ALSO BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
The Rainbow Stories (1989)
The Ice-Shirt (1990)
Whores for Gloria (1991)
Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (1991)
An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992)
Fathers and Crows (1992)
Butterfly Stories (1993)
The Rifles (1994)
The Atlas (1996)
The Royal Family (2000)
Argall (2001)
Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2003)
Europe Central (2005)
Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006)
Poor People (2007)
Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
Imperial (2009)
Imperial: Photographs (2009)
Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theatre (2010)
The Book of Dolores (2013)
VIKING
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by William T. Vollmann
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“The Forgetful Ghost” first appeared in Vice magazine;
“Widow’s Weeds” first appeared in Agni.
Illustrations by the author
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Vollmann, William T.
[Stories. Selections]
Last stories and other stories / William T. Vollmann.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-13548-2
I. Title.
PS3572.O395A6 2014
813’.54—dc23 2013047856
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER
It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased, to powder him, whiten his face and rouge his cheeks and lips, and dress him in a frock coat with patent leather shoes and black trousers, as if going to a ball, may God forbid—this shall not happen to Makso.
—Testament of Hatji Makso Despic, drawn up in Sarajevo, 29 March 1921
CONTENTS
Also by William T. Vollmann
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
To the Reader
Supernatural Axioms
I
Escape (Sarajevo)
Listening to the Shells (Sarajevo)
The Leader (Mostar)
II
The Treasure of Jovo Cirtovich (Trieste)
The Madonna’s Forehead (Trieste)
Cat Goddess (Trieste)
The Trench Ghost (Redipuglia, Tungesnes)
III
The Faithful Wife (“Bohemia” and Trieste)
Doroteja (“Bohemia”)
The Judge’s Promise (“Bohemia”)
IV
June Eighteenth (Trieste and Querétaro)
The Cemetery of the World (Veracruz)
Two Kings in Ziñogava (Veracruz)
V
The White-Armed Lady (Stavanger)
Where Your Treasure Is (Stavanger, Lillehammer)
The Memory Stone (Stavanger)
The Narrow Passage (Stavanger)
The Queen’s Grave (Klepp)
Star of Norway (Lillehammer)
VI
The Forgetful Ghost (Tokyo)
The Ghost of Rainy Mountain (Nikko)
The Camera Ghost (Tokyo)
The Cherry Tree Ghost (Kyoto, Nikko)
Paper Ghosts (Tokyo)
VII
Widow’s Weeds (Kauai, Paris)
The Banquet of Death (Buenos Aires)
The Grave-House (Unknown)
Defiance (Unknown)
Too Late (Toronto)
VIII
When We Were Seventeen (U.S.A.)
IX
The Answer (Unknown)
Goodbye (Kamakura)
And a Postscript
Sources and Notes
Acknowledgments
TO THE READER
This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost. As I watch this world turn past my window, I wonder how I should have lived. Now that it seems too late to alter myself, I decline to complain; indeed, my only regret is that pleasure comes to an end. Wherever there is a rose, runs the ancient Gulistan, there is a thorn; and when wine is drunk there is a hangover; where treasure is buried there is a snake; where there is the noble pearl there are sharks; the pain of death follows the pleasures of life, and the delights of Paradise are hidden by a wall of ill.— This wall of ill, won’t you view it with me? Through my late father’s binoculars, its aggregates of bloody leaves resemble coral or scrambled eggs, all washed and blended by watercolor fogs. Now let’s step up to count vines and snakes! If you’ll kindly verify my tally, I promise to prove that for all its deadliness, our wall of ill remains no less green and delicious. To be stung by that poisonous creeper over there might even induce an orgasm; for its leaves bear undeniably precious speckles, and there appear to be vermilion dewdrops upon its urticating hairs. And don’t forget to lick Malkhut, the Unlighted Mirror! Some of you may decline, in keeping with the axiom: This shall not happen to Makso. But why not make the occasion a dress ball, should the hole in the ground prove wide enough? As for me, even when I dance I long to describe everything—not least, the elephants who carry great blossoms on their braided trunks, and the green monkeys standing on the elephants’ heads—for what “posterity” declines to censor, time will blight, causing happy new generations of the ignorant to suppose that our wall of ill was never better than a hedge of grey thorns, so read me now! For I do see beauty; I retain my sexual hopes! Consider that bluish-faced crested iguana over there with the white-banded flesh; the way it watches me while slowly drawing itself along a branch can’t help but put me in mind of miscegenatory sports. Having heard so much, you still don’t care to crawl closer? Pick a rose with me; sip a bitter cup—or would you rather dive for noble pearls in your own private cesspool? Infinity, I am sure, will kiss you in this blue and green and cloudy land. Or should you prefer doctrine to sensation, I’ll guide you through barbed wire past Makso’s grave (and mine) to the Last Meadow, where my favorite moss-bearded prophet has nearly finished computing the answer to the following test of intellect: Is it better to lose all quickly or slowly—or best never to have been bo
rn? He has already taught me the names of the evil angels. He says: There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying. Therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world.— I’ll believe him—so long as I can whiten my face and dance with an iguana. My prophet intimates that both may be possible. He runs a barbering business on the side. He’ll rouge your cheeks and lips for next to nothing. When prostitutes can’t help you anymore, let him sell you a hole! He’s shown me how to play with death as did Newton with thought-pebbles. Before he got enlightened, he used to worry that you and I would feel sad upon learning how small we are. He himself is big. He says: You too will come to comprehend, if you but keep to the ill-ward path.— It was he who first led me to the pale river which is white in the morning, brown in the afternoon. Down this chalky way of rusty ships and crescent-boats sail people whom I used to know; they will transfer at various terminals, and then, somewhere I have not been, all of them, those rich crowds with red or yellow umbrellas, those poor men with the sacks on their heads, those longhaired women in flower-patterned dresses, will go swarming off the last ferry into the rain. Wasn’t that Makso over there? And didn’t my pretty lizard just make a getaway? Sharpening his razor, my prophet advises me to make my own fun. I may as well stay here overnight, polishing these last stories until they’re good enough to bury in the ground.
I see trees head on, in layers and layers, and now the river has turned to jade, because it reflects bamboos muted by the humid sky. Behind a stand of needle-leaved whipping-trees comes a mountain of writhing cobras; and from within that mountain I hear the hoarse rapid laughter of children.
A man and a woman sit across from each other, and on the round table between them lies a perfectly wrapped box of sweets. The man opens it. The woman smiles; her finger hovers, for each candy is a different color and shape, with a unique poison at its heart. She takes a pale jade jelly with sesame seeds on top. He takes a red one made of bean paste. She touches his hand. They gaze down into their candy box. Just so I gaze into my lovely wall of ill.
WTV
Sacramento 2005–2013
SUPERNATURAL AXIOMS
1. To the extent that the dead live on, the living must resemble them.
2. Confessing such resemblance, we should not reject the possibility that we might at this very moment be dead.
3. Since life and death are the only two states which we can currently postulate, then to the extent that they are the same, immortality, and even eternal consciousness, seems possible.
a. We do not remember what we might have been before birth. This, and only this, gives hope of oblivion.— Insufficient!
b. Many religions, not to mention our own egocentric incapacity to imagine the world without us, collude in asserting the existence of an afterlife.
c. The universe is at best indifferent. Since eternal consciousness would be the worst torture possible, and God’s own writings under various aliases hint at such a possibility, why not expect it?
d. Besides, a ghost told me so.
ESCAPE
That green light and humid summer air, the cigarette scent of hotels, the way that as the women aged they widened and solidified and their voices deepened; and then the way that the weather so often altered so that the green light would go grey or white; the loud and prolonged clacking of the key in the lock across the corridor, followed by footsteps echoing smashingly down the stairs, the dogs’ barking in early morning, all these stigmata of peacetime faded just as the shell-holes and bullet-holes should have done a decade ago, and the story of the lovers began.
Many men have been conquered by the way a Sarajevo girl parts her lips when she is blowing smoke rings, holding the cigarette beside her ear. Because Zoran had grown up with Zlata, he could hardly have said how or when he lost his freedom; but on a certain evening of green light, he found himself sitting beside her in the park, and while the birds sang, his hands went helplessly around her just above the buttocks; he was bending her backward, his tongue in her mouth; and she was pushing him away, after which her arm somehow fell around his neck.
On the following evening they were on the same bench, which he straddled, cradling her back and bending forward to kiss her on the side of the neck while she reclined against him; and the air smelled like flowers and cigarettes.
His face was large and strong. His skin was smooth. He kept his hair short, and his eyes were brownish-green.
Sometimes Zlata needed to torture her sweethearts a trifle to feel alive, to know that she was stronger than they. Afterward she felt remorse. She used to say to her elder sister: Maybe I’m asking of them something that they’re not able to give me.— But from him she asked nothing except everything.
First of all, she informed him, she demanded that he believe in destiny. He promised that she was his fate. She slammed her tongue into his mouth. He gave her a copper ring. She gave him her photograph. Their emotions could scarcely be contained in the immense greenness of a Central European evening.
Her mother, who held a cigarette not quite vertically between two fingers, did not remind her that Zoran was a Serb, that being of but middling significance in those days; besides, she knew the boy and liked him.
If we live long enough, it may well be that our virtues turn into agonies; but the memory of first love sweetens with age. I know a former blonde now gratefully married to an adoring and understanding older husband, who smilingly steps away whenever she asks some past acquaintance for news of the boy, now a greyhaired father with a heart murmur, who slept with her no more than three times (she remembers each one), invited her to travel with him in a foreign country, then abandoned her there, returning to his other woman, with whom he presently lives on bad terms. He will always remain the former blonde’s true love. And the husband smiles. With patient craft he invites her back into his arms.
It was with another sort of indulgence that Zlata’s mother regarded her daughter’s romance. If, God willing, something came of it, that would be all right. If not, there were other boys, some of whom even went to mosque.
They took a walk along the river, and somewhere, I cannot say how far from the Vrbanja Most, he proposed. She replied that she must ask her mother.
She was wearing a low top, and her cleavage made him weak. He squeezed her round the waist until it hurt; she loved that. She was whispering into his face, and he was smiling. Seeing how they mooned over each other, her elder sister threw back her head in amused disgust and closed her dark eyes.
Sitting him down, Zlata’s mother said that it must be a long engagement since they were so young; everyone would wait and see. But he knew that she was not angry. His mother went to see Zlata’s mother and returned, saying nothing. His father put an arm around his shoulders.
Whenever Zlata had to go home to her parents, Zoran felt anguished, and gazed for half an hour at a time at her photograph, drinking in her long reddish hair and big round earrings, her brownish-green eyes beneath the heavy, sleepy lids, the almost cruel nostrils and lush mouth.
Her family lived in the Old Town near the library, so once the war started, the Serbs paid particular attention to that area, which did, however, offer proximity to the brewery where one could get drinking water. Less fortunately situated people, such as Zoran, had to bicycle there, risking their lives to fill a water jug.
By then everyone had balcony gardens with tomatoes, cabbages, onions; and Zlata’s mother was one of the first to learn how to cut a tomato into small pieces in order to plant them in dirt in a big black plastic bag. God willing, six or seven new tomatoes might be born. She taught Zoran the trick, and he showed his parents.
Zoran’s brother got some real coffee, God knows from where, and Zoran took some to Zlata’s family. Matters certainly could have gone otherwise. I remember being told about the man who killed two hundred people in Srebrenica; he was from a mixed marriage, but all the same they told him: You mus
t do it or we kill you.— There were other Serbs like him, and various Muslims and Croats did the same. But Zlata and Zoran held fast to one another.
After Zlata’s teacher was killed by a sniper, the girl wept for many hours. Zoran sat beside her, holding her hand.
The Serbs had the leading position in our city, said her mother. We can’t understand what drove them to shoot us.
Drying her eyes, Zlata told her: Don’t say that in front of him. He’s never been against us!
Zoran smiled meaninglessly at the floor.
Zlata’s mother lit another half-cigarette. She wished to know if he were acquainted with any of these murderers.
Some of my old colleagues in the office are doing it, said Zlata, squeezing his hand. Now they even have Romanian girls who are snipers. Let’s get off the subject.
Well, well! Your colleagues! Which ones? Do you mean Darko?
Never mind.
Zoran, let me just ask you this: What should be done with these snipers?
How can I know? I’m not a soldier.
The next day he cycled to the brewery, his mother in the doorway praying after him; and an antiaircraft gun stalked him lazily without shooting. He felt sweaty between his shoulderblades. Pale thunderheads cooled the humid greenish and bluish mountains where the snipers were. He threw down his bike, grabbed the jug, sprinted through the doorway because a gun was often trained on it, entered the friendly dimness and queued for water. Then he rode to Zlata’s.
The besiegers were shooting, Zlata’s mother licking her lips for fear. He had never seen her look so ugly. They all sat staring out the window. Zlata pressed her fists against her ears. Suddenly the tendons arose on her elder sister’s smooth white neck, and she grasped for the wall. They bandaged up her calf; it was merely a grazing wound. Zlata could not stop screaming.
The next day when there was no shelling, Zoran set out for the brewery, where a yellow-faced old man lay dark-gaping and bloody, filled the jug, then rode to visit Zlata. Broken glass grinned newly in the stairwell. The elder sister lay sleeping, with her thin lips turned down like the dark slits of her clenched eyes. Her hair clung sweatily to her forehead and her face was pale. Zlata was scrubbing the dishes, using as little water as she could.
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