At this corner of the Northernmost frontier region of Kenya—touching on one side, South Sudan, a little bit of Ethiopia, then Uganda at the point furthest North—is what is infamously known as the largest refugee camp in the world. Hosting close or slightly more than two hundred thousand individuals, the site is as humbling as it’s touching. Here, people live in close proximity in plastic tents. Turkana, the County under which the camp is situated, is a dry zone where water is a scarce commodity. Winds carrying dust from all of the neighboring countries blow into the furrowed brows of many an adult staring into space, dreaming of a different time and place.
No Christmas carols are to be found around this settlement. No music of any sort either. The Christmas noises here are loud arguments from disgruntled youths, who are drunk on local brews. The elders just sigh and stare out in silence.
Kakuma is a loose Swahili word that stands for ‘Nothing’. Looking closely, one sees that nothing presents itself in many forms.
There are the missing limbs of survivors of the South Sudan wars, who haggle over the politics of a land they love and hate for stealing their lives. The trauma of their lives is clearly superimposed on their bodies over the brutal tribal marks that vividly separate one tribe from another, even as they share the uprootedness of their circumstances. The men, women, and their children stand out in the camp with their impressive heights that tend to go beyond six feet, as well as their beautifully dark skins.
There are other communities inhabiting Kakuma. Men and women from the larger Congo, the Darfur area, as well as Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. It’s a cauldron of cultures united by sorrow and deep wounds of war back in their countries of origin.
The World Food Program (WFP) and myriad other international humanitarian organizations do their best in providing basic survival kits for each household, including health care and education for the children. But what organization, however well intentioned, can bring the joy and celebration to a people who are clobbered by memories of their past into a stupor?
Rot has permeated groups of refugees in search of the assumed better things in life. Young people have gone on to experiment with drugs and engage in unprotected sexual escapades. Unwanted pregnancies, and illegal and unhealthy abortions are common consequences. There have been a few deaths. As if that isn’t enough of a price for these youths to pay—the older folks have carried their traditions to the camp and implement them ruthlessly. This Christmas was no different.
Men of marriageable age, and who through the camp’s assistance got asylum to other countries, make visits to pick brides from the camp. And this was the case with Aisha and Nyayiel, which became the whispered talk of the camp.
A beautiful South Sudanese girl of thirteen years of age had won the admiration of a general in his mid-fifties, who had six other wives living in the city of Nairobi. Nyayiel’s parents were ecstatic with the proposal because the girl was worthy of a hundred heads of cattle and ten thousand dollars in dowry. It was enough money for her father to marry a new bride, and for her sixteen-year-old, grade-eight brother to marry.
Unfortunately, Nyayiel had not been impressed by the proposal for she loved school and had for a long time nursed the idea of becoming a teacher after school. So this Christmas morning, Nyayiel did not wake up. She had taken an overdose of Malaria tablets along with an assortment of other drugs, and died without the parents sensing it. The general was cheated of his price fetch. But he was a resourceful man and presented a bargain. He was willing to take for a bride Nyayiel’s younger sister, Nyawitch, who was only nine.
The offer provoked a big sigh of relief from Nyayiel’s father, his sons, and other tribal elders who stood to benefit from the dowry catch. Nyayiel’s father had beaten his wife senseless before the camp authorities intervened. A morose air swept through the Sudanese side of the camp—a terrible silence that wouldn’t break even with drugged and drunken youths prowling and howling around. It was the silence of death on Christmas morning.
Ironically, once the general paid the monetary value for the nine-year-old, silence stepped aside, and a debate on the merits of kinship and the beauty of early marriage erupted among the men. Tragedy doesn’t come in darker subjects and behavior!
Across the divide of the Somali invisible wall, another war raged. Aisha had been subjected to female genital mutilation two weeks before Christmas morning, and the parents were ready to hand her over to their choice of a husband. He was another elderly candidate who was also her father’s cousin. Aisha had not argued to spare her mother the fate of Nyayiel’s mother. She knew the drill. Obey. Do as instructed. But any hopes or dreams she had nurtured died the day her clitoris was nipped and her labia stitched with cowherd thread. This Christmas morning, she had used her mother’s special protection military knife to dig into her heart. By the time the blade was pulled out, it was too late. Blood was spurting out like a burst water main. The family’s screams drew everyone around. She was declared death on arrival at the camp clinic. Having died before noon, the Muslim faithfuls and her immediate family were making arrangements for her burial before two in the afternoon.
Kakuma is a place of great sadness and incredible resilience. This is where memories bring madness while hope spits at defeat. This Christmas afternoon did break the cold hold on the camp with the two registered deaths. Fires were lit and cooking started in earnest. The smell of Fufu from the Congolese section wafted up into the blazing afternoon heat to meet up with kisra bread sizzling from the Sudanese section. The Ethiopians and Somalis were at their makeshift hearths working on Anjeela. And as the afternoon welded into the early evening, the dead were buried and the living fed.
Nancy Ndeke is a multi-genre writer. She writes poetry, hybrid essays, reviews, commentary and memoir. Ndeke is widely published with four collection of her full writings Soliama Legacy, Lola- Logue , Musical Poesy and May the Force be With you. She has recently collaborated with a Scotland-based Writer and Musical Artist, Dr. Gameli Tordzro of Glasgow University on the Poetry Collection Mazungumzo ya Shairi, and also co-authored the poetry anthology ,I was lost but now am found with USA Poet Renee Drummond -Brown . She contributes her writings to the Atunis Galaxy Poetry ( Belgium), TUJIPANGE AFRICA( Kenya, USA), Ramingo Porch, Africa Writers Caravan , WOMAWORD Literary Press, BeZine for Arts and Humanities( USA), Andinkra Links 5, Wild Fire Publication, Williwash Press, The poet by day webzine, Writers Escape at Poetry, Different Truths, ARCS PROSE POETRY. Nancy Ndeke also works as a literary arts consultant, copyeditor and Writers’ Clinics Moderator.
Short stories from the Extended Edition of: My Life at First Try
Mark Budman’s “My Life at First Try,” is smart and funny and compelling, and in an era when both the immigrant experience and the resurgent aggression of the once-Soviet Russia are central issues, the novel is timely, as well. This is a splendid debut by an important new American voice.
—Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winner, the author of “Intercourse” and “Severance”
The First Song
It’s 1954. I am four. My mother in her black fur coat and valenkies, felt boots, pulls me in a sled over the crisp Siberian snow. Fur is still cheap at this latitude. My two-year-old brother sits behind me. His mittened hands are clutching my sleeves.
I am a reindeer driver. I sing a song about what I see. I sing about a tractor pulling a wooden pole behind it to clear the road of snow. I sing about the general store where a giant poster the color of squished strawberries shows a worker and peasant hammering enemies of the state. I sing about a man lying on the sidewalk with his face down. He’s probably drunk, but I sing that the enemies shot him for defending the village. I sing about two men hitting each other in the face. They must be boxers in training, ready to defend my country. I sing about a policeman in his squirrel hat, its earflaps down, in his greatcoat made of deerskin, criss-crossed by shiny leather belts. A rifle is slung over his back. He says, “Move along, folks, move along,” to the people who watch the boxers. He is one great-looking warrior. If I were in charge, I would give him a medal. I sing about a girl in another sled, who lifts the scarf from the bottom of her face momentarily to stick her tongue out at me. I think it’s a girl because she wears a red coat while my brother’s and mine are black. I also have a scarf over my mouth. My words come out garbled, as if I am a foreigner, which I am not yet.
When I learn the alphabet, I’ll write this song down.
We live in a wooden house. One room is for my family, and the second is for the Petrovs. There is a rug that hangs from the wall, above my pillow, with rabbits, squirrels and hedgehogs. I wish them goodnight before I fall asleep. On the other wall, there is a poster of a grinning soldier playing an accordion. His teeth are white, as if he’s a kid.
Comrade Petrov is a butcher. That’s what my grandmother says. But butchers cut meat. The Petrovs eat only potatoes, lentil soup, bread and garlic. Their son Mishka is my age.
“What’s you name?” he said when we first met.
“Sasha.”
“That’s a girl’s name.”
“No. It’s Alexander. Like the great king.”
“What the hell is king?”
“King is a foreign tsar.”
“You’re named after a tsar?”
Mishka told me that his dad killed five men in a fight. He can bend a horseshoe with his fingers, carries a big knife, and he has tattoos all over. Mishka also told me that his sister Masha couldn’t piss on the wall. I pity her. Even my two-year-old brother can do that, and Masha is already ten.
In the evenings, my mother reads us Longfellow in Bunin’s translation while we all drink tea imported from India. I don’t know what India is, except that everyone calls it our friend. I like Hiawatha. He could pass for a Russian.
I ask my father how many people he killed. He says that he shot at the Germans during the war, but he doesn’t know if he got any.
Last summer, two prisoners, released after Stalin’s death, tried to grab me while I was playing in my backyard. My grandma saved me. She just took an ax, and they ran away. She is so strong. She has no rifle, but she can split a log with one blow. Her name is Annie. It’s the nicest girl name in the world.
My grandpa is even stronger. He could grab a bear by its paw, spin it over his head, and throw it all the way to the taiga’s edge. My father is a teacher. He knows everything.
Stalin sent my grandparents here to chop wood, and my parents volunteered to live with them. That’s how we got here. I don’t know this yet, and I already forgot about the two prisoners. Mishka doesn’t like Stalin either. He says that he’s a mothersucker. When I asked what it means, Mishka said that it’s a grown-up who still sucks his mother’s titties.
When I see Stalin’s portraits, I whisper, mothersucker. He’s got a big mustachio, so he probably tickles his mother’s tits. I’ve never seen her portraits, but she deserves it because she raised a son like that. She probably has tits like the witches in Macbeth. My mother says it’s too early for me to read the book, but I saw the pictures already. Now, my breath settles on my scarf and turns to ice as fast as I exhale. My song streams wide and fast, like a Siberian river in the summer. I am a happy reindeer driver.
Grammar
It’s 1957. I am seven. We are not slaves. Slaves are not us. Even in Russian, a language with a more forgiving grammar than English, that second sentence is barely grammatical. Yet Idea Vasil’evna, our first grade teacher, forces us to write it in our notebooks. She has no choice. It’s printed in our textbooks. What’s written by a pen can’t be struck out by an ax.
We dip our pens into the inkwells, stick our tongues out and write, “р–а–б–ы….” I hate how the ink smells—like scarlet fever. The pigtails of the girl in front of me beg to be pulled, but I restrain myself. I’m a man.
We know that we live in a Socialist society, but we are ready for the next step in the path of progress. That’s what Idea Vasil’evna said before the class began. She is wise and motherly.
She drums the beat on her desk with a ruler. Occasionally, she goose-steps the aisles, and cranes her neck to check our progress. When she does that, our hands shake. She hits the boys on the fingers with the ruler and returns to her desk. She never hits the girls. Their fingers are delicate, like ivory netsuke, and their tears shoot out too easily. She smells like the perfume store, only stronger.
Above the teacher’s desk, sweet Grandfather Lenin observes us with glee. If he could, he would jump out from his gilded frame, take away Idea Vasil’evna’s ruler, and drum our fingers with it. He would never spare the girls.
His portrait is off-center, and next to it, there is a painted-over spot. Kids say that it had Stalin’s portrait hanging there once. A few years before, these leaders would have jumped out together, and divided the responsibilities. Joseph, you go to the right, and I will take the left. Don’t spare the rod, Joseph.
Joseph would nod, grinning under his sardonic mustache. Afterwards, back in his frame, he would light a pipe. Lenin would squint like a tomcat with the belly full of mice.
But now, Lenin is lonely.
The bell rings. We run into the school yard, which is surrounded by a heavy iron fence. We scream. We jump up and down. We chase each other. Two older boys, maybe even sixth graders, get into a fistfight, and we watch. One boy falls and the other kicks him in the ribs. The school principal comes out and positions himself by the gates. He looks like a statue in the town square, but without a horse. Iron face. Endless shoulders. A raised hand. His clothes are the colour of dust. Does he have shiny, polished balls like the horse in the square? He coughs into a bullhorn. Everyone quiets, even the boy on the ground. The principal speaks.
I can make out only some words. Party. Lenin. Happy childhood. American imperialism. Five-year plan. When I grow up, I will draw posters and write big words with a red pen.
Yesterday, I saw a group of foreign tourists downtown. They stood so straight and laughed loudly like kids, as if no one was watching them. They were dressed in shiny, neat clothing, and their voices sounded like the cry of the birds heading west. I want to be a foreigner.
The bell rings again.
We return to the next class. A banner hangs along the length of the aisle. The Party solemnly proclaims: this generation of the Soviet people will live in a Communist society. That’s progress. One plus one is two. Slaves are not us, and will never be.
Dr. Arrogant
It’s 2020. I’m seventy. Now, I can attest that truth of the Talmud’s statement. At that age a person really reaches fullness of years. I did live a full life. So far.
At the doctor’s office, I introduce myself first. “Hi, I’m Alex. I’ll be your Russian interpreter.”
“I don’t understand you,” the doctor replies.
His last name is Arrogant. Maybe that’s not the name listed on his driver’s license. At least it’s not how he introduces himself to the patient. The way he says it, his name is completely unintelligible. Not that he speaks English with an accent. He probably doesn’t care if anyone understands him, least of all me.
“I’m trying to introduce myself,” I say. In my years on this job, I learned patience. I speak even slower now, trying to pronounce each word carefully. “Let me repeat that. Hi, I’m Alex. I will be your Russian interpreter.”
Dr. Arrogant apparently turns towards the patient. Apparently, it is a young or youngish woman, because he says, “When are you due?”
I couldn’t see any of that. What I’m doing is called OPI, Over the Phone Interpreting. There is no actual phone, at least in the room of my condo where I’m sitting now. I’m tethered to my laptop by a headset. The doctor has a similar arrangement in his office, but he’s using a microphone instead of a headset.
In the past, I used to do video interpreting, with a webcam. The doctor’s office also had a webcam. I stopped doing that. Now I don’t need to shave and brush my hair in the morning. They don’t need to see my wrinkles.
More importantly, with the OPI, I can make faces or flip the bird when I talk to providers like Dr. Arrogant. And I don’t have to wear a mask, or wash my hands, or breathe in viruses as when I was doing in-person interpreting in the office. The flip side is that I don’t go outside that often, and see the beauty of the early fall only through my window.
Dr. Arrogant measures the size of the patient’s dilation. When I was doing video interpreting, the nurse would turn the webcam away at that time, and I would turn away from the screen, too. Now, I don’t have to. The only thing I see on screen is the stats of the call.
The doctor says something I couldn’t hear. He’s probably turned away from his mic.
Usually, I have to be transparent, as if I’m not there, and as if the patient and doctor are speaking to each other, and they both understood English. So, for instance, I could say that I have bloody discharge from my vagina, and no one who knows the game would laugh. At least not out loud. Sometimes, I have to get out of that role—like when I can’t hear them speaking, for example.
I say, “Doctor, this is the interpreter speaking. I can’t hear you.”
The doctor doesn’t reply. I repeat my plea.
“She understood me,” he says. “Don’t interrupt, translator.”
I’m about to say that we don’t know if she understood him correctly, and that is the reason they employed me. I also want to say that I’m not a translator but an interpreter. I bite my tongue. My tongue already has a lot of bite marks.
There is some silence after that. Maybe the doctor knows what I think. More realistically, he’s typing his notes on the computer. I begin to compose a story in my head.
A man comes back to the country of his birth. He wears a beard and sackcloth. He enters a bus. The driver is bald like a watermelon. A poster of Stalin is attached behind his seat. The man nods to everyone. He’s met by thirteen pairs of hostile eyes, plus the dead eyes of Stalin. The man gives the driver a strange coin. It looks to be made of gold, and is shaped like a miniature version of a knight’s shield. When the driver touches it, hair grows back on his head. Everyone laughs. The man gets into his seat, takes out another coin and raises his hand high, showing it to everyone.
“Make no mistake,” he says in his native language.“I’m a miracle man. Curing baldness is just the beginning. I’ll cleanse your mortal sins, including pride. Beware, Stalin is rising. The end is near.”
The doctor interrupts my thoughts. “Everything looks good. See you in two weeks.”
I interpret that and say, “If there is nothing else, the interpreter is disconnecting. Thank you for using our interpreting services.”
There. I hope he won’t say “translator” next time.
The patient thanks me. The providers usually thank me too. If they are young, they at least say, “no problem.”
This doctor just disconnects. He probably thanks the janitor for cleaning the office. As a nationally certified interpreter, bilingual writer, inventor, engineer, and former editor, I’m as qualified to receive a thank-you as any average janitor. But maybe he doesn’t thank the janitor either.
Waiting for another call, I calm my nerves by reading the news about fires, the pandemic, and violent demonstrations. Only after work, I continue with the story. I don’t like it so far. It’s too didactic.
The following day, I receive an email from my boss at the interpreting agency. I’ve never met him, and know him only by his first name.
“A provider complained that you are too arrogant. I didn’t expect that from one of our best interpreters.”
Now, finding another job when you are seventy is not easy—not because I’d die from hunger, but because I’d be ashamed not to work. I mean, not to work for money. I do have other work. I write and help with raising my three grandkids. So I reply, “It won’t happen again, sir.”
He probably doesn’t know my age. That’s one of the advantages of OPI.
Outside, the leaves are turning red, brown and yellow. I open the window and tell them aloud, “Arrogance has no redeeming value. That’s your lesson for today.”
The leaves mouth silent thank-yous. They probably think I’m a janitor, and therefore deserve it. I fish out something from my pocket. It’s a gold-looking coin shaped like a miniature version of a knight’s shield. I hold it in my hand. It’s warm, and it clings to my fingers as if inviting me to be embraced for a long time, until the end, which I hope is not near. Not even at seventy.
I can still sing. I’m a feisty seventy-year-old. I’ll try to sing at the second try as well. We all deserve a second try.
My Life at First Try is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published by Counterpoint Press.
This extended edition published in 2020.
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the editors who have previously published chapters from this novel:
Mark Budman was born in the former Soviet Union but now resides in Boston. Mark follows the fine American tradition: a person moves to the US, learns the language, takes any job he can find, complains bitterly, but perseveres. Mark also writes and publishes flash fiction, so he knows how to express himself concisely, before the reader gets bored. He loves to travel so he can compare foreign countries to America and congratulate himself on the fine choice he made 38 years ago when he came here. He loves his family so he can get emotional support and an audience for complaints. Above all, he loves his readers, in sickness and in health.
Books by Mark Budman
The Shape-Shifter’s Guide to Time Travel
Condensed to Flash: World Classics
You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories
Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories (Karen and Michael Braziller Books)
You Have Time for This
Lucia loved food. She loved the look, the taste, the feel, the smell, even the sound of it as she kept it that second longer in her mouth before she let it slip away. Maybe the reason she loved sex was because the first time she was seduced, her hands were deep in some pearly dough.
Lucia worked in a restaurant kitchen, learning, among other things, to knead the dough for strudel. Bruno, the Austrian cook, had convinced the restaurant owner that strudel—not just apple strudel, but cherry strudel, plum strudel and even rhubarb strudel—would be novel additions to the dessert menu of The Hungry Taste Bud.
Bruno was an artist and like most artists preferred to get on with the creative part, leaving the routine of preparing the strudel dough to the kitchen help. Yet he always kept an eye the preparation of the dough.
‘250 gm of flour, Lucia. Mix it with one eighth of a litre of water.’ Bruno paused in his instruction as the girl in her white wrap-around apron gingerly measured the flour, tipped it into a bowl and added the liquid.
Lucia glanced up at the man. She needed him to give her time, time to see that it didn’t matter if some of the flour powdered onto the marble top counter.
‘Add two tablespoons of oil…that’s it…just pour it on…one whole egg, now…careful with the shell. Take the wooden spoon…stir it all about at first.’
His voice rolled low as Lucia stirred the dough, her silky black chin-length hair swaying to the motion of her arm; her eyes fixed on the changing matter in the bowl.
‘And now, Lucia, just a coffee spoon of vinegar and a pinch of salt.’
She added the last with a flourish and a satisfied smile.
‘Take the spoon out now—this is where you need to use your hands—if you want to make a really good strudel dough.’
Lucia scraped off the wooden spoon and watched as Bruno sprinkled more flour on the counter.
‘So it won’t slip,’ he said.
She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand causing tiny speckles of flour to fall and trace her jawbone. As he lifted the mass of
dough from the bowl and began kneading, a faintly sour scent rose to her nostrils. She gazed at the long, strong and even movements of his hands as he kneaded the dough until it had a pearly sheen.
‘It has to look and feel like silk,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go on for a while…just to get the feel of it.’
Lucia nodded, wiped her hands on her apron and plunged both hands into the dough.
‘Push down, Lucia. Push with both heels of your hands.
Draw the dough back with your fingers. Keep the rhythm.’
Lucia pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed. It felt as though her whole body was moving in harmony. As she leant forward to push with the heels of her hands across the counter, her knees bent so slightly in a rolling motion, causing the hem on the back of her dress to rise with the swell of her shoulders bearing down on the dough.
Bruno took a step back to gaze at the hypnotic movement. The only sound that could be heard was the cool flap-flap against the marble and the sound of rhythmic breathing.
Lucia kept on kneading, eyes half-closed. She felt a hand brush a trace of flour from her cheek as another glided from her
shoulder to rest on her hips. Lucia kept on kneading. She sensed the knot at the back of her dress surrender as the hands crept beneath the loosened cloth.
‘Hush,’ Bruno whispered in her ear. ‘Keep the same pace. It’s good for the dough.’
Tiny shivers rippled up from somewhere deep inside her as the hands cupped her breasts and a finger and thumb gently tugged at her nipples to the rhythm of her kneading.
‘This will be a wonderful strudel dough, Lucia.’ Bruno’s voice was softly hoarse. ‘But we must put it aside and cover it … then let it rest for half an hour.’
Lucia turned, her hands behind her back tightening the knot and drawing the white cotton of her dress tautly across her breasts.
‘And what shall we do in that half hour?’ she asked.
Bruno stroked a finger down her cheek and brushed her lips with his. ‘The strudel, Lucia. We have to finish it.’
Her palms warm and her breasts flushed, Lucia’s brown eyes searched Bruno’s.
‘We’ll need half a kilo of those dark red cherries, 60 gm of butter, 120 gm of breadcrumbs and about 250 gm of sugar,’ he said.
Lucia stroked a hand over her hip and turned towards the cooler chamber where the fruits and vegetables were stored.
‘Half a kilo of cherries,’ she whispered.
The cherries lay in a basket, plump and red, a red so deep it was almost black. She took a pair and slipped it over her left ear. She took a single cherry, placed her lips against it to feel its shine, then sank her teeth slowly into the flesh. Juice trickled down her lower lip as she smelled the rich full scent. She held the stone in
her mouth to suck the last of its pulp and, puckering her lips, spat the stone into the bin.
‘Lucia,’ Bruno called. ‘I’ll show you how to pip the cherries.’
She came towards him, the basket propped on her left hip, the cherry earring laughing at him like her dark brown eyes.
‘I shall wash them first,’ Lucia said and emptied the basket into the enamel sink filled with cold water. She felt Bruno’s eyes upon her as she swished the bobbing cherries about in the water. She tried to ignore him but inside she was throbbing with a strange excitement. When she had strained the cherries, she turned to Bruno and looked him straight in the eye. ‘What now?’
‘Ah, Lucia. We must remove all the stones.’ With a small kitchen knife he made a cut down the cherry. ‘Now take it and open gently, so as to keep it whole. Then pluck the stone.’
A flush rose passed from her neck to her cheeks as Bruno gently opened the fruit. They stood side by side; the tall blond man and the slim dark-haired girl; they worked the cherries until the fruit was ready. The fresh smell was heady and clung to their fingers, staining them dark red.
‘Now roast the breadcrumbs in the butter, Lucia, until they are golden brown. I shall prepare the strudel dough, it should be ready now.’
Bruno sprinkled more flour onto the marble counter and pulled gently at the dough, drawing it out to cover the counter-top. ‘You have to be careful with the dough, Lucia, pull gently in all directions…take care not to make any holes. Yet it must be as thin as you can get it…you should almost see through it.’ The dough lay like silk fabric on the counter. ‘Stroke some liquid butter over the dough…yes, with your finger…all over. Now the breadcrumbs, then the cherries.
Leave a space at the end…about 10 cm and then take some sugar, rub it between your fingers and sprinkle it over the fruit.’
Lucia did as he said. The feel of the butter slipping across the fragile dough, the smell of the roasted breadcrumbs, the rubbing sound of the sugar between her fingertips, how it fell like a soft snow on the cherries; plump and luscious, their juice on the verge of bursting. It all delighted her senses.
‘I’ll roll it up,’ Bruno said. Lucia watched as he tenderly rolled the dough and teased it into a horseshoe, making sure the cherries were well spread and that the dough didn’t break. He stroked some melted butter on a baking tray, brushed liquid butter on the rolled-up strudel It makes it glow, he said, and popped it into a medium-high oven.
‘Now Lucia, it will take 40 minutes to bake.’
‘And can I taste it when it’s finished?’
‘Come here, Lucia.’
Lucia came to his arms and breathed in his smell. Bruno’s lips caressed her cheek. ‘We shall taste it when it’s finished,’ he said.
Lucia pressed against him as if to quiet the ripples he aroused. ‘And we shall taste it while we wait.’
First published at Mind Caviar and subsequently at Ether Books, Excite, and in the collection by AstridL entitled Consuming the Muse – erotic tales.
AstridL is a little old lady who lives in the back of Sylvia Petter´s garden where she likes to dream up stories. She has a much neglected blog with information on her doings.
Whenever our family got together, it was inevitable that we would sit and tell stories. We would gather in my grandparents’ adjoining kitchen and living room, tjinja on the floor to make room on the couches and chairs for our elders. Here at the heart of the festive and crowded house, no one would be out of earshot. Yarns were unravelled and our feelings rose and fell. It was as if we were on a ship and the prairie around us was an ocean and in all that rolling whiteness, my grandparents’ house was our safe harbour. The stories often reminded us of the many dangers that existed then and in the past in what seemed such a placid and familiar world.
At Christmas, Grandma always told the final story. That was our tradition. It was about my great-aunt Rosa when she was a child in Russia.
Enunciating with care in her precise English, Grandma Zehen told the story. Her narration was theatrical and thrilling, but still heartfelt and purely told. She would fill in detail and sentiment, adding dialogue to suit. But most engaging of all, she always told the story as if it were ours. This may not have been strictly so; it may have been cultural lore as much as family history. I never felt that it mattered — I just remember waiting for the story every Christmastime.
Lights were dimmed, candles lit. Out came the platters of Christmas cookies from the warmth of Grandma’s oven. Fresh baked, we had been smelling them since the stories began, all of us waiting for them to arrive. I will never forget the candy taste of the pink icing, the buttery aroma with just a hint of vanilla. I can still see the glint of the crystal sugar in the candlelight. Best of all, dee tjinja got first pick from the overflowing trays!
Grandma began her special story once everyone had their cookies and we chewed as quietly as we could to listen. The room hushed as Grandma rose and drew herself up tall, her back straight, to tell our favourite story.
* * *
Okay, if all the children are comfy, I’ll start… Not too far from the city of Odessa and the shores of a faraway place called the Black Sea, there was a region called Molotschna Colony — “Milk River,” you know, as Englanders sometimes say it. Molotschna was home to many Mennonite villages. My mother’s sister, my Taunte Rosa, attended grade school in one of the villages there. By state dictate, the lessons were taught in Russian. The teacher, however, was brought in from Germany for the school year. Naturally, she was fluent in Hoch Deutsch — the more formal German language many Molotschna Mennonites had grown up with in church. She spoke Russian too, a stiff and slow-moving version, but best of all, this Lehrerin was also able to fly along in her Mennonite students’ native Plautdietsch. You understand, yes? Low German. Obah, for the schoolkids of course, Plautdietsch was like the difference between stale rye bread and fresh, hot raisin toast with butter!
After Russia’s Godless Revolution, a rule strictly forbade all religion. It was illegal to come together in any kind of gathering for those who intended to pray or worship. Why, even our little get-together today would have been banned under these new laws! Ambitious and meticulous, the government officials were particularly diligent in overseeing the local Mennonites in everything they did: at work, at home, and in Taunte Rosa’s school.
Even so, there were still some aspects of Christianity that refused to fade. In practice, this referred to the calendar and the arrangement of holidays, most of which were based on old religious traditions too deeply ingrained to go away overnight. Christmas ceased to exist, but a single day of rest near the end of December was conditionally permitted in Taunte’s village. Despite this allowance, officially, even the most innocent Yuletide symbols were banned.
Can you imagine? We Mennonites have not experienced oppression like this in Canada — at least not exactly — but let me tell you, this was a definite stimulant to Christmas celebration back then! There is a kind of enthusiasm for things that only forbidding them can produce. Ha! Bibles came out of hiding places. Late-night services were held in barns and haylofts and carols were sung in whispered voices. Even the auf’jefollna cast aside their backsliding ways and rediscovered their fervour! (Grandma smiled and winked at the adults as she told this last part.)
Now kids, I’m sorry for all the big words and grown-up talk! What I am saying to you is that Christmas was taken away. And not just Christmas, but Easter too and even going to Sunday School. It was a mixed-up time, joh? But you little ones shouldn’t worry — the next part of the story is really for you, most of all!
One year, a few days before Christmas Day, Rosa’s mother baked a batch of Christmas cookies, and young Rosa couldn’t stop herself. When no one was looking, she took one of the best, one with thick icing and red and green sugar crystals on top and snuck away. She wrapped it in oiled paper and secured it snugly with a thin ribbon she had saved from her birthday. Her coat had an inside pocket and she placed it there, near her heart.
Imagine the winter sky, children, as big there and just as blue as it is here. Think of Taunte Rosa as she hummed ‘Stille Nacht’ ever so softly while she walked to the schoolhouse, her bootheels squeaking in rhythm on the hard-packed snow path. Rosa, you see, felt guilty for sneaking the cookie and for not telling her mother about her plan. But… you know just how she felt, yes? She wanted to have the cookie so badly and feared if she asked permission, the answer would have surely been no.
After lunch, while the other children dressed to go out and play, Rosa walked, taking tiny steps, to her teacher’s desk and placed the ribboned package in front of her. Fräulein Rosenfeld tilted her head.
“What’s this?”
Rosa stood meekly with her heavy parka hung on one arm. At first, she was terrified, sensing that her teacher was angry and that she had done something wrong. “A present for you, Lehrerin.”
Fräulein answered with a hum and a slight frown. She was a prim woman, thin and neat and somewhat severe. Her brow raised and her eyes flicked up to see if anyone else was in the room. It was empty, the children were all on the playground. Reaching out, she picked up the bundle and unwrapped it with long piano fingers. She placed the dainty ribbon on the desktop with care, its brightness reflected in the varnish. Slowly and with the same delicate touch, she undid the folded oil-paper and then looked down at the Christmas cookie revealed now in the palm of her hand.
“Well, well,” she said, before taking a deep breath and sitting upright in her chair. She paused, pulling her feet under her as if to rise but then changed her mind. “How nice, Rosa. But, tell me please: did your mother give you this, for me?” She left her steady gaze on the child but took care not to stare too hard.
Rosa looked down, cheeks flushing. “Nay, Lehrerin. It was me,” she confessed.
“Nicht Mutti?” replied the teacher in more formal High German; her tone firmer, carrying the faintest taint of accusation.
“Nein, Fräulein. Mother doesn’t know.”
Fräulein Rosenfeld nodded curtly. She stood and walked to the doorway, her swift footsteps like hammer blows on the wood floor. Looking down the hall and then closing the door, she paused there, hands clenching as she gathered her thoughts. Rosa waited, feeling ever smaller next to the tall desk. The door locked with a snap.
“Nah joh,” Fräulein began. When she turned back to Rosa she was smiling, her face bright. “This is so nice.”
Rosa squirmed, basking in the moment.
“It’s just so nice!” Fräulein repeated. “Can we have it now, Rosa?”
The little girl studied her teacher’s face. Then, eyes shining, she said, “Joh!”
Fräulein Rosenfeld looked through the window to the playground. Then she returned to her desk and with eager hands broke the cookie into smaller bits. She ate some of it immediately, passing a piece to Rosa.
They ate together, nibbling busily like church mice. The teacher stood between Rosa and the door. Fräulein fretted from door to window and kept glancing at the large mantle clock on the shelf behind her, above the lined blackboard, keeping watch all the while.
Soon the cookie was gone. The teacher took the wrapper and folded it over and over until it was a small square. She pushed it far down into her pocket, together with the curly ribbon, which she had tied and retied until it was nothing more than a pink knot. She moistened her fingertip and dabbed at the few remaining crumbs. Holding one finger upright in front of her pursed lips, she then took Rosa’s little hands and squeezed them gently, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead in the silent classroom.
“Our secret, joh?” Fräulein said in a whisper.
Rosa nodded, elated to have a secret with her teacher — an honour she did not fully grasp. But perhaps it was just what the Fräulein had been lacking in cold and distant Molotschna, far from her native home in Germany. Just ask any oma or opa whose children have since begun their own lives and families, and they will tell you, it’s easier to feel lonely at Christmas than at any other time of the year.
Fräulein gazed with fondness at the tiny girl, she saw the joy in her eyes and touched her braided blonde hair.
Just then, the first of Rosa’s red-cheeked classmates huffed back into the cloakroom stomping snow off their boots and unwinding scarfs, their yarn-strung mittens wet and dangling. They stared at the two at the front of the classroom. Rosa’s friend Tina called out that they missed her for the game of fox and geese they had played, running in the fresh snow. Before Rosa could reply, the bell rang and she and the other children returned to their seats.
Now tjinja, you might ask, how dangerous was that one innocent küak? Surely no great peril could come from something so harmless? So childlike? But all it would have taken was for the wrong official to find out about the Christmas cookie. What would have happened to your great-aunt Rosa then? Those Russians, obliged by strict orders to investigate, might have gone back to Rosa’s family. Questioned them. Maybe some would have been sent by train to a distant work camp or forced into some hidden cruelty in Moscow. Unknown. Unspeakable. Who knows?
All because of a cookie.
Grandma sat and folded her hands in her lap. The house fell still and silent until Grandpa prayed, his voice solemn and laden with emotion. When he finished, after, “Amen,” we sang, giving thanks for our deliverance, rattling the windows, billowing our hearts; “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…”
* * *
At last, late on Christmas eve, I would lie in bed and retell myself Great-Aunt Rosa’s story. I could feel the packed snow of the path and hear the ticking of the mantle clock in the empty classroom. I hear it still.
Fräulein Rosenfeld was like a relative we saw just once a year — a loyal and trusted member of our family there in the tiny house behind the bakery on Barkman Avenue. Without this visitor from an ocean away and long ago, our Christmas could not be complete.
End
An earlier version of this story appeared in the Canadian lit mag, Red Fez in December 2016.
Mitchell Toews lives and writes lakeside in Manitoba. His writing appears in a variety of literary journals and anthologies. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Everyday heroes, the complicated lives of the quotidian, the beauty in life’s small kindnesses, and the cruelty that rolls off our fingers like pennies to a beggar — these are his preferred territories, often set on the prairies, or in the boreal, or in the hitch of a sigh.
Follow him on the trails, on the water, across the winter ice, or more conveniently at Mitchellaneous.com, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Judah, son of Mattathias, entered Jerusalem limping. He didn’t think a severed toe was a big sacrifice, considering the might of the Seleucid army and all those finely sharpened swords that outnumbered both swords and men in his own army. There was the further disadvantage of his men refusing to fight on the Sabbath, while it was precisely on the Sabbath that Antiochus IV had ordered his army to attack the Jews. He was smart, that Antiochus. He knew the piety of the Jews was an impregnable fortress that would bury them. A thousand of them were slaughtered that day: men, women, children, all letting themselves be pierced by Greek swords. Better death with God than life without Him, they reasoned, and burned like candles in the night.
It was known well beyond the boundaries of their land that the Sabbath of the Jews was untouchable and that made them all the more touchable themselves. On another Sabbath, when the Greeks expected another easy victory, they thought a band of disheveled, poorly armed men was a vision sent to them by Dionysus, the god who gifted them with much drink and merriment the night before. It’s a vision, Antiochus’s men cried as they fled, while Judah, son of Mattathias, son of Hasmon, was more of a vision than others, walking in front of his men, a sword in one hand, a stick in another, and a toe cut in half, leaving a bloody trail. He stopped only when they reached a village where his family temporarily stayed. He signed to the one who walked directly in his bloody footsteps and with words, “Nehora will do it!” dispatched the man to bring his wife.
When Nehora appeared, her black hair cascading down her shoulders and her white robe delineating her charming form, he offered her his foot as a greeting. He knew her so well that he was certain of her response. She took his foot with its hanging toe and surveyed the haggard troops with their swords and sticks and stones.
“Whoever has the biggest stone, step forward!”
Twelve shaggy men, one for each month of the Jewish year, stepped forward, and she selected the one with the biggest stone. She pointed to the ground, silently ordering him to put the stone in front of her. He obeyed and retreated into the rows of men, whereupon she lowered her husband’s foot onto the stone, took a knife that was rumored to have been King Solomon’s out of an ornamented cloth bag, raised her hand and let the knife fall on Judah’s toe, severing it completely from the foot.
She said, “Whatever is half-severed must be severed completely, for a half-severed part is the enemy of health.” We know this because her many disciples wrote down her teachings in a book called Wisdom of Nehora—but as an apocryphal book, it was banned by later rulers.
“We are back to basics here,” said Nehora, perhaps envisioning medical instruments of a more advanced time. She wrapped her husband’s foot in a leaf of a tree famous for stopping bleeding. This tree was not to be found in Judea or anywhere else after the healing of Judah’s foot, which is a great pity indeed, both for people as well as for the tree.
Judah considered the matter of the toe finished, finis, done with. It was noted that not a single cry of pain had escaped his lips during the procedure known in future centuries as the Severing of the Great Toe. Indeed, he had set new standards, or rather new heights, for tolerance of pain in manly silence, not a single facial muscle betraying him by a sudden shaking or jerking or twitching. It was said that he had triumphed over pain just as he had triumphed over the Greeks with their effeminate habits and that he had fulfilled an ancient prophecy about a man with a missing toe who was to win the desecrated Temple back from the enemy. His deformed foot became something of a sacred object itself, and wherever in the Temple he stepped, sacredness reestablished itself as if it had always dwelled there, as indeed it had but with some unpleasant interruptions, the most recent of which had been engineered by Antiochus IV and his minions, who had installed a painted Zeus at the altar.
As soon as Judah stepped inside, he saw pigs’ heads lying everywhere and pigs’ tails sticking out from cracks in stone slabs. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as though his breaths were trying to escape through cracks in his ribs but instead were getting stuck like pigs’ tails on the floor. He turned his head toward the entrance and saw his men waiting for a signal from him. “But it is defiled!” he cried. He shook his fist at the painted Zeus statue, and they understood at once. They jumped at Zeus, pulling him, pushing him, breaking his head with mallets, treating him the way no Olympian god had been treated in his homeland. But this was not Zeus’s homeland. This wasn’t Greece, nor was this the Seleucid Empire, with its pagan worship of the very same Olympians in Antioch, nor was this Rome, with the very same painted gods renamed to sound as though they were born and bred there: Jupiter instead of Zeus; Juno instead of Hera; Venus instead of Aphrodite; Bacchus instead of Dionysus. “How could they even think that people would believe in them?” said Zephirious, one of Judah’s commanders. His Hebrew name, Yemin, was an exact reflection of his position in life: Judah’s right hand. That’s what he was, and Judah trusted his Yemin like his own self.
He also trusted Nehora, but no matter how great a medic she was, a man could trust a woman only so much.
Three years before, when he was still married to Miriam, he went on foot from village to village, looking at the young men lined up just in time for his arrival. His orderlies went ahead of him to prepare the locals, so he wouldn’t have to linger and wait for them. In every village he’d say a short speech in front of a crowd of well-formed men who listened with their ears and eyes wide open, catching every word—and the words were to everyone’s liking, for who among them didn’t want to teach a lesson to the Greeks?
“Who?” asked Judah rhetorically.
“We all do!” roared the men. Whereupon he watched them wrestle, paired off on a dusty village road, and he invariably chose the winners, while the losers rolled away, covered with the same dirt and dust as the winners.
In one village he saw a young woman ministering to the losers, and as she poured water from an earthen jug onto bruised bodies, he saw that her face was the moon and the sun, her eyes the stars, and her mouth a river of honey, and he wanted nothing so much as to go on watching her care for those poor wretches who would never win the honor of pushing the Seleucid army into a hell of their own making where they belonged as surely as their Zeus belonged on the Olympus, which, Judah had never failed to add, was a mountain in Greece…a mountain, you understand, in Greece, you understand, not in our Judea, where hills we have, yes, but mountains—no! He approached her with his arms outstretched—wash mine, too, woman! But she silently showed him the empty jug: not a drop left, and as she put it down on the ground, he continued to stand like a beggar in front of her, his hands outstretched, as something better than water was pouring onto them.
“The force!” he exclaimed inside his own head, for although he had power over men, he had none over women. Or at least he thought so, which is why he made that exclamation about the force inside his own head, instead of letting it out of his mouth and into her ears, which surely were as well-formed as the rest of her. But beauty was not the point; the force was the point. What he said out loud surprised Yemin, his right-hand man: “I’d rather you were a hag.” Judah dwelled on this for a second, and then added, as an afterthought, “‘Tis true, be a hag.”
A few more moments passed while she stared at the ground, not daring to meet his eyes. After standing there for as long as he could bear, he finally turned to Yemin with the words, “Let us proceed,” and without so much as a look or any kind of farewell, he left her standing next to her empty jug.
He collected the winners, and with an all-inclusive gesture ordered them to walk beside the winners from previously visited villages. And so they walked on to the next village, where they watched another wrestling match, and again winners were added to the growing army, and losers were left with women who poured water onto them and ministered to their pitiable scratches. But none of the women had a face like the moon, and certainly none like the moon and the sun combined, and anyway it was not the face that mattered, he said to himself in the darkness of his own mind. He could no longer remember the face, only her force that still encircled him like a shimmering cloud. He could not escape from that cloud even at home when he made love to his wife of many years, his faithful Miriam, daughter of Miriam the Senior, herself once a woman of beauty, now only a rag of bones and skin and disjointed mumbling.
His wife, Miriam Junior, could sense something unusual, as though the shimmering cloud in which the other woman enwrapped him was her own doing, and he too wanted to believe that this amorous shimmering was for the love of her, his wife and the mother of his sons, but he felt the shimmering go out of his body precisely when he touched her. He didn’t like this new feeling, and he repeated to himself that he loved his wife, he loved his wife.
He went to the village a few weeks later, alone, and demanded to see the woman of the jug. When she was fetched by an old hunchback, half-male, half-female, and stood before him with her face like the moon and the sun, he said loudly, as though to convince himself: “I cannot love you, for I love my wife.”
She said nothing at all; she only sent forth more shimmerings. The cloud that had enwrapped him in her absence became so dense that he found it impossible to breathe. It was beginning to get into his nostrils and his lungs, the shimmering that emanated from this woman of the jug. She had no jug. She had nothing at all. She stood defenseless in front of him, except for the shimmerings that must surely be the work of Satan himself. Or else of God. “Yes, why not God?” he asked her, and as she made no answer, he commanded her: “Speak!” She remained silent.
“I shall tolerate your silence no more,” he roared. “For I am certain of one thing, if ever I was certain of anything, it is that I have been bewitched. But I must know on whose orders I have been bewitched. God’s? Or Satan’s? And speak you shall, because you are the tool he used, and doubtless you are familiar with the perpetrator.”
She continued her silence, so he tempered his impatience and changed his roar into a sweet voice no woman could resist and again asked her to name the perpetrator, as he called the force that had outdone him. The sweetness of his voice was more powerful than his roar, and she said simply, “It was neither God, nor Satan. His name is Eros. He is the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.”
Ah, how he cursed upon hearing that it was the Greeks again! The Greeks had bewitched him, even as he was walking on his own two feet from village to dusty village, gathering the strongest Jews to defeat them, there they were, the Greeks, preemptive as ever, defeating him in the guise of their child-god, Eros, and this woman who had been sent by Eros to unman him.…If she had said it was God who had made them pass through her into him, he would have succumbed, because obeying God’s will, no matter how incomprehensible, was a man’s duty, a badge of honor. But he would not succumb to a Greek child-god with a quiver of toy arrows that he shoots at random.
“Are you sure it was him?” he asked. “Describe him.”
“I’m certain it was him,” she replied. “And I’m certain he meant no harm. But what is done is done. The shimmerings we both feel are nothing but the result of his shooting us with his arrows. You don’t have to turn your life upside down because of them.”
“I shall go home,” he said, “I shall go home to my wife, and I shall love her as she deserves to be loved. No Greek boy-gods with their arrows are going to stop a pious Jew from loving his lawful wife.”
And away he went, leaving her with half of the shimmerings, which she wrapped around her body like a shawl, for the sky was growing darker and the air colder….
The Olympians were having a bit of fun with him; he had to give it to them. Yet wasn’t the very fact of their paying him so much attention itself a sign that they were unsure of their victory? The Greeks must be very weak indeed, if their gods resorted to low tricks like this one,…just so he could bring home another woman. Now he could see it all. It was all so clear to him. The pagan gods had tried their hands at military strategy, and all they could come up with was this new woman and the disturbance she would create in his family as well as in his inner self—for if there ever was a one-woman man, it was Judah, son of Mattathias, nicknamed Maccabeus, the progenitor of the Hasmonean dynasty that would extend the Jewish rule over the Galilee and Iturea and Perea and Idumea and Samaria and that could boast of great advances in every field….
He did not go to Nehora’s village again. He sent Yemin, for they would remember him no less than they remembered Judah himself, with a written order to bring the woman who had ministered to the losers. The woman with the jug. He omitted the comparisons of her face to the heavenly bodies, as he knew that such things were subjective, and that no matter how objectively beautiful the woman was, no one else might see her resemblance to the moon and the sun and the stars, and the fact that he had the little Greek god Eros to thank for it—he couldn’t name it, whatever it was, still concealed in the shimmering cloud; it was more than lust, and even more than love. Whether it was Hermes or Eros who had brought it about, he didn’t care. He had his God. And even if she of the shimmering cloud had been sent forth by the enemy gods with the single purpose of creating a commotion in his life and weakening him before the next battle, they had failed, because when the cloud finally receded, he saw that he had a new wife and that she was faithful of heart and mind. She adored his children. After the initial period of pain in which they couldn’t help but miss their mother, the children grew to love Nehora too. And she feared his God, the one and only, and him, Judah, she loved fiercely and fully, the way she loved winners and ministered to wrecks.
Chapter Three
A few days after the feast with the peace seekers—who proved to the Maccabees the high quality of the grain and other provisions they had gifted them following God’s edicts—the Maccabees defeated the small Assyrian force at Nahal el-Haramiah. It was as though the prophesied victory couldn’t wait, as though it was hiding right around the corner. It came almost as soon as the battle began and with hardly any loss of Maccabean blood.
By then the Maccabean meant not only the five brothers—Judah, Jonathan, Eleazar, Simon, and John Gaddi—but the whole army of traditionalist Jews who defied Antiochus’s edict to worship the Olympian idols and who couldn’t forget the loss of a thousand women, children, infants, and old men; hundreds had been massacred in the space of three days and hundreds more sold into slavery on the orders of the same Antiochus who had sacked Jerusalem and whose protégé Apollonius was among the first to fall in this most propitious battle.
Judah removed the sword from the hand of the corpse that had ruled Samaria, and later, at night, when everyone slept exhausted by the day’s battle, he cleaned and shined the blade until it gave off a light of its own. In the morning he announced to the citizens of Samaria their freedom from the pagan yoke. As he spoke to the crowd of Samaritans, he held the sword in his raised hand. The crowd did not need to be told who it had belonged to—they all knew that the man who ruled them so ruthlessly lay dead. In Judah’s hands, the sword became more than a mere weapon, because by fulfilling one prophecy—Mattathias’s last words to Judah were now common knowledge—it became a promise of more prophecies similarly fulfilled, although not as easily as the victory at Nahal el-Haramiah.
The people remembered Judah’s first entrance into the Temple, when he had laid his eyes on the defilement inflicted by Antiochus’s lackeys. Now, at his return to it, they gathered to celebrate. Pigs’ heads and tails had been removed from the Temple and carried far out of Jerusalem in order not to contaminate anyone inside the city walls.
The guests poured in, looking for empty seats on the long benches that lined the walls of the reception hall. This was a very special occasion indeed: the return to Jerusalem and the rededication of the Temple.
“How many millennia does one have to live to witness a miracle?” Judah asked the guests.
He spoke to the guests, the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Essenes, and to those simple souls who did not belong to any faction but had helped him win battle after battle. He said it was the fervor of these simple souls that he valued most in battle, because it was not just the fighting of Greeks or Jews that mattered, as it was not simply mortal men fighting each other but the gods of the Greeks with the God of the Jews—and this is where faith mattered, he said. In his speech, as at a start of battle, Judah was carried along by a force. The force knew what he had to say, so he didn’t have to make any decisions because the words came naturally to him and at the right time, like fruit falls from a tree: all he had to do was adjust his energy to the flow of the force, and the force took over. Now the force was saying, “Behold the visitors!”
Later, when he had time to think, he began to doubt it was really the force that had said those words or any of the words that followed. He noticed that Yemin, his right-hand man, was no longer by his side, and strange as it was not to have Yemin near, it was even stranger to see a man of Yemin’s stature standing in the back of the hall, behind the benches, in the dark corner near a back wall. Judah heard the clamor of the guests change abruptly from a roar into a stunned silence, as if indeed there was a miracle being performed. He felt it with his whole being, down to the small hairs on the back of his neck, which were rising as though magnetized. He turned around slowly, so as not to appear undignified in case whatever it was behind him had the power not only to surprise him but to awe him as well. When he turned and saw the three visitors, he no longer cared about appearing dignified.
“You spoiled the vision,” he rebuked Yemin later, when the hall was being cleaned by Idumean servant girls who had been instructed not to utter a word of what they had heard, under the penalty of death.
“You, Yemin, with your face to that back wall, either imagined or dreamed it in your half-sleep, and with the grain of doubt growing and overshadowing the vision, you transmitted it to me….
Yemin said, as softly as before: “I heard voices in the silence, and I knew it was the three visitors speaking to each other loudly enough to be overheard, yet quietly enough for anyone listening to realize that this was a very private conversation, the kind that happens in a dream with the soul of a dear departed, and the fact that I was allowed to eavesdrop on it had to do with a wish of these visitors to make the private public, a custom that has much to recommend itself, certainly more than keeping the private private, a practice that would have deprived the people of His Word.
“I saw a house being built. Some of the builders, who had already finished the foundation and most of the first floor, were now working on divisions between rooms on the second floor. That was when one of the visitors, who until that moment was standing with the other two to the left of the construction site, went up to the master builder and asked if the floor they were working on was intended for him, and when the master builder said no, his was actually the foundation, the patriarch exclaimed, ‘What? You’re putting me in the pit?’, whereupon the master builder explained that the pit was not quite the right word for the lovely quarters they had built for him, and as the foundation had been completed, he offered to give Abraham a tour, to which Abraham grudgingly acquiesced.
“‘This would be your own room,’ said the master builder, after they went down a few newly built steps, ‘And this,’ he said with a circular gesture, inviting Abraham to make himself comfortable, ‘is the room of your miracle. Since it was the first major one, it has become the foundation of our faith, which explains why we placed you in the foundation of the house.’
“‘Which miracle was that?’ Abraham grumbled like an old man that he was, and the master builder hurriedly reminded him, ‘The one where your own beloved son, lying tied on top of a mountain like a sacrificial lamb, was spared death by his father, the one in which your own hand with a knife raised over his shivering form had let go of the weapon. The one in which your faith had been tested, don’t you see it reenacted again and again?’
“The master builder pointed at the center of the room, which was round and elevated to look like the top of the famous mountain, but Abraham shrugged and said that it was a pity he had misunderstood His command and had been ready to sacrifice his own son, which had scarred poor Isaac for the rest of his life.
“‘The misunderstanding was a lesser miracle,’ the master builder said quickly, ‘We moved it into a corner, as you can see.’
“He pointed to what would have been a corner if the room hadn’t been completely round. At this point the distinguished visitor expressed a wish to go outside, for the lack of air in the foundation was hard to tolerate. The builder obliged, supporting the old man as he climbed up the stairs, while Abraham moaned and complained of pain in his knees and back. When he rejoined the little group and told the other two visitors what he had seen, they too expressed a wish to see their quarters.
“It was the turn of Moses to look at the first floor with its large parlor, the far side of which was divided evenly into ten spaces, one for each of the plagues, the builder explained. When Moses gave his guide a look of utter incomprehension, the man hurriedly listed the plagues, pointing at each of the stalls:
“‘Blood in rivers. Frogs. Lice. Wild animals. Pestilence. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. Deaths of the first-born.’
“‘But you’re housing miracles like livestock in a barn!’ Moses said with indignation so terrible it made the man tremble with fear that the old one’s next miracle might well be directed at the poor builder himself. In his defense he said that, indeed, this was to be a house of miracles, and it was being built according to specific instructions they received from you-know-who, as each miracle was to be preserved for future generations ‘intact,’ the instructions said, and as the space was limited, and as there were so many miracles to be housed on the first floor, they were forced to…as you can see, we have them all here.
“‘Is that my burning bush?’ Moses said in a voice that the master builder would hear in his sleep every night to the end of his days. They were both looking at the center of the room.
“‘This is not for me to say,’ the master builder said diffidently. ‘We’re building to exact specifications…We invent nothing…’
“‘Very well,’ said Moses, ‘I shall speak with the one who’s behind it all.’
“He went outside and told the other two what he had seen, whereupon the third one, known for his wisdom, said he would pass on the tour of the second floor, and not only that, he said firmly to the disappointed builder, he also wanted to offer his own part of the house to the Maccabees, because their miracle was the kind that would light up the hearts, while his was merely wisdom.
“You remember, Judah,” said Yemin, “After I mentally transmitted these words to you and you said them out loud to the public, the people began to stir. The people have done plenty of listening; they demanded to see the shimmering patriarchs and the house of miracles with their own eyes….They felt especially hurt that on a day like today, a day like no other, they had been treated to a scam, a fraud, a swindle. What little shimmering they were able to see for themselves was quite formless to them, and as they could see neither the house under construction nor the patriarchs themselves, they became quite agitated. Someone shouted, ‘Impostors!’ More voices joined in, and soon a loud outcry shook the hall: ‘Impostors! All three of them! Bring water, pour it on them! That’ll teach them how to fool us with their shining!’”
“And then you, Judah, rushed to the center of the hall where the Shimmering Ones stood still, as though they couldn’t believe that this blaspheming crowd had descended from the same people they had led out of captivity and protected and ruled with patience and wisdom. No, these must be some other people, if they couldn’t recognize their own forefathers, shimmering and translucent though they were. You held your arms wide apart as though to protect them from the crowd, but your outstretched arms must have seemed more of a menace than a comfort to them as their shimmering grew duller and soon dimmed altogether.
“‘No!’ you cried, “We are still your people! Your great-great, and so forth, sons! But we’re tired of old stories and thirsty for new miracles. I wish to ask you…’ you lowered yourself on your knees, ‘to address the assembly, one of you, or all three of you…if you could give meaning to us, something to raise our spirits and give us hope, a true speech, words that come directly from God. Inspired words are what we need, because we are a people that cannot live without inspiration.’
“‘What inspiration do you want other than the miracle of the oil, which will shortly take place in the Temple?’ said Abraham.
“‘No,’ said Moses decisively. ‘Words are not the way to impress a new miracle onto the weary consciousness of our people. We must create a symbol strong enough to be reenacted every year, for millennia. It shall be called Hanukkah, and it shall be born thus. First, we must make them see the small cruse of oil, the only one that is still sealed. Then we must impress upon them that there is no oil left anywhere else. They must see it with their own eyes: not a drop, anywhere.’
“‘We don’t have to try very hard since they’ve seen empty jars lying among the refuse that littered the Temple. The Greeks had opened them and poured the oil out just to spite us,’ you said.
“‘Still, it would be nice to impress it upon their consciousness how little there is, or was. How it can’t last longer than a day,’ said Solomon.
“‘And when it does…’ said Moses.
“‘There’s your miracle,’ said Abraham.
“‘You don’t mean,’ you said to them, “you don’t mean to say that all miracles…are made like this’ ….
Judah stood by the altar, and as he was about to pour a few drops of oil into each of the seven lamps, the jar in his hand reflected the light that wasn’t coming yet from the menorah because it was still unlit. But the light was there, the light was of the future, and as he looked at the men around him, he saw their faces lit by the glow of this future light, and he saw everything that would come from this moment, all the prayers for all the Hannukahs for millennia to come, and all the humiliations, all the expulsions, and all the massacres, but he couldn’t remember the details because they flashed by so quickly, and the men behind the menorah were still saying the words of a prayer when the vision evaporated and his hand dropped the first drop of oil into the first lamp.
Moscow born, Nina Kossman is a bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Her English short stories and poems have been published in US, Canadian and British journal. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary journals. Among her published works are two books of poems in Russian and English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two collections of short stories, an anthology, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myth, published by Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her new book of poems and translations has just been published. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Spanish. She received a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundacion Valparaiso. She lives in New York.
First December in Lawrence, Kansas
I spelled its name in my mind, extatic,
eyes on the fresh visa in my Romanian passport:
A M E R I C A. I hadn’t foreseen
crossing a baseball diamond on foot
in Lawrence, Kansas, the shortcut
to the University bus station.
Early morning. Snow up to my knees.
No one told me the first things I needed:
a driver’s license, a vehicle, winter tires.
I wrap my neck, my chin in the scarf
my grandmother knitted, hid in my suitcase.
I touch my cheeks, expecting to see blood
on the tips of my fingers,
after the wind gust that slapped me.
I part my lips: A M E R I C A.
Each letter sound drops at my feet,
an icicle, or a snowflake.
Last Christmas tree with Dorin
The last Christmas tree in the market leaned against the corner by the window of our living room, in the place of a seldom-watered rhododendron.
My dad dragged it drunk by a rope, like a stray dog with patches of lost fur, wrestling weak in the knot.
Propped up, we wrapped it in garlands of tissue paper, hard candy hung with white thread. From the top of the dresser, decorations in plastic filigran and tin lace.
Dad fell asleep with his head on the table, as we lit up the candles, not too close to the cotton wadding imitating snow. With the lights off we whispered our dearest carol
”Aseară pe-nserate, fecioara Maria,
În Viflaim cetate, călătorind venea”
My brother’s eyelids droopy, as he nestled with mom on the couch. Out the window, in the golden cone of the street light, an owl stretched out its large wings.
Daniela Hendea is a Romanian-American poet and translator. Her first collection of poetry, Acordor de teremin (Theremin Tuner), was published at Fractalia Press, Bucharest, in 2018. Her poetry and literary translations have been published in Romanian (Familia, Apostrof, Ateneu, Echinox), Italian (Un Posto di Vacanza), English (Asymptote, Entropy, Fragmented Voices). An editor of the Romanian publication Prăvălia Culturală, she lives in Texas.
The Numbering at BethlehemAfter Pieter Bruegel
They have not gathered to enjoy themselves,
their full pockets will soon be emptied.
A mother struggles to hold her little boy
next to the tax gatherer’s desk.
A woman cooks outside,
her two children play nearby,
her husband hurries to help;
the axe on the long trunks.
Some other men, husbands no doubt,
stop working to chat. The pond is crowded
with ice-skating kids and men
with backs bent by baskets.
On a mule’s back, a woman in a blue mantle
and a man slip in among the others.
The carts left outside overnight
are covered with a mantle of snow.
Sense of Things
After Wallace Stevens
The snow has fallen and gone
like a lost precious jewel
we held in our hands.
It's not easy to express this feeling:
it’s the return to the world of logic
after having savoured the magic.
It's time of disillusion
after a fleeting joy given by the sky.
Yet human strength carries on,
a rose is blooming in the icy cold.
My dear,
Counting the days before your arrival,
I dream of you.
You don't know me yet
but I promise it will be fun together.
We will be in the kitchen fire-fighting
on the biggest truck ever seen,
will sail the most dangerous waves
on a pirate boat in the bathroom sink.
As I look around, Christmas decorations
loop from everywhere and windows stop people
in the streets. I feel Pinocchio
in the Land of Toys. Should I regret
to be a child still, though I am an adult?
I can't wait to hold you;
so delicate and precious.
You will smile. And I will be yours.
Your aunt
(After a line from Hartley Coleridge)
Chiara Salomoni is Italian and lives in London. She graduated in Oriental Languages and Literature (specialising in Chinese studies) from Ca’ Foscari University. Some of her English poems appear on Vivienne Westwood’s Climate Revolution website and on The Blue Nib Digital Platform. Her translation of Silvio Ramat’s poem was given an Honorable Mention in the Stephen Spender Prize in 2014. In 2015 she read from her translations of Andrea Zanzotto at the Poetry Library in London. One of her translations of Zanzotto and her homage were published in Poem in 2018. One of her children’s poems was on a poetry illustration display at the Royal Marsden Hospital in collaboration with Sutton High School at the beginning of 2020. Her translations of three poems by Corrado Govoni appear on The Blue Nib Digital Platform. She is a member of the Tideway Poets.
I wrote what will follow before the election in the United States was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I’m tempted to delete and replace it with nothing more than this quote from a beloved leader, Jack Layton, in his posthumous letter to my country.
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
— Jack Layton
But there is also work to be done to bring the change that Jack Layton foresaw. There is a stain to erase and prevent from coming back.
This, from last night:
Four years ago, following the election of Donald Trump in the United States, my neighboring country, I spent the night vomiting into a freshly-scoured toilet bowl.
Until that moment, I had been a Conservative Christian, attending and adhering to either the Mennonite faith of my mother’s heritage, or the Seventh-day Adventist one of my father.
That ended in November of 2016, when my white, Christian, American counterparts overwhelmingly, by exit polls of 81%, aligned themselves with and ensured the election of a man who had cheated on all of his wives, admitted to and laughed about assaulting women, mocked a disabled reporter, denigrated war heroes both living and dead, and incited hatred and violence against People of Colour: people who are children of this earth, no matter where they live or whom they love.
All these things, he did, and so many more, throughout a monstrously vice-filled life, and a divisive, self-serving campaign that turned out to be just the beginning. Children in cages would come next.
Tonight, as the 2020 election in the United States comes to its achingly slow conclusion, we know, I know, that a small percentage of the American president’s white Evangelical, Mainline and Catholic supporters have left his side. Overwhelmingly, they have not. And while trying to wrap my understanding around this once again, while trying to put words to this everlasting grief, I found a few paragraphs by novelist, essayist and screenwriter Dean Bakopoulos, re-posted by ministry candidate Elle Dowd, on Facebook earlier today.
Instead of discussing how how he, how I, can further distance myself from certain white communities, Bakopoulos instead writes about how white people are needed to redeem them.
These, clearly, are the new mission fields. And much of what Bakopoulos proposes we plant them with is art and thought and science.
And so, for the remainder of my space here, I’m going to yield this platform and ask, if you are white, like me. Christian and/or otherwise, like me. Still binding up your heart, discouraged and disillusioned with your own people, like me, please read Dean Bakopoulos and consider how to make this a possibility where you live. Consider, too, that if there are stories here in WordCity that speak to you, that they may very well be the seeds for this soil we’ve been given.
White liberals like to do a lot of their work in communities of color, but this election has shown us that white progressives have the most work to do in the rural white communities. Communities of color have shown us that they’re doing their own work and doing it well.
But we have a major deficit in white communities, particularly in rural white communities–of creativity, of compassion, of critical thinking, of care. It’s easier to go into marginalized communities–white saviors–and feel good about the work we do. But those communities feel so good to work in precisely because they have so much creativity, compassion, care, critical thinking.
It’s much more difficult to deal with the spiritual and political toxicity in white communities. More dangerous, more emotionally treacherous. But that’s really what we must do next…
You won’t sway the votes of MAGA voters with logic or numbers or a pandemic that has killed a quarter of a million of their fellow citizens.
We’ve learned that. We need a revolution that brings art and history and science to the young people that live among the MAGA crowd, that sets them up for a higher education that makes them critical thinkers. Not political work, but heart work. Mind work. Our [white] communities are sick. We like to believe we an heal other communities, but we’re not dealing w
Bakopoulos has more to say in his original, now viral, post, for which I encourage you to visit his Facebook page.
Whatever you take from this, I am personally grateful for the author’s words. Because no matter what comes next, spending any time wrapped around a toilet on account of a hateful man with too much power for at least another eleven weeks, is time we cannot afford to waste. That’s why we create WordCity every month.
That’s why, this year, before we knew what would happen across the border, I picked up my pen instead of getting out my bleach and my brush.
Podcast by Contributing Editor Jane SpokenWord
In this month’s podcast we introduce you to Arthur ‘Art’ Collins, a poet, educator, and mediator. A believer in the transformative power of literature, “Art the poet” is a natural sayer and teller of all that is. A restorative justice practitioner with a solid background in Education, Nonprofit Organizations, Youth Development, Coaching, and Crisis Intervention, he is committed to ending the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ by encouraging solutions that allow more students to remain in school and continue their education. As one who identifies symbols and markers in society his commitment to the agenda of humanity is unwavering. ~ Jane SpokenWord
This month we have four stories for you. Three are by Canadian writers and one by a UK writer with a more musical bent. All four stories deal with individuals who are a bit “different” and therein lies their humanity enriching us through seeing it.
Jenn Ashton´s story, “Still”, deals with a husband with dystonia and appears in her collection, People Like Frankand other stories from the edge of normal published byTidewater Press, in 2020.
Janice MacDonald´s story, “The Piano” reminded me of Tim O´Brien´s seminal short story “The Things They Carried” from his collection of linked stories of the same name in that a thing, the piano, and its various iterations mirrored all the ups and downs of a life.
Anne Sorbie´s satirical yet “Modest Proposal for Sending Alberta Children Back to School” is presented in the form of a pseudo-academic research proposal.
Finally, John Ravenscroft, an English writer, musician, gentleman farmer, lover of wildlife, in his prize-winning story “Crazy Gene” explores a father´s madness and a son´s coming to terms therewith. Rather than the usual bio and photo, I have included John Ravenscroft´s old and still functioning website because of the wealth of material that could be useful for emerging and seasoned writers alike, and also to showcase his current musical passion. ~ Sylvia Petter
Patrick Gathara
Thanks to Dr. Alexandra Guerson from the University of Toronto who directed me to this “brilliant thread by a Kenyan journalist, @gathara, covering the American elections using the same language American media uses to cover elections in African countries”. ~ Sylvia Petter, Contributing Editor of Fiction (and satire), WordCity Monthly
(presented with permission)
#BREAKING November 1. Polls are set to open in 48 hours across the US as the authoritarian regime of Donald Trump attempts to consolidate its hold over the troubled, oil-rich, nuclear-armed, north American nation. Analysts are sceptical the election will end months of political violence.
#BREAKING African envoys have called for Americans to maintain peace during the elections and to be prepared accept the outcome of the vote. In a joint statement , the diplomats condemned recent incidents of incitement, violence and intimidation directed at opposition supporters
#BREAKING A team of African election observers led by the famed explorer, Milton Allimadi, who discovered the Gulu River in Europe, is en route to the seaside capital of Washington DC where they are expected to separately meet with Mr Trump and opposition candidate, Joe Biden.
#BREAKING Milton Allimadi, head of the African election observer group, urged US media to be responsible in its reporting, and take care not to inflame the already tense situation. “We urge American journalists to preach the gospel of peace and acceptance of election results”.
Since there is a growing number of COVID-19 cases among the province’s school-age population, our proposal suggests closing schools immediately and forming a test group to better determine and predict future rates of infection.
First, we highly recommend engaging in the test group, the children of Alberta’s 1% who are currently registered for the 2020 / 2021 school year. These children best represent the most advantaged of the population, and those most equipped to handle the socio-economic losses and future health challenges, possibly long term, that the test may incur. Side effects may include contracting COVID-19, having an inflammatory response to CV19 that leads to multi-organ failure, coma, intubation and ICU stays, the infection of siblings, parents, grandparents and other extended family members, and exponentially, their immediate family members, friends and community contacts. Additionally, death may occur in a very few cases. These elite children (or subjects) will be conscripted. However, if the children volunteer to take part, their parents can avoid the province’s newly minted wealth tax. Volunteer subjects will be included in the test on a first come first served basis and will represent students from a number of undisclosed schools.
When I was six years old my father went mad and attacked himself with a hammer.
People don’t go mad these days, not like they used to. They have phobias and ‘episodes’ and anxiety attacks instead. They have bipolar depression, or schizophrenia. I reckon there’s at least a dozen fancy-sounding psychoses to choose from – some you can even mix and match. But back in 1959 when I was a snot-nosed kid, things weren’t so complicated. Either you were sane, or you were mad. It was a two-sided coin, and the edge didn’t count. Dad’s coin flipped, got plucked out of the air still spinning, and was slapped down on the kitchen table. It said mad. From that point on, that’s what he was. A loon. A nutter. Three sheets to the wind.
A few times a year I start to feel the walls closing in. The house seems smaller and I realize that it’s probably getting too cluttered in here. Although I watched Marie Kondo’s program on decluttering religiously and even bought the book, the habits did not completely form and after a year of collecting old clothes and odds and ends and donating them to Goodwill each month, I’m afraid I fell off the “tidy” wagon.
Our house isn’t exactly messy though. Rather it just begins to feel close when stuff starts to pile up—books, dog toys and even plants, especially because lately I’ve been on a succulent binge and my entire desk has been taken over by all the lovely shapes and colors. But, with three small, very active dogs and my husband Charlie in the house, it can feel a bit like a whirlwind of activity in here. Sometimes I know that it’s also my mind that needs to calm and declutter too, and tidying the house will help with that, so last Saturday I flicked on the TV to watch Marie’s happy little frame and rewatched my favorite episode, the one with the vet, and then felt refreshed and ready to revisit my clutter.
The nuns were amazingly accommodating of her mother, a Protestant divorcee, who couldn’t get through traffic to pick her up till after four. Normally, girls at the convent school didn’t start piano lessons right away, but they called the music teacher, who ran her through some exercises, pronounced her musical and agreed to take her every day after school for lessons and practise sessions, and the Burser beamed and sorted out the paperwork for Mommy to sign. Providing she was baptized, no of course it didn’t matter what religion, they would take her.
When class was over each day, she took her coat and lunch box up to the music rooms, and practised her scales and pieces. Sister would give her a lesson one day a week, and one of the older girls, Julie or Melucia, would oversee her practise each other day. She sometimes was allowed to practise in one of the bird rooms, where finches sang in cages, but most often she was in a room with one or two pianos, a window and a relatively sound-proof door. The practice rooms ran along a balcony hall above the gymnasium, and oftentimes she could watch the older girls play volleyball or basketball, themselves practising, practising.
At home, there was no piano to play. Sister had given her a cardboard keyboard, which she unfolded on the kitchen table and dutifully practised the fingering of her scales. Mommy smiled up from the other side of the table where she marked other children’s homework. Someday she would be able to play some of the little pieces for Mother, when they had a piano of their own.
This month’s creative non-fiction contributions are full of travel. Italian poet and essayist, Franca Mancinelli, and her American translator (also writer and critic), John Taylor, take us on a much-needed excursion to Fano, Italy. The trip to this picturesque, historic coastal town in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, once a settlement belonging to the Roman Empire, lets us revisit a fascinating past, though this also unearths an old story—of women persecuted and burned as witches. Novelist and short-story writer, Irena Karafilly, treats us to her “paranoid musings” on a visit she made to Djerba. It’s a l97-square-mile Mediterranean island off the coast of Tunisia, which still wears its history—that of a scenic, exotic, and bustling contact zone for numerous ancient cultures.
Gary Fowlie continues his “Covid Recovery Road Trip.” On his way to Canada, where he plans to take a respite and recover from the lasting and debilitating effects of his bout with Covid, he passes through Minneapolis, Minnesota, then grappling with the fallout from the murder of George Floyd. Despite the unrest there in early June, Fowlie writes as a witness: “There is a sensibility about the people of Minnesota that gave me hope as I watched them….If any state can face and fix the scourges of racism and white supremacy, it would be Minnesota.” From the vantage point of this date, November 7, just days after Minnesotans chose Biden as America’s next president, Fowlie’s words come across as especially prescient.
An exceptionally moving account of life with Ollier’s disease, comes to us from the accomplished Jessica Penner. Her strength as a woman and writer, the depth of her testimony as she describes her personal struggles, are remarkable. Ultimately, her wisdom, as Penner watches a total eclipse in Nebraska, to which she has travelled to gaze on a phenomenon she’s unlikely to see again in her lifetime, transports the reader to a place of spiritual comfort that isn’t bound by space or time.
Finally, my own piece on the series Lovecraft Country, also takes up the themes of travel, racism in America, as well as courage and resilience in the face of forces that threaten to overwhelm us. Welcome dear readers! Enjoy! ~ Olga Stein
Gary Fowlie
A Covid Recovery Road Trip Part 2
An overweight, out of shape young man is jogging. He stops and sweats all over the sidewalk on an uphill stretch of Edgecombe Avenue in Washington Heights. He wears no mask and shows no concern for this busy stretch of pavement, where other old masked men like me have escaped our lockdown for a walk, in hopes of unlocking housebound muscles.
I pass and I hold my tongue, but when I hear him panting up from behind, I turn, stretch my arms out and yell, “If you’re not going to cover up at least keep your distance.” He ignores me and chugs right past. “Arrogant fucking millennial,” I send his way but soon regret it—not because he stops and sends me back an exaggerated unmasked cough, and follows that up with, “I hope you die Gramps!”
It’s not his fault he doesn’t know that I’m in recovery and may or may not be immune to the Covid bug that hopped, skipped, and jumped its way down 162nd Street to bite my 65-year-old ass. No, I regret my comment only because my temper got the best of me. When he turned to jog away I hit out again, this time going even lower: “Your parents must be very proud of you.” I should have known better. My mother once told me to never forget how easy it is to raise someone else’s kids. She was right. I’m sure his parents did the best they could. That he turned out to be a self-centered ass isn’t their fault.
To begin with, a word of advice: If you’re thinking of travelling to North Africa, do not read Paul Bowles! I knew nothing about the Tunisian island of Djerba, except its being a mecca for European sun worshippers. It was February and I needed rest and sunshine. I made the mistake of reading Bowles’ “The Delicate Prey” on the plane.”
Houmt Souk is an ancient town, once renowned for its silk and wool, its trans-Saharan slave trade. Its history has left Jerba with a small black minority which today shares the l97-square-mile Mediterranean island not only with Berbers, but with the descendants of Arab invaders, persecuted Jews, Greek and Maltese sponge fishermen.
I met a local woman for tea at a fonduk, a modernized inn where Ottoman merchants once sought shelter along with their camels. The Arischa had studded portals painted cerulean blue and a whitewashed courtyard festooned with purple bougainvillea. My acquaintance was a Jewish woman who had converted to Islam in order to marry her jeweller father’s apprentice. Jerba’s Jewish community is small but ancient, going back to 56 B.C, when Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar II.
It is hour 30 of a 48-hour ambulatory EEG. The sun has unveiled herself after a brief flash of rain, and the few birds that I can hear over Fordham Road’s late-afternoon cacophony of horns and sirens are madly chirping. Seated on my red velvet futon, surrounded by dejected pillows and unopened mail, I watch the sunlight pierce the maroon and turquoise curtains that cover the bay windows and listen to the breeze as it rustles leaves beyond my line of sight. I’ve done little else, besides sleep, for the past 30 hours.
I’m wearing a skullcap of tightly wrapped gauze. Beneath the skullcap is a braid of brightly colored wires cemented to my head by an earnest technician. We were together long enough that I found I didn’t want to leave him behind when he finished. I wanted to know his history, his passions, the identity of the woman he spoke to in another language on his cell phone as he worked, but he dismissed me without a glance, so I had to make do and invent my own story for him.
This is my habit: to invent stories and personalities for complete strangers and inanimate objects. About a year ago, someone painted a frowning face on a sidewalk near my apartment. I named him Lester, and feel guilty if I don’t whisper hello to him when I walk past. The past year has been hard on Lester; his outline has faded, his frown almost a memory. I wonder how I will feel when Lester finally disappears.
This ambulatory EEG isn’t anything to worry about—or so I tell myself in hour 30. I’ve lived with Ollier’s disease, which causes tumors that stunt and disfigure bones, my entire life. My left leg has been scarred by an orthopedic surgeon’s repeated work to straighten and lengthen the femur, tibia, and fibula. A skull-based brain tumor that caused seizures was partially removed, and my left eye paralyzed in the process; the remainder of the tumor was zapped with proton and photon radiation. Two of my fingers were amputated because the tumors grew to monstrous proportions. I’ve had just about every piece of bad news due to this disease that one can imagine. I’ve learned that the brain tumor has blocked messages between my uterus and pituitary gland (short read: no ovulation, no children) and could be the reason behind my lapses in memory.
Additional thanks and credit to Jessica Penner, whose extraordinary photography from New York makes up the images for this month’s photo collage a the end of the journal.
Franca Mancinelli, Memoir, Translated by John Taylor
Piazza XX Settembre — Fano: Following the Ammonites
This space that I see slowly opening up between the roofs of the houses, between walls dividing one intimacy from another, one property from another, tiny gardens from the concrete, takes on a definite shape with its pleasing imperfect geometry as might be drawn by a child’s pencil: it’s a rectangle softened by the years, by the scorching sunny days, by the dense drizzles of the intermediate seasons. It’s the square. I can also see it with my eyes closed, or sitting at the window and watching the light move the trees. A mirror has been left on the cobblestones, and water flows incessantly from the muzzles of lions tamed by stone. In a prehistory blended with fairytales, they came down from the hills to drink and, as if in a spell, remained there meek and resting on their legs, releasing an arc of water from their jaws. Above them, a woman freed from a cloth lets it swell in the wind. As if in a game, it mimes a flagpole, the mast of a ship. She is naked as only a divinity can be. Without malice, she wears her own body. Around her extends a city that I could recognize and call with only two single syllables, almost two musical notes or two opposing answers: fa no [do not]. The place name denotes unrest, uncertainty—like something which, once pronounced, would like to be called back, into the darkness beyond the throat. It is in this language that I speak, the language that has taught me an inland rippled by the Adriatic. At a handful of kilometers from the shore, you can still follow the veil as something that is submerged yet moves in the air.
I am from this countryside between two horizons of hills, wheat fields, and roads signaled by oak trees, ancient boundary stones. A backbone of fresh water, the Metauro river, flows through it. Somewhere along its edges, in a sandbank, lies the brother who was called to the rescue and who fell, carrying the seed of the defeat. Hasdrubal, by now scratched by a plow, by the teeth of a bulldozer, robbed of weapons and coins, and immediately covered over again—or he may still be sound asleep, lying undisturbed, a few meters of earth from the surface. And I am made of the almost never clear water of this mild, half-enclosed sea that becomes furious every so often, in the winter, with the shores that have constricted it.
Olga Stein, Essay Examining HBO’s Lovecraft Country
Lovecraft Country: Monsters in America
Embarking on a review of Lovecraft Country, an HBO series currently trending on Crave, is, I suspect, either like coming to a celebration late, having missed all of the excellent tributes, or it’s like arriving in time to hear a great keynote speech and realizing that something can yet be added to fully mark the occasion. Lovecraft Country, the series based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, has already received a great deal of attention—from academics included. There are obvious and somewhat less obvious reasons for this. The televisual adaptation, a story that revolves around members of two African-American families living in 1950s Chicago and grappling with malevolent forces, offers a stylish and appropriately macabre homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s large oeuvre of dark fantasy or gothic or weird fiction (all appropriate labels for the Lovecraftian brew of fantasy and horror). With its monsters, human and supernatural, the series, like the novel it’s based on, is fanciful, gripping popular entertainment (though to be clear, its pop culture credentials by no means render it “low” entertainment; as I’ll explain below, this isn’t stuff that pulp fiction is made of, however it may reference it). Yet what accounts for the series’ favourable reception among ordinary viewers and critics alike is not that, or not just that; it is watchable and compelling because of its thought-provoking and sustained critique of America’s in-the-bone kind of racism. Moreover, the critique is clearly meant to be seen as applicable today as it is to the Jim Crow America of the 1950s, which is where most of the Lovecraft Country’s stories unfold. Its unmistakable message—that Black lives continue not to matter—is, let’s face it, exceedingly timely.
Peace be Upon You Davos. A review by Ahmad Salleh bin H. Ahmad
In this Peace Be Upon You Davos, Siti Ruqaiyah worked together with 16world-renowned poets publishing another bi-lingual peace anthology series which she worked on and translated, after “Khabar Dari Strasbourg/News From Strasbourg” which she published in 2017.
Siti Ruqaiyah herself wrote14 poems in this anthology , starting with “Peace Be Upon You Davos” and ending with a poem titled “Between Stolen Glances”. Peace Be Upon YouDavos is loaded with cynicisms, on the plight of the victims of war who suffered and forced to be refugees. They are represented by Osama, Mohamed, Shaif, Brahimand Ziaur. War happened solely to fulfill the agenda of great powers with their greatest economic sources in the arms trade. The great powers of the world have never fought each other but cunningly waged their proxy wars for the sake of their arms trade. Siti Ruqaiyah cynically clings to the Davos-based economic forum and invokes hopes to return to universal peace values needed by everybody.
Timeless Memories by Joshua Akemecha. Reviewed by Edward A. Ayugho
Akemecha burrows into his childhood and youthful expectations which serve as a perfect place for a poet to look for things to write about. When we read Akemecha’s poem ‘To my Last Pair of Shoes”, it reminds us about Lord Byron’s hypothetical statement cited by Michael Meyer in Poetry: An introduction that “For a man to become a poet… he must be in love or miserable” (xxxii). We cannot afford to be indifferent to the battering throes of poverty and unemployment which Akemecha spotlights in this poem. The second stanza foregrounds the poet’s plight:
A poem for the dead
“I die daily”
It is not as if I planned on dying . . .
At least not at this time,
But I, we always knew
That death always lurked
In the white shadows
Of our lives
Our hues and pigmentation
Was a non-red flag
That signaled our presence
And that of their unfounded hate
For our existence
I bother no more about the ‘whys’,
For
Understanding it all
Is quite the conundrum of humanity
Or the lack thereof . . .
Bliss Molecules
To COVID-19 Survivors
The smell of water,
fresh water, seawater, dead water, marshes and streams,
water carrying her away—
folded, squished
rocked on the tides of a second Noah’s flood come true,
no ark in sight,
no piece of timber randomly afloat,
all expectations lowered to the basics
“Lower her!” “Turn her!” “Hold her!” some scream
a looped polyphony,
her S.O.S. dawning and fading in her grizzled lungs,
Flyer
We were grumbling again about the long isolation
loud enough to trade complaints
with the tenant next door, her stamp-
size balcony butting up to ours, neighbourly
enough, in the realm of concrete condos
high above the world on the 21st floor
(privileged as we know we are), the ocean
merely blocks away, our view this span
of sparkling blue, the distance to Japan.
Evening waves had shifted, were churning a froth of white,
A VISITATION I NEVER TIRE OF
One of the poets I love, one
who no longer walks among us,
still drops by the apartment once a year.
And once again I’m surrounded by
her lyrical intensity, her humor
her imaginative leaps and storytelling.
She tells me she reads my poems
and enjoys them—I prefer to believe
she’s telling me the truth, why not?
We talk poetry and poetry until darkness
shows up and escorts her out.
I look out the window into the darkness
at the birds, the ones you can’t see,
but the ones you know are there, close by.
Continue Reading…
Mbizo Chirasha (hybrid poetry and poetry essay)
MIDNIGHT MONOLOGUES (thought tracks on bad politics, quarantine, exile and isolation) *
(i).
I smell the heavy scent of the night, pitch black night
It is sunset on the foothills of my country,
I smell the heavy scent of the pitch-black night,
pitch black night coils into this tired land feigning its darkness
pitch-black night,
birthing revolutionary ghosts and ideological imbeciles
Pitch black night pregnant with emotion and wrong ambition,
Inside the pitch-black night heartbroken shadows are harvesting funerals,
In this pitch-black night
I drink tears for tea,
munching grief chapped lips for bread,
dry bread to fill up my four-decade aged spiritual torment
Normal in a Covid World
He tells me
it’s normal to feel anxious
everyone is these days.
I want to believe him
but as his pen dances
across a thick prescription pad
I wonder if I’m the only one
barely hanging on.
Straightening Nails
his granddaddy settled in Ridgedale
North Saskatchewan
a carpenter all his life
and gave the six-year old
a simple task –
straighten nails
for this was a time when nothing
got thrown away, nothing
taken for granted, everything
repurposed, everything reused
and with a hammer and intention
the boy spent his summer
straightening nails
for this was a town where every
window, every
floorboard, every
plank and every
nail saw new life
good-bye home town
above the rich crops of the valley
paddy, maize, millet, green, greener, grey
I fly away from my center, to the edge, farther and farther away
silence brings me back to my senses
my laughter-lit Cindrella hours are over
the hills that guard the valley fade dim
soon they soften my memories
this moment shall become a dream tomorrow
history when I visit here next
tangled: every twist and turn of this bond
once the ties that dig deep are cut
I shall set myself free like a bird
in the space,
Confession of
the poetical firefly to
muse-butterfly of poesy
You must excuse me. You dear dreamer!
I have overly felt my dreamery about Golden Fleece.
I built my small paradise without any other ontological beings.
I based the dreamiest sempiternity on tenderness of my wings.
Thus. I painted my wings in color of an ambrosia.
Withal: I liked dew of dawns for the sake of elves.
I loved too much the wizardry of mayhap dreamy Erlkings.
North, and What the Woman Saw There
Look how summit, empty of all the useless kinds of noise,
Sends out evergreens that are bold and steadfast,
standing eternally flush against a mountain sky.
Ancient goats and wind, snow unmelting—
time is simply a guest here.
What peerage, to be a mountain citizen.
I am only a transient visitor though,
heading west, tempted into pause
by wild peaks who are not ashamed of anything.
Dignity
“To: Joyce Echaquan*”
A flat tire stopped us
In the middle of a vast desert
extending between two oceans.
Sands can move through the borders
freely with the wind,
as waves can move
through borders in the ocean.
No border exists for sand and waves.
Sands are equal, waves too.
Sinking
down a country road,
swarthiness blends into soft soils on sunny days
a kaleidoscope of flame and golden leaves
shimmers and sings against pale skies
a wall of pines rises
swarthiness tucked in needle blankets
but even here,
thunder rumbles
Poems are hard to create
they live, then die, walk alone in tears,
resurrect in family mausoleums.
They walk with you alone in ghostly patterns,
memories they deliver feeling unexpectedly
through the open windows of strangers.
Silk roses lie in a potted bowl
memories seven days before Mother’s Day.
Soak those tears, patience is the poetry of love.
Plant your memories, your seeds, your passion,
once a year, maybe twice.
Jesus knows we all need more
then a vase filled with silk flowers,
poems on paper from a poet sacred,
the mystery, the love of a caretaker−
multicolored silk flowers in a basket
handed out by the flower girl.
I'M POSSIBLE.
Possessed with ideals of perfection,
Shapes and sizes telling beauty,
Skin tones and heights,
Pedigrees rules the mortal man,
Dare you a scar acquire,
Or bent of back in need of wheels,
Masses stare in disbelief,
Love may well take a back seat,
Or all together commit you into hiding,
As if you planned a defect,
As if you invited a malady,
Not even age is spared,
In this month’s podcast we introduce you to Arthur ‘Art’ Collins, a poet, educator, and mediator. A believer in the transformative power of literature, “Art the poet” is a natural sayer and teller of all that is. A restorative justice practitioner with a solid background in Education, Nonprofit Organizations, Youth Development, Coaching, and Crisis Intervention, he is committed to ending the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ by encouraging solutions that allow more students to remain in school and continue their education. As one who identifies symbols and markers in society his commitment to the agenda of humanity is unwavering. ~ Jane SpokenWord
Art Collins in Conversation with Jane SpokenWord
Boston native Arthur Ray Collins is an educator and spoken word performance poet who believes that there is extraordinary power in words and considers his poetry to be socially conscious as well as entertaining. His brand of poetry motivates action, provokes thought, and stimulates the mind of the listener.
A Co-host of the infamous Lizard Lounge Poetry Slam and member of 2008, 2010, 2016-2020 Lizard Lounge National Poetry Slam Team, he is also a founding member of the National Black College Alliance and L.I.V.E Brothers (Loyal, Intelligent, Victorious, Everlasting,) mentoring club for boys, State of Young Black Boston, and the Brother’s Keeper Poetry Theater Ensemble.
A graduate of Clark Atlanta University and New Hampshire College Graduate School of Business, he holds a B.A in Political Science and a Master of Science degree in Community Economic Development. He facilitates writing workshops and speaks at various forums on youth, education, and community development.
An Educator, counselor, community organizer and youth advocate specializing in youth with social, emotional and developmental needs, Arthur has worked as the Out of Harm’s Way Manager, Student Support Specialist, and a Trauma Specialist in the Boston Public Schools System.
He is certified in Crisis Prevention & Intervention, Communication & Literacy, Preliminary Educator License, Moderate Disabilities in Special Education and District-wide Restorative Justice Practices Coach.
Arthur Collins continues his lifelong commitment to community through his poetry and his work.
Jane SpokenWord
Street poet Jane SpokenWord’s performances represent the spoken word as it is meant to be experienced, raw, uncensored and thought provoking. From solos, to slams, duos, trios, and bands, including a big band performance at The Whitney Museum with Avant-Garde Maestro Cecil Taylor which garnered All About Jazz’s Best of 2016. Other collaborations include: Min Tanaka, Miguel Algarin, Beat Poet John Sinclair, her son HipHop musician/producer, DJ Nastee, and her partner in all things, Albey onBass. Combining the elements of spoken word, music, sound and song “Like those of the Jazz poets, the Beats, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron and others – she is usually accompanied by Albey onBass Balgochian’s moaning, groaning, rumbling contrabass – adding double the gut-punch to her words.” (Raoul daGama) To preserve the cultural heritage of wording to document life, and foster a broader collective community, she brings her poetry and spoken word to a diverse set of venues including museums, festivals, libraries, slam lounges, art galleries, clubs, busking street corners and living rooms everywhere. She has authored two books of poetry with art and music by co-author Albey onBass: Word Against the Machine and Tragically Hip. Publications include: TV Baby A collection of Lower East Side artists – OHWOW, Shadow of The Geode, Bonsia Press, Stars in the Fire and Palabras Luminosas – Rogue Scholars Express and We Are Beat in theNational Beat Poetry Anthology.
A special thank you to Albey ‘onBass’ Balgochian for the sound engineering in the prelude and postlude of the audio. Albey’s performances range from the Bowery Poetry Club to the Whitney Museum of American Art, his résumé includes many distinguished artists including Nuyorican Poet Miguel Algarin, Beat Poet John Sinclair, Darryl Jones (Miles Davis, Rolling Stones,) and the Cecil Taylor Trio & Big Band (“Best of ’05, ’09, ’16” All About Jazz) https://albeybalgochian.com/
When I was six years old my father went mad and attacked himself with a hammer.
People don’t go mad these days, not like they used to. They have phobias and ‘episodes’ and anxiety attacks instead. They have bipolar depression, or schizophrenia. I reckon there’s at least a dozen fancy-sounding psychoses to choose from – some you can even mix and match. But back in 1959 when I was a snot-nosed kid, things weren’t so complicated. Either you were sane, or you were mad. It was a two-sided coin, and the edge didn’t count. Dad’s coin flipped, got plucked out of the air still spinning, and was slapped down on the kitchen table. It said mad. From that point on, that’s what he was. A loon. A nutter. Three sheets to the wind.
Mum never told us the truth about what happened. She lied to everyone. She lied to me, to Susie, to the neighbours, to postmen and milkmen, to anyone who asked awkward questions. She even lied to herself. According to Mum it was his job that pushed him over the edge, but Susie and I always knew that was only part of the picture. Over the years we found one or two missing pieces and slotted them into place, but even now we don’t know the truth. Not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Susie was – still is – my big sister. She looked out for me. She’s four years older, and back then she understood a lot more of what was going on. But even I knew things weren’t right, even I could tell that Mum felt guilty. It was obvious. However hard she tried to cover it up, little slivers of guilt kept sticking out of her whenever she dropped her guard, like the bits of broken bone I see poking out of Dad’s left hand whenever I dream about him. Yes, there was a shit-load of guilt floating around our house in those days. I just wasn’t sure where it was all coming from.
Dad worked at the same factory for years, putting in the hours, trying his best to keep the four of us on less than twenty quid a week. It was a trick that was always just the wrong side of possible. Other families managed on less, but Mom was never very good when it came to money. The pennies and the pounds just trickled away, slipped through her fingers. Wherever they trickled to, it wasn’t to a place where you could buy stuff for the house, or find clothes to put on our backs. Susie and I wore second-hand, and we sat on it, too. I remember Mom cutting out cardboard soles to slip into our shoes. We were walking clichés, Susie and me. Clichés are fine until it rains.
Then there was the shouting. Lots of shouting, late at night. Susie used to drag me under her bed. We’d lie there for hours, breathing in the dust, sneezing, waiting for it to settle.
Dad wasn’t home much. Mondays to Saturdays, sometimes Sundays too, he’d be at work, pounding sheets of metal into roof cowls, railway lamps, car doors, whatever the blueprints called for. We hardly saw him.
He hated his job, hated it even more than his dad had hated it before him. Many years later, I would come to hate mine more than both of them put together. I’ve often thought that there’s a warning sign in that trinity of facts. The trail-tracks of Crazy Gene.
These are the things I know about my father. He was in love. He was in love with reading, with the world of books, but to make a living he was forced to spend his days trapped in a world of metal. It was a world he detested: a world of oil and sweat, hot steel and aluminium. The noises, the smells, the constant, mindless grind of it all diminished him bit-by-bit; a little more each day. But he couldn’t let on how he was feeling. This was the 1950s, remember, a time when men were men, and if they weren’t they pretended to be. The war was still a fresh bruise, and whatever peacetime cesspool a man found himself drowning in, he was expected to remember how bad things had been before and get on with it. The rules were simple enough. You did your job, maybe went for a few beers with your mates, and at the end of the week you collected your pay packet. Then, like the song said, you started all over again. If you had problems inside your head, you hid them from everybody for as long as you could, because being mad was even worse than being queer, and your average queer didn’t last long on the factory floor.
Just before he flipped, Dad went to see a doctor. The doctor examined him, looked at him like he was some malingering piece of shit, and said there was nothing physically wrong. No way was he going to give him a sick note. ‘You’ve got to make more of an effort, man,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together.’
I don’t remember Dad coming home that night, but Susie does. It had been a bad afternoon. Half the furniture in the house had been repossessed by men in brown coats because Mum hadn’t kept up the HP payments, and she’d been hitting the gin. Later on, after Susie and I had gone to bed, there was another row. I don’t remember that either, but Susie says Dad found us huddled together in the dust, crying. I think maybe that was the last straw for him. A few days later something snapped inside his head, and instead of pulling himself together he pulled himself apart.
People always say it’s the quiet ones that are the worst, don’t they? Well, Dad was a quiet one all right – still waters, running deep. When a quiet one finally flips, he doesn’t mess about. Dad went mad with a vengeance.
On Monday morning, at ten o’clock precisely, he suddenly stopped pounding the sheet of metal on his bench. He put down the hammer he was using, selected a heavier one – the heaviest of the half-dozen he kept in his toolbox – and in front of all his workmates began pounding himself instead. He demolished all four fingers and the thumb of his left hand, and shattered his right kneecap. He was about to start on his skull when his mate Charlie grabbed him from behind. Despite getting his nose broken – Dad was flinging his head backwards in some kind of spasm – Charlie held on until someone else managed to get hold of the hammer.
We didn’t see anything of Dad for a long time after that. When he eventually came home, he wasn’t the same. He’d got the push from work and nobody else was going to offer him a job, so he sat in his chair in the living room all day long, staring at the wall, sometime reading a little. Once, I saw him crying. You don’t want to see your dad crying when you’re six years old. I started spending the time I wasn’t either asleep or at school out on the streets, playing Cowboys and Indians with the other kids if they let me. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they took the piss, said my dad was a loony. But however bad it got, I stayed out of the house as much as possible. When I had to come in for meals I made sure I never went into the living room. Not if I could help it.
For a while Mum had a job cleaning offices in the evenings, but it didn’t pay much. With hardly anything coming in the arrears began to mount up. I don’t know what would have happened if things had carried on the way they were going, but they didn’t.
Early one morning, Dad got out of his chair. He walked out the front door and took a solitary bus ride out of the city, back to the village where he’d been born. There was a railway line running through the place in those days, crossed by an old wooden bridge. He’d taken us there a few times, Susie and me. We liked the place because when the steam trains thundered through beneath your feet, you found yourself lost for a few seconds, vanished in a great grey-white cloud of smoke. You could smell it in your hair and on your clothes for hours afterwards.
But Dad wasn’t there just to smell train smoke that day. He was looking at trains, but thinking hammers. The stationmaster saw him walk to the centre of the bridge, climb the wooden railings, and chuck himself directly in front of the 10.25 from Birmingham. He timed it just right, too. The train hit him like God’s own hammer, the biggest fucking hammer in the universe. And it did a much better job than any of the half-dozen he kept in his toolbox could ever have done.
* * *
I was about thirteen, my second or third year at school, when we started to study heredity. Our biology teacher, Miss Loseby, introduced us to Mendel and his performing peas, and as soon as I’d worked out the basics of what she was talking about, I began to worry. I imagined I had a cowboy wandering around inside me. He’s still in here, even today. I call him Crazy Gene.
Crazy Gene’s a particularly mean-tempered son of a bitch. He looks a lot like I tried to look when I was six, when I was busy rounding up all the Indians who kept yelling ‘Loony’ at me. He wears a black cowboy hat, a red bandanna, and dusty blue jeans. On his hips, low-slung, he carries two Colt 45s, loaded with DNA, and his stamping ground is Nucleus City.
I know for sure he as good as murdered my father, and I’ve got a gut feeling he winged my grandfather a few times, too. Maybe his father before him. Crazy Gene is bad news, and the more I learn about him, the more I feel the rip of his rusty spurs as he walks the long trail through my bloodstream, tearing a capillary here, rupturing a cell wall there.
He didn’t cause me too many problems until I got to university, but once I was there the fun really began. That spicy mix of girls, dope, booze and examination pressure was just the kind of set-up Crazy Gene liked best. He started shooting up the town, and I started to self-destruct. There weren’t just lost weekends – there were entire lost weeks. Shitty grades, sessions with university counsellors, you name it I was in it. But we stuck it out. Somehow we came through, Crazy Gene and me. We even got a decent degree, a teaching qualification. We even picked up a wife along the way.
And then we taught. For twenty-four years, we taught. Crazy Gene gave me a pretty hard time once in a while, but I knew his tricks by then, and although he winged me more than once, I usually managed to stay upright – long enough to convince whoever needed convincing that I could do the job, anyway.
But one week before my forty-sixth birthday, he finally got me. I’d always known he would. He ambushed me one dark night and, following in my dad’s footsteps, I went mad myself.
It was easier for me than it had been for him. Like I said, forty years down the line we don’t go mad. You don’t hear folks using the word, not in public, anyway. Whatever they might say in private, to your face they feel obliged to look sympathetic, to give understanding nods, to talk about ‘stress’ and ‘depression’. ‘Pressures of modern living,’ they say. ‘How’re you coping, with it?’
Yes, things are better now. If Dad could just have hung on to his sanity for another forty years, life would have been a sight more comfortable for him, and for us, too. You never know, he might even have gained a little street cred. There’s almost a touch of glamour attaching to nervous breakdown nowadays, isn’t there? Especially if the broken happen to have money and fame, if they’ve been on TV. Every trashy magazine on the stands has some vaguely familiar face talking about Prozac, about a long and painful struggle with that old dark night of the soul. The corridors of Publication House are clogged with minor celebrities, full of fading pop singers and ex-soap-stars, hoping the revelation of a history of mental illness will reinvigorate their flagging careers. Dad would never have believed it, but in the 1990s a cupboard containing a crazy skeleton or two can come in very handy if the public’s attention has started to wander.
But me, I don’t feel glamorous. Well, I wouldn’t, would I? I’m no pop singer. I don’t even watch the soaps, let alone star in them. No, I’ll tell you what I feel. I feel scared. Shit scared, if you want to know the truth. I’ve started dreaming, see, dreaming about things I’d rather not dream about. I’ve started dreaming about hammers, and about clouds of smoke and about wooden bridges and steam trains.
And more than anything else I dream about Crazy Gene. I dream about him scraping his spurs through my bloodstream, shooting up my neurones, whistling softly to himself as he walks his long, lonely trail through my guts and bones and brain.
Published in issue 19 of Peninsular Magazine and a prizewinner!
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