The Lost Pages

by Marija Pericic

The others would feign confusion for a moment and then someone else would offer timidly, ‘Well, you know, Max did come to mind.’ Then would follow a chorus of loud and eager sympathy to cover their greedy curiosity: ‘Poor Max, so brave, he manages very well I’ve always thought.’ And then: ‘Has he read it, do you think?’

  And of course I would see my friends soon, I would encounter them at a party, or a café, or walking down the street, and they would be thinking all of these things and watching me for some reaction. I had to put a stop to it.

  The manuscript was still lying in the corner where I had thrown it. I rolled out of bed and retrieved it. I took the papers to my writing table and smoothed them on the surface of the desk with my palms. The black ink burned against the white page. I saw my hands drift to the top of the pages, and it was like watching the hands of another person. The hands picked up the manuscript and tried to tear it, but it was too thick. I watched them tear off the first page, slowly, deliberately. Then they began to tear that page in half and then in half again and again. The paper hissed in protest, but it made no difference; soon all that remained were little flakes of white, speckled with black. They rained down all over the writing table and onto my lap and shoes. Once the hands had finished with the first page they began on the next, and the sound of all that paper tearing was more exquisite to my ears than the singing of angels.

  __________________

  * The Metamorphosis

  † The preceding three paragraphs were uncovered from beneath a scrap of lined paper, on which the following three paragraphs appear. The scrap has been fixed over the notebook paper with adhesive. The glue has partially dissolved the ink in some areas, and the meaning has been approximated from the context.

  10.

  AFTER DESTROYING THE MANUSCRIPT I FELT WONDERFUL, BETTER than I had felt for months, but this feeling did not last. I knew that my act of destruction was meaningless and by the next morning my depression had descended once more. A heavy fog had settled over my mind and, rather than being able to concentrate on the problem of Franz to try to solve it, I was totally incapable of any kind of productive thought. I was sluggish, stupid and wanted nothing but to sleep the day through in a room with heavy curtains drawn. But I had been at home now for some days and was due to return to the post office. I was reluctant to return, but once I had I was grateful for the rhythm of the familiar routine. I performed the necessary tasks of my day mechanically—I got up at the usual time, dressed, ate my usual meals and completed my work with ease—but all the while I felt nothing inside.

  Days passed. It was as though I, the part of me that I called ‘I’, had become independent of my body, which carried on with my usual routine as if from some intelligence built into the bones and the muscles. My real self floated somewhere in the air around my body or had retreated to somewhere in its depths. I appeared to be normal; that is, no one seemed to notice any difference. People’s faces looked the same as they usually did when they greeted me, and no one started in surprise at the spectacle that I presented: of a man of animated flesh, of walking and talking muscles with no one at the helm. In my office at work I would sit very still and listen to my own breathing, breath after breath, in and out, as inexhaustible as the waves of the sea. Occasionally I took out the notes for my book and looked over them, but all I found there were some dead black marks on the dust-covered page, like hieroglyphics.

  Thoughts of Anja pained me, though only in a theoretical way, and I avoided the streets close to her house and the grounds of the university, more from their association with my former bliss than the desire to avoid running into her. She came to call on me in any case a few weeks after I had returned to work. She arrived at the house shortly after I had come home from the post office, bringing with her a tray of biscuits from the Café Louvre. Her voice was kind and gentle, and I thought I could read regret in her eyes, but perhaps it was only sympathy.

  Elsa made coffee and Anja and I sat in the living room and ate the biscuits. The anaesthetised feeling that I had maintained for days began to falter and images from Franz’s Gregor flashed into my mind at random, each bringing a stab of pain. I pictured Gregor as a monster with my face, wearing my clothes, and the whole story playing out in the rooms of this house, in my own bed, under this sofa.

  I was besieged, too, with jealous thoughts about Franz. His straight body, his elegant features haunted me. How could she ever prefer me to him? The spectre of my ruined body returned to me and I viewed myself as if from the outside, a lumpish, repulsive figure slumped beside Anja’s delicate form, like a rude lump of clay beside a Meissen figurine. I strained to keep my body as upright as possible so that my hand shook as I lifted the little coffee cup to my lips.

  Anja seemed to have noticed nothing amiss and carried on as if everything was as usual between us, as if the episode with the comb had not occurred. I felt grateful to her for this, and also for the sense of calm that she exuded. She leaned forward to take a wafer from the tray. The disturbance of the air wafted her perfume towards me and all the smells of summer came to me: plums and dusty grass heated by the sun. The smell unknotted something in me and my head was suddenly tight with tears. A great sadness unfolded itself over me: the sadness of regret, as though Anja had died, or I had, and there was no going back.

  I wanted to tell her about Gregor, confide my fears. I wanted to ask her about Franz and have her laugh away the suggestion. I wanted to sink into the sofa cushions and cry and have her smooth away my pain with her white hands. But I did not know where to start the story. She knew me only as Max Brod, the successful writer. I had never spoken to her of any of my difficulties, either with writing or with my life in general. She knew nothing of my childhood, of my being a cripple. I had pretended to myself that she had not even noticed my deformity; a fantasy, of course, but it was also true that I had never seen her eyes fasten onto my body and slide down it the way the eyes of others did. While she had told me every tale of her own childhood and a thousand details of her experience, I had largely remained silent or else presented her with carefully curated scenes. To break down now and flood her with my misery would be to edge close to madness. I wondered if I could simply show her Franz’s manuscript, and whether she would then understand about Gregor. Would she? And would she then laugh the thing away? Or would she turn towards me with her eyes crumpled in concern? She had the power to allay my fears but also to give them life.

  Instead of crying, I sipped the bitter coffee and crumbled a biscuit to sugary dust between my fingers. Anja began telling me about Herr Liška, who had been making repeated visits, apparently having renewed his offensive. All I felt was relief; Liška was better than Franz, after all. My apprehension of Liška had changed, and I no longer believed that Anja was using him to rouse my jealousy. I noticed that she asked me for clarification of Liška’s actions and words as though I were that man himself, or a close friend of his who would know his mind. Perhaps she thought that the minds of all men were the same.

  ‘Max, I’ve missed you these last days,’ she said then and reached to take my hand. Where once I would have felt excitement now there was only wariness, tiredness. Both of her small hands enclosed mine lightly like warm water. If only I could forget her. And yet, at her touch I felt an involuntary rush of warmth flood the region of my heart. It was painful. That summer smell hung all about her and I was drawn now within its warm cloud. I breathed in a lungful of delicate air and held it, as if it might contain some remedy for my pain.

  ‘I don’t know what I would do without you,’ she went on. ‘Who would I talk to?’

  She shuffled her body so that I could feel the warmth of her along my crooked side and she leaned her head on my shoulder. I mumbled something indistinct, not knowing what to say, knowing what I wanted to say: Anja! Anja, you are my love! You alone can cure me.

  But then she sat up and looked at the clock on the wall. She gave a little start and jumped up. I felt a rush of coldness as her body was withdrawn from mine. I
remained sitting there.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘Look at the time! And I promised Aunt Ilse …’ Her voice trailed off as she dashed a few steps towards the door and then swooped back to touch my shoulder gently with her fingers.

  ‘Goodbye, Max,’ she said. I felt the warm breath of her as she leaned down and lightly grazed the top of my head with her lips.

  She slipped from the room and I sat with my eyes closed and listened to her steps echo away. I heard the front door opening and closing and then silence. Then I heard the steps approach again; she must have forgotten something. I got up from the sofa as the door swung open.

  It was Franz. I fell back into the sofa. He did not greet me. His face was stony, almost unrecognisable. He was holding a small paper bag in one hand and he reached inside and took out a handful of something. I stood up, ready to confront him.

  ‘How dare you?’ he said, and threw the thing he held in my direction. I flinched and covered my face with my hands, but I felt only something soft brushing against me. I opened my eyes to see a swirl of white flakes fluttering down around me.

  ‘You think your actions are the actions of a god,’ he said. He threw another handful. ‘But they are useless.’ He laughed then, once, toneless and hollow, like a lunatic.

  The white flakes had landed on my shoulders and the front of my jacket. I picked some off and inspected them. I saw that they were tiny pieces of paper written on one side in black ink. I was able to decipher the odd word, and recognised the writing as Franz’s. It was his manuscript, I realised in a flash: the one I had destroyed.

  Franz began to advance on me and I backed away.

  ‘You will read this work again; you will see it soon, everywhere. You can’t stop me.’

  I felt ill. He was still coming towards me and I thought that he would strike me, but in the end he only threw the empty bag in my face and then walked out.

  I immediately crouched down and began scrabbling around to pick up the fragments of paper. I hurried to scoop them up and put them back into the crumpled bag before anyone came into the room. When all the little flakes were back in the bag I threw it on the fire.

  All of my old worries returned to me. Had Franz met with Theodor? Had he convinced Theodor that Alexandr was an impostor? If so, I was ruined. But I had a dim recollection of Theodor saying that he would be out of Prague for the next weeks. There was a conference in Vienna that he attended every year, and he generally stayed away a while. And Franz’s threat did not necessarily mean that the two had met. Perhaps Franz had only sent Theodor the manuscript at the same time that he had given it to me. And why, indeed, had he given it to me? Was he taunting me?

  Over the next days and weeks I agonised over the situation. I waited for the angry visit from Theodor, for the telegram or letter denouncing me. But nothing came. Franz must only have corresponded with Theodor, or perhaps it was all just bluster. Weeks turned to months and gradually I began to relax again.

  11.

  ONE DAY MONTHS LATER, JUST WHEN THE WHOLE THING HAD faded from my mind, the dreaded letter from Theodor arrived in the morning post. It was nestled among the routine bills and newspapers like a cuckoo’s egg. I grabbed at the envelope and tore it open with a trembling hand. Inside was only a small card. My first thought, nonsensical though it was, was that it was Theodor’s lawyer’s card. I felt everything begin to collapse around me, and the walls of the house were suddenly made thin, insubstantial as pieces of cloth. I pulled the card out. It was not a lawyer’s card. It was much worse: an invitation to a party that was to be held in honour of Franz, to celebrate his new work, Die Verwandlung. On the back of the invitation Theodor had scrawled an affectionate note for me, thanking me for introducing him to Franz.

  I stood, holding the card dumbly. It seemed that there was no escape from Franz. The only thing in my favour was that it was clear that Theodor had not met Franz. Luck must have been on my side for once and Franz’s contact with the publishing house must have only been through one of the other staff. However, the invitation presented more of an obstacle than a reassurance. The prospect of attending the party was a horrifying one. I could picture the gaze of a hundred eyes, swinging between me and the book’s cover. ‘There he is!’ people would whisper to each other. ‘Look!’ they would say. ‘It’s the real Gregor!’

  But, even worse, the party presented anew the problem of my deception being uncovered. I had thought that the whole matter was behind me and I felt extremely weary at the realisation that I had been wrong. It seemed that my act of deception could not be outrun. I would have to face the consequence of Theodor discovering what I had done. I could not even imagine what he would say. My career, of course, would be finished. The party was still a few weeks away. Perhaps I could leave Prague, I thought wildly. I had family in Brünn; perhaps I could request a transfer to the post office there. But in the following days I settled into a kind of lassitude. Instead of considering the situation, I pushed it from my mind and slept, dreaming empty dreams of blackness.

  I read the news of the imminent publication in the Bohemia newspaper. Early reviews also began to appear and I could not help seeking them out in the morbid way one seeks out the obituary notices. In Hyperion, Der Neue Weg and Herderblätter the reviews were enthusiastic, and the more conservative journals attributed the work to a diseased mind and lamented the decline of literature: a reaction that only increased Franz’s fame and notoriety.

  The following week, copies of the book began to appear in the bookshops. They were often arranged in the window and would catch my eye when I walked past. I would stop involuntarily and gaze at them as I would have done had the book been mine. I would stand there for a long time, mesmerised by the rows of coloured oblongs arranged in neat stacks, until my gaze unfocused and the colours of the covers had run together into a bright, soft mass. Gradually, I would become aware of my own reflection in the windowpane, a stunted shadow cast over the scene, and then I would hurry on, crumpled with self-consciousness. I had told no one about my suspicions regarding the origin of Gregor. Some things are just too shaming to allow to pass through one’s lips.

  I knew that by this stage most of my friends would have read the book, and the conversations and conjectures I had imagined had probably already taken place in various hotels, cafés and parlours all over the city. Since reading the manuscript I had retreated into myself; the circle of my days had narrowed to encompass only work and home. I had met none of my friends, gone to no lectures or readings or theatre productions or concerts. All the letters and postcards that came enquiring about me were left unanswered. If I chanced to pass someone I knew in the street I would duck my head and cross to the other side before they could greet me, convinced that the sight of me would conjure the image of Gregor in their minds.

  Anja faded from my life along with everything else at this time. She did not call on me again and no longer sent the little cards she used to send when we had not seen each other for a while. I did not seek her out—I was too ashamed and dejected—but I alternately longed for her and wished I had never met her. I thought of her constantly and wondered whether Liška was the cause of her silence, or Franz.

  The night of the party drew closer, like a storm coming in over the sea, and suddenly it was only a few days away. I tried to ignore it. I locked myself in my study, keeping up the pretence that I was working, though in reality I was only reading. As usual I had asked Elsa not to disturb me. My thoughts turned occasionally to Franz and the party, but each time they did I forced them away and back to the book I was reading. The lamplight smoothed and rounded out the corners of the room and made the walls curve around me in a dome, like a protective embrace. The fire murmured contentedly to itself and beyond the room I could hear the muted evening activity of the house. I heard a knock at the front door but I hardly gave it a thought. But then someone knocked at the study door, and I saw the door handle twitch as it was tried. I froze and held my breath. The knock came again. I considered sitting silently th
ere and leaving the door unanswered. My recent isolation from society had made me shrink from contact with people somewhat. The knock came again and drove me up from the sofa. I straightened my clothes and hair before I opened the door. It was Anja.

  She came in and we sat side by side on the little sofa in front of the fire. The light of the flames made her skin luminous and as smooth as wax. She was so perfect that it seemed entirely possible that she was not even real. I had the urge to reach out and touch her to make sure. But that evening I noticed that there was something different about her, some hesitation that made me nervous. Her eyes moved over my face probingly, as if she were trying to gauge my reaction to something. I guessed that she had come to tell me some ostensibly happy piece of news, such as her forthcoming engagement to Liška.

  ‘What?’ I could not help myself asking after a few moments of superficial conversation. ‘What is it? You have something you want to tell me?’

  Her face had a strange, rigid look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I only … Well, you know that party, the one for Die Verwandlung—’

  I knew at once what she was going to say. My usual reserve slipped and I barked at her, ‘I suppose Franz has asked you to go with him.’ I saw her eyes widen in surprise and I was instantly ashamed of myself.

  ‘Oh no,’ she answered in a small voice. ‘I haven’t been invited to the party. I heard about it from a friend at the university. Actually, I was rather hoping that you might ask me to go with you.’

  For a moment I was amazed that she would want to go. To me, the evening was nothing more than an ordeal to be survived. The idea that someone, and indeed probably everyone other than myself, considered it to be a celebration surprised me. Of course I longed to take Anja to a party and introduce her to everyone, to see her lovely face smiling and see the admiration in everyone’s eyes, to claim her as mine. There was nothing I wanted more. But it was impossible. I could not face the humiliation. That gallery of sneers and sideways glances. And, even if I managed somehow to steel myself against my shame, there still remained the problem of Franz. I did not wish Anja to be a witness to my shameful unmasking. But she was sitting there looking up at me timidly with her dark eyes and I did not know how to refuse her. I never wanted to refuse her anything.