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Sport 40: 2012

On the Consumption of Books

page 185

On the Consumption of Books

From the moment she learnt to read, Ada read lots of books. Reading was neither a chore nor a hobby, it didn’t follow any special design. Reading was a condition in which time passed because it had to, while Ada’s intellect stopped foraging frantically and immersed itself in nutrients, consuming and converting at a regular rate. In the intervening hours, the mind eased off and put its feet up for a while, like a machinist exhausted from operating dangerous equipment day and night. Ada read in the same way that tree trunks are fed into a sawmill. Since thick, hard logs take longer to consume, she favoured books from the nineteenth century and anything written before the Second World War. Recent works, in her opinion, were mere distractions from the genuine article, they were light and sweet, to be eaten like sugared popcorn while the head was busy with other things. This was particularly true of books by German authors, with the exception of Arno Schmidt, in whose honour Ada would occasionally dream up moon metaphors and enter them in a diary she seldom used. Dear Selma: the moon, mushy as a dollop of potato puree smudged by a child’s hand against the sky. The moon, an asymmetrical flatbread. A moon—the kind that no one notices—beckoning to a herd of clouds.

Ada imagined the First World War as a great black coat cast over the continent, under cover of which unspeakable things occurred. Four years later it lifted, leaving chaos behind. The Second World War was a fathomless chasm into which the current of history coursed from historical heights, plummeting straight down rather than slowing and spilling across the flatlands of recent memory, carrying the Ark of the present towards the future sea. A parched riverbed snaked through the desert, away from the abyss. After a time, water bubbled through the cracks in the ground, at first no more than a trickle, then a stream, page 186until finally, with channelling and reinforcement, eighty million democrats in single and double kayaks could paddle downstream. It was a fine thing to head in the other direction, sit on the crumbling edge of the chasm and cast a line. The fish that Ada pulled from the torrent were strange and powerful, like creatures from a prehistoric age. They came from Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Mann.

During her first years at senior school Ada had a friend to whom she related everything she read. The friend was called Selma, she was in the same year as Ada but in another form, and she came from Bosnia-Herzegovina, which existed in her memory only in the shape of sunshine and plum jam. She moved to Germany when war turned her summer-scented homeland into a place of hell and blood. Selma owned a dog that she and Ada would take for long walks in the woods of the Kottenforst, setting out in the afternoon, often on the scent of a herd of deer or wild pigs, until the dog, covered from head to toe with leaves and bits of twig, would bring them home. While they walked, Ada would talk and Selma would listen. Selma was interested in everything that Ada had to say, any story she retold. An incomplete retelling of Buddenbrooks full of leaps in logic was just as welcome as a whole series of amorous liaisons from La Comédie humaine, a staccato of Zweig novellas or some general remarks on the nature of space and time.

Whenever they were prevented from meeting by another of Selma’s many family commitments, Ada wrote letters that in time became a diary entitled ‘Dear Selma’. Literary synopses were followed by dispatches from the realm of thought and feelings. Ada reported that she had never encountered anything more beautiful than Selma, that all the trees in the mixed woodland forest turned their heads to follow them with their gaze, that the whole Kottenforst bowed down before them, the birds changed their song in their honour, and that Ada was proud and happy to occupy Selma’s inner landscapes with her stories for a time. In a few years, Ada’s diary predicted, others would express their admiration more elegantly than the trees, the birds or Ada. But until then, she wanted Selma for herself. Selma pledged her fidelity in writing on a separate page, and from then on Ada was permitted to put an arm around her and kiss her on the mouth while they were walking in the forest or lingering in the toilets at school.

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Ada’s papers reveal that she related over three hundred novels, novellas and short stories to Selma before the breach occurred. When Ada’s mother and stepfather announced they were going on a family holiday to the mountains that summer, Ada demanded to be allowed to stay with Selma, whom she referred to as her ‘wife’. Not long afterwards she found herself on the deck of a chalet, gazing at the rocky spines of the titans that loomed uncomfortably close, while reading books and listening to a cassette she had taken from the tape deck in her stepfather’s car. When the song was over, Ada rewound the tape and played it again. It is impossible to describe what unfolded inside her. The music was the soundtrack to her despair, her longing for Selma and the pent-up force of too many unrecounted stories threatened with oblivion, screaming and kicking at their fate.

The song had a chorus that Ada, whose grasp of English was still shaky, interpreted as ‘Sir Don Camisi, to me’. After a few lines, the phrase ‘I love you’ could be heard. Her letters to Selma, deposited at the local post office by her stepfather once a week, asked for their author not to be forgotten, begged for good care to be taken of the diary left in Selma’s safekeeping, summarised a few recently read stories, and imparted the messages whispered on the silence of the surrounding giants. The signature at the bottom read ‘Don Camisi’. Loneliness had a name.

Ada returned to find that Selma’s parents had discovered the diary and intercepted all the letters. It was the end of walking in the woods. Selma never answered the notes that Ada slipped to her in the playground, and Ada’s battle for Selma ended abruptly when the family was deported back to Bosnia, to a place with a name that Ada could never quite recall. Years later it cropped up in some papers she was reading for a history assignment: Višegrad. There the bridge spanned the river Drina and bore an old inscription: Flow, Drina, flow, and tell your story. Ada repeated the words three times and felt an urge to cry, whether from joy or pain she didn’t know. That same week, as coincidence makes a habit of doing, Don Camisi was flattened by reality. A remix of the 1980s hit was released: Words don’t come easy to me.

No new Selma appeared nor anyone else who wanted to listen. Ada learnt to read without relating the contents of every book. She kept page 188 up with her diary but never wrote more than a few lines each week.

To ensure that her mental processes functioned without interruption, Ada took to shutting herself in the bathroom. On her way upstairs she would stop in front of the three bookshelves in the living room. From the collection of her prematurely departed progenitor she would take a fat novel; the books were his only legacy, more or less. Her stepfather, whom Ada had started calling the ‘major- general’ since his most recent promotion, had left his library behind when he abandoned the family home; from his shelf Ada would take a book about time, astronomy, philosophy or Bismarck’s Realpolitik. Last of all she would scan the row of new additions printed on glossy paper and attired in bright jackets, and select one or two. Quickly and quietly she would carry her stack of books across the old parquet floor and up the newly constructed spiral staircase to the bathroom on the top floor.

Shortly after the major-general’s departure Ada had begun her transformation into a funnel. Any kind of worry or distress could be spoken into her without a drop being spilt or surfacing again. Her mother poured her verbal outbursts through the funnel as often as she could. Ada’s character was beginning to resemble that of the departed general in certain unmistakable respects, and since the two were not related, this could only be attributed to a decade of his influence, a psychological transfer of personality, like a sociogenically transmitted disease. The task of combating this pathology emerged as the defining responsibility of Ada’s mother, who had one by one relinquished her other maternal duties following the departure of husband number two. Her method was the word-based equivalent of deep-sea dumping. The mother directed all her energies towards fighting the general in her daughter, and evasion proved difficult. Ada’s bedroom could not be considered a natural boundary. None of the doors in the apartment had locks, so it was perfectly within the rules of politeness to gain entrance by knocking. Any attempt to resist the verbal deluge was considered a new sign of illness, requiring a shift from inundation to all-out attack, a war of aggression in Ada’s best interests.

It was a happy day, therefore, when Ada discovered that the bathroom door was no mere frontier but a bulwark, supported by the sanctity of personal space. Steadily she extended the duration of her page 189 visits to the bathroom until, equipped for a sojourn lasting several hours, she could retreat behind the door, turn up the heating, sit on the toilet seat or lie in the empty bath, and read. Every now and then her mother would venture upstairs, knock and enquire how much longer she was going to be. Not long, Ada would call from inside—but in the meantime could her mother use the other bathroom downstairs? Her mother believed that beauty, far from being a gift, was a duty for women, so she welcomed the idea of a young girl spending most of the day in front of a mirror—and the fact that her unsophisticated daughter was taking a sudden interest in personal grooming was particularly good news. For a moment she would hover outside the door, then her high heels would click down the spiral staircase and recede into the mirrored expanse of the floor below.

After that, the verbal crusades were mostly limited to mealtimes, and Ada’s reading quota rose to three or four books per week. Later, someone would enter Ada’s life and occupy the sawmill in her head more intensely than any novel, and this encounter would force her out of the world of literature and into the world described as real. Everything was going to change. But it would take a full year, during which a great deal would happen, although Ada would be only marginally involved.

From Spieltrieb © Schöffling & Co., 2004. English translation © Sally-Ann Spencer, 2012.