The Marksman

By Serge Iourienen

SERGE IOURIENEN "THE MARKSMAN". A NOVEL. C'est un grand livre.
— Le Figaro (Paris)

The plot… is sturdy and simple… The novel investigates this "infernal metaphysics of the Border." …By the end, in a series of flashbacks from the agent's childhood, we get a gripping account of what life on the border really means… Skillfully rendered here into English, the novel constitutes a parody of salvation scenarios current in East and West. Neither side, it is clear, can save or destroy the other. And wedged in between is that no man's land, an increasingly common place for gifted Russian writers to call their home.

— The New York Times Book Review

Dostoyevsky-ridden and Hemingway-haunted, the novel seems suspended between two cultures, two literatures… A strong writer
— Publishers Weekly

The narrative is undoubtedly about love.

— Novoye Russkoe Slovo (New York)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312785656

Book preview

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B A N K F U R T

SERGE  IOURIENEN

B A N K F U R T

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Franc-Tireur

USA

Bankfurt

Firstly published in the USA (AGNI #38)

as The Petersburg Express

By Serge Iourienen

Copyright © by Serge Iourienen

Translation © by Mary Ann Szporluk

All rights reserved.

ISBN  978-1-312-78532-8

Printed in the United States of America

B A N K F U R T

On the inside, the Hauptbahnhof—that multi-leveled octopus in Frankfurt-am-Main—turned out to be much more complex than his sluggish imagination, and so an hour went by and it started to turn dark before he figured out that over the past hundred years or so everything had gone through a process of miniaturization and he should probably be looking for a subway and not a train.

That proved to be correct. Only it was not the city subway, the U-Bahn, but the S-Bahn—the long-distance one. And you could get to it by taking an elevator right beneath the smoky, cathedral-like station arches. A pair of cement cubes in fact were elevators.

On his first try he took the wrong cube. He found an umbrella instead. It stood on its tip in a corner of the solid metal cabin— someone had forgotten it.

And providentially forgotten it: when the S-Bahn flew out onto a bridge and crossed over a motionless river, the dark glass on the outside was covered with spots that suddenly turned into streams and washed away the obtrusive reflection of his face. Two teenage girls next to him—punk types from the suburbs—sank separately to the floor. He grabbed the rail; a tousled head dyed cornflower blue swayed before his groin. Her shaved neck stuck out from the collar of a black leather jacket like a dirty pale stem. Without hair it looked like some kind of fiberglas.

Bad Hamburg station. While crossing the platform, he opened the umbrella. It was lilac silk inside.

On the station square an old woman was getting soaked. She wore thin bright out-of-season trousers