THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

by Adam Thirlwell

  I had the waiter take her a bottle of wine, and after I’d eaten my soup I started to leave. It was going on three in the morning. When I tried to get past her, she grabbed my sleeve.

  “You weren’t at Nikola’s funeral,” she said. “You must have been abroad again.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “There were only four of us there to walk the coffin to his grave-side. He died in his sleep. They found him a week later. I don’t believe he suffered. Here’s my card. Call me sometime.”

  I was listening to her voice as if from a distance. I remember shaking hands with both men, one of whom was her husband. Then I went down Francuska Street toward the Republic Square and then on towards the Hotel Moskva. The shop windows in the passage of the Zvezda cinema were still lit up; dust had gotten into the fabric on the buttons for sale, changing their colors; dead flies covered the glass bottoms of the display cases as if they were dried-out aquariums. The pre-dawn sky was purple with the far-off harbingers of sunrise. When I was in the passage, I heard the jangling of an alarm clock; in a window facing the courtyard a light went on.

  The courtyard entrance was barricaded with rotten planks; there were rows of rusty trashcans in front of it. A cat leapt out from between them and raced right past me. I peered through the decayed boards; inside it was dark and reeked of urine. I thought I could hear the squeaking of rats. I walked back out to the road. At the corner I started down Balkanska Street. Through a metal fence I saw a warehouse in the first light of day. The wall separating it from the house in which I’d once lived had been torn down, and the windows of the house had been removed and the roof demolished. In the shed stood a truck loaded with bricks and crushed rock next to enormous rolls of cable. I suddenly became aware of birds twittering, and I looked in their direction. A large sumac tree leaned over the courtyard, its foliage still green and swaying, as though anticipating the imminent sunrise and not simply buffeted by the breeze. I remembered: people can cut sumac back, but a new shoot will always poke up somewhere else. It can penetrate stone or concrete.

  During my final years as a student I had found a room in the center of the city—the dream of all students, especially those from the provinces. That gave you not only a certain amount of social prestige but also the advantage of staying late in the cafés without the fear of missing the last bus and then having to wait till early the next morning—chilled to the bone in the wintertime (an experience familiar to all of us). The apartment was located in a passage and had entrances from two different streets. If you went through the passage—with its display windows for leather-goods stores, for stores that would mend nylon stockings, sell fountain pens and buttons, do alterations—you came out in a courtyard of little paving stones. At the far end, on the left, was a recessed doorway that led down to the lower level of the building, facing Balkanska Street, via a set of steps made of worn brick. The building was old and had just two floors. There were Turkish balconies and walls from which the plaster was crumbling, warped window frames, and a shaky wooden door. My landlords were elderly Russians, emigrants who’d come during the 1920s, a married couple without children. They rented out my room for a sum that covered a part of the electric and water bills; one could say they let it out more or less gratis. I had been sent their way by a certain Anjutka, a tour guide. I had met her on Skadarlija Street, thanks to some Russian writers whom she was supposed to hand over to me so I could take them to an official dinner in the Writers’ Club.

  I slept on an iron army cot, while the other bed, on the wall opposite, was occupied by Nikola, one of my landlords. Marija Nikolajevna, his wife, slept in the smaller second room, which also served as the kitchen.

  Because I was often out of the house—by day in the library, in the evenings at the club—I was satisfied with my new lodgings; they worked fine as a free place to lay my head, and one that was in the city center to boot; I had access to a bathroom with hot water, and my landlords didn’t hold it against me when I came home late.

  Marija Nikolajevna was a sickly, somewhat sarcastic woman with a puffy face that was disfigured on one side by traces of burns. Her hands showed the damage too; scalded, contracted skin was drawn taut over muscles and tendons; her fingers resembled claws. Marija Nikolajevna seldom set foot in the “men’s quarters.” She would knock on the door, stick her head into the room, and let fly some incontrovertible observation: “I know you don’t own anything except this guitar. You don’t have to lie.” Or: “Somebody threw up last night in the bathroom. I hope it wasn’t Nikola. Next time it needs to be cleaned up better. Good night.” Or: “Yesterday, the bathroom was completely filled with smoke. You weren’t even home. This means Nikola has started smoking. It’s all due to your bad influence.” (In a very stern voice:) “He’s also taken to drinking with you. He never used to drink before. With you around he’s become a bohemian too.”

  Nikolaj Aleksinski was an old man with an upright bearing, short gray hair, and smiling blue eyes. He was as deaf as a door-knob, but that didn’t dampen his spirit or his good cheer one bit. He got up early, showered with cold water all year long (while you listened to him exclaiming “hu-hu-hu” and “ha-ha-ha” from the bathroom), and fasted one day every week, on Friday, for health reasons; on that day he drank only spring water that he had brought home from somewhere in a big demijohn. But this all had nothing to do with that nearly obscene resistance to death so typical of the elderly; this was more like a military kind of mental discipline paired with simple hedonism. I learned how to carry on a conversation with him by means of a kind of sign language. Our alphabet consisted of schematically reproduced letters from the old Cyrillic alphabet once used in Russian, and it contained symbolic abbreviations as well: touching one’s hair with a finger indicated the first letter of a word or the word itself: v as in volosy, hair; touching a tooth yielded z for zub, tooth; pressing your palms together gave you d as in druzhba, friendship. It sufficed to get across the first letters of words to him; once the word was underway, he completed it out loud while looking you straight in the eyes.

  I show him: thumb and index-finger in the shape of a Cyrillic s, then close the circle by pressing my fingertips together (o), and touch my hair (v) . . .

  “Soviet,” he says.

  I sign: l, i, t . . .

  And he finishes the word by saying “literature”: “Soviet literature is still in its infancy,” he maintains. “Like new grass. One must be patient while it grows.”

  I tell him (using my fingers): “Something is forever trampling on this grass.”

  “Yet no one can stop the grass from growing,” he says. “Do you see that sumac tree out there in the courtyard? It grew up out of the concrete. Take a look at it.”

  I say: “But people—”

  He guessed my thoughts: “People can cut it back as much as they like; somewhere a new shoot will always come forth. Force its way through stone, or through concrete.”

  I ask him, “Did you know Prince Ževahov?”

  He stares at me in amazement. “Where did you pick up that name?”

  I reply: “I read his book about Sergei Nilus.”

  Nikolaj waves his hand.

  “Ževahov lived in Novi Sad until recently. The Russian emigrants have their headquarters in Sremska Mitrovica. Ževahov was an unfortunate case. With age his mind dimmed considerably. He saw ghosts. Don’t you have anything better to do that to concern yourself with the likes of that mad Prince Ževahov?”

  “I’m collecting eyewitness accounts,” I say. “In connection with Nilus, he wrote about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What did this Ževahov look like?”

  “In his youth he was attractive, tall. The last time I saw him was back before the war. He was still wearing his old-fashioned pincenez and an Order of St. Nicholas on his shabby old dress coat.”

  I give Nikolaj the manuscript of my first book. (It would end up being published three or four years later.)

  “It’s as if you belonged to the circle of the Serap
ion Brothers,” he says. “There are hints here that you share the same artistic program. Your reality is a poetic one.”

  I say something to the effect that poetic reality is still reality.

  “Reality is like grass and earth,” he says. “Reality is the grass that grows and it’s the feet that mangle it.”

  I tell him that this is also a poetic image. A metaphor.

  “An image, perhaps,” he says. “Let’s have another round. This is homemade kirsch. Some friends brought it to me. A writer,” he went on, “is supposed to observe life in its totality. The writer has to point out the great theme, dying—so that humans might be less proud, less selfish, less evil—and, on the other hand, he or she must imbue life with some kind of meaning. Art is the balance between those two contradictory concepts. And a person’s duty, especially for a writer—and now you’ll say I’m talking like an old man—involves leaving behind in this world not work (everything is work) but rather some goodness, some knowledge. Every written word is a piece of creation.” He paused. “Listen to that: the birds are singing already. Let’s turn in. Marija Nikolajevna will be angry if we go on like this till morning. She’s had a difficult life. Very difficult.”

  I never had the nerve to ask him what kind of conflagration left its terrible tracks on her body. Just as I also never came to learn anything about his own life. From my “acquaintance,” the woman who had called my attention to this apartment and recommended me to the couple, I knew only that Marija Nikolajevna “had suffered burns while escaping from Russia” and that Nikolaj Aleksinski had come to Belgrade by way of Constantinople and was a specialist in forestry (a profession that I later assigned to the fictitious protagonist of one of my stories, in memory of Nikolaj Aleksinski, who already struck me as fictive, even back then). Although I spent many nights in conversation with this lively, good-hearted old man, I never heard so much as a single sentence from him spoken in confidence. I figured that my own shared confidences would make him my debtor, that he would one day grow communicative. But despite my confessions he never revealed anything about his earlier life.

  I say to him: “What . . . should . . . I . . . do? I . . . am . . . in . . . love . . . with . . . two . . . women.”

  At once his face assumes an expression of sincere concern. His eyes, twinkling with encouragement, betray the fact that my romantic woes have touched his heart.

  “Love is a frightfully tricky thing. Don’t hurt either one of them. And don’t rush into anything. For your sake, and theirs.”

  I say: “You’ve met one of them . . . I introduced her to you a month ago.”

  “Clytemnaestra,” he comments. “A real Clytemnaestra. She’s capable of doing serious harm. Harm to herself or to you. Love is a terrible thing. What can I tell you? One can’t learn anything from the romantic experiences of other people. Every encounter between a man and a woman starts off as if it were the first such meeting on earth. As if there haven’t already been billions of such encounters since the time of Adam and Eve. You see, experience in love is nontransferable. This is a great misfortune. And a great piece of luck. God set things up this way. Just one more, and then I’ll put the bottle away. Marija Nikolajevna would be upset. Be careful. Don’t hurt anyone. Our souls carry the wounds of love longer than anything. And take care that literature doesn’t come to be a substitute for love for you. Literature is dangerous that way too. Life can’t be replaced by anything.”

  Sometimes I asked him to play on his lute for me. When he was in a good mood, he’d say, “Tune it for me. I know you know how to do it.”

  I would tune the lute and he’d start to play. He knew a few lieder and some Gypsy romances by heart. His ears had gone deaf but a few melodies still tingled in them, like distant memories; and he would make these remarkable sounds as he played, as though humming to himself.

  “I think it sounds good today,” he’d say.

  I would nod in agreement.

  “That’s because it’s cloudy outside,” he stated. “The lute has been drying out. But weather like this suits it. Is it in tune?”

  Leaning over the instrument as if he was listening for something, he strummed a few chords. Then he looked me in the eyes.

  “A-minor,” I responded.

  “It’s cloudy outside: the humidity does it good.”

  I continued visiting him for years afterward, long after I had moved out. When my spirits were low, or when I needed advice, I would look him up. I knew he was reading all my writing in the journals, along with the reviews of my books.

  “Talent is a curse,” he said to me. “Pushkin suffered on account of his talent. People envy nothing so much as a divine gift. Prodigies are rare, while mediocrity is legion. It’s an unending struggle. And don’t you go bury yourself in books. Travel. Listen to people. And listen to your own inner voice. Now, Marija Nikolajevna is expecting to see you too. Don’t get upset if she scolds you from time to time. She’s sick. And unhappy.”

  Marija Nikolajevna, wrapped in a threadbare woolen shawl, was sitting by the window. The window gave onto a gloomy courtyard surrounded by battered walls.

  “I read in the newspaper,” she said, “that the theater company you work with is going to Russia. Are you going along?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “We’re going on a fifteen-day tour.”

  “That’s what the paper said. Could you do us a favor?”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “I’ve written down two addresses for you here. The first one is my sister’s: Valerija Mihajlovna Ščukina. The second is for Marija, like me, Marija Jermolajevna Siskova. That’s her best friend. Once she was my best friend, too. The last letter I received from either of them was in January of ’56. So, nine years ago. There’s a chance that they’re both still alive, or at least that one of them is. I assume that there would’ve been somebody to notify me if they had died. But just in case, take this—another name. Karajeva. Natalija Viktorovna. She’s the youngest of all of them. Let me write down her address for you, too. She could tell you what became of them, in the event you can’t find those first two. Would it be too hard for you to do this for us?”

  On the second day after our arrival in Moscow, I was able to bribe the stern-looking caretaker on our floor. In front of the entrance to the hotel an invalid in a shabby army coat was standing propped up on crutches; he held out his greasy cap to the passersby. I gave him a bit of change. He tendered his thanks as though reciting a passage from Dostoyevsky.

  I had barely turned the corner when I came upon the taxi stand that I’d discovered the day before, during our official tour of the city. The taxi took me to a large apartment building with a grim entrance and long, cold corridors.

  I approached a couple of girls who were playing by the door. They looked at me, flabbergasted, and then scattered without a word. Finally a woman showed up and I read off the name and address to her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Who else can I ask?”

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of tenants here.”

  I didn’t intend to give up. Once inside the building I figured out how things were numbered and what the abbreviations in the addresses meant; they represented the doorways, floors, building wings, and then individual apartments. At last, when I’d figured out the note, I knocked on a door. After a long pause, I heard a woman’s voice: “Who is it?”

  “I’m looking for Valerija Mihajlovna Ščukina.”

  “She doesn’t live here.”

  The voice came from just behind the planks of the door; I knew that the woman was observing me through the peephole.

  “Maybe you know where I could find her?”

  “You’re a foreigner?”

  “Yes. A foreigner.”

  I heard the woman unlocking the door. She stuck out her head.

  “Let me have a look at it.”

  I gave her the address. “Do you know any of these three people?” I asked.

  She shook her head.
<
br />   “We’ve only been living here for three years. Ask over there, down at the end of the hall. Last door on the right. Ivanovna. Varja Ivanovna Strahovska. She might know.”

  Then she handed me the piece of paper back; I heard her locking the door.

  I knocked slowly, cautiously. No one responded. At some point it dawned on me that no one was behind the door, and I pushed down on the handle. The room measured about five meters square. A lightbulb without any kind of shade hung down from the ceiling. In the corner was a massive stove, like the ones in factory canteens. I understood then that this was the communal kitchen for the whole wing of the building. Feeling like I’d stumbled onto a secret hiding place, I exited quickly and closed the door behind me. But my inspection had apparently not gone unnoticed.

  “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

  The woman was enveloped by a large knit shawl; she wore her hair done up in a big bun. On her feet were stiff army boots.

  “Excuse me,” I said, handing her the paper with the addresses as if it were an official form. “They told me that Varja Ivanovna lived here. Strahovska.”

  “You’re a relative of hers?”

  “You could say that.”

  “A foreigner?”

  “A foreigner.”

  “Varja Ivanovna is very ill. Her heart. Wait here.”

  She knocked on the door right across from the community kitchen; she disappeared for a minute and then reappeared.

  “She says she has no relatives abroad. Or anywhere else.”

  “I’m a friend of Marija Nikolajevna Aleksinka. Tell her that. She’ll know.”

  The woman went back into the room without knocking again. This time she was gone longer. At last she emerged.

  “Go in for just a bit. I take care of this building. You should have called ahead. Go on in.”

  The room resembled a cell. Bare walls. A bed against the wall, and next to it a stool. A glass of water and a little bottle of prescription medication on the stool. A pale gaunt woman lay with her head on a thin pillow, covered up to her chin with a singed army blanket.