, but sounded better. A brief demonstration follows:

  Q. DID YOU EVER HAVE A MODEL RAILROAD?

  A. NO, I WAS INTO WHORES, GAMBLING, AND COCAINE.

  Q. —

  I was going to write a few more questions, but suddenly it occurred to me why exactly I demand that Yigal stand around in casinos watching people: It’s because that’s what Daniel Deronda did—that’s how he met Gwendolen Harleth! He met her at a roulette table. She was drinking, and losing heavily, flushed with emotion, playing away her family’s last dime, pawning her jewels to play again—Daniel saved her. I love Daniel. I personally have seen a Swiss casino only once, from the side of the road. I’ve never met anyone who read Daniel Deronda, but the novel accounts for the regular appearance of “George Eliot Street” in the older Israeli towns.

  With the introduction of Daniel Deronda I realize I have strayed further than ever from my task of re-creating, from limited and unreliable memories, Avner Shats’ novel Sailing Toward the Sunset. Even worse, the mention of the rival hero Daniel draws attention away from the real focus of my work, namely, the subject author, for whom these chapters are written and e-mailed each morning.

  The novel in letters has a long history in English literature. Scholarly consensus holds the first English novel to have been Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Samuel Richardson, 1740). The heroine spends five hundred pages locked in a room, waiting to be raped. The hero even climbs into bed with her dressed as the housekeeper, having gained entrance by promising her some food, but she fights him off again and again, and ultimately wins the big prize: his hand in marriage. Pamela proved that light reading can be rendered suitable for young ladies, sparking a literary explosion that has lasted to this day. Richardson never intended to write a novel. He wanted to publish a manual of letter writing, but got carried away.

  As Kafka said, “A letter is like a sheep, pretty soon here come the rest of the sheep” (I’m paraphrasing slightly), or later, “For we are like sheep lost at night in the mountains, or more precisely, I am like the sheep who is following the other sheep who are lost at night in the mountains.”

  This chapter is like the second sheep in line behind the sheep who is following the sheep lost at night in the mountains.

  In my possession is an advertisement of a service, active on the Upper West Side of New York City during the 1980s, which promised to send the subscriber all Kafka’s letters to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in order, and at the rate at which they were originally sent (two or three per day for several years), for under $1,000, including an attractive storage binder. I swear this is true.

  Kafka burned many unfinished manuscripts before his death, but he could not stop his intimate confessions from entering the public domain and becoming, by virtue of their authenticity, his most popular works. When we read a work written for publication, we allow a stranger to direct our behavior and narrow our focus. When we read that same stranger’s diaries and letters, our reality is widened and enriched.

  It is this voyeuristic urge present in all of us, along with the vogue for books recalling survey courses in comparative literature, which I hope to exploit by promoting, as though it were a novel, this series of elaborately coded personal letters to Avner Shats, written daily for several weeks in the month of December, 1998.

  Yigal strolled into the casino at Bern and dropped SF 5,— into the slot machine nearest the door. Immediately it returned SF 15,—. He reinvested SF 5,—, cleared SF 25,—, and bought a whiskey sour from a woman dressed as a milkmaid. They talked. She persuaded him to buy four keno tickets, and at 7:15 he pretended he had won. A blinding light shone in his eyes as the imaginary emcee handed him the envelope stuffed with cash, and he heard scattered applause. In the darkness behind the spotlight he could see someone trying to get his attention by waving a handkerchief.

  He felt too drunk to drink anymore, and walked out to the street. A taxi pulled up, then pulled away. He sat on the curb, took off his undershirt, and threw it into the gutter. Then he remembered his plan to go to Biel.

  Mary, to do her credit, didn’t go straight to Yigal’s apartment from the airport. First she walked out into the blazing sun of the runway and shook her head from side to side, hard, as though she had just emerged from the North Sea and her ears tickled. She passed through customs smiling and wriggling with joy after the confinement of the flight. Then she stood under the bus shelter, soaking up the brilliant light with her black, curious eyes. The poured concrete of the parking garage soared overhead like an iceberg, yet everything was wonderfully warm. She squatted down and traced a fingertip along the pavement. Through the calluses she could feel a ferocious heat, and she laid her palm flat. The sidewalk was like the top of a coal stove, but pale gray as the arctic in winter. She pursed her mouth and gave a mysterious approving look, then sprang into the bus. It was one o’clock sharp, time for news, and the driver turned up the radio really, really loud until a deep, soothing voice filled the cabin of the bus with chiming, incomprehensible sounds. Outside she could see a hot, hard, dry landscape drowning in brightness, the dry brush casting shadows so dark every field looked like a checkerboard. The bus turned toward a residential neighborhood of short white buildings selling ice cream under blue umbrellas, like an aquarium. Mary began to hum a happy song.

  When she got to the beach, she had a little swim. She had booked a room at a small place on HaYarqon near the American embassy, but didn’t think she was going to need it, and she didn’t, since whoever cleaned up after the impact had left Yigal’s door unlocked. I first saw her from above, through the hole in the floor, as she was shuffling through his personal papers. They were in Hebrew. She looked frustrated. She had already been working for an hour by the time I thought to ask her what she was doing. I had assumed she was from some competing intelligence agency, perhaps the one that had sent the missile in the first place. She made us coffee in Yigal’s kitchen and told me the whole story.

  “So Yigal knew you were a silkie the whole time?” I asked. “I don’t like that part, it reminds me of this thing my friend Pat Sweeney talks about, where if you look closely at a lot of novels they just add up to fantasies about fucking these easy, available women whose feelings never get hurt, especially science fiction novels—there’s so much science fiction about the ethical issues that arise in a man’s mind when he finds the first really convenient sex of his life is with a robot or an alien or something. Pat calls them sheep-farm books—Mary?” She was crying.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Like in Runts of 61 Cygni C, where these astronauts land and they start fucking all the time with these little one-eyed midgets, and they start growing big yellow penises. Then they go back to Earth and of course it’s destroyed, just like in Planet of the Apes, and they’re stuck with these little tiny brain-dead—but, I mean, Yigal left me. . . .” She began to cry again. I saw what she meant. Instead of hanging around to take advantage of the willing alien life-form, Yigal had run off, which might mean, at least in part, what Mary thought it meant: that he was a decent guy. On the other hand, he was supposedly in Tel Aviv, yet not at his own apartment.

  With my help, Mary at last found what she was looking for: a list of names and phone numbers.

  Now, when you’re trying to figure out what sex Americans are, it helps to know their names. Say you’re faced with two identical fat boys in flannel shirts, one named Dixie and the other named Doily—I’ll give you 7 to 5 that Dixie’s the girl. In Israel, names are more help when you’re trying to guess someone’s age. All Rachels are over sixty-five, for example, but Tals, Gals, Yams, Sharons, Shachars, and even Zohars can be either sex. Fortunately I had noticed that the current crop of what in Hebrew are called “pieces” are all named either Naomi or somet
hing that ends with a t, and as I expected, Yigal’s list had four Naomis, two Osnats, a Nurit, two Dorits, and an Orit, plus an Ilanit and an Ephrat whose names had been crossed out. I wouldn’t have known where to start if Yigal hadn’t highlighted “Nofar,” a name I’d never heard before, in yellow and circled it twice in red.

  “The highlighted one is Nofar, which sounds to me like a girl’s name,” I said, dialing the number.

  “Yigal?” Nofar said. “Is he a variety of”—I’m translating from Tel Aviv slang—“as-if Yoram like that, black hair as-if curls like those?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  Mary called an Osnat.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Mary, assistant to Mr. Francis Ford Coppola. Your name was suggested to us by Yigal Paz. We need actors for some scenes in a café—women aged twenty to thirty, fit and attractive, vivacious, good walkers—to serve drinks. There may be a speaking part. Are you slim? How’s your walk?”

  “I’m tall and slender, with chestnut hair in long, luxuriant waves, a full, generous mouth, ample breasts, a tiny waist, pert belly, disorienting hips, luscious knees and ankles, and a PhD in Oriental studies, which while you might think it means I can speak Hindi or Japanese, actually involved a lot of time in England. But I can put on an American accent, if that’s what Mr. Coppola wants.”