He lit up like it was still the 80s, no trace of self-consciousness whatsoever. He was admirably oblivious to the hysteria over the last thirty years concerning the dangers of second-hand smoke. I, however, wasn't and already flinching from the reprimand I was certain must be coming from somewhere.
"You can't do that inside anymore," I whispered urgently across the alarmed candle-flame.
"What's that?"
"Smoke. It's against the law now."
He exhaled. "Really? Astonishing, and in a free country. Don't worry. I survived Stalin, Hitler, and Tito. At this juncture, I'm beyond the law. I'm dead."
He was right. Stealing a quick, furtive glance at the other tables, I saw with relief that no one seemed to be paying the least attention to us. No waiter rushed over to reprimand him.
He shrugged. "What doesn't kill me…"
He took a long, thirsty drag from his brightening cigarette. He looked every bit the part of a famous writer, dressed in an unpressed, unbuttoned white shirt with a scrunched-up collar and a bulky sportscoat that looked all the bulkier hanging as it did on his lean, angular frame. His face was long and hollow and serious, as I expected it to be from author photos. His thick hair, still dark, and usually wild in these same author photos, was pressed down, subdued. His mouth was stretched and thin and set in an expression that was hard not to see as critical and slightly disapproving. Still, thin as they were, his lips had a mockingly sensual cast, set between a parenthesis grooved deep from the sides of a long philosophical nose. It was hard not so see death haunting that face, even back in the days when he was alive.
"But it did kill you. At only fifty-four. Lung cancer."
He exhaled, squinting through the smoke. "True. Then let's say what kills me can't hurt me anymore."
It was extraordinary, having met, by chance one chilly November evening, in a nearby secondhand bookshop and now talking to him like this, well, not quite in the flesh, over a couple of glasses of wine in a basement bar in Williamsburg. Gosh, but Danilo Kis was a handsome guy, not that it did him much good anymore, I suppose, since he'd already died a quarter century ago, back in 1989.
"Death preserves," he said, as if reading my thoughts, which probably weren't hieroglyphic, studying his face as I was. "If I'd lived I'd have been a haggard old dude of 79 by now. You wouldn't give me a second look."
He squinted again, this time inhaling smoke, the slit of his still open eye examining me for a response, verbal or otherwise.
Stumped, I momentarily hid behind my wineglass.
When I lowered it, I said something perfectly banal. "You speak amazing English. Not even a trace of accent."
He didn't miss a beat. "Death is the perfect translator. It speaks the universal language."
I had really meant to say something about regretting not being able to read his works in the language in which he wrote: Serbo-Croation. That, as a result, I was certain I must be missing some essential beauty of his prose. But that would have been only marginally less banal than what I did say. I was out of my depth. Thank god for alcohol. The wineglass came to my lips and my rescue once again.
* * *
I had read a collection of his short stories, The Lute and the Scars. I told him so, thinking it might provide an inroad into the dense thicket of an uncomfortable silence that was rapidly building up between us. Uncomfortable for me, I should say. He seemed perfectly at ease.
He raised his hand, pulled a pained face.
"Unfinished work. Culled from my posthumous papers. Stray sheets left behind in a drawer where they should have stayed, as if in a grave, unresurrected. I should have arranged to have them burned. When you're dead, you lose control of your corpse and your oeuvre. It sucks."
"Still, it was powerful stuff."
"You should have read A Tomb for Boris Davidovich or Encyclopedia of the Dead if you want powerful stuff. That's where my legacy, such as it is, lies."
I'd heard of both these titles, but they weren't available at the Brooklyn Pubic Library, a fact which I thought it best to keep to myself. I was dealing not only with a mercurial artist, but a dead one as well. Who knew what might set him off? From what I'd read of his work, Danilo Kis was as obsessed with death even while alive. In every story collected in The Lute and the Scars someone dies. His world is a grim one, his unfortunate characters having been caught in two successive hells, surviving Nazi fascism only to be delivered into Stalin's version of the totalitarian nightmare. Even when one of his protagonists, miraculously, manages to escape both concentration camp and gulag, as the elderly Jewish writer does in Jurij Golec, he or she is haunted by the past, dogged by survivor guilt, and seduced by the repose of oblivion held out by suicide. I tentatively put forward this observation.
"But of course. Ever since the Gilgamesh epic, death has been one of the obsessive themes of literature."
"It makes perfect sense that you should say that. I think it may be one of the reasons I felt such an immediate affinity for your stories, your world-view. I've always thought that every important book ever written was basically a rewriting of and response to The Epic of Gilgamesh. It's the one essential book, the one book I'd bring with me to the moon if one book was all I could bring. It's not just about death, but about love, too. The tragic love of Gilgamesh for his friend Enkidu. It's about how all of human experience is subject to transience. All is vanity, as it was later put in Ecclesiastes."
"Yes, yes," he stirred the cloud of smoke hanging around his head with the red tip of yet another cigarette. "What I can't stand is the serialized fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it's hidden omniscient author."
"So true," I agreed enthusiastically, glad now to be on the more certain footing of abstract literary theory, where I felt I had the most in common with Kis. "It's so entirely artificial. As if life ever made so much sense."
"The omniscience of the narrator and the art of psychological portraiture are the most pernicious and persistent of literary conventions. I believe that in its ideal, unattainable, Platonic form the novel should resemble an encyclopedia entry or, rather, a series of entries branching out in all directions, yet condensed."
"You followed Borges…"
"He found a new way of using documents, real or imaginary. I expanded on his innovations."
"It gave his work a more realistic illusion of reality, so to speak."
He leaned forward over the table, stabbing the air with his cigarette for emphasis.
"What it did was enable him to compress his material to the maximum, which is, after all, the ideal of narrative art. Yes. The document is the surest way to make a story seem both convincing and true, and what is literature for if not to convince us of the truth of what it tells, of the writer's literary fantasies. Such is the direction Borges's investigations take, and they lead him to the pinnacle of narrative art and technique."
"Yet you're stories are far darker than Borges…"
"I lived in darker times and in a darker place than Jorge Luis Borges, that is a fact. Hiroshima is the focal point of that fantastic world, whose contours could first be discerned at about the time of the First World War, when the horror of secret societies began to come to life in the form of mass ritual sacrifices on the altar of ideology, the gold calf, the religion…I say 'secret societies' because I am speaking of the occult…"
"Freedom is free. It's ideology, the belief that freedom must cost us our lives, that's what kills."
"Man's soul has long side been given up to the Devil."
"Is there no escape then? No salvation?"
"What do you think?"
I don't think I was imagining the sarcasm I heard in his tone.
"Literature…art…maybe, offers a way, a world of one's own. If one is a powerful enough creator, why can't one create a world even more real than the one everyone else takes for granted is the real one, because they are told it is the real one, because they lack the imagination to create one of their own, like Blake says 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's…"
I was babbling. He cut me off, having gotten my gist, or having heard enough of what he considered my nonsense.
"I want readers to believe that they are reading more than fantasies or figments of the imagination, that they are reading the truth, and not only artistic truth."
And then, perhaps sensing my embarrassment and regret for having put forward my own impromptu view, half-articulated as it was, blurted out in rush of passionate intensity and exposing my idealistic vulnerability, he softened his own view as if trying to bring it more into line with mine.
"Call it commitment if you like: an enlargement of the circle of reality as well as an increase in the obligations resulting from it…"
I was grateful for his kindness.
* * *
At this point, our conversation started to fade, as did Danilo himself, eventually vanishing altogether like the smoke of his cigarette, which somehow became my cigarette, ending up burning nearly to the filter between my fingers, even though I don't smoke.
I threw the cigarette quickly, guiltily into what was left of the wine in my glass, dousing the ember, just as I saw the waiter turn and start towards me with a hostile, disapproving look on his face. My shrug was exaggerated and overdramatic. Working my lips like a clown for the crowd, I mouthed the words, "it's not mine."
I nodded towards my now missing companion to indicate where he'd been only moments ago. But my glass was the only one on the table.
Note: This story is based on an experience confided to me by a good friend of mine by the name of Nadja Klein. It took place in San Francisco, not Brooklyn, during the autumn of 2004, when Danilo Kis would have been dead for fifteen, not twenty-five years, as he was in the above fictionalized account. She was doing her doctoral thesis on Danilo Kis at the time and during the course of her research had run into a man in the legendary City Lights bookstore who, having overheard her asking a clerk what works by Kis were in stock, first claimed to have been a close personal friend of the famous writer, and later, in fact, confided to her that he actually was Danilo Kis. His appearance was roughly what could be expected of a Danilo Kis aged sixty-nine. His knowledge of the works of Kis was extensive, worthy of a scholar, especially inasmuch as the English-speaking world didn't know much about Kis at the time. Nonetheless, Klein didn't believe the elderly man's fantastical story of faked death, secret emigration, and anonymous life in San Francisco. For one thing, it bore too many of the cliches contained in most such stories and for another, the would-be Kis made no great effort to render these cliches especially plausible; if anything, he seemed to relate them in a careless, haphazard way. Ironically, if there was anything that may have led Klein to believe his absurd claim it was his cavalier attitude to the facts supposedly supporting his lie and his evident lack of concern whether she believed him or not. In any event, he was an undeniably brilliant man, expert, as I mentioned, in all matters Danilo Kis and in possession of some manuscripts which, even if they were by his own hand, bore such an uncanny resemblance to Kis's own work as to seem, at least to Klein and the few who she showed this work, including the present writer, to be at least worthy, if not identical, to the work of Kis himself. To her surprise, Klein found herself involved in a torrid and unconventional sexual relationship with a man nearly forty years her senior, which, of course, as anyone could have predicted, ended and ended rather badly at that. What followed was the predictable downward spiral that often attends the collapse of such a magical, tragical, obsessive relationship. By the time she recovered herself, Klein had lost all stomach for her thesis on Danilo Kis and even burned the manuscripts the impostor, for she had decided once and for all to regard him as an impostor, had given her. The man himself, whoever he'd been, had disappeared without a word and has remained silent, if in fact he still lives, ever since. Klein was left with nothing tangible of the experience except this story and a two-pack a day smoking habit that most likely led to the lung cancer which is currently in remission. She eventually earned her doctorate with a thesis comparing the work of the poets Emily Dickinson and H.D.
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