Dear Herr Doktor:

[begìning of August 1920]

... Obviously, we are all capable of living, because at one time or another we have all taken refuge in a lie, in blindness, enthusiasm, optimism, a conviction, pessimism, or something else. But he has never fled to any refuge, not one. He [Kafka] is absolutely incapable of lying, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He lacks even the smallest refuge; he has no shelter. That is why he is exposed to everything we are protected from. He is like a naked man among the dressed ... Everything he is, says, and lives cannot even be called truth; actually, it is predetermined being, being in and of itself, being with nothing added that might allow him to distort his picture of the world- whether into beauty or distress. And his asceticism is completely unheroic-hence all the greater and loftier. All "heroism" is lying and cowardice. This is not someone who chooses asceticism as a means to an end; here is a man who is forced to be ascetic because of his terrible clairvoyance, his purity and inability to compromise.
    There are very intelligent people who also refuse to make compromises. But they don magic glasses and see everything in a different light. That's why they don't need any compromises. That's why they are able to type quickly and have their women. He stands beside them and gazes at them in wonder, at everything, even this typewriter and these women. He will never understand.
    His books are amazing. He himself is far more amazing. Many thanks for everything. I wish you all the best. I'm allowed to visit you when I come to Prague, am I not? I send you my most heartfelt greetings.


Thư Tình nơi Sofa
Letter in the Sofa
1957

   

Thư Tình nơi Sofa
Letter in the Sofa
1957
Life finds a thousand ways to cheat lovers.
Đời kiếm đủ cách để gạt những kẻ yêu nhau

Note: Trong cuốn “Trên lưng voi”, Gấu lọc ra được hai bài tuyệt. “Thư tình” đi trước. Cực kỳ thê lương.
Sẽ đi 1 đường tiếng Mít sau.

Note: Cái truyện ngắn này, trên trang của K, vậy mà bây giờ, nhờ server, mới được đọc.
Phạm Vũ Thịnh, dịch Murakami, thần sầu. Độc giả TV đọc cái này trước, trong khi chờ GCC dịch “thư tình”, của Durrell.

GCC mê nhất 1 câu, nhớ đại khái, thằng cha này, sống đời với nó, cực khó, nhưng chết chung, thì OK
Có em nào muốn, chuyện này, thì đăng ký!

Cái truyện “cùng chết thì OK” này, coi lại hóa ra là đã chôm về Tin Văn từ hồi Diễm Xưa rồi.
Ấy là vì Gấu bực quá, không lẽ chưa... chôm, bèn rà lại folder Giới Thiệu…
Ra luôn cái truyện Liêu Trai thần sầu sau đây.
Đọc Tiểu Thu, thì lại phân vân, có khi duyên, kiếp này, là duyên thừa, của bố, hay của mẹ, kiếp trước!
Tiểu Thu

Cái truyện Tiểu Thu, và cái gọi là “duyên thừa, từ bố mẹ để lại”, làm GCC nhớ lại, hồi mới ra được hải ngoại, lần đầu nghe Yanni, và hiểu ra được chân lý này: Một khi bạn sống đời của bạn mà chưa 1 lần phải “biên tập đạo hạnh” – biên tập theo nghĩa của Brodsky - thì về già, bạn sẽ được sống lại đời bạn lần thứ nhì, thứ ba, thứ tư…   và trong những cuộc đời này, cái gọi là khổ đau, không còn nữa, hoặc nó cũng được thanh hóa... trở thành hoan lạc, hạnh phúc, ân sủng….

Một khi bạn bắt đầu biên tập đạo hạnh, đạo đức của bạn, cái này nên, cái này không nên, bạn đang tán tỉnh thảm họa.
When you start editing your ethics, your morality –according to what is or isn't allowed today - then you're already courting disaster.
Trò chuyện với Joseph Brodsky. Solomon Volkov. II WAS A YOUNG SAPPER MAJOR who found the love-letter while he was combing through the villa his unit had inherited from the Germans, on the look-out for booby-traps-though I must confess this seemed to me an unnecessary operation, for we had moved swiftly into the Island of Rhodes to find its starving garrison only too glad to welcome us.
    The Germans were literally starving; there were two hundred deaths a day from sheer malnutrition among forces and civilians alike. The place was a shambles.
    I still retain an image of destroyers drawn up in the harbor feeding out biscuits from the great broken boxes by searchlight, tossing them into the forest of waving hands in great packets.
    Unit for unit, the incoming administration took over the offices and billets of the military garrison, and the sappers inherited a rather pleasant villa on the hill from some German sapper unit. While I was only a civilian, I had arranged to mess with them as my printing-press was near by.
    It was odd that, just as I was calling on them to make my number, their major should hand a love letter in Italian. He had been groping in the bowels of the big, ugly Second Empire sofa which stood in the window, with its incomparable view over the sea and the Anatolian hills. I translated a few lines for him, and he grunted contemptuously.
    "A love-letter;' he said. “I suppose these Huns had girl-friends up here of a night."
    I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it; but later that evening I remembered it over my solitary dinner in the town (my work kept me late) and I read it again in full.
    It was rather a remarkable letter to find in a sofa, and as I read it I became interested, for it was written in the most touching and spirited style. There was nothing mawkish or silly about it at all.
    It was signed Rebecca Monteverdi and addressed to someone called Wilhelm-Marla. It was a long letter, almost valedictory, for the writer had been surprised by the dreadful news that Wilhelm-Maria had been posted back to Germany: she did not know whether he would find this letter in its hiding-place or have time to leave one for her. (Apparently he had neither been able to claim her letter nor deposit his own.)
    She spoke also of the Italian lessons, and "other officers.”
    It seems as if she had been giving the unit Italian lessons.
    But why the sofa, then, and the secrecy?
    Then the truth suddenly dawned. Her name was a Jewish one, a typical Spanish-Levantine name, Monteverdi! This explained the secrecy, at least, the hidden exchange of letters via the sofa on which she sat to give her lessons.
    I thought no more of the matter until one day, quite by accident, the intelligence people who were fussing through the garrison muster rolls produced some information about the original inhabitants of the mess.
    There was only one Wilhelm-Marla on it: Rowohlt.
    Then there came another small coincidence-a party in the mess during which I met the grave, sad Mr. Silvani, President of the Jewish Committee of the island, and learned some distasteful things about what the Germans had done.
    "Out of a population of seven thousand Jews;' he told me quietly, "they took away three thousand, mostly women, among them my own daughter." (1)
    He paused and drank his cocktail with an air of great deliberation. Then he went on steadily: "Up to now, we have located about 1,500 through the Red Cross. They are all over the place."
    I said: "Well, that's something-I suppose they will be coming back."
    He looked at me quietly with the muscles tightened in his jaw. Yet his voice was mild.
    "Most of the women;' he said, "were sent to officers' brothels on the Russian front, and many, some ... well they don't want to come back. Out of shame."
    I don't know what prompted me to say: "Do you know anything of a girl called Rebecca Monteverdi?"
    He nodded slowly and put his glass down. "Of course. She was taken among the last lot. A brilliant girl. Doctor of Law at the University of Rome. She was caught here on holiday by the war and stayed on with her mother, dead now. She gave Italian lessons to the Germans. But that did not save her."
    All of a sudden I felt that I could see her very clearly, her dark head bent to her lesson-books, seated before the window with its marvelous panorama of water and mountains.
    "Did you know her?" asked Mr. Silvani, and again to my surprise I found myself answering: "Not personally. She is a friend of my sister."
    He could not tell me whether she was among the 1,500 persons located who might be expected to return. The war was over, but there was a good deal of chaos everywhere. You never knew.
    And if she did, Wilhelm-Marla, if he was not dead, was somewhere in the tangle and confusion of a disrupted Germany. If she did return, could she find him? Would she want to? Or perhaps ... There I let speculation rest.
    But good stories don't let one rest. Two months later I met a don engaged on the undonish work of going through the German archives on the island, sorting out the papers to check the names of the prisoners we held in the desert pens in Egypt.
    I asked him to keep an eye open for a German sapper officer called Wilhelm-Maria Rowohlt, as I would like his address.
    Trust an Oxford don! Within three weeks I had a note from him on my desk at the office, telling me that he had turned up information on Wilhelm-Maria and giving me an address in Bavaria-a little village of sorts, full of timber mills. He had even discovered that Wilhelm-Marla was a Doctor of Philology from Dresden. 
    I wrote him gratefully, though of course all this was purely gratuitous curiosity; I felt I was prying into something which was hardly my own affair. After all, if Rebecca Monteverdi came back, and Wilhelm- Maria wanted to reach her ...
    Then my own posting came through and I packed my affairs, sad to leave this beautiful island. To my surprise, I found the crumpled love-letter among my papers. I can't think why it had not been destroyed.
    I sat and read it again right through, seeing the whole story quit clearly now in my own mind. What is more commonplace in a war than the human love story?
    Then on a pure impulse, I took the love-letter and scribbled a few lines on the back of it-I didn't know quite how to put it-giving Wilhelm-Maria's address and hoping that she would once more gel ill touch with him. (We writers are sentimental people at heart.)
    In the morning I took the letter round to Mr. Silvani. I had to pay a courtesy call to say goodbye anyway.
    "May I leave this for Rebecca Monteverdi?" I asked him, "I mean in case she should come back to the island. I expect that sooner or later she will be located and brought back. It is rather an important message. It contains my sister's address."
    He assured me that it would remain to await her arrival among his archives.
    The next day I left the island, and have never been back. And that is the end of the story. It is years ago now. I have never had the courage to write back and find out whether she got back and found my letter- her letter. I feel superstitious about these things. It is better to let destiny take its own course not to try and be a deus ex machina.
    After all, suppose she did get back and get in touch; she might have found him married already, or legless, or a tramp in the new Germany. Life finds a thousand ways to cheat lovers.
    I personally don't want to know the answer to the story. I know that in life it is always a thousand to one against the Happy Ending. For life is not like a short story. Or is it?


NOTE
1.    Rhodes had been hard pressed under a fascist and anti-Semitic Italian governor and then the Nazi occupation. In 1944, 1,673 Jews were taken from Rhodes and transported to Auschwitz where approximately 150 survived. A Rebecca Capelouto was among the survivors, and she may be Durrell's inspiration in this text.