The Blind Accordionist Read online

  Also by C. D. Rose

  The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

  Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else

  The Blind Accordionist

  Copyright © C. D. Rose, 2021

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: May 2021

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Melville House UK

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612199177

  Ebook ISBN 9781612199184

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932785

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  The Card Players

  Pilgrim Souls

  An Incident on the Train to Lvov

  Peter, Who Thought He Was a Bear

  At the Gallery of National Art

  Jenny Greenteeth

  Sosia and the Captain

  Dead Johann

  The Visitors

  AFTERWORD: A GUIDE TO THE GUYAVITCH’S NINE STORIES

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  INTRODUCTION

  MAXIM GUYAVITCH WAS born in Galicia in 1882. Or Dalmatia in 1894. Or perhaps in Moldavia, or maybe that’s Moravia, in 1888, or ’89, or ’90.

  He was an orphan who joined the army in order to save himself from destitution; the only son of a neglectful bourgeois family; an inveterate gambler; the greatest writer you have never heard of; a thief; someone with a far more respectable career as something other than a writer who used a pseudonym to publish their work; an itinerant pianist; a serial dissident; a man obsessed with pears. Opinions vary. Theories proliferate. “He” may actually have been a collective of writers, all for one reason or another anxious to hide their true identities. He may never have existed at all.

  Truth is, no one knows much about Maxim Guyavitch.

  What we can be sure of: Stories under his name began to appear in small magazines in various countries and various languages in the early twentieth century. There were only ever nine of them. Sometime in the early 1930s, they stopped.

  What we can’t be sure of: anything else.

  The stories were later collected and published in German, Czech, Polish, French, Russian, English, Hungarian, and various other languages in editions ranging from leather-bound, gold-embossed volumes destined for private libraries to knockoffs made of cigarette paper and glue to be flogged at railway station stalls and newspaper kiosks. Few editions ever sold more than a handful of copies, and, fairly rapidly, they dropped out of print, then memory.

  If you look carefully and study the minutiae of publishers’ catalogues, conference proceedings, and literary tittle-tattle, you may from time to time see his name surface, and the stories, too, as they are rediscovered, then reforgotten. In the book world undergrowth, a small para-industry has flourished, samizdat versions of the stories have been circulated, and dubious new ones have emerged and, their authorship contested, sunk. Minor academics at major universities and major academics at minor universities have specialised. Letters have been written. Websites with improbable names, immune to search engines, still exist. His name was—and still is—whispered knowingly, as though uttering it might show membership in a certain group, though his work has been rarely read.

  A few years ago, the modest success of the publication of a series of my lectures1 created another small ripple of interest in Guyavitch and his work, and I was invited to edit a new edition of his Nine Stories.

  The task was far from a simple one. The texts that exist are now difficult to come by, often corrupt, and usually conflicting. The edition I have put together—the book you hold in your hands or have laid flat on your table before you right now—may infuriate purists, pedants, and Pharisees, but I care little. Others may consider my choices merely idiosyncratic. For example, I have not included the story “Little Eli’s Shoes,” as I believe it of dubious authenticity and inferior quality, but I have included “Dead Johann,” refusing to accept the notion that it is somehow “cursed.”2 I have arranged them in what I believe to be chronological order of production, noting the stylistic, thematic, and—I believe—personal development from “The Card Players” as far as “The Visitors.” In short, this is, I believe, the edition Guyavitch’s work deserves.

  But enough. I do not wish to detain you further with distraction from the stories themselves. To those of you who already know Guyavitch, I hope you will again experience the wonder of reading these tales, as if for the first time. To those of you new to this curious, unsettling, beguiling writer, read on, and read carefully, for you may never return.

  Skip Notes

  1 Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, Melville House, Brooklyn and London, 2018

  2 Though neither am I convinced by the suggestion that it is, in fact, the key to this enigmatic collection of work.

  A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  WHETHER AN ART, a science, or a craft, literary translation has been variously compared to a pane of glass, a bridge, a woman, a string quartet playing a piano sonata, a kiss through a blanket, and a mule. It has been described as an ongoing contradiction, an act of intimacy, an act of surrender, an act of espionage, a necessary act of barbarism, and the art of failure.

  Arguments rage (rage!) over target versus source, soundness versus shapeliness, and fidelity versus licence. Should a translation be correct or comely, deforming or reforming, expressive or instrumental, faithful or free? Some speak of the joys of corruption, others of the pleasure of the pure. Should footnotes pile up at the bottom of the page, or should the translated text fend for itself? A translator may always be tempted to polish, to rephrase, to rewrite, even to stray—while still remaining faithful. But faithful to what? What source text is ever pure? What manuscript does not bear pentimenti and erasures, second, third, and fourth thoughts? What book has not passed through the hands of editors, proofreaders, typesetters, advance readers, and the marketing department?

  I once knew someone (who was an idiot) who claimed they would never read a work in translation, as it was not authentic. But there is no authentic text, no original. There are only ever versions of some Platonic form, echoes with no source. That is all we are.

  I have faith. Translators, I believe, are magi, silver-tongued shapeshifters deftly slipping from one language to another. They are illuminators, curators, bearers, blessed and cursed to be forever between two (or three, or four) cultures and languages. Without translators, we would not be able to exist.

  It is unclear what language Guyavitch wrote in—no autograph manuscripts survive—and we may be fairly certain that he had no mother tongue but was born into a capacious family of languages. The work you have here has been collated from a number of different editions, each one in turn disputed or possibly corrupt, and in many cases, no original translator was named. Put simply: funds available for this translation were scarce, so I have done the best job I could.

  Walter Benjamin wrote that “all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines,” and this is the case here. All life is between the lines; all is potential.

  Any infelicities and inconsistencies here are my own. All other errors are volitional, and therefore portals of discovery.

  C.D.R.

>   THE CARD PLAYERS

  CHRISTMAS HAD PASSED, and though the bottles of pear champagne had been opened and drunk, January was reluctant to arrive. Snow, ice, and frost had slowed not only passage into or out of the town, but the very days themselves. At this sink of the year, the cold could crack bones. These days—when the light was starting to fight back but the darkness still won—inspired little desire to celebrate; everyone waited for the year to show itself before welcoming it. Beginnings to the year are rarely auspicious—it is only humanity, after all, that has chosen to mark them thus. Nature cares little, as it has neither ending nor beginning.

  Some mornings—like this one—the very air seemed ice itself, each breath enough to freeze the tissue that lined a man’s lungs. The light hung ashen and sluggish, thick and slow. The river that curled around the town had grown solid enough to build a railway on. Ice ruled the land.

  And yet, this gelid day had been warmed by a rumour stewing, softening the bite of the chill and perfuming the town with its potent smell of possibility.

  The Marquis went out at five, as the Marquis did, but today Eva and Ada had listened carefully, knowing the soft thud of each footfall, the creak of every floorboard, and the scrape of every opening drawer well enough to be able to envision him carefully trimming his moustache, slipping the small compact mirror into his right glove, then choosing his shiniest shoes to wear under his felt overboots. He came down (they scurried), then ate nothing but a slice of black bread with white cheese and requested only a light broth for supper on his return.

  The rumour was true.

  Tonight, there was to be a game.

  Ada and Eva watched the Marquis head down the path and, once convinced he was out of eye and earshot, ran upstairs to change.

  “The red?” asked Eva.

  “No, the green,” replied Ada.

  “The fox fur?”

  “The sable.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Boots.”

  Once painted, shod, coated, scarved, and furred, they opened their front door.

  “Brass monkey,” said Eva.

  “Frog’s tail,” said Ada.

  “The Devil’s shoulder,” said Eva.

  “Witch’s tit,” said Ada, and they set out.

  They passed the cinnamon shop and the coral merchant, the seller of tallow candles and the importer of damasks. The baker had begun selling off the morning’s now-stale loaves, the printer had hushed his press. Behind the banked-up snow and the spaces of the silence, the rumour had taken flesh, begun to crawl, then to walk as fast as the small crowd now gathering around Eva and Ada, following the Marquis at a distance ample enough to consider themselves unseen. Peter and Johann cracked their knuckles, ready to pick pockets; the cartographer rolled his maps; Grasso carried up bottles of pear brandy from the cellar and stoked the fires. In the back room of the Golden Lion, a man sat with his notebook, frantically trying to record everything that was happening—everything, that is, as far as he knew or understood it, and quite possibly just making a lot of it up.

  The town had no railway, but its arrival had once been promised, and in anticipation of that day a hotel had been built and popularly named the Station Hotel, and it was there, at this very moment, that a man with hunched shoulders and a bent nose wearing a stiff black suit and an unfashionable, wing-collared shirt, neither warm enough for the scouringly cold weather, walked down the stairs, across the lobby, and onto the street.

  Even though evening was already cowling the narrow streets, the light seemed unexpected to him, and from his breast pocket he produced a pair of dark-tinted, oval-lensed glasses, which he carefully rested on the bridge of his nose and would leave there for the rest of the evening.

  From behind these glasses, he looked around a moment; then he struck out, his boots clacking on the stone flags, then thudding on the board pavement as he turned off the square and made decisively for the knot of old streets in the town centre. On the corner where the alleys untangled and the main street began, he saw a group of people huddled in a close circle. Believing them to be warming their hands at a fire and now himself feeling the cold, he walked over to join them, but as he grew closer, the small crowd dispersed like leaves floating in a teacup, and he discovered there was no fire, and that they were gathered around nothing at all.

  He feigned composure, adjusted his jacket against the cold, and carried on his way, vaguely aware of the crowd reforming behind him. The crowd, indeed, turned their heads to observe his progress. They muttered to themselves and nodded to each other. It was true: He was making for the Golden Lion. Not only was there to be a game this evening, the Galician had come to play.

  The Marquis was the first at table. The Marquis was always the first at table. There was no reason for this, no rule except the unwritten one: if the Marquis wasn’t first at table, the evening’s game couldn’t begin. As the Marquis took his seat, removing his overcoat and felt boots, the Galician was making his way down Golden Lion Street. As the Marquis broke a fresh pack of cards, the Galician was heaving open the heavy door into the saloon and pulling back the insulating curtain behind it. As the Marquis ordered a pear brandy, the Galician was brushing snow from his unsuitable shoes. As the Marquis sipped his brandy, the Galician walked into the back room of the Golden Lion Inn.

  The game could begin.

  The crowd swelled and bobbed. Ada and Eva were already there. Although they had left after the Marquis, their skill in navigating the slippery roads matched with their intention not to miss a second of the evening’s adventure and led them to arrive before the Marquis. Despite the external chill, the fierce stove soon made the room uncomfortably hot, and many of the women removed their furs as more people (Peter and Johann, the cartographer’s wife, the cinnamon seller) also pushed their way into the back room of the inn. Klug even brought the dog who he swore could talk, though no one had ever heard it do so. Two men who have no part in the story stood shoulder to shoulder in matching grey overcoats.

  A chair was found for their visitor, and the crowd, anxious to know more about the newcomer, attempted to engage him in conversation.

  “Have you visited our town before?” they asked him, but the Galician shook his head.

  “Not that I remember,” he replied.

  “How do you know of the game?” they asked.

  “Everyone knows about the game,” he replied. No one asked who “everyone” was, each of them believing it to be themselves, and indeed, they did all know about the game, even if they did not know quite where it had come from.

  The game, some said, was part of the Trick-Taking family, related to Euchre; similar, in its way, to Skat, Clabber, or Juckerspiel. Others claimed it was a branch of the Cuckoo group of Draw-and-Discard, and more akin to Bester Bube or Krypkasino, while others saw it as a piece of Schafkopf, like Spitzer or Kierki, or even a Partition game, like Chor Voli or Hazari. Still others considered it a variant of the classic Vying games, a distant cousin of Poker, Brag, Bouillotte, or Ferbli. The chemin de fer variation of Baccarat was also often cited. Discussions regarding the game’s ancestry were as lengthy, complex, and passionate as the game itself. There was no right, no wrong, no reason. No one knew. The game was what it was.

  “Surely,” thought the crowd, “the Galician has an ancestor here. How else could he know about the game?” No one claimed to be related to the Galician, though Karm believed his uncle had once visited the region.

  No stranger had come to play the game for as long as anyone could remember. The crowd speculated: the Galician, surely, was a millionaire come in hugger-mugger to buy up cheap land, or finally to bring the railway to town; the Galician was the illegitimate child of a shamed but unnamed local come to claim his rightful inheritance, or, at least, to demand recognition from his errant sire; the Galician was a spurned lover pulled by the magnetic force of jealousy; a lone traveller who had lost his way; an imperial s
py; a nihilist anarchist; a cunning plotter come to destabilise everything everyone had ever known or would ever know. The Galician, it was said, wasn’t even Galician.

  The Galician said nothing.

  (The speculation, however, fluttered around the Marquis’s ears, making him uncomfortable, as it was known too that the Marquis wasn’t actually a Marquis, though he had been called so ever since anyone could remember. No one knew why, not even Ada and Eva.)

  Although no one knew who the Galician was, he had come to play, and on this the rules were clear: the table was open, anyone was welcome to take their seat, and this the Galician did.

  The work of the night awaited.

  The crowd pointed out that there was no extra chair. The Marquis had a chair, the Galician seated opposite him had a chair, but there was no empty chair. One of the rules of the game (though whether it was a rule or merely tradition wasn’t certain) was that one empty chair should always be present at the table. Should someone else, a guest uninvited or unexpected, a passing stranger, even, wish to take part in the dealing, shuffling, exchanging, and placing of the cards, they would always be welcomed. Stray drinkers stuck in the saloon were displaced as a chair was liberated and passed into the crowded back room, then given to the card players.

  Another round of drinks was poured, though the Galician declined the offer of pear brandy and said he would prefer linden tea. Grasso had his wife prepare a pot of linden tea.

  They were almost ready to make the toast that would signal the opening of the evening’s game, but the tea was still too hot. They waited for the tea to cool.

  While they waited for the tea to cool, the Marquis reshuffled two packs of cards, one French, the other Neapolitan. As the host, he would open the evening’s play, though—it was said—he could, as a courtesy, ask the Galician to lay the welcoming card, but this was most improbable.