A Handful of Sand

by Marinko Košcec

  In short, someone prompted him that it would be noble and wise to invest his capital and know-how in publishing. That was a God-given time for publishers, especially of school textbooks, because so much material needed to be redevised–history, language and our centuries-old spiritual heritage, and particularly for those publishers who fought their way up to the altar of New Knowledge and came together with important catechists. The Boss was very sociable and loquacious, with a broad smile and hands. Nor were books foreign to him: there were always one or two on his desk in case he had a free moment between his innumerable appointments and phone calls. He even tried his hand at poetry back in his student days (though he never once mentioned the name of the institution which earned him this attribute) and, persuaded by our chief editor (about whom I’ll gladly say something later), he dug up those works of romantic and patriotic inspiration and published them in a volume which formed the basis of our Poesis rediviva series, although it was not followed by any other titles. The book was beautifully illustrated by a well-known Croatian artist and given an inspired presentation by a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts at the launch held at The Croatian Centre. National TV news reported on the event, and the daily paper Večernji list dedicated a whole page to it with a brilliant review by a prominent critic, which today hangs framed on the wall of the Boss’s office together with the legendary presidential lip.

  But let us return to our first conversation, to the time when all I knew about him was that he was the manager of an ascendant publishing house famous above all for its textbooks, which had swept away the competitors, undoubtedly owing to their superior quality. All he knew about me was that I had a degree in German and Phonetics, had demonstrated talent in postgraduate study of literature, and had undoubtedly asked myself how I could turn that talent to gold. Theoretically, he could have left the interviewing to someone else, but it turned out that he didn’t even let others design Christmas cards or order paper clips, be it due to the confidence he had in his own aesthetic criteria or because he feared others could do deals to line their own pockets. After all, there was no one at the firm in charge of human resources or any kind of planning, and the only rung of the hierarchy between him and the ever more numerous staff was a persona he called the Chief Editor. But the fellow suffered from a strange communication disorder: he never looked at the person he was speaking with, took every rebuttal as an attack on his integrity, and then backed away and thought feverishly about what you could have meant. If you entered his office he would make a pained face, immediately start compulsively looking at his watch, reach for the mouse and read mails with one eye, reply purely with yes, yes, successfully turning you into a piece of furniture miraculously endowed with a mouth, which you opened for a moment longer like a fish out of water, and then withdrew, finally aware of your own nullity.

  Regardless of their different titles, everyone employed at the firm ended up doing everything, except for the Boss’s wife in the office with the plaque Technical Director, who didn’t do anything. Although she could have done that equally well at home, let’s not underestimate the need of the human being, that social animal, to be surrounded by other animals of the same species. The Boss’s daughter was also ‘employed’ at the firm, so to speak; she turned up periodically when she had nothing more entertaining to do, once as Finance Manager, another time as the editor of a children’s book; what she did best was jetting around to visit book fairs throughout Europe. Everyone else blundered around in others’ work, improved it according to their momentary inspiration or redid it; usually they were unable to complete their own and left it to be discovered weeks later by whoever took a fancy, or to be embraced by oblivion.

  A foreign publisher once sought the rights for a book we’d published and brilliantly marketed two years earlier. The cover image of a different book was shown in our web shop by mistake, and the assiduous buyer tried in vain to organise things over the phone; two months later the books turned up in our stockroom–a thousand copies, still packed. At one launch two catering firms turned up. At another, the author didn’t appear because no one had informed him of the change of date. A third was attended only by the author and the presenters because the promotional material had been sent by van to Rijeka instead of Osijek. We had many and varied series, but since the editor of medical dictionaries also loved literature, the occasional novel which touched on medical matters in some oblique way also slipped in among them. Most of our titles were translated from foreign languages which the editors, intriguingly, usually didn’t speak; most often the translations were checked by their wives, sisters, mothers or–even better–by a relative with a different surname, a family friend or neighbour. Some manuscripts were edited properly: twice in parallel, on two different printouts, in two adjacent offices. The colleagues might have told each other if they hadn’t had a complete falling-out long before due to some tactless comment. The graphic designers were keen to improve linguistic style and throw out sentences they found redundant. The artwork for the jacket was discussed from the accounting section to the stockroom and everyone’s opinion was equally relevant, all the more because no one in their right mind would engage the services of a professional designer, so arrogantly overpriced; finally, two or three delegations presented their separately perfected visions to the Boss, and he compiled the most successful elements and regularly arbitrated in favour of his own version because design was his secret passion–to the joy of all the city’s art critics and those who consider themselves such.

  The amorphous organism of the firm pulsed to the rhythm of the Boss’s capricious, boundless appetites, which saw that ever more picturesque landscapes of human wisdom were annexed, from gardening to chess, from statesmen’s biographies to entomology. Magazines were started up, printing companies, binderies and trade-fair stalls purchased, and new bookshops were opened up to take over the country foot by foot. New recruits were deployed, though not as a response to demands and occasional cries for help from the rank and file but rather when the Boss had inspiration for an injection of fresh blood–just as he felt from time to time that a particular staff member was no longer needed, for example because of their inappropriate clothing habits. The employees always struggled to keep up with the burgeoning volume of work; newcomers were strung out between several sections, and depending on the urgency of the tasks at hand they packed book orders, negotiated with agents, made coffee or wrote blurbs.

  But let us try and go back to the conversation which preceded all this knowledge about the firm. It wasn’t an easy interview because talk of allophones and enclitics wouldn’t help us much; the Boss had heard of catalysts but only in an automotive context; in short, it was best not to mention phonetics at all. Instead, he picked on German, which isn’t a particularly fertile topic, so he transformed it into a means: he asked me wann ich geboren bin, und wo, und was ich im Krieg getan habe, und was ich sonst so gemacht habe, und ob ich katholisch bin. He was satisfied with all my replies and cheerfully noted them in his memo book with a golden fountain pen. He didn’t stop grinning even when a pause ensued, which he filled by puffing on his cigar. At the same time he deep-scanned me with crafty eyes–he had remarkable extrasensory perception–and just one further question sufficed. What were my expectations in terms of salary? And when I told him I hadn’t thought about that, the big boss up on the wall said Gut, gut, nimm ihn. We sealed the mutual rapport with a handshake, but I almost spoiled the grand occasion by knocking the cigar out of his hand with a clumsy movement. He quickly picked it up and looked at it apprehensively for a moment, but he overcame his disgust–the cigar was expensive and he’d just started it. Neither did he toss me out, and I stayed at the firm for almost nine years.

  The decision to take me on, which I vindicated with absolute submissiveness and an impeccable performance in everything required of me, was most correct, like almost all his decisions. Such business instinct can’t be learnt at management school – you’re either born with it or you’re wastin
g your time. In the space of just a few years he built up one of the most respectable publishing houses in the country from almost nothing. What I call ‘almost nothing’ was a body which had grown on the humus of Yugoslav self-managed socialism; it printed the doctorates of labour-movement theoreticians, monographs of prizewinning artists, ballot papers and the like. One day the employees were informed of a change of ownership, and several days later they were out of a job. Only the manager stayed on; though soon he too ‘retired’. However, he made sure to drop in once a month for many years to come and invoice for obscure services which helped the firm to flourish. There were rumours that he was close to the Government Commission for Textbooks, but without any firm evidence.

  Textbooks were needed, of course: the Boss bought up the rights for those the Commission had rejected and then accepted after all. Money was also needed to print them: the Boss had some great contacts at a newly-founded bank, which vanished into thin air soon after opening generous credit lines. Above all, one needed hard-working staff: he creamed off the best from rival firms, masterfully arguing that it was better in his, if necessary emphasizing that it was worse elsewhere, and he could also go off on the tack of If you don’t want to, there’s a crowd of others who do. His best achievements were in the related field of forcing down the price of labour; he was able to intricately gauge how little he dared to pay for someone’s service and still have them agree to do it. Only because justice is rare in this world did he miss out on receiving an honorary doctorate from the Employers’ Association.

  I’ve never met another person who could lie so naturally and ardently, with all their heart. With the average and even the advanced liar, what’s concealed or fabricated always shows through in the flicker of an eyelid, a minute dilation of the pupils or a twitch of the lips faster than a hummingbird’s wings; but the Boss was able to pronounce the most transparent untruth and remain plastically smiling from ear to ear, like Jack Nicholson in the role of the Joker. In that way, he would win people’s favour, or at very least leave them speechless. But with him it wasn’t a conscious perversion of the truth; rather, his consciousness spontaneously produced whatever suited the demands of the moment, and his ingenuity and eloquence truly came to the fore when presenting reasons why he couldn’t pay a penny more for something.

  From time to time, a pretentious editor would have the cheek to claim that his self-sacrificing commitment had been exploited. A puerile author would come up with the idea of asking exactly how many copies of his book had been sold. A grotesque translator would suddenly find the rate of pay an insult to his intelligence, that he ought to be paid for the spaces between words too, or that six months waiting for payment was too long, or that he was entitled to royalties on subsequent editions. But even after the troublemaker had surrendered, the Boss continued to pound away with arguments and explain in endless detail how heinous his demand was, and what a threat to the integrity of the firm, the dignity of the publishing profession and all the efforts to advance the community as a whole. Did this ungrateful employee’s egoism prevent him from seeing that yielding to one individual’s unreasonableness would be the first stone of an avalanche which would to come down and crush the tender young plant of his publishing business? That others similar to him would then throng in, not caring if their avarice meant that a kid went without a picture book, a single mother without her child allowance or a Croatian war veteran without antidepressants? The grumbler would then of course repent, forego the outstanding money, and ask if he could help the publishing house with a loan.

  Be it because of this talent or other qualities, he was appointed assistant to the Minister of Culture, specifically for the Publishing and Literary Heritage strand. This didn’t significantly change the routine of his work since he carried out the ministerial mission mainly from his office. What did change, however, was the image of the firm: our editions became more splendid, our launches as well. They soon grew into first-class cultural events, epicentres of glamour which flooded the country. Not to attend them would have been suicidal for anyone who cared about their literary stature–for every aspirant to the intellectual elite it would have meant marginalisation, exile and annihilation. The only thing that could temporarily save you from sinking into oblivion, into the distant past, was the lens of a big-name photographer brushing you just when you were toasting with the mayor, an art historian or a plastic surgeon at the launch of the Encyclopaedia of Mushrooms or What Is My Dog Thinking?

  After conquering the textbook market, the Boss’s restless spirit turned to the literature most precious to the nation in those post-war years: books on esoterics, astrology, psychological self-help, and handbooks for gaining one’s first million and immigration visas for overseas countries. It was a real heyday, with people buying our books even if they could scarcely afford bread. And each edition, on the second-last page, thanked the Ministry of Culture for its generous support.

  But still the Boss renounced a political career and channelled his surplus creative energy into working with the Government Commission for Supporting the Book Sector. That brought yet another gust of wind to our already straining sails; the number of series multiplied and the catalogues blossomed. The costs of printing–in our own printing company–reached dizzying heights, but that didn’t bother the Commission or the libraries which placed the orders.

  At the same time, our publishing house devoted itself more to fine literature, above all that of Croatian authors. This was for patriotic motives, needless to say, but also because their works didn’t need to be translated or the rights bought from foreign publishers. Many didn’t even need to be paid because it was the peak of their aspiration to see their name on the cover, ideally with a colour photograph. Moreover, many were prepared to pay for this themselves, or they found a sponsor in their spouse, a successful Croatian firm or their local parish. But government providence radically altered the situation; soon it was no longer a problem to print a book but to find enough authors in whom to invest all the subsidies which the Commission showered on the publishers.

  Even if there had been space further up in the firm’s hierarchy, I personally wouldn’t have got far in my nine years there; I lacked the crucial assets of idealism and enthusiasm. For the first few years I sincerely strove to justify the trust which had been placed in me: that mainly meant correcting the texts on my desk as best I could, within the narrow bounds of the permissible. I didn’t feel a need to produce any writing of my own, either then or beforehand. Every day, across all meridians, parallels and diagonals, more and more new texts accumulate on top of the billions already written since humanity has been around. That thought alone is terribly taxing; why should one add anything, and to what end? But whatever arrived on my desk didn’t need to be plucked from the void or rescued from the brink of the chambers of superfluity. Here evidently was an author who had gathered sufficient self-love for the feat, and the result strutted before me, magnificently real and blatantly irrefutable. I would grab hold of it like a cherished anchorage, perhaps the last relic of terra firma in the great flood of indefiniteness, revelation and dissolution–that orgy of despair which longed to lift its disguise and would soon need no more pretexts to show itself in its full glory.

  It was a mute and gratuitous despair, inexplicable even when you consider everything people come up with, and all the more destructive. It arose as soon as I’d assured myself a place in the community of diligent citizens, as soon as my immersion in that terribly real world was complete.

  For a time, the bulwarks of manuscripts kept the despair at bay. I lived beneath them like in a greenhouse, hibernating under paper membranes. Through them, I watched the universe above me; it stretched into unknown expanses far away, exhilarating and infinite, whereas my role was to keep the pieces together down here–the delicate spots in complex sentences like conjunctions, word order, spelling, commas… I loved my vocation of text mechanics and the focussing of my gaze on ever tinier parcels of the world, its written relics
. In an age of universal expansion, where continents were busy colliding and distant galaxies called us to boldly go where no one had gone before, I picked around at paper fossils, examining their texture with magnifying glass and microscope. I would gladly have disassembled every single letter into atoms and meditated endlessly on all its molecular bonds. I was untouchable and myself on the path to disintegration into subatomic oblivion behind the sign Work in progress. Do not disturb.

  But the atmosphere at the firm more resembled a beehive besieged by wasps; everything was always behind schedule, literally everything, and the blame for this state of affairs forever hung in the air like a guillotine ready to fall, inflaming hysteria and chaos, reciprocal accusations and threats. We were constantly seeking a lost diskette or envelope, at the very least a cigarette lighter, and this sometimes led to the mobilisation of the entire staff; new manuscripts came in by the hour, hot on each other’s heels. In brief, the circumstances weren’t favourable to meditation; I was expected to deliver results in my proof-reading. On the other hand, it didn’t take me long to realise that the objective could be achieved by declaring the text ready to print. Not only did no one check how much work was behind this announcement, and not only was there no authority capable of gauging the value of that work: it was damaging and even dangerous to correct others’ work, even in the case of glaring mistakes or plagiarism, because sooner or later it would come out. Everyone prefers their own mistake to being corrected by others. It just provoked fury and made enemies who thirsted for revenge. The writer, for whom you puttied up gaping holes in his pieces for primary-school textbooks, became an enemy (they were actually stylistic flourishes, he said). As did the translator who gave free rein to his fantasy whenever he encountered something he didn’t understand, hoping no one else would either. Or the translation editor who happily sacrificed meaning and common sense on the altar of grammatical correctness, and as a sworn follower of orthographical orthodoxy, barricaded behind rows of dictionaries, would defend any madness as if they were his own children.