The "Male Edition's" rendering. . .
(of pp. 293-94 in Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the
Khazars, New York: Knopf, 1988)
And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the
table in front of him. I could have pulled the trigger then
and there. There wouldn't be a better moment. There was only
one lone witness present in the garden--and he was a child. But
that's not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting
sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them
instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen fingers with
their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi
mentions in his book on the Khazars. I thought how each and
every one of us is just such a tree: the taller we grow toward
the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we
must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters
toward hell. With these thoughts in my mind, I read the pages
given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in
disbelief I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got
them.
The "Female Edition's" rendering. . .
(of pp. 293-94 in Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the
Khazars, New York: Knopf, 1988)
And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the
table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb
brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation
that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they
had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages,
I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and
drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and
self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but
uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few
moments, I came to and re-establsihed contact with the text, I
knew that the reader who returns from the open sea a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not
reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia
where he had got them he said something that astonished me even
more.