THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

by Adam Thirlwell

  Even those people who had a completely negative view of Madame d’Orsetti, claiming she was a lesbian and an alcoholic, admitted, however, that she had great culinary talents and gastronomical imagination. As appetizers on this particular evening she served us caviar, tuna with black butter, and carrots in cream, and for the main course, “carp-in-the-sand” and lamb with rhubarb and walnuts; following that there were cheese and ice cream (pistachio and pineapple) with a sauce of crème de cassis. Along with this they brought us a 1967 white, “d’Orsetti,”—on its yellow label stood the maxim “In vino veritas”—as well as a Bordeaux for those who didn’t wish to align themselves with the tastes of the lady of the house.

  After the dinner, Mme d’Orsetti, enveloped in a purple shawl, sat on the floor and rocked, barely perceptibly, to the rhythm of music from the gramophone (Rameau, Brahms, Vivaldi). At some point she put her glass down on the rug and nodded at me to follow her. When we reached the bedroom, she indicated that I was to take a seat on a bed with a violet baldachin; she passed me a glass and filled it to the rim. While pouring the vodka, she had said:

  “Your friend Jurij Golec has committed suicide. I wanted you to dine in peace first. Now I shall leave you alone. If you feel the need to talk with someone, d’Orsetti is at your disposal.”

  The burial was set for Tuesday, at four p.m., but the ceremony started almost an hour late. Apparently people here are used to it, because when I showed up, right at the appointed time, there was nobody at the cemetery yet. I thought that Jurij Golec’s friends would be gathered at the graveside or in front of the chapel; but then Luba Jurgenson, an acquaintance of mine, showed up and we waited together in front of the cemetery gate. Toward five o’clock a crowd began to gather. We wondered if they had really come for the funeral of Jurij Golec. They must have been asking themselves the same thing when they saw us standing there, shivering in the cold wind. Finally Luba, an émigré writer and one of Jurij Golec’s protégées, recognized a mutual acquaintance; she went over to a woman in black and embraced her. “Jurij’s sister,” she remarked to me. “She’s just now come from America.” Dolores-Dola and Nataša showed up in the company of a young man wearing a cowboy hat and striped pants; it was yet another Russian émigré, a painter, according to Luba. Finally there were about thirty of us: Emil Cioran, Adolf Rudnicki, Ana Novak, a literary scholar and former camp inmate; representatives of the Gallimard publishing house, the cultural attaché of the Israeli embassy, a delegate from the Jewish community, as well as various friends and admirers.

  Mme Ursula Randelis kept her word and, contrary to my expectations, did not come to the burial. That same morning she had told me:

  “I don’t like dead people; I only like living people. The last time I was at a funeral, it was for my mother, twenty years ago. Then I made an exception, for Jurij’s sake, and went to Noémie’s, barely a month ago now. That will suffice for the rest of my life. Oh, now who’s going to call me a ‘crippled old mare’? Who will say to me, ‘You horsey old goy, they cut off my phone again!’ And who will tease me with ‘Hey, you lazy biddy, let’s go wet our whistle’? The next time I go to a cemetery . . . Come to my house after the burial, all of you. I don’t know the Jewish customs; they aren’t in my domain. I’ll prepare something to eat. And we’ll drink a glass of vodka to his soul. But I will not go to any more funerals. Not until the day it’s my own.”

  The rabbi was a man of about fifty, trim, clean-shaven, in a black caftan, and had none of the bearded biblical prophet about him; more than anything he resembled one of those French judges in a robe whom one encounters in the cafés around the Palais de Justice. With arms extended, his palms turned up, he beckoned us to come over with one finger: “Come closer and gather about him, as you did in life. Closer, closer still, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The coffin was up on a podium set on one of the cemetery paths, under a large sycamore. In the widest part of the lid a small rectangular window had been put in, as if it were some kind of special Noah’s Ark that would transfer the body of the traveler to the shore of eternity. Gleaming metal letters were affixed to the lid: “Jurij Golec, 1923–1982,” like a perfectly condensed biography for an entry in The Jewish Encyclopedia.

  When the rabbi had started to speak, I noticed Dr. Wildgans; his powerful figure had materialized behind a gravestone. That probably accounts for the impression I had that he didn’t come in from the drive but from the field of graves.

  Ever since Mme d’Orsetti had informed me that Jurij Golec had taken his own life, my suspicions had fallen on Dr. Wildgans. And this belated appearance of his, somehow furtive, fed these doubts. I tried to read his thoughts: was he feeling remorse? Or was he proud, perhaps, like a man who’s done his duty by his neighbor? Ultimately, being both friend and doctor, it was he, I thought, who could best judge the validity of his decision; to slip an ampule of cyanide to a man who viewed death as salvation, or to procure a pistol for him. My misgivings were further corroborated by the fact that Dr. Wildgans was the last person with whom Jurij Golec was seen alive; on the evening I’ve described, I had left him alone with the doctor. Perhaps Jurij Golec had finally succeeded in changing Dr. Wildgans’s mind by the force of his arguments.

  On account of the noise from the street and the indifference of people in big cities, there seemed to be no one who had heard the shot. The Japanese woman next door hadn’t been at home. So no one knew exactly when he’d done himself in. The police were conducting an investigation but weren’t interested in filling in the details for the curious.

  Should I have helped him? I wondered. I actually could have gotten him a pistol, through my Yugo-thugs, with no great risk to myself. My conscience hadn’t let me rest, in the meantime. I’d kept imagining him lying there on the sidewalk, bleeding, his skull shattered; or how the blood would stream out of his veins; or how he would hang there in the cabinet among Noémie’s furs, skin gone blue, his tongue jutting out and his eyes popping from their cavities. Now I felt like a person who had failed to hasten to the side of someone in mortal danger; like a coward who had left his friend in the lurch.

  This sentiment was compounded with feelings of guilt of another sort: since everyone knew that I was one of the last to have seen him alive, I had the impression that they suspected me. Mme Ursula Randelis had repeated the following menacing formulation to me two or three times over the phone: “If I catch the bastard who provided him with that pistol . . .” And it seemed that the threat was aimed at me.

  Dr. Wildgans liberated me from this nightmare. As if he intuited my suspicions about him, he came over and gave my hand a very prolonged shake. He told me about Jurij Golec’s end: he had purchased a hunting rifle and some big-game ammunition; he’d pointed the barrel at his heart. He’d left the receipt for the weapon on the table, too, as written up by the saleswoman, as if to avoid any misunderstandings and to prove that we were all naïve bumblers and that he was not as inept in practical matters as we thought. On the reverse of the receipt he scribbled in an agitated hand his Kafkaesque last will and testament: “Burn my papers.”

  In the text that the rabbi read aloud, I recognized a brief passage that had been printed twenty years ago on the cover of Jurij Golec’s one novel: “Born in Ukraine in the years immediately following the civil war, Jurij Golec, once a prisoner at Auschwitz, has lived in Paris since 1946. After pursuing Asian studies in Poland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, he worked as a correspondent for various foreign newspapers. His one novel—he was, as one says, a man of one book—was written in French.” Then the rabbi listed all the volumes of poetry and essays, and he particularly emphasized the major role that Jurij Golec played in the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Elias Canetti. “He helped his neighbors; he prayed facing toward Jerusalem; in his own way, he believed in God.”

  When the rabbi began reading the Psalms, alternating between Hebrew and French, five or six men put on the yarmulkes they pulled from their pockets. Dr. Wildgans placed a twice-folded handkerchief on hi
s head.

  The rabbi read, holding his Bible on the casket as if it were a pulpit, supporting himself with his fists on the lid: “My soul drew near even unto death, my life was near to the hell beneath. They compassed me on every side, and there was no man to help me: I looked for the succor of men, but there was none.”

  And he continued in Hebrew: “Adonai, Adonai.”

  “O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore . . . I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart. Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee . . . My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off . . . Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation.”

  This was a distant echo of King David’s voice, pressing toward us from the obscurity of time and history; it was the testimony of an inspired and afflicted poet, written some three thousand years ago, that still reaches our hearts like a knife and like balsam.

  “I cry out to you, Lord, saying, ‘You are my confidence, my portion in the realm of the living. Hear my lament, for I am much tormented; save me from those who persecute me, for they are mightier than I. Lead my soul from the dungeon, that I might praise your name. The righteous will gather around me, if you are favorably disposed to me.’”

  Next to the grave, on the edge of the marble slab, I caught sight of a dead rat; it lay on its stomach, as if resting for a moment; its tail, stiff and straight, lay draped on the ground like a standard in defeat. What led it here? What worked its death? I wondered. Was God’s providence perhaps at work here? Jurij Golec, a connoisseur of the Talmud and the Upanishads, would certainly have found an explanation for this phenomenon, and would not have seen any provocation in it. Then I remembered: “A few late rats, like bulky army tanks, are making their way home to their boathouses.” So it’s a rat from that simile of his, I thought; one that has come straight from his novel to the Montparnasse cemetery. Because nothing is stable apart from the grand illusion of creation; no energy is ever lost there; every written word is like Genesis.

  I stood by the grave and observed. Hugging the stone and seemingly contorted, ants stretched out their wispy antennae in the direction of the huge swollen body, not daring to attack it. And the dead rat, the living rat from the novel, lay there motionless, still unmarked by any visible signs of decay, like a heavy armored vehicle; its treads had been blown apart by an anti-tank mine and its crew had abandoned it.

  “I sink into the deep mire, where there is no bottom; I fall beneath the water into the depths and the spate will cover me. May my prayer rise up before you; incline your ear to my wailing; for my soul is full of woe, and my life approaches the inferno . . . You have placed me in the bottom of the deepest pit, into the darkness and the abyss.”

  Using ropes, the gravediggers lowered the casket into the hole that had been dug next to the drive. The letters on Noémie’s headstone were already starting to dull; the marble plaque resembled an iceberg that had survived the winter; on the bare wires of the wreaths scraps of crepe paper hung, washed colorless by the rain.

  As we moved past the opening, we threw handfuls of earth onto the coffin, the same way one used to throw stones onto dead bodies in the desert so their skeletons wouldn’t be scattered by wild animals. One of the gravediggers was carrying a little wooden chest with earth from Jerusalem; the earth was light in color and loose and was mixed with desert sand. The wreaths were all leaning on Noémie’s grave. One of them read “For Jurij Golec—may God forgive you.” I understood, even though the name of the benefactor wasn’t listed: “I only like living people; I don’t like dead people.” I knew who was capable of leaving so harsh a message, which was also a sign of love.

  I waited around until the undertakers had put the marble slab in place. It was identical to the one on Noémie’s grave. Then I helped them arrange the wreaths, and divide them fairly. After so many years the two of them were resting under the same roof again, like a pair of lovers from the old days; not in the same grave, but still next to each other. After thirty-three years of shared life.

  “An excellent bottom line for an old Jewish couple,” I said to myself.

  Postscript

  The name Jurij Golec is not invented; it’s merely one of the names that my unfortunate friend Piotr Rawicz assigned the narrator in his one novel, Blood from the Sky. Thus his presence in this story has remained halfway between reality and the world of Platonic concepts.

  The price of the fur coat seemed exaggerated to me at first, and I was prepared to lower it arbitrarily by knocking off a zero. Fortunately, just as I was finishing this story, I found an ad in a newspaper (from November 19, 1982) for a large store specializing in furs; a Russian sable at that time cost 106,000 francs after the 15% discount (original price: 125,000). Thus I learned, six months after taking a look into the closet of the woman known here as Noémie, that her most expensive fur coat was a zibeline (Russian sable), that it was worth precisely the amount given in the story, and that J.G. had not exaggerated. Aside from these utilitarian facts, e.g., the price of a fur, I discovered an entire array of exotic fauna and subsequently went over Noémie’s wardrobe in my mind, that wardrobe where so many furs of inscrutable origins shimmered: mink, silver fox, arctic fox, lynx, Canadian wolf, astrakhan, beaver, nutria, marmot, muskrat, coyote; and these have now, voilà, found their way into the story through the back door, after the fact, unleashing new sensations, opening new worlds: métiers, market forces, money, adventure, hunting, weapons, knives, traps, blood, animal anatomy, zoology, far-off exotic regions, nocturnal animal noises, Lafontaine’s fables; great are the temptations of a tale. In contrast to a novel, however, one may not, in a tale, open the doors of cabinets with impunity.

  THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

  Although I had sworn never to set foot in the place again, one evening, after a two-year absence from Belgrade, I dropped by the Writers’ Club. I’d had plenty of opportunities to convince myself that associating with authors was difficult, fraught with misunderstandings, jealousy, and insults. And I was also aware of the fact that this kind of intellectual struggle, éscrime littéraire, bitter and sterile, is part and parcel of the literary trade, just like writing reviews and checking page proofs. On this point I remembered a piece of advice that Chekhov once gave a young writer, challenging him to leave the provinces and mingle with the literary crowd in the big city; once he’d gotten to know them, he would draw less idealistic conclusions about writers.

  It was early autumn and warm out, and people were still seated in the garden. An undertone of voices was audible, along with clinking silverware and tittering women. Upon entering I took a look at the guests and discovered with astonishment that in the two years of my absence nothing had changed; they were all sitting in their old places and appeared to be drinking the same bottles of wine that they had ordered on the last evening I was here. It was just that the women were a touch more voluptuous, and the men, graying at the temples, had let their bellies go. The rings under everyone’s eyes were even darker, and their voices had become more gravelly still from drink and tobacco. With my back turned to the garden there was now only one table in my field of vision, the one under the gnarled tree, closest to the entrance. Two middle-aged men I did not know were sitting at the table, along with a round-faced woman with bleached-blonde hair and small, lively eyes. The woman kept giving me a little smile.

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  I shook my head.

  “Anjutka,” she said. “We met once at Nikola’s house.”

  Now I remembered.

  “Don’t burn your bridges behind you,” I repeated under my breath. “How are you?”

  “I got married,” she said. “This is my husband.”

  She looked like a shaggy old dog. She was constantly brushing the hair out of her eyes; she tossed her head back coque
ttishly, causing the flabby skin on her cheeks to shake. She was one of those women who don’t understand how to grow old, who add to the misfortune of aging a grotesque mask of youthfulness. It was easy for me to calculate how old she was. Back when I slept with her, she had been thirty-nine; I had been twenty-three then; and since that time about fifteen years had passed. “I could have been your mother,” she told me. “Almost.” In those days I lived in the vicinity of the Dunav railway station. She demanded that I retain the formal mode of address. “This doesn’t give you the right to speak casually to me,” she said; then she would go back to rolling her eyes and imitating the throes of passion. In the morning I walked her to the streetcar stop and told her we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. She answered me with a proverb: “Don’t burn your bridges behind you.” She was right. A week later I looked her up again. “I’ve been thinking of you, Anjutka.” In the morning I awoke on her maternal bosom.

  In those days she worked as a guide for Russian tourists and traded on the black market. She succeeded in selling me Bulgarian rose water (tiny ampoules in a wooden container that resembled a salt cellar), a portrait of Pushkin in bronze bas-relief on a pedestal of Caspian marble, and Blok’s selected works in three volumes (Moscow, 1958). I knew that these were gifts she had received from Russian tourists . . .

  She leaned across the table toward the other men and related something to them in a low voice while shaking her head. I observed the fatal workings of time on her face.