THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

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by Adam Thirlwell


  On the edge of the next village, the motorcycle slowed down and pulled into a soccer field overgrown with grass and tall weeds. (The sound of the motor died out abruptly and he thought it must have broken down.) There he saw someone next to the decrepit goalposts beckoning with a little yellow flag. He turned around, thinking the signal wasn’t meant for him but rather for some boys who had been trailing him, or for some inquisitive cyclist who had gotten too close. But there was no one behind him. The motorcycle curved around and stopped right by the goal. The driver pushed his rubber goggles up onto his forehead and stretched his arms out in a gesture of helplessness.

  Valdemar D. looked closely at the race official and had the feeling he knew this man from somewhere; he seemed to recognize the short brawny arms, the bowlegs, the massive squarish head. The umpire kept waving the flag and indicated by his energetic remonstrations that the marathoner was to stop running.

  “Number 25, you must take a breather,” he heard the judge’s voice saying. (Even this voice somehow seemed familiar to him.)

  Valdemar D. kept running anyway, looking for a way out of this neglected, weed-covered soccer field. On all sides, a fence of rusty barbed wire. Valdemar D. knew that he couldn’t stop, that he couldn’t stop now, now that he had achieved what he had achieved, now that he’d covered half the course. So he kept on running, round and round in circles riding his momentum so the machine of his body wouldn’t get winded, so that his flywheel would not come to a halt, so his body’s mechanisms wouldn’t grind down, so his forward motion wouldn’t diminish, so the rhythm of his stride and his heart wouldn’t be disrupted. Hardly out of breath at all, he called to the race official (my God, he knew that head from somewhere):

  “Sir, I’m not tired.”

  And he kept running, around and around in circles.

  “I command you to stop and catch your breath!” the race official screamed at him, his face beet red; he waved the flag up and down, up and down. “That’s an order!”

  Valdemar called back to him over his shoulder, without breaking his stride:

  “But, sir, if I stop now . . .”

  “You must stop this instant, Number 25. I order you to halt! Did you hear me? Knock it off!”

  “At the half-way mark?” Valdemar groaned, continuing to run and looking in vain for a passage through the rusty wire.

  “It’s for your own good,” the umpire shouted, forgetting for a moment to wave the little flag. “If you don’t believe me, No. 25, here’s a person here who will convince you that it’s in your best interests. You are tired.”

  At that point Maria appeared from the tent at a sign from the official. (This low-ceilinged tent apparently served as a command post, and it was equipped with a field telephone.) He recognized her even before she began to speak, although her straw hat covered half her face with its shadow.

  “Valdemar,” she shouted to him. She was scared of something, “I implore you to stop! Come, take a rest. You must rest, Valdemar!”

  Then he woke up. The dream crumbled like the stack of ashes on the end of a long-burning cigarette. Waking up felt like a fall, like the fall of an angel. Had he not been ranging through paradise itself just a short while ago? Maria, whose voice still resounded clearly in his mind, had been dead—to keep this in some sort of coherent perspective—for more than fifteen years.

  Outside the day was dawning, dirty and gray.

  There was still enough time to tell his dream to the man lying next to him in the bunk of this Siberian labor camp. After Valdemar’s sudden death, however, the latter man told the story to another prisoner who is also now dead. Thus Valdemar’s dream reached Abram Tertz, who used to tell his wife all sorts of things in his letters. The camp censor scarcely paid any attention to Tertz’s letters anymore, since he carried on like an idiot in them and was more likely to write about God, the devil, and Gogol than about the weather, diarrhea, and the lousy makhorka.

  Tertz concluded the story of the unfortunate man from Latvia with this laconic comment (in this letter to his wife he still needed to save space for Providence and Gogol’s nose): “He had precisely 12 years and 6 months to go before the end of his sentence.” On the next page (p. 76) of the London edition, he added, in a separate context and yet somewhat paradoxically: “Sleep is the watering place of the soul to which it hastens at night to drink at the sources of life.”

  Recently, while reading the book by Tertz, I remembered Šejka’s story. (I am more and more convinced that he had to have had a copy of the manuscript.) He narrated the course of events in his own way, referring frequently to Berdyaev, Dostoyevsky, and Beckett. He was lonely, sick, and Russian. And he knew how to bathe his story in the same mysterious light that emanated from his paintings.

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) remains best known in his native Serbia and in the world of translation as a novelist. If one throws into his dossier the fact that his fiction was mildly (and bravely) postmodern and that the Holocaust was one of his main themes, we will have just about reached the end of our popular, journalistic understanding of the man and his works. Yet the refinement, even the reframing, of Kiš’s profile continues as we move well into the third decade following his premature death of lung cancer in Paris. Recent years have seen the publication of more and more scholarly articles about the methods and themes of his works, as well as the translations of some additional stories, an early novel, and a play; in Serbia there are even new primary sources coming to light, such as the two Kiš film scripts, published in late 2011 as Dva filmska scenarija, and the occasional rebroadcast of his 1989 collection of filmed interviews in Israel with “double victims” of fascism and (early) Yugoslav communism, Goli život (Bare Life). The new trends arising from this publishing activity—trends that supplement but in no way supplant the basic Western critical understanding of Kiš originating in his “family cycle” of novels and stories and in the carefully selected, cosmopolitan essays brought out in the English-language version of Homo Poeticus during the war-torn 1990s—could arguably be summed up as increased attention both to the Yugoslav milieu depicted in his writings and to his artistic and ethical aversion to Stalinism. There are a number of other jewels awaiting their turn to speak to audiences in translation, and Kiš’s life itself still awaits a great biography, in any language. The publication of this volume is, in my opinion, a bracing new chapter in Serbian and East European literature, and . . . one might add . . . it represents only a fraction of the excellent work that still remains inaccessible in English.

  The seven stories contained in this version of The Lute and the Scars do not have an overarching common theme. They do, however, all very much bear the stamp of the author’s mind and touch. They are enjoyable, by turns intimate and politically obstreperous and sad and even funny, and their diversity will allow a fuller appreciation of Kiš’s thematic concerns and, possibly, his stylistic approaches. One of the stories, “The Stateless One,” reflects themes explored elsewhere in Kiš’s oeuvre—here, the difficult relationship of an artist to his work and skepticism about modern nationalism—though, even so, it is unique in choosing a (real) late Habsburg novelist as its protagonist. “Jurij Golec” is a touching and elegiac treatment of the last days and legacy of a Soviet refugee writer in Paris; it is without doubt one of this translator’s favorite stories in the volume, by dint of its alternating tones of sadness and levity, as well as its serving as a reminder of the existence of a little-known Holocaust novel, Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky, which ranks alongside key works by Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Aleksandar Tišma, and Kiš himself among the indispensable fictional treatments of Nazi genocide. “Jurij Golec” is also the cosmopolitan equivalent of the very Yugoslav and very political account of a man of letters driven to desperation by ideological and physical brutalization at the hands of the secret police that we find in “The Poet.” Also rooted firmly in the Serbian context, and beautifully and humanely demonstrating Kiš’s respect f
or Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić, for whom he had enormous but seldom discussed admiration, is “The Debt,” a stream-of-consciousness final will and testament of the great writer in his final days in the hospital. “A and B” is a short but challenging autobiographical essay that condenses many of Kiš’s unconventional views about the “brutality” of Central Europe and the nobility of the Balkans (an inversion of the typical epithets); this is also the thematic register of his great novels Garden, Ashes and Hourglass. Finally, “The Lute and the Scars” is another colorful autobiographical piece that depicts bohemian Belgrade in the 1950s, the cold, lingering Stalinism of the USSR, and the struggle of a young writer to find authenticity and maintain personal integrity. “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” also bearing the imprint of inimical Soviet conditions, memorializes the precariousness—the mortal condition of being pitilessly “exposed,” if you will—of the marginalized and marked outsider: Kiš’s preferred formula for the concept of “victim.” Each of these stories is anchored in Kiš’s biography or in literary history more generally.

  For an overview of the complicated genesis of the stories in this volume, the following table has been assembled from the original notes provided in the Serbian edition.

  Readers will perhaps find it useful to stay attuned, while immersed in these stories, to conceptions of “home,” to various ways of embodying and depicting the “creative life,” and to the corrosive effects of dystopian dictatorships. The stories do at times have a lyricism that approaches the inimitable writing in the stories of Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers; they are, on the other hand, nowhere near as bloody as, and by and large not as harrowing as, the stupendous component tales of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. They have enough of the virtues of these other story collections to elicit a strong reaction from readers, however, and they also read like “vintage Kiš”: to wit, the compression, the enumeration, the poignant detail, and the restlessly conversational language. The stories also offer us a chance to embrace a more fully Yugoslav, or Serbian, Kiš. The deep affection for Ivo Andrić and, metaphorically, the acknowledgement of the author’s own set of “debts,” is every bit as much “the real Kiš” as the cosmopolitan-ism—an artist’s search for authenticity and intuitive acceptance of diversity and intellectual and emotional (as opposed to political or ethnic) affinity—of “The Stateless One.” Likewise, the reflections on Yugoslav conditions in “The Lute and the Scars” and in this translator’s other favorite story in the collection, “The Poet,” are just as real as his many nonfiction pieces on French symbolism, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce. Finally, the looming presence of the USSR in so many of these stories reminds us that the political coloration of the backdrop to Kiš’s life changed, significantly, from black to red before his teenage years were out. This epic turn left its indelible marks on his intellectual biography, and it precipitated neatly into that most engaging of his plays, Night and Fog (see Absinthe: New European Writing 12 [2009]: 94–133).

  * * *

  These stories are deceptively complex, and their publication history is also complex. Therefore they received a good and necessary measure of critical attention and analysis as they were published—hence the indispensability of notes in and on the tales themselves. The original published notes to the stories can be found at the end of this volume.

  The basis for the translations of the first six stories is the collection Lauta i ožiljci, edited by Mirjana Miočinovič and published by the Beogradski izdavački-grafički zavod (BIGZ) in Belgrade in 1994. For the provenance of the final story in this collection, “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” please see the notes at the end of the book.

  I owe a debt of real thanks to the following friends for their help with various aspects of these translations: Predrag and Tamara Apić, Jessica Blissit, Sara Brown, Pascale Delpech, Ken Goldwasser, Bea and Wolfgang Klotz, John McLaughlin, Dragan Miljković, Mirjana Miočinović, Jeff Pennington, Dan Shea, Predrag Stokić, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Verena Theile, Gary Totten, and Milo Yelesiyevich. From books and encouragement to food, friendship, and fine points of vocabulary, these wonderful people have made bringing stories by Kiš to an anglophone audience into a very satisfying adventure.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Murlin Croucher. He was a mentor to many of us in the field of East European and Russian studies, an accomplished librarian, a universal wit and seeker, one pug-crazy dude, a lover of great literature wherever it was to be found, and my friend since 1987. Requiescat in pacem.

  JOHN K. COX, 2012

  NOTES TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

  Original Notes

  These explanatory notes, a kind of critical apparatus for the individual stories in this collection, were written and first published by Mirjana Miočinović. The vast majority of them have been translated from the first edition of Lauta i ožiljci (published in 1994 by BIGZ in Beograd). There are four exceptions to this attribution. The last sentence in the entry for “The Lute and the Scars” and the final three paragraphs of the entry for “The Poet” are additions taken from the 1995 edition of Skladište. In the notes to “The Debt,” the comparative material on Eugène Ionesco is also from Skladište. The entire entry for “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” like the beginning and end of the story itself, was taken from the subsequently published French and German editions of the story, since I have not yet seen a Serbian edition.—JKC

  General Remarks

  The stories from Kiš’s literary estate entitled “The Stateless One,” “Jurij Golec,” “The Lute and the Scars,” “The Poet,” and “The Debt,” all of which we are bringing out in this volume, originated in the years between 1980 and 1986, connected more or less directly with the book The Encyclopedia of the Dead. We have supplemented these with the short two-part prose piece “A and B,” which in manuscript form had no title. Although it does not seem to fit the definition of “short fiction,” it does function in a metaphoric (and metonymic) way in relation to the larger body of Kiš’s work in prose: hence its place in this collection, and its position at the end, as a sort of “lyric epilogue.”

  The stories “Jurij Golec” and “The Poet” are being published here for the first time. The others have already been published in this order: “A and B” in the book Život, literatura (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1990); “The Stateless One” in Srpski književni glasnik (1992, vol. 1); “The Debt” in Književne novine (1992, pp. 850–851); and “The Lute and the Scars” in Nedeljna borba (April 30–May 5, 1993).

  In giving to this book the title The Lute and the Scars, we were guided by the fact that Kiš named two of his three collections of stories after one of the collected tales themselves; he did so less because of the story’s privileged position in its collection than because of the ability of the title itself to bring thematic unity to the other stories. It seemed to us that we could accomplish something similar with this title, in addition to enjoying its inherently paradoxical quality.

  The Stateless One

  The story “The Stateless One,” which comes down to us in “in-complete and imperfect” form, was inspired by the life of Ödön von Horváth. It will not be difficult for the reader to comprehend the reasons for Kiš’s interest in this “Central European fate” that ended in such a bizarre manner on the Champs-Élysées on the eve of the Second World War: Ödön von Horváth died on June 1, 1938, during a storm that descended abruptly on Paris, obliterating trees and sweeping away everything in its path. A heavy branch took Ödön von Horváth’s life, right in front of the doors to the Théâtre Marigny. He had arrived in Paris after an encounter with a “premium fortune-teller” in Amsterdam, who had prophesied that an event awaited him in the French capital that would fundamentally alter his life! (It is also easy to recognize the figure of an unnamed poet who plays an indirect but important role in this story: Endre Ady, whose life and literary fate was intertwined in similar ways with those of both Horváth and Kiš. In this sense, “The Stateless One” is
in some of its passages a condensed replica of parts of Kiš’s story “An Excursion to Paris,” which dates from 1959 and was dedicated to Ady.)

  Kiš first obtained translations of some of Horváth’s plays in 1970. These were the French versions that Gallimard published in 1967 (namely Italian Night, Don Juan Comes Back from the War, and Tales from the Vienna Woods), prepared with an introduction that provided French readers with basic information about the life of this writer who had been utterly unknown up to that point. At this point Horváth began appearing in Kiš’s “warehouse” of emblematic figures and “themes for novels, topics for stories, parallels . . .” But ten years would have to pass (this was the decade in which he wrote Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, and The Anatomy Lesson) before the fate of this stateless man, which was attractive for reasons far exceeding mere literary interest, would again come to the front of Kiš’s mind. For it was in 1979 that Kiš began his ten-year long “Joycean exile,” at the end of which, as was the case with Horváth as well, came death in Paris. A further, external stimulus came from a recently published doctoral dissertation concerning history and fiction in Horváth’s dramas (Jean-Claude François, Histoire et fiction dans le théâtre d’Ödön von Horváth, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978). On an unnumbered page of the manuscript of “The Stateless One,” we find the following:

  A story about the apatride or the Man Without a Country has been an obsession of mine for years. Actually from the time I read a short note in a magazine about his life and his tragic end. At first I had in mind writing some kind of retrospective or scholarly study about him. I wrote down a few observations, some of those naïve notes in which you conceal your own thoughts behind your characters. That was all really just appeasing my conscience and the creation of an illusion that notes like that are the beginnings of stories, their nuclei, the load-bearing beams of a future prose construction. But of course I got no further than that. And then one day I came across (by accident?) a PhD thesis that dealt with my stateless man. His character came back to life for me at once. And what did I find in this dissertation that related to my hero? A mass of useful information, dates, facts; but my story, my imaginary story atomized. The secret and mysterious atmosphere enveloping the life and death of my “hero” dissipated abruptly. But I nonetheless resolved to persevere, to try to bring back the atmosphere of secrets and the unknown. To write according to my own lights the bare-bones framework of facts, similar to a net of squares made of intersecting words.

 

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