Of course I could have saved myself the inner torment of this guessing game simply by asking her. I could know the truth in seconds. But somehow I could not bring myself to do it. The question was too shaming. Instead I walked mutely along beside her, through the gardens and then back to her house, my mind sick with whirling suspicions. I imagined her meeting with Franz and his thin, elegant hands pawing at her, his slick smile inches from her face. I imagined the two of them laughing together, perhaps about me, and Franz mocking me. For a few moments I began to hate her.
After I had returned her to her house, I automatically made my way home, but when I arrived at the door I was unable to go inside. The house seemed suddenly as small as a coffin. Instead of going in I turned away from the door and began to walk at random. I walked up the darkened Karpfengasse and crossed the Moldau over the little Kettensteg bridge. I stood for a long time on the bridge, watching the surface of the water slide away beneath my feet.
I took the little box from my pocket, the comb still inside, and dropped it into the dark river. I felt no emotion. I did not even hear it hit the surface. I found the ginkgo leaf in my trouser pocket and dropped it in too. It fell to the water in a series of swoops like broken sobs, then it sailed away down the river, a little yellow boat on a sea of black.
9.
FOR SOME DAYS AFTER THIS I STAYED IN MY ROOM, SUFFERING with a fever that made a truth of the illness I had feigned at the post office. I drifted in and out of sleep, slipping between the world of the familiar room, and Elsa and Sophie, and another world of a continuous dream that was just as real as the world of my bedroom.
In the dream I was running after Anja and Franz was running after me across the whole city. My body was as heavy as a lump of stone and wouldn’t obey me. I strained to catch up with Anja, who was reduced to the hem of a skirt or a sweep of hair that was always just disappearing around a corner, out of reach. My chest burned with exertion and I let out mute cries, and the terror that I would lose sight of her was the terror of death. Meanwhile, Franz pursued me with a giant’s strides, brandishing a sheaf of papers like a club. I would wake gasping from these dreams, my sweat chilling my skin.
When I was awake the anxiety about my writing and Franz returned and competed with the anxiety I felt about Anja’s rejection. After some days, when I had recovered slightly, I began to write her letters, but I did not know what tone to take, who to be in the letter. Letter after letter I wrote and then discarded, throwing them into the fire when my wastepaper basket had overflowed.
I lay in bed and analysed her behaviour, every look, every word, every gesture that I could remember, in a futile round that always ended with everything slipping away from me. The only conclusion I could reach was that I was uncertain as to what was between us and what might be between her and Franz.
Postcards and letters began to arrive for me: from Kröner at the post office, from Felix and Kurt, and of course several from Uta. I received none from Anja.
Uta’s were the first to arrive: she must have heard from Sophie about my illness. They were written, of course, on pastel-shaded, scented paper, Uta’s looping hand scrawling inferior epigrams and clichéd wishes across the page. I opened the first one by accident and was overcome with nausea as the perfume with which the paper was infused reached my nostrils. Uta also visited several times and my ears were constantly on alert for her shrill voice raised in greeting at the front door. As soon as I heard it I feigned sleep, so that when Sophie brought her to my bedroom the door only opened a small way and then quietly closed again. I would lie motionless until I heard their whispered voices recede down the hallway.
A postcard also came from Theodor, ostensibly to wish me well in my illness but really to remind me of my looming deadline. It seemed that he was not as much in my debt from my procurement of ‘Franz’ as I’d hoped. To give myself the courage to examine my shambolic notes, I took out a copy of my novel and leafed through the pages. But the printed words I saw there were so foreign to me that I felt my eyebrows travel up my forehead in surprise at my own cleverness. I could not recognise myself in the words I read.
Perhaps, I thought, the problem was that it was written too long ago. I went through my papers to find something more recent, but after some searching I realised that there was nothing, apart from the few scratchings of notes that I was steeling myself to read. Then I remembered the story that I had written a few months before when I had fallen asleep at my writing table. I searched through my desk without finding it, before remembering that I had taken it to work with me. But when I looked in my briefcase it was not to be found there either. I must have left it in my office.
My desk and the floor around it was now littered with papers and books. My eyes fell on Franz’s manuscript. The weight of all of that paper, the thought of his hand making all those minute motions of the pen across the page, dismayed me. I felt drawn to read it, compelled by a sick desire to measure myself against him. I took the manuscript back to bed with me and looked for the first time at the title page: Die Verwandlung.* I disregarded the pages with plans that preceded the text and began to read.
Even the first lines caused the skin over my skull and the back of my neck to contract with horror. When I read the description of Gregor, the vermin, getting out of the bed, his body monstrous and uncontrollable, I had the impression that I was reading a story about myself. It was like looking in a mirror. Gregor’s experience on that first morning is my own on every morning of my life. In the realm of sleep I am not hampered by palsied limbs and misshapen bones. There, I glide through the world without obstacles. Waking every day is waking to a cage that must be carried around at all times, without exception.
When I was five years old my childhood ended. My body had grown enough to reveal the broken form that it would take and my poor foot trailed behind me as I walked. I listed like a ship, as I had not yet learned how to negotiate the distribution of my weight. My mother took me to the house of a healer she had heard of—a shoemaker and man of miracles who lived in the forest to the south. It was winter, and a long journey, first by a series of trains and then the final part by carriage over the icy roads. I remember pressing my face against the cold sheet of the carriage window and seeing the forest advancing darkly upon us like a storm cloud.
I did not really know where we were going, only that we were going to make me better, make me like the other boys. As a child I was desperate to please my mother. I was aware that somehow I was always disappointing her but I did not know the reason for it. I strained for her affection, hungered to make her proud of me. But whenever she looked at me there was always in her eyes a wall of sadness, a regret that she would quickly hide behind some other emotion. No matter how well behaved I was or how many things I learned, this look was always hovering close by, ready to emerge at an unguarded moment.
The shoemaker’s house was far from the nearest village, on the very edge of the forest. It was a small cottage, cosy and neat, with smoke drifting from the chimney, but behind it a dense wall of trees surged up like a black wave about to engulf it. There was a little kitchen garden, covered in snow, which was surrounded by a wooden fence. Beside the front door was a kind of trellis, and when we came closer I saw that upon it hung a range of rusted tools. My eyes fell on the blades of all kinds of jagged saws and monstrous scissors and metal implements that I could not name. At the sight of these I began to cry and pull on my mother’s hand, refusing to go any closer. I had visions of the man hanging me up somewhere and slicing pieces of flesh from my side with the rusty tools, the way a butcher slices sides of meat from a hanging carcass.
The interior of the shoemaker’s house was filled with an even greater range of nightmarish tools and machines. Of the man himself I had seen only his large and muddy boots, which sprouted from the ground like huge brown mushrooms. I was too afraid to raise my eyes, so the current of his conversation with my mother took place over my head, against the background of my jagged inhalations and snuffling bre
aths. Eventually, the man crouched down before me and raised my head with his hand under my chin. His hand was rough and hard but I was surprised at the kindness of his eyes. He looked at me for a moment and smiled, and then straight away got down to the business of measuring me. He stood me on a raised block, like a little pedestal in the middle of the room, and I swayed unsteadily there, crying for my mother. He produced a series of callipers and measuring tapes. I had never seen callipers before and I imagined them to be some kind of device for torture that would compress parts of me in their jaws. I could see them crunching down on my bones. I screamed and cried when he approached and my mother came to my side and held my hand, stroking the back of it and speaking to me in a low monotone to soothe me. She told me that the man was only measuring me and not to be afraid, and that it was just like being measured by the tailor for my clothes. Measuring took a long time, and the man laboriously wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper.
My mother and I stayed in the nearest village for some days, but the details of the place have been lost from my memory. I only remember that my mother’s sadness seemed to intensify during this time. She was also excessively gentle and permissive with me. She allowed me to choose the food I would eat, and did not insist that I rise from bed at a particular hour. Although this pleased me at first—normally I only received these privileges when it was my birthday, or some special occasion—as day followed day, these unaccustomed freedoms began to make me uneasy.
I remember clearly our second visit to the house of the shoemaker. My mother was very agitated on the journey and told me that the man had built something very special for me to make me well. Since she had mentioned tailors to me before I imagined that this would be some item of clothing, like one of the magic cloaks that I had read about in my books of fairy tales at home. The shoemaker’s house seemed less sinister to me as we approached it, now that I could associate him with the wise men and women of the stories. I became quite excited and forgot my apprehension of recent days.
The man stood me once again on the pedestal and I eagerly looked around the room for my magic garment, but there were no bolts of cloth to be seen. Neither were there any rows of coloured cotton on long stands as there were at the tailor’s shop. The shoemaker left the room and I imagined the moment that I would be dressed in the cloak. I wondered what magic powers the cloak would give me, and worked myself up into quite a state of nervous expectation.
At last the shoemaker returned. In his hands he held not a cloak, but a kind of skeleton made of wood and metal with leather straps hanging off it and a canvas middle section. It looked a bit like the harnesses used for horses, but much smaller. He approached me with it and, like a young untrained horse, I shied away when he tried to place it on me. Even my mother’s words could not soothe me this time and I dodged the shoemaker and tried to run out of the room, but he caught me in his arms and lifted me back onto the pedestal—patiently at first, but after a few attempted escapes he grasped hold of me roughly and shoved me onto the hard ground, holding me down and forcing the harness over my head. I struggled and tried to fight him with my fists, but it was like hurling myself against a great tree. I was soon totally exhausted and lay back, limp, on the dirty stone floor. The shoemaker picked me up again and placed me on the pedestal, and this time I did not resist and just stood slack and still. He adjusted straps here and there and turned me about.
The harness had two curved pieces of wood that hooked under my armpits, and from which two flat metal bars ran in a vertical line down my ribs to my hips on either side. A further two rods reinforced the back of the harness. Two leather straps like stirrup leathers on a saddle were fastened in a crossed fashion over my shoulders onto the front of the two wooden hooks. This wood and metal structure was lined with canvas in the shape of a tight vest. It was uncomfortable enough with the straps unfastened, heavy and thick. When the straps were tightened, it was almost unbearable. My crooked torso did not fit the shape of the straight metal reinforcing rods and, although they were slightly flexible, they strained against my flesh and threw me off balance. I looked at my mother and saw that she was crying. The shoemaker lifted me down from the platform and I waited for him to undo the straps again, but he did not. I wore that harness for the next year of my life for every hour of the day, except when washing. It was impossible to sleep the first few weeks. I would lie in every position I could think of and secretly loosen the shoulder straps, but to little effect; for that whole year I felt I was living in the grip of a vice, where I had to strain to take every breath.
Each time I had a bath my mother would come and examine me to try to find signs of my body straightening, but even after some months had passed the only visible effect the harness had on my body were several permanent open sores under my arms and on various points of my torso, where the metal bands pushed against my soft skin, and two deep grooves on the tops of my shoulders from the straps, which I still carry on my body today.
Lying there in my bed, I could feel again the leather straps and metal rods tighten around me, cutting into my flesh. I touched the deep runnels on my shoulders. Reading about Gregor was about as unnerving as hearing another person speak with my voice. I read and reread the opening sequence and felt a sense of vertigo, as though my fever had returned.
It occurred to me that I was Gregor; I was the model for him. I must be. That Franz, all the time we had been together, had been silently observing me as though I were some rare specimen, storing up impressions and noting them down to imprison me in his story like pinning an insect to a card. The more I read, the more convinced I became that this was the case, and that Gregor was a thinly veiled version of me.
I felt terribly ashamed, as if I had been paraded naked down the Wenzelsplatz in the middle of the day, with every one of my flaws and faults visible to all. I quite literally felt that I wanted to die. I threw the manuscript into the corner of the room and it landed with its pages splayed out, flower-like, over the carpet. I fell back onto the bed. I felt too ill to get up and go out, but too well to sleep in the middle of the day. I expected to lie there in agony for hours but instead I immediately fell into a deep sleep.
I dreamed that I had woken in my own bed. Everything in the room looked exactly the same as it had earlier, except now it was night-time, which made it difficult to tell if I dreamed or was awake. I looked over to where I had thrown the manuscript, but it was gone. I heard a shuffling sound and a white shape like an enormous flat spider scuttled out from under the bed and ran under the sofa. Its many-legged, jerky gait made me nauseous and light-headed. I got out of bed and picked up one of my shoes, Silently in my bare feet, with my knees bent for stealth, I tiptoed very slowly across the room. I brought the shoe up over my head, ready to strike.
Holding my breath, I bent down to look under the sofa. The creature was huddled there against the wall. It looked like it was made of paper. I reached my hand with the shoe under the sofa to chase it out, but it flattened itself onto the floor and the shoe passed harmlessly over the top of it. As I withdrew the shoe and was standing up again, considering what to do next, the creature dashed out from under the sofa straight at my bare ankles. It flew against me with angry rustles, the edges of the paper cutting and cutting my flesh. It wrapped its pages around my ankles like the tentacles of an octopus, hobbling my legs together.
I screamed and began swiping at my legs and jumping from foot to foot, trying to dislodge it. The touch of the thing against my skin disgusted me and worried me much more than the streaks of blood that were running over my feet and onto the carpet. I raised the shoe over my head and brought it down on the creature with a crunch, dislodging a few pages. I beat and beat at it until it was a torn lump of pulpy pages scattered on the floor.
I awoke with a sense of triumph. It was night-time and I could see the whitish glow of the manuscript in the corner where I had thrown it. It was only a manuscript: perhaps it was the only manuscript, the only copy. Was this likely? I did not know if Franz made carb
on copies or had arranged for the novel to be copied before passing it to me.
I revisited the satisfaction of my dream, the feeling of beating the bundle of papers to a pulp, then began to fantasise about different ways I could destroy the manuscript. I could throw it in the fire, using the poker to break up the last remnants of paper into the finest powder. I could shred it into pieces as small as snowflakes and cast them over the Moldau. Or I could drown it in water and then mash the pages into a papier-mâché ball, which I would then mould into the sculpture of a man’s head and display on a shelf.
As pleasant as my thoughts were, these actions were unlikely to have any effect. Franz, I mused, was a lawyer who worked for an insurance company. If anyone were likely to keep copies, an insurance lawyer was sure to. And where would those copies be? Would he go so far as to stow them away in a safe somewhere? I imagined myself creeping into his house or his office at night and rifling through the papers in his writing desk by torchlight.†
But it was useless. I knew that even if I did any of these things it was unlikely to make any difference. The best I could hope for was a short delay in having the thing brought out. Franz would have no difficulty in having the book published, with or without my help, and I had no doubt that it would be a success. It was a work of genius. I imagined my friends reading the novel and recognising me in Gregor. They would meet and excitedly discuss the novel, each wondering whether it would be indiscreet to speculate on whether Gregor had originated with me. They would slyly eye one another, gauging whether the others were thinking the same. After a while someone would hesitantly raise the subject.
‘Did the descriptions of Gregor’s … condition … remind you of anyone?’
The Lost Pages Page 9