The Letter Killers Club (17 page)

Nodding his thanks, Mov turned to the next person. “Fev?”

“To a man in whose lungs one of those Acheron toads has settled, the bottom of a river flowing around death does not always inspire mirth. I'll say this: your story has left a coppery taste in my mouth. Ask the next person.”

But the next person, Tyd, didn't wait to hear his name. Moving his chair so close to Mov's that their knees touched, he began, “I think I can guess your—or, rather, our—ending, Mov: ‘and then …' Wait a minute—and then Fabia leaned toward Sept, the obol gleaming between her lips. Sept reached for it with his parched mouth. First their lips fused, then their souls. The dropped obol slipped down and vanished in the black waters between worlds. The skiff pushed off without them. The two remained between death and life because that is what love is … Understand? I'd like to know what Zez says.”

“I say,” Zez replied dully, “that instead of inventing endings one had better rethink the beginning: I would construct it very differently.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Perhaps because I'm a man … a man with his obol clenched firmly between his teeth. My story next Saturday will make my words plain: to all and to the end.”

O
N RETURNING
home, I sat up for a long time reviewing the evening's reversals. The series of images was interrupted now and then by Rar's empty, silent armchair. How would he have dealt with the Obol of the Dead? I began thinking about his reasons for fleeing the earlier meeting. And strangely: the uneasiness that had tormented me the whole last week quieted and subsided. It no longer looked like a casual act. Rar had clearly broken with the group. So much the better. My plan was this: to attend one more meeting of the conceivers, make completely sure of Rar's decision, and discreetly try to elicit his real name and, if possible, his address.

All that week I felt slightly unwell. I didn't leave my room. Out the window winter was in its death agony: the snow was turning black and sinking down; clods of mud stared up out of rank pools; carrion crows hunched on bare trees, as though waiting for decay; dripping drops muttered like psalm readers on the tin-plated sill.

My tear-off calendar changed numbers six times before I saw the word: Saturday.

Toward evening, at the usual hour, I set off for the meeting. I walked slowly, step by step, considering how and to whom to put my questions about Rar. Nearing the house where our meetings took place, I saw a man dash down the entrance steps. Under the flapping cape and hat pulled low, I divined the figure of Tyd—I wanted to call out, but didn't know how. He ducked around the corner of the house. Puzzled, I climbed the steps and rang the bell. The door opened directly: Zez's face peeped out and peered cautiously around. I wanted to go in, but he blocked the way.

“The meeting's canceled. Have you heard about Rar?”

“No.”

“That's odd. Barrel between his teeth and … Burial's tomorrow.”

I stood there stunned, unable either to ask or answer. Zez's face came closer.

“It's all right. We'll have to suspend our meetings—for a week or two, no more. The police may pay a visit. Let them: no one searching emptiness has ever managed to find anything. You seem worried. Don't be. Whatever happens, all you need to know is how to clench your obol firmly between your teeth.”

The door slammed shut.

I wanted to ring the bell again—then changed my mind. Back in my room, I was a long time overcoming the torpor that had seized me. I drew my armchair up to the table and sat staring out the window into the black night—stupidly and vacantly. The pendulum clock on the wall continued to clacket.

I hadn't expected them: they came of their own accord—one after another—the five Saturdays. I tried to drive them out of my mind, but they would not go. Then I reached for my inkwell and clicked open the lid. The Saturdays nodded—now and then, their lips moved; and the dictation began. I barely had to time to fetch a pen; words were suddenly gushing out of all five mouths, jostling at the split in the nib. Thirsting and impatient, they guzzled the ink and whirled me along from line to line. The blankness of the black shelves had suddenly bestirred itself: it was all I could do to take down the flooding images.

Now the fourth night is nearly gone. My words too are nearly gone. My writing life—having begun so unexpectedly—shall die newborn. Never to be reborn. As a writer I'm all thumbs, it's true—I don't have a way with words; it is they that have had their way with me, conscripting me as a weapon of revenge. Now that their will has been done, I may be discarded.

Yes, these half-dried sheets have taught me a great deal: words are spiteful and tenacious—anyone who tries to kill them will sooner be killed by them.

Well, that's all, my pen has scraped bottom. Again I'm without words—forever. The ecstasies of these four nights have taken everything from me: I'm spent. And yet I did, if only briefly, for a few scant instants, break out of my orbit and step out of my “I”!

Here—I'm giving the words back; all except one: life.
*

1926

Calderón:
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), Spanish dramatist who excelled at autos sacramentales, allegorical religious plays; author of La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream).

Saint Francis:
Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), Italian monk known for his love of nature; founder of the Order of Franciscans.

Eckermann:
Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), German writer and amanuensis to Goethe; author of Conversations with Goethe (1836–1848).

Börne:
Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), German political writer and satirist known for his attacks on Goethe; lived in Paris after 1830.

Ebbinghaus:
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), German psychologist who pioneered experimental methods of measuring human retention and memory.

Shakespeare's famous character who asks if his soul is easier to be played on than a pipe:
Hamlet to Guildenstern (III.2): “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass … do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”

the provincial tragedian who—for effect—breaks Hamlet's pipe in half:
Edwin Booth (1833–1893), an American actor famed for his Hamlet, would “snap the pipe across his knee and throw the pieces from him.” Elizabeth Robins, “On Seeing Madame Bernhardt's Hamlet,” North American Review (December 1900): 171.

two empty bottles and a Primus:
Typical artifacts of Soviet life: the bottles for reuse or return; the one-burner oil stove for cooking on in a communal kitchen.

Ernesto Rossi:
Italian tragedian (1827–1896) most admired for the Shakespearean roles with which he toured Europe and, on several occasions, Russia. He played Hamlet over four decades, from 1856 to the end of his life. A Russian biography of Rossi based on his memoirs appeared in 1896.

Salvini:
Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), Italian tragedian with a high forehead and aquiline nose. Like Rossi, he brought his Shakespearean roles to Russia in Italian. The passion of his Othello (Moscow, 1882) made a powerful impression on the future stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who devoted a chapter to it in My Life in Art (1924).

Sarah Bernhardt:
French actress (1844–1923), who first played Hamlet in Paris in 1899. On opening night the audience was cold and unreceptive until Polonius asked, “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet, “dressed and got up like the pictures of young Raphael, was lying on a chair. The first ‘Des mots
' he spoke with an absentminded indifference, just as anyone speaks when interrupted by a bore; in the second ‘
Des mots
' his answer seemed to catch his own attention; and the third ‘
Des mots
' was accompanied by a look, and charged with intense but fugitive intention, with a break in the intonation that clearly said: ‘Yes, it is words, words, words, and everything else in the whole world is only words, words, words.' The whole house applauded.” Maurice Baring, Sarah Bernhardt (London: Peter Davies, 1933).

Kemble:
 
John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), stunningly handsome English actor. (His sister Sarah Siddons also played Hamlet.)

Kean:
Edmund Kean (1789–1833), English actor whose fire after the formality of Kemble was a revelation. Reviewing Kean's Hamlet in the Morning Chronicle (March 14, 1814), William Hazlitt called his kissing of Ophelia's hand “the finest commentary ever made on Shakespeare. It explained the character at once (as he meant it) as one of disappointed hope, of bitter regret, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around him.”

Richard Burbage:
English actor (1568–1619) who first played Hamlet. He and His brother Cuthbert built the Globe Theatre in which Shakespeare was a partner. Three centuries later Burbage's hold on the Globe was summed up by Austin Dobson:

When Burbage played, the stage was bare

Offount and temple, tower and stair,

Two broadswords eked a battle out;

Two supers made a rabble rout;

The Throne of Denmark was a chair!

And yet no less, the audience there

Thrilled through all changes of Despair,

Hope, Anger, Fear, Delight and Doubt,

When Burbage played.

Zamtutyrsky:
A parody of a typical provincial Russian actor at the turn of the twentieth century. Zamtutyrsky's name, an imperfectly constructed pseudonym, is intended to sound grand (the Russian prefix za means “beyond”) but comes off as silly and absurd. The Russian prefix zam means “deputy” or “vice,” tut means “here”—so that a fair translation might be “Subheresky.”

I'm looking for the book in the third act:
A sign that Stern is coming undone. He should have said “second act,” but Zamtutyrsky's Hamlet, always drunk, doesn't notice.

Polevoi:
N. A. Polevoi (1796–1846), whose poetic, if rather free, translation of Hamlet (1837) firmly established Shakespeare on the Russian stage; it was reissued more than ten times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the appearance of other recognized versions. See Gamlet: Antologiya russkikh perevodov 1828–1880 / 1883–1917, 2 vols. (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2006).

Pavlenkov:
F. F. Pavlenkov (1839–1900), politically liberal St. Petersburg publisher whose mission it was to help the masses educate themselves with his cheap but neat editions of good books on most subjects, including astronomy, zoology, mathematics, medicine, psychology, and ethics. Though Pavlenkov brought out a brief life of Shakespeare (1896) as part of his biography series, Zhizn' Zamechatel'nykh Lyudei, he did not reprint Polevoi's translation of Hamlet. For a catalog of his publications, see Yu.A. Gorbunov, Florenty Pavlenkov (Chelyabinsk: Ural Ltd, 1999).

I'm taking the role and breaking it in two:
“Shakespeare is wholly dialogical … Even left alone, a character fences with himself, splits into two … If it is Hamlet, into two Hamlets debating inside the soliloquy, one of whom says ‘to be,' while the other naysays: ‘not to be.'” Krzhizhanovsky, “Fragmenty o Shekspire,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), edited by Vadim Perelmuter (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2001–2010), Vol. IV, 366–67.

Will was playing the Ghost:
According to Shakespeare's first biographer, Nicholas Rowe (1709), the playwright was “not an extraordinary actor: the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.”

You know you need marjoram and rue for the mad scene:
Mad Stern has mixed up his mad scenes. Instead of the requisite “rosemary,” he calls for the “marjoram” suggested by Edgar in Lear (IV.6) when the King is at his maddest. (Sweet marjoram was used as a remedy for diseases of the brain.)

The Feast of the Ass:
A medieval festival variously associated with Balaam's ass, the ass ridden by Mary on the flight into Egypt, and that ridden by Christ on his entry into Jerusalem; originally intended as an edifying entertainment along christian lines, a substitute for pagan spectacles.

Goliards:
Disaffected priests and monks, students and scholars in medieval France, England, Italy, and Germany, who “made great verse and grievous scandal … Rebels against authority, greedy of experience, haunted by beauty, spendthrift and generous, fastidious and gross … they owed no allegiance to any man, but followed their own will.” Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (New York: Double-day, Anchor Books, 1955; first published in 1927), 120, 172, 179.

Angelus bell:
A daily prayer bell dating back to the thirteenth century in the Roman Catholic Church; it accompanied a devotion commemorating the Annunciation.

soutane:
A black cassock worn by secular clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. “The soutane gave a poor clerk a claim on the charity of all good men: it was moreover a real security, for to strike a clerk meant excommunication.” Waddell, 187.

Blessed Jerome:
Saint Jerome (c. 347–420), one of the great teachers of the Western Church; translator of the Latin version of the Bible (Vulgate). In a letter (XXII) to his protégée Eustochium, Jerome wrote: “Hear Jesus speaking to the Apostles: ‘Take no thought what ye shall eat; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?'” (Matthew 6:25).

Abbey of St. Gall:
Founded in St. Gallen in 613 by the Benedictines; the abbey's library is among the richest medieval repositories in the world.