Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online

young woman, this one Chinese, dressed in a dancer’s leotard. A dark-haired man with a waxed mustache, decked out in tails and a top hat. A young man sleeping on the grass in what looks like a public park. An older man, perhaps in his mid-fifties, lying on a sofa with his legs propped up on a pile of pillows. A bearded, scraggly-looking homeless person sitting on a sidewalk with his arms around a large mutt. A chubby black man in his sixties holding up a Warsaw telephone book from 1937–38. A slender young man sitting at a table with five cards in his hand and a stack of poker chips in front of him.
    With each successive failure, Mr. Blank grows that much more discouraged, that much more doubtful about his chances with the next one – until, muttering something under his breath in such a low voice that the tape recorder cannot pick up the words, he abandons the effort and pushes the photographs aside.
    He rocks back and forth in the chair for close to a minute, doing what he can to regain his mental equilibrium and put the defeat behind him. Then, without giving the matter another thought, he picks up the typescript and begins reading again:
    My name is Sigmund Graf. I was born forty-one years ago in the town of Luz, a textile center in the northwestern part of Faux-Lieu Province, and until my arrest by Colonel De Vega, I worked in the demographics division of the Bureau of Internal Affairs. As a young man I earned a bachelor’s degree in classical literature from All Souls University and then served as an army intelligence officer in the Southeast Border Wars, taking part in the battle that led to the unification of the Petit-Lieu and Merveil principalities. I was honorably discharged with the rank of captain and received a distinguished service medal for my work in intercepting and decoding enemy messages. On returning to the capital after my demobilization, I entered the Bureau as a field coordinator and researcher. At the time of my departure for the Alien Territories, I had been a member of the staff for twelve years. My last official title was that of Deputy Assistant Director.
    Like every citizen of the Confederation, I have known my share of suffering, have lived through prolonged moments of violence and upheaval, and have borne the marks of loss upon my soul. I was not yet fourteen when the riots at the Sanctus Academy in Beauchamp led to the outbreak of the Faux-Lieu Language Wars, and two months after the invasion I saw my mother and younger brother burn to death during the Sacking of Luz. My father and I were among the seven thousand who took part in the exodus to the neighboring province of Neue Welt. The journey covered some six hundred miles and took more than two months to complete, and by the time we reached our destination, our number had been reduced by a third. For the last hundred miles, my father was so weak from illness that I had to carry him on my back, staggering half-blind through the mud and winter rains until we came to the outskirts of Nachtburg. For six months we begged in the streets of that gray city to keep ourselves alive, and when we were finally rescued by a loan from relatives in the north, we were on the point of starvation. Life improved for us after that, but no matter how prosperous my father became in the years that followed, he never fully recovered from those months of hardship. When he died ten summers ago at the age of fifty-six, the toll of his experiences had aged him so much that he looked like a man of seventy.
    There have been other pains as well. A year and a half ago, the Bureau sent me on an expedition to the Independent Communities of Tierra Blanca Province. Less than a month after my departure, the cholera epidemic swept through the capital. Many now refer to this plague as the Blight of History, and considering that it struck just as the long and elaborately planned Unification ceremonies were about to begin, one can understand how it could be interpreted as an