The Lost Pages

by Marija Pericic

  I became aware of nearby motion and a voice inside my head saying my name. Other voices came to me, and I struggled to open my eyes, which seemed loaded with heavy weights. I saw some yellow object floating on a white ground, and it took me a moment to recognise it as the ceiling lamp. I shifted my eyes to the left, and Stephanie came into view, talking to a man I vaguely recognised as being somehow connected with the post office. They were both looking at me intently and they tried to hoist me into a sitting position. My body became rigid at the touch of their hands. I hated to be touched; even to shake hands cost me an effort.

  I felt quite normal, and I wanted more than anything for everyone to leave my office, to be left alone. But they insisted on staying and kept me sitting on the floor, propped up against the desk. There was a soft knock at the door, and it opened to admit a strange man carrying a case: the doctor whom they had called.

  He did not ask for my colleagues to leave the room, but examined me in their presence. He declared my vital signs to be normal, but took the weakness in my legs as a symptom of the fall. My voice quavered when I was forced to identify myself as a cripple. At last he left, along with the man from the post office, and I was allowed to get up from the floor. But Stephanie still lingered and soon Jelen was at the door, his face grave. He sent me home for the day.

  When I left the building I collided with a wall of heat that had already built up, though it was still quite early. I began to sweat as soon as I stepped away from the shade of the doorway. After a few blocks, I stopped at a café, more out of the need for a cool place than the need for a drink, and I ordered tea only because it was still too early for beer. I tried to forget the article I had read, but my thoughts circled unendingly over Kafka, Anja, Klopstock, Theodor, but could not fix firmly on any one. The scale of my problems was suddenly too large to contemplate, and my mind shied from the task. It was useless to try to concentrate. What I would have most liked to do was to go for a walk in the country to clear my head, but the day was much too hot for that. I left the café without drinking my tea and walked home.

  When I turned into my street, I could see Elsa’s head protruding from the window of our house, and she waved when I came into view as though she had been keeping watch for me. By the time I had reached the house she was standing outside the entrance door. Sophie called my name from the window where Elsa had been earlier and waved at me as though I were returning home after a long absence.

  It turned out that Jelen had been worried about my condition and intended to have someone accompany me home from the office, but I had left too quickly, so he had sent a messenger to my house to notify my family of my illness. The messenger was still there when I went up, one of the junior clerks. He looked relieved to see me and hurried off as soon as I had sat down.

  I had planned to keep the incident of my collapse from my family, knowing they would worry and fuss over something that was really of no significance. Elsa and Sophie commandeered me as soon as the clerk had left. They made me lie down on the sofa and Sophie began bathing my forehead with a washcloth soaked in rosewater. I allowed them to tend to me, mostly because of the worried expression on Sophie’s lovely face.

  These kinds of collapses had been a commonplace occurrence in my childhood, and had been the subject of endless speculation by doctors. I used to be afraid of the further illustration that they presented of my lack of control over my own body. I was afraid, too, of the reaction they provoked in others. The experience of the collapse itself was not especially worrying or unpleasant. It usually began with a sensation of sliding, a moment of vertigo, which was very much like the experience of being in a stationary train carriage and looking out of the window at the adjacent carriage of another train, also stationary, and then that other train slowly beginning to move, but feeling for a moment that it is one’s own train that is moving. After this sliding sensation, I was aware of nothing until I came to myself again. There was nothing in the interval that I could ever recall; only blackness. Yet I had always felt sure that something must happen to me in those parentheses of consciousness; surely I must go somewhere, in the same way that one visits dream worlds when asleep.

  Lying on the sofa, breathing in the scent of roses from the cool cloth over my face, listening to Sophie’s and Elsa’s murmuring and the dulled street noises, I began to drift into sleep. Instead of Sophie’s face bending over me I imagined Anja’s, her eyes soft with concern, her hair falling a little over one shoulder. She smiled a slow smile, pulling me into sleep.

  __________________

  * Two pages have been torn out of the notebook and have not been recovered. The first part of this sentence is an approximation.

  † There is a newspaper clipping included here, measuring approximately five by seven centimetres, which on one side contains part of a photograph of an unknown face, and on the other an advertisement for Gottlieb coffee.

  22.

  AFTER MY COLLAPSE, JELEN HAD INSISTED THAT I STAY AT HOME for a few days. The collapse had an oddly calming influence on my nerves, as if a circuit had been broken, and when I woke from a heavy sleep the following day it was to a state of tranquillity that I had not experienced for many months. Wakefulness came to me gradually, and I became aware of the world of my bedroom. Light pooled in through the window and I saw every object in the room anew. My ears detected a complicated arrangement of sounds, through which I constructed the idea first of the house, and then of the city as it gradually spread out around me; Elsa’s steps on the stairs, the sound of my own breath, a carriage passing in the street, the trilling of a kestrel, and a jackdaw singing a complicated response.

  I smiled to myself and closed my eyes again. I found that now I could easily fix my mind on the idea of Anja and Franz without it continually slipping from my focus, as it had the day before. The previous day had been the first that I had not called on Anja since my return from Karlsbad, but I was surprised to feel no urgency about this. I wanted to drift off again into sleep, but a persistent sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs prevented me. This became joined by the hissing whispers of Elsa and Sophie, together with my mother’s voice, which spoke at the normal volume, only to be immediately shushed by the others.

  I remembered then that it was my birthday, and a moment later the bedroom door slowly opened and Sophie, Elsa and my mother crept into my room. My mother began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ straight away in a loud voice, and the other two joined in. Sophie brought me a breakfast tray with flowers and cards and letters that had arrived in the morning post.

  Cups of coffee were distributed and I began to look through my birthday letters. There was one from Felix, and Kurt, and of course Uta, whose was written in a pale violet ink. There was another letter from our cousin in Brünn and a very thick one from Berlin, addressed in handwriting I could not immediately identify.

  Sophie clamoured for me to read some of the letters aloud, and I opened first the one from Brünn and read out the birthday wishes and news of marriages and births of the extended family and the activities of the summer.

  While I was reading, the letter from Berlin was lying on my lap. Something about the writing looked familiar and made me feel uneasy. After a moment I realised that the writing looked like Anja’s. I continued mechanically to read aloud. I wanted to seize the Berlin letter and tear it open, but there were many pages still to come of detailed news from Brünn. My cousin Oskar was an amusing letter-writer, and my audience was laughing and exclaiming at the incidents he described. My eyes kept sliding to the Berlin letter. It suddenly seemed to possess an extraordinary weight that pressed down on me through the bedclothes.

  At last I reached the final page of Oskar’s letter and my fingers were itching to take up Anja’s letter immediately, but it occurred to me that perhaps its contents might not contain birthday wishes that could be read aloud to my assembled family. I had not had any communication with Anja since before I was in Karlsbad. The envelope looked thick and heavy, suggestive of the emotion
al outpourings I had been both longing for and fearing.

  At last I finished reading my cousin’s letter and reached out for the other letter, but Sophie announced that it was now time for me to open my birthday presents. She jumped up from the bed and ran out of the room. My mother immediately began a long-winded story from the time of my childhood. Her memory of this period was surprisingly unimpaired and she had a ready collection of anecdotes that she recounted in the smallest details. Her words fell about my ears, while all my attention was on the thick envelope in my fingers.

  I had heard the story she told many times before; it concerned my brother, Otto. While she spoke I surreptitiously began to slide my finger underneath the envelope’s seal. With one hand, this was a difficult feat. The fibres of the papers gradually gave way to the pressure of my fingers and I felt the paper tear a small distance. I edged my finger further along, extending the tear with a timid, dry crackle that I covered by rustling the bedclothes around over my legs and shifting about in the bed. I continued to tear along the envelope in tiny bursts, striving for silence, pausing to give the appropriate responses to my mother’s tale.

  When I had torn it completely open, I slid my fingers inside the envelope and felt about in the folds of tissue-thin paper that it contained, all the while keeping my eyes on my mother’s face, nodding attentively.

  She had reached the end of the story, and in a rare expression of emotion, had stretched out with both hands to take my hand, the one entangled in the hidden envelope. I was forced to discard the envelope, and my hand was caught now in her grasp. She told me what a delightful child I had been, such strength, such promise. Every year at my birthday she told the same tales of Otto’s childhood, having mistaken me for him. I never had the heart to remind her that Otto was long dead.

  My hand lay limp between hers and she patted it absently, as though it were a small pet. Her eyes were far away in the dim past, while mine drifted to the area of bedclothes under which the letter was concealed. It felt vulnerable and exposed lying there, despite being covered up, as if there was a risk of it slipping off my lap and being blown away. I imagined it flying out of the open window, the folded pages of the letter being released and spreading out into the air like a flock of migrating white birds.

  Sophie came back with a pile of parcels and I could at last detach my hand and tuck the letter into the safety of my pyjama waistband. After I had opened a few of the parcels I excused myself and went out of the room to read the letter in privacy. As soon as I was outside the bedroom door I examined the writing; it was clearly from Anja, but she had omitted to write her name over the return address.

  While I had been unwrapping the parcels, I had tried to think of the worst possible things that the letter might contain, as though identifying the threat and ruminating on it would prevent it from happening. The worst, I mused, would be the news that Anja was together with Franz in that room in Karlsbad, although I knew that it was unlikely that Anja would write to me to impart this news. Or, worse still, she could be writing to tell me that she and Franz were to get married.

  I no longer had any kind of objective view on the situation and was unable to judge what was a likely occurrence and what wasn’t. I went into the empty living room, and by the time I had closed the door behind me, my calm of earlier in the morning had vanished and I was in a high state of nerves once again. I stood in the middle of the room and reached into my waistband with hands that seemed not to be mine. My fingers felt thick and rubbery and out of proportion, as though I had a fever, and they fumbled the paper from the envelope. One sheet was folded separately from the others, and I opened this first.

  The sight of the page covered in Anja’s writing flooded my eyes with tears. I immediately saw that her letter was a short one, more of a note than a real letter.

  Her signature appeared two-thirds of the way down the page. I was so agitated that the words scurried like ants over the surface of the paper and I had to concentrate to make sense of them. The letter began with some banal greeting and enquiries about my time at Karlsbad and then a few lines of her impressions of Berlin. Then came the blow.

  ‘I enclose here the newest stories of Kafka, which I very much enjoyed. They are works of true genius, with a humour and a darkness that I find wholly irresistible.’

  I read the letter again, but the line was still there. Wholly irresistible. The beat of my heart shook the paper in my hands. It was just what I had dreaded. Her letter, especially when considered together with the letter I had seen in Karlsbad, was as good as proof of her liaison with Franz. The room whirled around me and my stomach clenched so that I thought I would be sick. I felt a desperate need to see her. I had to go to her. I turned over the envelope and read the return address again: Nostitzstrasse 70, Berlin. I automatically reached for my watch, which of course I was not yet wearing, and was ready to run to the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof and leap aboard the first train to Berlin.

  ‘Max?’ Sophie’s voice came through the door. I stuffed the letter back into my waistband and returned to my bedroom.

  Sophie was standing outside my bedroom door. She gripped my arm when she saw my face. ‘You’re ill again,’ she said. Her eyes were round with concern.

  I smiled at her, but I had seen my face in the hall mirror, the lines of my flesh all directed in a downward motion, the panels of my cheeks hanging flat, my eyes staring from bloodless skin.

  ‘It’s only tiredness.’

  The bedroom was now even more crowded. My father had joined us. He was standing behind his wife with his hands on her shrunken shoulders, and as I limped into the room I felt a wave of sympathy for him; what a family he headed—a family of cripples and madwomen. For the first time I was aware that he must live with a shame and regret almost as deep as my own.

  He stepped towards me and formally shook my hand and wished me many happy returns for the day, as though I were a distant relative, but Sophie pushed him and everyone else out of the room, saying that I was not yet well and that they had all overwhelmed me with their birthday wishes. I felt grateful to her as I climbed back into bed. The letter rustled under my pyjamas as I lay down. Sophie hovered around the room as I settled myself and she came and felt my forehead for signs of fever. I closed my eyes against her anxiously peering face until I heard her leave too.

  For hours I lay there, not sleeping, not awake, aware of the letter against my skin and its significance. The words of the letter weighed like objects in the room, dark heavy furniture, crowding the space. If the situation was as I feared then I had nothing left to me. I had no more will to write, not after my last failure. And now it appeared that Anja, too, was lost to me. Franz had won. Once again, the only thing I had which was really my own was my broken body.

  23.

  ELSA AND SOPHIE CAME INTO THE ROOM SEVERAL TIMES DURING the day to check on me, and each time they did I closed my eyes and feigned sleep to avoid having to speak to them. When I was alone I fell into a kind of daze. I lay staring at a patch of sunlight that shifted along the wall with the passage of the hours. I listened to the noises of the street as people went about their unremarkable activities.

  At some point in the afternoon I heard someone come in and move across the room to sit in the chair beside my bed. Sophie, I thought, my eyes still closed. She whispered my name a few times, testing the depth of my sleep. Her voice was tense. I think that she knew I was not sleeping, so I opened my eyes.

  ‘Max, how are you feeling?’ She put her hand on my forehead and frowned as she measured my temperature.

  I groaned and closed my eyes again.

  ‘I know you’re not well,’ she said, ‘but do you think you could get up? We thought—Uta and I—well, it was going to be a surprise, but we’re having a birthday afternoon tea for you.’

  Uta. The name fell like a stone. I felt sick at the thought of her coming into the house and inserting herself among my family and friends, as if she were one of them. I pictured her letter, with its violet ink, lying on
the floor with the others.

  ‘What, now?’ I asked Sophie.

  ‘Yes. We’re all waiting for you downstairs.’

  I groaned again in protest.

  ‘Please?’ she said. ‘Everyone is there.’

  I could imagine Uta sitting there cosily with Sophie, patting my mother’s hand, laughing too loudly and ingratiatingly. The prospect was overwhelming, but I was too weak to refuse Sophie’s request.

  ‘Let me dress and then I will come down,’ I said.

  When she had left the room, I threw back the bedclothes. As I sat up, Anja’s letter crunched in my dressing-gown pocket. The sound heralded a flood of images of her that settled on me like a flock of heavy black birds. For a crazy moment I wondered if she might be downstairs with the others, waiting for me to come.

  I thought of Anja’s apartment in the Martinsgasse and those movements I had seen behind the curtains; perhaps the letter was a mistake, or perhaps the letter had been delayed and since sending it Anja had returned to Prague. I wanted to go to the apartment immediately. I pictured myself shoving the concierge out of the way and making for the stairs. I would throw stones up at her windows. break the glass panel, break down the door.

  When I stood up, I realised that I did feel ill. My skin felt tender, and to move was to push through air that was mysteriously thick. I decided that I would dress and then simply leave the apartment and go to Anja. If I could not find her at the Martinsgasse, I would take the train to Berlin. I pulled on my clothes and shoes and put the letter in my pocket. My head ached and my ears magnified every sound. As soon as I opened the bedroom door the noise of Uta’s shrill laughed flew at me like a swarm of biting insects.

  I could see from the head of the stairs that the double doors to the living room were folded back and Uta’s voice reigned. Perhaps I could just walk past, I thought, and no one would see me. I held on to the bannister to lighten my step, and proceeded down the stairs slowly, but the top stair still gave a loud creak, alerting Uta.