“It is better to be a dull and rusty blade than magnificent but empty scabbards; and generally—it is better to be, somehow, than magnificently not to be.”
“The reader, I would say, does not manage to have designs; the right to them has been taken away by professionals of the word, who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader’s imagination…”
“I came here to converse with the emptiness of the bookshelves. I asked these black wooden caverns for a theme. Patiently, every evening, I locked myself in here with the silence and the void and waited.”
“Letter excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space from the foreign for one’s own; the right to design belongs to everyone…”
“If a design is projected onto the theater, it means it is pale, insufficiently fertile. You are always trying to slip out through the keyhole—and outside: from the coals of the fireplace—to the footlights. Beware of the footlights!”
“Bubbles above a drowned man.”
“What?”
A triangular nail, with a quick glissando, slid over the bulging spines that stared at us from the bookshelf.
“I say: bubbles above a drowned man. Because once your head is in the deep pool, immediately—your breath bubbles up: it swells and bursts.”
The speaker once more surveyed the rows of silent books, pressed together along the walls.
“You’ll say—even a bubble can capture the sun, the blueness of the sky, the green swaying of the shore. So be it. But to the one who already has his mouth to the bottom: does he need it?”
And suddenly, as if stumbling over some word, he stood up and, clasping his fingers over his elbows pulled back to his spine, paced from the shelf to the window and back, only occasionally checking my eyes with his.
“Yes, remember this, my friend: if there is one more book on a library shelf, it is because there is one less person in life. And if one must choose between the shelf and the world, then I prefer the world. Bubbles toward the day—the self toward the bottom? No, thank you kindly.”
“But you,” I tried timidly to disagree, “you gave people so many books. We are all used to reading your…”
“I gave. But I don’t give anymore. It’s been two years now: not a single letter.”
“You are, as they write and say, preparing something new and big.”
He had a habit of not listening to the end.
“Whether it’s big—I don’t know. New—yes. But those who write and talk about it—this I know for sure—will receive not a single printer’s mark more from me. Understand?”
My expression, evidently, did not convey understanding. Hesitating for a minute, he suddenly walked over to his empty armchair, moved it closer to me, sat down, almost knee to knee, gazing intently into my face. Second after second painfully dragged on in silence.
He was searching for something in me with his eyes, the way one searches a room for a forgotten item. I abruptly stood up:
“Your Saturday evenings—I’ve noticed—are always busy. The day is waning. I will go.”
Rigid fingers, gripping my elbow, prevented me from rising:
“That’s true. My Saturdays, I… that is, we lock away from people. But today I will show you my Saturday. Stay. However, what will be shown to you requires some preliminaries. While we are alone—let me summarize. You are hardly aware that in my youth I was an apprentice of poverty. My first manuscripts took my last copper coins for postage and invariably returned to the desk drawers—battered, thumbed, and beaten with stamps. Besides the desk, which served as a graveyard of fictions, my room contained: a bed, a chair, and a bookshelf—four long planks along the entire wall, bent under the weight of the letters. Usually, the stove was without wood, and I was without food. But I treated the books almost religiously, as some treat icons: to sell them… the thought didn’t even occur to me, until, until… a telegram forced it: ‘Mother died Saturday. Presence necessary. Come.’ The telegram attacked my books in the morning; by evening—the shelves were empty, and I could shove my library, converted into three or four banknotes, into my side pocket. The death of the one from whom your life comes is very serious. It is always, for everyone: a black wedge driven into life. Having passed the funeral days, I returned—across a thousand versts—to the threshold of my destitute dwelling. On the day of my departure, I was disconnected from the setting—only now did the effect of the empty bookshelves fully register and enter my mind. I remember, after undressing, I sat down at the table and turned my face to the void suspended on the four black planks. The shelves, although the book burden had been removed, had not yet straightened their bends, as if even the void were pressing down on them perpendicularly. I tried to shift my gaze to something else, but in the room—as I already said—there was only: shelves, a bed. I undressed and lay down, trying to sleep off the depression. No; the sensation, having given only a short rest, woke me; I lay facing the shelves and watched a lunar gleam, trembling, creep across the exposed planks of the shelves. It seemed that some barely perceptible life—in hesitant trespasses—was germinating there, in the booklessness.
Of course, all of this was a strained game on overtightened nerves—and when morning released the pegs, I calmly looked around at the sunlit, empty gaps of the shelves, sat down at the table, and set about my usual work. I needed a reference: my left hand, moving automatically, reached toward the book spines: instead of them—air. Again and again. I gazed with annoyance into the booklessness filled with swarms of sun motes, trying by sheer effort of memory to see the page and line I needed. But the imagined letters inside the imagined binding twitched from side to side, and instead of the desired line, a motley scatter of words resulted; the straight line broke and tore into dozens of variants. I chose one of them and cautiously wrote it into my text.
Before evening, resting from work, I used to like to stretch out on the bed, with a weighty volume of Cervantes in my hands, leaping with my eyes from episode to episode. The book was gone; I remember well—it stood in the left corner of the bottom shelf, its black leather with yellow corner-pieces pressed against the red morocco of Calderón’s autos. Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine it here, next to me—between my palm and my eye (the way those abandoned by their lovers continue to meet them—with the help of clamped eyelids and concentrated will). I succeeded. I mentally flipped a page or two; then memory dropped the letters—they became jumbled and slipped out of the vision. I tried calling them back: some words returned, others did not; then I began to fill in the gaps, inserting my own words between them. When, tired of this game, I opened my eyes, the room was full of night, a dead blackness that had jammed all the corners of the room and the shelves.
I had a lot of leisure at that time, and I began to repeat the game with the emptiness of my unbooked shelves more and more often. Day after day—they began to overgrow with phantasms made of letters. I had neither the money nor the inclination now to go for letters to bookstalls or second-hand shops. I drew them—letters, words, phrases—out of myself in handfuls; I took my designs, mentally printed them, illustrated them, dressed them in carefully conceived bindings, and neatly placed design next to design, phantasm next to phantasm, filling the obedient void, which absorbed into its black wooden planks everything I gave it. And one day, when some casual guest, who had come to return a borrowed book, made to put it on the shelf, I stopped him:
“Occupied.”
My guest was as poor as I was: he knew that the right to eccentricity was the sole right of half-starved poets… Looking me over calmly, he placed the book on the table and asked if I would agree to listen to his poem.
Closing the door behind him and the poem, I immediately tried to put the book away somewhere: the vulgar golden letters on the bulging spine only spoiled the game of fictions that was just being established.
In parallel, I continued working on my manuscripts. The new batch, sent to the old addresses, to my most sincere surprise, did not return: the works were accepted and printed. It turned out: what books made of paper and paint could not teach me was achieved with the help of three cubic meters of air. Now I knew what to do: I took them, one after another, my imaginary books, the phantasms that filled the voids between the black planks of the old bookshelf, and, dipping their invisible letters into the most ordinary ink, turned them into manuscripts, and the manuscripts—into money. And gradually—year after year—my name swelled, there was more and more money, but my library of phantasms gradually dried up: I was spending the void of my shelves too hastily and carelessly; their void, I would say, became even more irritated, turning into ordinary air.
Now, as you see, my destitute room has grown into a solidly furnished apartment. Next to the retired old bookshelf, whose spent void I have again filled with the burden of books, stand spacious glazed cabinets—these ones. Inertia worked for me: my name brought me new and more honoraria. But I knew: the sold void would sooner or later take revenge. Essentially, writers are professional word-trainers, and words walking across the line, if they were living beings, would probably fear and hate the split of the pen, as trained beasts fear the lash raised above them. Or even more precisely. Have you heard of the making of what is called karakulcha? The suppliers of this type have their own terminology: having tracked down the pattern and curls on the skin of an unborn lamb through cunning methods, and waiting for the desired combination of curls, the unborn is killed—before birth: they call this ‘securing the pattern.’ That is what we are—with our fictions: industrialists and murderers.”
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