Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

Schopenhauer. I conjured up the image of the man, the photograph that was etched on the frontispiece of my copy of The World as Will and Representation . He looked sternly out from under the great cliffs of his eyebrows, undisturbed by the clouds of fluffy white hair that shot wildly out from either side of his head. His mouth was a grim line of concentration.

‘Max,’ his voice boomed out at me, ‘concentrate. Will. Will to live. Will to write.’

At that moment I had no will. Only perhaps the will to sleep. I felt the profound exhaustion of one who has been working for hours.

I began to tidy the papers on my desk, telling myself that when it was all straight and neat, then I would be able to begin. I felt quite virtuous as I sat sorting out papers and exercise books, creating a little ordered pile and making more of the surface of the table free. I pulled out a fat bundle and saw that it was Franz’s manuscript. The thickness of the pages between my fingers made my jaw clench tight with a spasm of raw envy. Cautiously, in the manner of one examining a wound, I took the papers out of their wrapping and began to read. The story was too good. When I had finished, I put it down on the table. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears. I watched my hand steal out and take hold of the pen and lower it to the page. A line emerged from the pen, a line of shining blue ink that intersected with the dried black shapes on the paper. A word was crossed out. I crossed it out again. Then another. The blood was pounding through my head, but my hand moved with precision. A curving blue line now ran across the page, making small tears in the paper. Then the next page lay before me, dry and black and white at first, but soon covered with glossy blue, unreadable. Page after page came faster and faster, and the rustle of the papers had soon drowned out the roaring in my head.

I must have fallen asleep or lost consciousness, for I heard a voice saying my name close in my ear. The next moment I was looking upon an arid desert landscape that was spread out below me, over which I seemed to be flying. I became absorbed in its features, boulders and mountain ranges, but after a moment the perspective shifted and the landscape resolved itself into the underside of the chair upon which I had been sitting, and I found that I was lying curled on the floor with my head underneath it. I lay for a moment, looking at the unfinished wood and dusty canvas of the underside of the seat. My mind and body retained the dim ghost of some euphoria, of a dream that had fled from me but left its evasive imprint. Lying in its warm glow I felt completely relaxed and relieved of all burdens. This feeling gradually faded and soon my body began to feel cold and stiff, host to a catalogue of familiar pains and discomforts. I rolled awkwardly out and straightened myself up into a sitting position.

Paper was scattered across the desk and formed tessellated patterns on the carpet. I began to gather up the torn pages of Franz’s story. Some had fallen face down beside the writing table, and when I lifted them up I saw that the carpet beneath them was stained with ink. The writing that covered the pages, dense blue lines of it, was now smudged, but still legible.

I began to read it with difficulty, and, as I read, I felt a sensation of lightness and expansion in my head. My body became unreal to me, my hands, my fingers, blue-tipped holding the papers, were foreign, no longer belonging to me. The phrases that I read, though they were plainly before me in my own handwriting, were new to me. I had never seen them before. [5] This sentence is followed by several others that have been heavily crossed out and are illegible.

The story was completely unlike anything I had ever written, crystallising private sides of myself that were barely conscious to me and that I would never dare commit to paper. An uneasy sensation grew in me, one of being watched by an observer hidden in the dim and silent room. My skin contracted and I began to shiver. Phantom shadows danced in the gloomy corners of the room and I turned up the lamp, feeling ridiculous. I forced my movements into deliberate slowness, trying to reassure myself, but my breath and heartbeats were ragged. A loud bang came suddenly from the fastened window. It was only the night-time wind, I knew, pushing at the glass that was loose in the frame, but I jumped as though I were under fire. My hands shook as I tried to collect the fallen pages from all around me. My ears began to ring and I soon abandoned my measured pace and hastily grabbed at the pages of Franz’s ruined manuscript. I bundled them up roughly and crumpled them into an untidy pile on the writing table. They hissed at me for my rough treatment of them. I took the pages covered in my writing and shoved them in the drawer and locked it, as though I feared some contagion that dwelled in their pages might leak out and poison the air.

THE NEXT DAY I SAT AT MY DESK AT THE POST OFFICE COMPLETELY exhausted. After my fainting fit, I had gone straight to bed but I had not been able to sleep. I had felt hot and cold by turns. Indistinct pains travelled up one side of my restless body and then the other. The skin of my feet became so excessively sensitive that the weight and movement of the bedclothes upon it was almost intolerable. Every position that I adopted quickly became unbearable, and the night was endlessly long, each minute stretched out by discomfort. My mind ran over and over the story that had appeared to me and I tried to consider it rationally, but my mind ran stupidly in circles. I drifted along loosely connected lines of thought, picked out in bright strings on a black background; not quite dreams but not quite thoughts either.

Elsa woke me when it was already quite late, and in the light of day the story seemed a product of my long, restless night. I no longer believed that it had happened. Before breakfast I went into the study, expecting the locked drawer to be empty, but the pages covered with dense lines of blue ink were exactly where I had left them. I read a few lines, and the feeling of reading my own writing still unsettled me, even in the brightness of day.

At the post office, I sat and dozed the whole morning through, unable to concentrate. Once again I was thankful for the mercies of having my own office. I had been in my position at the post office for more than four years and had settled into an easy work life there. At that time I considered it imperative to keep my writing separate from the need to earn money, rather than using it as a means to do so. There were many benefits of my position at the post office that were well suited to my writing vocation. I found the work easy and could complete the allotted workload in less than the time expected without any difficulty. I kept my quickness a secret and used the time that I had won to write undetected in my office during the workday.

As I sat there that morning I was aware of my briefcase propped up under the desk. It contained my story from the night before, and I pictured the white pages making a pale ghost in the dark leather cavern of the briefcase pocket. The air around the briefcase seemed to prickle with contained energy. The thought of the pages by my feet gave me a sinister feeling, and I had the impression that they were emitting a malignant energy that was being absorbed by my body. I felt an absurd reluctance to open my briefcase.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I muttered aloud to myself and picked up the briefcase. I could not help but attribute some strange magic or sentience to those pages, and I would not have been surprised to look at them again now and find them blank or covered with a completely different writing altogether, perhaps even in a language unknown to me. I undid the clasp with a beating heart and pulled out the loose bundle of pages.