And after all, if I produce the novel first, who’s to say I’m not the author? If you get right down to it, how often have I felt I was onto something ten years before younger writers came along and got more attention for it? Who’s to say that in another time the Irish poseur didn’t himself get knocked on the head and wake up and steal the novel from someone else? In fact, who’s to say that in another past, the Irishman didn’t get knocked on the head and wake up and find my version of the novel that I’m copying now, dropped beside him? Maybe my version of time, thinks X, is the true prototype while the other is the clone.
To be sure, dilemmas present themselves. The first is that, thoughtlessly, the black teenage girl in Berlin who hid in the shadows while X was beaten neglected to deposit at his side, along with the one book, the rest of the century’s canon, which X hasn’t exactly committed to memory. Grimly realizing he’ll have to write his own versions, he brightens: Who’s to say I can’t write them as well or better? But something else nags at X; he’s not sure he can put his finger on it. . but if the same words are written by a different writer, then are they the same words? Is it still the same book? Or is the text transformed by the experience and persona behind it? And as X imagines writing his own versions of these novels, he begins leaving out passages of the book he copies now — it just goes on and on and on, he groans — because no one can possibly miss them; and then it isn’t such a far leap from cutting to editing to revising to recasting, enhancing, reimagining, improving.
~ ~ ~
This begs of X the most profound question of all. That question is whether it’s possible for someone of his country to speak for the Old World. X is of and from a country that no sooner became the New World than it was time’s other bookend, or floated outside time altogether; he is of and from a country that always has belonged to the rest of the world’s imagination more than it belongs to its own. Now X labors to author the novel where the literature of the Old World discovers the vision of the New and waves goodbye to itself. Dublin? X would never be able to explain Dublin anyway. But if he doesn’t know much about Dublin 1904, then let the story take place in the Los Angeles of 1989, seventy years early. Nighttown will be Twilighttown and Molly will be Dolly, and Bloom will be Zoom or Doom or Groom (as in a man searching for a bride) or Ploom (as in a column of smoke) or Woom (as in where a mother carries a child). Or Toom (as in where you’re buried).
~ ~ ~
Zan wants to kill X. In his sleep, he seethes at the character with every passing word, growing more furious: This is why you’re a failure! he screams at him silently in the dark of the rue d’Alsace hotel. You have a chance to be the greatest novelist of all time, author of the literature of the century, and you rewrite it.
With John’s revision of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Zan tells the university seminar in London a week and a half ago, though it seems longer now, “the novelization of history replaces history itself.” John’s version of the narrative means to preclude all others. It means to banish from history those who are deaf to its music and to declare all other sins trivial compared to the sin of deafness. John’s is the narrative as sustained hallucination, totalitarian in the manner of all great art. With paper and the printing press, the act of creation becomes an intimate one, the act of reading a private one, at which point storytelling is liberated from avoiding the forbidden in order to pursue it. The transformed imagination transforms the conscience. From John’s novel there can only be one place to go, the Book of Revelation, “which isn’t a novel at all,” Zan tells the lecture hall, “but a rave.”
Zan can’t kill X. If he kills X, the rest of Zan’s novel vanishes into the future. But as the ocean liner continues its way to New York, in the early morning hours a mysterious and unseen stranger bearing a strong resemblance to Zan himself breaks into X’s cabin and beats him senselessly.
~ ~ ~
When Viv went to Addis Ababa the first time to get her new daughter from the orphanage, lying on the hotel bed and feeling the small girl next to her at night she heard the sax line of a song drift through the open window.
It was a song that Viv heard everywhere in Ethiopia; later Zan would play it on his radio show. “Tezeta”—meaning memory, or nostalgia, or reminiscence or melancholy — was not quite a title as much as a musical species like the blues, and in this land where memory is a euphemism for the blues, this curling melody always sounded the same to Viv’s ears, whether played on sax or piano: smoke that got in your ears rather than your eyes. When the girl lying on the bed next to the mother ran her finger along the outline of Viv’s profile to make certain she was there, it felt to Viv like smoke itself.
~ ~ ~
Now on her return to Addis to find Sheba’s mother, when Viv stops in the labyrinth at the city center where the driver has led her and says, looking around, “No, this isn’t right,” she hears “Tezeta” rise mournfully in the distance like an answer. She has no idea what the answer is. The walls of the passages resonate with distant chants, the thunder of gathering storms, and Viv feels the past and future yearn for each other. Though she’s almost certain the song she hears isn’t just in her head, now she hears things in the Ethiopian memory-blues that she never heard the first time, lying on the hotel bed with Sheba beside her.
The song is ravenous for memory, and Viv hears in it everything that’s happened to her and her family since that first time she came, the struggle of everything since Sheba came to live with them, the whispers between her and Zan in the night that somehow everything will be all right even as it becomes harder to understand how that can possibly be true. Lost here in these passageways Viv has a realization bordering on a small epiphany: It’s the memory of how quiet Sheba was those first nights lying on the hotel bed beside Viv wreathed by “Tezeta,” and how it wasn’t until Sheba got back home that her own small body began to broadcast its music, as though a secret word was spoken that turned her up.
~ ~ ~
Jasmine hears the song on returning to Ethiopia for the first time since the age that Sheba was on leaving it. This is during Assassination Summer, riots as much about grief as rage sweeping the Chicago park where, forty years later on Zan’s TV one November night, crowds greet the election of a new president whose only precedent is what forty years before was forsaken. Jasmine’s sojourn follows a brief reconnection with her father, a retired medical orderly — who never became a doctor — hobbling with arthritis, and her brother, an eternal thirty-one-year-old student wandering the landscape of aspirations looking for his.
While she’s angry at her father for abandoning her and her brother and mother, Jasmine senses this reconciliation is a fleeting final chance at something. The three take a trip to Addis together where at night she hears “Tezeta” wafting from the clubs and isn’t sure whether what she glimpses is a memory from when she was two or a dream posing as one; but hearing this song is the only time Jasmine feels like she’s home. In assassination’s wake she sometimes aches for the solace — a less secular word than comfort — of the mosque; on the flight to Ethiopia, she wonders if she’ll leave. Eight days later, with her brother she does, but her father does not, and she never sees him again.