By Paul Mirabile
Adamov led an introverted life. Perhaps because everyone, both friends and foes, thought he was ugly. In fact, he himself, when looking in the mirror that hung lopsided on his peeling wallpaper drew the same conclusion. An ugliness that drove him deeper into his own world, and which would lead him to become the foremost collector of books in the Kalmak region of the Caucasian mountains, and even beyond … This intense activity, which began at a very early age until his violent, and I may add, mysterious death in a dingy New York City hotel room, took him to the four corners of the earth, buying, bartering, stealing manuscripts, first published books, political pamphlets, rare essays. He even possessed, heaven knows how, an incunabulum[1]: a Lutheran Bible! Adamov also acquired, as a picturesque pastime, miniatures of Mughal, Kangra and Rajput stamps, Tibetan thankas, Buddhist prayer masks, mediaeval Chinese scroll paintings. It was said that he amassed more than 25,000 books at the humble two-storey lodging of his home village in the mountains of Daghestan ! But this, I will not confirm …
In short, books became his very existence, his raison d’être. His trusty companions and faithful, consoling friends in his many moments of maniac depression. His book-hunting transformed Amadov into a detective, snooping out the scent of an affair, flaring the odour of yellowing pages, crispy to the touch, invigorating to the smell, pleasing to the eye.
For Adamov, it was not just a question of tracking down a book like a hunter hunting his prey, but of locating the author’s place of residence, his or her favourite haunts. He would spend weeks, months in cities and towns, even after having procured his book, following the daily footfalls of those illustrious or obscure writers. If the writer happened to be alive, he would trail him or her from his or her home to a restaurant, a hotel, a library or book-shop, but never like a sleuth. If caught red-handed, this might have caused him some embarrassment. Adamov was afraid of direct confrontation, especially if it involved the law. To tell the truth, Adamov had no real intention of meeting an author, however famous. He reckoned that authors never measure up to their books, so why waste time actually meeting them? What would they talk about anyway: the birds and the bees? The weather?
It was during those moments of utter dolefulness on the road that Adamov recalled his childhood with a faint smile: He recollected rummaging through the dilapidated homes of his village in search of maps, pamphlets, books, picture cards or any scribblings that caught his eye, classing them in files either by theme or by date of their finding. For example, in 1960 he found 345 miscellaneous documents; in 1961, only 127. He had such a wonderful childhood, in spite of the periodic bombings from above, parental scoldings or beatings, visits from the neighbouring village militia that demanded money, food or young blood for the ’cause’ … A ’cause’ which he never adhered to, nor was ever recruited for, given his frail body and nervous disposition …
Finally he left his home village in search of bigger game, although he promised his parents that he would always keep in contact with them by his book trade; that is, every book purchased, after having read it, would be sent to their two-storey home … A home which became legally his after their deaths in the 1970s …
In 1974 we find our book-hunter in Amsterdam, lodged at the Van Acker Hotel, Jan Willem Brouuersstaat 14, just opposite the Concertgebouw, the famous concert hall, where he had been listening to Beethovan’s symphonies during that delightful month of May. It was in that hotel, in his room, that he arranged an appointment with a Dutch book dealer, a pasty-faced, unscrupulous dwarf, who negotiated hard for his wares. He clutched in his chubby, wrinkled arms an XVIIIth century first edition of Dom Bedos’ L’Art du Facteur d’Orgue[2], that Adamov had been tracking down for years. And finally, there it lay in the hands of that despicable dwarf who wanted more than 7,000 guilders for it! Adamov knew this was an illegal purchase, being classed as patrimonial property, probably having been stolen from the National Library by this slimy sod, but he had to possess it ! They haggled over the price for hours and hours well into the night. Following a rather violent squabble, the dwarf suddenly clutched at his chest, gurgled a few irrelevant syllables, and fell stone dead at Adamov’s shoeless feet. He wretched the priceless treasure from the still clutching arms of the dwarf, slipped on his shoes, checked the street from his window, then the corridor from the door, noiselessly. Adamov quickly packed his meagre belongings (he always travelled light), locked the door behind him and silently crept out into the soothing blackness of the street. In his flight, he threw the hotel door key in a rubbish bin, then made a bee-line for the bus station, where at six o’clock in the morning he was already headed for Berlin, and without wasting a moment, on a train for Istanbul where he was expected by an Armenian seller (or reseller ?) who possessed several Armenian illuminated manuscripts of mediaeval stamp, costly indeed, but since he paid nothing for Dom Bedos’ invaluable treasure, after an hour or two of desperate haggling, bought two manuscripts. The Armenian threw in two or three miniatures from Herat and Tabriz in the hope that his client would return for the other four illuminated manuscripts … Adamov never did: He was murdered sixteen years later …
Now the incident in Amsterdam caused our book-hunter much discomfiture; not any pangs of conscience mind you; Adamov felt no grief over the sudden death of that dwarf. He feared rather police enquiries about the death, and the overt fact that he fled from his hotel without assistance to him, and without paying the bill to boot! The police might accuse him of the dwarf’s death … As to the manuscript, that posed no particular problem since the dwarf had undoubtedly had it stolen or had stolen it himself. Wherever he went now, the hunter would have to look over his shoulder, staying at the grottiest hotels imaginable to avoid the police or their hired henchmen, travelling on night-buses or trains or on cargo ships when crossing oceans or seas.
The Amsterdam incident happened three years ago. Since, Adamov had eluded local police and Interpol not by any Arsène Lupin[3] tactics or strategies, but perhaps by some lucky star or a guardian angel, if the readers are inclined to believe in these wardens of the wanton. But still our book-hunter remained on the qui-vive[4]! Since that unfortunate (or fortunate?) incident, Adamov had been seen in Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Uzbekestan, where he spent over a year, illegally (his visa having expired after three months!), in Bukhara haggling over a XIVth century publication of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi’s Hikmets (Strophes of Wisdom)in the original Chagatai language, a language that he learned to read in three months.
How he slipped out of Uzbekistan is anyone’s guess. He probably bribed the custom officials. In any case, we find traces of him in the Yunnan, at Lijiang, southern China, bargaining hard for three colourful Naxi pictographic manuscripts from a Dongba priest, manuscripts which the Chinese government absolutely forbade to be taken out of the country, but whose exorbitant estimated price on the black market, a cheery sum of 25,000 yuan, persuaded the wily priests to take the risk. Besides, the priest could always imitate the three XVIth century manuscripts : it was all a question of time and patience … And he had both! Who would ever know? Adamov sensed the abysmal greed of his vender, and promised him 10,000 yuan more if he would relinquish two more of the forbidden scriptures, but payable in two days since he would have to wire back to Daghestan for the money. The plucky priest, all agog, smiling a wicked smile, handed the two booklets over to him without hesitation. Adamov never returned. He disappeared, travelling quickly through Nepal to the Himalayas via Sikkim, Ladakh and Zanskar, where, at last, at the Phuktal monastery he sojourned for five months, reading a first edition of James Hilton’s Lost Horizons whilst ploughing through the Hungarian philologist and Tibetologist, Alexander Csoma’s Tibetan-English Dictionary. Before he bid farewell to his kind and generous hosts, he had filched six illuminated prayer books in Tibetan, two festival masks and a thangka[5]. By the time the good monks noticed the theft, the incorrigible thief had trekked to Kaylong, bussed it to Manali, finally arriving in Karachi, where he boarded a cargo ship for Japan, then on to Oakland, California.
Aboard the cargo the thief had time to mediate upon his book-hunting existence. He admitted it wasn’t particularly glamorous — abandoned parents, a dead dwarf, stolen patrimonial property, false passports and bribery of officials. Nevertheless, these unsavoury moments of his hunting never dampened his enthusiasm. His lust for sweet-smelling tomes, his craving to possess, at any cost, more and more of them. To tell the truth, Adamov had become completely obsessed by his collection. Oddly enough, the more he accumulated the uglier he became ! In fact, he not only became uglier, he became fatter … Adamov had no qualms about this ponderous load; indeed, it enveloped him with a sort of pompous aura, whose fleshy freight he swaggered about the decks of the ship like some august, stately sultan. It added to the mystery of his past, present … and future. A future that had little cheer and much disquiet. He was running out of money, for he refused to sell what he bought. Even the many stolen books he dreaded to forswear. How many times had he asked himself why he hoarded such a vast treasure without really capitalising on his assets, without developing a trading-network throughout Asia, without, at least, rereading his precious volumes two or three times, sniffing their illuminated contents, inhaling the strange forms of their letters and signs, touching ever so lightly, again and again, the brittle paper of their pages or the calfskin vellum of their covers … To these questions he had no clear answer. He felt trapped in a conundrum, out of whose meshes Adamov, the hunter, gradually fancied himself the hunted!
But by who? The few passengers aboard hardly looked at him, much less spoke to him. He ate his meals with two or three burly fellows, perhaps Koreans, who beyond a good morning, afternoon or night, never pronounced a word to him, nor amongst themselves for that matter.
So he churned these thoughts over and over in his head as the days went by on the never-ending Pacific Ocean. What he needed was a project. Yes, a project that would offer him a meaning to his collecting … to his cherished collection. He resolved to go to New York City once disembarking at Oakland. Why New York City? Because Adamov had read about a Jewish New Yorker, named Louis Wolfson, who spoke many languages and wrote in French because he hated his mother speaking English to him. An odd chap indeed, but this is what he read. The idea fascinated him. The fact that Wolfson was still alive, in spite of the many sojourns in psychiatric wards and clinics. It was his book : Le Schizo et la Langue[6] that he would find and read. This posed no real problem, having been edited and re-edited since 1970. Yes, this book would put him on the trail of something enormous … Something worthwhile. Adamov looking out to sea gazed complacently into his future. A piercing crimson glow hollowed out a widening hole amidst the thick, grey clouds … He spun on his heels. The hunter sensed a pair of eyes bearing down on him. Yet, when he searched out the deck and the bridge high above him there was not a soul in sight. He sighed, padded his paunch, and casually shuffled off to his cabin as the swells lifted the ship high into the crests of the grey sky, only to drop with tremendous speed into the black, oceanic valleys below …
Six months later, Adamov had reached New York City on a greyhound bus from Atlanta, Georgia. He took up his lodgings at a sleezy hotel on the Lower East Side, Water Street, number 9. It wasn’t long before Adamov, weaving in and out of the 8 million New Yorkers day after day, night after night, had purchased a cheap 1970 edition of the aforesaid book by Louis Wolfson, with a preface by Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher of some renown in Europe. He pored over this odd book as if he himself had written it. His fascination over such a contemporary edition unnerved him. This Wolfson grew on him like a drug-addiction — not for his writing, which indeed proved rather drab, but to the singularity of his method to achieve a written work through strenuous exercises of self-neglect and utter detachment from maternal infringement. The schizophrenic maniac had managed to create his own sphere of reality through the myriad experiences of listening to such diverse languages as Yiddish, French, Russian and German on his make-shift Walkman whilst strutting through the streets, sitting in parks, at the table when eating with his obnoxious mother, ensconced in the public library as he read or wrote in all the languages he knew … except English, that accursed language that his mother tortured him with like a sadist would when ripping out fingernails! That language which he hated as much as he hated his mother …
Adamov bought a Walkman and had recorded Persian, Arabic and Mongolian on it, which he listened to as he strolled about the same streets that Wolfson had strolled. Or, he sat in the same New York Public Library where Wolfson had sat for hours and hours until closing time. He couldn’t give a biscuit where Wolfson was now living, probably locked up in some clinic for the alienated in a straitjacket. He had nothing personal against English. However, these dippings into ‘alien tongues’ hour after hour, day after day, lifted him out of the ‘New World’ into one of his own making … his own created polyphonic world. His excitement grew as he shifted from Wolfson’s book to the many languages that he repeated over and over again …
It was more or less at this time that I penetrated Adamov’s world. I, too, had my grotty lodgings at the same hotel, a room right next to his. At night I heard his wild, inflamed exclamations about things I hardly deciphered. However, one day we met in the low-lit, begrimed corridor as he dawdled to his room. He had shaved his head and let grow a beard down to his chest. He wore a skullcap of pure white. Adamov’s black, beady eyed bore into mine with some suspicion at first, but my soft spoken, causal demeanour put him immediately at ease. I introduced myself, and he invited me into his room for an evening chat …
It was the first and last discussion I had with this odd fellow, and it lasted well into the night. The oddness lay not so much in the subjects that we touched upon, but the dream-like atmosphere that Adamov somehow created. There he sat enthroned behind his reading and writing table near the unclean window like Genghis Khan himself, stroking his beard, turning the pages of Wolfson’s book that lay before him, his pudgy fingers smearing coffee grinds on page 40, heavily marked with pencilled notes ! He would address me in English, then after several minutes switch to Spanish and Italian with the utmost ease, an ease that I echoed since I was well versed in those languages. My host appeared to be pleased by this hollow echo in the night. After a drink or two of some cheap red wine, Adamov would burst into a soliloquy in Turkish, afterwards slipping into Russian, German, Dutch and French, attempting to throw me off the chase, to deviate my beating. And in this, I must confess, he thoroughly succeeded. Oftentimes the sly polyglot began a sentence in Russian and finished it in Chinese or Tamil, a feature that linguists call ‘code-switching’. I was flabbergasted …
But what really stupefied me was this strange man’s ability to alter his speech patterns and accents. Now he would impersonate, linguistically, an American from the deep South, now one from New York City. Now a Frenchman from Paris, now from Marseilles! When he fell into speaking Spanish, he conversed ever so casually with a Mexican ‘gaucho’[7] accent, only to follow up with a ‘caballero’[8] one from Barcelona or Madrid … All these inflections and modulations left me swooning, to say the least. At length, at four in the morning, I rose and retired to my room, having learnt absolutely nothing of importance about this amazing creature. In short, I felt more ignorant of this man than before I ever laid eyes on him …
Everyday Adamov spent over ten hours at the public library. It was there that his great project suddenly took form, looming larger and larger in his excited mind. Why not write stories myself ? Why not write stories in many languages and not just read or listen to them ? Yes, different stories written in different languages, signed by invented names! Twelve stories – fiction, each bearing a style of its own, a flavour and texture of its own, yet signed by twelve different writers. Adamov grew more and more agitated, fidgeting in his chair much to the annoyance of two elderly readers opposite him, poring over a William F. Buckley essay and Eric Lux’s 1991 edition: Woody Allen: A Biography.
But what languages could he choose? French, Spanish, English, Turkish, Italian and German … Any. How about Russian and Chinese? That would make eight. “I can get on all right with Tamil and Persian … and Armenian?” Adamov paused, collecting his thoughts. What would be the twelfth language ? His own ? Never. It was his mother’s tongue, and besides who would ever read it? But was being read all that important, vital to his existence? No. This project was beyond a reading public … beyond mankind’s expectations of what writing and literature meant to him.
By this time, Adamov’s eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets. The two elderly readers rose from their chairs and left with many a smirk and sneer. What did he care? Still, he needed one last language: “I got it, I’ll invent a language from all the languages I know! That will be my twelfth story; a story to end all stories …”
He mapped out his plan of action mentally. Our future short-story writer shot out of his chair and made a bee-line for his hotel. He would put his plan into action that very night … He set to work at his reading and writing table, having decided to begin the Twelve with English, the language that Wolfson loathed! He cringed under that delicious stroke of inspiration. Let the bugger loathe all he might! Adamov could love his book, but he harboured no devotion towards its writer. Besides, he was residing in an English-speaking country and there he wanted to write in English. He would write French in France or Belgium, Spanish in Spain or in Latin America, Turkish in Turkey, and so on.
Hours went by as Adamov pressed on and on, burning oil of the midnight lamps, filling sheets of cheap notebook paper as quickly as his imagination spiralled out. Coffee after coffee kept pace with his hand, à la Balzac, amidst the screaming police sirens, the bickering of pimps and their whores below his window, rubbish bin cans crashing on pavements as stray cats or vagrants rummaged through their contents. Through the thin walls of his room he heard coughing, sneezing, cursing, snoring and sleep-talking.
As the sun broke through the thick, colourless skies of a New York City morning, Adamov, thoroughly exhausted, threw down his mighty writing tool. He had finished the first of the Twelve: The Garden of Enchantment, signed Hilarius Eremita …
Just at that triumphant moment a sudden hammering at his door rocked him out of his reverie. He rose sluggishly and shuffled to the unlocked door. As he grasped the knob the door burst open in one forceful thrust. Two hooded men seized Adamov by the throat, pinned him against the wall and strangled him with their bare hands. The ponderous writer slid limply to the floor, mouth ajar, eyes open in tragic astoundment. The hooded men fled, vanishing into thin air, as the expression goes …
Hearing hurried footsteps, I waited until they had died down, then tip-toed to his room. For some unknown reason his premeditated murder, for premeditated murder it undeniably was, did not surprise nor move me. I swiftly, however, rushed to the writing table : Nothing had been touched ! I gathered all his papers then returned briskly to my room …
And this was how I was able to salvage from the malevolent hands of Adamov, or Hilarius Eremita, the story called, The Garden of Enchantment …
When I think back on this whole affair there is no shadow of a doubt that the hunter had become the hunted for reasons that we shall never really know. In light of that, I departed from New York City the day after the murder on a flight to Buenos Aires, then on to Madrid …
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[1] A book printed on a Gutenburg Press before 1500.
[2] The Art of an Organ Builder.
[3] Famous French ‘gentleman’ robber who steals from the rich to give to the poor, and in doing so, always outsmarts the police, but without ever shedding any blood. Arsène’s adventures were written by Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941).
[4] On the alert (French)
[5] Tibetan painting
[6] The Schizophrenic and Language.
[7] A cowboy from the Mexican plains or pampas.
[8] ‘Gentleman’.
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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