Private Novelist (4 page)

YIGAL'S FIRST RIDE DROPPED HIM AT
the entrance to Herisau, in Canton Appenzell. A stone footpath led into the fir trees by the road, and thinking a moment's privacy might be nice, Yigal walked down it. After a few feet the path was covered with needles, and the trees closed overhead, linking their boughs arm in arm, like a zipper, Yigal thought, until it was almost dark. In the gloom his bare white penis seemed to glow like a firefly, and when he shook it, it was as though someone were waving a handkerchief, trying to get his attention, from a long way off. Nothing he did made a sound. Every noise was swallowed by the immense pillows of needles and twigs stacked around the tree stems and pierced here and there by squirrels' entrances, exits, and tattered flakes of pinecone, forming a landscape of bumps and hollows as regular as an Olympic mogul run, in which the trees stood like drinking straws thrust into the tops of sand castles.

He thought of Kafka's shortest prose piece, “For we are like tree trunks in the snow, which the lightest push could topple; but look again, even that is an illusion,” and decided to walk a bit farther before returning. The path was blocked by
spiderwebs, in which sat huge black-and-orange spiders. Yigal gently pushed them aside with a fallen branch and stepped around them. Under the needles he could still feel the stones. He took off his sandals and dug down with his toes until they touched the warm slate, which had stored the heat of the noon sun under its blanket of dry straw. He crept forward, listening closely, and heard a car pass on the road behind him. Then the trees unlocked their arms, the sky was visible overhead, and Yigal found himself facing an immense granite obelisk, surrounded by shaggy green grass, on which a voluminous text was printed in German, French, English, and Italian. He stood before the English side, which faced the sun, relieved to know English so well, since the French side, on the north, was indecipherable under a layer of moss that was presently in bloom, raising tiny wet cups to the sun and sheltering a puddle filled with tadpoles and liverwort. He began to read:

N
EAR
T
HIS
S
POT

ON
C
HRISTMAS
D
AY
1956

R
OBERT
W
ALSER

P
OET OF
L
OVE, OF
L
ONG
W
ALKS

AND OF THE
W
HITE-
C
OLLAR
P
ROLETARIAT

W
AS
F
OUND
D
EAD IN THE
S
NOW

A
FTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE
Y
EARS IN
H
ERISAU'S

P
UBLIC
H
OSPITAL

F
EIGNING
C
ATATONIA AND
W
RITING IN
S
ECRET

TO
S
AVE
M
ONEY

I
N
1914 H
E
R
ECEIVED

THE
A
WARD OF THE
W
OMEN'S
S
OCIETY

FOR THE
A
DVANCEMENT OF THE
P
OETRY

OF THE
R
HINELAND—
T
HIS
S
TONE
I
S
R
AISED

TO
H
IS
M
EMORY BY THE
W
OMEN'S
S
OCIETY FOR

THE
A
DVANCEMENT OF THE
P
OETRY OF THE
R
HINELAND

ON THE
H
UNDREDTH
A
NNIVERSARY OF
H
IS
B
IRTH

A
PRIL
15, 1978

— H
ONORED
S
IRS
! —

I
AM A POOR, YOUNG, UNEMPLOYED CLERK NAMED
W
ENZEL, IN SEARCH OF AN APPROPRIATE POSITION AND HEREBY TAKE THE LIBERTY OF ASKING POLITELY IF PERHAPS IN YOUR AIRY, BRIGHT, FRIENDLY OFFICES THERE MIGHT BE SUCH A THING AS AN OPENING.
K
NOWING THAT YOUR ESTEEMED FIRM IS LARGE, OLD, PROUD, AND RICH,
I
CAN'T HELP BUT THINK THAT YOU MUST HAVE SOME EASY, PLEASANT, ATTRACTIVE LITTLE SPOT INTO WHICH
I
, AS INTO A SORT OF WARM CUBBYHOLE, MIGHT SLIP UNNOTICED.
I
AM ESPECIALLY WELL SUITED, IF YOU MUST KNOW, TO OCCUPY EXACTLY SUCH A SOFT, WARM HIDING PLACE AS IT WERE, FOR MY NATURE IS DELICATE, AND MY ENTIRE BEING IS THAT OF A QUIET, MANNERLY, AND ABSENT-MINDED CHILD, EAGER TO ENJOY THE HAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS THAT OTHERS THINK IT DEMANDS LITTLE, WANTING ONLY TO BE PERMITTED TO TAKE TEMPORARY POSSESSION OF SOME INSIGNIFICANT CORNER OF THE WORLD WHERE, IN ITS SMALL WAY, IT MAY PROVE ITSELF USEFUL AND COME TO FEEL SOME VAGUE SENSE OF SATISFACTION.
A
SWEET, QUIET, TINY PLACE IN THE SHADE HAS BEEN MY LIFE'S CONSISTENT AND NOBLE DREAM FROM EARLY YOUTH, AND IF THE ILLUSIONS WHICH
I
NOW ENTERTAIN WITH REGARD TO YOUR WEALTHY FIRM ARE NOW GROWN SO STRONG THAT
I
MIGHT HOPE FOR THE DELIGHTFUL LIVING FULFILLMENT OF MY OLD YET ETERNALLY RENEWED DREAM, YOU WILL FIND IN ME THE MOST DEVOTED SERVANT POSSIBLE, WHOSE CONSCIENCE WILL
NOT REST UNTIL EACH OF THE TRIVIAL OBLIGATIONS YOU LAY UPON HIM IS COMPLETED PRECISELY AND PUNCTUALLY.
P
LEASE UNDERSTAND THAT
I
CANNOT TAKE ON SIGNIFICANT OR DIFFICULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND DUTIES OF A WIDE-RANGING NATURE WOULD TAX MY BRAIN UNDULY.
I
AM NOT ESPECIALLY INTELLIGENT—BUT MORE IMPORTANT,
I
PREFER NOT TO CALL ON MY INTELLIGENCE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
I
AM, AS IT WERE, MORE A DREAMER THAN A THINKER, MORE A ZERO THAN AN ACHIEVER, MORE STUPID THAN CLEVER.
B
UT SURELY IN THE MANY BRANCHES OF YOUR IMMENSE INSTITUTION, IN WHICH
I
IMAGINE VAST COMPLEXES OF UNOCCUPIED DESKS, THERE EXISTS SOME SORT OF WORK THAT CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED WHILE DAYDREAMING.
I
AM, TO SAY IT OPENLY, A
C
HINESE, A PERSON WHO PREFERS THINGS TO WEAR A SMALL, MODEST, UNFRIGHTENING ASPECT OF LOVELY SWEETNESS, AND TO WHOM ALL THINGS LARGE OR OVERLY DEMANDING APPEAR HORRIBLE AND TERRIFYING.
I
KNOW ONLY ONE NEED—TO FEEL SECURE ENOUGH SO THAT
I
MAY SAFELY THANK
G
OD EACH DAY FOR THIS DEAR, BLESSED EXISTENCE.
I
HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED THE DESIRE TO SHINE PUBLICLY.
T
HE DESERTS OF
A
FRICA COULD NOT BE MORE FOREIGN TO ME.
M
Y HANDWRITING, AS YOU CAN SEE, IS QUITE FLUID AND DELICATE, AND YOU DON'T NEED TO IMAGINE ME AS BEING COMPLETELY WITHOUT INTELLECT.
M
Y MIND IS QUITE CLEAR; IT MERELY HESITATES TO TAKE HOLD OF TOO MANY THINGS AT ONCE—ABHORS IT, IN FACT.
I
AM HONEST, BUT
I
RECOGNIZE JUST HOW LITTLE THAT MEANS IN THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN, AND HEREWITH, ESTEEMED
S
IRS,
I
WILL CLOSE, IN ORDER TO AWAIT YOUR RESPONSE, FAITHFULLY DROWNING IN DEVOTION AND REVERENCE,

—W
ENZEL

The path circled around the monument and led downhill. He followed it down a few stone steps to a sort of pit where a spring was indicated by a pipe sticking out of a crumbling brick culvert, and took a drink. At eye level he saw something like a hand sticking out of the leaf mold and debris. There was a bronze statue of a man, Robert Walser he supposed, lying facedown at full length with its left hand stretched toward the spring. The model was young, with a high forehead and full lips, and was depicted fully clothed, in a crudely patched tweed suit with army boots and a Tyrolean hat. The eyes were cut deep to look intelligent and expressive, while the smile seemed deliberately weak and silly. The face was creased with premature wrinkles as from suffering and worry and bad food. There was no signature and the statue did not appear to have been touched in a long time. A tree root had grown around a trailing shoelace, and the statue was tilted awkwardly as though it might eventually fall into the spring. Yigal gave it a good hard push to make sure it was still bolted down, and walked into Herisau to get some lunch.

The memorial to Walser actually had nothing to do with the Women's Society, etc., but was placed there by his daughter, who lives now on Panorama Street in Haifa—in fact, she is Shats' neighbor, and sometimes sees him on Saturdays at the Arab kiosk when he goes out for milk. She walks very slowly, with a cane, and he always says hello when walking up behind her, so as not to startle her. Her mother, a married Pomeranian Jew, met Robert Walser in Berlin in 1912. They were together several times in his apartment at No. 1 Spandauer Berg, Charlottenburg. By the time this book is published, she will have died, never having told anyone the secret, which she discovered while reading her mother's diary in 1960, four years after both her mother and Robert Walser were dead.

Robert Walser is my absolutely, totally and completely favorite writer, whose works I despair of translating, though I'm pretty pleased with my rendition of “The Cover Letter,” loose as it is. I've stopped recommending him to people who don't read German. Even the snobbiest Knopf edition, with the introduction by Susan Sontag, has painful errors in first lines, and somehow everyone got the idea that he was a dark and pained expressionist, probably by seeing the misleading movie (
Institute Benjamenta
) of his uncharacteristic first novel (
Jakob von Gunten
), so that they turn his pleasing and delightful coinages into portmanteaus that remind me mostly of
A Spaniard in the Works
. Like Shats, he worked as a clerk and had beautiful handwriting.

The public library in Herisau had two first editions by Walser,
Jakob von Gunten
and
Die Rose,
lying with a photograph in a glass case. They had been placed there in 1978 and never disturbed since. The photograph showed a dog belonging to the owner of Herisau's pub. The dog's name was Brahms. He died in 1985.

“Where's the nearest casino?” Yigal asked the librarian. She advised him to go to Bern. He took a flyer for a weaving course off the windowsill, read several words, and dropped it in the umbrella stand as he left the library.

As a young man, Yigal had often remembered Kafka's assessment of the four main components of the resting mind, “Hatred, Rage, Shame, and Torture,” with a sense of their perfect appropriateness. But as Yigal had aged, he had lost the capacity for hatred. Even when he killed a man, he felt only a sort of mild disgust. His rages had become stereotyped, one so much like another, and all so like his father's, that one day they had just stopped, choked off by the friction of tedium. He had lost all sense of shame, sometimes not looking in the
mirror for days at a time, and, far from torturing himself, he was likely to eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream at a sitting. His habit of visiting casinos stemmed from a mature preference he called, by way of contrast, “Whores, Gambling, and Cocaine.” Generally it meant having a few drinks and watching people he didn't know, but sounded better. A brief demonstration follows:

Q. DID YOU EVER HAVE A MODEL RAILROAD
?

A. NO, I WAS INTO WHORES, GAMBLING, AND COCAINE
.

Q
. —

I was going to write a few more questions, but suddenly it occurred to me why exactly I demand that Yigal stand around in casinos watching people: It's because that's what Daniel Deronda did—that's how he met Gwendolen Harleth! He met her at a roulette table. She was drinking, and losing heavily, flushed with emotion, playing away her family's last dime, pawning her jewels to play again—Daniel saved her. I love Daniel. I personally have seen a Swiss casino only once, from the side of the road. I've never met anyone who read
Daniel Deronda,
but the novel accounts for the regular appearance of “George Eliot Street” in the older Israeli towns.

With the introduction of
Daniel Deronda
I realize I have strayed further than ever from my task of re-creating, from limited and unreliable memories, Avner Shats' novel
Sailing Toward the Sunset.
Even worse, the mention of the rival hero Daniel draws attention away from the real focus of my work, namely, the subject author, for whom these chapters are written and e-mailed each morning.

The novel in letters has a long history in English literature.
Scholarly consensus holds the first English novel to have been
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
(Samuel Richardson, 1740). The heroine spends five hundred pages locked in a room, waiting to be raped. The hero even climbs into bed with her dressed as the housekeeper, having gained entrance by promising her some food, but she fights him off again and again, and ultimately wins the big prize: his hand in marriage.
Pamela
proved that light reading can be rendered suitable for young ladies, sparking a literary explosion that has lasted to this day. Richardson never intended to write a novel. He wanted to publish a manual of letter writing, but got carried away.

As Kafka said, “A letter is like a sheep, pretty soon here come the rest of the sheep” (I'm paraphrasing slightly), or later, “For we are like sheep lost at night in the mountains, or more precisely, I am like the sheep who is following the other sheep who are lost at night in the mountains.”

This chapter is like the second sheep in line behind the sheep who is following the sheep lost at night in the mountains.

In my possession is an advertisement of a service, active on the Upper West Side of New York City during the 1980s, which promised to send the subscriber all Kafka's letters to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in order, and at the rate at which they were originally sent (two or three per day for several years), for under $1,000, including an attractive storage binder. I swear this is true.