The Lost Pages

by Marija Pericic

  ‘You looked lonely sitting here all on your own,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like a little company.’

  His voice was deep and musical. He bent forward and slid his loosely clasped hands towards me across the surface of the dirty table. His knowing eyes sought mine and he smiled, full-lipped.

  I had no doubt as to his intentions, but I was surprised to be propositioned so boldly in the middle of the day, even here in the Karlshofergasse. Also, the fact that he wore his uniform was shocking to me. But perhaps he had no other clothing. I wondered what awful punishment would await him were his superiors to discover his attempts to sell himself, no doubt out of the need to supplement his insufficient army income. I am not a homosexual, though homosexuality has often been attributed to me. I know that this comes from my monstrous appearance, which at a glance aligns me with that dark shadow world where forbidden love lives. But I have no horror of these men, and rather feel sympathy for and a kinship with them.

  The soldier looked thin, with burning eyes glaring from sunken hollows. He was certain to be unknown to Theodor. Perhaps this was better than a theatre actor; arguably the practice of his trade also called for the adoption of roles, one might even say to a far more convincing degree than that demanded by genteel theatre audiences.

  ‘Karel,’ I said, stretching my hand across the table. He took it almost tenderly. I realised then that, if he was going to meet Theodor, he would have to know my name. ‘But call me Max,’ I said.

  He did not blink an eye. ‘Alexandr,’ he said.

  I told my story of the practical joke, and he heard it with a bland expression. He asked no questions, outside of what he would be required to do. Then he told me his fee. The whole thing was arranged in a matter of minutes and at a far lower price than I had expected. He asked for half of the sum now and half afterwards. ‘Seeing as it’s an advance booking,’ he explained. I was glad that I had thought of withdrawing the cash that morning.

  The only difficulty was Alexandr’s uniform. It seemed altogether too unlikely that the author of the works of genius that Theodor had read was an infantryman. As I had suspected, Alexandr said when I asked that he had no other clothes, at least none that would be suitable to wear at a dinner. My budget did not run to a new suit of clothes and Alexandr would not fit into my other suit. We haggled a while before Alexandr agreed to find a suit before this evening, for an extra twenty-five crowns. We agreed to meet at the café where Theodor’s dinner was to be held. Completely irrationally, I instinctively trusted Alexandr. There was something reassuring and honest about him—no doubt one of the tricks of his trade.

  We shook hands, and I left the pub and went to the post office. I had thought I might feel nervous, but in fact I felt relaxed and freed of responsibility. I had tossed the whole problem into the lap of the fates to decide; now I would simply await the outcome.

  I was the first to arrive at the café that evening. I sat watching the door with a complete absence of anxiety, merely interest as to who would come through it. Would it be Theodor? ‘Franz’? Franz? I did not have to wait long before Theodor arrived, and his expression on seeing me alone made me glad of the labours I had undertaken that day.

  ‘And where is your friend?’ he asked me, before he had even taken his seat. His voice came out at a higher pitch than usual.

  ‘You are early,’ I said. ‘He will be here.’

  Neither of us spoke as we waited. I could feel the tension rising off Theodor like waves of heat. He had his eyes trained on the door with the intensity of a gun dog.

  At exactly the appointed time, a figure appeared at the door. I could make out a black hat through the glass panel, and my heart tightened for a moment, but when the door swung open Alexandr came in. He had certainly kept his word. He was scrubbed and shaven, wearing an elegant suit of light grey.

  ‘Here he is,’ I said.

  Alexandr moved with grace and precision. Theodor’s face as he watched Alexandr thread his way through the tables was as beatific as if he were in the grip of religious ecstasy.

  I introduced the two men. Alexandr played his part perfectly; I doubted whether one of the actors from the National Theatre could have pulled it off so well. In ten minutes he had charmed Theodor, and even I had almost forgotten that he was not the real Franz.

  It had occurred to me that Theodor would ask Alexandr something about the stories, about which he would know nothing, and the deception would be revealed, so I sat ready to intervene at any moment. But I needn’t have worried. While we ordered the food and waited for it to come, Theodor kept the talk about general topics before he gradually steered the discussion around to his main objective: the terms of his contract with ‘Franz’. I could see that Theodor was uncomfortable discussing this with me sitting by, and before long I began to feel the same way. I was resentful, though not surprised, to find that the terms he was offering Franz were much more generous than those under which I laboured. I felt like a child whose father favoured his sibling over him. I had to keep reminding myself that the man sitting in front of me, who now had the pen in his hand and was signing the contract, was not Franz, and that I had in fact averted a crisis.

  As soon as the contract was signed, Theodor slipped it into his briefcase and stood up to go, leaving most of his meal uneaten. No doubt he was afraid that the precious contract that had for so long eluded him would somehow be snatched from his grasp at the last moment.

  ‘I do apologise,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning I go to Vienna for a conference. I must bid you goodnight.’

  He directed a small bow in Alexandr’s direction and then in mine.

  ‘Max, you are a good man,’ he said. ‘I am in your debt.’

  I watched him walk out the door, then I sat back with a sigh. I knew that I had done the right thing.

  __________________

  * The letter has been located among the papers, but water damage has rendered it illegible.

  8.

  IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS I HEARD NOTHING FROM EITHER Theodor or Franz, and the problem of Franz appeared to have been solved. I was happy to be able to forget the whole thing, as I was more preoccupied than ever with Anja. Her university examination period was about to begin and, in much the same way that I had been neglecting my work on Schopenhauer, Anja had been neglecting her studies. I felt no guilt whatsoever about this; to me the neglect was solely a validation of the strength of her feelings for me.

  I began helping her to prepare for her exams. She was particularly nervous about the oral examination, and in order to better assist her I had learned her subjects with such vigour that it was as though I were taking the exam myself. I set her difficult questions and interrogated her—once, I recall with shame, until she started to cry. I enjoyed my role of tutor. I enjoyed watching her strain to express herself concisely and synthesise ideas. She had a quick intelligence and I had no doubt that she would impress her examiners. Of course, at that time beautiful young female students were more of a rarity than they are now, and I felt that this would put her at no disadvantage with her professors.

  I was walking back to my house from one of our many hours of study together, my head deep in the planning of the next lesson, when I heard my name being called. I looked up and there was Franz, the real Franz, standing in front of me in the street. At first I could not believe that it was really him. Seeing him gave me a morbid jolt, like seeing a man whom one had thought was dead. Indeed, the whole episode with Alexandr had almost convinced me that he was. But there he was, alive as ever. His nose sliced the air in front of him, underlining his presence, and the outline his body made against the street scene was as sharp as though he had been cut from a page and superimposed onto it.

  Without preamble he proceeded to describe a new work that he had been writing. He told me that it was almost finished, and then he produced a sheaf of papers—his manuscript—which he handed to me as though we had agreed to meet by appointment for this purpose. He did not mention the many messages I had sent
, and although I was bewildered by this, of course I did not probe him.

  ‘You’ll look over the manuscript,’ he said to me. It was more of an order than a request. Once again I was baffled as to why he would bother to press his writing on me when it was clear that he did not need my help.

  I had automatically taken the manuscript, and the weight and thickness of the pages in my hand reminded me that my own writing had gone neglected and forgotten, the pages lying crumpled and senseless in the dark of desk drawers and briefcase pockets. The extra time that I had bought for myself had made me lazier rather than spurring me on. It was true that at odd times I had sat down at my writing table with my notes arranged before me, ready to work, but all it ever amounted to was me discovering anew that the material I had was depressingly impenetrable. After a short time I would give up and instead take out my journal and write about Anja.

  But even the pages of my journal were strikingly blank for all the time I devoted to them. In truth, most of the minutes and hours when I should have been writing were spent sitting and staring out of the window in a reverie. Thinking about Anja induced in my body a feeling of floating warmth, which cocooned me from the passing minutes and hours. In a way, I preferred this time of remembrance and musing to the time I spent with her. When I was with her, her presence was too overwhelming, too beautiful for me to fully take in.

  As I held the pages of Franz’s manuscript in my hand, the bile rose in me. How foolish I had been to think that the problem of Franz would simply fade away. I had never even considered the obvious fact that he would continue to write. For the first time I did not agree to look over his work as he had asked. Instead I told him about Anja, about how close we had become over the last weeks and months. I felt the unfamiliar thrill of sexual victory in the telling, something I rarely experienced; the thrill of having won a prize, of having beaten an opponent. Thrill, and a kind of pity. After all, what worth was some manuscript, even one that might prove a masterpiece, compared with the discovery of love?

  I had expected Franz to be surprised by my revelation, even openly upset or bitter, but he just nodded and said that he had heard about it.

  ‘Congratulations.’ He said it with the most correct politeness and gave a crisp little bow. ‘Tell Anja that I wish her well for her exams.’

  We parted, and for the remainder of my way home there was a heavy stone of uneasiness in my chest. I carried the papers in my hand, and they hissed at my side, rebuking me for my laziness. Of course the manuscript had upset me, but there was also the shock of seeing Franz again. Now it dawned on me that my deception of Theodor was brazen and irresponsible in the extreme. Surely the affair would come to light and then I would be completely ruined. It was only a matter of time. Franz’s parting words came back to me and I took them in for the first time. How could he know about Anja’s exams? I had not mentioned them to him. Had she been in contact with him? On the one hand it seemed unlikely. When would she have had the time to meet with him? During the day he was barricaded in his office, seeing no visitors, and in the evenings I had been with her. It was impossible that they could have met. But then how else could he have known?

  When I arrived home I stuffed Franz’s manuscript into one of the drawers of my writing table and tried to put him out of my mind. I went back to revising my notes for Anja’s study.

  The exam about which she was the most anxious was her final one. It was in a few days’ time, and I was planning to feign illness on that day so I would be free to accompany her. I had also bought her a small gift for the occasion: a jewelled comb for her hair. I took it from the box in which the jeweller had packed it and held it in my hand. It had three tortoiseshell prongs, which were surmounted by a little crown of red and silver stones: garnet, the jeweller had told me, and marcasite. It gave off a gentle warmth and the stones shot darts of light up at me. My heart raced at the idea of giving it to her and a host of doubts crowded into my mind. Was it the right style? Was it too serious to give such a gift? Too overblown? I had deliberated over the gift for hours, touring all the jewellery shops of the city and changing my mind a thousand times. I had never before had the occasion to purchase anything of this nature.

  When the day of the exam arrived, the thought of giving Anja the gift reduced me to a state of nerves that must have rivalled Anja’s own. I was acutely aware of the little box with the comb sitting in my breast pocket, where it exerted a uniquely painful weight and pressure on my chest.

  I could feel it there in my pocket when I collected Anja from her house and during the whole walk with her to the examination room. I spent the hour of her exam wandering the university grounds and the botanical gardens. The summer had faded since I had last been there and the gardens had assumed their autumn colours. There were several people walking the paths and admiring the red and gold foliage of the trees, but I found the dying leaves repellent; the yellow ones like ghosts, the few remaining green ones with their living edges being eaten away by a rusty decay that would slowly engulf them before they silently fell to be crushed underfoot or swept away by a gardener. The people’s exclamations at their beauty seemed inconsiderate, even gruesome, as if they were admiring the hue of the bruises on a dying man.

  I went and sat on the bench beneath the ginkgo tree where I had first sat with Anja. We had returned here several times to sit and talk, but I had never really seen the garden; when I was with her she filled all of my gaze. I looked up at the yellow leaves quivering against the sky, echoing my heart with their nervous motion. I took out the comb for the hundredth time and looked at it, rehearsing again in my mind what I would say when I presented it to her.

  I became aware of a rustling hiss and felt something brush softly against my face. I pocketed the comb and looked up once more and a ginkgo leaf drifted past, and then another. The rustling became louder and soon the ginkgo leaves were fluttering down all around me, though there was no wind. I sat perfectly still, now staring straight ahead, and let myself be covered by their fall. People walking the paths stopped in front of the tree to exclaim, and to catch the leaves as they fell, for luck. Soon there was a small crowd standing around the tree.

  ‘You’re going to be the luckiest man alive!’ a man said to me as he caught a leaf and then discarded it in the hope of a more perfect specimen.

  The leaves fell over me and filled up the brim of my hat and the cup of my palm lying open in my lap. I turned my face up and closed my eyes and the leaves rained down around me in a curtain of crisp sighs, brushing over my face like dry butterfly wings.

  I remained sitting there until Anja’s exam had finished, but before I left I selected two of the most perfect leaves from my palm—one for her and one for me—to keep as good-luck charms. It was a good omen: for Anja’s exam, for our love, for my own writing. I put Anja’s into the jeweller’s box. The ginkgo rain had dissolved the tension I had been feeling and I felt strong and happy, chiming at one with the pulse of the world. It was just like the man had said: I was the luckiest man alive.

  When I met Anja, she was flushed and talkative, and was swaggering along like a little sailor after a few glasses of rum. My heart ached with love for her. We walked aimlessly about the corridors while she unleashed a torrent of words: the questions she was asked, the answers she had given, and effusive gratitude for the hours I had spent practising with her.

  Now was the perfect moment to give her the gift. I kept putting my hand into my breast pocket to take out the box but she always had something more to say and I was unwilling to interrupt her. My fingers nervously ran up and down one of the sharp edges of the box inside my pocket while I waited. At last there came a pause and I steered her to a low balustrade where we both sat down.

  I took out the box and gave it to her with a trembling hand. My prepared words failed me and all I could manage was a broken, ‘Congratulations.’ My hands were clammy and I had to look away while she opened the box and took out the comb. When I looked back again she had taken out the ginkgo leaf an
d was holding it up with a questioning look.

  I told her then about the ginkgo rain, and being the luckiest man alive, and her the luckiest woman. Later I realised how arrogant this sounded. She did not say anything, but looked into the distance and twirled the leaf against her lips. Her soft breath fluted over its edges. The comb lay still in its nest of cotton.

  ‘Won’t you try the comb?’ I tried to keep my voice steady.

  She looked down at the comb and then closed the lid and gave me back the box, the ginkgo leaf held now between her ring and small finger. She shook her head. ‘I can’t take it, Max. I’m sorry.’

  For all my nerves and worry I had somehow not prepared myself for this, yet at that moment I felt no emotion. Mechanically, I pocketed the box again.

  ‘But this leaf,’ she said, ‘I will keep forever.’

  She suggested that we take a stroll through the gardens. We climbed up and down the stone steps and she talked and exclaimed and hung onto my arm as though the incident with the comb had never occurred. At her touch my feelings began rushing back, all my love for her, together now with a desperate and crushing panic.

  How could she have rejected my gift and yet still promenade with me now, whispering in my ear and collecting pretty leaves to show me? I could not understand it, and yet a part of me knew. Franz. It had to be. The idea clicked into place with all the inexorable finality of a lock snapping shut. Clearly, I saw now, he had mentioned her exams to me in order to demonstrate that he, too, was close to her, but I had not been willing to look this fact in the face. But perhaps, I told myself in a moment of optimism, it was Herr Liška. It could equally well be him. Losing Anja to Liška would be terrible, but it could be borne. But Franz … I could not live with that ending to my and Anja’s story.