Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

The Combinations

ture. In my mind I was searching and searching for the missing clue, the piece of the puzzle, the resolution, only I didn’t know where to look or what the puzzle re- ally was. There was only the Black Book of the (for ar- gument’s sake) indeterminate Mr T.H., with its endless lists and columns and numbers. And on the assumption T.H. stood for Tomáš Hájek, late Professor Emeritus, what was it he’d been trying to uncover? Was the Black Book an attempt at a final solution to Voynich’s enigma, or the proof that none existed? Did it have a meaning at all? Or was it like a room, filled with a voice spout- ing nonsense so that nothing else could be heard? The noise of whatever had come into his head—the echo of something formless which, become an echo, assumes a form—the way a contradiction does? Or, as Confucius once said, like a stone shaped by the sea . The stone a child picks up on a beach and wonders at—keeps in a jar, beside cuttlebone, green glass, snail shell, bul- let casing, foreign coin—or else arranges on a shelf ac- cording to some arbitrary schema: igneous, sedimenta- ry, metamorphic—white, black, grey… ‘Did you hear the one about the Russian butcher?’ I was sitting in Volta’s waiting room, killing time ahead of my weekly appointment. The room was entered from the stairway by a frosted glass door which had been left standing ajar. Through it a woman’s accented voice was partly audible. A man was talking to her. I gazed

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