The Lost Pages

by Marija Pericic

  __________________

  * This word is unclear: it has been crossed out and written over.

  † This sentence is followed by several others that have been heavily crossed out and are illegible.

  3.

  THE NEXT DAY I SAT AT MY DESK AT THE POST OFFICE COMPLETELY exhausted. After my fainting fit, I had gone straight to bed but I had not been able to sleep. I had felt hot and cold by turns. Indistinct pains travelled up one side of my restless body and then the other. The skin of my feet became so excessively sensitive that the weight and movement of the bedclothes upon it was almost intolerable. Every position that I adopted quickly became unbearable, and the night was endlessly long, each minute stretched out by discomfort. My mind ran over and over the story that had appeared to me and I tried to consider it rationally, but my mind ran stupidly in circles. I drifted along loosely connected lines of thought, picked out in bright strings on a black background; not quite dreams but not quite thoughts either.

  Elsa woke me when it was already quite late, and in the light of day the story seemed a product of my long, restless night. I no longer believed that it had happened. Before breakfast I went into the study, expecting the locked drawer to be empty, but the pages covered with dense lines of blue ink were exactly where I had left them. I read a few lines, and the feeling of reading my own writing still unsettled me, even in the brightness of day.

  At the post office, I sat and dozed the whole morning through, unable to concentrate. Once again I was thankful for the mercies of having my own office. I had been in my position at the post office for more than four years and had settled into an easy work life there. At that time I considered it imperative to keep my writing separate from the need to earn money, rather than using it as a means to do so. There were many benefits of my position at the post office that were well suited to my writing vocation. I found the work easy and could complete the allotted workload in less than the time expected without any difficulty. I kept my quickness a secret and used the time that I had won to write undetected in my office during the workday.

  As I sat there that morning I was aware of my briefcase propped up under the desk. It contained my story from the night before, and I pictured the white pages making a pale ghost in the dark leather cavern of the briefcase pocket. The air around the briefcase seemed to prickle with contained energy. The thought of the pages by my feet gave me a sinister feeling, and I had the impression that they were emitting a malignant energy that was being absorbed by my body. I felt an absurd reluctance to open my briefcase.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I muttered aloud to myself and picked up the briefcase. I could not help but attribute some strange magic or sentience to those pages, and I would not have been surprised to look at them again now and find them blank or covered with a completely different writing altogether, perhaps even in a language unknown to me. I undid the clasp with a beating heart and pulled out the loose bundle of pages.

  There came a knock at the door. I knew by the characteristic percussive sequence that it was Stephanie, the stenographer from the adjacent office, a vapid girl whose skin strained to contain her plumpness. I straightened myself and adopted a serious expression, the briefcase and papers hidden from view in my lap. But instead of Stephanie’s blonde head at the door, I was surprised to see Franz enter.

  He seemed to flow around the door like an eddy of water around a stone. His lean, flat body moved with a fluidity that made me conscious of the smooth muscles surging under his skin, effortlessly controlling the levers of his bones. He seated himself opposite me with the nonchalance of a regular visitor.

  ‘So, did you get the story I sent you?’ he asked, not even bothering to greet me. ‘Is that it in there?’ He pointed at the papers in my lap.

  Blood flowed to my face. ‘No, ah … these are something else,’ I said as I stuffed the pages back into my briefcase, fumbling with the clasp.

  Franz’s appearance in my office disoriented me. How had he discovered my place of work? And he spoke to me with such casual familiarity, even using the informal method of address. It was almost as though he had mistaken me for someone else.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘never mind about the stories now. I’ve come to impart a fantastic piece of news.’

  I sat with the briefcase still on my lap and tried to compose myself. Although I was by no measure happy to see him, I remembered my resolve to make a friend of him. I forced my face into a smile.

  He took an envelope from his jacket pocket. ‘Yesterday, I got this—’ he paused and held it up in the air—‘from your old friend Theodor. He wants some of my stories for a collection, an actual book.’

  He leaned back in the chair, radiating satisfaction, and the leather squeaked to accommodate him. He slid the envelope back into his pocket.

  Even though I could not say that I was surprised, Franz’s news gave me an unpleasant shock, and it was an effort to keep my face fixed into the friendly expression of encouragement that I had conjured. I felt betrayed by Theodor. Franz, harmless though he looked, loomed large and threatening; it appeared that he could, with a flick of his finger, destroy everything that I had taken years to build up. My impulse was to order him from the room or to leave the room myself, slamming the door. But this would be unwise.

  Questions swarmed up in my mind. How much of Franz’s work had Theodor seen? The fact that Theodor would go to such efforts to hunt Franz down and secure him seemed to indicate that he must also have read the stories that Franz had given me. What would this mean in regards to my own position? Had Theodor and Franz already met? The fact that the proposal had come in a letter allowed me the hope that they had not. And had a contract been included; was it already signed? I was desperate to know, but I was aware I had to be careful not to betray my anxiety. I breathed out slowly and clenched my fingers into two tight knots in my lap. I felt the muscles in my forearms straining with pressure.

  Franz sat there like a snake in the chair, his unblinking eyes on mine, waiting. I had to keep him close, I knew, either to destroy him or to save myself somehow. I stood up and offered him my hand, and we shook hands across my desk.

  ‘Let me invite you for a drink to celebrate,’ I said.

  We made for the beer hall in the cellar of the Gemeindehaus. As we walked along Wenzelsplatz to the Konigshof, Franz shared his ideas for the stories he was planning for the proposed collection. Listening to him, there was a numbed, hard feeling in my breast—fear, I suppose—which emerged and was then smoothed over again, like a jagged stone lying below the surface of the sea, covered and uncovered by waves.

  As he talked, his plans became more and more ambitious, and he mentioned that he was also working on a longer piece, of a kind never seen before, which would forever change the face of literature. I listened with half an ear while I thought of ways to casually question him about the nature of Theodor’s offer. Perhaps it was only an offhand politeness of Theodor’s. If only I could take a look at the letter. Surely I could ask him to show it to me if I framed my request as friendly interest. After a few beers, perhaps. Or else, if he removed his jacket when we were inside, I could quickly take a look while he was in the bathroom.

  The beer hall was packed and noisy. Everywhere men sat crammed against one another on the bench seats, the tables in front of them covered with empty glasses. We ordered our beers and squeezed in side-by-side at a crowded table in the middle of the room. Franz had removed his coat, but kept his jacket on. He drank steadily and, wishing to keep a clear head, I allowed him to outpace me. Franz was relaxed and voluble, and talked as though we two were old friends. I kept waiting for a gap in his monologue so I might steer the talk to the letter, but he never paused.

  It was hot in the cellar, the humid heat of a roomful of drinking men, and I took off my jacket, hoping that Franz would follow suit—which, to my joy, he soon did. He laid it between us on the bench, beside mine. The breast of his jacket was folded back on itself, and I could see the tantalising edge of t
he envelope inside. I tried not to stare at it as he talked on. After some hours of speaking, he excused himself to use the bathroom. Now was my chance.

  As soon I saw that he had left the room I grabbed for the jacket, but in my haste I pushed it to the floor, right under the table. I had to bend awkwardly into the tight space between the bench and the table to retrieve it and when I rose was met by a shout.

  ‘Hey! You!’ A red-faced man sitting on the opposite side of the table was pointing a fat finger in my direction. ‘Gimme back my jacket! Are you trying to rob me?’

  ‘This isn’t yours,’ I said, holding Franz’s jacket up for him to see.

  ‘I think I know my own clothes!’ he shouted. He stood up and made a grab for the jacket, knocking over my empty beer glass as he pulled it towards himself over the table. I wanted to protest, but the man was a huge, hulking creature, apparently formed solely of overlapping layers of muscle.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I do assure you, that jacket belongs to my friend,’ but my voice was just a thin little quiver in the noise of the hall. The man ignored me. I was conscious that I had only a little time before Franz returned, and I could hear the loud ticking of every precious second as it slipped past.

  The man’s fleshy face was like a pink cabbage, contracted in concentration as he bundled the jacket this way and that, searching the lining for identifiable markers. His fussing had attracted the attention of his two friends, who sat on either side of him, and they both scowled at me across the table. I could not help risking a few nervous glances towards the door to see if Franz was coming back.

  ‘What are you looking so antsy for then?’ the friend on the left, a raw-skinned redhead, asked me.

  But the fleshy-faced man gave a roar of laughter. ‘It’s alright, Karl. The gentleman’s right.’ He stood up and bowed, handing me the screwed-up jacket along with many apologies, but it was too late. Before I could sit down again, Franz was there beside me once more. He saw his jacket in my hands and absent-mindedly took it from me and put it on. I could have cried with frustration.

  ‘So,’ Franz asked, ‘how was the Hyperion party?’ His mouth was set in a smug line: he need not even make an appearance to have half of Prague chasing after him with publishing offers.

  ‘It was fine,’ I said. I breathed slowly in and out. ‘We all wondered where you were. Especially Theodor.’

  ‘I gathered as much.’

  This could be my chance. ‘Hence the letter,’ I said, prompting him to go on, but he was silent. I continued, ‘Have you had the pleasure of meeting Theodor yet?’ I tried to sound casual and uninterested, but even I could hear the anxiety straining at every syllable. I wished I had not spoken.

  Franz ignored my question. ‘I heard that Uta was lavishing you with attention,’ he said. He looked amused, and I felt the prickle of irritation that Uta always brought with her. I wondered how Franz had come to hear about her.

  ‘Uta is a nice girl, but unfortunately I am allergic to her. She causes me to suffer from a terrible nausea when I am exposed to her for any length of time.’

  Franz laughed at my joke, but it was true. I found there to be something viscerally repulsive about her; her flesh, or what I had seen of it, was too soft, too pliant, and gave off the fetid odour of overripe fruit.

  I was at that time in the—for me—unfamiliar and privileged position of being able to reject women’s advances, which, since I had become well known in literary circles, suddenly seemed to come from all around. This had the perplexing and wholly unexpected effect of making women far less attractive to me than before. A few years earlier I would never have dreamed that I would be plagued by such a lack of attraction to women.

  In the days of my obscurity I was like a sensitive machine built to detect the attractive aspects that lay in all women, no matter how faint or tarnished, and then magnify them until the woman had become absolutely irresistible to me. No woman was spared—housemaids, flower sellers, the aged wives of my father’s friends; it did not matter who they were, I would feel drawn to them for some minute characteristic that was so distilled, so rarefied that it barely existed.

  I would happen to stand behind a woman on the tram, for example, and become captivated by the mobile curve of her neck, which ran from the lobe of her ear to her shoulder, and this curve would become the foundation of a whole lustful sequence of imagining. This sequence would grow and grow, and when the woman stepped down from the tram a few stops before my own destination I would feel a blind impulse to run after her, as though I would certainly die if I lost sight of her. Sometimes I actually would follow her, leaping from the tram at the last moment. My eyes would be riveted to her as I followed her through the crowd as if my gaze were a fine wire that was attached to her, and with which she pulled me along in her wake. Everything else around me—the streets, the crowds—would fade and disappear, until she suddenly turned into the doorway of some apartment building or office, and the connection would be broken. I would be left standing on the footpath, unmoored, with no idea where I was. This woman would linger in my memory until the next one took her place in an unending procession of unattainable objects of attraction, an unbreakable chain of frustration and thwarted desire.

  After I became well known, though, women would approach me and I would feel nothing. I would desperately try to seek out things in them that would attract me, little hooks on which I hoped to snare myself, but I was invariably disappointed. Occasionally I would feel a hopeful stirring of interest but, at the sound of a too-shrill voice or a down-covered cheek, the interest would die away again.

  The desire I felt at the party for Anja Železný was like a return to my old mode, and I welcomed it with a sense of relief. But with it, too, came attendant worries and anxieties. Would she return my affection? Might she already have a lover, or prefer someone else—Franz for instance. His handsomeness blazed out at me again, and I remembered the look on her face as she had searched the crowd for him.

  I had no idea if Franz had a lover. Up until that night I had never thought of Franz in relation to anything other than writing. That he had emotions and relationships had never occurred to me, as if he did not exist in the world. It struck me that I would not like to have him for a sexual rival as well as a literary one. The possibility of him attracting the attention of Fräulein Železný the way that he had attracted Theodor made me forget all about the letter. My mind filled with paranoid thoughts of Franz and Anja together.

  Though I knew it was unlikely, I had to ask Franz if he knew Fräulein Železný. I began to feel almost superstitious about the question: as though the only way to avert certain disaster was by asking, but I found that I did not know how to formulate the question. ‘The nausea is a problem,’ I said, and then added clumsily, ‘but from Anja Železný I get not a hint of it.’ I gulped at my beer to hide my embarrassment.

  ‘Anja Železný,’ he repeated, and began nodding slowly. I waited for him to continue, but he just reached for his beer, silently drank the dregs of it and then placed his glass down again. It made a hollow sound on the wooden table.

  ‘Do you know her?’ I hated myself for pressing him.

  He picked up his empty glass and examined the sediment that lay at the bottom as if I had not spoken. My body was hot with embarrassment at having exposed my obvious interest.

  ‘Uta, Anja,’ he said. ‘It looks as though you have too many women in your life. Too many is as bad as not enough.’

  ‘I know which I would prefer.’

  ‘In that case, shall we go now and find ourselves some more women?’

  ‘Go? Where?’

  ‘Corpse Lane. Don’t tell me you’ve never passed through there on a midnight walk.’

  Corpse Lane was the common name given to Der Hohler Weg, a narrow laneway that intersects the Little Quarter. It got its nickname long ago when it had been the thoroughfare to the local graveyard, now disused, and funeral processions used to pass along it. Corpse Lane’s main traffic now was quite the opposi
te of bygone days; mostly young men, alone or in small groups, looking in the many windows of the houses there and examining the girls on display, girls that could be bought. Franz’s assumption was correct: I had passed along Corpse Lane on several occasions. To make this journey was something of a rite of passage for the young men of my city, although for me undertaking that journey was always a source of shame.*

  __________________

  * This last paragraph was written in different ink, which has been verified as dating from the 1960s at the earliest. This suggests that Brod reviewed the material shortly before his death.

  4.

  WE LEFT THE BEER HALL AND CROSSED THE RIVER AT THE Karlsbrücke, which was almost deserted at that time of night. The statues of the saints that squatted along the walls raised their dark heads against the clouds and I felt uneasy passing under their stone gaze. On the other side of the river we climbed up the steep streets of the Little Quarter. There were no lights here, and hulks of broken buildings crowded the narrow and twisting lanes. It began to rain very gently. On my previous visits I had always come alone and furtively, with my coat collar pulled up and my hat pulled down and my heart shuddering as I hurried along, terrified of discovery. But Franz amazed me; his demeanour was of such calmness that he could have been walking anywhere, for any purpose. He sauntered along, loose-limbed, and nodded to passers-by as though he were taking a turn in the city park on a Sunday afternoon.