Danilo Kiš - The Lute and the Scars

“The eyewitness accounts of the last period of his life are contradictory. Some see him beset by anxiety, avoiding elevators and automobiles with suspicion and horror, while others. ”

Once, more than twenty years ago, he had read in the newspaper that a young man in Pest plummeted into a basement on board an elevator; they found him smashed to pieces. This event from long ago impressed itself upon his memory and slumbered there, in hiding for years, only to pop up again one day the way a corpse resurfaces when the stone on it is dislodged. Indeed, this had happened only a few months earlier, while he was standing by the elevator door in the editorial offices of a Berlin publishing house. He pressed the button and heard the humming of the old French elevator in its cage as it descended from somewhere on high. Suddenly it stopped right in front of him, abruptly, with a slight rattle, a polished black coffin, lined with purple silk imprinted with irises like the reverse side of a lustrous piece of crêpe de Chine ; it also had a huge Venetian mirror, polished on the edges, with green glass like the surface of a crystal lake. This upright coffin, made to order for a first-class funeral and controlled by the invisible power of a deus ex machina , had descended from above, docked like Charon’s ferry, and now sat awaiting the pale traveler standing there petrified and uncertain, the manuscript of his latest novel, The Man Without a Country , shoved under his arm (and through the grate he himself was observing the pale traveler in the mirror, standing there petrified and uncertain, with the manuscript of his most recent novel clenched under his arm). And the coffin was waiting to take him not into the “other world” but merely into the grim basement of the building, the crematorium and cemetery where glassy-eyed stray travelers rested in sarcophagi similar to this one.

When he reached his room, to which the porter had already delivered his luggage, the guest first spread his manuscripts out on the table and then began to jot down his impressions of the day. In the last few years the man without a country had been writing more and more frequently in hotel rooms at night, or by day in cafés, on tables of artificial marble.

He captured in haste a few observations, a few Bilder : a newspaper vendor slurping her soup from a plate, next to her nostril a wound the size of a coin, a raw open wound; a female midget attempting to climb up into a train; a waiter totting up a bill with his pencil between his little finger and index finger because the rest of his fingers were missing; and a pimply porter with a boil on his neck. And so on.

He despised duels as a symbol of Junker arrogance, in the same way that he scorned commonplace scandal and showdowns with fists or knife, but for all that he was no less obsessed with human cruelty, which he saw simply as a depiction of the cruelty of society. Physical deformity and every kind of abnormality fascinated him as the flip side of the “normal.” Giants, dwarves, boxing champions, and circus freaks triggered in him a whole chain of metaphysical associations. Deaf from the noise of the fans, he watched their maniacal faces. Squeezed in amongst hysterical fans, he grasped, he sensed corporeally, the meaning of certain abstract concepts such as community, leader , and idea , as well as the connotation of that hoary adage about bread and circuses that sententiously presents us with the whole starting point of modern history.

Back in his homeland this poet had a monument, and streets, named after him; he had generations of admirers and his own mythos, as well as followers who praised him to the skies and stood in awe of his verse and lyrics as the pure emanation of the national spirit; and he also had sworn enemies who considered him a traitor to national ideals, a sell-out to the Germans and the Jews, the nobles and the moneyed classes, and these enemies denied that he had any originality, proclaiming him an ordinary imitator of the French Symbolists, a plagiarist of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and they wrote pamphlets about him full of accusations and every manner of slander.

His father, Aladár von Németh, began his “diplomatic career” quite modestly covering the shipping news for the Pester Lloyd newspaper, and his first posting was in Rijeka (Fiume). The journey to Fiume coincided with the honeymoon of this young diplomat who had just married a certain Zofia, née Dvořak. In that city of consuls and diplomats the future “man without a country” came into the world; he would retain for the whole of his life the memory of the sea and of a palm tree in front of his window, straining beneath the hammering of a gale, as an illustration of a Spartan proverb that was near and dear to his father’s heart: the power of resistance is acquired through constant struggle against the elements.

His room was lined with carpets and the floor covered by sheepskins; in summer the blinds were let down over the windows to shield him from the sun while in winter the sitting rooms were heated by a gargantuan tile stove that looked like a Secessionist cathedral. From the time he was five years old the nursery had been unheated, as a hygienic precaution and a part of his training in the Spartan mode; sometimes the nursemaids would lie down in the child’s bed so that their wholesome commonplace warmth would fill the heavy feather duvet.

His great-grandfather on his mother’s side (mutton chops, stove-pipe hat clutched in his left arm, his right resting at the elbow on a high shelf; on the shelf, in a vase, paper roses; at his feet a faience figure of a tremendous mastiff) was named Feldner. He didn’t leave much of a paper trail around the house, with the exception of that photograph with the paper roses, and it was with a certain feeling of guilt that they referred to him as “the late Feldner” (using his last name and always with the addition of “late”). That some ancient wrongdoing had come down from him, some type of original family sin — this was beyond certain. Hence the sparse documentation on him; hence the sole photograph in the album.

And this round face, with its big black moustache and hefty sideburns, that’s the writer’s father, Dr. Aladár von Németh, accompanied by Lajos von Hatvany (“who corresponded with T. Mann and Romain Rolland”). And here is the writer’s mother (a cheerful face under a crown of blonde hair pinned up in plaits). And here we see the family in a boat, on a river. Au verso : “Belgrade, 1905.” The high walls with the tower that one can almost make out in the background are the walls of the Kalemegdan fortress. — A clearing in the woods, with guests seated around a roughly hewn wooden table. The boy is sitting in his mother’s lap; next to them is Dr. Aladár von Németh, with his hunting rifle, the stock of which he has leaned against the table like a hajduk would do; at the head of the table, a gentleman in a hunting hat; the women are also wearing hunting hats, and the men Hungarian tunics: “Dr. Aladár von Németh in the company of His Highness Ludwig III, King of Bavaria. Pressburg/Bratislava.”—The boy on his bicycle. With one hand he’s propping himself up against an ivy-clad wall: “Budapest, Rákóczianum, 1913.”—The lad with a group of other schoolboys and professors; an arrow indicates Egon von Németh: “München. Wilhelmsgymnasium, 1914.” And so forth.