Dossier K: A Memoir Read Free Page A

tell me, now, why do you crow so much each and every time you catch me writing some true, actual detail, or “reality,” as you put it?
    Because you blur reality with your fiction theory. You cut yourself out of your own stories
.
    There’s no question of that. It’s just that my proper place is not in the story but at the writing desk (admittedly, I didn’t yet have a piece of furniture like that at the time). Allow me to call on one or two great exemplars as my witnesses. Would
War and Peace
, for instance, still be a good book even if Napoleon and the Russian campaign had never existed?
    I need to think about that … Yes, I think so
.
    But the fact that Napoleon really did exist and the Russian campaign was a reality, and what’s more all of it was written down with scrupulous precision, with the historical facts being kept in view—that makes the book even better, doesn’t it?
    Yes, it does
.
    And if Fabrizio del Dongo, the young hero of Stendhal’s
The Charterhouse of Parma
, wanders irresolutely and uncomprehendingly across fields and groves and continually stumbles into cannon and cavalry units, hears incomprehensible shouts and commands—that’s quite an interesting fiction in itself, is it not?
    It is
.
    But if we know that he happens to be cutting across the site of the Battle of Waterloo, that makes it even more interesting, doesn’t it?
    That’s right
.
    Now, if it’s something concerning the Battle of Waterloo, that constrains one to accuracy because the Battle of Waterloo is a historical fact.
    I see where you’re heading, and I appreciate your Socratic method, but let me ask something in turn. You told me what lengths your mother went to once she knew you had got into police custody—and what a ludicrous expression that is in your case! You said nothing, however, about how she came to know what had happened, because to the best of my knowledge you were living with your stepmother at that time
.
    My stepmother wrote a letter to my mother in which she told her about my disappearance. What a letter, though! The style! “Dear Goldie (that was my mother’s name: Goldie), There is an unpleasant piece of newsabout which I have to inform you …” “Naturally, I made inquiries at once …” The word “naturally,” and the various euphemisms, I “filched” from my stepmother’s vocabulary and then made use of in
Fatelessness
. A ruinous personality she had.
    What do you mean by “ruinous”?
    I’m not really sure … There is a sentence in Gombrowicz’s novel
Ferdydurke
—I may be quoting it inaccurately, but it goes something like: “Have you ever known the sort of people inside of whom you dwindle in size?” Well, my stepmother was like that.
    Which suggests you had a tough time with her
.
    And she, the poor soul, had an even tougher time with me. I couldn’t stand the … the … To be brief, I couldn’t stand her at all; her taste most of all. Just imagine, she had this medium-grey, or rather light-grey, two-piece costume, and to go with that she bought a little narrow-brimmed red hat, a red lacquer purse, and red shoes, and she thought that they made her look frightfully elegant. And she would go out like that with me for a walk—“bunk off a little” was the way she put it. It was dreadful; I could have died. On top of everything, she wanted me to call her “Momsie,” and my father backed up this fervent wish. Anyway, they tried and tried but no way did it work; the word simply would not come out.
    It seems that already in childhood you were highly sensitizedto words. In your most recent novel
, Liquidation,
you talk about the phobia you had about some words
.
    Yes, some nonsensical scheme was attached to language; the pronunciation of certain words elicited specific concepts, but that’s not what is meant in this case. Her grey two-piece suit and the red hat and the “Momsie”—for me all that elicited a horror for which I only later found a name; it was an apotheosis of