THE LUTE AND THE SCARS (14 page)

The title
“
The Debt
”
does not figure in any of the seven extant tables of contents for
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
, which would seem to indicate that the story was written after 1983. The reader will probably recognize the great Bosnian author Ivo Andri
ć
in the character of
“
the debtor.
”
And this identification, among other things, leads us to take 1986 as the year of origin for the story: at that time Ki
š
was writing the foreword to the French edition of Andri
ć
’
s
The Woman from Sarajevo
. Although arising in connection with this special occasion, Ki
š
’
s repeated focus on Andri
ć
could also have been the stimulus for the production of this type of homage to that other writer, one of the closest relatives in Ki
š
’
s
“
literary family tree.
”
Even the fact that the story remained unfinished validates our view that its genesis should be associated with the aforementioned year, before the end of which Ki
š
’
s illness had manifested itself.

Nearly all the persons mentioned in this story are connected with Andri
ć
’
s early life (his schooling, his start as a writer, his first years in the diplomatic service) and Ki
š
located information about them in Miroslav Karaulac
’
s book
Rani Andri
ć
(The Early Andri
ć
, Prosveta/Svjetlost, 1980), which he even mentions right at the beginning of the French foreword. Singling them out from the abundance of persons who come up in Karaulac
’
s study, he transformed them into character-paradigms via a process of extreme fictional compression, that essential hallmark of his prose.
“
Andri
ć
is undoubtedly a moralist,
”
Ki
š
would go on to write, assessing the former
’
s literary works (
“
A Foreword to
The Woman from Sarajevo
,
”
in
Ž
ivot, literatura
, Svjetlost, 1990); thus both his selection of facts and his formulation of statements (often in the form of maxims) are made according to principles that might be ascribed to a writer-moralist. The story, however, functions as a double portrait (the portrait and the vase), for Ki
š
is also taking moral stock of his own experiences and inclinations (the delicate terrain of good deeds and gratitude). And we believe that readers will have an easy time identifying points of contact between the characters in this
“
double exposition.
”
(The last will and testament of Eug
è
ne Ionesco, published in
Le Figaro litt
é
raire
after that writer
’
s death, was written in the form of a life reviewed as a balance sheet of debts; when compared with the story
“
The Debt,
”
which was written nearly a decade earlier, Ionesco
’
s will can serve as evidence that even literature knows something about wondrous coincidences and the affinities of kinship.)

Textual Notes:

They served as a kind of rosary
: The following sentences were crossed out:
“
He needed to distribute his two hun- dred crowns fairly, the amount his stipend brought him, and not remain in debt to anyone. Because at this mo- ment he knew, with the lucidity that comes with the hour before death [. . .].
”

The idea came to him, struck a part of his consciousness
: This seems to bear little direct connection to what pre- ceded it, even considering the cancelled lines mentioned above. It
’
s difficult to say why this gap emerged, though the reasons for the deletion of the missing sentences are clear enough: the prematurely delivered exposition and the stylistic rawness of the second, unfinished sentence.

. . . it made him chuckle to himself
: Left out of the first publication (
Knji
ž
evne novine
, October 15, 1992).

for all human endeavors . . . in silence
: From Andri
ć
’
s letter to Tugomir Alaupovi
ć
of July 6, 1920. Cited in Miroslav Kara- ulac,
Rani Andri
ć
(Beograd: Prosveta, 1980), 154
–
55.

over the course of his life
: Written by hand on the margin was this (possible) addition to the sentence:
“
Jelena, for instance (and he tossed the thought away as from the deck of a ship . . . for it was too painful).
”

the eyes of posterity
: Written in pencil in the margin and on the back of the third page of the manuscript. In the text itself, following the colon (
“
. . . in bundles: poems, journals, notes . . .
”
), is a section that is circled in pencil and that contains only incomplete sentences. The circling might be understood as the designation of the spot to which the text from the margin and back of the page should be inserted (possibly as a substitution). This al- lows us to replace the incomplete passage from the main text and preserve it here. It reads:
“
love letters that, wrapped in the old-fashioned way with purple ribbon, he kept his whole life (and in which was . . .) politically com- promising . . . A will written down . . .
”

proving a fool to be a fool amounts to compromising oneself
: Incomplete.

As for the spiritual debts . . . one
’
s homeland
: The material in this paragraph up to this sentence was crossed out by two heavy diagonal lines. However, since the text that fol- lows represents a natural continuation of what was crossed out, and cannot be understood without it, we de- cided not to move it to a note.

two crowns
: The amount of the debt was written in by hand, later, first spelled out (
“
dvije krune
”
) and then with a digit. Considering the second method to be temporary, and chosen by the author for simplicity
’
s sake, we have written out all numbers in this story.

. . . historical necessity
: A portion of this sentence, some- what altered, comes from the story
“
Dogs and Books
”
in
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
.

To Count Ivo Vojnovi
ć
: This was proceeded in the manuscript by an incomplete entry:
“
To Mrs. Zdenka Markovi
ć
. . .
”

Mrs. Vera Stoji
ć
: Andri
ć
’
s girlfriend from wartime bohe- mian circles in Zagreb, with whom the writer carried on a lively correspondence during his stay in Rome in the early 1920s. In one of these letters we find the following sentence, which could as well have been written by Ki
š
:
“
I write little, and with difficulty; nothing exists without our country; and I can live neither with it nor without it.
”
Ka- raulac
’
s book contains, however, no information at all about the character of Mrs. Stoji
ć
, who was obviously Andri
ć
’
s privileged interlocutor, which perhaps accounts for the brevity of her entry here.

A and B

We can date this short piece of prose with relative certainty to 1986, the year that Ki
š
’
s illness was diagnosed; the work has no title and consists of two circled entries labeled
“
A
”
and
“
B,
”
each of which has a subtitle in English:
The magical place
and
The worst rathole I visited?
This text, comprising three typed pages, was found in Ki
š
’
s literary papers already prepared for publication, with the author
’
s name in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. Aside from the issue of dating the text, we were vexed by the question of why Ki
š
would suddenly return to themes, places (which are here placed in sharp opposition to each other, as indicated by the titles of the constituent parts: magical place and worst rat-hole), and images from his
“
family cycle
”
; and we were inclined, trusting in the correctness of our intuition, to link this
“
homesickness
”
with forebodings of his own imminent end. Today, following closer studies of his literary oeuvre, and an inventory of its topics and motifs, made over nearly an entire decade (from 1978 to 1986), we realize that our assumption was more a matter of the
“
treacherous influence of biography.
”

(Mme Pascal Delpeche recently mentioned to us that this text could be a response to a questionnaire about
“
most beautiful and ugliest places
”
received by the author. While this solution would remove all mystification as to Ki
š
’
s motive, it would not alter the significance of the chosen places themselves.)

The Marathon Runner and the Race Official

The story
“
The Marathon Runner and the Race Official
”
was written in Belgrade in the summer of 1982. It was intended for the volume
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
, as attested by the fact that the title is mentioned in the first three tables of contents for that work. The manuscript includes six continuously paginated typed pages. In Ki
š
’
s papers, however, we found only the second, third, fourth, and fifth. Due to the fragmentary nature of the text, which we considered final, we did not publish the story in the first edition of
The Lute and the Scars
. It was, together with other fragmentary texts, published in the book
Skladi
š
te
, which contains all of Ki
š
’
s unpublished literary papers. A few days after that book appeared, as we were completing work on a bibliography (the date was March 4, 1995), we leafed through a number of folders of press clippings. In the first folder we picked up, we noticed, between two yellowed sheets of newspaper, the missing pages (pp. 1 and 6) for which we had been searching in vain for two years. We revel in this miracle, which needs no commentary!

On two other pages were found additional elements intended for the story, which ostensibly should have formed part of its postscript. It is a matter of a brief introductory comment and also the translation of an anecdote from Abram Tertz
’
s book
A Voice from the Chorus
, which formed the basis of the story. We reproduce both of them here in this summary annotation:

Leonid
Š
ejka died in November, 1970.

A and B

The italicized phrases in this piece are in English in the original text. Additionally, the parenthetical statement in the first paragraph was originally written in French.

The Marathon Runner and the Race Official

on the sidewalks
. . . : The available Serbo-Croatian text of this story picks up here, after the word
“
sidewalks.
”
It runs for most of the story, up to the sentence ending
“
. . . for more than fifteen years.
”
(See the following note). This text is found in the section labeled
“
FRAGMENTI
”
in the compendium
“
Dosije
Enciklopedija mrtvih
,
”
in Mirjana Mio
č
inovi
ć
, ed.,
Skladi
š
te
(Beograd: BIGZ, 1995), 336
–
40. The first and last sections of this story were translated from the French and German versions published after the missing pages of Ki
š
’
s manuscript were found. These works are:
Le luth et les cicatrices
, translated by Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1995) and
Der Heimatlose: Erz
ä
hlungen
, translated by Ilma Rakusa (M
ü
nchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1996).

for more than fifteen years
: This phrase marks the end of the Serbo-Croatian text available for first publication in 1995.