14 What is the difference between the male and female editions of DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS by Milorad Pavic?
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This article is from the Books FAQ, by Evelyn C. Leeper eleeper@jaguar.stc.lucent.com with numerous contributions by others.
14 What is the difference between the male and female editions of DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS by Milorad Pavic?
Page 293
FEMALE:
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 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-established
contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas
of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a
short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading
those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawja where he had got them he said
something that astonished me even more.
MALE:
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 of 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. Muawja where he had got them.
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