Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

ALTHOUGH I DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, THAT FIRST EVENING AT Karlsbad was to be the model for the rest of our time there. The news that a famous writer from Prague was in residence had apparently spread instantly through the hotel the moment we had arrived. This gossip was a welcome distraction for the bored well-to-do women who populated its rooms, and hunting for Franz must have filled in time between massages, doctors’ visits and comparing ailments, and indeed perhaps formed an invigorating part of their cure.

Any movements that Franz made around the hotel were observed and shadowed by dozens of people who tailed him in the hope of claiming a moment of conversation with the celebrated artist. The resulting encounter was then loudly flaunted by the victor at dining tables and along the spa colonnades for days afterwards.

Maddeningly for me, although news of Franz had rapidly spread, I remained anonymous. People began to take me for Franz’s assistant, and I became drawn into the hotel guests’ hunt for him, as they followed me to discover Franz’s whereabouts or tried to befriend me in the hope of wangling an introduction to Franz or, better still, an invitation to dinner with him.

Although Franz must have been greatly surprised by this behaviour he never said a word about it. I tried as best I could to shield him from the interest that he aroused, and when this was not possible I would trivialise it, putting the fascination down to boredom or the small-minded fads that thrived in spa resorts.

I am sure, of course, that at first Franz enjoyed this unfamiliar attention. Women were constantly employing flimsy ruses to entrap him, their fluting voices teasing and flirting with him; men at the bar offered to buy him schnapps or the town specialty, Karlsbader Becherbitter, and wanted to talk politics. Ignored, I looked on with gritted teeth. Franz began to be engaged in a fury of letter-writing in answer to the endless little notes that were left for him at all hours at the hotel desk or in our room or at our usual table in the dining room. I was used to being on the receiving end of such adulation, and felt bewildered and offended by how quickly Franz had taken my place as the centre of attention. Indeed, if I was honest with myself, I would have to admit that the attentions that I had received even at the height of my popularity could not equal those that Franz enjoyed at Karlsbad. He was treated like a film star, a king.

However, to my surprise, after a few days of this I found that, following the initial sting, Franz’s eclipse of my own popularity became easier to bear. I found that I was even quite grateful to slip into the restful role of anonymous spectator. A great and unexpected sense of freedom and lightness came over me, as though I were only arbitrarily connected with the world and floated through it like a ghost, completely free and invisible.

Franz also treated me as if I did not really exist. Aside from discussing places to visit for the travelogue, he completely disregarded me and went about the routines of his day as if he were alone. I had never lived in such close proximity to another person for such a length of time and I observed Franz’s habits with all the interest of an anthropologist. Franz to me had always been a model of the urbane gentleman: supremely elegant of figure and dress, fluid of movement, immaculate at all times. From our first meeting and every time I had seen him after that I had always been struck by his physical presence. I had often imagined the lives of others, of those not plagued by defects such as mine, and had dreamed that they lived lives of easy simplicity and naturalness, but I was surprised to find that there was a great deal of stage-managing that went on behind the scenes, even for Franz.

Every morning on waking he would embark upon a series of physical exercises performed on the bare boards of our room. My wake-up call of those mornings at the Kroh were invariably the thumpings and groanings that Franz made as he jumped and stretched and pushed and pulled his own body about. I would lie under my bedclothes and watch the proceedings with interest. He would perform the sequences in his underwear and they would conclude with a series of noisy breathing exercises performed at the open window. After this, Franz would pull out a small tape measure and take note of his statistics—the circumference of his thighs, his waist and his chest—and jot them down in his notebook.

He was completely heedless of my presence in the room: a lack of delicacy of which I was quite envious. He followed his exercise schedule regardless of circumstance; the cold did not deter him, and if the rain blew in the open window and soaked him as he breathed aggressively at the air, he seemed oblivious. The exercises took precedence over all other things; breakfast and any morning appointments were all postponed until Franz had completed his circuit. I now saw his perfect physical form in a different light and being made aware of the work that went into it was strangely comforting to me, bound as I was in my own imperfection.

Franz had another habit in which he engaged less regularly, one that I was not privy to until we had cohabited for more than a few weeks. One afternoon I came back into our room to find it empty. I noticed that the wardrobe door was ajar, and a second later realised that Franz was there in the room after all, crouched next to the wardrobe and obscured by the open door. He was so engrossed in something that he had not noticed me come in. He was standing in the beam of sunlight that came through the window in front of the long mirror that was fixed to the wardrobe door. He was fully dressed and looked ready to go out. He was peering anxiously into the mirror, his face inches from the glass, his breath making white clouds upon it. Then he held something up to his face and began angling his head and his body awkwardly around, turning in a slow circle. He kept pitching his head at odd angles, his eyes on the object in his hand. I saw that it was a tiny hand mirror, which he was using to view himself from all angles. He turned to look at himself in profile and tested out various expressions, smiling and looking serious, tilting his head up and down. He turned and viewed himself from the back.

I felt ashamed for him, to have caught him in such a private moment, but also surprised, because his actions spoke of a vulnerability of which I had not thought him capable. I also felt the shock of recognition. In my younger years, and still now at times of nervous unease, I have engaged in a similar obsessive looking; to what end, I do not know. Perhaps I looked to try to gain control of my image, as if the offence it could cause were a finite physical thing that could be used up by my eyes alone. Or perhaps I looked to assess the exact sum of my hideousness, to quantify it. But in this I was never successful, because all proportion disappeared in front of the glass, and with my exposed self before my eyes my sense of judgment became confused and useless. Was I a complete monster or only mildly unpleasant? The answer always eluded me; the more I looked, the less I knew. What could Franz possibly be looking for? I wondered. He surely had no need of it in the way that I had.

I quietly took hold of the door handle and silently opened the door a small way and then noisily pulled it shut behind me, pretending that I had only just come into the room. I had expected him to jump hastily from the mirror and I gave him time to do so by lingering with my back to him while I hung up my hat and coat. But when I turned to face him I found that he had not moved; the only concession to my presence was his gaze sliding briefly over to me and then immediately back to the mirror’s surface.

During the time at Karlsbad, my thoughts often drifted to Anja. My feelings for her had the effect of inoculating me against the charms of the women in the town. The days of pleasant reverie about my relationship with Anja were long over and now my thoughts circled menacingly. Now I relived each one of our encounters obsessively, trying to discern the point of collapse, the moment when that first germ of destruction had entered into our relationship. There were so many things I would have liked to ask her.