In writing this Introduction I shall make every effort to avoid making it read like a legal brief. As an attorney at law, I claim neither knowledge nor any kind of experience in the task of literary editing. However, the body of work that my longtime client, Mr. Leonard Kaminsky (hereby named The Author) left behind him, which was found, unfortunately, in a fragmented and highly unfinished state, made it necessary for me, for professional as well as personal reasons, to rise to the task.

I served the author for nearly thirty years. From the beginning I suspected him to indulge in various pleasures, even when he could barely afford them. Smart and tightlipped, he gave me the impression of someone who is likely to conceal some secret affairs; someone with a healthy appetite for the ladies, an appetite matched only by his experience; which at the time, I considered enviable.

Quite often, when I would attend a concert, I could recognize him down there in the front row, accompanied from time to time by an extremely blond girlfriend, whose name I can no longer recall. He would listen intently to the music, his face glowing with joy, which was as remarkable as her boredom.

Such were the circumstances when, according to the newspapers of the time, he fell madly in love with his first wife, the renowned pianist Mrs. Natasha Horowitz (later, Kaminsky). The spark happened instantly, while he was watching her performing on stage. Soon afterwards they married, over the bitter objections of her family.  

Then, less than six years ago, the author mentioned to me (quite abruptly and out of context) that having suffered through the misfortune of watching her deteriorate, he was determined to assemble a ‘collection of voices’, with the goal being the ‘preservation of time’. However, until unearthing the pile of notebooks, which contained various fragments, various blurbs of his writing, and until coming upon the two audiotapes, which were labeled in his handwriting, I had absolutely no inkling what he meant.

Once these fragments were in my possession (as no one else would claim them) I found myself obligated to review and arrange them, as best I could, into a coherent whole. I aimed to do it in such a way as will benefit his survivors; more precisely, those he had named in his latest will: His older son, Mr. Benjamin Kaminsky, twenty eight years of age, born to him by his first wife; and his younger son, Nathan Kaminsky Junior, one month old, born to him by his second wife in April of this year.

Until three days prior to the accident, my conversations with the author were infrequent at best. We talked strictly about routine matters of law, as they related to his financial investments. Thus I must admit that he never shared his ideas about writing fiction with me; nor did he mention that his attention (aside from work) was focused on recording certain sounds; capturing certain objects (such as The White Piano) in words; and furthermore, preserving certain events (or as he would say, certain ‘moments in time’) on paper; which in later days, would prove crucial in piecing together what lead, eventually, to his untimely death.

Therefore, I have no way of knowing what final form (if any) the author envisioned for these fragments, and in which order he would have presented them, had he lived to finish the task. Perhaps he knew, somehow, that his days were numbered; which would explain certain phrases, certain morbid phrases (such as Dead Man’s Fingers) included in his latest fiction. In trying to fill his place, I regarded myself as more than merely the editor of that which he had left behind: I regarded myself, truly, as its custodian.

Thus I found myself engaged in an editorial guesswork, which to me, was as thrilling as it was confusing. My dedication, I grant you, was unusual; it surprised even me. I must have been studying these fragments far too long (perhaps to the verge of obsession) and thus, at this moment, out of exhaustion, I can no longer see the whole; which (I confess) leaves me somewhat puzzled. 

In spite of this, the text (such as it stands, at this point) must see the light of day, so that you, the reader, with your power of observation and your unbiased judgement, may assist me at some point in the future, and contribute much needed, fresh insight.

On the morning of his last day, the author set up a special fund, under my care, for the purpose of paying the rent for his place of residence for the next couple of months. Regretfully, the family (such as it was) dispersed soon after, and the key was entrusted to my keeping. Therefore I decided to use this opportunity, sad as it was, to examine the various compartments of his desk (its drawers and file cabinet, and elsewhere). For no apparent reason, the notion that something was amiss happened to cross my mind. Thus I managed to convince myself that my curiosity was purely professional.

After a few hours of sifting through an incredible mess, which by no means could have been typical of him, I finally gave up. Old bills, out of date address books and crumpled shopping lists were all scrambled together in front of me. I closed the drawers, utterly in disgust, and got up from the desk, thinking the search was futile. It was over with, done. That was when the pile of notebooks on the floor suddenly caught my eye.

I still go back there from time to time, unlock the door and sit at the kitchen table, and reflect on what I have learned here. I ponder what seems so suggestive in his fiction; and ask myself if this is what really happened. I still entertain some hope (which is waning, gradually) to find additional notes, which might have been concealed by the author (or perhaps, his survivors), and which might provide me with more clues on how to join the fragments. If I talk to myself, an echo answers from the walls.

I like to believe that the author would have approved of my editorial decisions; or at the very least, that he would not have been entirely disgusted with some of them. Also I hope he would find my publishing the text here, in this book, beneficial for his survivors. God willing, it may become a source of income for them (for I would take no part of the reward). In addition, the book is a memoir of sorts; or more precisely, it will become that, in time. In a long time.

As far as I can tell, this ‘preservation of time’ (as he would say) was recorded, originally, on a number of audiotapes (most of which have not been recovered, so far). Without giving away the story I can say only this: For the most part there were two distinct voices, two players (a male and a female) each of whom was about to reveal certain facts about the author, and about each other. With startling honesty, they disclosed their memories, and their most intimate thoughts, right there on audiotape. They did it without shame; and rarely, if ever, did they take into account that he, the author, would (at some point) listen in on their discourse.

Which eventually, he did. Thus, these voices were conveyed (for lack of a better word) to paper. At what cost to his sanity the author carried on this task, I have no way of guessing. The disclosure of intimacy between the two players, or even the suggestion of it, must have caused him immeasurable pain. For the first time in his life he, the so called Keeper of Secrets, unravelled the secrets of others, and found himself betrayed.

At times I wonder: Did he have the guts (and even more importantly, the balls) to listen to the entirety of their confession? Or did he stop mid-stream, finding himself unable to go on?

How could he possibly reconcile his role as an author, all knowing and remote, with his role in their lives, lives that because of him became so hopelessly entangled? It seems that on one hand, he was determined to hover from above, to observe events as they unfold, yet steer himself away, clear out of danger—and on the other, he could not help but wade straight into it.

However, I digress. I tried various methods of arranging the voices (which as I said, were conveyed to paper) so that out of discrete, yet disconnected moments described by them, I could, perhaps, recreate time; that is, tell a story. A complete story. In doing so I held myself back, as best I could, from the temptation of stepping into the role of the author. The task, I told myself repeatedly, was one of editing.

At first I attempted joining all the fragments corresponding to the male voice into one story; and likewise, all the fragments corresponding to the female voice into another. However it quickly became clear to me that (try as I may) each of the two disjointed stories seemed to be lacking; lacking in chronological specificity, in background detail and above all, in objectivity.

Therefore I came up, at last, with a more complex, yet cleverer method: One of combining the two voices by alternating them (at a certain rhythm) so the story can become more mutually supported by them; and indeed, more orchestrated. Thus, it is fuller, and can be perceived as a sort of a dialogue, or better yet: A musical duet.

This book also serves as the highest form of complement I could pay the author, posthumously of course. When I unearthed the pile of his notebooks, and began sifting through them as if they were some ancient archeological finds, I was surprised, even deeply moved by certain passages in them. I am not a man given to reading prose, much less poetry. However, decoding these fragments felt (to my astonishment) as if the voices came alive. Over the rustle of paper in my hands, they spoke directly, and at times almost lyrically, to me.

I find it necessary to write this introduction because no one else would. By the time I was prepared to ask for his assistance, the older son had already left for Europe. I am uncertain if he did so, in part, to express an objection to some of my editorial decisions; or indeed, to the task as a whole.

I can appreciate (but politely disagree with) his point of view. He may well be concerned with an alleged violation of his privacy (as first hinted in A Wall A Separation A Wall). Indeed, some sensitive, even explosive family matters concerning all players (the author, the older son, the first wife and the second wife) were indadvertedly exposed here. 

However, let me argue that in my opinion, the author regarded these matters purely as input material for his fiction. Therefore, so do I.

Presently, the second wife, Mrs. Anita Kaminsky, is no longer residing in the Author’s place of residence, which has been partially emptied. The four poster bed has been removed from the premises, as was the piano. The oval, standalone mirror in the bedroom lies on the floor, in pieces. Glass shards are still strewn all the way back to the other corner.

To my knowledge, the second wife is still in town. However, she has been utterly silent. So far (possibly because of her grief) she has refused to say anything, much less write anything in his honor. I suppose that having given birth only a month ago, the task of commenting on the author’s life (and on this book) is somehow not the first on her list.

However, I am glad to report that I have accepted her suggestion regarding the title. When I asked her, “Any suggestions? What shall I name the book?” she shrugged at first, saying simply, “Call it anything; I don’t really care.” However, on her way out of my office, she stopped by the door, and just before going out of sight, threw a smile back at me, and said, “Anything—Apart From Love.” 

Now, to say that Love appears sparingly in the text would be an understatement. In all the aforementioned fragments, the players seem to deliberately avoid saying this word, even when being consumed by its fire.

There are, however, two notable exceptions, two instances where the phrase Apart From Love appears; and in each of them, it does so quite crisply: First by a one voice, then another. Accordingly, it takes on an entirely different meaning (upon which I am not going to speculate here). Sadly, this ambiguity leaves me frustrated; which explains, perhaps, why that phrase struck me in such a remarkable way, as soon as I heard her say it. Furthermore, it explains why I settled, finally, on this title and no other.

Editiorial Notes:

Before his passing, the author came up with temporary working titles for some of the fragments. Clearly, his titles had a poetic slant in them (such as A Woman, Forgotten, and A Place Called Sunrise). After some deliberation I decided that these titles would have to do (at least for the time being) even though by his own account, he was still unsatisfied by some of them. Therefore they were adopted as chapter headings, for lack of a better, more comprehensive naming scheme, for which I am still searching.

Other fragments he left nameless. In such cases I tried to invent appropriate titles. The ones I came up with can be easily recognized, as they have a down-to-earth slant in them (such as Go Back Your Mama, and No Omelette For You.) Inventing titles may seem like a trivial task to you, but it took a serious and sustained straining of my imagination. Where it failed me I resorted to using asterisks (in place of titles) to mark the beginnings of new fragments. Simply numbering them was deemed more trouble than it was worth, as I constantly shuffled and reshuffled them, in an attempt to identify a correct logical and chronological order.

Of the thirty some fragments collected here, only one was published during the author’s lifetime. More precisely, a fragment titled Leonard and Lana was published as a short story some thirty-five years earlier, in a periodical that has since gone out of business. However, after its publication, it has undergone considerable changes by the author, in two separate revisions:

The first revision, in which the author appended an entirely new fragment (called, appropriately, Seven Months Later) is dated thirty-four years ago. The second revision is undated. However, close examination shows that it builds upon changes found in the first revision. Thus, I argue, it seems to be the more recent of the two.

At first I considered omitting it altogether. I debated with myself, thinking I should do so not only because it had been published previously; not only because it sounded like an altogether new and different player (that is, a third one); and not only because it introduced a new and different writing style (that is, in the third rather than the first person); but above all, because its events were clearly outside the principal scope of time. It is worth noting that in this fragment, the player (apparently representing the author as a young man) acted as if he were utterly inexperienced with the ladies; which was starkly different from the way he would have presented himself these days. According to his own story, he seemed to be innocent to the point of being barely recognizable as himself.

However, perhaps that was the way the author saw himself. Thus I decided to include the second (and in my opinion, the more up to date) revision of Leonard and Lana. Had I omitted it, certain references made to it (in two other fragments, which are included in the book) would have seemed questionable and indeed, awkward.

In all, seven notebooks were discovered, most of them in one pile, under a heap of sheet music that laid on the floor, in the corner of the living room, under a small marble bust of Beethoven. The notebooks were of different bindings, shapes and sizes, and contained written or typed blurbs of text, which appeared so tight and so dense as to make reading practically impossible.

To decode their meaning I had to look at them through a magnifying glass, and then, with a fine brush, mark tiny white dots between the letters, in places where I figured that spaces should have occurred.

In several cases, the pages were clearly out of order. It took me the better part of a month to set them in their right place; more precisely, in what I assumed to be their right place. As the author would say: It seemed as if someone had cast the notebook up in the air, and let the pages fall as they may, descending like parachutes behind enemy lines.

• One notebook, which (by its paper quality) appeared to be the oldest among them, was hand written in blue ink on brittle, yellow papers, which were stitched together to form a notebook.
• Three other notebooks were in fact legal pads (with my office logo on top) which I must have given the author, I suppose, some time ago, in one meeting or another.
• Another notebook consisted of a fake leather binding, clasped together to hold a few Xerox copies of the same fragment. The original, however, was never recovered.
• Another notebook held loose notes, which the author made to himself, containing various (seemingly unrelated) flowery phrases. There is no mention of any of these phrases in any fragment of this book. Perhaps he considered making use of them in some future story. Some of the notes were written on the back of a checkbook. Others were printed on the back an old music sheet. One, with a simple drawing of a heart, was scribbled inside a paper napkin.
• A bunch of papers were simply stapled together in one corner, and preserved under the green-tinted glass, which laid, a bit askew, on top of the desk.

The author made corrections (to his own text) by hand in the margins of these fragments. He did so in pens and pencils of different colors, some of which have already faded by now.

Thus, to my disappointment, some phrases remain entirely illegible to this day. However, in a number of cases I detected what I thought was a rather feminine handwriting; which seemed suspiciously different from that of the author (in  slant, size and shape). Whoever it was, she attempted making various corrections, most of which were utterly crude: Words were misspelled, and there were glaring grammatical errors. Therefore I concluded that such corrections were made by someone other than the author, and (acting as the editor and custodian) decided to ignore them.

In addition to the notebooks, two audiotapes were found, only a week ago, neatly wrapped behind the bottom drawer of the author’s desk; which explained, incidentally, why it had never closed properly.

• One audiotape was labeled “Beethoven’s Fifth” and dated eleven years ago.
• The other was labeled “Benjamin, Age 12” and dated sixteen years ago.

The voice on the second audiotape was clearly a child’s voice. However, halfway through the audiotape it was overwritten (accidentally perhaps) by a soft, slightly raspy voice, closely resembling that of the second wife. Then, towards the end of her discourse, some commotion can be heard in the background: A voice, presumably the author’s, shouting loudly, “No! Not that one—” and then, nothing. Nothing but crickets.

The discovery of the second audiotape shed some light on his writing method. By no means can it be regarded as a simple transcribing. I took great care to study it in detail. First I compared the recorded child’s voice to its corresponding fragment (titled Only An Empty Dress). Then I compared the recorded voice of the second wife to its corresponding fragment (titled In My Defense). Only then did it become apparent to me that the author had invested considerable effort, in both thought and time, to shape raw input and flesh it into moments. Perhaps that was what he had meant by the ‘preservation of time.’

Indeed, the author strove hard to bring out what he considered the essence of each moment. Thus, in conveying the first half of this audiotape to paper, he downplayed certain passages, making them much shorter than originally recorded, especially where the child’s voice became excessively verbose, or was lost in repetition (of the same emotion or idea). In conveying the second half, he corrected some of the most atrocious grammatical errors (in places where he deemed them overbearing). However, he left enough of them in place; perhaps to keep the voice of his second wife vibrant and thus, authentic.

According to her, these two audiotapes were the only ones left out of an immensely large ‘collection of voices’. There is no telling where the rest of them might be found.

Conclusion:

Now until the last moment before submitting this text for publication, I plan on reading and rereading it, looking for gaps in chronology, logical misalignments between fragments, even outright errors, which might have escaped me. I am still tormented by my own doubts as to this editorial guesswork.

Therefore I would not put it past you, the reader, to sense some dissatisfaction, as I do, in the current state of this book. It was unfinished, and still is. I wish I could be more confident of its veracity and completeness. I wish I could do more. This, I suppose, is the nature of the quest for truth; even if it is truth in fiction.

U.P.