Daniel Kehlmann - Fame - A Novel in Nine Episodes

“All this isn’t real,” she said. “Or is it?”

“Depends on your definition.” He lit a cigarette. “Real. It’s a word that means so much, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

“That’s why you’re so serene. So composed and on top of everything. This is your version, this is what you’ve made of it. Out of our trip back then and out of what you know of my work. And of course Lara is there.”

“Lara is always there when I am.”

“I knew you’d do this. I knew I’d end up in one of your stories! Exactly what I didn’t want!”

“We’re always in stories.” He drew on the cigarette, the tip glowed red, then he lowered it and blew smoke into the warm air. “Stories within stories within stories. You never know where one ends and another begins! In truth, they all flow into one another. It’s only in books that they’re clearly divided.”

“The mistake with UNPROFOR shouldn’t have happened. Ever heard of research?”

“I’m not that kind of author.”

“Could be,” she said. “And I’m going to leave you.”

He looked at her. She felt a wave of sadness well up in her. The horizon glittered again. Out there was death, out there reality was so harsh and so painful that there were no words to describe it. No matter whether he’d thought it up or she was actually here—there were places of pure terror, and places where things were themselves and nothing else.

“But not now,” he said. “Not in this story.”

They were silent for some moments. In front of them the uniformed men had lit the fire. Now they were sitting around the flames talking quietly in their language. From time to time, one of them laughed.

“In reality you’d never turn down a prize. Give me a cigarette.”

“That was my last.”

“Nothing to be done?”

He shook his head. “My God, no. And yet I badly need more, I’m appallingly nervous.”

She blinked, but she could hardly see him anymore. He struck her as unreal, already almost transparent and more of a placeholder than himself. And inside the hut meantime, she knew, Lara Gaspard’s presence and charisma had only grown stronger.

“Poor Mrs. Riedergott! Did you really have to use her too?”

“Why not?” His voice was almost disembodied, it seemed to be coming from all around and yet was almost inaudible in the evening wind. “I found her very useful.”

“Useful.”

“Is that bad?”

She shrugged and went back inside. Lara Gaspard was holding a pencil and drawing in a sketchbook with dreamlike concentration. How graceful she was! Beside her Rotmann was reading a worn French paperback, The Art of Being Oneself by Miguel Auristos Blanco. Müller and Rebenthal were playing cards with one of the militiamen.

“Sometimes he deals,” Müller whispered. “Sometimes we deal, then we look at the cards and he tells us who’s won. What the hell kind of game is that?”

Elisabeth shrugged to show she had no idea what kind of game it was. She sat down and leaned her head against the wall. She was dead tired, but she wanted to stay awake. What kind of dreams would she find herself in if she fell asleep? “So where’s Leo?”

Müller looked up. “Who?”

Elisabeth nodded. That’s how they did it, that’s how they evaded their responsibilities. Already he was everywhere, behind things, and above the sky and beneath the earth like a second-class God, and there was no remaining possibility to hold him accountable.

“We should go to sleep.” Lara Gaspard closed the sketchbook. “Tomorrow will be a hard day.”

Elisabeth shut her eyes. Mind you, if this was a story, something would happen and things would become hard, and if they didn’t become hard, then it wasn’t a story. Where was sleep going to take her? Suddenly she didn’t care. Her phone rang. She paid no attention.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in 1975 in Munich, the son of a director and an actress. He attended a Jesuit school in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels and short stories, among them the 2005 Candide Award, the 2006 Kleist Award, and the 2008 Thomas Mann Award. His works have been translated into more than forty languages, and his novel Measuring the World became an instant best seller in several European countries, selling more than 1.5 million copies. Kehlmann lives in Vienna and Berlin.

Carol Brown Janeway’s translations include Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader , Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s In the Cellar , Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost , Zvi Kolitz’s Yosl Rakover Talks to God , Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy , Sándor Márai’s Embers , Yasmina Reza’s Desolation , and Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World and Me and Kaminski.