Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  Imagine my surprise, after passing the muffins around page 2, which apparently is as far as most people get, to discover that Albertine is a lesbian and that the volume titled Cities of the Plain (in French Sodom and Gomorrah) largely concerns the Baron de Charlus’ relationship with his tailor. Marcel’s first act when Albertine finally leaves him is to pay a tradesman for temporary use of his little daughter—is this, perhaps, a coded reference to pedophilia?

  Still, I recommend Remembrance of Things Past. Marcel does not ask to be held to heroic standards, and there is nothing like the experience of reading a book that is truly long. Proust was a thorough psychologist, and I am sure he could have written a beautiful novel about Zohar’s relationship with his portable radio. His boring dinner parties take as long to read as they might have lasted in real life, and characters mentioned briefly can reappear months later, in different contexts, displaying qualities unsuspected previously and continuing for hundreds of pages before vanishing forever. When, in the final volume, the vast array of social climbers meets to find themselves old and out of style, the effect is breathtakingly lifelike. His translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, maintains a lovely prose style throughout.

  It is said that, to foster concentration, Proust sealed his windows with foil and refused to leave his bed. I have no such requirements. Having been raised to evade chores through reading, and helped by natural introversion, I am disturbed by noise above a certain threshold of volume and by little else. If I write while playing a CD, I do not hear it. I forget pots of rice, and the pitas I remove from the toaster oven sizzle as I drop them in the sink.

  Significantly, it is the word “Nell!” which I find easiest of all not to hear. “Nell,” in other words, is perceived on some level not as my name, but as something akin to the six-digit number my computer must send to the server at Tel Aviv University in order to enter and manipulate it.

  When I was a child, I rushed to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, impressed by the idea of a novel about the events of a single day. Unfortunately, unlike Proust, whose protagonist moves relentlessly forward after the muffins yank him violently into the past on page 2, Solzhenitsyn cheats. I.e., he allows Ivan to reminisce about other days.

  I was much more impressed by The Gulag Archipelago. At times I envied the prisoners, who were given relative privacy and the chance to sleep eighteen hours a day. When one felt lonely, he would turn to his neighbor for a brief spell of chess or chemistry, then fall cheerfully back into a doze. Their transfer to the labor camp horrified me, and many years later, when I began to work for a living, I developed a mental game which permitted me to stay with jobs I should have quit on the first day: the Gulag Archipelago Test. Standing in a student cafeteria, sweating profusely into plastic gloves while a supervisor yelled, “Tighten up on that line! You girls better tighten up!” I would ask myself, “Is this as bad as building a railroad in Siberia in January with no shoes?” The answer was always no, and I would go on working hard until I was fired.

  After reading Solzhenitsyn I would sneak out into the snow barefoot, just to see how long I could take it—generally, not long at all. With boots on, the process was more gradual and bearable. The numbness in my legs, moving upward by shades and turning into a dullness and blissful lethargy that affected my entire body, always tempted me to lie down and rest in the soft, inviting snow, but I kept in mind what my mother always said: “Never lie down in the snow.” I would lie down for a few seconds, hurried and guilty, then jump up to run inside for hot cocoa.

  Am I a masochist? I admit to an early habit of lying down in the sandy construction site near the cafeteria at the Girl Scout camp and pretending that I was in the middle of the Sahara, without water, unable to move, and soon to die; I still like indirect flights with long layovers, and last April, I resolved to tour the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in southern Colorado by flying into Kansas City. But even as a child, I was able to identify things I didn’t like. I loathed 440-yard races, for example, and said frequently, “Running four-hundred-and-forty-yard races is an exercise in masochism.” (I am sure I am quoting myself accurately—my family is the sort where people look at broken glass on the floor and say, “I would like to file a formal protest.” Now all children talk that way, having learned it from TV situation comedy writers.) Sometimes instead of finishing the race I would throw myself to the ground, making sure to skin my knees badly for authenticity. In other words, I do not think my masochistic behavior was inspired by masochism, but by a desire for significance, and where is the significance in running faster than a few other rural Virginia high school girls? Significance came from emulating Solzhenitsyn, or the Count of Monte Cristo, or the sailors in the books my dad was always lending me, who endured weeks on rafts by catching seagulls and sucking them dry, or the one who survived two weeks’ confinement to the bowsprit by carefully rationing a single pint of rum. A girl who plunges toward a cinder track, scarring her hands and covering her knees with blood just to avoid thirty seconds of asthma and the shame of coming in third, is worth six of a girl who plods obediently around the track in 1:15, in my view, now and, apparently, then.

  Likewise, I believe that my actions with regard to the Great Sand Dune were governed, not by masochism, but by a creative urge. Direct flights and clean, comfortable hotels make for pleasant vacations, but drab stories. Trailers packed with living beef forced me off roads all over the vast reaches of the Great Plains. The Rockies loomed before me, frightening monoliths of black ice. Climbing the Great Sand Dune, I paused for ten or fifteen breaths after every step, as though I were on the last approach to Everest without oxygen.

  I carried only water, a peanut butter sandwich, and Little Debbie apple turnovers. The ascent took nearly two hours and began with a punishing barefoot run across the glacial stream which encircles the dune, carrying sand from downwind back to windward, preserving the position of the main dune indefinitely. At the top, the wind was cold, the sand was unsteady, and I was met by an elderly couple with ski poles, but I didn’t care, because what I had come for was the descent: 750 vertical feet of leaping and sliding through sand soft as puffy feathers, as if I were fifteen again (I used to leap down hills all the time), weightless and invulnerable.

  Soon after, I was the only guest in the only hotel in still-frigid Pitkin, Colorado, where flocks of blackbirds sang pure, clear notes alternating with what seemed to be English, and a few days later, I was trapped in a snowdrift on a blind curve near the top of Monarch Pass. The masseur who rescued me laughed heartily when I said I regretted not driving over Red Mountain instead. “It’s nothing but switchbacks,” he said. “There’s a big monument to the snowplow drivers who have died.” I thanked him for saving my life. Only then began the true test of character: benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. (They call it “benign” when they don’t think it started with a stroke.) After three thousand miles my eyeballs, grown used to the passing of scenery, now twitched uncontrollably from left to right at all times, and I was unable to walk. I could only drive. I hit the bottom somewhere east of Dodge City in an itchy bed in a thin-walled motel. The room was hot, and rolled like a daysailer in a nor’easter to the moans and erotic repartee of an ever-changing stream of whores.

  For significance, offhand I would say it borrowed slightly more from Lifepod than from the Swedish movie about the North Pole expedition (I escaped alive). Missing was any trace of the Gulag Archipelago—my freedom was complete, almost too complete. Tales of imprisonment and slavery have faded from my inner life since I stopped attending school. Like most adults, I now embrace literature that celebrates futile journeys.

  Accordingly, Mary set out the next morning to Brooklyn on the 7 train from Grand Central, then transferred to the G train.

  The G moved slowly, wobbling and stopping at intervals, its flickering lights often failing completely. At first Mary only looked around at the weary faces of the people whose lives were spent on this forgotten train, which rolled shuttle-fashion from Brook
lyn to Queens and back again, but after a while she thought, This can’t be what Yigal comes here for, and she turned to look out the window. The tunnel walls crept by, opening here and there in a white niche for workmen to hide from the passing train, and every so often there was a glass-windowed office and a Christmas tree, gray as charcoal and draped with shreds of tinsel. She looked again at the other passengers, and then the lights went out. Outside, the walls had fallen away. Holding her hands around her eyes, she tried to let them adjust to the darkness, but they were too slow and the train heaved into motion again before she could see what was outside. She closed her eyes. The next time the train stopped, she was ready. They were in a mothballed station, sealed from above, with just the barest crack of daylight falling through a grating. The distant walls were very busy and irregular, as though something were piled against them, stacked up almost to the ceiling. She heard a door slam somewhere on the train, and as it began to move and the lights came up she saw someone walking, far away down the platform. She moved to the end of the car and tried the door. She stepped gingerly onto the metal plate over the coupler and leaned out over the swinging chain. When the train stopped she jumped to the rocks below. She could feel dense black dust on her palms as she crossed to the other side and walked down the tracks, looking for a ladder.

  A man helped her up. “Thanks. Where am I?” she asked, wiping her hands on her pants.

  The man turned on a flashlight and shone it in her face. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. Don’t mind me, I’m just browsing.”

  “You’re a silkie.”

  “What?”

  “I can tell you’re a silkie, despite what you’ve done with your hair. I bet you had no idea that anyone, even another silkie, could pick you out in this light, but I can, even though you’re the first silkie I ever saw.”

  Mary laughed at him. He continued quickly: “‘The skin, hair, and fingernails all of the same tint, the openings of the ears and nostrils precisely the same size. It is said that he who created silkies saved himself three minutes’ labor in this way, for to him no labor is too trivial to be saved’—you can deny it if you want, but I know you’re a silkie.”

  “I don’t deny it. So there. How did you know?”

  “You don’t know where you are? Not at all?”

  She shook her head.

  “This station is part of the Institute of Demonology Libraries. Now do you get the connection?”

  A little background information: By 1968, the height of the psychedelic drug craze, it was apparent to librarians of demonology that their collections, once merely misunderstood, were becoming dangerous. The attractions of rigorous study were outpaced for most students by drug-induced feelings of conviction, leading to widespread and deeply held Satanist beliefs. Orgies and human sacrifice ensued, and one by one the great demonology libraries were walled up—at Holy Cross, at Notre Dame—and their catalogs stricken from the record. The many branches of the institute represent only a fraction of the great lost treasures of the Jesuits, etc.

  “Are you saying silkies are minions of Satan?”

  “Not necessarily, but unlike the other minions they’re very well-documented, so I started doing my dissertation on them. I got this job conditionally and then never finished it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Actually, there is something I’m interested in. I used to have this little medallion . . .”

  He led her toward a heap of boxes. “This is everything I have. Take a look. The collection’s not cataloged—just organized by station. Everything at this branch was at Mary-mount.”

  “Can I borrow your flashlight?” She opened a box and peered inside. “Is this one just bones?”

  “I think so.”

  She tried another box. It was full of coins, medals, statuettes, dice, spinning tops, bundles of sticks, packs of cards, and rotted kapok. “So you don’t actually know what any of this is?”

  “No.” He looked into the box. “Sometimes I take it out and play with it, though.”

  She asked to see his collection of silkie material. He pulled out a box with a lid, then began removing folders from it. Mary picked each one up and put it down. “These are all in weird languages I can’t read.”

  “I know. That’s the problem. It took me eight years at Columbia just to get started. If you can read four words in a row, you’re practically an eminent scholar, and after you publish, you wait for years for someone to get curious enough to check your work.” He sighed. “I’ll show you one of the places I learned to recognize silkies. It’s written in heavily inflected early medieval Latin that was spoken in Spain and noted down in Arabic characters, in shorthand. It’s pretty typical of the silkie stuff—a little tract called ‘Women to Avoid.’”

  He unrolled a crumbling scroll on his desk, held the flashlight over it, and began, “‘Women to Avoid. Of all the women, these women you must avoid. You must avoid the bear. Large, hairy, you must fear the bear. You must avoid the’—I forget what this is . . . I know—‘the squirrel.’”

  “Skip to the silkies.”

  “Hmm. ‘The seal you must fear, above all women. Small, gold, both skin and fingernails. The hole of the ears, the hole of the nose, precisely alike.’ See?”

  “How many women have you accused of being silkies?”

  “I don’t meet women very often.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. You’d think more women would be drawn to this kind of scholarship, but demonology seems to be very much a male thing.”

  “Don’t you go upstairs? Don’t you go on dates?”

  “I don’t know, I just sit down here and read. It doesn’t pay so well, so I live with my mom—”

  “What have you got on Jews?”

  “Oh, reams and reams. That whole wall over there.” He pointed across the station. “The roof leaks on that side, it should all be gone in ten years or so.”

  “I know this is a personal question,” Mary said, “but do you ever feel you’re wasting your life?”

  He grinned. “Isn’t that just like a minion of Satan, coming down here to tempt me—don’t you know you’re the woman I fear most?”

  “If I were you I’d fear the bear and the squirrel more,” Mary said. “Are you sure I can’t tempt you upstairs for some coffee?”

  “Just a minute,” he said, loosening his tie. He pulled out a wooden crucifix on a chain and held it toward Mary.

  “Ouch! Stop that!” she cried. He jumped back in terror and she began to laugh. “Come back, I was kidding.”

  The librarian was still panting in fear as he led her up the stairs.

  Somewhere, I won’t say where but my friends know who I mean, there is someone who goes around saying that I live to torture men. Am I a sadist? Is it true that I cruelly force men to fall deeply and helplessly in love with me, and then crush them, body and soul, like bugs?

  On this theory I am, like Mary, entirely ordinary looking, with what is called in Spanish a cara de buena persona, prompting men who would not ordinarily aspire to possess the ideal woman (which I am, all things considered, in spite of my appearance) to regard me as already practically theirs. Letting down their guard, they notice only too late the transfigurative power of the brilliance, wit, and sympathy I employ in elevating myself beyond their reach to celestial heights from which I can only look down smiling, waving, forever unattainable. If I were better looking, they would realize the danger from the beginning and take precautions. If they, on the other hand, were better looking, they would not bother with someone like me in the first place. Their own homely awkwardness becomes the snare that traps them: Fearing they’ll never do any better, they are caught, like Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whirling in a vicious circle, but by themselves.

  Lucky for everyone, I am divinely beautiful, and no man can look at me without becoming intimidated and depressed. Close relationships cannot flower in the atmosphere of universal self-abasement created by my very existence.

  Mary, however
, was not so lucky, and she was in real danger of hurting the feelings of the homely and awkward demonologist. They sat drinking coffee together for an hour, Mary doing her best to befriend him, hoping only to learn what she could about the IDL and its possible connection to Yigal, Mr. Pickwick, and the heir to the Israeli throne. Unfortunately, he seemed to know nothing but silkie folklore and esoterica. She yawned and asked for the check.

  Meanwhile Yigal knocked on the door of the Dolphin Star Temple in Mount Rainier, Maryland. The high priestess answered, clad in her steel-gray robes. She had just been perfecting a new dolphin-like movement.

  “Yigal,” she said softly. She walked backward, her gray gauze streaming in the breeze from two electric fans, and knelt on a silken pillow before the altar.

  “Holy one,” Yigal began, “things are getting confusing and I need your help.”

  “Yes, my priestess in Tel Aviv told me of your trouble.” She nodded toward a picture of me on the back wall, decorated with kelp. “You wish to learn the meaning of the card Leviathan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you never drew that card.”

  “No, holy one.”

  “How do you know it exists?”

  Yigal said firmly, “I don’t know the card exists. Let’s just say I want to know the meaning of the entry in the book. You know why.” She nodded and beckoned him forward to the altar. He sat beside her on a cushion and raised his arms in a dolphin-like manner. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, she was holding out a different book, a very small one that looked a bit like a CIA manual. He began to read aloud:

  The Leviathan is a unique futuristic prototype with no moving parts. Made almost entirely of a gelatinous substance, it is sheathed in a continuous ribbon of osmium sealed with caoutchouc and wooden dowels. Like the golem of Prague, it takes its motive power from a name—the name of Moshe Dayan.