Dictionary of the Khazars: Male Version by Milorad Pavic

Author:Milorad Pavic [Pavic, Milorad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780679727545
Amazon: 067972754X
Barnesnoble: 067972754X
Published: 2011-02-06T22:37:02+00:00

gray mustache had left the trace of a kiss on her cheeks… And then suddenly the prey he was hunting would disappear from sight, its trail lost. Masudi did the only thing he could do — he put down in his Khazar Dictionary everything he had observed the last time, and now these writings, old and new, traveled with him, alphabetized in a green feedbag that got heavier and heavier. And still he had the feeling that many dreams being dreamed in his immediate proximity were simply slipping by, that he was not catching them all and dividing them up among the dreamers. The number of dreams was bigger than the number of dreamers. Finally Masudi turned his attention to his camel. Gazing into the animal’s dream, he saw this young man with the callused forehead and strange two-toned mustache like an affliction upon his face. Up above was one of the constellations that never bathe in the sea.

He stood by the window, reading a book tossed between his feet on the floor. The title of the book was Liber Cosri, but Masudi did not know what the words meant as he gazed through closed eyes into the dream of the camel.

This was the moment when the hunt brought him to the onetime Khazar border. Black grass grew in the fields.

Now more and more people were again admitting the young man with the Liber Cosri into their dreams for the night. Masudi realized that sometimes the same dream, with the same people in it, was dreamed by entire generations or classes of society, but he also realized that some dreams slowly become twisted and disappear, that they were more frequent in the past than in his lifetime. These common dreams were obviously aging. Yet here at the border his hunt was turning into something new. Long ago he had noticed that the young man with the half-gray mustache would lend a fistful of silver to everyone whose dream he visited. And he gave it under very favorable terms, with an annual one-percent interest rate. In this remote spot of Asia Minor the loan was sometimes akin to a promissory note, because it was believed that dreamers must be honest with one another in the presence of the one about whom they were dreaming, for he holds all the account books in his hand. In other words, there was something akin to an accurately kept double accounting system, which covered and pooled capital from the conscious and the unconscious, based on the tacit agreement of the participants in the transaction…

In a small town that for Masudi had no name, he entered the tent of a Persian who was performing at a Thursdaysite. The crowd, packed so tightly not even an egg could drop to the ground, was ringed around a pile of rugs, on which braziers were placed; a naked little girl was brought before the spectators. Moaning softly, she held a chaffinch in each hand, then opened her left hand and, the instant the bird made to fly off, caught it with lightning speed.

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