The Blind Accordionist Read online

  And then she was one again, and whole again, and walking again. She had been here before and would be here again. A vertigo of possibility overtook her, the fertile chaos of this life. She shivered with the forest itself as the breeze rose, her skin one with the air and the wind, each beat of her heart a footstep, each footstep a breath. Time became her and ceased to exist. Life was so fragile, and utterly inextinguishable. She had been, was, would be again, there to name the names of the unseen, untouched, unheard, unremembered, and transfigure them into and out of time. Those things that had been lost, or never happened at all, she would hold them. No, it was not time yet, she could not cross, she would need the names of things, to echo them, to sound them out, bring them back or conjure them into existence. She should try, yes, she thought, with his name, with the names she had called him, to his face and in secret, the breaths over his face while he slept and in his last illness, as if that would bring him back, how he had been and not what he became, from wherever he was now, and not just him, but the others, she would remember, and remember too what had not happened, remember what had never been seen.

  She had always thought someone was following her when she came into the forest, and now knew it was herself, pulled by the mortal and touched by the ineffable, all her selves. They were all there, she could have them all, she knew as the visitors came again, behind her, and all of a sudden she remembered them, and knew who they all were, each and every one, and she remembered laughing with them, and laughed again. I am blessed to have had such, she thought as she walked on, and again they slowly dwindled as they spoke to her. “You’re tired, aren’t you?” they asked, and she was, but she wouldn’t stop, not now, she was nearly there. The path went on, as far as the sea, perhaps, and the sea would wait for her, and the sea would be warm and invite her in, and she could hold the taste of a pear and feel its weight in her hand and the touch of his skin and the sound of his name and all the others, and she was leaving for an adventure, back through the forest, full and still, where she could hear the trees and their leaves and the birds in them and the animals under them and the light itself, and she was coming home now, and it wasn’t art, it was love, and maybe maybe maybe it would, this time, be enough.

  AFTERWORD

  A GUIDE TO GUYAVITCH’S NINE STORIES

  LET ME BEGIN by saying that I have long been concerned with the question of beginnings. Where, for example, would be the right place for an essay such as this to open? Or—to consider the matter at hand more carefully—which among the chain of unpredictable yet inevitable events that form a tale would be the one for a story to alight on, and commence its narration? What is it that sets such events or thoughts into their motion?

  The breathless sighting of sails in the offing, if not the docking of the ship in the port itself, will always make a fine opening. The rush to the harbour or the faces of the disembarkers as they glimpse this new land for the first time, or cast a cold eye upon the city to which they are returning. The arrival of a train in a station, large or small, our focus on either those arriving or those waiting. The shrill ring of the alarm clock would be another possibility, the groggy hand reaching out to silence it, the rapid cut to the brewing of coffee. The chance encounter (in a bar, bookshop, or theatre) of two strangers, destined to become lovers. The unexpected arrival of an unsigned letter, perhaps. The discovery of a body, of course, a quick section with the dog walker or jogger finding something unpleasant in the bushes, then cut to the hard-bitten cop shaking off their hangover and having to explain something to their rookie partner while quizzing the shaken discoverer. Someone walking across a field at dawn, the dew on their boots, the mist lifting with the rising of the sun—they’re whistling a tune, I think, as they hop over a gate. Perhaps they have an eager dog bounding around their legs. Neither knows yet what the day holds, but there is anticipation, expectation, desire written into it. The hanging of the gun on the wall, unnoticed yet already loaded, a casual detail, a day like any other, its cargo signalled yet not announced.

  Departure is always a promising start: the train building up a head of steam, or its electronic bleeping telling us the doors are about to close, the rush to the ticket barrier or the wait as the leaver gazes out of the window looking back on what now lies behind them, but we should consider, too, the false ending as beginning, the beginning that plays on the knowledge that much has already been done: let’s get the band back together; the old-timer blackmailed into one last heist; the arrival of the mysterious stranger in town that a single person recognises. Beginnings never start at the beginning. Something has always already happened. The place we choose to start is but one moment in a constellation of many.

  Notes such as these, for example, may be expected to give the “backstory.” I dislike the term “backstory,” for there is no backstory, no simple explanation or expurgation, neither apology nor apologia. There is, however, always a shadow story, a story’s inverse. That which is not told, but which is part of the tale or the account. The exploration of this (and, in turn, what you are reading right now) is what we could call “forensic literature.” Investigation becomes speculation, an inevitable launch into fiction, to remember what never was.

  The roll of the dice, the spin of the wheel, or the deal of a hand of cards is perhaps the cleanest opening there could be. Fate made manifest; the future as a whim. As has become my habit of late, I wonder about Maxim Guyavitch, and what he thought as he sat down to write the opening line of his earliest (known) story. And where was he, I wonder? In a gloomy study with a view of rooftops? A cramped bedroom, tangled sheets, clothes strewn on the floor? A café, filled with smoke and steam and chatter? Busy packing a suitcase, ready for yet another departure? The long description of lancinating chill in the story “The Card Players” leads me to think Guyavitch was a man well familiar with cold, and suffering from a lack of heat at the time, but I admit the equal possibility that it was the height of a stifling summer and he wrote to invoke the icy, the gelid, the crystalline.

  There is always a temptation to read a writer’s work very closely against their life, as if all writing were a form of autobiography, but Guyavitch never played cards once in his life. Of this, I am sure. “The Card Players” is not a story about games; it is about beginnings. It is a story about the power of chance, chance cast against destiny.

  I do, however, believe that Guyavitch had watched many games take place, though I admit the possibility that several other things could have influenced this story, one of which may have been Nikolai Gogol’s play The Gamblers. This is a play with a plot both ludicrously complex and fantastically simple, as unpredictable and inevitable as the best plots should be. Ikharev, an itinerant gambler, checks into a rundown hotel in a remote Russian town, where he runs into three other card players who immediately recognise him as one of their own, namely, a cheat. They get together with a plan to fleece Glov, a rich landowner, who is in town with his idiot son who also likes to play cards. It gets complicated after that, but ends up with Ikharev destitute, realising only too late that he had been the patsy all along.

  I suspect, but cannot prove, that Guyavitch saw The Gamblers. The play is rarely performed, it doesn’t work well on stage. It would have been much better written a short story—Gogol’s forte, after all.1 It’s difficult to show a game of cards on a stage. Stories and pictures do it better. Of the former, there are strangely few;2 of the latter, many.3

  Every gallery should have a picture called The Card Players. The daddy of them all, the image that founded its own genre, is Caravaggio’s 1594 Card Players or Cardsharps. It doesn’t have a precise title, is sometimes given other names, but is commonly known in Italian as I bari. Bari would be best translated as “cheats,” though this is still not a perfect translation, as barare implies something slightly different to the more common imbrogliare or fregare, which merely mean to “rip off.” Un baro is someone slightly more elegant, someone who has charm and wit and skill, and is more than
a mere huckster or conman. Un baro is an inveigler, someone with a mark who is an almost-willing participant in their own deception. A storyteller, perhaps.

  It’s fitting that there are several names for Caravaggio’s painting, because there are several paintings. Some estimates put the number as high as fifty, though how many of these are by Caravaggio, no one is quite sure (probably only two, maybe three). Whether “from the workshop of” or outright forgeries, less importance was placed on authenticity or originality in those days, the minor addition to the established theme or the skill shown in executing the set image being far more valued. Today, perhaps, we pay too much attention to concepts of authenticity or originality.

  It has been suggested that Caravaggio’s picture was an illustration for one of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares, most probably the tale “Rinconete y Cortadillo” (due to its Neapolitan references—both Cervantes and Caravaggio spent some unhappy time in the city). Cervantes wrote this collection around the turn of the seventeenth century, following the first part of Don Quixote, and quite how Caravaggio is supposed to have been aware of them I do not know, as he died in 1610. There are twelve original novelas, all separate tales tangentially linked, but more than one version exists of a number of them, while others have had their authorship disputed. Some reappear in Don Quixote itself. Minor works by major writers are so often the more interesting ones. Or the major works of minor writers, perhaps. After all, who gets to decide?

  Caravaggio’s cardsharps are playing “zarro,” a Persian game that had been banned a century earlier by Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, for being socially dangerous.4 Card games are, of course, socially dangerous, and as we have seen, can never end. The picture warns us of dangers while revelling in them, and it is for this paradoxical reason, perhaps, that every gallery should have a picture of card players, if not by Caravaggio, or Cézanne, or Sander, then at least by Cassius Coolidge.

  Coolidge was born to strict Quaker parents in upstate New York in 1844, and after a series of failed endeavours (druggist, journalist, banker, playwright, cartoonist, and portrait photographer) took to painting. Despite his lack of training, his pictures have become some of the most well-known and valuable works of art of the modern era. In 1894, he painted Poker Game, and he followed this up ten years later with the first in the sequence that became known as Dogs Playing Poker.

  Each of the sixteen pictures in the sequence are variations on the theme, much like that of Caravaggio, or Cervantes. The sequence, by which I mean the repetition of form with minor variants potentially having a major impact, is a structuring principle for much great art, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere to Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossienes to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills.

  In 2015, Poker Game sold at Sotheby’s for $658,000. Given the value of these pictures, it is little wonder that fakes abound, particularly as Coolidge seems to have been unconcerned about ownership of his work: copies, interpretations, spoofs, and outright rip-offs have conspired to flood the popular imaginarium. (It is possible that one of the definitions of the spurious category of “great art” is exactly its potential for generating copies, interpretations, spoofs, and outright rip-offs.) One of the series in particular catches my eye, a later work entitled His Station and Four Aces.

  The picture features seven dogs (four players, two observers, and a conductor) in a train compartment, by night. The train is coming into a station (the lights on the platform and other canine passengers waiting to board can just be seen through a semi-raised window blind), the conductor is doing his rounds to announce this, and yet the boxer dog, seated to the left of the picture and one of its dual foci, holds four aces (an incredibly rare hand in human poker) and is aghast. His station has come; he will not be able to play his hand.5

  The sequence with repetition of form and minor variants is much like a train, and the interior of a train, with its enclosed spaces, curious elongation and compression of time, and enforced yet accidental intimacy with strangers is (as the characters in “An Incident on the Train to Lvov” note) a perfect setting for a short story.6 The train possesses dreamlike and sinister qualities, as does a good story. Even the most overcrowded, underfunded commuter services can have their touch of the oneiric, though I admit I may be stretching the point here.

  Any regular train rider becomes a careful observer and keen fabulist. Guyavitch, I am certain, was a man who spent much time travelling third class himself. “An Incident on the Train to Lvov” is clear proof of this. I see him, sitting in the corner of a cramped compartment, pen in hand, listening carefully and attentively while simultaneously being a thousand miles distant. Guyavitch was a man who listened to everything, and listened well, I think.

  Isaac Babel, too, spent a lot of time on trains. Though his Odessa Stories are a part with the place he was born and grew up in, a place he listened to carefully, felt viscerally, and recreated through his fiction, he only wrote them after he had left. He may have stayed in Odessa forever, if he hadn’t been refused entry to the university (not due to academic failing, but because he was Jewish). So Babel (a man “who loved to confuse and mystify people,” according to his daughter) headed to Kiev, then Saint Petersburg (which became Leningrad), then Romania (possibly), then Georgia, then had a spell back home before the army (the source of his Red Cavalry stories), then Poland, Ukraine, wherever he was posted. Finally, having become a recognised writer at a time when it may have been better to have stayed unrecognised, he went to Moscow. Babel’s stories7—minimal and maximal, tender and brutal, clear eyed and woozily romantic, funny and bitter—earned him enough reputation to grant him the freedom of long stays in Paris, more trains, but less writing. In the 1930s, dangerous times for a truth-telling Jew, his output ceased almost entirely. “I have become a master of the genre of silence,” he said.

  Like Guyavitch’s stories, Babel’s stories have a constant longing for home, a home never to be found, as it no longer existed and could only be reconstructed through memory. It would be wrong to say such a man found his home in his stories, but parts of Odessa could be rebuilt using them as a plan.

  We don’t know where Guyavitch’s home was8. How many of us truly know where home is? “Pilgrim Souls,” like most of the Nine Stories, is about home, and its absence.

  Villages which have moved and been rebuilt are many, those evacuated or abandoned even more. Few countries are without their eerie ruins, their ghost towns, environmental or hydroelectric plans gone awry, silenced disasters. Pripyat, near Chernobyl, is now one of Ukraine’s biggest attractions, featuring on bucket lists for the adventurous traveller. Imber, a small village on Salisbury Plain in England, found itself in the middle of an arbitrarily decreed army testing range in 1943 and now only lets its aged inhabitants and their descendants visit once a year, a military Brigadoon. The town of Plymouth on the island of Montserrat lies under volcanic ash, a future Pompeii. In Kalyazin, Potosí, and Sant Romà de Sau, church spires rise from lake waters in spells of drought; in Shi Cheng, Capel Celyn, and Neversink, bells are said to be audible if you listen carefully enough, on the quietest of nights. Now villages, towns, and cities all across the world await fire or flood, and I wonder if Guyavitch’s story is not one of aching nostalgia, but of foresight.

  Bruno Schulz—another of Guyavitch’s contemporaries—never left his hometown but lived in several different countries. He was born in 1892, just two years before Babel, in Drohobych, near Lvov. This was in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been part of the Kingdom of Poland, but later found itself in the short-lived Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, then the Second Polish Republic, then the Soviet Ukraine. His stories contain nothing of this, almost blissfully impervious to the changes around themselves, obsessively concentrating on his family and his hometown, a place that could also be built from the descriptions in The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, though if it were, it would seem no real place, but the
dream of one, the town dreaming itself.

  I wonder where, exactly, the passengers in “An Incident on the Train to Lvov” are, and where the city of N— is. I wonder if they pass through Drohobych, or if they are east of there, near Brody, where Joseph Roth was from.

  While Babel may have had rootlessness forced upon him, and Schulz had it happen around him, Roth chose it. Born two years after Schulz and some two hundred kilometres east of him, young Joseph moved to Vienna when he was twenty, spent some time on the Eastern Front, saw his homeland collapse, then moved to Berlin, with spells in Poland, Italy, Russia, then finally, after leaving Germany in 1933, to Paris. “A man whose element was turbulence,” wrote Michael Hofmann, one of Roth’s translators. It would be wrong to call Roth a writer of short stories, but it would also be wrong to categorise him at all. He wrote journals, journalism, letters, feuilletons, novels, memoirs, fragments, all about loss and nostalgia and drinking and wandering. A man who had little time, I think, for any conventions and restrictions of genre.

  That said, defining things can be hugely satisfying. The Periodic Table of the Elements: all physical matter classified and arranged. The International Phonetic Alphabet: each sound the human mouth is capable of producing given a symbol. The Beaufort Scale: something as intangible and powerful as the wind itself pinned down. Linnaean taxonomy: life, defined. Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, bibliographies, catalogues raisonnés. A train timetable: all that chaos and complexity neatly arranged into columns of places and times, destinations and arrivals.