“Fictional stories” of Borges in brief
Secret miracle
On the night of March 14, 1936, in the apartment in Celetnaya Street in Prague, Jaromir Hladík, the author of the unfinished tragedy “Enemies”, the work “The Justification of Eternity” and the study of the implicit Judaic sources of Jacob Boehme, sees in a dream a long chess game. The game was started many centuries ago and was played out between two noble births. Nobody remembered the prize sums, but it was fabulously great. In a dream Jaromir was the first-born in one of the rival families. The clock was marked by a battle every move made. He ran under the rain in the sand of the desert and could not remember the rules of the game. Waking up, Jaromir hears a measured mechanical hum. This is at dawn, Prague includes the advance detachments of the armored units of the Third Reich.
A few days later, authorities receive a denunciation and detain Khladika. He can not refute any of the accusations of the Gestapo: he has Jewish blood
Khladik is horrified. At first it seems to him that the gallows or the guillotine would not have been so terrible. He continually loses the upcoming event in his mind and, long before the appointed time, dies a hundred times a day, representing the scene of his own execution in various Prague courtyards, and the number of soldiers changes every time, and they shoot at him from afar, then at point-blank range. Following the miserable magic – imagine the cruel details of the coming to prevent them from realizing – he eventually begins to fear, as if his fictions were not prophetic. Sometimes he waits for execution with impatience, wanting to put an end to the vain imaginative game. In the evening before the execution, he recalls his unfinished verse drama
In the drama the unity of time, place and action was observed, it was played out in Hradcany, in the library of Baron of Remerstadt, one evening at the end of the 19th century. In the first act of Remerstadt visits the unknown. This visitor is followed by others, unknown to Remerstadt, but their faces seem familiar to him, he already saw them, perhaps in a dream. The Baron becomes clear that a conspiracy has been drawn up against him. He manages to prevent intrigues. It’s about his fiancée, Julia de Vaidenau and about Yaroslav Kubin, who once bothered her with his love. Now he is crazy and imagines himself as Remerstadt… The dangers multiply, and in the second act, Remerstadt has to kill one of the conspirators. The last action begins; the number of inconsistencies is multiplied; return the characters, whose role seemed to be exhausted: among them flashes the murdered. Evening does not come; the clock strikes seven, the sun is reflected in the windows, a Hungarian melody sounds in the air. The first visitor appears and repeats his remark, Remerstadt answers him without surprise; the viewer understands that Remerstadt is an unhappy Jaroslav Kubin. There is no drama: it is the again and again returning delirium, which Kubin continually resurrects in memory…
Khladik completed the first action and one of the scenes of the third: the poetic form of the play allows him to constantly edit the text without resorting to the manuscript. On the eve of the imminent death, Hladík turns to God with a request to give him another year to complete the drama, which will become an excuse for his existence. Ten minutes later he falls asleep. At dawn he dreams a dream: he must find God in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes of the library, as the visually impaired librarian explains to him. With sudden confidence, Hladík touches one of the letters on the map of India in an atlas that is near and hears a voice: “You are given time for your work.” Hladik wakes up.
There are two soldiers who escort him to the patio. Before the execution, scheduled for nine hours, there are fifteen minutes left. Khladik sits down on the woodpile, the sergeant offers him a cigarette, and Khladik takes it and lights it, although he did not smoke until then. He tries unsuccessfully to recall the face of a woman, whose features are reflected in Julia de Weidenau. Soldiers are being built in a square, Hladik is waiting for shots. A drop of rain falls on his temple and slowly rolls down his cheek. The words of the command are heard.
And here the world freezes. Rifles are aimed at Hladika, but people remain immobile. The hand of the sergeant who gave the command, freezes. Khladik wants to shout, but he can not and understands that he is paralyzed. It does not immediately become clear to him what happened.
He asked God for a year to complete his work: the all-powerful gave him this year. God did for him a secret miracle: he will be killed at the appointed time by a German bullet, but in his brain from the team to its implementation a year will pass. Khladik’s astonishment is replaced by gratitude. He begins to finish his drama, changing, cutting and reworking the text. Already everything is ready, only one epithet is missing. Khladik finds it: a raindrop begins to slide over his cheek. A volley of four rifles is heard, Khladik manages to scream in some unintelligible manner and falls.
Jaromir Hladík died on the morning of March twenty-ninth at ten two.
South
Buenos Aires, 1939. Juan Dalmann serves as secretary in the municipal library on Cordova Street. At the end of February, an unexpected event occurs with him. On this day, a rare edition of the “Thousand and One Nights” in Weil’s translation falls into his hands; hurrying to consider his acquisition, he, without waiting for the elevator, runs up the stairs. In the dark, something touches his forehead – a bird, a bat? The woman who opened the door to Dalman screams in horror, and, passing his hand over his forehead, he sees blood. He cut himself on the sharp edge of the newly painted door, which was left open. At dawn, Dalmann wakes up, he is tormented by heat, and the illustrations for “The Thousand and One Nights” interfere with the nightmare. Eight days stretch as eight centuries, the surroundings seem to Dalman hell, Then he is taken to the hospital. On the way, Dalmann decides that, elsewhere, he can sleep peacefully. As soon as they arrive at the hospital, they undress him, shave his head, fasten him to the couch, and a man in a mask puts a needle in his hand. When he wakes up with nausea, bandaged, he realizes that until now he was only on the threshold of hell, Dalman stoically suffers painful procedures, but he cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. As soon as they arrive at the hospital, they undress him, shave his head, fasten him to the couch, and a man in a mask puts a needle in his hand. When he wakes up with nausea, bandaged, he realizes that until now he was only on the threshold of hell, Dalman stoically suffers painful procedures, but he cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. As soon as they arrive at the hospital, they undress him, shave his head, fasten him to the couch, and a man in a mask puts a needle in his hand. When he wakes up with nausea, bandaged, he realizes that until now he was only on the threshold of hell, Dalman stoically suffers painful procedures, but he cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. and the man in the mask puts a needle in his hand. When he wakes up with nausea, bandaged, he realizes that until now he was only on the threshold of hell, Dalman stoically suffers painful procedures, but he cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. and the man in the mask puts a needle in his hand. When he wakes up with nausea, bandaged, he realizes that until now he was only on the threshold of hell, Dalman stoically suffers painful procedures, but he cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. Dahlmann stoically suffers painful procedures, but cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. Dahlmann stoically suffers painful procedures, but cries for self-pity when he learns that he almost died of blood poisoning. After some time, the surgeon tells Dalmann that he can soon go to the manor, an old long pink house in the South, which he inherited from his ancestors. The promised day comes. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat. Dalman rides in a hired carriage to the station, feeling happy and light-headed. There is still time before the train, and Dalmann spends it in a cafe over a cup of coffee banned in the hospital, stroking a huge black cat.
The train is at the penultimate platform. Dalmann chooses an almost empty car, throws a suitcase into the net, leaving himself a book for reading, “A thousand and one nights.” He took this book with him with some hesitation, and the decision itself, it seems to him, serves as a sign that misfortunes have passed. He tries to read, but in vain – this morning and the very existence are a miracle no less than the tales of Shahrazade.
“Tomorrow I’ll wake up at the manor house,” Dalmann thinks. He feels at the same time as two people: one moves forward on this autumn day and familiar places, and the other suffers humiliating insults, staying in perfectly well-conceived captivity. The evening is approaching. Dalmann feels completely alone, and sometimes it seems to him that he travels not only to the South, but also to the past. From these thoughts he is distracted by the controller, who, checking the ticket, warns that the train will stop not at the station that Dalmans need, but on the previous one, hardly familiar to him. Dahlmann comes off the train almost in the middle of the field. There is no crew here, and the station master advises him to hire him in a shop a kilometer from the railway. Dalman goes to the shop slowly, to prolong the pleasure of walking. The owner of the shop seems familiar to him, but then he realizes, that he just looks like one of the employees of the hospital. The owner promises to lay a britzka, and to pass the time, Dalmann decides to have dinner here. One of the tables is noisily eaten and drunk by the guys. On the floor, leaning against the counter, sits a swarthy old man in a poncho, which seemed to Dalmann the incarnation of the South. Dalman eats, drinking a dinner of tart red wine. Suddenly, something light strikes against his cheek. This turns out to be a pellet of bread crumb. Dalmann is at a loss, he decides to pretend that nothing has happened, but after a few minutes another ball falls into it, and the guys at the table are laughing. Dahlmann decides to leave and not let himself be dragged into a fight, especially since he has not yet recovered. The owner anxiously comforts him, calling him by the name – “Senor Dalmann.” This only worsens the matter – until now it was possible to think,
Dalmann turns to the guys and asks what they need. One of them, constantly croaking curses and insults, throws up and catches a knife and causes Dalman to fight. The master says that Dalman is unarmed. But at this moment the old gaucho sitting in the corner throws a dagger under his feet. As if the South himself decides that Dalman must fight. Bending over the dagger, he realizes that the weapon, which he almost does not own, will serve not to protect him, but to justify his murderer. “In the hospital they would not let anything like this happen to me,” he thinks, and, after the guy, walks into the yard. Crossing the threshold, Dalmann feels that to die in a knife fight under the open sky, instantly, it would be for him deliverance and happiness on that first night in the hospital. And if he could then choose or invent his own death, he would choose just that.
And, tightly clutching the knife, Dalmann follows the guy.
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