Liability Abroad

The van smelled of cigarettes and sheep medicine, and the GPS had stopped pretending to know where we were about forty minutes ago. Its screen showed a gray void with a pulsing blue dot, which I suppose was us, though the dot seemed uncertain about this too.

Drago drove with one hand on the wheel and the other conducting an invisible orchestra. He spoke seven words of English: “no problem,” “very close,” and “it is what.” The last phrase appeared to be a complete philosophical position. When I’d asked at the embassy motor pool how long the drive to Korbejn would take, Drago had said, “It is what,” and we had been in the van for three hours.

I was rehearsing, under my breath, the pronunciation of the celebrated author’s name. Aleksandar Bogataj. I had been saying it wrong for three months — Boh-GAH-taj, with the confidence of someone who has been wrong so many times that consistency has replaced accuracy. Drago had corrected me that morning with a noise that combined instruction and sorrow in equal measure. BOH-ga-tie. Like a bow tie, but with more disappointment.

On my lap sat a gift-wrapped first edition of Bogataj’s novel The Laudankia, purchased on the embassy’s cultural engagement budget after a procurement process that required me to explain, in triplicate, why the British government needed to spend four hundred euros on a book written in a language no one in the building could read. I had not read it either. I had read the Wikipedia summary and a review in the TLS and considered this sufficient preparation, which it would have been, had the author existed.

My name is Philippa Quist. I am forty-one years old, Third Secretary for Cultural Affairs at the British Embassy in Budapest, and I have been requesting a transfer to Vienna for nine years. My career peaked seven years ago when I organized a Kazuo Ishiguro reading in Ljubljana that was, by my own account, adequately attended. I tell this story at parties with the practiced timing of someone who has calculated exactly how self-deprecating to be — enough to seem charming, not so much that anyone feels obliged to disagree.

The village of Korbejn — spelled Corbein on British maps, owing to a Bartholomew cartographer’s error in 1893 — appeared around a bend in the road like something that had been left out in the weather and forgotten. A church, a square, a building that might have been a school or a large shed. Bunting. Quite a lot of bunting. A banner across the main street read WELCOME LITERARY FESTIVAL in English, with a comma splice that I found oddly touching.

Drago stopped the van in front of a cafe and gestured toward it the way a surgeon might gesture toward an operating theater. “Very close,” he said, which by this point in our relationship I understood to mean: you have arrived.

I should explain how I discovered the fraud, because it was not through investigation or cleverness. It was through coffee.

The festival committee — five people who treated me with the combination of warmth and suspicion that small communities reserve for visiting officials — had assembled in the cafe to brief me on the schedule. Bogataj himself was, they explained, resting. He was, they said, shy. He was, they said, perhaps available this evening. The word “perhaps” did a great deal of heavy lifting.

I was holding a cup of coffee over a manuscript page — a draft of something that had been placed on the table as evidence of the author’s ongoing vitality — when my elbow caught the edge of the saucer. The coffee went sideways. And two people, from opposite sides of the table, lunged for the page simultaneously.

The pharmacist, Josip, grabbed the left corner. The baker, Slavica, grabbed the right. They held it between them like a wishbone, and then they had an argument — in rapid, furious dialect — that Josip concluded by jabbing his finger at a paragraph near the bottom and saying something that, based on Drago’s whispered translation, meant approximately: “This is my scene, you cow.”

There was a silence. The committee members stared at the table. Slavica stared at Josip. Josip stared at the wet manuscript page. I stared at all of them and understood, with the terrible clarity that comes from spending fifteen years reading rooms for a living, that Aleksandar Bogataj was not a person.

He was a project.

The pharmacist did mornings. The baker did afternoons. The retired schoolteacher, Franjo — a thin man with the posture of a question mark — did evening events. Each had internalized a third of the author’s personality. They bickered about continuity the way actors do in a long-running show, each convinced their interpretation was the definitive one. Josip’s Bogataj was melancholic and intellectual. Slavica’s was warm and anecdotal. Franjo’s was, from what I gathered, mostly drunk.

The village had maintained this arrangement for eleven years. They had conducted interviews, attended regional festivals, and produced two novels through what was essentially a writing committee with a rotating public face. They had also produced one spectacularly ill-advised opinion piece about the European Union that had nearly ended the project, but this was attributed to Franjo’s influence on the evening shift and was not spoken of. The name itself — Bogataj — was the surname of a goat farmer who had died in 1987 and therefore could not object to the appropriation.

“You understand,” Josip said to me, in careful English, “this is a matter of some delicacy.”

I understood. I understood it completely. And I made a decision that was both rational and catastrophic, which is a combination only competent people can manage.

Here is the thing about the committee: they were terrible at being Bogataj. Their version of the author was inconsistent, nervous, and prone to contradicting himself between breakfast and dinner. Josip’s Bogataj at a morning panel would expound on the loneliness of the creative process, and then Franjo’s Bogataj at an evening reading would tell a joke about a donkey. Journalists were beginning to write about the author’s “mercurial temperament,” which is a polite way of saying they’d noticed he became a different person every eight hours.

I perform identity for a living. I have been the appropriate version of myself in seventeen countries across three continents. I once spent an evening pretending to find a Romanian deputy minister’s jokes about fish amusing, and I did it so convincingly that he sent me a crate of smoked trout for Christmas. My ex-husband, during our divorce three years ago, told me he had “never been entirely sure she was home.” He meant present. Engaged. Herself. I found this hurtful and inaccurate and have been silently composing my rebuttal ever since.

I proposed a collaboration. I would become the public face. They would feed me the details. It was, I explained, merely a matter of logistical efficiency. Three people playing one role is a scheduling nightmare. One person playing one role is called acting.

The truth, which I did not explain, was simpler: I had never been good at anything the way I was good at being someone else. The Ishiguro reading in Ljubljana — the one I tell people about with practiced deprecation — had been the only time in my career I’d felt entirely present, entirely competent, and it was because I’d spent the evening channeling Ishiguro’s publicist, who had cancelled at the last minute, and whose calm I’d borrowed like a coat.

The committee looked at one another. Slavica looked at Josip. Josip looked at Franjo. Franjo poured himself a drink.

“You would do this?” Josip said.

“I would do it well,” I said, which was not the same thing as answering his question, and we all knew it.

I did it well.

The Korbejn Literary Festival lasted three days, and by the end of the first morning I had given an interview to a Croatian literary magazine in which I explained the concept of the laudankia — the creature from Bogataj’s novel, named after the vine snake so perfect at imitating a dried gourd stem that even its scientific name comes from the plant rather than the animal. A creature whose identity is its disguise. I described it as a metaphor for authorship itself: the writer who becomes so absorbed in their characters that the characters become more real than the person holding the pen.

The interviewer called it “the most penetrating self-analysis I have ever encountered in a living author.” I accepted this compliment with the modest deflection of someone who has read the Wikipedia article on vine snakes twice and considers this sufficient expertise.

But each success required a bigger deception, and each deception generated a bigger success, and I could not stop because stopping would require me to be myself again, and I was no longer certain what that involved.

A German publisher named Dieter arrived on the second day wanting to discuss the next novel. He was the kind of man who wore linen in all climates and used the word “zeitgeist” without embarrassment. I met him in the cafe while Slavica fed me plot points through a walkie-talkie from the village’s volunteer fire brigade, which I had concealed inside a wool scarf. The walkie-talkie was the size of a small brick and weighed approximately as much. I wore the scarf looped twice around my neck, which gave me the appearance of someone recovering from a throat operation, but Dieter attributed this to “the eccentricity of the artistic temperament” and seemed to approve.

The arrangement might have been seamless except that Slavica was simultaneously pulling bread from the oven, and her instructions arrived in bursts between timer beeps.

“The new work,” I told the publisher, touching my scarf thoughtfully, “concerns itself with — ” A beep. A hiss. The faint sound of a bread paddle scraping stone. ” — with the cartographic impulse. The desire to name places that already have names.”

“Fascinating,” said Dieter. “Like the Bartholomew dynasty?”

I had no idea what the Bartholomew dynasty was. Through the scarf, Slavica whispered something about maps and Edinburgh. I tilted my head as though considering a question I had in fact been considering for approximately two seconds. “Precisely like the Bartholomew dynasty,” I said. “Six generations of Edinburgh cartographers, including the man who named Antarctica. The presumption that naming something gives you authority over it. This is — ” Another beep. ” — this is, I think, the essential colonial gesture. Not the flag but the label.”

Dieter set down his espresso. “And the working title?”

From the scarf: a crackle, then Slavica’s voice, barely audible, saying what sounded like either “The Map of Other People” or “the bread is almost ready.” I chose the first interpretation. “We do not discuss titles,” I said. “A title is the last lie the book tells.”

Dieter offered a two-book deal. I told him I would have my agent be in touch, and then spent the evening helping Josip draft an email from a fictional literary agent named Petra Novak, because the deception had, by this point, become a family that required feeding.

Then the doctoral student arrived.

Her name was Ivana, she was from Zagreb, she was writing her dissertation on post-Yugoslav literary identity, and she had read The Laudankia twelve times. She could quote passages from memory. She had a photocopy of every interview the author had given. She was, in the way that only doctoral students can be, both the most dangerous person I had ever met and the most earnest.

She asked me about a passage in chapter three that describes a woman watching a snake in a garden. I had not read chapter three, or any chapter, but I improvised from the Wikipedia summary with what I hoped was authoritative vagueness. The snake, I said, represented the gap between appearance and essence — the laudankia vine snake, which resembles a dried gourd stem so precisely that its very name derives from the plant it impersonates. The woman’s stillness was the stillness of recognition — seeing something so perfectly disguised that noticing it at all felt like an act of violence against the disguise.

Ivana wrote several lines in a notebook with handwriting so small it seemed intended to be kept secret from the page itself. She nodded. Then she pulled out a photocopy of a letter Bogataj had written to the Slovenian literary review in 2019 — a letter Franjo had composed after three glasses of slivovitz and subsequently forgotten — in which the author stated that the snake scene was actually about his mother.

“How do you reconcile these readings?” Ivana asked.

I looked at her. She looked at me. The entire cafe seemed to lean forward.

“An author,” I said, “is not obligated to tell the truth about his own work.”

Ivana wrote this down as though it were scripture. She underlined it twice.

I went to the bathroom and sat on the lid of the toilet for three minutes, breathing. Then I washed my hands, checked my scarf for the walkie-talkie frequency, and went back to being Aleksandar Bogataj, because the alternative was being Philippa Quist, and I had tried that for forty-one years with mixed results.

Two weeks after the festival, I received an email from Petra Novak — the fictional agent whose email account I now checked daily, with the anxious regularity of someone tending a houseplant they never meant to own — informing me that The Laudankia had been shortlisted for the Adriatic Prize for Fiction. The ceremony was in Dubrovnik. I wore a borrowed blazer and a look of literary gravitas that I had practiced in the mirror of the hotel bathroom until it sat on my face like something that had always been there.

The auditorium was full. Real writers, real critics, real publishers — people who had spent their lives constructing things from words, which is the same material I was using to construct a person. I stood at the podium and delivered a speech about the solitude of the creative life, and I meant every word of it, which was the problem.

“A writer,” I said, “is someone who has agreed to be haunted. Not by ghosts — that would be manageable — but by versions of themselves they were too afraid to become. The characters we create are not inventions. They are confessions. Every protagonist is the person the author would have been if they’d had the courage, or the cowardice, or simply the different postal code.”

The audience was quiet. Not politely quiet. Quiet the way a room goes quiet when something true has been said by accident.

“The laudankia — the vine snake — survives by becoming indistinguishable from its surroundings. We call this camouflage, but that implies the snake knows it is pretending. I think it is more accurate to say the snake has forgotten. It has imitated the dried gourd stem for so long that imitation has become identity. This is not tragedy. This is craft. And it is, I suspect, the only honest definition of authorship I am capable of providing.”

The applause started somewhere near the back and moved forward like weather. I stood in it the way you stand in unexpected rain — startled, and then still, and then aware that you are getting wet and there is nothing to be done about it.

I went to the bathroom during the reception. I stood at the mirror for four minutes. I did not wash my hands or check my scarf or practice any expression. I just stood there, looking at a face that had no particular expression on it, which was new.

The novel did not win the prize. It came second to a Croatian memoir about beekeeping, which Josip later described as “competent but emotionally shallow,” a critique I found rich coming from a pharmacist who had written the chapter about grief.

The van ride back to Korbejn was dark and quiet. Drago drove with both hands on the wheel for once. The GPS had resumed its services, though it still called the village Corbein, because the Bartholomew cartographer’s error had been digitized along with everything else, and no one had corrected it, because no one had cared.

About thirty minutes from the village, Drago spoke. A complete sentence. I nearly fell off the seat.

“My grandmother,” he said. “She was one of the writers.”

I waited.

“She did the love parts.” He said this the way you’d say someone did the plumbing — a skill, not a sentiment. “She was very good at the love parts.”

I asked him why. Why had the village created Bogataj? What was the point of maintaining a fiction for over a decade — the scheduling, the arguments, the constant risk of discovery?

Drago thought about this for a long time. The road unreeled in the headlights, pocked and narrow and, according to every official map, nonexistent.

“Nobody comes here,” he said. Then, after a minute: “They came for him.”

I turned to the window. Outside, the hills were black against a slightly less black sky. Somewhere in them was Korbejn, or Corbein, or whatever the place was actually called by the people who had been living there before a Scottish cartographer arrived and decided he knew better.

I returned to Budapest on a Tuesday. I filed my expense report. Under “Notable Achievements,” I wrote: Successfully delivered the Korbejn Literary Festival. The author was well received.

I scheduled a call with the cultural programming office in London about next quarter’s events. I renewed my transfer request to Vienna. I checked the email account I had created for Petra Novak, the fictional literary agent, because Dieter had written to ask about delivery timelines for the second novel.

I replied to Dieter. I told him the author was deep in the new work and could not be disturbed, which was not precisely a lie, since the village was presumably still writing.

I still say Bogataj’s name correctly. BOH-ga-tie. I say it to no one, in no context, for no reason. Sometimes in the shower, sometimes waiting for the kettle. The name of a person who does not exist, pronounced with a precision that serves nothing except the strange conviction that getting it right is the least I owe a man I pretended to be for three days in a country that, according to my GPS, was not entirely there.