For the time being, Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen is free to solicit items for publication. I believe her husband procures from among his fellow scientists part of what she requires. And every day, from some distant state of America, a student of prairies or a writer she has never met sends a bulky parcel of typescript pages and surprising photographs, hoping to win her favour.
Days and nights have passed since I began to write on these pages. You need not ask, reader, what might have happened in this house or on my estates or anywhere in Szolnok County while I have been at my writing. I have a wife who also lives in this house, along with my youngest daughter. I have servants and animals and farmhands and fields and pastures. But these have always seemed not quite real to me.
I have spent much of my life watching white or grey clouds drifting over my flat lands while I dreamed of being known in some place of more consequence than Szolnok County. Another sort of man – my father who died young or my grandfather who founded this library – might have dreamed of a book with his name on its spine or on some of its pages. But the sight of these books around me only adds to my heaviness. Who could want his name or his story buried in a book? Seasons and whole years pass while this room of books remains deserted – except for myself, and a young female servant who comes quietly each week and scatters the dust on the locked glass doors in front of the shelves.
No one unlocks the glass doors in front of my books, but sometimes I stand in front of the glass and I wonder what lies behind all the dull-coloured spines and covers. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, I see in one of the glass doors an image of the windows behind me. I see an image of clouds drifting across the sky, and I think of the white or grey pages of books drifting across the space behind covers and spines. Clouds drift through the sky, and the pages of books drift through the libraries of manor-houses. Clouds and pages drift across the Great Alfold and away towards the skies and the libraries of other countries. And other clouds and other pages drift over the plains of the world towards the skies and the libraries of Szolnok County.
But these pages lie safely on my table. These are not the drifting pages of books. My pages will never drift across the skies in the libraries of this country or any other country. I am not writing on clouds. I am not writing on pages of books. I am writing to my editor. I am writing to a living woman.
I have been searching among the pages on this table for the letters from Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen to me. I would like to read again today the letter from my editor begging me to send her some of these pages.
Write to me, my editor wrote to me. Send me your paragraphs, your pages, your stories of the Great Alfold. Write what may well decide my future in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute.
On many days, before I began this writing, I kept to my library and watched the clouds passing and thought of my editor’s latest letter to me. I wanted to prolong the pleasure of having a young woman in America so anxious to read my pages.
I supposed the contest for the position of editor of Hinterland had grown more fierce. Some powerful man within the Institute of Prairie Studies had stepped up to the desk of Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen and had stood between my editor and the window. The man had warned Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen that people looking into Hinterland in time to come would be looking for pages sent by men from prairies and plains to the young women who were their editors and translators.
Then, so I supposed, the powerful man from the Institute of Prairie Studies had walked to the window and had stared out across the gentle valleys where boneset and little bluestem grow. If any man within the Institute of Prairie Studies could ever have dreamed of a man such as myself here in Szolnok County on the Great Alfold, then the man staring out through the windows that Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen stared through so often would have dreamed of me at that moment.
But I can only suppose the man at the window would have said to Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen that he was thinking just then of the pages of Hinterland. He was thinking of himself looking at the pages of Hinterland and thinking of grasslands far away from America and on those grasslands manor-houses and in each of those manor-houses a man sitting alone at a table in a library with a window-sash that bumps sometimes faintly in the wind.
Afterwards the man who had warned Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen stepped into the rooms of one after another of her rivals and warned them in the same way. Then the man I have only dreamed of went back to his own room high up in the Institute of Prairie Studies and walked to his window and stared at the same prairie that Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen stared at so often, except that he could see from his high window a little more of grassland than she could see and perhaps a line of trees in the distance.
Now all three of us keep to our rooms. The man in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute stares out from his window and waits for Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen to come to him with a stack of pages in her arms. Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen herself stares out at the place that she calls her dream-prairie. She thinks of a red roof among green treetops; of the white gleam of sunlight on a lake; of pathways winding under arches of roses and past beds of canna and agapanthus. And she waits for my pages to come to her.
I myself do just as I have already written. I sit at this table and sometimes I write a little, or I dream of myself writing.
I have been writing about myself dreaming about the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute of Prairie Studies when I should have been writing about my editor begging me to write to her.
On many days before I began writing on these pages, I thought I would make my editor pay a price for my pages. I would compel her to answer questions that I had wanted for many years to ask. I would ask her about the year when she turned from a child into a young woman. I would ask her about the young man who first unfastened her clothing in the district where the Sio and the Sarviz flow side by side. I would ask her what she remembered of that young man when the breeze at night drifted in from her dream-prairie.
When Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen signs a letter, her name reaches far out towards the centre of the page. If I look at her name for long enough, all her ens and esses turn into grass-stems and all the grass-stems lean as though a wind is blowing over them. If I stare at a page from Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen I can see words turning into grass – long, silken Magyar grass that would touch my thighs if I walked among it; short and brittle American grass that I could trample; and down below the tangle of stems, boneset or chokeberry or tiny reds and blues with no names in her language or mine.
Today when I remember the writing of the person who begged me to write, I see the penstrokes of someone who dreams hardly ever of grasslands.
I think of Gunnar T. Gunnarsen, scientist of prairies. I think of the stern Swede with his cold skin clamped every night against my warm and nervous editor. He believes his wife has kept hidden for all these years some secret of Transdanubia where she was born. He has counted the grass-stems and the flowering bushes on the dream-prairie of Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen, but he suspects that his wife once strolled with me between the Sio and the Sarviz and he wants to know what secrets Anne Kristaly shares with me that she will not share with her Swede husband.
And now the scientist of prairies has signed his wife’s name beneath a letter asking me to send her some pages from the Great Alfold. He pretends to be my editor and translator so that I will write to him about a stream trickling among stones, dragonflies poised above the reeds, storm-clouds gathering behind the poplar trees, a young woman beside me in the grass...But if I write about such things, no more letters will come to me from America. Gunnar T. Gunnarsen will sign my name on a letter to Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen. The letter will tell my editor that I have died and been buried in the district where I was born; that I lie under the grass on the Great Alfold and under the drifting clouds.
Now, having written this, I see that the husband of Anne Kristaly has always wanted me dead. I see him crouched among the wolfberry on the dream-prairie of Anne Kristaly and hating me because I see him and he cannot see me.
My editor wi
ll read the letter calmly, but afterwards she will sit at her desk all afternoon writing a notice to appear in the rear pages of Hinterland, among reviews of books about childhoods spent hundreds of miles from sea-coasts, advertisements for holidays to be spent in houses with hundreds of windows overlooking level countryside, requests for companions male or female for expeditions to far corners of America, requests for pen-friends female only from remote districts plains preferred or gentle hills definitely no mountains or sea-coasts...
I have spent a whole afternoon writing the notice that Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen will display at the rear of her publication.
I have tried to insert something of myself into the passage below.
OBITUARY NOTICE
There died quietly some little time ago, at his family seat in Szolnok County on the Great Alfold, a gentleman who preserved during a lifetime spent almost wholly in the seclusion of his ancestral library, or in solitary walks though the extensive park and grounds laid out by his grandfather, a secret so burdensome that no writer of fiction would dare implant it in the heart of any one of his characters for fear of ridicule.
The gentleman had a particular enthusiasm for the literature and the flora of other nations. His servants speak admiringly of his standing for long periods before the shelves of his library or among the massed displays of his exotic blooms. His love of books one can readily understand as the mental voyaging of a man confined for private reasons behind the walls of his manorial park. As for his botanising, the gentleman was often heard to aver that he loved his plants for what he chose to call their constancy.
Skies, landscapes, even the familiar gables and turrets that we glimpse at the end of each journey homewards, and not least the features and the gestures of our dear ones – all these so change or are changed in time that none of us can say what is the true appearance of the person or the thing that he loves. Yet unfailingly each year, on some humble bush or clump which first we peered at as timid or lonely children, the petals unfold of the exact hue and shape, of the very same number, and at the precise points around the flower-rim as of old, and we recognise that something at least of all we have loved has kept faith with us.
These sentiments from a famous foreign writer, whose works in translation must surely have graced the shelves of the gentleman’s library, might well have been written by the gentleman himself in order to explain his retiring often to the depths of his garden. Why he strove thus to erect before his eyes an image of his earlier life we may hesitate to ask. But something of his state of mind on many an afternoon among his quiet avenues we may surmise from the report of a witness. This was a young woman, a farm-servant and a member of a family which later found its way to America. Even at the time of the gentleman’s death, the woman could describe vividly a sight that had met her eyes many years earlier. In her own unadorned words:
In those days one of my habitual routes took me past a corner of the great park where the brick wall gave way for a considerable distance to upright spikes of metal. On the afternoon in question my eye was taken by an area of unusually vivid colour a little distance beyond the fence. I pressed my face against the upright metal. (It was unexpectedly warm, and I observed at the time that either the afternoon sun had much more strength than I had supposed or the long poles retained for a surprising length of time the heat of noonday.) Then, on looking towards the remarkable colour, I saw that it came from a dense cluster of the blooms whose name in my mother tongue is tiger-lily.
The flowers seemed at first so closely massed that I might have been observing one fabric formed from the stitching together of a hundred petals. And at first, the intense glow that had attracted me seemed to come from the flowers all having intercepted, for that little space of time, the level rays of the almost-sunken sun.
But I soon observed that although the patchwork of petals was a uniform lily-colour, still one small area contrasted oddly with its surroundings. The small area had none of the tiny brown spots and blotches that seem on tiger-lilies so like freckles on golden skin. The unfreckled patch seemed odd because it was the one part of the fabric that did not resemble skin. Yet it was itself skin: the face of a man clean-shaven and with hair receding from his forehead and eyes downcast.
Although my own family were farm-servants, I was not quite ignorant of the ways of the gentry. My mother in her youth had had some dealings with the family whose head now showed his head to me in a bed of lilies. I knew that the polite course for me was to betray no surprise or concern at having come upon the owner of our lands engaged in some private ritual in a natural setting. No doubt I glanced upwards at the fierce pointed ends of the fence-poles barring the way to my master’s domain, and shuddered at the image of impalement that came to me. Yet I sensed that my master was aware of my presence without being disposed just then to drive me away. I had not actually seen his eyes on me, but I was somehow convinced that he had been watching me – and not just on that afternoon but perhaps for days past, whenever I had come that way. I therefore fixed my gaze on a pale and somewhat furrowed pink that I took to be the lowered lid over one of my master’s eyeballs, and I waited to hear what he wanted from me.
I had not been gazing for long at my master when the sun fell suddenly below the western horizon, whereupon I noticed that although the gold and the freckle-brown were fading rapidly from the petals of the lilies, on the face at their centre a mild flush or glow persisted. I resolved there and then to occupy myself for as long as my master was still preparing himself to address me by speculating on the condition of his heart in whose face such a light...
I need not go on with this writing. Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen would be able to bring it to a fitting end. She would write that the man kept his face to the horizon until the last colour was gone from the sky and the long pole above the well in the middle distance had quite disappeared. She would write what the man might have said at last to the young woman and what the young woman might have answered. She would know how to fill with words the deep rectangle edged with black below the photograph of my family graveyard in some out-of-the-way page of Hinterland.
My editor has never seen a photograph of me. I have not wanted to remind her of the difference between her age and mine. But I am preparing to send her a picture of my family graveyard. I will send the picture not because of the tombstones and the names engraved on them but because I understand that my editor sometimes finds in graveyards a few stems of a grass or a small flowering plant that once flourished where farms and villages and cities now stand. In certain graveyards in America a patch of unmown grass between two tombstones may be the only place in all the county where the same plants grow, and in the same numbers, as grew in that place long before my editor and I were born.
Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen sometimes visits these graveyards. No heaviness presses on her while she walks between the stones. When she kneels with her face close to the soil, she sees what may well be virgin prairie. If she thinks of herself dying she is not afraid. Even if she dies, she thinks, some of the men who once wrote to her will go on writing.
I am thinking today of the pages of Hinterland in all the years when my editor will think of me as dead. I am prepared to have my editor think of me as dead, but I wonder what will become of all the pages I was going to send to her. Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen once wrote that she would lay my pages under the eyes of men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the Great Alfold, but who want to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring flowers with mournful-sounding Magyar names.
I am ready to go on writing although my editor believes I am dead. But if I send my pages in a parcel to America, the leader of a gang of scientists will seize my pages before they reach the desk of my editor.
The Swede scientist has always hated me. He strides out from among the folds of my editor’s dream-prairie and towards the staircase of grey marble, then up the staircase and between the columns of white marble and under the carved gold
letters, CALVIN O. DAHLBERG INSTITUTE OF PRAIRIE STUDIES, then in through the tall doors of black glass. He goes on striding over carpet geranium-red and between green blades of potted palms. He steps into the elevator-cage. The servant-girl, in livery green or brown with sky-blue trim, looks shyly up at the eyes of ice-blue. She presses a button brass or bronze and the cage is hauled by cables upwards. The scientist and the servant-girl stand far apart in the cage, but his body and her body sway and shudder in sympathy past floor after floor of geranium-red, and windows after windows with sights of wider and wider land.
My enemy takes long strides across the topmost of all the layers of geranium-red. The windows at his back show prairies true and false on the Great Plain of America, and in the farthest distance a building white with a golden dome in the city of Lincoln in the state of Nebraska. In the chandelier above him, the prisms and cylinders of glass are clustered like the skyscrapers on the island of Manhattan. My enemy strides towards a door with HINTERLAND stamped in gold leaf on a pane of frosted glass.
A boy-man in livery dark-grey with gold trim and a hat strangely flattened appears from around a corner and takes rapid goose-steps towards the same door that my enemy approaches. The boy-man holds his right hand near his right ear, with palm upward and fingers splayed. The splayed fingers support a silver salver. On the salver is a parcel of brown paper with many-coloured postagestamps in rows like military decorations.
The boy-man is first to the door by a margin of five paces. He reaches his left hand towards a button in a circular recess beside the door. Gunnar T. Gunnarsen arrives at the door. He grips the boy-man’s left wrist in his brown right hand and whispers an instruction.
The boy-man makes no move to obey the instruction. The tall Swede moves his brown left hand also to the left wrist of the boy-man and then grips the frail wrist and twists his own hands in opposite directions around the wrist. The Swede scientist gives the boy-man what American children call a Chinese burn.
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