The Letter Killers Club (4 page)

For a minute he fell silent and eyed the oak backs of the armchairs which, ranged around him, appeared to be listening with great attention.

“Little by little, chosen ones from the world of writers and readers began gathering here, in letterlessness. My garden of conceptions is not for everyone. We are few and shall be fewer still. Because the burden of empty shelves is onerous. And yet—”

I tried to object: “You're confiscating letters, as you put it, not only from yourself, but from others. I would remind you of the outstretched palms.”

“Well, that … You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann
*
) as a wildly overgrown tree that—for two hundred years straight—had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne
*
called Goethe: ‘A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.' Both men were right: if our letterizations stifle one another, if writers prevent each other from writing, they don't allow readers even to form an idea. The reader hasn't the chance to have ideas, the right to them has been usurped by word professionals who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader's imagination, the professional writings of a small coterie of scribblers have crammed shelves and heads to bursting. Lettered excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space of other people's conceptions to make room for one's own: everyone has the right to a conception—both the professional and the dilettante. I'll bring you the eighth armchair.”

Without waiting for a reply, he flashed from the room.

Left alone, I again surveyed the black step- and word-muffling sanctum with its shelves encasing emptiness. A feeling of wary bewilderment was increasing in me with every second: so an animal must feel under vivisection. “What am I to him or them? What do their conceptions need from me?” I resolved to find out. But when the door opened, it admitted two men: my host and a bespectacled, moonfaced person with cropped red hair: leaning his limp, seemingly boneless body on a walking stick, he scrutinized me from the threshold through his round lenses.

“Das,” our host introduced him.

I said my name.

After Das, a third person appeared: a wiry little man the muscles of whose clenched jaws twitched under needlelike eyes, with a thin crack for a mouth. Our host turned to face him.

“Ah, Tyd.”

“Yes, Zez.”

Noticing the puzzled look in my eyes, the one called Zez burst out laughing.

“After our conversation, you'll understand that writers' names have no place
here
.” He stressed the last word. “Let them remain on title pages: instead every member of the brotherhood is given a ‘nonsense syllable.' A certain learned professor Ebbinghaus,
*
while researching the laws of memory, relied on what he called ‘nonsense syllables': he took any vowel and placed a consonant either side; from the series of syllables created in this way, he discarded those with even a hint of meaning: the rest he used to study the memorization process, we use them more for … Well, I needn't go into it. But where are the other conceivers? It's time.”

As if in reply, there was a knock at the door. Two men entered: Hig and Mov. After a bit, one more appeared, wheezing asthmatically and wiping away sweat: his sobriquet was Fev. Only one armchair remained empty. Finally, the last man entered: he had a softly delineated profile with a steep brow.

“You're late, Rar,” the president greeted him. Rar raised his eyes, their look was remote and faraway.

F
OR A MINUTE
there was silence. Everyone watched as Mov, squatting down, made a fire in the grate. Following his movements, the slowness of which recalled the performance of a ritual, I was able to study him: he was considerably younger than the rest; the glints soon dancing on his face picked out the capricious line of a striking mouth and keenly quivering nostrils. When the crackling wood had begun to hiss, the president picked up the cast-iron tongs and banged them against the logs. “Attention. The seventy-third Saturday of the Letter Killers Club is now open.” Then, prolonging the ritual, he walked slowly to the door: click-click. The key's steel bit gleamed in Zez's outstretched hand. “Rar: the key and the floor.”

After a pause Rar said, “My conception is in four acts. Title:
Actus Morbi
[1]
.”

The president craned forward.

“Beg pardon. Is it a play?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. You always go against Club tradition. I think you do it on purpose. To dramatize is to vulgarize. A conception intended for the stage is pale and insufficiently … fertilized. You always try to slip out through the keyhole—and away: from the embers in the grate to the footlights across a stage. Beware the footlights! Then again, we are your listeners.”

The face of the man who had begun his story showed no emotion. Interrupted, he calmly heard the tirade out and went on: “Shakespeare's famous character who asks if his soul is easier to be played on than a pipe
*
later flings the pipe away, but leaves his soul. For me. Still, there is a certain similarity here: to make a recorder sound its lowest note, one must stop all its vents, all its windows on the world; to pluck out the depths of a soul, one must also close all its windows, all its outlets to the world. This, my play attempts to do; I should tell you that my
Actus Morbi
is not in so many acts, but (in the spirit of the language favored by Hamlet) in so many ‘positions.'

“Now, about the molding of my characters. In
Hamlet
there is a double character that has long intrigued me, one reminiscent of an organic cell that has split into two not entirely separate daughter cells, as biologists call them. I mean Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, beings impossible to imagine apart, one without the other, who are—in essence—one role copied into two notebooks. The splitting process begun three hundred years ago, I attempt to push farther. Imitating the provincial tragedian who—for effect—breaks Hamlet's pipe in half,
*
I take, say, Guildenstern and break that half-being again in half: Guilden and Stern—two characters. The name Ophelia and its combined meaning I take now in the sense of tragedy, Phelia, now in the comedic sense, Phelya. For even putting now a garland of bitter rue, now curlpapers in one's hair, even that may be divided in two.

“So then, to start the game. In the first position, four pieces are in play: moving them about an imaginary stage, like a chess player who plays without looking at the board, I arrive at the following—”

For a moment Rar broke off. His long, white, nearly translucent fingers fumbled something in the air, as if testing the malleability of his material.

“As they say: ‘The scene is set in …' Well, in a word …”

STERN,
a young actor, has locked himself away with his role. The role can be divined even without the soliloquies: a black cloak hangs over the back of an armchair; on the desk—among piles of books and portraits of the Elsinore prince—lies a black beret with a broken feather. Also a doublet and braces.

STERN (
unshaven, his faced lined with sleeplessness, flicks at the half-closed window curtain with the tip of his rapier
): A rat.

A knock at the door. Still with his eye on the rapier-fretted curtain
, STERN
unbolts the door with his left hand. Enter
PHELYA.

“We see her: a lovely face with dimpled cheeks, a being who in plays is always loved by two men, but whose psychology demands one thing: that she choose one of the two.”

STERN (
doesn't see her come in
): A rat!

PHELYA
hitches up her skirt in fright. Dialogue.

STERN (
without turning round at
PHELYA
's cry
):

Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down

And let me wring your heart, for so I shall.

He twitches back the curtain. On the windowsill, instead of Polonius, are two empty bottles and a Primus.
*

A king of shreds and patches,

Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.

In the doorway he collides with
PHELYA.

PHELYA: Where are you going like that? Without a jacket. Wake up!

STERN: Is that you? Oh, Phelya, I … If only you knew …

PHELYA: I know my role by heart. Whereas you—you silly bungler. Stop speaking in verse—we're not onstage.

STERN: Are you sure?

PHELYA: Now please, don't try to persuade me otherwise. If there were an audience, I wouldn't do this (
stands up on tiptoe and kisses him
). Well, did that wake you up?

STERN: Darling.

PHELYA: Finally: a word not from the role.

“Here I must interrupt love's weary round: you need to know that at this point Phelia is closer to Stern than Guilden, his rival and stand-in. She wants Stern to win the role. In any case, I can assert that as the dialogue unfolds, it brings chess piece closer to chess piece, Stern closer to Phelya. Hence the stage direction: open parentheses, kiss, close parentheses, period. This time for Stern too, the kiss is not through the role but in reality. Take a good look. Now shift your gaze slightly to the left.”

The door, which has been left ajar, swings open to admit
GUILDEN.

GUILDEN (
smiling a little wickedly
): Spectators are not welcome. I'll go.

The
LOVERS,
of course, detain
GUILDEN.
A minute of embarrassed silence.

GUILDEN (
looks through the books scattered about
): The role, I see, is not as compliant as … (
glances at
PHELIA).
Shakespeare.
Hmm.
On Shakespeare
. Again Shakespeare. Incidentally, on the tram just now some simpleton noticed the script poking out of my pocket and, wanting to be nice, remarked: “They say Shakespeare never existed, yet look how many plays he left; now if Shakespeare had existed, then chances are the number of plays …” And he looked at me with such idiotic curiosity.

PHELYA
laughs.
STERN
remains serious.

STERN: A simpleton he may have been, but … What did you say to him?

GUILDEN: Nothing. The tram stopped. I had to get off.

STERN: You know, Guilden, not so long ago your nonsense would have struck me as just silly. But now that I've spent nearly three weeks struggling to exist in nonexistence, to—how shall I put it—to inhabit a role which you will say has no life of its own, now I'm very careful with all those “to be's” and “not to be's.” Between them, you see, is only an “or.” Everyone is given to choose. Certain people have already chosen: some have chosen the struggle for existence; others, the struggle for nonexistence. Crossing the line of footlights is like passing through customs: for the right to sojourn on the far side of the lights, one must pay certain duties.

GUILDEN: I don't understand.

STERN: Ah, but understanding isn't everything. You must also make up your mind.

PHELIA: Have you made up yours?

STERN: Yes.

GUILDEN: You're an odd duck. If we told Timer, he'd have a good laugh. Although our patron has been rather dour lately. Yesterday, when you skipped rehearsal again, he flew into a terrible rage. That's why I've come, to warn you that if you mean “not to exist” at rehearsal again today, then Timer has threatened—

STERN: I know. Let him. I have nothing, you understand, nothing, or rather, no one to bring to your rehearsal. Until the role comes to me, until I see it right here, as I see you now, I have no business at your gatherings.

PHELIA
looks pleadingly at
STERN
, but he has disappeared inside himself, he neither sees nor hears.

GUILDEN: But there ought to be an outside pair of eyes: first the director's, then the spectator's—

STERN: Rubbish. Spectators: if you took their coats off the hooks in the cloakroom and seated them in the theater, and hung those spectators on the cloakroom hooks instead, art would not suffer. As for the director—his eyes, as you put it: I would gouge them out—out of the theater. To hell with them! An actor needs his character's eyes. Only. If Hamlet were to walk in here, search out my pupils with his own, and say to me—You know what, my friends, don't be angry, but I must work. Sooner or later I shall summon him, and then … Away, I say.

GUILDEN: Phelya, did you hear that? He spoke to us just now like a real prince. We'd better go. Rehearsal starts in fifteen minutes.

PHELIA: Stern, darling, come with us.

STERN: Leave me. I beg you. For me as well, it is about … to start.

“Left alone, Stern sits very still for some time, like this. Then”—Rar reached abruptly for the shadowy emptiness of the bookshelves: his listeners followed with their eyes—“ … Then … he takes a book—the first to hand. I'll summarize his monologue.”

STERN: Now then, let's see. Act II, Scene 2: “I'll speak to him again.” (
To me:
) “What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.” Oh, if only I could know: the words that were in that book. If only I could know: that knot of meanings. “What is the matter, my lord?”—“Between who?”

From out of the room's gathering darkness, the
ROLE
appears soundlessly in the doorway. Through the murk, like the reflection in a cheap looking glass, it mimes the actor's every gesture.
STERN
, sitting with his back to the door, doesn't notice the
ROLE
until, gliding up from behind, it touches his shoulder.

ROLE: Listen, would you like to know the words in that book I've been in the habit of perusing in the second scene of the second act for the last 320 years straight? I suppose I could lend them to you-of course, not gratis.

The black phantom has already subsided into the empty armchair opposite the actor: for a minute
STERN
and the
ROLE
peer intently at each other.