Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

He stood in the middle of the records office, or rather he had advanced into the more powerfully lit area having emerged from among the shelves, with no one around, everyone having gone home since it was after four, or possibly even half past four, advancing into the light clutching a family file, or to be more accurate, the sub-file or fascicile containing the historical documents of the Wlassich family, stopped under the big lamp, unpacked the sheaf of papers, separated them out, riffled through them, examined the material revealed with the intention of getting the files into some order if that were necessary, for after all they had lain undisturbed for many decades, but going through the various leaves from journals, letters, accounts and copies of wills, somewhere between the miscellanea and other official documents, he discovered a pallium or binder, under the reference number IV. 3 / 10 / 1941 -42 that, as he immediately noted , did not seem to fit, that is to say to fit the official description “family documents” because it wasn’t a journal entry or a letter, not the estimate of a financial estate, not a copy of a will, nor any kind of certificate, but something he immediately recognized, as soon as he picked it up, as altogether different, and though he knew this as soon as he set eyes on it he did nothing at first, just looked at it as a whole, casually leafing through, to and fro, observing the year of entry, picking out names of individuals or institutions, and riffling through again to get some handle on the kind of document it was so that he might be able to conduct further work on it and so recommend an appropriate course of action, this entailing a search for some number or name or anything that might help him place it in the right category, though this proved fruitless since the one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty pages, or so he calculated, carried no accompanying note, no name, no date, no clue in the form of a postscript as to who had written it or where, in fact not a thing, nothing, as Korin observed with furrowed brow as he sat at the big table in the records office, so what on earth is it, he wondered as he set to examining the quality and nature of the paper, the competence and idiosyncracies of the typing and the style of the layout, but what he found did not match anything that related to other material either in the fascicule or the various palliums , in fact it was clearly unrelated, distinct from anything else, and this being the case he realized it required a different approach, so he actually decided to read the text, taking the whole thing and starting at the beginning, sitting himself down first, then, slowly, carefully, making sure the chair did not slip from under him, sat and read while the clock above the entrance showed first five, then six, then seven, and while he did not once look up, proceeding to eight, nine, ten, eleven o’clock already, and still he sat in exactly the same place in exactly the same way, until he did glance up and saw that it was seven minutes past eleven, even remarking loudly on the fact, saying, what the heck, eleven-o-seven already, then quickly packing the things away, tying up the string once more, leaving that which had remained unidentified or could not be identified in another file bound up with string, putting it under his arm, then going round, still holding the package, turning off the lights and locking the glazed entrance door behind him with the idea that he would continue his reading at home, starting all over again from the beginning.

Back home, so Korin broke the momentous silence that had descended on him, back home he used to work in an archive where the day generally ended at about half past four or a little earlier, and one day on one of the back shelves he found a file that contained a mass of papers that hadn’t been disturbed in decades, so, having found it, he brought it out to get a better idea of its contents, took it to examine under the big lamp over the main table, opened it up, spread it out, nosed around in it, leafed through it, and investigated the various palliums , intending, he told the sleepily blinking interpreter, to put them into order should they require ordering, when suddenly, while examining various journals, letters, accounts and copies of wills referring to the Wlassich family, along with other miscellaneous documents the file contained, as he was looking through these he came upon a pallium registered in the system as number IV.3 / 10 / 1941 -42, a number he still remembered because it didn’t fit, which is to say it didn’t fit the family-documents category that the Roman numeral IV indicated in the archive, and the reason it didn’t fit was because what he discovered there was not a diary, not an estimate of the financial estate, not a letter, not even the copy of a will, nor was it a certificate of any kind, or indeed a document as such, but something quite different, a difference that Korin actually spotted straight away, as soon as he started turning the pages, examining it all, turning the papers to and fro in order so that having discovered some clue as to its nature he might be able to furnish it with the appropriate note of advice or suggest a correction, which was a way, he explained to the interpreter, of preparing the file for further work, and that was why, he said, he was seeking a number, name or anything at all to help him assign it some known category, but however he looked he didn’t find one among the one hundred and fifty or, at a rough estimate one hundred and sixty-odd typed but unnumbered pages that, apart from the text itself, contained no title, date or indeed any information as to who had written it or where, nothing at all in fact, and there he was staring at the stuff, Korin continued, completely puzzled, embarking on a closer examination of the quality and weight of the paper and the quality and typeface of the script, but he found nothing there that accorded with other “ palliums ” in the fasciscule , “ palliums ” which did however accord with each other and therefore made a coherent package: apart, obviously, from this single manuscript, as Korin emphasized to the interpreter who had started to nod off in his exhaustion, which had nothing to do with the rest and made no coherent sense whatsoever, so he decided to look at it again from the beginning, he said, meaning he sat down to read through it from the start to finish, sitting and reading, as he recalled, for hours on end while the clock in the office moved on, unable to stop reading until he reached the end, at which point he turned off the lights, closed up the office, went home and started reading it once more because there was something about the way the whole thing had fallen into his hands, so to speak, that made him want to reread it straightaway, indeed immediately, as Korin stressed in a significant manner, because it took no more than the first three sentences to convince him that he was in the presence of an extraordinary document, something so out of the ordinary, Korin informed Mr. Sárváry, that he would go so far as to say that it, that is to say the work that had come into his possession, was a work of astonishing, foundation-shaking, cosmic genius, and, thinking so, he continued to read and reread the sentences till dawn and beyond, and no sooner had the sun risen but it was dark again, about six in the evening, and he knew, absolutely knew, that he had to do something about the vast thoughts forming in his head, thoughts that involved making major decisions about life and death, about not returning the manuscript to the archive but ensuring its immortality in some appropriate place, for he understood as much even at such an early point in the proceedings, for he had to make this knowledge the basis of the rest of his life, and Mr. Sárváry should understand that this should be understood in its strictest sense, because by dawn he had really decided that, given the fact that he wanted to die in any case, and that he had stumbled on the truth, there was nothing to do but, in the strictest sense, to stake his life on immortality, and from that day on, he declared, he began to study the various repositories, if he might so put it, of eternal truth so that he might discover what historical methods had been employed for the preservation of sacred messages, of visions, if you like, concerning one’s first steps on the road to eternal truth, in quest of which methods he considered the possibility of books, scrolls, films, microfiches, encryptions, engravings and so forth, but, finished up not knowing what to do since books, scrolls, films, microfiches and the rest were all destructible, and were in fact often destroyed, and he wondered what remained, what could not be destroyed, and a couple of months later, or he might just as well say a couple of months ago, he was in a restaurant when he overheard two young people at the next table, two young men, to be precise, he smiled, arguing about whether, for the first time in history, the so-called Internet offered a practical possibility of immortality, for there were so many computers in the world by then that computers were for all purposes indestructible, and, hearing this and turning it over in his mind, the personal conclusion that Korin himself came to, the conclusion that changed his life, was that that which was indestructible must perforce be immortal; and thinking this he forgot his food whatever it was, needless to say he couldn’t now recall what it was he was eating, though it might have been smoked ham, left it on the table and went straight home to calm down, going down to the library the next day to read the mass of material in the form of books, papers and discs available on the subject, all of which were replete with technical terms hitherto unfamiliar to him, but seemed to be the work of excellent and less-than-excellent authorities, reading which he grew ever more convinced about what he should do, which was to establish the text on that peculiar sounding thing, the Internet, which must be a purely intellectual matrix and therefore immortal, being maintained solely by computers in a virtual realm, to lodge or inscribe the wonderful composition he had discovered in the archive there, on the Web, for in so doing he would fix it in its eternal reality, and if he managed to accomplish this he would not have died in vain, he told himself, for even if his life was wasted, his death would not be, and that was how he encouraged himself in those early days, by telling himself that his death had meaning, even though, said Korin dropping his voice, his life had none.