Free THE LUTE AND THE SCARS by Adam Thirlwell and John K. Cox

completely filled with smoke. You weren ’ t even home. This means Nikola has started smoking. It ’ s all due to your bad influence. ” (In a very stern voice:) “ He ’ s also taken to drinking with you. He never used to drink before. With you around he ’ s become a bohemian too. ”
    Nikolaj Aleksinski was an old man with an upright bearing, short gray hair, and smiling blue eyes. He was as deaf as a door-knob, but that didn ’ t dampen his spirit or his good cheer one bit. He got up early, showered with cold water all year long (while you listened to him exclaiming “ hu-hu-hu ” and “ ha-ha-ha ” from the bathroom), and fasted one day every week, on Friday, for health reasons; on that day he drank only spring water that he had brought home from somewhere in a big demijohn. But this all had nothing to do with that nearly obscene resistance to death so typical of the elderly; this was more like a military kind of mental discipline paired with simple hedonism. I learned how to carry on a conversation with him by means of a kind of sign language. Our alphabet consisted of schematically reproduced letters from the old Cyrillic alphabet once used in Russian, and it contained symbolic abbreviations as well: touching one ’ s hair with a finger indicated the first letter of a word or the word itself: v as in volosy , hair; touching a tooth yielded z for zub , tooth; pressing your palms together gave you d as in druzhba , friendship. It sufficed to get across the first letters of words to him; once the word was underway, he completed it out loud while looking you straight in the eyes.
    I show him: thumb and index-finger in the shape of a Cyrillic s , then close the circle by pressing my fingertips together ( o ), and touch my hair ( v ) . . .
    “ Soviet, ” he says.
    I sign: l , i , t . . .
    And he finishes the word by saying “ literature ” : “ Soviet literature is still in its infancy, ” he maintains. “ Like new grass. One must be patient while it grows. ”
    I tell him (using my fingers): “ Something is forever trampling on this grass. ”
    “ Yet no one can stop the grass from growing, ” he says. “ Do you see that sumac tree out there in the courtyard? It grew up out of the concrete. Take a look at it. ”
    I say: “ But people — ”
    He guessed my thoughts: “ People can cut it back as much as they like; somewhere a new shoot will always come forth. Force its way through stone, or through concrete. ”
    I ask him, “ Did you know Prince Ž evahov? ”
    He stares at me in amazement. “ Where did you pick up that name? ”
    I reply: “ I read his book about Sergei Nilus. ”
    Nikolaj waves his hand.
    “ Ž evahov lived in Novi Sad until recently. The Russian emigrants have their headquarters in Sremska Mitrovica. Ž evahov was an unfortunate case. With age his mind dimmed considerably. He saw ghosts. Don ’ t you have anything better to do that to concern yourself with the likes of that mad Prince Ž evahov? ”
    “ I ’ m collecting eyewitness accounts, ” I say. “ In connection with Nilus, he wrote about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . What did this Ž evahov look like? ”
    “ In his youth he was attractive, tall. The last time I saw him was back before the war. He was still wearing his old-fashioned pincenez and an Order of St. Nicholas on his shabby old dress coat. ”
    I give Nikolaj the manuscript of my first book. (It would end up being published three or four years later.)
    “ It ’ s as if you belonged to the circle of the Serapion Brothers, ” he says. “ There are hints here that you share the same artistic program. Your reality is a poetic one. ”
    I say something to the effect that poetic reality is still reality.
    “ Reality is like grass and earth, ” he says. “ Reality is the grass that grows and it ’ s the feet that mangle it. ”
    I tell him that this is also a poetic image. A metaphor.
    “ An image, perhaps, ” he says. “ Let ’ s have