From The Sixty-Nine Drawers

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the opening chapter of Goran Petrovic’s novel The Sixty-Nine Drawers, a man approaches Adam Lozanic in his office at work and asks him to correct an already-printed book entitled My Memorial by Mr. Anastas C. Branica, self-described “man of letters.” The stranger promises generous compensation and explains that his wife will instruct Adam as to what kind of changes to make. A degree candidate at the School of Philology’s Serbian language and literature program and part-time proofreader for the tourism and nature magazine Our Scenic Beauty, Adam is wary, but he could use the rent money. He lives in a tiny studio apartment on Belgrade’s Milovan Milovanovic Street, sandwiched between a family with two preschool children and a peddler of souvenirs for tourists who spends considerable time hammering on laths to make his cheap trinkets. In these opening pages we also learn of Adam’s unusual relationship to his own reading:

“Beginning a year ago, from time to time it seemed to him that when reading he met—other readers. From time to time, only now and then, but more and more vividly, he recalled those other, mostly unknown people, who had been reading the same book at the same time as he. He remembered some of the details as if he had really lived them. Lived them with all his senses. Naturally, he had never confided this to anyone. They would have thought him mad. Or at best a little daft. Truth be told, when he seriously considered all these extraordinary matters, he himself came to the conclusion that he was teetering dangerously on the very brink of sound mind. Or did it all appear to him thus from too much literature and too little life?!”

In “Second Reading,” the section of the novel that follows, Adam begins the editing project, though still unsure of how or why he is supposed to correct this “book bound in saffian,” written fifty years hence by a now-deceased author.

—CK

SECOND READING

where we speakabout a sumptuous garden,and, a little further on,about a french park,about a pergolawith late-blooming roses,about a light-and-dark-colored villaand an inscription in a gable,about a brief report in politika,an outsize shadow,the contentsof a glass pavilion,about a conversation with a manwhoinconsiderately pressedthe doorbell,and then about the question:what good are recipes,if you can’t add somethingaccording to your own taste?

All around, as far as the eye could see, stretched a garden of ravishing beauty. The road first wound between rows of larches, and then red oaks prevailed, and then, in perfect harmony, in a fireworks of form, the wholes were interchanged, skillfully joined by bends of brushwood and low, shrubby vegetation. One could hardly take a step without this next angle of observation giving rise to some new delight. From the primeval lichens, tranquil mosses, stubborn mistletoes, and trembling ferns in the hollows, through the young ivy and mighty trunks, to the round, pyramidal, branchy, conical, sadly drooping and bushy outlines of the treetops. Isolated here and there. Then grouped in small clusters of birch or conifer. Divided by forked trails of settled dust …

Solitary, disheveled English oaks—on grassy plateaus swarming with mushroom caps. Then pastures, gentle slopes edged by wild blackberry bushes and low walls of dry-stacked stone, overgrown with creepers of ivy. Quite unexpectedly—steeper inclines and endemic flora nestled against bare, blanched rocks, as in the Alps. In seemingly carelessly arranged contours, but always in such a way that the shady side never encroached on the sunny, so that each blade of grass had sufficient light and cool …

Vegetation accentuated by a well-considered, seething palette of colors. Nuances of red, purple, yellow, blue, and green. Doubled in intensity by textures of shiny smoothness, mealy pubescence, or hoary shriveling … Receding in a gradation of lighter tones, which lent to the whole expanse a certain depth...