The Letter Killers Club (3 page)

[13]
“Chelovek protiv mashiny,” written for the in-house publication of the Moscow Chamber Theater, “7 dnei Moskovskogo Kamernogo teatra” (1924), in
Sobranie sochinenii
, Vol. IV, 660–62, quotes on 660.

[14]
“Most cherez Stiks” (1931), in
Sobranie sochinenii
, Vol. I, 496–507, quotes on 500 and 507.

A
FEW DISCREPANCIES
in the published Russian text of
The Letter Killers Club
have been corrected with the help of Krzhizhanovsky's typescript (see notes). For improvements to the finished translation we are indebted to Caryl Emerson.

“B
UBBLES
over a drowned man.”

“What?”

A triangular fingernail slid with a quick glissando over the swollen spines gazing down at us from the bookshelf.

“I said, bubbles over a drowned man. Plunge into a pool headfirst and your breath will rise to the surface in bubbles: swell and burst.”

The speaker again surveyed the rows of silent books crowded along the walls.

“You'll say that even a bubble can catch the sun, the blue of the sky, the green curve of a coastline. Maybe so. But does that matter to the man whose mouth is grazing the bottom?”

Suddenly, as if he had run against a word, he got up and, gripping his elbows behind his back, began pacing to and fro between the bookshelf and the window, only rarely meeting my eyes.

“Yes, remember this, my friend: if there is one more book on the library shelf, that is because there is one less person in life. If I must choose between the shelf and the world, then I prefer the world. Bubbles to the day—oneself to the depths? No, thank you very much.”

“But you,” I tentatively tried to disagree, “you've given people so many books. We're all used to reading your—”

“I've given. But no longer give. It's been two years now: not a single letter.”

“I've heard and read that you're at work on a major new—”

He had a habit of interrupting. “Major? I don't know. New, yes. But the ones talking and writing about it, this I do know, they will not have a single typographical symbol more from me. Understand?”

My expression, evidently, did not convey understanding. After a minute's hesitation, he returned to his empty armchair, drew it up to mine, sat down so that our knees nearly touched, and looked me searchingly in the face. The seconds dragged on in excruciating silence.

He was casting about in me for something, the way one casts about a room for a thing forgotten. I stood up.

“Your Saturday evenings, I've noticed, are always busy. The day is nearly gone. I'll be off.”

Rigid fingers gripping my elbow restrained me. “It's true: I, that is, we lock our Saturdays away from people. But today I shall show it to you: Saturday. You must stay. What you're about to see, however, requires some background. While we're alone, I'll give you a brief sketch. I doubt you know that in my youth I was a student of poverty. My first manuscripts robbed me of my last coppers, which went for the postal wrappers that invariably came back to my desk drawers torn, dirty, and bruised with postmarks. Besides the desk that served as a cemetery for my fictions, my room contained: a bed, a chair, and bookshelves—four long boards the length of the wall, buckling beneath their load of letters. The stove was usually without wood, and I without food. But I reverenced my books, as some do icons. Sell them? The thought never entered my head until…until it was forced to by a telegram: MOTHER DIED SATURDAY. PRESENCE REQUIRED. COME. The telegram attacked my books one morning; by evening the shelves were bare, and I could slip my library, now in the form of three or four banknotes, into a pocket. The death of the person who gave you life, that is very serious. Always and for everyone: like a black wedge in your life.

“When I had done the funeral days, I journeyed back over seven hundred miles to the door of my shabby abode. The day of my departure I had been disconnected from my surroundings—only now did the effect of the bare bookshelves make itself felt and enter my mind. I remember I took off my coat, sat down at my desk, and turned to face the emptiness suspended on four boards. The boards, though relieved of their burden of books, were still bowed, as if the emptiness were weighing them down. I tried to shift my gaze elsewhere, but in my room, as I said, there was only a bed and shelves. I undressed, lay down, and tried to sleep off my depression. No: the sensation, after only a brief rest, woke me. Lying with my face to the shelves, I watched a quavery moonglint dance along the denuded boards. Some scarcely perceptible life seemed to be dawning—with timorous glimmerings—in that booklessness.

“Of course, all this was playing on nerves strung too tight—and when morning loosened the tuning pegs, I calmly surveyed the shelves' sun-swashed hollows, sat down at my desk, and resumed my usual work. I needed to look something up: my left hand reached—automatically—for the spine of a book; in its place was air, again and again. In my annoyance I peered at that booklessness, filled with swarms of sun-shot motes, and tried—with an exertion of memory—to see the page and line I wanted. But the imagined letters inside the imagined binding kept fidgeting: instead of the wanted line I found a ragtag stagger of words, the line kept breaking and bursting into dozens of variants. I chose one and gingerly inserted it in my text.

“Come evening, resting from my labors, I liked to stretch out on the bed with a weighty volume of Cervantes in hand, to skip with my eyes from episode to episode. The book wasn't there: I remembered that it had stood in the left-hand corner of the bottom shelf, pressing its black leather with yellow corner pieces to the red saffian of Calderón's
*
autos
. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the book before me—between palm and eye (thus do forsaken lovers continue to meet their loves—with the help of eyes shut tight and a concentrated will). It worked. In my mind I turned page after page; but then my memory dropped some letters—they got mixed up and slipped out of sight. I tried calling to them: some words returned, others did not; so I began filling in the gaps, inserting words of my own. When, weary of this game, I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by night, a snug blackness caulking all the corners of the room and shelves.

“At the time I had a great deal of leisure—and more and more often played the game with the emptiness of my debooked shelves. Day by day they became overgrown with phantasms made of letters. I had neither the money nor the desire now to go to bookstalls and secondhand booksellers for letters. I was extracting whole fistfuls of them—letters, words, phrases—from myself: I took my conceptions, printed them in my mind, illustrated them, clothed them in carefully considered bindings, and stood them neatly on the shelves, conceptions next to conceptions, phantasms next to phantasms—filling the willing emptiness, whose black wooden boards absorbed everything I gave it. One day, when a man who had come to return a book made to replace it on the shelf, I stopped him: ‘No room.'

“My visitor was a poor devil like me: he knew that the right to eccentricity was the only right of half-starved poets … He regarded me calmly, put the book on my desk, and asked if I would listen to his poem.

“When I had closed the door on him and his poem, I quickly put the book out of sight: the garish gold letters on the swollen spine were already disrupting my barely established game of conceptions.

“In the meantime I continued to work on my manuscripts. A new bundle sent to the old addresses, to my genuine surprise, did not come back: the stories were accepted and printed. As it turned out, what books made of paper and ink could not teach me, I had learned from three cubic meters of air. Now I knew what to do: I took them down, one by one, my imaginary books and phantasms filling the black emptiness of the old bookshelves, and, dipping their invisible letters in ordinary ink, turned them into manuscripts, and the manuscripts into money. And gradually—over the years—my name grew fat, I had more and more money, but my library of phantasms was drying up: I was spending the shelves' emptiness too fast and recklessly: that emptiness, less and less charged, was turning into ordinary air.

“Now, as you can see, my shabby room has grown up into a respectably furnished apartment. Next to the old shelves, their disused emptiness freighted afresh with books, I have large glass-fronted bookcases—these here. Inertia was on my side: my name continued to fetch me fees. But I knew: sooner or later the emptiness I'd sold would have its revenge. Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen's nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb's wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb—before birth: they call that “clinching the pattern.” That is exactly what we—trappers and killers—do with our conceptions.

“I, of course, was not a naïve person even then; I knew that I was turning into a professional killer of conceptions. But what could I do? Surrounded by outstretched palms, I kept flinging them fistfuls of letters. They only wanted more. Drunk from the ink, I was prepared—whatever the cost—to force more and more themes. But my exhausted imagination had no more to give. It was then that I decided to stimulate it artificially by the old proven means. I had one of the rooms in my apartment emptied … But come with me, it will be simpler if I show you.”

He rose. I followed. We passed through a succession of rooms. A threshold, another threshold, a corridor—he led me to a locked door hidden by a portiere the color of the wall. The key clicked loudly, then the light switch. I found myself in a square room: at the far end, opposite the door, was a fireplace; ranged round the fireplace were seven heavy carved armchairs; and along the dark felt-covered walls, rows of blank black bookshelves. Cast-iron fire tongs rested against the fender. That was all there was. We walked across the patternless, step-muffling carpet to the semicircle of chairs. My host motioned to me: “Sit down. You're wondering why seven? At first there was only one armchair. I came here to commune with the emptiness of the bookshelves. I asked these black wooden caverns for a theme. Patiently, every evening, I would shut myself away with the silence and emptiness and wait. Gleaming with black lacquer, dead and strange, the shelves were loath to reply. So I, a professional word tamer, went back to my inkwell. Several deadlines were approaching: I had nothing out of which to write.

“Oh, how I hated all those people slitting open the latest literary journal with their paper knives, surrounding my flogged and exhausted name with tens of thousands of eyes. I've just remembered a tiny incident: a street, a little boy on the frozen pavement hawking letters (R and L) for galoshes, and my immediate thought: both his letters and mine will end up underfoot.

“Yes, I felt that both I and my literature had been trampled and made meaningless; if not for ill health, a sound solution would scarcely have been found. Sudden and difficult, my illness disconnected me for a long time from writing: my unconscious was able to rest, to gain time and gather meanings. I remember that when I, still physically weak and only half connected to the world, finally opened the door of this black room, made my way to this very armchair, and once more surveyed the bookless emptiness, it began to speak—softly and indistinctly, but still, still—it agreed to speak to me again, as in those days I had thought gone forever! You realize that for me this was such a—”

His hand touched my shoulder—and jerked back.

“However, we've no time for lyrical effusions. They'll be here soon. So, back to the facts. I now knew that my conceptions needed love and silence. Once profligate with my phantasms, I began hoarding them and hiding them from inquisitive eyes. I kept them all here under lock and key, and my invisible library reappeared: phantasm next to phantasm, opus next to opus, edition next to edition—they began to fill these shelves. Look here a minute—no, to the right, on the middle shelf—you don't see anything, do you? Whereas I…”

I moved mechanically aside: a hard, concentrated joy trembled in my host's sharp pupils.

“Yes, and then I made up my mind: to shut the inkwell lid and return to the kingdom of free, pure, and unsubstantiated conceptions. Sometimes, out of long habit, I was drawn to paper, and a few words would steal out from under my pencil: but I killed those freaks and dealt ruthlessly with my old writerly ways. Have you ever heard of the
giardinetti di San Francesco
—the gardens of Saint Francis?
*
In Italy I often visited them: the tiny flower gardens of one or two beds, three feet square, inside high solid walls, in almost all Franciscan monasteries. Now, in exchange for silver
soldi
and in violation of the tradition of Saint Francis, one may view them, if only through a grille, from without. In the past, even that was forbidden: flowers grew there—as Saint Francis had willed—not for others, but for themselves: they could not be picked or replanted outside the enclosure; those who had not taken vows could not set foot in the gardens, or even look at the flowers: immune from people's touch, protected from eyes and scissors, they could bloom and be fragrant for themselves.

“Well, I decided—I hope you won't find this strange—to plant a garden immured in silence and secrecy in which all my conceptions, all my most exquisite phantasms and monstrous inventions might, far from people's eyes, grow and bloom for themselves. I hate the coarse rinds of heavily pendant fruits that torment and wither branches; I wanted my tiny garden to contain an eternal, non-deciduous and non-bearing composite of meanings and forms! Don't think I am an egoist who cannot step out of his ‘I,' a misanthrope who hates thoughts not his own. No: in the world only one thing is truly hateful to me: letters. Anyone who can and will pass through this secrecy to live and work here, by the beds of pure conceptions, I welcome as a brother.”