‘Emembededed’

A story

‘I reached the impossible book down from its shelf and leafed through its pages’.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand

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I had not previously come across the name of C P F Chantraine, let alone heard of his one published novel Emembededed (George Pal and Drome: London 1935). A Google search revealed that he had in his life been Professor of New Testament Greek at the University of Oxford in the 20s and 30s; that he was the author of Histoire du Parfait Grec (Paris 1927) and the Moffatt Commentary on the Johannine Epistles (1931). He seemed, from what little I could determine, to have been a blameless individual: a bachelor, a scholar and a churchgoer. There was no mention in the official records that he had done so bohemian a thing as write a novel; although his bibliography did include one article in the Cambridge Review for 1934 on ‘Frame Devices in French and German Fiction’. His death is recorded as happening in 1935, although some online sites suggest he didn’t so much die as ‘disappear’.

I came by the book itself by strange chance. I don’t have time to tell that story here, though it is full of queer twists and turns. The important thing is that I found myself, one bright spring day, with a copy in my hands—mould-speckled faded green boards, but clean pages. I was seated upon my favourite sofa in my own study. The sun was shining through the window, and I had a cup of tea to hand. I opened the book and began to read.

The title page bore a handwritten note: Famous as a Biblical scholar, Professor Chantraine wrote but one novel, and this is it. More scholarly exercise than effective fiction, it was written to explore the limit possibilities of ‘frame narratives’: those tales in which a narrator introduces a secondary tale-within-the-tale, which proceeds for a while before breaking off to introduce a third tale-within-the-tale-within-the-tale, and so—after the manner of the famous nesting Russian Dolls. There was no indication who had written this note.

The text was printed upon very thin paper, and the volume was exceptionally well bound. Indeed, the whole book was a pleasure to handle, despite being, as I noted above, a little faded and foxed on the outside. One oddity: the pages were not numbered.

I began reading

The outer frame tale concerned a Professor at the University of Cambridge, forced to discipline a student for non-attendance of lectures. He summoned the lad to his office on a certain day and time. At the appointed hour a knock upon the professor’s door revealed not the delinquent undergraduate but rather a small and elderly woman with a prominent red wart upon her forehead, like a chilli-pepper She explained that she had been tasked with delivering to the professor a parcel, and handed him a bundle of paper tied with string. As the professor took this, she remarked that she required payment: a sixpence. The professor happening not to have such a coin upon him at that moment offered her, instead, a shilling: but though this coin is, of course, twice the monetary value of the other the old woman became enraged at the offer of a nickel rather than a silver coin, and stormed off, shouting unsavoury imprecations as she went.

The professor opened the parcel. It was a typed manuscript, written by the student. It began without preamble or apology, instead launching the reader into the middle of some circumstances that had occurred the previous summer. The professor read on, expecting to find some manner of self-exculpation in the narrative. But if it was there, the author was going about it in a very circumlocutory fashion. The student’s narrative related how, the previous Summer, he had joined several of his university friends on a climbing trip to the Bavarian Alps. Raised in Wiltshire, schooled at Repton, and now a student at Cambridge, he had lived his life in flat landscapes of Southern England; but the call of the high mountain had sung in his soul, and the prospect of his adventure was a thrill. His party of four set off with a local guide and a sixth man to climb the fabled Zugspitze. On the first day they made good progress, and camped for the night on a snowy shoulder of the mountain. On the second day, though, the weather worsened, the sky darkening its grey and growing scratchy. Soon enough a blizzard made climbing impossible and the party waited-out the inclemency in their two tents. To pass the time, the party’s guide began telling them his life story. He was a sprightly, bald-headed man in his late forties, an experienced mountain climber, but he possessed one strange physical anomaly—there was a large protrusion or lump in the middle of his forehead, underneath the skin. This, he explained to the shivering young climbers, was because there was something embedded beneath the flesh, in the very bone of his skull: something spherical and hard, something that no surgery might remove. ‘I was not born with this object in my head,’ he told them. ‘Not at all. Indeed, I was born into a wealthy family—Russian aristocracy, raised in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution, schooled in Paris and Bonn. I loved poetry and parties and girls; I played tennis and (yes) I climbed mountains. But my greatest joy was to sail our family’s yacht through Mediterranean waters so blue they appeared almost purple, under a sun white hot and all-seeing. These lazy days were the happiest I have known in my long life. Now, the crucial thing, the thing that I must relate to you all now, occurred in the summer of 1913, when I and my fiancée took the yacht around the Ionian islands. After a blissful week—disaster. A storm rushed up from nowhere, caught me (neophyte sailor as I was) off my guard, and smashed our boat against the rocky shore of a tiny island. My best estimation is that we were some fifty nautical miles south west of Crete. We were lucky to get off our craft without injury, and I was still pulling supplies and necessaries after me when the storm doubled its intensity, ripped the boat from its rocky pinion and smashed it to splinters—the force of the gale lifted it clean into the air, before hurling it against the rocks!

‘We found shelter and waited the storm out, much as we gentlemen are doing, here on this mountainside. The next day, exhausted and soaked, my girl and I explored the island. The weather has switched back with Mediterranean abruptness: the sky blue and placid, the air hot and filled with the sound of the sea and the snoring of insects in flight. I was not ready to despair: after all, it was not as if we were in the mid Pacific! Sooner or later a ship would be sure to pass, and we would signal for rescue.

‘The island appeared uninhabited by either humans or animals. It was small enough for us to walk around in a few hours: the entire shore comprised of rocky jags, the coast fringed with a doily of white foam upon the blue sea. Its centre was a peak hundreds of metres tall, covered in trees. Exploring this took mountain-climbing skills that were beyond my companion. Leaving her by the seashore, I alone ascended, and found near the top, hidden on amongst the trees, a stone cupola, with a door in the side. I naturally explored inside, but stepping through the open space caused sparkles to dazzle my eyes, and a fierce migraine to attack my head. I stumbled, and when I came to I found myself inside. It was a much larger room than the exterior had implied. The space was white, lit by a gas-lamp hanging from the apex. In the exact centre of the floor sat an old woman, small and wrinkled and with a bright red wart in the middle of her forehead. She addressed me in French, and I answered her in the same tongue. Did I have a silver coin? It so happened that I had a silver two-franc piece in my trouser pocket, and when I gave her this she smiled and laughed. Seating myself cross-legged on the floor I began to tell her of my plight, but she reassured me. ‘Calme-toi,’ she said, and told me to sit down.

‘”I shall tell you my story,’ she said, in a wheezy voice. ‘Though you may not believe it. I am, for instance, much much older than you would imagine. In fact when I was born France still had a king …”’

At this point I put Emembededed aside. I had been reading for several hours, and was sixty or seventy pages into the book (it was hard to tell, since the pages were not numbered) yet I appeared to have made no progress so far as diminishing the block of pages that remained to be read. I lifted a page of the superfine paper and admired its onionskin fineness. In truth, the suspicion had grown on me that this novel was a mere barren exercise in endless postponement—in English we have the phrase ‘a shaggy dog story’. Would it simply proceed like this, endlessly deferring the reader the satisfaction of tying-up the narratives? How annoying would it be to invest time and energy in such a story, only to be twitted at the end?

I flipped to the end of the book. The last few pages were indeed, and to my surprise, the conclusion of the outer frame tale, with the professor and his delinquent student. I flipped some pages backwards and found that the second embedded tale was also brought to a conclusion. I snapped the book shut as soon as this was apparent, for I have something approaching a phobia to finding out the end of the story I am reading before I have finished my reading. I said to myself: I have started this story, and must pursue it now. I need to find out how the stories unfold, to the end. I must not cheat.

I opened the book near the beginning, at approximately the place where I had left off reading. Instead of the strange tale of the young Russian shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island I found myself in the middle of a strange tale about a royal naval officer from the time of George the Third who, via the discovery of some alien device (or so I deduced) finds himself upon the moon, with only the technologies of the eighteenth-century to support him.

I flicked back through the astonishingly thin pages, seeking my the place where I had left off, and various embedded stories caught my eye—a young girl whose every single head hair acquired a worm-like life of its own, an elderly man who had managed to extract his own soul and fix it inside amber, but who had then spent thirty years clutching the oval object in his hand, such that the bones of palm and fingers deformed around it, for fear that letting it go would damn him for ever—without reaching my original point.

With a feeling of growing unease I turned back to the beginning and turned individual pages one by one, revisiting familiar stories, until I found where I had left off. The sun was setting outside my study, and a whisky-coloured light was making the polished mahogany of my bookshelves gleam. Dust motes swirled like gnats. Very far in the distance I could hear the chiming of the church clock, like a melodious hammer smiting a long silver nail. My own intestines griped and clutched. A great fear was upon me.

I knew, of course, of the 1975 Borges short-story ‘The Book of Sand’: ‘El libro de arena’ in its original Spanish. In that brief fable the Argentine master imagined a book with an infinite number of pages, and speculated intriguingly about its properties. The sense was growing within me, and making my heart stutter painfully with fear, that I was holding an actual example of this book in my hands. In Borges story, the mere fact of the book so alarmed the protagonist that he hid it in the shelves of a vast library, as a leaf is hidden in the forest. Borge’s book was written in an unknown script and an indecipherable language, and although punctuated with many illustrations the owner could do nothing more than leaf through it, knowing that he could never chance upon the same page twice. My copy of Emembededed was a different matter: written in readable prose and telling a series of absorbing stories.

The thought flashed upon my inner eye: the book was cursed. In his Biblical studies, Professor Chantraine had somehow stumbled upon black magic, the necromancer power to make this codex—this violation of the laws of physics. I might read it forever, and never make any large progress.

I put the book on the table, got up from my sofa and paced about my study. It was now dark enough outside as to necessitate turning on the light. I was being absurd. Magic? Necromancy? Pff. The book was long, certainly: longer than the width of its spine suggested. But this was on account of the thinness of the paper. But the pages I turned between finger and thumb possessed material heft; they took up space. It would not be possible to fit an infinite number of them between front and back cover. I was being foolish. The book was long but assuredly not infinite. I would prove this by reading it.

I settled myself back upon the sofa and began to read. The first, second, third and fourth tales, each embedded within the other, were familiar. The fifth was more fantastical, concerning a species of inverted subterranean birds that fly through the soil as ordinary birds pass through the air, and nest in the roots of trees as conventional birds nest in branches; and the sixth more bizarre again. It was during my reading of this latter that I became haunted by a sense that I was not alone in my study. There was no breeze, and I was not disturbed, yet the electric light bulb within its emerald-green shade seemed to swing, gently. The old woman with the red wart upon her forehead occurred in the fourth embedded tale, and then reoccurred in the eleventh tale and I was gripped by the—irrational, idiotic—feeling that she was somehow in the room with me, watching me read. This could not be, and whenever I glanced up at the peripheral apperception of motion, or of a grinning face staring at me out of the shadows in the corner, there was never anything there. My whole torso was possessed of a kind of inner weight, a sinking feeling that I was about to pass beyond some irreversible threshold.

The twelfth embedded tale was interrupted by the thirteenth, which I read. Then I knew there was no going back.

I read on. The window outside my study purpled and turned black; dawn came and made the shelves opposite the window shine with brightness; the sun slid a parallelogram of light slantways along the wall. The sun set and night came again. I read on.

I read increasingly grotesque and fanciful stories, each interrupted at their midway point by a new story. A fever of reading had taken hold of me; I could not stop moving my eyes over the words. Each new embedded tale gripping my imagination with renewed intensity. I became a moving eye, a hand that turned the page, occasionally a lip and tongue that moistened the pad of a finger and facilitated the page-turning.

Night and day became indistinguishable. My light-bulb fused and winked out overhead, dead, but the pages themselves—I now saw—possessed a distinct, eldritch kind of light—not unlike (though it is a strange comparison to make, for such an antique object) the screen of an iPad, only warmer and more organic. Reading on in the darkness was easy and even pleasant. I read. The ghostly presence of the old woman became more evanescent. The air cooled. The building fell away around me; ziggurats and orbital-elevators flickered into existence and vanished away, the stars staggered and fell in unison over and again like a standing man knocked unconscious. The sea swept over me, emerald green, and drained away to reveal an endless red plain, mud cracked with the wild hexagonic pattern of terminal drought. The sun grew bloody and swelled to a hugeness that filled half the sky, and then it swelled larger again such that it became the sky, and the horned patch of blackness shrank. Then, in an instant, the solar balloon deflated and shrank away, and a million stars in strange configurations glittered in the absolute chill overhead. Then one after the other they went out, like my light bulb had done, and a placid age of vast darkness commenced. I read on. The universe breathed out as far as breath could take it, and then drew itself inward over eons impossible to measure. I licked finger and thumb, separated the next page from its fellows, and turned it.

There was a twist in the essence of things, a knot was folded and pulled tight to reveal itself only a trick-knot, and the string straight and plain again.

I had passed the central tale; now each new story I read completed one of the countless that I had read before. The reading became process smoother, more fluid, requiring almost no movement of eyes, the barest flicker of pages. Around me new light was coming into being, the refreshed gravitational pressure squeezing trillions of atoms into the shining gold of new stars. I slid smoothly through the latter half of the book.

And as I did so, a sense of profound awe overcame me, at the sheer intricacy and brilliance of the structure. Chantraine was a genius, greater than Shakespeare, Goethe and Proust combined. As each story ‘paid off’ its narrative, I began to see how the whole vast pattern cohered, its fractal fineness and narrative satisfactions creating a work vastly greater than any one linear story ever could.

And here was the end of the story about the young Russian and his girlfriend, shipwrecked in the Mediterranean.

And here, now an old man, the strange object fixed beneath the skin of his forehead explained, was the end of the story of the student’s mountaineering trip to the Bavarian Alps.

And finally here was the conclusion of the outer frame story. Such splendour, such wonder, such beauty in the final element being slotted into place.

I closed the back cover of the book, and dropped it to my lap, if I still had a lap. I turned my head and, with new eyes, looked around at the cosmos of which I was a part.

I had read the book.