War & War (12 page)

19.

In his childhood, Korin began in the kitchen the next morning while the interpreter’s lover was busily working at the gas burner with her back to him, he had always found himself taking the loser’s side, though that was not quite right, he shook his head, for to put it more precisely, it was the story of his entire childhood he was talking about: being with losers, spending all his time with losers, not being able to deal with anyone else, only with unfortunates, the failures, the mistreated and the exploited, they being the only ones he sought out, the only group to whom he felt drawn, the only people he felt he understood, and so he strove to follow them in everything, even in his school textbooks as Korin recalled now, sitting on the edge of the chair by the door, recalling how even in literature classes it was only the tragic poets that moved him, or, to put this more precisely, the tragic ends of the poets themselves, the way they were neglected, abandoned, humiliated, their life-blood ebbing away along with their secret personal knowledge of life and death, or that, at least, was the way he visualized them while reading the textbooks, having, as he did, an inborn antipathy to life’s winners so that he could never be part of any celebration or feel the intoxication of triumph, for it just wasn’t in him to identify with such things only with defeat, and that identification was immediate, instinctive, and ran to anyone at all who had been condemned to suffer loss; and so that’s that, said Korin, as he rose uncertainly from the chair, addressing the immobile back of the woman, though this condition, the pain he felt at such times, had about it a peculiar sweetness that he experienced as a warm sensation running right through him, irradiating his entire being, whereas when he met with victory or with victors, it would always be a cold feeling, an icy-cold feeling of repulsion that seized him, that spread through his entire being, not hatred as such, nor quite contempt, but more a kind of incomprehension, meaning that he could not understand victory or victors, the joy experienced by the triumphant not being joy to him, nor was the occasional defeat suffered by a natural victor truly a defeat, because it was only those who had been unjustly cast out by society, heartlessly rejected—how should he put it?—people condemned to solitude and ill fortune, it was to them only that his heart went out and, given such a childhood, it was no wonder that he himself had constantly been swept to the side of events, grown reserved, timid and weak, nor should it be surprising that as an adult, having been easily swept aside, having grown reserved, timid and weak, he had become the personification of defeat, a great hulking defeat on two legs, although, said Korin taking a step toward the door, it wasn’t simply that he recognized himself in others similarly fated, that wasn’t the only reason things had turned out as they did, despite such a self-centered and infinitely repulsive beginning: no, his personal lot could not entirely be regarded as particularly harsh, for after all he did actually have a father, a mother, a family and a childhood, and his deep attraction to those who had been ruined and defeated, the full depth of it, had been determined not by himself, far from it, but by some power beyond him, some firm knowledge according to which the psychological condition he had experienced in childhood, which sprang out of empathy, generosity and unconditional trust, was absolutely and unreservedly right, although, he sighed, trying to get the woman to pay minimal attention as he stood in the doorway, this might be a somewhat tortuous and superfluous attempt at explanation, since, there might be nothing more at the bottom of all this than the fact, to put it crudely, that there are sad children and happy children, said Korin, that he was a sad little child, one of those who throughout his life is slowly, steadily consumed by sadness, that was his personal feeling, and perhaps, who knows, that is all there is to know, and in any case, he said as he quietly turned the handle of the door, he did not want to burden the young lady with his problems, it was time he got on with things back in his room, and this whole account of sadness and defeat just sort of came out, and he didn’t quite understand why it should have done so, what had got hold of him, which was ridiculous, he knew, but he hoped he hadn’t intruded on her time, and that she could happily carry on cooking and so, he added by way of farewell to the woman still standing with her back to him by the burner, he was off now, and so … goodbye.

20.

If we ignored the toilet that was next to the steps leading up to the attic in the stairwell, the apartment consisted of three adjoining rooms plus a kitchen, a shower and a small store-cupboard of some sort, that is to say three plus one plus one plus one, in other words six spaces, but Korin only poked his nose round the other doors when the occupiers went out in the evening and when he would finally have the opportunity of examining his surroundings, to see where he had wound up a little more closely, but he hesitated here, he hesitated there, at every threshold and was content merely to cast a desultory glance inside, because, no, he wasn’t interested in the dreary furniture, the torn wallpaper with its patches of damp, the empty wardrobe and the four or five collapsed shelves hanging off the walls, nor was he curious about the ancient suitcase employed as a nightstand, or the rusty, headless shower, the bare light-bulbs and the security lock on the front door with its four-figure combination, because, rather than drawing conclusions from such evidence, he preferred to concentrate on his only real concern which was the question of how he should screw up courage and talk to the owners on their return, addressing them to some such effect as, please, Mr. Sárváry, if you would be so kind as to spare a little time for me tomorrow, and it was clear from all that followed that this was the only reason he stumped round the apartment for hours, this being the only thing he wanted, and the only thing he was preparing himself for, practicing for, so when they came home at about one in the morning he should be able to appear and present his latest, and, as he now promised, his really last request, pleading, Mr. Sárváry …, which he practiced aloud, and finally succeeded in actually saying at about one in the morning, appearing in front of them as soon as they entered and starting, Please, Mr. Sárváry, asking him if he would be so kind as to escort him to a store the next day, a store where he could purchase the items necessary for his work, since his English wasn’t, as they knew, quite good enough yet, and while he could somehow piece together a sentence in his head he’d never be able to understand the answer, for all he needed was a computer, a simple computer to help him with his work, he stuttered while fixing him with his haunted eyes, and this would entail, he imagined, an insignificant investment in time to Mr. Sárváry, but to him, said Korin, grabbing hold of his arm while the woman averted her head and went off into one of the rooms without a word, it would be of enormous benefit, since he didn’t only have this ongoing problem with English but knew nothing at all about computers either, though he had seen them at the records office, of course, back home, he explained, but how they worked he was sorry to say he had no idea, and was equally clueless as to what kind of computer he should buy, being certain only of what he wanted to do with it, which was what it depended on, retorted the interpreter who was obviously ready for bed, but Korin felt it natural to check that it depended on what he wanted to do, to which the interpreter could only reply: yes, on what you want to do, what, I, enquired Korin, on what I want to do? and spread his arms wide, well, if the interpreter had a moment he would quickly explain, at which point the interpreter pulled a long-suffering face, nodded toward the kitchen, and went through with Korin close behind him, taking the seat opposite him at the table, the interpreter waiting while Korin cleared his throat once, said nothing, then cleared his throat again and once again said nothing but kept clearing his throat for an entire minute or so, like someone who had got into a muddle and didn’t know how to get out of it again, because Korin simply didn’t know where to start, nothing came, no first sentence, and though he would dearly have loved to begin something kept stopping him, the something that got him into the muddle that he did not know how to get out of, while the interpreter kept sitting there, sleepy and nervous, wondering why, for God’s sake, he could not get started, all the while stroking his snow-white hair, running his finger down his center parting, checking whether this line that ran from his crown to his forehead was properly straight or not.

21.

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.

22.

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.