The Abridger
“Oh no, no no, this just won't do.”
These were the words of Jonathan Kepler Franks, the abridger commissioned by the Donaldson Brothers Publishing Company to trim the fat from the famous masterpiece of 18th century Russian literature
Время летит завтра, commonly translated as
Time Flies Tomorrow, by Feodosiya Tretyakov. The 1,357 paperback pages of tiny script the story of the early days of the Russian Empire required in its unedited form were simply too much for the casual reader. It was thus Franks' responsibility to cut the story told from the point of view of a group of young Russians whose fates were intertwined with each other and the birth of the Empire, ending with the promise of a great future for the nation shrouded in the melancholy shadow of imperialism and oppression, down to below 800. At the moment he was struggling with a passage of Tretyakov at his most romantic, when the young lovers conspire to meet at night in Moscow.
There, in that pale moonlight, Anastasia was waiting for Anatoliy. He was late and she was afraid and cold, worried for the young man, wanting to go seek him out to alleviate her trepidation. But she could not help to think of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Under their moon, beneath the mulberry tree, Thisbe awaited Pyramus, but was scared away by a lioness. When he came for her he thought his love was dead and took his own life as the thought of living after losing the great love of his life without ever getting the opportunity to hold her against his body was too much to bear. Thisbe, upon discovering his body, plunged the same blade still wet with his blood into her own heart, for lovers will always share the fate of the object of their affection. The fear that urged her to leave this garden Anastasia now felt to be her very own lioness, trying to chase her away to keep her and her love separated forever. But if they would not meet in this life, she thought, would the Gods take pity upon them, like they did upon those lovers of antiquity, and mourn their sad fate by using their passionate blood to paint the mulberry, allowing their unsatisfied love to live on for all eternity?
“What is this? What is this?” Franks mumbled as he crossed out the entire section with a red pen. “This has got to go.”
As he did so and was ready to go through another sheet of paper with his merciless ink he felt his chair began to tremble ever so slightly. He looked down, somewhat confused. There are never earthquakes here, he wondered. Despite the geographical details the trembling increased by the second, and soon he ducked under his desk as he felt the ceiling might give out. But it did not do so, as the quake subsided and he saw a beam of light between the floor and the ceiling. There, floating in mid-air in that beam was an old man, bald with a long grey beard. Franks stared at the man in wonder.
“I, I know you,” he said, leaning over the seat of the chair, still hiding under his desk.
“I should hope so,” the old man said with a distinct Russian accent.
“You're Tretyakov!”
“And you're the man ruining my life's work.”
“What?” Franks said bewildered by the accusation, and then he noticed the piles of paper spread out across the floor, most of them covered with big red Xs. “Oh, are you talking about abridging? That's not ruining anything! I'm helping people to understand your work!”
“If there is something in my book someone doesn't understand it's the fault of the reader, not the book.”
“Look, listen here,” Franks said as he crawled out from his hole and ceremoniously dusted his clothes. “It's all about balance, see? You can't spend 200 pages at the start setting up a scene. You can't spend 50 pages on a dream sequence that's mostly nonsense. And you certainly can't just write some convoluted mythological parallels without a damn good reason. I'm not even touching the subject that no one could possibly remember all these names. The problem with your Ruskies is that you clearly never had any editors, because this just won't do, buddy.”
The light went out, and the old Russian ghost descended onto the floor, brandishing his long bony finger in the abridger's face. “You understand nothing of literature!”
“And you understand nothing of writing! And I love literature, it's my life! That's why I'm doing this, so people can actually read this damn book!”
“I've had to deal with pipsqueaks like you since I was alive, you idiot! Just because you cut something out doesn't make it better.”
“No, but it means you have to read less nonsense.”
“Nonsense! You think my work is nonsense! You think Russian life is nonsense!”
Becoming vaguely aware he was in fact arguing with a ghost, Franks decided to adopt a more diplomatic approach.
“Now, I never meant it like that. All I am saying is that there are people who want to read your story, but don't want to read fourteen hundred pages of it.”
“You can tell an idiot if you ask them what a book is about and they give you the story.”
“Look, I don't know how things were in 18th century Russia, except apparently long-winded, but in this marketplace brevity is key. Brevity is the soul of wit, as the greatest writer who ever lived wrote.”
“Wit is for idiots, as is Shakespeare.”
“With that attitude, no wonder no one reads you anymore. Everything is for idiots. Do you want your brick of a book collecting dust in some old library next to damn Gothic romances and other outdated drivel?”
“I don't think I can reason with you, boy.”
“It's not me you need to reason with it. It's the Donaldson Brothers Publishing Company you have a beef with. I'm just doing a job here.”
“A very bad one at that.”
“No need to get personal. But now if you don't mind going back to heaven or hell or wherever you came from, I still need to fix this mess of yours.”
Franks turned around to his desk as he said that, but some secret vein told him that the Russian ghost behind took particular offence at these last words. He did not have time to react, however, as he felt those cold skeletal fingers wrapped around his shoulders.
“What are you doing!” he exclaimed. “Get your claws off me!”
“You said it's all about balance,” the ghost said. “I'll balance things out for
you.”
*
Jonathan Kepler Franks opened his eyes, and shut them right away. He was no longer in his dim den, but in a snow covered forest, the white earth in the bright light of day harsh on his eyes.
“What's going on here?” he mumbled as he held his aching head.
“Don't you remember this forest?”
Franks turned around and saw Tretyakov, his deathly pale skin sickly in the winter sun. Looking around the landscape it was indeed familiar to the abridger, though not as familiar as the sight now fast approaching. He saw a group of people coming his way: a man and two boys.
“It's my father!” Franks said as he looked at the man with an axe flung over his shoulder.
“And your brother,” the ghost said. “And someone else.”
The sight of the small boy that trailed behind captured the abridger's gaze; he felt like a shipwrecked who was seeing a mirror for the first time in years.
“I, I remember this,” Franks said. “This forest, it's near the cabin our family rented one Christmas.”
He kept looking as the father and his two boys went to a small fir tree, and the man brushed the snow off the needle-laden branches. The small boy stood back as the father got ready to chop the down the tree.
“This, this is not how it goes!” Franks said. “I was close to the tree, and it fell on me.”
“A tree fell on you?” the ghost said. “That's stupid.”
“It's small and light! It didn't even hurt! But I always remembered that, caught beneath the Christmas tree in the snow. Every Christmas I told my brother about it, and he would say it never happened, but I know it did!”
The tree came down, breaking the powder covering the land and trapping no child underneath it. The man took the trunk and began dragging it away, the boys following him. Franks held his head, his headache growing worse. “This is not right,” he muttered.
“It was a nonsensical memory anyway,” Tretyakov said. “You're better off without it.”
*
Jon Kepler Franks turned towards the literary ghost but saw no one, and the white of snow all around had been replaced with the white of walls: the clinical environment he found himself in had the distinct sterile atmosphere of a hospital. The corridor was lit by a litany of fluorescent lamps, one of which flickered in and out of existence at even intervals, casting a ghastly pall over the place. Franks walked disorientated until he came to a large window, behind which he saw a company of cribs, only one of them occupied. A helpless baby slept soundly and serenely as Franks looked at him through the glass. The cradle had a name tag which read “Jonathan Franks.”
“Where's my middle name?” he said, to no one in particular.
“Middle names are superfluous,” he heard an all-too familiar voice.
*
Jon Franks sat on the floor with his back against his desk and his eyes fixed on eternity. All around him lay pieces of paper with red marks all over them, signifying all the excess removed.
