The Red Thread

by Unknown

  The whole, then, has to be considered a work in progress, changing as it goes. My own larger sense of literature, as must have become clear by now, does tend to locate the work of the imagination in relation to history, which it both responds to and seeks to reshape. A book endures as long as it has a recognizable authority, originality, individuality, and truth to experience, one that attests to the circumstances, personal, historical, literary historical, out of which it arises, while also rising above them enough to suggest something else, beyond or within. Transcend is the old word for that, and I don’t think we should be embarrassed to use it, presuming it means being left ­hanging as much as reaching some higher plane. Transcending its own origins, the good book also affords readers a measure of transcendence over their own particular circumstances, momentarily freeing them from them, allowing them to feel and reflect on things good, bad, ugly, and beautiful that they might otherwise have never known (and in certain cases can only hope they will never know). It is to that extent just as much an experience of critical awareness as it is of imaginative enlargement. The good book is alive, independently of the interests of the person, place, or time that gave rise to it, and we take life from it, and it lives through us. Reading, like writing, is an exercise in not knowing—what will happen next, to begin with—and, you might say, of unknowing. Art that is something more than distraction or propaganda engages us in such a way that we suspend not only disbelief but our preconceptions and pay full attention. And in the end, and most especially, I’d say, if the end is happy, we are still left in a state of suspense.

  •

  Twenty years now flash by in which, I don’t need to say, there have been many changes, among them something of an improvement in the fortunes of independent bookstores and the readership for foreign literature, and in which the complacency of 1999 that I mentioned has been succeeded by a state of comprehensive alarm—not necessarily an improvement—to bring you the little book you have in hand. The red thread: In China this is said to be a metaphor for a binding tie that exists between people unknown to each other, and I suppose we can say that that is one thing literature may be. In Greek mythology, it was thanks to the ball of red thread given him by a besotted Ariadne that Theseus, having tracked down and killed the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, was able to find his way back out—and abandon the girl. Literature is also a kind of labyrinth in which heroes and monsters and plain people do battle; sometimes they fall in love. Who is what is not always clear, and perhaps it is no less unclear what is lost or found there, much less who has lost or won.

  But enough. The little book in your hand is an anthology that I have put together to reflect something of the consistency and variety of the NYRB Classics series as a whole. A sampler. It isn’t a greatest hits, by any means, though it does contain a fair amount of work by writers who have several books in the series. Putting it together, I found it taking, as by a will of its own, the form of an itinerary or road book, and that is one way of looking at the series, I suppose. The order here is perhaps best described as intuitive, if not whimsical, based on links between the pieces, ways they speak back and forth and agree and disagree with each other, that pleased me as I shuffled them together, but I don’t know that there is a real red thread to The Red Thread (the poor astronaut on the cover appears to have gotten lost indeed while looking for it). Each piece is also in any case capable of standing on its own—at least I hope so—and now I am reminded of Mavis Gallant’s strangely moving remark in the afterword to her collected stories (included in Paris Stories): “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” There are a lot of animals, I don’t know why. James Crossley, of Madison Books, in Seattle, suggested the section of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani that’s included, and I am grateful to him for that. There is one novelty: Elizabeth Hardwick’s portrait of Billie Holiday appears as it appeared when it first came out in The New York Review of Books and not as in her novel Sleepless Nights. I did start this book with one particular thought in mind, however, which was to begin with Platonov and to end (or, as you’ll see, almost) with Serge. Once I’d put everything in place, I discovered that the two pieces both conclude with the same word: astonishment. It surprised me. It wasn’t something I had planned, but it seems right.

  —EDWIN FRANK

  THE RED THREAD

  THE CAMEL

  Andrey Platonov

  FOUR BOATS were getting ready to sail from Chardzhou to Nukus with supplies for the cooperatives there. Chagataev did not try to make use of his official status, since this was something only faintly recognized; instead he got himself taken on as an untrained sailor. It was agreed that he would travel as far as the Khiva oasis, and would then go ashore.

  Long days of sailing began. In the mornings and evenings the river was transformed into a flood of gold, thanks to the sun’s oblique light penetrating the water through its living, drifting silt. This yellow earth traveling in the river already looked like the corn it would become, like flowers or cotton, or even like the body of a human being. Sometimes a small, strange, many-colored bird would be sitting on top of a rush, fidgeting from inner excitement, its feathers shining under the living sun as it sang something in a radiant, delicate voice, as if bliss had already dawned for all creatures. The bird reminded Chagataev of Ksenya, the small woman with different-colored eyes who was now thinking something or other about him.

  After fourteen days and nights Chagataev went ashore at the Khiva oasis, receiving his pay and the thanks of the captain.

  Chagataev stayed for a few days in Khiva and then set off down the road of childhood towards his birthplace, Sary-Kamysh. He remembered this road from landmarks that were no longer so impressive: the sand dunes seemed lower, the canal less deep, and the path to the nearest well had grown shorter. The sun shone the same as ever, but it was not as high as when Chagataev was small. The burial mounds and yurts, the donkeys and camels he met on the way, the trees along the irrigation channels, the flying insects—everything was unchanged, but indifferent to Chagataev now, as if it had gone blind without him. Feeling hurt, he walked as if through a foreign world, staring at everything around him and recognizing things he had forgotten, though still going unrecognized himself. It seemed as though every little creature, object or plant was prouder, more independent of former attachment, than a human being.

  As he came to the dried-up bed of the Kunya-Darya, Nazar Chagataev saw a camel sitting like a human being, propped up on his front legs in a drift of sand. He was thin, his humps had sagged, and he was looking shyly out of black eyes, like a sad and intelligent human being. Chagataev walked up to the camel, but the camel paid no attention to this man coming up to him. He was watching the motion of some dead stems of grass being blown about by a current of wind: would they come close or would they pass by out of reach? One blade moved along the sand right up to his mouth; then the camel chewed the grass with his lips and swallowed it. In the distance a ball of tumbleweed was drifting along the ground; the camel watched this large, living plant with eyes made kind by hope, but the tumbleweed passed by to one side. The camel then closed his eyes, because he did not know how he was meant to cry. Chagataev inspected the camel. The animal had grown thin long ago, from illness and hungry need, and almost all his hair had fallen out, leaving only a few clumps, and so he was shivering from an unaccustomed chill. He had probably been part of some passing caravan, abandoned here because weakness of strength made him unable to carry his load—or else his master had died and, until he had expended his own reserve of life, the animal was going to wait for him. After losing the capacity for movement, the camel had used what remained of his strength to raise himself up on his front legs, so he could see blades of grass being driven towards him by the wind and consume them. When there was no wind, he closed his eyes, not wanting to expend vision to no purpose, and was in a doze.
He didn’t want to sink back and lie down, because then he would never be able to get up again, and so he remained sitting all the time—now vigilant, now half-asleep—waiting for death to bring him down or for some insignificant desert beast to finish him off with a single blow of a small paw.

  For a long time Chagataev sat beside the camel, watching him and understanding. Then he fetched several armfuls of tumbleweed from some way away and gave them to the camel to eat. He couldn’t give the camel water because he only had two flasks for himself, though he knew that farther along the bed of the Kunya-Darya there were shallow wells and ponds with fresh water. But it would be difficult to carry a camel across the sands on his shoulders.

  Evening set in. Chagataev went on feeding the camel, fetching grass for him from round about, until the camel put his head down on the ground and fell into the meek sleep of new life. Because of night, it began to turn cold. After eating some nan breads from his bag, Chagataev pressed himself against the camel’s body for warmth and dozed off. He was smiling. Everything in the existing world seemed strange to him; it was as if the world had been created for some brief, mocking game. But this game of make-believe had dragged on for a long time, for eternity, and nobody felt like laughing any more. The desert’s deserted emptiness, the camel, even the pitiful wandering grass—all this ought to be serious, grand and triumphant. Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable—why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something? Chagataev curled up against the camel’s stomach and fell asleep, full of astonishment at strange reality.

  Excerpted from “Soul”; translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, with Jane Chamberlain and Eric Naiman

  THE LONG CROSSING

  Leonardo Sciascia

  THE NIGHT seemed made to order, the darkness so thick that its weight could almost be felt when one moved. And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.

  They were huddled with their cardboard suitcases and their bundles on a stretch of pebbly beach sheltered by hills, between Gela and Licata. They had arrived at dusk, having set out at dawn from their own villages, inland villages far from the sea, clustered on barren stretches of feudal land. For some of them this was their first sight of the sea, and the thought of having to cross the whole of that vast expanse, leaving one deserted beach in Sicily by night and landing on another deserted beach, in America and again by night, filled them with misgivings. But these were the terms to which they had agreed. The man, some sort of traveling salesman to judge from his speech, but with an honest face that made you trust him, had said: “I will take you aboard at night and I will put you off at night, on a beach in New Jersey only a stone’s throw from New York. Those of you who have relatives in America can write to them and suggest that they meet you at the station in Trenton twelve days after your departure . . . Work it out for yourselves . . . Of course, I can’t guarantee a precise date . . . We may be held up by rough seas or coastguard patrols . . . One day more or less won’t make any difference: the important thing is to get to America.”

  To get to America was certainly the important thing; how and when were minor details. If the letters they sent to their relatives arrived, despite the ink-blotched, misspelled addresses scrawled so laboriously on the envelopes, then they would arrive, too. The old saying, “With a tongue in your head you can travel the world,” was right. And travel they would, over that great dark ocean to the land of the stori (stores) and the farme (farms), to the loving brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, to the opulent, warm, spacious houses, to the motor cars as big as houses, to America.

  It was costing them two hundred and fifty thousand lira each, half on departure and the balance on arrival. They kept the money strapped to their bodies under their shirts like a priest’s scapular. They had sold all their saleable possessions in order to scrape the sum together: the squat house, the mule, the ass, the year’s store of provender, the chest of drawers, the counterpanes. The cunning ones among them had borrowed from the money-lenders with the secret intention of defrauding them, just this once, in return for the hardship they had been made to endure over the years by the usurers’ greed, and drew immense satisfaction from imagining the expression on their faces when they heard the news. “Come and see me in America, bloodsucker: I just may return your money—without interest—if you manage to find me.” Their dreams of America were awash with dollars. They would no longer keep their money in battered wallets or hidden under their shirts; it would be casually stuffed into trouser pockets to be drawn out in fistfuls as they had seen their relatives do; relatives who had left home as pitiable, half-starved creatures, shriveled by the sun, to return after twenty or thirty years—for a brief holiday—with round, rosy faces that contrasted handsomely with their white hair.

  Eleven o’clock came. Someone switched on an electric torch, the signal to those aboard the steamship to come and collect them. When the torch was switched off again, the darkness seemed thicker and more frightening than ever. But only a few minutes later, the obsessively regular breathing of the sea was overlaid with a more human, more domestic sound, almost like buckets being rhythmically filled and emptied. Next came a low murmur of voices, then, before they realized that the boat had touched the shore, the man they knew as Signor Melfa, the organizer of their journey, was standing in front of them.

  “Are we all here?” asked Signor Melfa. He counted them by the light of a torch. There were two missing. “They may have changed their minds, or they may be arriving late . . . Either way, it’s their tough luck. Should we risk our necks by waiting for them?”

  They were all agreed that this was unnecessary.

  “If anyone’s not got his money ready,” warned Signor Melfa, “he’d better skip out now and go back home. He’d be making a big mistake if he thought he could spring that one on me when we’re aboard; God’s truth, I’d put the whole lot of you ashore again. And, as it’s hardly fair that everyone should suffer for the sake of one man, the guilty party would get what’s coming to him from me and from all of us; he’d be taught a lesson that he’d remember for the rest of his life—if he’s that lucky.”

  They all assured him, with the most solemn oaths, that they had their money ready, down to the last lira.

  “All aboard,” said Signor Melfa. Immediately each individual became a shapeless mass, a heaving cluster of baggage.

  “Jesus Christ! Have you brought the whole house with you?” A torrent of oaths poured out, only ceasing when the entire load, men and baggage, was piled on board—a task accomplished not without considerable risk to life and property. And for Melfa the only difference between the man and the bundle lay in the fact that the man carried on his person the two hundred and fifty thousand lira, sewn into his jacket or strapped to his chest. He knew these men well, did Signor Melfa, these insignificant peasants with their rustic mentality.

  •

  The voyage took less time than they expected, lasting eleven nights including that of the departure. They counted the nights rather than the days because it was at night that they suffered so appallingly in the overcrowded, suffocating quarters. The stench of fish, diesel oil and vomit enveloped them as if they had been immersed in a tub of hot, liquid black tar. At dawn they streamed up on deck, exhausted, hungry for light and air. But if their image of the sea had been a vast expanse of green corn rippling in the wind, the reality terrified them: their stomachs heaved and their eyes watered and smarted if they so much as tried to look at it.

  But on the eleventh night they were summoned on deck by Signor Melfa. At first they had the impression that dense constellations had descended like flocks onto the sea; then it dawned upon them that these were in fact towns, the towns of America, the land of plenty, shining like jewels in the night. And the night itself was of an enchanting b
eauty, clear and sweet, with a crescent moon slipping through transparent wisps of cloud and a breeze that was elixir to the lungs.

  “That is America,” said Signor Melfa.

  “Are you sure it isn’t some other place?” asked a man who, throughout the voyage, had been musing over the fact that there were neither roads nor even tracks across the sea, and that it was left to the Almighty to steer a ship without error between sky and water to its destination.

  Signor Melfa gave the man a pitying look before turning to the others. “Have you ever,” he asked, “seen a skyline like this in your part of the world? Can’t you feel that the air is different? Can’t you see the brilliance of these cities?”

  They all agreed with him and shot looks full of pity and scorn at their companion for having ventured such a stupid question.

  “Time to settle up,” said Signor Melfa.

  Fumbling beneath their shirts, they pulled out the money.

  “Get your things together,” ordered Signor Melfa when he had put the money away.

  This took only a few minutes. The provisions that, by agreement, they had brought with them, were all eaten and all that they now had left were a few items of clothing and the presents intended for their relatives in America: a few rounds of goat-cheese, a few bottles of well-aged wine, some embroidered table-centers and antimacassars. They climbed down merrily into the boat, laughing and humming snatches of song. One man even began to sing at the top of his voice as soon as the boat began to move off.

  “Don’t you ever understand a word I say?” asked Melfa angrily. “Do you want to see me arrested? . . . As soon as I’ve left you on the shore you can run up to the first copper you see and ask to be repatriated on the spot; I don’t give a damn: everyone’s free to bump himself off any way he likes . . . But I’ve kept my side of the bargain; I said I’d dump you in America, and there it is in front of you . . . But give me time to get back on board, for Crissake!”