Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

Loose sheets of writing paper spilled off the bed and onto the floorboards around it. I looked down and saw some of the crumpled pages underneath my shoes, dirty and torn. The smudged lines of blue ink looked familiar to me. I thought it looked like my own handwriting. I stooped down to pick up one of the crumpled pages, and it looked like the story I had written that night so long ago. I read a few lines, but the words had changed and I could no longer remember what I had written before. The figure in the bed sighed and shifted. It leaned its head back onto the pillows to look up at me.

I knew that it was Franz, but it was difficult to find any feature that anchored him to this identity. The bones of his face pushed out painfully like the blades of knives against the inside of the skin and his face seemed to have widened and flattened. His eyes were DARK animals hiding in shrunken hollows, his hair a mass of dirty cobwebs spread over the skull. His hands were crowded with large bones, too heavy for his bird-like limbs, and they lay abandoned on the bedclothes. He smelled of death, of earth and mould and dark silence.

I was conscious of the sound of the watch in my pocket. I was still holding my hand curled around it, afraid to let go and release the deafening sound into the room. I asked him where Anja was, and my voice trumpeted out of me and hurt my head. He did not respond—perhaps he did not hear me—but only sank further back onto the pillows and closed his eyes.

It seemed impossible that Anja could be in any of the rooms of that dingy apartment. I remembered suddenly the other door that opened off the entrance hall. I imaged Anja inside, sitting silently, or tied up, gagged, being kept PRISONER. I went to it and threw the door open so hard that it bounced off the wall behind it. I was faced with a MAN [24] This may read ‘myself’. standing on the other side of the room, watching me. I froze, but then saw that it was only my reflection in the black window. The room was completely bare, empty of furniture, with the naked glass of the window like a great eye looking in. The sound of the watch bounced from the hard surfaces into my face like physical shocks.

I went back to FRANZ’S [25] ‘The other’ is crossed out, and ‘F’s’ is written in the space above it. room and shouted at him to tell me where Anja was. My mouth stretched with crude savageries and my hot breath hissed against my teeth. I leaned over him, into the fog of pestilent air that hung about the bed. But Franz looked completely unaffected by my outburst, and his only reaction was to stretch his white lips over his teeth in a caricature of a smile. Slowly, he raised one of his limp hands from the bedclothes and pointed across the room. His dry voice was in my ears; it hissed and sighed like a sibilant Eastern language, it rustled like paper, and I could not understand his words. The beats that came from the watch fell onto his words and sliced them into pieces of animal noise.

He began to speak and gesture more insistently, and I could see that he was pointing at the writing table. I went towards it and looked down at the sheets of paper covered with his spiked writing. I remembered the letter from Anja that I had found in Karlsbad and the letter in my pocket. Had he written these to lure me to him? Or was Anja somewhere here, behind one of the closed doors on the landing? I leafed through the papers on the table with one hand and read a few phrases here and there. I opened the drawers of the writing table at random and scooped the contents out onto the floor. My fingers found a tightly bound stack of folded paper. I pulled out a sheet and saw that it was covered with my own handwriting. It was a page from one of my letters to Anja, my outpourings of love for her, which I had written all those months ago in Karlsbad. [26] ‘Anja, Anja, Anja’ is repeated here for four lines in Brod’s writing. This had been omitted in the interest of fluency and coherence. There was a pain in my stomach like a wound. I opened another sheet from the stack, and it was the same. The whole drawer was full of these little folded parcels, a stockpile, a mausoleum of my useless affection.

It did not occur to me to wonder how they had come to be here. My eyes were swollen with the weight of hundreds of uncried tears, and I could see again every image of Anja I had ever witnessed, every scene I had enacted with her. They moved past me one after the other like pictures in a gallery. Her face was as clear to me as though it were projected onto the blank wall above the writing table.

I stuffed the folded papers back into the drawer and sat down in the chair. The papers on the desk swam together under a film of tears and I ran my hand over them as if over the surface of the ocean. A patch of cream PAPER stood out against the sea of white and I pulled it out and held it before my eyes. ‘My darling Franz, my love.’ I closed my eyes against it, the sheet of Anja’s writing. [27] This line has been crossed out with several strokes, but is still easily legible. I could feel the tears pushing against my eyelashes as though they were grains of salt, hard little stones. A coldness rolled down through my body and filled me with ice.

So Franz had won in the end. And it was the end. He had used me like a parasite. He had wormed his way into my life, into my love, and had eaten them hollow, leaving only a calcified, empty shell. Even my writing [28] ‘Body’ appears underneath the word ‘writing’, but is clearly legible. had been sapped by him in some mysterious way. I was like a mother who gives birth in the bloom of youth, unwillingly, and is left haggard and exhausted, having passed the energetic spark of her life on to her child. For in some ways Franz was like my child. An unwanted one.

And what was left to me now? A book I had sweated and toiled over, certain at the outset that it would be a masterpiece, which had been a complete failure. Anja was lost to me. I was nothing more now than a crippled worker at the Prague post office. Anja, Anja. Fresh tears pressed in my throat at the thought of her. Now I was left with only Uta. Uta. Her coarse face leered at me and the muscles in my ears clenched at the thought of her voice of affected childishness.

The sound of the watch was now so loud that it was shaking the room, as though the walls of the building were being struck by a battering ram. The legs of the furniture jumped and scratched over the floor. Loose sheets of paper snowed from the bed and the writing table and the clothes on the rail began to jerk their arms and legs in a phantom dance. I still had my hand wrapped around the watch, but with each beat it was becoming more and more painful to hold, and I was afraid that if I let it go I would be deafened in an instant. I waited for the space between two beats and then took the watch out, still wrapped in the useless handkerchief, and flung it onto the floor. It spun on its back like a golden beetle and I brought my foot down upon it with all my force. I felt its hard form resist painfully under my heel. The beat slowed and I seized a chair and smashed it down again and again onto the tiny metal object, until its innards, miniature wheels and cogs, all spilled out onto the floorboards in a small golden pool. In the spreading silence I could hear the tinkling music of these tiny mechanical components rolling away into cracks in the floorboards.

I went back to the bed. Franz’s whole BODY was still and lay there among the bedclothes like the discarded skin of a reptile. All the life that he yet contained had become distilled in his quivering eyes and eyelids. He was whispering something to me, the same phrase again and again, but his dry lips were two rigid straps and he could not form the words. I leaned closer and held my breath, afraid to inhale his contagion.