Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

After we had passed what seemed to me a hundred lighted windows and heard a hundred voices calling to us, Franz stopped outside a corner house. He looked up at it.

‘This is the place,’ he said. ‘The girls here…’ He made an appreciative gesture with his lips and fingers.

He stepped up to the door and knocked, and then took off his hat and beat it against his leg to shake it free of raindrops. The madam of the house opened the door. She was a thin woman whose extremely small stature was apparent despite her high-heeled boots and the mountain of hair piled onto the top of her head. She greeted Franz as though she recognised him and they started chatting like old friends.

I had remained standing in the lane, looking up at the dark old house. It too held a lighted window that framed a girl. This one was very young. Her face was gentle and her body was a collection of flowing arcs and curves enclosed in polished skin. She was absorbed in fastening a ribbon around her slender neck, her head bent and her hair falling over one shoulder. She must have been around the same age as my sister Sophie. It pained my heart to think of Sophie and to know that this girl in the window once, and perhaps still, had a mother and father and perhaps brothers somewhere who worried about her and wanted to protect her. It pained me that I could know this yet still desire her all the same.

Her animal sense felt my eyes on her and she turned and looked down at us. I saw her look first at Franz and take in his upright bearing and the cut of his clothes. Then she looked at me. Revulsion flashed across her face. I instinctively readjusted my position to make myself appear more unobtrusive, hating myself for doing it. I saw myself through the girl’s eyes as I stood there beside Franz. I saw how she must be anticipating with disgust the moment that she would be obliged to touch me and feel my body pressed against hers, how she must be hoping to be chosen by Franz and not by me.

Franz called my name, and the madam held the door wider and motioned for me to come in, but the image of the girl’s face was in my mind, and my shame at myself had obliterated any feeling of desire I had had. Franz made a show of trying to entice me in, but I could see now that the girls were more important to him than spending the remainder of the evening with me.

I walked the long distance home, allowing my tired body to relax into its natural misshapen form. My gait collapsed into its usual pitching roll and my uneven footfalls on the cobblestones broadcast my affliction out into the night. I met no other walker on my way.

When I arrived home, the house was dark, but I could hear my father moving around in his room next to mine. I turned up the lamp in my bedroom and removed my hat and coat, my jacket, trousers and collar, my undershirt and socks, and went and stood in front of the mirror. The mirror was large, as tall as myself, and beautifully framed in a mottled red wood. I surveyed myself. My dark hair, already receding slightly at the temples, had been flattened to the contours of my head by my damp hat and looked as if it were painted on. My face, an echo of my body, had a slight twist to it; the cleft in my chin was not quite in line with the tip of my nose, and the whole lower half of my face was crooked, as if it had been wiped to one side. My left shoulder rose much higher than my right, and I had my jackets and coats made up with extra padding on the right side in an effort to disguise this. My whole right side appeared shrunken and hollow and my body collapsed over to this side while above it my head struggled for equilibrium. My right leg, a ruined thing, twisted inwards and its toes curled pathetically into the instep of my left foot as if they were seeking shelter there.

I turned my crooked side to the mirror to examine it more closely. In profile I was a question mark, with my straight legs and curved back, my head at the top poking forward like the head of a tortoise. [7] Pencil sketches in a spare, cartoonish style appear in the margins of the manuscript here. They depict a male human figure and have been partially erased. I had learned over the years to control my body to a degree, to make it appear more like other bodies, but it cost me much discomfort and required a great deal of concentration.

No one ever spoke a word to me about my deformity. Out of all the people I passed every day around Prague—the tram drivers, the maids, the whores, Stephanie in the next office, my mother, Sophie, the postman—not one ever said a word. The tongues of all those who inhabited my world were silent, but their eyes were not.

Their eyes spoke, that sea of eyes through which I moved each day. They glanced and looked in secret and averted their gazes, and this looking and not-looking spoke louder than any voice of disgust, curiosity or, worst of all, pity. I offended them. I frightened them. I showed them what they had, and what they had to lose.

I could still see the eyes of the girl in the window as she looked from Franz to me, her face twisting unknowingly as if to mirror mine. I felt no malice towards the girl; her reaction was justified and even warranted. I was able to observe myself objectively from the outside just as easily as I could observe Franz or any other person, and even I—especially I—would have preferred Franz to myself.

I often imagined how life would be if lived in a normal body. I obsessively watched people in the street and chose features that I would like to have for myself, composing a vast catalogue of them. A strong neck like a pillar, a back that spread outwards from the spine in two even wings, square shoulders that hung balanced from the neck, legs straight and muscular, moving like pistons. All of these were like fabulous riches to me, wonders I would never possess. Franz did possess them, together with a supple elegance, like that of a dancer. His body appeared weightless, borne upwards from the soles of his feet as though he were moving in water, or he were composed not of flesh but vapour. What a fool I was to think that Fräulein Železný, who could have anyone she chose, would be interested in me. I, who disgusted a cheap whore on Corpse Lane.

SOME WEEKS LATER A CITY BOOKSHOP ORGANISED FOR BOTH Franz and me to attend a literary evening where authors were to read from their work. I had managed to salvage enough from my notes to give an overview of the Schopenhauer book, and Franz was to read an unpublished story. The event was to be held at the Charles University, where I had studied some years ago. As I walked through the grounds, I found the old buildings unchanged and instantly familiar, and I was surprised to find that I still knew my way around the echoing corridors. The students I passed also seemed unchanged as they hurried past, singly, with clutches of books, heads ducked, or strolled together in small clusters, arguing in loud voices.

Speaking to a large group of people about my work still brought with it the sharp bite of anxiety. Whenever I had to read my own work in public, my body, which had already failed me so much, added to its crimes with bouts of nausea and headaches for days beforehand, and tremors and sweating as I stood facing the crowd.

This had originated with my first public-speaking engagement. It was the year before, in summer; a season that I have always disliked because the fewer clothes one wears, the more difficult it is to disguise a hunchback. That summer, though, was the only one that I remember ever having felt at ease with myself. I was the happiest I had ever been at having my work published—and not only published, but praised. I would wake in the morning and the thought of my book gave me the same feeling of lightness that one feels when one wakes and remembers that it is a holiday. For the first time, something in my life eclipsed the reality of living in my crooked body.