Read Online The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Free Book Online

unfound chorale. That night it came to him in a dream—lofty and mournful, slowly marching in the mixolydian mode. * Next morning, while sitting at the piano trying to re-create the dreamed chorale, he noticed a surprising resemblance between Notker’s Media vita and his own Commentary on Silence . Continuing to ransack the St. Gall library, our sleuth learned that the old composer of music with the odd sobriquet of Stammerer (or Balbulus) had been a lifelong collector of words and syllables to fit music; it was curious that, while venerating sound combinations, he had utter contempt for articulate human speech. In one of his authentic writings, he said: “At times I have quietly considered how to secure my combinations of sounds so that they, even at the cost of words , might escape oblivion.” Words for him were so many motley signals, mnemonic symbols, for memorizing musical sequences; when he tired of choosing words and syllables, he would pause at an Alleluia and lead it through dozens of intervals, * nonsensing the syllables for the sake of other abstruse meanings; these exercises in atekstalis * were of particular interest to our sleuth. The hunt for the Great Stammerer’s neumes led him first to the library at the British Museum, then to the Library of St. Ambrose in Milan. * Here occurred the second meeting, a meeting of two books not content to have their fate, * as the saying goes, but desirous of becoming fate itself. In his tireless search for material on the St. Gall monk, my hero called on a dealer in old books. Nothing of interest, junk, but, wishing to repay the Milanese shopkeeper for the good hour spent bustling about, he pointed to a random spine: that one. Then he slipped the chance purchase into his briefcase with his work, loose longhand sheets slowly coalescing into a book. There, in that sealed sack, they lay together like man and wife, pages in pages, Notker the Stammerer and The Four Gospels (the text bought blind turned out to be the old story, clad in ancient Latin characters, of the four Evangelists). At his leisure one day, having abstractedly perused the volume, my student of atekstalis was about to put it aside when his attention was caught by a note penned in the margin, in a seventeenth-century hand: S-um .
    â€œA nonsense syllable,” muttered Fev from his corner.
    The young man leafing through the Gospel thought so too at first. But the dash separating the S from the um intrigued him. Running an eye down the Vulgate’s * margins, he noticed another mark in ink bracketing two verses: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen …” * and so on, and “He shall not strive, nor cry; * neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets.” A vague presentiment compelled him to scan the margins with more care, page by page; three chapters later he found the faint score of a fingernail: “ … O Lord, thou son of David; * my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word.” The margins that followed appeared to be blank. But the composer of Commentary on Silence was too intrigued to abandon his search: examining the pages in the light, he discovered several more marks grown faint, the work of someone’s sharp fingernail—and opposite these: “And when he was accused of the chief priests * and elders, he answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly.” Or: “But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote * on the ground, as though he heard them not ”; some marks could be seen only with a magnifying glass, others stood out; some were shorter than a dash and picked out only three or four words—for instance, “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness …” * or “But Jesus held his peace”; * others extended down a series of