K

K**. She had the translucent skin of a nocturnal animal. And the way she walked: as if she were trying to steal into the enemy camp, find the silken tent of the sleeping khan, and plunge the silver-handled dagger into his chest. I preferred her to other women because she looked straight into the depths of existence and would formulate questions that were as clear and hard as blocks of ice. Would I be capable of killing someone in order to steal, of killing in cold blood? Clean interrogations, straight from a mind that spun in the void, entirely uncontaminated by any practical matter. She evaluated the possibility of taking drugs or committing suicide in the same way. When we were traveling through Central Asia, I knew she was fully capable of stepping off any train at any unknown stop and disappearing into the STEPPE. I, lying on my cot, the train already back underway, gazing out at the scorched grass in stupefaction.

At first K** didn’t want to know I was a writer. The weighty tomes of my Vasari had impressed her, the vast collection of THELONIOUS MONK records, the KLIMT reproductions in my room, but since she thought too much she projected herself far from the insignificance of my articles, the sporadic evidence of certain publications of mine left lying about. When one day the mail brought a magazine containing a story I’d written about our stay at a mountain lake, this was her reaction: “It must be an однофамилец”—odnofamilets, someone with the same name—“no?” Which left me speechless. There is no way to object to so simple a refutation. If someone denies your identity, he says to you, “You are not you,” and there exists no way of effectively demonstrating the contrary. Show your birth certificate, your identity card? Come on! These are mere pieces of paper. The solemn heart of the matter is that you are not you, you are anyone else but you. I could not convince her that this story was mine, that I was a writer—a beginner, yes, but a writer. Afterward, meditating on it, I reached the conclusion that she was right: the writer was someone else, not me. Wasn’t Nabokov, to give an example, someone else? We arrive in a world overflowing with books and are told to believe they’ve been created by people who are called Nabokov, Conrad, Borges, individuals who evidently had nothing to do with the appearance of books that, nevertheless, we attribute to them. K** would not have believed their assertions, their protests to the contrary, either; if she’d managed to convince me, why wouldn’t she have convinced them, too? As a result, I’ve lived all these years without being a writer. When this ENCYCLOPEDIA is published I will not be its author, only an odnofamilets, someone whose last name I share. Perhaps one day the magic of publicity will succeed in merging us into one and the same man, and then my face alone will suffice to accredit me as a writer, a solution that will be valid only as far as the marketing campaign extends: beyond that I would never be able to prove my condition ontologically. (For K**, the idea of God was not an effect of the existence of God.)

KLINGSOR’S LAST SUMMER (see: ⁄LTIMO VERANO DE KLINGSOR).

KLIMT, GUSTAV. In the sense that a mane of hair in the hue known as red ochre held great meaning for me. I’d taken a long while to develop this passion but it had the impact of a sudden awakening when it finally bloomed within me, as when we’re no longer hoping for anything from a boring opera and then, in the last act, a backdrop is lowered with a beautiful waterfall or a Chinese pagoda. To discover the splendor of red hair was to set foot for the first time upon the sands of a terra incognita: a new displacement of the soul which, within my sentimental education, acquired the worth of a pilgrimage to Tibet.

I. At a spot along Nevsky Prospekt, LINDA, who, as I would later learn, was named Anastasia Stárseva, was waiting for me. She’d been playing the FLUTE in the portal of the Kazan Cathedral and THELONIOUS stopped to listen to her. Moved, he thought of the MAGIC FLUTE and his adolescent years, and allowed himself to be carried off by the FLUTE’S trill, the human warmth of its metallic resonance. When he reopened his eyes onto that morning—Saint Petersburg, the cathedral’s colonnade—he discovered in surprise that a halo surrounded the flautist. Then he took a closer look and was left mute with astonishment. This was LINDA’S skin. As if it had been deliberately stretched across her cheeks in such a way as to retract, while she blew into the FLUTE, without forming any wrinkles, assimilating itself into the depths. Only a slight intensification of tone to a deeper red gave away the work of that skin, the subcutaneous flow of blood. (In winter, cheeks like that, brushstrokes of bright red applied by the HARD FROST, embellished the vestibule of a movie theater where we’d taken refuge to warm up: the vivid bloom of a naive doll’s painted face. Then a gradual return to a pale pink that bespoke such freshness, a quality that belonged to the centuries before the habit of sunbathing became widespread, and that was very well suited to the still life V** and I comprised, stretched out on the bed: the sheet’s heavy folds, the leaden gray of a vase, the inchoate drift of our disarticulated limbs, dark against pale.)

After a short pause, the flautist attacked a march with great resolve—the happy tremolo—then almost immediately interrupted her playing to remove her warm woolen cap. A luxuriant mass of red hair, rolled into locks thick as snakes, fell in cascades over her back, shoulders, chest. (Oh how well doth a fair colour and a brilliant sheen upon the glittering hair! Behold it encountereth with the beams of the sun like swift lightning, or doth softly reflect them back again, or changeth clean contrary into another grace. Sometimes the beauty of the hair, shining like gold, resembles the colour of honey; sometimes, when it is raven black, the blue plume and azure feathers about the necks of does, especially when it is anointed with the nard of Arabia, or trimly tuffed out with the teeth of a fine comb; and if it be tied up in the nape of the neck, it seemeth to the lover that beholdeth the same as a glass that yieldeth forth a more pleasant and gracious comeliness.—The Golden Ass, Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, translated by William Adlington.) Monk stops short, fears he will lose his footing and topple into the abyss at his feet, and quickly raises his eyes beyond this splash of red ochre, locating the bridge with its winged lions, the canal’s gray parapet, to rest them there a while, the girl forgotten in the depths of his peripheral vision. His calm regained, he courageously resolves to focus his gaze on her once more: the apparition of Venus on the seashell, a chorus of little angels, their cheeks puffed out, blowing. A vision that filled Monk with indescribable tenderness: the great God who has placed another portion of that BREAD . . .

I wonder if THELONIOUS would ever have discovered LINDA if not for the miracle of that music. Be that as it may, he decides to follow her. He watches her pick up the hat full of small change, then separate the FLUTE into three parts and return them to their case; he watches her take the arm of her friend in the overcoat and walk away from the cathedral toward Nevsky Prospekt . . .

KVAS. Russia is an old country with strange fermented beverages and barrel staves lying in the mud. I jump from stave to stave to keep my boots from getting dirty, while dogs bark behind fences. At the corner—this city on the Volga where I’ve come to spend a few weeks, these low brick buildings—the same woman as yesterday is pouring out KVAS.