Perec came to me and stayed with me, just like that, a permanent piece of equipment often stored in my camera bag, which is my most private luggage. At the end he’s usually rugged and torn at the edges.
When people write about Perec it’s usually about all the obstacles he created for himself and then had to overcome. It’s enough to take a look at the manuscript of Life a User’s Manual, to see a list of those obstacles, points, and mandatory words. It’s not a thin copybook, but a thick volume hard for outsiders to understand. The plots of life go according to their own paths and pace in this novel and the difficulties have been overcome, which is why it’s hard to notice them. These difficulties were a necessity, helpful obstacles. And so, whenever people talk about Perec, it’s always about how hard it was for him to write and how peculiar it was for such lightness to come out of such struggle. I’m convinced he couldn’t do it any other way. He wrote about it himself, the hardship was necessary. He outlined mandatory checkpoints, signposts along his ski route, and it was all he could do to follow them. He couldn’t go straight, but had to slalom his way down the mountain. One of his admirers, Italo Calvino, wrote in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium that he knew only a few of Perec’s constraints, but there were many more than Perec admitted.
Suddenly you see, all within one second, into a Parisian townhouse on 11 Simon-Crubellier Street, as if the entire façade was removed to reveal everything within, the interior, the rooms, the people. It feels as if, in a sudden flash of light, you see all their stories. It doesn’t happen slowly, by meticulously reproducing chains of events, but rapidly, in a single glance. That’s Perec. He’s not obvious; an artificial design from start to finish. And it’s that artificiality that should transpire through every seam. But there are no seams. And so the journey across the landscape of inhabitants’ frozen lives, which are exposed like a brain during trepanation, takes the path of a knight on a chessboard. I follow the knight, mindlessly and without paying attention to the fact that it lands in every square only once, and that it skips one of the squares entirely, even though it doesn’t have to. And that’s a flaw inscribed into the perfect structure of that journey, a distortion that makes it even more beautiful. I move like a chessboard knight. I sit around provincial train stations, airports made of glass. I sit for hours on the train, separated from the rest of the world by a language barrier. I find myself inside an artificial world woven out of ideas, and if I’m a little distracted while I read (that’s how most people read, after all) I don’t stand a chance. Perec substitutes himself against what is real. If you were to add the commonly known fact that he was fascinated by mathematical riddles all his life, and that he wrote A Void, a three-hundred-page long novel, about the disappearance of the most common letter in the French language, the vowel “e,” without which this language seems impossible and as a result deprived him of two thirds of the French vocabulary, then the image he creates becomes clearer. Perec’s was a beautiful, but perverse mind. He was doomed, or so it seemed, but whenever he approached failure he would always come out victorious.
I always wanted to grab him by the sleeve, learn about more than is written down throughout his literary games; games that, nobody knows how, turn into great literature like water into wine. I knew very little, only as much as anybody else: that he died of cancer, probably because of those Gitanes cigarettes, and that his parents were from here, from Poland. They were Icek and Cyrla Peretz of the Szulewicz family. They left for France before the war. His father died after volunteering in the army. His mother, by contrast, never volunteered anywhere. The war came for her. Cyrla was sent to Auschwitz and never made it out.
Perec’s own life, the one without a user’s manual, the life that grew wild and escaped mathematical laws, was spent visiting psychoanalysts—taking drugs—the contemporary equivalent of Bedlam chains. He lived in several different places, including Poland, I know about it from friends. He came and was different than in the pictures. He wasn’t so radiant, so burdened with a cat on his shoulder, not so Egyptian. He looked more like a bum, rather tired with his different lives. It wasn’t a trip to find his roots, but rather a penance in the form of a pilgrimage to the place of hollowness and disappearance. And so I was jealous of friends who got to meet him and did nothing to keep the memory of him for me because back then I didn’t understand that, actually, they had. They told me part of the story.
Another moment of beauty in Perec is his endless calculations, lists of objects, people, facts, and occurrences that stemmed from each other. Lists of consecutive owners of certain objects filling out spaces that, in the end, disperse like smoke over a meadow because, as the author claimed himself, they had never existed, were neither beautiful nor ugly. They just weren’t at all. There’s no romantic plot in Life, only chains of events, one next to the other, that captivate the reader, and enforce their own rhythm into my head—a rhythm far more powerful than the clamor of a train. The powerful rhythm of that novel, its wit, and ironic smile behind the hidden mistake—that one skipped square . . . When there’s a row of rotten teeth behind the wall of lips, how much more real does the image look? How much more trustworthy life becomes when cancer corrupts it from within. The characters are shrouded in irony, and that’s why you perceive them as so real, this bunch of crazies, Bartlebooth and his servants, like Winckler. And all of that in order to bring a story as vast as the universe to a close—because between its beginning and its end is an entire world, packed in with its creation, painting lessons, trips attested by the number stickers on trunks. There are puzzles completed and ruined from being brought back to their initial form—an empty sheet of paper and a thin board. There were people, later they were gone, and we can’t say anything about them. That was the ideal according to Bartlebooth. Perec, with his dying man’s smile, testifies to something different because he tells us everything about his people.
If I were to count all the trips I probably spent with Perec, it would add up to many months. One time in Arles, in the south of France, we were in a café on a market day—the crowd flowed before our eyes, overloaded with seafood, cheeses, and local wines. We were sitting, sipping coffee, then picon or some other muddy aperitif of the south that tastes of anise. Suddenly one of my friends nonchalantly said that maybe we should stay longer so that we could meet Perec’s widow. So we sat by the boulevard des Lices in Bar du Marché; time went by and we were getting progressively more and more drunk. The widow was nowhere to be seen and never showed up in the end. I don’t regret it, and I even feel silly for waiting for her on that day. What I really waited for that day, as Grandma would say, I haven’t got the slightest clue.
I would’ve never learned about the sedan chairs on the streets of Dresden if not for the memoir of composer and orchestra conductor Karol Kurpiński. There are more operas, churches, choirs, organs, chamber music, Italian singers traveling from city to city, their throats ruined to no surprise after performing twice or even three times a day, more dances, ballets, operettas, meetings with music publishers and composers according to this slightly unreliable-seeming journal of his 1823 journey through Europe than there is actual life outside of music. Oftentimes Kurpiński doesn’t report anything of note, but sometimes, accidentally, he will mention a thing or two and that’s how, en passant, he directed my attention to this unexpected mode of transportation employed in Dresden. “What a preposterous idea,” I thought to myself, “to get around a city in a sedan chair in the middle of Europe and not see anything immoral about it.” Although, on the other hand, it’s like riding in a rickshaw pulled by a man, somewhere in Asia. That still happens today. But in Asia, of course, it’s commonly accepted. A Western Man on vacation pardons himself because, after all, he’s far away from home and people there do the same if they can’t afford a car. But a sedan chair carried by men—because we’re not talking about a basterna carried by mules—in Dresden in the nineteenth century is something different.
Kurpiński isn’t the only one who leads me throug
h countries full of facts that are not entirely comfortable. When I read in King Sobieski’s father’s journal that some Frenchman, wild with hatred and surrounded by other wild Frenchmen, ate pieces of Ravaillac in his scrambled eggs, I don’t think about the mental limitations and innate brutality of those people. When I read passages by the London chronicler Ackroyd, about how pieces of convicts’ bodies were in high demand and how some pregnant woman took a dead man’s hand and placed it on her stomach because a hanged man’s hand was supposed to bring health to the baby, I think about all the official methods of applying death that produced these human bits and pieces. It all happened by order of the court, not by revenge under the cloak of the night, and not by a robbery gone awry. It all happened in broad daylight, on a square, in order to show what happens to men who break the law. And for a little bit of entertainment, too. Gallows were designated for the lower classes, common criminals. Their bodies would hang in the city or along the road. Those who were born to a higher social class deserved a more dignified death, by sword or ax, which reminds me of the medieval custom, beautiful but extinct, something locked in stone and frozen in a tale just barely comprehensible to us today. It doesn’t bring to mind times that are in the past, but almost around the corner of our memories. From that second, more dignified way of bringing about death, by sword or ax (not always foolproof because the blade could slip and the whole procedure would have to be repeated), came an ingenious idea by doctor Guillotine, and later so eagerly put into practice by the French Revolution. He commenced a democratic process of decapitating all enemy heads, regardless of class and with mechanical precision.
The beginning of the guillotine’s industry and its marvelous period of gaining momentum, when heads kept rolling into wicker baskets, are generally well known. The conversation about its end is sparse. And for me, the end of its story seems far more interesting. In France, the guillotine ended its career not too long ago—in 1977 and to the misery of the last general executioner for the state, and to the former and longtime assistant to the general executioner, who was fired after two executions he performed out of his own initiative. Only twelve years earlier, communist Germany decided to stop decapitations because Germans, not only in the communist East, liked rolling heads too. Jünger noted in the forties: “mainly horse butchers applied for the job. Those who still carried out executions by ax felt a kind of artistic superiority toward guillotine operators. They had a sense of a service tailored to each individual customer.”
During the first execution under the rule of Kniébol “the executioner, who took off his tail-coat for the occasion, reported for duty wearing a shirt and a tilted top hat. He was wielding a bloody ax in his left hand; his right was raised in a ‘German salute.’”
Kniébol stood for Hitler. That’s how Jünger nicknamed him in his memoir.
Kurpiński is extremely helpful as a tour guide around that gone world; a world assumed to be similar to ours out of laziness. Without him, I also wouldn’t know about lonlokaj. He doesn’t even explain the word, just like my family never explained words they brought to me. Lonlokaj is a servant for hire to travelers who also acts as a tour guide. That’s what I learned from the footnote. Lonlokaj—a beautiful word hidden in times when travelers needed servants. It’s an almost extinct category because barely anybody needs servants anymore, or human tour guides for that matter. Today’s traveler prefers a guidebook, or to look around online. A human tour guide is usually a pain, his jokes a little stale. That’s why, on my journey through Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, I choose to rely on a book, on Kurpiński, and observe with a half-smile from a distance of almost two centuries how he runs like a madman between the theaters and opera houses of Europe to compare performances with those staged in Warsaw. But I also notice moments when he manages to observe a little something more, paintings, sculptures, women. He sees so clearly sometimes that he momentarily becomes tempted to stray from the path of virtue. He’s ready to sleep with a beautiful French girl, even though according to him they remain deaf to the sighs of men who are not backed by a coin or two. He doesn’t consider any other reason for rejection. And so he remains faithful despite himself. He complains that his pocket is too empty for infidelity, just so that in the end he can ask his wife to type out the manuscript. Kurpiński crosses Germany—and it’s a country completely different from the one I know. He travels through France, also different of course, and through Switzerland. He gets stuck in Italy for a long time, naturally because of the opera. In Rome there is a break in his records, no more descriptions or cries for his beloved dog and wife. Kurpiński barely finds time to list all the places he went to and all the things he saw, and sometimes he fails to do even that.
I read his memoir and Kurpiński becomes my lonlokaj. I search for guides like him because when my own clan wanted to teach me about the world, my ears were plugged with ear-wax and my eyes were sewed shut. Ever since I can remember, my family bored me. They would recreate an entire hagiography, a story of our holy clan, a monolithic being centuries old without a single crack on its surface. They would project their vision of this beautiful creature, morally dominating over the rest of the world. Even if it was simply based on virtue of where we came from. After all, we came from those better parts, and only those born there could compare themselves to our family.
The sky turned dark and it was raining almost vertically. There were just two of us, me and some black guy, under the roof of a waiting area. He took out his suitcase from a locker and set up shop on the table next to the closed café. He had some chips, toasted bread, and some hot dogs. He was making supper for himself. After about an hour, the hallway was packed because the ferry was leaving soon, but he kept on methodically stuffing his face, kept on composing nicely squared sandwiches while surrounded by the crowd. I was trying to dry my umbrella and my shoes. Everything was wet and heavy.
At that time of the year ferries as huge as the Ararat Mountains leave from Nynäshamn—almost empty. The captain kept announcing through the speakers that we had over a hundred cars on board, even though it could fit five hundred, and that there were three hundred twenty-six passengers, even though it could take five times more. The ferry left the dock, and the invasion of the bar commenced. Then eating, anything to kill time, those three and a half hours of travel in the dark. Finally, after midnight, the island—Gotland.
It was the end of the tourist season. Only on the weekends could small groups be spotted wandering around with a map of town in their hands, so they could see everything there is to be seen in the sole town on the entire island. They were out to see the ruins of churches, defense walls, and wooden cottages. I would often watch from behind my desk how they approached our house on the hill, a house with the view of the city, of the rooftops smeared with sunlight, and of the sea. I could hear a tour guide announce: “And behind me, ladies and gentlemen, is a famous center for writers.” And all eyes would look into our windows.
I would meet my housemates on the promenade. They would be throwing rocks into the water or coming back from somewhere by bicycle. I would meet them at the store and we would exchange laconic greetings. Sometimes they’d be gone for an entire day, which meant they were working, locked up in their rooms. Only the Greek guy could be spotted day and night because he had a room on the main floor, facing the street. He would translate Greek poetry and cookbooks interchangeably, smoke Azeri cigarettes and drink wine. Sometimes he would wave to me from behind his desk to come in, have a cigarette and a drink. We would arrange to meet in the kitchen in the evening.
I don’t know why I had such Balzacian ideas about writers, that they always work hard until they drop, are always chased by deadlines, but when the job is done—craziness ensues. They drink, eat, and party until dawn. I went into the kitchen on my first night there, quietly, to take a look around, figure out what’s up. Three stoves. Three fridges. Several coffee machines. There were a lot of cookbooks in the corner because everyone cooked for themselves.
There was a great celebration of gluttony ahead of us, a chance to try Swedish, Finnish, American, Belarusian, Indian, and German cuisines, I don’t remember all the other countries people were from.
In the evenings we would sit together around a scratched table in the kitchen. C. would drop by, a Swede from Finland, mumbling something to himself. He would grab the biggest frying pan, and the other pans would drop to the floor and scatter. Everyone would go silent. C. would then grab olive oil, a quarter of a kilo of bacon, eggs—six if he bought a smaller box and eight if he got the bigger one. He would make himself scrambled eggs and bacon with vicious intensity. It would stick to the bottom of the pan because this center for writers had only cast iron pans. And so he would try to get all of it off the bottom with a wooden spoon, cursing in five languages. He wore an army jacket. He was short and this jacket was supposed to make him look more serious. In the end he would sit down with the frying pan at the table, still silent and still wearing the jacket. He’d devour his scrambled eggs, bite into his bread greedily and as fast as possible. He would soon disappear, with his pockets filled with beer bottles. The table would come back to life. “I mean, it’s rude,” the American would say, “I don’t know how to interpret that” she would add. “Someone should tell him,” and she would go back to eating her avocado salad.
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