The Letter Killers Club

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  Turning out into the street, Moov set off automatically without knowing where he went. This was the hour when the series returned from work. Falling in with their methodical ranks marching slowly along—two steps a second—our poet failed to notice how quickly he submitted to their strict and exact tempo; he even liked the light, soulless emptiness infused into him by this contact with the machines’ dead thrusts. After what had gone on in Zes’s study, he wanted not to think for as long as possible, to play for time, and so he purposely, as if joining in some game, pressed his elbows to his body and, staring at the round head of the exon in front of him, thought: “I must do as he does; everything as he does—it’s easier that way.” The round head, rhythmically rocking, turned left at the crossroad. Moov too. The round head marched straight down the avenue to the steel humpback of a bridge. Moov too. Then up the echoing rise between stone balustrades. Suddenly, the round head—like a billiard ball ricocheting off rail cushions—banged first into one balustrade, then—at the angle of reflection—into the other. Moov too. The round head, now rounder and reddening, hung over the balustrade and plunged into the billiard-pocket below: splash. Moov too: splash.

  Informed by the supervisor on duty of the death of his secretary, Zes frowned for a fitful instant then raised his eyes to the suddenly silent init. “Go on.”

  He went on, but what followed was highly alarming: cases of insubordination to innervations were multiplying by the hour and becoming widespread. The exons who serviced the Central Ex (which required extremely fine motor coordination) had had to be taken off the job and destroyed: they were becoming too dangerous. Now at the controls of all exes, as during the struggle for Exinia, were inits. Dark and difficult days lay ahead: unaccustomed to working, the coddled oligarchs had again to work almost round the clock, rapping out an artificial existence on the keys of a colossal instrument. But harmony, the old exactly calculated harmony, did not result: the keys kept kicking up and causing the innervators’ thrusts to dissipate before reaching the exons’ recalcitrant muscles, the score of fact-phrases never reached the strings. The transparent masts in the invisible enclave went on sounding like a swarm of glassily whining wasps, but their once-wise refrain was a dissonance of warring ether waves, disturbing and distorting the celebrated Pax Exiniae.

  Every day the barbed-wire entanglements around the invisible enclave, now home to all inits, were wreathed with the corpses of exons who had tried to break through the steel ring. Most of the monitors (from among the inits) who worked in the regions had died a violent death; the rest had fled to the center. To send out replacements was not deemed possible—the enclave was now isolated and surrounded: by barbed wire, by madness, by the unknown.

  Autopsies were performed on the bodies of all self-deactivated exons, their brains and peripheral nervous systems carefully examined. Their brains turned out to contain a mysterious substance: produced inside nerve tissue in infinitesimal quantities, it appeared to be a protective secretion that had built up gradually and was somehow connected with the process of self-deactivation. Zes summoned the head of the laboratory and asked for an exact description; then he pulled some yellowed sheets out from under a paperweight and put them before the chemist.

  “The handwriting is Nototti’s,” he muttered in confusion, his eyes leaping up from the lines.

  “I was told you were a chemist, not a graphologist. Now come to the point. Does this formula resemble that of the just-discovered protective secretion?”

  “It is identical.”

  “Thank you. In that case, we can say that this substance has been discovered for a second time by you, its name by me: init.”

  At the last meeting of the Privy Council, Zes listened to the members’ opinions, then summarized.

  “So then, in has risen against ex. The outcome of a war between init and vibrophags is clear. But so long as the vibrophags haven’t opened a front, so long as millions of madnesses haven’t broken through to muscles, we may still even the score. I propose we stop the exes. All of them—without delay.”

  Put to a vote, everyone abstained. Except Zes: his voice alone was enough to stop all voices in the invisible enclave. The droning of the exes, reeling in air, slowly began to abate, wafting chromatically upward and vanishing like a swarm of wasps driven away by smoke. In that same instant tens of millions of people crumpled to the ground, their bodies motionless or feebly twitching.

  The inits now emerged from their wire incarceration. Splitting up into groups, they passed among the expiring bodies. The third day of the exodus, some groups were still picking their way through the putrid stench and decay, while others had already reached places that were peopleless—or, rather, corpseless. But the forests and caves where these inits took refuge were not entirely deserted; they were inhabited by half-savage clans and hordes that had escaped into the thickets and underbrush, banished from the culture, winnowed by the first ether wind. They had hidden far from the verges and burrowed into the ground for fear of being activated by an invisible innervator; their city clothes had long since given place to animal skins and bast and they frightened their forest-raised young with the name of the evil god Ex. The none-too-numerous inits either died out or faded into this human forest fauna. And the wheel of history, having described a full circle, again began turning its onerous spokes. But if the man whose pseudonym was Anonym, the one who nearly wound up—you may recall—under the ordinary wheel of an ordinary automobile, if he had in fact wound up under that wheel and been flattened, together with his idea, then, who knows, perhaps everything would have turned out differently. Although …

  Das pulled the wire-rimmed lenses from his eyes and proceeded to wipe them with a bit of brown foulard. His suddenly dulled pupils, shrouded in red blinking lids, had ceased, it seemed, to see the theme.

  A silence yawned. Then chairs were pushed back. Rar reached the door first. I was afraid the president might again bar my way with questions, but Zez sat staring at the extinguished fire as though consumed by some difficult thought. I left right after Rar, unnoticed and unhailed.

  I caught him up in the vestibule. Together we walked out into the nearly deserted midnight street.

  “I’m afraid I’m not very good with words. You needn’t answer, but I can’t help asking. Asking you, that is. You’re the only one of them whom I think of as human. May I?”

  “I’m listening,” said Rar without turning his head. We continued on—elbow to elbow—down the deserted pavement.

  “Among you conceivers, as you call yourselves, I feel odd and ill at ease. I just sit, whereas you— Well, in a word, I don’t want to be an exon among inits. Why do you need me? You kill your letters, but I have none: neither conceptions nor letters. I repeat: I don’t want to be an exon!”

  “You have the right instinct. ‘Exon’—that’s not bad. I’m not allowed to answer, but I will anyway. You can blame everything on me, an init.” Half looking around, Rar regarded me through an affectionate half smile.

  “On you?”

  “Yes. If I hadn’t started the needle-and-thread dispute with Zez, our fireplace would not likely have welcomed an eighth armchair.”

  “Needle-and-thread?”

  “Well, yes. A week before you first appeared at our regular Saturday meeting, I tried to prove that we are not conceivers but eccentrics, harmless only owing to our self-isolation. A conception without a line of text, I argued, is like a needle without thread: it pricks, but does not sew. I accused the others and myself of fearing matter. That’s just what I called it: matterphobia. They attacked me, Zez worst of all. In my defense I said that I doubted our conceptions were conceptions since they hadn’t been tested by the sun. ‘Conceptions and plants can grow in the dark, botany and poetics can do without light,’ Tyd riposted, supporting Zez. ‘If you want to trump me with analogies,’ I replied, ‘a sunless garden produces only etiolated* shoots.’ Then I told them about experiments in cultivating flowers without light: the result, curiously, is always an exceed
ingly tall branching plant, but put that gloom-grown specimen next to ordinary plants used to night and day and you will find it fragile, withered, and pale. In short, our debate raised the question: would our conceptions withstand the light, would they be as effective outside our black room? As a temporary measure, we decided to include an outside pair of ears, an average reader brought up on letterizations: would the emptiness of our shelves prove sufficiently visible? Here Fev began to fret: ‘Darkness,’ he said, ‘turns men into thieves—it’s only natural: what if this intruder, whose head we shall stuff full of our conceptions, manages to extract them and exchange them for money and fame?’ ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Zez. ‘I know the perfect person. We may reveal all our themes to him, without a worry. He won’t touch one.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Because he’s all thumbs: what Fichte called a “pure reader”:* the best match for pure conceptions.’ There, I think that’s all. Forgive me.”

  He shook my hand and vanished around the corner. For a minute I stood stunned and befuddled. Rar had gone, but his words were still whirling me about, and I didn’t know how to break free. When I had recovered myself somewhat I realized the mistake I had made in not finishing what I had to say and not asking him about the main thing; the narrow black street stretched ahead of me like a thread that had slipped its needle.

  5

  I DECIDED not to attend any more Saturdays of the Letter Killers Club. But by the end of the week the thought of Rar had made me change my mind. From the first evening, this singularly original man had struck me as necessary and significant; his name, for all that it pretended to be a nonsense syllable, was the only one of them to suggest a meaning; nevertheless, the address bureau would not exchange it for an address. I had to see Rar again, just once, and finish what I had to say: he wasn’t one of them, he was one of us. Why should he remain among killers and distorters; first the manuscript, then the— I had to see Rar. And since this was possible only inside the black square of blank bookshelves, when Saturday came I decided—for the last time, I told myself—to attend the club meeting.

  As I entered the assembled circle, Rar, sitting in his accustomed place, raised his eyes to me in surprise. I tried to hold his gaze, but he turned away with a look of utter disconnection and indifference.

  After the usual ritual, the floor was given to Fev. A sly glint glimmered in his small, fat-embedded eyes. He shifted in his seat, which creaked beneath the weight of fat and muscle.

  “My asthma,” Fev began, laboring to draw breath, “does not like it when I launch into long narratives. I shall therefore give you only the bare bones of my Tale of Three Mouths.”

  In a tavern called the Three Kings, three merry men were squandering their last taler* on drink. Three letters will suffice to form their names: Ing, Nig, and Gni. It was past midnight: the hour when bottles stand empty and hearts fill to overflowing. To the music of wine cups, the friends were amusing themselves—each in his fashion. Ing had the gift of gab; clinking wine cup to wine cup, he gave toasts and little speeches, quoted the holy fathers and told florid tales. Nig was a hunter after kisses and a good judge of them (the very best); now he too was hard put to keep up his end of the conversation because his lips were working—had the stout wench upon his knee been paid by the kiss, one evening would have made her a rich match. Gni needed neither words nor kisses: his bulging cheeks were stained with grease, while his mouth suckled an enormous mutton bone from which he patiently tore the meat with meticulous teeth.

  Suddenly the wench, between two of Nig’s kisses, said, “Why don’t men have three mouths?”

  “So as to kiss three wenches at once?” Nig roared with laughter and made to return his lips to hers.

  “Wait a minute,” Ing stopped him, sensing a new theme worthy of rhetorical elaboration. “Don’t go butting in between words with kisses.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying.” Nig’s lass turned to Ing. “If you each had three mouths, so as to talk, eat, and kiss all at the same time, then you’d—”

  “Bosh!” Ing raised an edifying finger. “Syllogisms* don’t pop out from under skirts. Now hush. Let’s better ask holy tradition and formal logic: Saint Augustine* tells us three times that man, unlike a brute animal, is a being that chooses. Isn’t that the basis of liberum arbitrium[1], the ability to select the best from among many? Aristotle teaches us to distinguish the highest purpose, entelechy, from incidental or subordinate co-purposes;* and Thomas Aquinas* completes them by separating the substantial form from the accidental, the emanant from the attendant. One’s mouth—os, as he would say—is privy to food, to kisses, to words; but what is its principal attribute? What do you think, my good friend Gni? Take that bone out of your mouth and answer me.”

  The bone wiggled to one side to let the words pass.

  “To my mind,” said Gni, “it’s pointless to rummage in books for arguments. They’re right here—on my plate: clearly, a mouth is for eating. The rest is … happenstance.”

  “My dear friend,” Ing wagged his head, “one shouldn’t look for arguments among food scraps. Why happenstance?”

  “Because,” said Gni, having knocked back a preliminary pint of wine, “if you and I did not drink and did not eat, death would have parted us long ago—I’d be in heaven and you in hell—and you must agree that at that distance you’d find it hard to ask your questions, and I’d have no reason to answer.”

  “I pity the angels,” Nig interposed, tugging at the mustache above his plump, red lips, “should they ever have to haul a hulk like yours up to heaven. Listen, simpleton, without kisses on earth, there’d be no births. And if no one were born, there’d be no one to die. You hear?”

  Now Ing, with a smile of undisguised sympathy, interrupted them both: “You, Nig, are right only in that you call Gni wrong. Why are the lips of some floozy better than a plateful of scraps? We must consider this logically: since a mouth, when kissing, requires another mouth, this introduces the category of the other,* τό ἑτερον, as Plato expressed it. This defers the problem, instead of solving it. Now let’s see: if not for the enjoyment of food, there would be no life—true; but if not for kisses, the living would not be born—that’s true too; but—now listen carefully—if God had not said the words ‘Let there be,’ birth itself would not have been born; neither life nor death would exist, and the world would be the devil knows where. I maintain”—Ing banged his fist on the table—“that a mouth’s true purpose is not to smack lips with lips, and not to gobble victuals and guzzle drink, but to utter words granted from on high.”

  “If that’s so,” Gni would not give up, “then why does it say in the Scripture that ‘not that which goeth into the mouth* defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth’? Answer me that!”

  Ing and Nig both answered at once, talking over each other, and the dispute would have gone on till dawn if sleep had not come, sealing their eyes with dreams, their mouths with snores.

  Ing dreamed of a monstrous, three-mouthed creature relentlessly working its six lips: Ing tried to prove to the creature that it didn’t exist, but the repulsive ghoul, talking back out of all three mouths at once, would not be bested. Ing woke in a cold sweat. Out the window the first fissure of dawn glowed crimson. He set about waking his friends. Nig, his eyes barely open, asked where that Ignota was; Gni, thinking he meant a viand, muttered gloomily, “It’s all gone.” Nig roared with laughter. Ignota, he explained, was the name of last night’s lass.

  “It’s she who’s gone. That was a trick question. But where can she have gone … ?”

  “Like a ghost,” Ing added. “If my dream is to be believed then your Ignota knows too much; perhaps she’s not a wench but a succubus—a delusion, a shade.”

  “The devil take it,” Nig smirked. “That shade crushed my knees. Tell me your dream.”

  From out of the dream the dispute returned—as if it too had had a good sleep and rest—to reality. The three mouths were all shouting at once about the mouth’s main purpose:
/>   “It’s to eat.”

  “Wrong. It’s to kiss.”

  “You’re both wrong. It’s to speak.”

  “And now,” said Fev, “I shall throw away my oars and trust to the tide: why should I go on inventing, tell me, why should I go on creaking at the oarlocks when I’ve rowed up to a mighty current that will sweep my plot along, along with plots about ‘lies and truths,’ about wandering Brahmins in the Panchatantra* and other such sucheties? What I mean to say is that Ing, Nig, and Gni, still very much at odds, now set off—for the greater glory of the canons of plot construction—to roam the world, asking everyone they meet to settle their dispute. The illogic of these wandering disputes, their earthly gratuitousness, should not trouble anyone who knows that life developments and plot developments merely cross, they do not coincide. Plotlines throw out disputes the way a plant throws out spores: into space, where they germinate. So then—I’m drifting …”