I should have loved you when I had a chance. When the time was right and, as they say, all the ducks were lined up, and it would have all been so easy. That small window, open just a crack, but with a crowbar and this thing growing in me–was it even then love?–I could have got down there and pried it open.
A literary critic from São Paulo,
reflecting on Brazilian song
of the twentieth century,
said that the secret
of its popularity
was the substantial presence
of unexpected paradigms
in the lyrics.
The unusual juxtaposition,
surprising,
and sometimes even bizarre,
of two nouns, of two things
which never ought
to appear together,
like tumor and diamond,
petal and lead.
Each of these paradigms
could cause
a brief and benevolent
mental short-circuit.
So then I think of the new century,
the one of pre-emptive wars,
of the rogue state,
of bombs blasting
in the name of liberty.
Welcome to the kingdom
of unexpected paradigms!
Please make yourself at home,
ass and metaphysics,
nice and spread out
on these muddied, chaste sheets.
You can expect to receive rocks thrown
and masked frenzies,
and they will take from you
hypothalami and harpoons,
while supplies last
in the utter season of pain.
Poor Brazilian song,
poor Chico Buarque,
Gil,
Noel Rosa and Caetano,
Jobim,
João Gilberto.
Their winning
rhetorical strategy
has become
the daily dalliance
of the new sensibility.
But the game goes on.
The possible conspiracies
are infinite.
Let’s shuffle the words
one more time:
The strategy of the tumor
of well-fed Chico Buarque
has become
the lead harpoon
of chaste liberty.
The rogue nouns
of the short-circuited century
are unexpected stones,
are pure mental mud
disguised
as rhetorical diamonds.
I PARADIGMI IMPREVISTI
Un critico letterario di São Paulo,
ragionando sulla canzone brasiliana
del Ventesimo secolo
diceva che il segreto
del suo successo popolare
era la nutrita presenza
dei paradigmi imprevisti
nelle parole.
L’accostamento insolito,
sorprendente,
e a volte anche bizzarro
di due sostantivi, di due cose
che non dovrebbero mai
comparire insieme
come il tumore e il diamante,
il petalo e il piombo.
Ognuno di questi paradigmi
potrebbe causare
un breve e benevolo
cortocircuito mentale.
Allora penso al nuovo secolo,
quello delle guerre preventive,
dello stato canaglia,
delle bombe esplose
per la libertà.
Benvenuti nel regno
dei paradigmi imprevisti!
Accomodatevi pure,
culo e metafisica,
per favore, larghi
sulle caste lenzuola di fango.
Vi aspettano sassi
e febbri mascherati,
vi saranno sottratti
ipotalami e arpioni
fino all’esaurimento scorta
della pura stagione del dolore.
Povera canzone brasiliana,
poveri Chico Buarque,
Gil,
Noel Rosa e Caetano,
Jobim,
João Gilberto.
La loro strategia
retorica vincente
è diventata
il cane quotidiano
della nuova sensibilità.
Ma il gioco non si ferma.
Sono infinite
le cospirazioni possibili.
Rimescoliamo le parole
ancora una volta:
La strategia del tumore
del nutrito Chico Buarque
è diventata
l’arpione di piombo
della casta libertà.
I sostantivi canaglie
del secolo cortocircuito
sono sassi imprevisti,
sono puro fango mentale
mascherato
di diamanti retorici.
Translated by Don Stang and Helen Wickes
Artwork by Mia Funk
I hear the slamming of a door, bolted shut, which belongs to a house with a weather-beaten chimney. On the street tinkles the sour moaning of the windows’ metal bars. Street lamps are shining in a depressive state. A seventy-two-year-old helpless loner walks past me.
I was waiting for a film to start
in front of the wrong cinema.
I was alone,
there wasn’t a line,
and the evening was darkening.
I was sitting on the steps
next to the statue of Puccini,
who was also seated,
in an armchair.
He held a cigarette
between his fingers.
I too would like to smoke,
but I gave it up
ten years ago.
Once
in a piazza in Rio
they unveiled
a bronze bust
of a friend of mine.
I saw it by chance,
while crossing distractedly.
And what a fright!
It was him
but with vacant eyes
and an enormous brown head
which just at that moment
was being soiled by a pigeon.
My poor friend,
poor Pedrosa,
what have your admirers
done to you?
By then I had realized
that it was the wrong theater.
But something held me
in that deserted piazza,
in the dusky twilight
which skimmed the windows.
All of a sudden,
and slowly walking backwards,
a tall man
with white hair
arrived.
He was looking at the sky, the chimneys,
and he was smiling ecstatically.
When he noticed me
he said softly:
“It’s the nightingale.
He will sing like this
all night long.”
Only in that moment I understood
why I was still waiting
in front of a closed portal,
why I wanted to
talk with Puccini,
why I had not moved
from my steps.
Beauty
had entered in me.
A gentle intoxication
of music.
A dizziness,
a lethargy,
a torpor in the air.
Hidden in an opening,
or between the roof tiles,
the little bird
holds dominion.
When I was a child
they would tell me
the legend of the uirapurú:
a tiny bird
of the Amazon.
When it sings the jungle
falls completely silent,
and the jaguar doesn’t roar,
the monkeys don’t scream,
not a single nut falls
through the foliage.
And night descends
on the piazza.
Descends on Puccini
and on all the music,
on the white hair
of the childlike man,
descends on my skin,
on everything down here,
on a world
that has chosen metal,
the sharp edges hidden by the darkness,
as its setting.
A world without a libretto.
Night descends,
but the Tuscan uirapurú
is still singing.
So let the curtain
of great night descend.
From your undiscoverable cranny
let this jungle be silenced.
As I am tired,
let silence fall on me as well.
Translated by Don Stang and Helen Wickes
Artwork by Mia Funk
MUSICA
Aspettavo l’inizio di un film
di fronte al cinema sbagliato.
Ero solo,
non c’era nessuna fila,
e s’incupiva la sera.
Ero seduto sullo scalino
accanto alla statua di Puccini,
anche lui seduto,
su una poltrona.
Aveva tra le dita
una sigaretta.
Vorrei fumare anch’io,
ma ho smesso
dieci anni fa.
Un tempo
avevano inaugurato
in una piazza di Rio
un busto di bronzo
di un mio amico.
L’ho visto per caso,
attraversando distratto.
E che spavento!
Era lui
ma con gli occhi vuoti
e una enorme testa marrone
che proprio in quel momento
era imbrattata da un piccione.
Povero amico mio,
povero Pedrosa,
cosa hanno fatto di te
i tuoi ammiratori?
A quel punto avevo già capito
che quello era il cinema sbagliato.
Ma qualcosa mi inchiodava
a quella piazza deserta,
al crepuscolo bruno
che lambiva le trifore.
E all’improvviso,
camminando a ritroso,
lentamente è arrivato
un uomo alto
con i capelli bianchi.
Guardava il cielo, i comignoli,
e sorrideva estatico.
Quando si è accorto di me
ha detto piano:
“È l’usignolo.
Canterà così
per tutta la notte.”
Solo in quel momento ho capito
perché aspettavo ancora
davanti a un portone chiuso,
perché volevo
discutere con Puccini,
perché non mi ero mosso
dal mio scalino.
Era entrata in me
la bellezza.
Un’intossicazione
benigna di musica.
Uno stordimento,
una spossatezza,
un torpore nell’aria.
Nascosto in una feritoia,
o tra le tegole,
il piccolo uccello
domina.
Da bambino
mi raccontavano
la leggenda dell’uirapurú:
uccello minuscolo
dell’Amazzonia.
Quando canta la giungla
fa un silenzio assoluto,
e non ruggisce il giaguaro,
non urlano le scimmie,
non cade nessuna noce
sopra il fogliame.
E scende la notte
sulla piazza.
Scende su Puccini
e su tutta la musica,
scende sui capelli bianchi
dell’uomo bambino,
scende sulla mia pelle,
su tutto quello che ci sta sotto,
scende su un mondo
che ha eletto il metallo,
gli spigoli nascosti nelle tenebre
a suo scenario.
Un mondo senza testo.
Scende la notte,
ma canta ancora
l’uirapurú toscano.
Fai scendere tu allora
il sipario della grande notte.
Dal tuo introvabile anfratto
fai zittire questa giungla.
E fai zittire anche me,
che sono stanco.
“You played Madonna?!” My patient Shira is an expressive, wonderfully cocky, and very hip Yale sophomore. This is her opener as she strolls into my office. “Yes,” I say, watching her settle into the black leather recliner across from me. She looks horrified. Shira likes to feel that she’s “in the know” about trends, pop culture, and especially, music. She’s derisive and unimpressed that a Madonna tune has appeared on my radio show. It’s too “average.” It’s “retro.” She’d probably play obscure, indie Brooklyn bands if she were the DJ selecting music.
Shira and I are in uncharted territory. I’m a psychotherapist who hosts a weekly music and interview show on the radio. My musical tastes, the questions I ask guests, what makes me laugh, and what fascinates me—it’s all out there in the ether, for anyone who is listening. My “celebrity” is quite minor, but I work in a provincial, psychoanalytically influenced New England community, and the attention I get seems to induce a frisson of anxiety in some of my colleagues. “So,” they say, eyes widening, “you’re on the radio? Do, um, do your patients know? Do they listen to your show (horror of horrors)? How do you handle that?”
I understand their curiosity. Therapists face new challenges to their privacy these days. Even before most patients have stepped into the office, they’ve consumed unfiltered information about us via the Internet. We’re being googled. This phenomenon has forced more and more therapists to recognize and cope with many aspects of ourselves already being public—privacy no longer really exists. The delicate and important balance of public versus private has preoccupied us since Freud’s notion of the analyst as a blank screen onto which fantasies will be projected (a methodology most useful for psychoanalysis, but not for psychotherapy, which is what most of us practice). Throughout our careers, we calibrate how much to reveal about ourselves (or our own feelings) to each individual. The basic paradigm—for us to reveal less—remains useful. Although we ask for great revelations from the patient, if we contributed all our personal details, associations and vulnerabilities, the therapy process would degenerate into comparisons of experience. There is a concept I learned while taking boxing lessons: “finding your range.” It means that you need to be just the right distance away from your opponents—not so far away that you can’t reach them when you need to and not so close that you will be overly vulnerable and swallowed up.
Clinical techniques have expanded; contemporary theorists studying the uses of therapeutic self-disclosure have gone on to explore ways that authentic, in-the-moment feedback (and in some cases, information about the therapist) can especially benefit patients who struggle in relationships in which no one has provided “mirroring,” or ever questioned their own particularly distorted beliefs. We make careful decisions for each clinical pairing.
For therapists practicing in a small town, things are already claustrophobic. My colleagues talk about running into patients at the local pool, the gym, or around town. (I’d rather a patient hear me on the radio than see me in a bathing suit!)
Sometimes those “collegial” reactions to my radio activities make me feel that I’ve been slapped with a subtext—that I must be doing something wrong. I worry they think I should pack myself back into analysis to examine my own narcissism. So when my peers appear a bit shocked, it helps when I reflexively clarify that it’s not a radio advice show about mental health problems. I’m not immune to bouts of anxiety, so I’m attempting to reassure myself, tooNone of us just live in our office chairs. Patients begin to stitch together their quilted portraits of us as soon as they see our parked cars in the assigned spaces (old Honda Civic? Brand-new Saab?), view our décor (Paul Klee reproductions? Primitive sculptures?), experience our sense of humor (or lack thereof), and learn where on the Cape we’re vacationing or that we don’t like to travel. This information does not have to be considered unfortunate “leakage.” It is inevitable real-world information, and we have a reliable tool for the complexity of this issue. We can explore what each detail or nuance means to someone—and we can accept that we function in a dual capacity—both symbolic and real.
With some patients who do hear me, it can be, as with Shira, an opportunity for them to directly express aggression, envy, or criticism. Shira and I had been working together for seven months, talking about her struggles in relationships. Her offhand comment about Madonna was the first time she had challenged me directly, even just a little. I admire her critique of the Madonna tune. Many college-age patients are such perpetually “good students” that they treat therapy as if it were another class. They’re fearful of making a mistake and want to please any authority figure. Shira’s challenge is a welcome contribution that is a healthy expression of her own tastes and individuation.
I listen for any feelings or fantasies about my “other dimensions,” if and when they come up, giving room and space for anything someone needs to express. If I bring it up (“So on my radio show I interviewed so-and-so”), there’s usually a dynamic in the relationship that causes me to go there, some way in which the patient makes me (and often others) feel invisible or unimportant. Occasionally I’m thinking that there needs to be some idealization of me for the therapy to work, and that hosting a radio show gives me some gravitas. I could swear that recently, after I casually mentioned an author interview I did on the air, a patient who had not known about my radio life began to listen to me more closely, as if my wisdom suddenly deepened. And sometimes it just slips out because I want to be . . . more real, as multidimensional as my patients, or because my own countertransference compels me to say, “Hey, I’m cool.” The gratification of occasional admiration is like a cool drink of water to a parched throat.
I give so much to my patients—I am laser-focused on every word they say, attentive, warm, compassionate, and hard working. I quietly tune myself to patients’ melodies, and each hour begins with someone else’s song. As clinicians we are trained to suppress automatic reactions, modulate our responses, wait for the best moment to speak, assess potential effects and timing of interpretations, and listen. We restrain the impulse to shift the focus to us; that goes with the job. I’m not alone in sometimes wanting to burst through the confines of the psychic-midwife role, and say “Hey, over here! On the diving board! Look at me! I have some special things going on outside the office!”
Sometimes patients want to impress us with their creative efforts, and maybe this occurs with me a bit more often because of the radio show. Recently a new patient, an artist and musician, placed a CD of his original music on my desk as he was leaving the office. He mumbled, “Heard you like avant-garde music . . . and maybe you did radio once?” The CD, forlorn and unprotected without a sleeve or a clear reason for being there, sat unheard on my desk for the next week.
“Yes,” I said at the next session. “I do radio.”
“Actually, I know that. I listened to a few of your interviews. I am your biggest fan now!! I tried to find the music shows, but the computer archive of past shows wasn’t working right.”
A wish to help him find the shows flared briefly, like a firefly in the darkness. I suspected he would enjoy them and imagined how nice it would be to get that ego gratification. But that was not the point.
“The CD you brought in . . . I think I should give it back to you . . . because I . . . we don’t know yet . . . what exactly does giving this to me mean to you?”
He thought for a moment and, with spontaneous honesty, said, “I want you to, um, like me, I think. I want to impress you.”
I’ve worked with this issue of having a public life outside therapy for multiple decades and decided long ago that radio was too important a part of my creative life to give up—whatever the lingering biases about a therapist not having too big a personality. It stretches back to my childhood in the early 1960s, to a field trip to WGBO’s studios in Newark, New Jersey. Seeing the creativity involved in producing a radio show, watching the DJ establish an on-air intimacy and using multiple aspects of the “Self” to do so, I was immediately smitten with the idea of being an on-air host.
For me, like for many kids, radio was a soundtrack to my emotional and social life. In grade school, I followed AM radio, with its Top 40 hits and fast-talking disc jockeys. My best friend and I would lie in bed, talking to each other on our princess phones, writing down the Top 10 being counted down. The Righteous Brothers, Petula Clark, and the Temptations eventually gave way to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the more intimate and intense experience of FM and public radio, with its non-commercial zeitgeist. From Newark, I heard radio hosts on the New York stations WBAI and WNEW and found comfort and solace in their late-night voices. They talked. They talked a lot. And if Allison Steele, the “Nightbird” of WNEW, chose to play an entire album side of a Procol Harum record—so be it. Their voices were comforting. So I understood when a patient said, “Last week, when I wasn’t able to come in for my session, I knew I could hear your voice on the radio, and it was very soothing.”
As a wild child of the 1960s, I didn’t get my career trajectory in shape until I was thirty. I had a long moratorium in my twenties after dropping out of college. In other words, I was floundering. At twenty-five, I became involved with a non-commercial radio station in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I was also back in school, doing some writing, and alternately working as a typist, editor, secretary, or whatever I could find. Hosting a show became the centerpiece of my week. This was the pre-CD era, so like a Sherpa I schlepped some of my own vinyl collection up the three flights of stairs. I always wanted something new to play, some spoken-word oddity that might create the perfect prelude to a piece of music; thus I always needed a range of choices on hand. William Butler Yeats seemed to go with Patti Smith. The French poets wanted to be punctuated by punk rock. On this station, we could be as experimental as we liked. When a segue worked, I felt powerful, excited, fulfilled! I studied hard and passed the Federal Communications Commission licensing test, which involved computations of wattage and power output and the memorization of obscure regulations I would never need. That was a happy day. I started out with shows on Tuesday and Thursday nights, from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m.
Several years after becoming a radio host, I went off to Smith College to study clinical social work. Making radio a career didn’t seem feasible—I wasn’t a commercial type of host, and I was clueless about how to negotiate my way toward National Public Radio. I had no mentors, which is not a complaint, more of an explanation and a disclosure—I often felt I had to blaze my own way, to my disadvantage. In contrast, life as a therapist made a remarkable amount of sense. I’d always been fascinated by psychology and human behavior. I’d had my own experiences in the patient chair. I’d been reading Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and I very much wanted to do meaningful work.
During my time at Smith, I took a break from radio to focus on my studies. My internships at Clifford Beers Child Guidance Clinic and Yale University Department of Mental Hygiene were intensive. After a second fellowship year at Yale, I started a private practice. The early years were extremely stressful. In an effort to anchor myself, I carried a collection of meaningful totems—a book by a beloved author, a special rock in my pocket, my favorite mug—as I went back and forth to the shared office I rented by the hour. I typed up my notes from the clinical sessions religiously—patient said/I said—as if they were epic novels.
I’d been in practice for around five years when I realized I missed radio. I returned to the station and pre-produced a weekly segment about the AIDS epidemic that another DJ aired on his show. It was a gentle way back in. Then I took on a weekly four-hour Saturday night music show.
Decades later, in that sly way in which how we spend our time determines the shape of our lives, I am still doing radio, and I am still in private practice. And I’m still struck by how often I evoke that curious or puzzled reaction from colleagues. Does assuming the role of a therapist mean you give up your passions? Die a slow death of the spirit?
Over the years, my on-air persona has developed. Around five years ago I began interviewing authors, celebrities, musicians, and activists. The book I published in 2010 (Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind) connected me to many other writers who wanted to talk about their work. The book itself is a memoir about my midlife involvement with the world of boxing and the history of Jewish boxers. During my on-air conversations with boxing writers and famous trainers I became freer about revealing aspects of my own history. I used humor, I was self-deprecating, I could often be silly. I spoke with emotion about the music I chose and what it meant to me. I talked about films I’d seen that week and books I was reading.
I am always a bit self-conscious on the air because of my profession. A patient might be listening, so I hold back on sharing what I do on the weekends, where I walk my dog, or very personal things that have happened in my life—I try to focus on pop culture and information. I feel embarrassed if I make a mistake and a bit of profanity in music goes out over the air. If patients are listening, I want to do a good job and not be a sloppy DJ. When I do wander into a personal anecdote, I withhold anything that I imagine might be too wildly disturbing or disruptive to a listening patient. Of course, it’s impossible to completely control what might be disruptive to different individuals!
Being a psychotherapist and radio host does involve keeping a close eye on all the balls in the air. I’m sure I drop one now and then, but most of the time the juggling does not pose unmanageable complications. I believe as therapists we can work successfully in the postmodern age with new theory-bases and approaches to the increasingly more public aspects of our identities. So I continue to lug my bag of tricks up the stairs to the studio each week and present new Icelandic rock, electronica, or poignant tunes by singer-songwriters. I can promote the works of brilliant authors, which I love to do.
Coming to the end of a music show recently, I recall Shira’s dismissive reaction to my playing Madonna. This particular morning (I’m now doing two hours every Thursday), I’m not playing Madonna—I’m ending with Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” What would Shira think of that choice? I wonder, as I start packing up my radio bag full of CDs. My bag is lighter now that there are more alternatives to vinyl. I’ll just have time for lunch before I go to my office and spend the afternoon seeing patients. I remember the first time Kate Bush’s debut album arrived in the studio, how thrilled I was by her strange, ethereal voice and complex musical arrangements. I put down my bag and leap out of my chair just as I did then, and find myself twirling around the studio. Her five-octave vocal range is transporting. I raise my arms.
At least one of the virtues of radio is that no one can see me dancing.
This essay appeared in the anthology How Does That Make You Feel:
Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch,
ed, Sherry Amatenstein, Seal Press, 2016.
Binnie Klein maintains a private psychotherapy practice in New Haven, CT, and is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. Her memoir, Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY Press) came out in 2010. She has a weekly show at WPKN-FM (and wpkn.org), Thursdays, 10 am until Noon called A Miniature World
I sat on my bed, against the pillows, and I began to wonder what the house knew, what it had watched, whether it believed in me more than Fred or liked us bot the same? How did I measure up to Sally, or she to Shirley or Shirley to Stanley? I floated somewhere between relaxation and sleep, and I felt the pulsing of the house’s life begin to shrub inside me as if we shared a single heart. Not that the walls spoke, nothing so insane, but I could feel the history of footsteps treading its floors. The slamming of doors, the rumpled bed linens, the broken glasses and books left abandoned by bedsides, the arguments and the laughter, the spilled drinks and worn socks and burnt stews and crumpled pages. I smelled flowers and semen, vomit and sweat, the sour scent of cigarette smoke, the achy sweetness of bourbon in the bottom of a glass come morning. History, the history of lives here lived, our history. The thought was comforting, like the monotonous churn of the waterwheel down in the village reservoir, over and over and over so that crashing water lost its violence, became its own continuing momentum—
thoughts into words into pictures and i closed my eyes. my brain calmed, slowed, foot soldier words aligned themselves in sentences nonsense thoughts i’d never thought such things and as i woozed and floated embryonic in the clock-ticking electricity humming heat rising silence i began to know, to know—
i know who i love, i dreamed it, dreamed the words, was i waking or sleeping, i know i know
stanley—i said to him—stanley, stanela
but i was dead, how was it so, that i was dead and i was her and so i told him, stanley listen
when i was alive, i told him, and we were happy (decades of this, and weren’t we very?), we made a vow that whichever of us went first would be cremated, and i sit in a jar on the dresser in our bedroom, keeping an eye on things.
was i waking or sleeping, i dreamed. i dreamed i was shirley, i dreamed i was shirley. i knew i was shirley i was. shirley
“you, you’ll remarry,” i told you. “men do. you won’t like to be alone.” there was no dig in this (i fucked dylan thomas on our porch, did i ever tell you? there was a party, and all our friends drunk as lords inside and it was winter. too much gin and i took him to the porch, where he grabbed icicles off the roff and tickled my neck with the cold end, then licked my frozen skin. and me, he lifted my woolen dress and drew down my tights, and yes, he fucked me, stanley, on our very own porch with you inside and some eager undergraduate stroking your shoulders as you held forth. but dylan thomas, stanley, dylan thomas—now that was a man worth holding against skin chilled and rubbery, dylan thomas—). i only wanted you to know i would not mind.
“don’t love her more than me,” i said, and you studied me, noting the brittleness in my tone, unsure whether i was about to lose my temper.
“impossible.”
Pages 195 to 197 of Shirley: A Novel
by kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 2014 Susan Scarf Merrell.
Published by PLUME, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Artwork:
Supernova Angels for the Return of the Light
by Margo Berdeshevsky
It's 3 AM. The crows on one leg or none are already starving for infant nests. A few leaves hang on still. A prayer of godwits enters the dream from the upper left quadrant. No, I tell the dream-maker,
no, make it a lamentation of swans. The times demand it. Instead, I’m given an affliction of starlings tearing the leaves that remain as they fly, and the dream is ruined. What’s real is in bed with me,
mounts me, slides in like a husband entering with the unquestioned privilege of his sexual entitlement. Drowsy, I open my thighs to him, to it, to the day. To my habit of saying “Accept it, I’ll
die tonight,” each night when I pull the quilts for sleep, so that I can practice belief. The next day is new. Always. Fair or fetid, bring with me only what I dare to remember. Opening new eyes, there is
the baby in her crib, her shape nothing I wanted. Waking is waking. What’s real is the child with her badly sculpted brain, her damaged possibility of dream. What’s real is our day in a diseased year and
the baby has come out wrong. Blame it on the chemicals. Blame it on the sting of the genus Aedes aegypti, white stripes on her legs, a marking in the form of a lyre on her upper thorax. Say that she
comes at dawn. What’s real is I was another one of the harmed, the infant, more so, but less harmed than the worse harmed than we.
Awake, it is still beautiful to hear the heart beat, I repeat. A prayer of godwits hovers at my door.
I am so deeply awake.
Previously published in Plume
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York city, often writes and lives in Paris. Before The Drought, her newest collection, is from Glass Lyre Press, September 2017. (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of her poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press,) the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Her works appear in the American journals: Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, & Jacar Press—One, among many others. In Europe her works have been seen in The Poetry Review (UK) The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques. A multi-genre novel, Vagrant, and a hybrid of poems, Square Black Key, wait at the gate. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new in the world.
Her Letters from Paris in Poetry International.
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/01/26/interviews/devin-kelly/quintan-ana-wikswo-and-margo-berdeshevsky/
My Creative Process
Can you tell us a little about the origins of “No Modifier At All” and why you wrote it?
I believe these questions can be answered in the paragraphs below (emended from a piece I also wrote for its publication in the journal “Plume” (included in a section called The Poets Speak.” ) :
Was it before or after I read words of a Swedish poet who wrote between worlds, and in the boundary between them? I don’t honestly know or remember. Because I also have written between worlds, timelines being nonlinear for me much of the time. But also because I am often a poet who asks this question in her poems, and in her life: how close is death, how near is a god … these particular lines struck a chord.
*“It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.”
— Tomas Tranströmer
from “After A Death” in The Half Finished Heaven
And was it before or after the poem began to shape for me that the words I culled from Tranströmer became a title? Do I begin with a title or end with one. Either. Both.
In Robert Bly’s introduction to The Half Finished Heaven, he says of the poet whose words I’d read that even as a very young writer Tranströmer was aware that the dead “wanted to have their portraits painted.” And I had—been thinking about infants who were dying or twisted by the Zika virus, about their helpless, stung-in-the-dark, or fucked and infected mothers.
Did I think of these other words? “And what is empty turns its face to us /and whispers / I am not empty I am open…” Yes. Before, or after. I don’t know which. Time is often nonlinear to me.
Was I, in the poem that was in the process of becoming—becoming such a woman with such an infected infant in her crib, in my imagination? Or such a woman opening her legs to the man who would infect? In my somewhere in the dark—musing, that is what was happening. And the fear I have for our world and what threatens us, tiny, unseen, until it manifests, was finding language. And Tranströmer seemed possibly to whisper. And the poem moved from fetus to infant in its crib.
At this moment, in early 2018, the first case of sexually transmitted Zika infection has been confirmed in Los Angeles County. The completed poem is one in a new as yet unpublished manuscript titled “Square Black Key,” a poetic hybrid, that marries my poems and prose and photographs. At the moment, the poem lives on page 59. And IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT.
What was your path to literature?
I began my life with words as an actress, first. I was being raised in New York City, in the theatre world, and my first ambitions was to be an actress. So Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams were all my early whisperers. I also wrote very bad poems in solitude, but I was developing an ear for the music of finer writing...and I knew I loved the best. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to follow a call to truths as best I could. And, in the guise of characters, I learned, that such a word as truth had many voices, not always my own. I learned to listen to other voices and to find my way to speak for them as well.
When did you realize you were a writer?
When I was able to stand in public and to speak my words aloud and to feel the quiet in those listening...
I knew that feeling as an actress when I was offering words spoken by another. But when I felt such a silence in the room in response to my own words, I dared to believe that I was a writer who had words to share that came from my own deepest wells.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
There were many shelves of books in my growing up home, and I was taken to the theatre and to museums and concerts in New York City, and later, in Paris. My mother was a woman who “wanted” to write, but I think she lacked the confidence to do so. She lived more in her head, and she had much she might have written if she had dared to do so.
It was your mother who encouraged you to read books?
My mother read me three pages of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn each night before `I had reached kindergarten. I listened. I heard. And she played classical music on the radio. By fifth grade I had one British-born teacher who read us The Wind In The Willows aloud. I wanted her to never stop. I don’t remember what the first Shakespearean play was that I attended—but I knew I would read more and more. I loved the language. I wanted to speak those words aloud as well.
You've studied under some pretty remarkable teachers and schools.
I went to the `High School of `Performing Arts in NYC (after auditioning with a monologue from Shaw’s St Joan.) That school, later known as Fame High School in the film years on...that school helped to shape my esthetics. I learned how hard one had to work to dare to be a voice in one’s time. And I learned that both the beauties and the sordid both were elements to be deeply studied and communicated without prejudice or compromise or inhibition. To be an artist of any kind, I was learning...meant being very naked in public. And eventually, I studied acting under Lee Strasberg of the Actors’ Studio, and learned more profoundly what it mean to risk vulnerability (sometimes too much so.) But again, my esthetics were being shaped, and would continue to push me, and to guide me further.
Which books do you remember most fondly?
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Milne’s When We Were Very Young, Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Eliot’s Prufrock... and more...and more...
Which writers, teachers, friends supported you on your path to becoming a writer?
I first heard an interpretation teacher at Northwestern University, Lila Heston, read Gerard Manly Hopkins out loud. I fell in love with such poetry, such experiment, such holiness. The science fiction genius, Theodore Sturgeon was a writer who whispered to me that I could also write fiction, and remain a poet. He showed me how a passage in one of his stories was written in perfect iambic pentameter. I never forgot that. As I mentioned, Strasberg was my teacher in the art of acting. His guidance toward telling the truth of one’s being— was signal to me.
I never graduated from a university, although I attended two, Northwestern and NYU. But I am in many ways an autodidact. My reading is both eclectic and voluntary, and in some ways, I am still pleased about that. The freedom I have felt to explore and to invent my complex paths in literature makes me a bit different I suppose. And I am still, still, still...learning. I still have much to learn. Why not?
Are you a teacher?
I have taught in the “Poets in the Schools” program in America, when there was still an NEA grant to support that wonderful project.
What works do you recommend to your students?
Everything. Read. read read.
What do you hope your students take away from your classes? What advice do you give them? Be brave. Be a little braver than you imagined you might ever be. Stand up to be counted in these times. These times are more devastating in so many ways than we ever imagined. And yet, here we are. What can we do but to become voices in our time? I take such a challenge and I offer it.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? · For you, what makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I am also a photographer. I very much like seeing the world through the metaphors that image offers me...both in language and in shape and in form and in light.
What are you working on now?
I am increasingly drawn to multi-genre work. Not being forced into one box or one shelf.
I have a new hybrid manuscript that is looking for a home, it merges my collaged photographic images and poems and short prose, all reflecting one another in a variety of looking glasses. the title is “Square Black Key.” And until it is between covers...it is still clay in my hands and words in my heart...so `I am still working in it.
Also, there are new poems in my notebooks, some are more baked as edible bread than others.
Do you have a recently published or forthcoming book or project you’d like to share?
My newest published book is BEFORE THE DROUGHT from Glass Lyre Press, which can also be found on Amazon.
I am admittedly proud that it is in the world right now. I feel it to be a book for the cries and whispers of our time. And I hope it will be widely read.
What are your hopes/concerns for the future of literature?
We need it (literature) as we need one another...more than ever before, I believe. We need our many voices. In harmonies, and off-key! Our many and maybe conflicting wisdoms. We need to listen to one another. And we need to refuse to be dumbed down.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
I used to hate graffiti when I saw it defacing beautiful architecture. Then one day I saw the colors and the yearnings of its perpetrators...the yearnings to be seen and heard outside of the venues of the establishment. And I began to accept it. I feel similarly about many changes. Acceptance is one path to enlightenment. Even the acceptance of modes we first have deemed unacceptable. Many of the new technologies are inspiring, and some need to be learned. I use a computer for my image works in ways that a darkroom never allowed. I taught myself Photoshop and use it as I once did a darkroom, only more. I type and retype and file in ways that my old shoe boxes of poems never allowed. I collage and steal from myself to include in another and another page. There are reasons to fight the big stores and online sellers, and the loss of the beautiful and cherished small bookshops. Self-publishing is a mode that some follow. I prefer to be published by those whose other choices I know and respect as editors. But that’s me. There are as many reasons to open ourselves to something new. I hope to hell there will be another springtime...
Once upon a time, printing was new! Once upon a time, paintings of the “profane” were not allowed. Only the sacred dared show its face. Once upon a time...I was new. (Maybe `I still am. )
Considering the current state of the world, what are your hopes for our future on this planet? What are your views on the importance of creativity and the humanities?
I am not optimistic about our chaos, our wars, our marches toward illiberalism or fascism or racism or our inhumanity to one another. I cannot be so. And yet, I write. And yet I walk in the river of a life. And yet I make my small drops into the huge seas and call them poems, and call them cries and whispers for being the best “Margo” I can be, today. If we fail, we fail together. If we save ourselves, it will be because more of us have dared to create something finer, kinder. I don’t always or even usually know if or when prayer is effective. but in my own silences, I pray. And with my poems...I whisper, or speak, or shout, as I can. I was born with such a yearning. I hope such a yearning remains with me until I die.
Karena pressed the message button and pleaded as the voicemail recording was about to start – interview, interview, interview. While waiting through beeps and pauses, she edged gingerly out of her high-heels – ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. Her toes unstuck from one another and stretched themselves into the carpet. A circle of dried blood spotted over one middle toe, where a neighbouring nail had dug in.
The phone clicked. The sound of breathing took over, followed by an unrecognized male voice, “Oh, baby…yeah, that’s how I like it.”
Her finger stabbed at the off button as she stuck out her tongue like an angry child.
She sighed and loosened up her shoulders the way athletes do in circular motions. The interview had gone well in terms of her performance – confident and sharp – but she knew when she passed through the lobby and her stomach sank that she wouldn’t get the job. The memory of it with its sense of defeat made her reach for the half of a cannabis joint still in her ashtray from the previous night. No, she thought, it will just make me hungry. And she only had two joints left and had to make them last.
She drew the curtains, giving the room an afternoon darkness – not black like the night, but grey from the daylight peeking through the curtains’ edges.
Sauntering towards the couch, she turned on the fan and snapped up the TV remote. It was some talk show, where a couple yelled and gesticulated at one another as the camera flipped back and forth between them and an agitated obese woman in the audience. Imaginary company in Karena’s new world, a drudge of temping as an admin assistant around job hunting. Too worried about money to socialize, her evenings were spent in front of the TV. Just as well since her friends distanced themselves as if unemployment was contagious. Or worse, perhaps they didn’t want to be associated with a whistle-blower.
She eyed the joint in the ashtray again.
The wife belted out, “You liar, you liar!” The camera panned the audience, wide-eyed, riveted.
Back to the husband. “Did not, did not!”
“And that wasn’t the half of it,” the wife continued, flicking back strands of wavy dyed-blond hairs, “You used to go around in my shoes – my best pumps!”
The audience roared. “Dump him, honey,” came from the large women.
Karena grinned and unbuttoned her blouse half way, pulling the rest over her head and tossing it over a chair. This behaviour made her think of the cleaning lady who used to come to her old apartment once a week, and how Karena herself was once meticulous, clean to a crisp. Now clothes were tossed, mugs with coffee residue left out for days, while dust swirls settled into baseboard colonies.
She stretched out on the sofa and closed her eyes.
Thump, thump, thump.
She shook her head in frustration.
“Lisa, Lisa...It’s Mrs. Wilson.” Knock, knock. A woman’s voice, scratchy and nasal, shrieked from the hallway.
“Huh?” Karena grunted, weaving a path to the door. “Yes, I’m here.” As she partially opened the door, a wave of heat hit her face.
In the hall stood an old woman holding a Macy’s Christmas bag. She wore a sour expression, which then burst into a smile of oversized dentures. Looking up at Karena through thick glasses that made her eyes appear round and dilated, the woman said, “Lisa, didn’t you hear me? Oh, no, you were napping. I can tell. You look like you just got up.” Her insect eyes glared closer at Karena, who stood with her mouth ajar, shielding her body with the door. “In fact, Lisa, honey, you look flushed. Are you okay?” The old woman slanted her silvery head as if to see into the apartment.
“But, my name isn’t Lisa...”
“Oh, no, I forgot your name again. Oh, I’m so embarrassed. But don’t tell me – I’ll remember in a minute or two.” She placed her hand on the door gently pushing it to let herself in. Tired and weak, Karena leaned back as the woman came trotting through, her leg movements stiff with age.
“Well, I brought the dress for tonight,” the woman said clipping her words. “Oh, you were watching Steve Harvey. I used to watch him, but now I watch Dr Oz.” She placed the bag down on the table. “My, it’s dark in here.”
“Uh, I think there’s been a mis…”
The woman hurried to open the curtains. “It’s warm in here too. No wonder you’re flushed.” Bright sunlight suddenly filled the room. “Oh, you only have your bra on. Me, too. I do that all the time. Just make sure you don’t do that on the second Thursday of the month. That’s when Charlie, the window cleaner – he’s such a good boy – that’s his day.”
“Uh, but, no...”
“Not another word. I told ya, you could borrow it for tonight. Not another word from you.” She then looked at Karena’s exposed trunk, her eyes growing bigger. “Ya know, Laurie, you’re thinner than I thought...”
“Because I’m not...”
“This dress won’t be tight. It might be a little big even.” She paused to catch her breath, and before the baffled Karena-Lisa-Laurie could utter another word, “Well, I’ll be off now. If you need anything else, you know where I live – 302, that’s me – just down the hall.”
Karena’s mouth opened in a silent ah ha.
“And, Lisa, I mean, Laurie, take it out of the bag right away so you won’t hafta iron it.”
“But...”
The old woman was heading to the door. “And there’s a pair of shoes in there too – you don’t hafta return those – can’t wear them anymore.”
Karena’s last effort, “Ah, but...”
The phone chirped in a three-beat monotone.
“Oh, I’ll let you get that. You don’t hafta see me out. Have a good time tonight.”
The phone nearly drowned out the old woman as she said her parting words.
Karena shook her head – weird.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” another unknown male voice began, this one sounding like a pop music radio announcer. “Am I speaking to Ka-ren-na?” He sounded unsure about the pronunciation. “Karena Ferguson?”
She knew what this meant – being at home in the daytime made her prey to telemarketers. She rolled her eyes. “Yeah.”
“You are a guaranteed winner in the Daytona National Sweepstakes.” His speech kicked into rapid pace, every sentence one breath of air. “You could be the lucky winner of a brand new sports car or perhaps you’ve won a Caribbean cruise or perhaps…”
She slotted the phone back into its cradle. She hated to do that – after all, she could be the person making those calls if she didn’t find a steady job soon. As she sighed she could hear Steve Harvey saying, “We’re now going to meet another couple…”
The shopping bag on the table seemed to jump for her attention. She went to the closet, where a shirt laid crumpled on the floor. Imagining some other woman, the Lisa-Laurie, panicking for the dress, she pulled on the wrinkled shirt, slipped on some canvass loafers and grabbed the bag.
She had to walk the entire length of the hall, stuffy without air-conditioning, to reach 302. Approaching, she could hear a television inside and knocked on the door loudly for the old lady to hear.
The door swung open. A short Latino man with a large potbelly and bare feet held a startled look on his face. “Si? Jes?”
At first she didn’t know what to say. The old woman had said 302. Karena was sure of it. “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong apartment. Does a little old lady live here? She left this in my…. I live down the hall.” She pointed, feeling her cheeks turning red.
The man smiled out of politeness. “No, not in thees apartment, sorry.” He turned away, anxious to get back to the baseball game on television.
“Uh, do you know of an old lady on this floor?”
“No, sorry.” The door slammed behind him.
Maybe it was 3-0-something else. She stepped down the hall trying 300 and 301 – nothing. At 303, a student-type came to the door, emitting a waft of cannabis fumes. He wore a nose ring, had holes in his jeans and had black and purple hair. This creature was definitely not keeping an old woman with thick glasses.
Karena continued, knocking on 304 to 308. No one had answered – probably still at work – the teachers, office workers and taxi drivers, the kind of people who lived in an apartment building the likes of this in a residential area. She had moved away from the verve of downtown – a change of scene, the line she used with anyone who asked. But it was economizing and self-punishment for opening her mouth and losing her job.
She returned to her apartment, frustration furrowing her brows and her face glowing from the steamy hallway. The living room was back to grey. She couldn’t remember, but she must have closed the curtains after the old woman had left. She dropped the bag on the table and hoped that the woman would realize her mistake and come back.
“You can be a sweepstakes winner!” came from the television.
She stared at the curtains and thought about a snack. Salad or sandwich? She hated herself for thinking about food nearly all the time. When she was managing her own staff she was too busy to think about eating. Lunches were often forced on her by Marta, her assistant, bringing in sacks of Harry’s bagels for the team.
Now she needed to stop the cravings and hold out until dinner. The Macy’s Christmas bag could distract her. It wouldn’t hurt to look. The old lady expected her to. Inside was a folded square of crepe paper that smelled of dust and perfume. She unfolded it and a silky red dress – so brightly red it could be seen in the darkened room – laid itself alluringly over the table and on to a chair.
“Wow,” Karena said aloud.
She held the dress up to see its lines. It tapered in around the waist and then came out slightly fuller at the hips, where it continued to knee length. It was cut straight and high across the chest with wide elegant straps – the type of dress that suited her angular frame. She caressed it and then draped it on to herself, imagining how she would look in it. No, I can’t do that – I simply can’t. It wouldn’t be right.
She rummaged through the bag and found a pair of red slipper-like shoes with short heels. She tossed one, then the other, on to the floor. They landed in a line, waiting for her to step in. She kicked off her canvas shoes and eased into the red slippers. They were cushiony inside and fit her perfectly. “Yessss.” She clicked the heels three times like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Grand ballerina poses took over her body. A few bold strides and she was at the curtains, where she made sweeping gestures parting the panels as if she were on a stage. The bright sunlight was dazzling. She closed her eyes and spun herself around and stopped with her arms in the air. As the final note played in her head, she gently lowered her arms – applause.
On television, the audience applauded. A woman about the same age as her said, “Yeah, like, I’ve moved on with my life.”
Karena pirouetted back to the table, kicked off the red slippers, swept up the imaginary dress and headed into the bathroom, barefoot with dried blood still on her toes. She knew she wasn’t going to win any sweepstakes and didn’t want to grow a paunch in front of the television or spend her evenings in a cannabis haze. There was only one thing to do. She’d go to a busy club or maybe even one of the grand hotels – someplace with dancing and where she could pretend to belong to one group or another. The music would be too loud for conservation. No one would ask what she did for a living or where she worked. If someone asked her name, she would yell over the music, “Lisa Laurie.”
Paola Trimarco's stories and essays have been published in several magazines, including Mslexia, Fishfood Magazine and Shooter Literary Magazine, along with a story and an essay at The Creative Process exhibition website. She was shortlisted for the Wasafiri Life Writing Competition 2014 and her stage plays have been performed in London. She has authored four textbooks, is a co-author of The Discourse of Reading Groups and is a regular contributor to The Literary Encyclopedia.
Perhaps the same could be said of any living creature:
a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, unaware of the beak of an
approaching bird; an egret mesmerized by its reflection in a pond,
as if it were the master of the universe; or Hanfeng’s own
folly of repeating the same pattern of hope
and heartbreak, hoping despite heartbreak.”
– YIYUN LI
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Artwork: Chemin de la Fontaine des Tins at Céret, Chaïm Soutine
There’s a place on Sing Woo Road in Happy Valley where you can buy hairy-crabs from Yangcheng Lake. I bought six, I was going to have the amah stew it in hot Szechuan peppers for Sonny. But he never came home that weekend. It wasn’t the first time. I know something is going on. It’s always the same damn Chinese clients in Shanghai. Karaoke bar. Singing Raindrops Are Falling on My Head or some looney tune that only Sonny knows. They speak only Mandarin up there, right? Yeah, they’ll be singing that oldie, Shanghai Beach, something syrupy like that.
I didn’t end up cooking the crabs. I threw them out. What’s the point? I could easily eat six, I could eat twelve on my own, but what’s the point in dining alone on crabs?
Sonny’s a real tightwad, so when he called from Shanghai, I stuck it to him. “I spent a lot of money on those crabs. What a pity I had to feed them to the neighbors’ dog.”
As if on cue, the damn Lab started to bark. Sonny could probably hear him all the way in Shanghai. He sighed, “I hate to break it to you, babe, but that shop on Sing Woo Road is known for trying to pass off Hongze crab at Yangcheng crab prices. You’ve been stiffed.”
What Sonny was really saying: if I had been able to speak Cantonese, they wouldn’t have tried to pass off counterfeit crabs on me. This town was full of counterfeits. Fake Gucci purses. Fake Jimmy Choo shoes. Pirated DVDs. Fake gold. Whatever you’ve got, they could fake it for you. It’s the perfect town for me, really. I’m another version of counterfeit: yellow on the outside, but I can’t speak a lick of Cantonese.
***
Sonny’s French cut silk shirts hang like expensive ghosts in the closet. He seems quite the counterfeit himself – a counterfeit of his former self – when his sideburns began to turn salt-and-pepper, he came back with a platinum-blond dyed cut that makes him look younger by ten years. On the street, women flash him smiles or circle their midriffs with their palms. He’s also turned faux-European, courtesy of membership at The Hong Kong Jockey Club, often sporting a V-neck sweater tied around his shoulders, an Oxford shirt and skinny jeans. With his recent promotion to Head of Sales at Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, he travels a lot. I watch him put on his expensive brogues, scuff his shoe on the welcome mat at the doorway as if trying to rid himself of gum picked up on the soles, and I think to myself: even wild desert donkeys have to go to work.
***
The neighbor’s dog is baying. No matter the time of day, it bays as if it’s a call of duty, or deep in heat. Someone should neuter that dog. Someone should pay heed to his loneliness. But his owner is never home.
Outside Peninsula Villas where we live, a group of missionaries loiter. They look like a youth gathering, except one of the young men is Caucasian. He has longish hair in need of a barber, his hair is cornsilk yellow, and in the sun, it gleams like a swatch of silk. Getting close enough one day, I see that his eyes are strange --- one green one blue. His smile is lupine, as if hungry to save souls, hungry to recruit for God’s army. God has a booming voice, God is certainly liable to shout: how many have you saved today, and I would have to say I have not even managed to save myself.
The Caucasian young man approaches me, perhaps zeroing in on an aura I’ve unwittingly exuded, an aura of loneliness and accessibility. He opens his mouth and out flows a stream of Cantonese. The only word I understand is ‘sister’. His intonations are so perfect that I find myself halted in step listening to his jolting cadence.
“Where did you learn to speak Cantonese like that?” I can’t help blurting out.
The young man stops talking. “I’m sorry, I’d mistaken you for a local.”
I smile. “No offense taken. I’m already saved though. I went to a Catholic school. I know the seven cardinal sins, the sacraments, all of that.”
He breaks into stride alongside me. “But do you believe in Jesus? Being baptized alone isn’t enough unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior.”
Do I accept Jesus as my personal savior? A long time ago, I thought I did.
But to brush him away, I quote John 6:44 –No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.
The young man nods. “I see you know your Scripture, sister. God bless you. Have a good day.”
He lopes off in a crooked gait, and I watch him make a beeline for another woman emerging from Peninsula Villas. This time, a woman who speaks dignified upper-crust Cantonese. I listen to his rapid conjugations, and once again, I’m thinking that here’s another counterfeit – a boy who is the embodiment of the foreign devil but speaks such fine yellow earth. Or perhaps I’ve got it all wrong: I’m the counterfeit and he’s the genuine article. Tell me, how does one discern real from fake in this topsy-turvy world?
On a tram heading towards Causeway Bay another afternoon, the Caucasian young missionary has climbed on as well, and behind my blue-tinted pilot Gucci shades, I watch him wend his way down the gangway, looking for victims. This tint of blue suits me. I do not remove my glasses. I’d like to think the world is as off-color as I am.
He sits down beside me and accosts me in English. “Sister, do you believe in God?”
“You’ve already tried to convert me once, don’t you remember? I’m Catholic.”
He frowns slightly. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bother you.”
“No, please sit. You never did tell me how you learned to speak Cantonese so fluently.”
His eyes maintain a sly translucence; the disparate color pupils mesmerize me. The young man has an ability to gaze without blinking, without revealing any emotion or flicker of life within. “I grew up with missionary parents in Kowloon. They were Jesuits.”
“What is your name?”
“Douglas.”
“I’m Lillian. Nice to meet you Douglas.”
I turn into your average busybody aunt; I quiz him about his family background. The government housing where he grew up was in Shatin, and he played soccer with a group of boys from the same block every afternoon after school. His best friend was a diabetic Chinese boy, self-named Peanuts. Completely without irony, Douglas tells me Peanuts was crazy about Snoopy cartoons. He loved red bean buns, except of course he couldn’t eat any. He died a sudden death from insulin shock. He wasn’t even sixteen. Douglas had a hard time accepting the death of his friend. That was when he started turning to God. He grew up saying his mealtime and bedtime prayers, went to Jesuit prayer meetings with his parents, but it wasn’t until Peanuts died that he really began to pray for the first time. “Truth hides in the most peculiar places, my friend.” Douglas rubs the corner of his lips with his fingers as if he’s eaten something gelatinous. He uses such antiquated phraseology, as if he’s training to be a priest. “There’s no truth bigger than death. But it hides itself in the illness of my best friend. He died so I could find life. His life though short had purpose. If I hadn’t lost him, I would never have known the beneficence and wonderful love of our Father in Heaven.”
I find his words self-obsessed, delusional. I stare at the calm unmoving pupils in his face. They are completely unruffled, devoid of any expression. For something to say, I start telling him about my baptism by water, how the priest at Assumption Catholic Church dunked my head for five seconds too long, a thick, callused palm pressed hard against the crown of my head, how bubbles of air escaped my lips in a mild panic, and I thought I would drown.
Douglas finds this amusing. “You thought you were going to get killed being baptized?”
“It sounds really lame, doesn’t it?”
He smiles. “Not so lame. I once thought I would die if I was bitten by three mosquitoes in succession.”
“Didn’t you say sometimes truth hides in the most peculiar places? Well, maybe it hides in every third mosquito.”
His strange emotionless eyes are depthless. “You’re funny.”
“Am I?”
He makes a blessing gesture of the cross, gets up and seats himself in the row behind me, in search of the next potential convert. “You are not alone,” he says to me, solemn and blank-eyed, “Our Father in Heaven is looking at you.” I know he meant ‘after’, not ‘at’, but it sounds just right.
***
This is what Sonny accuses me of – melodrama, histrionism, unreasonableness, which in Sonny’s book, is an even bigger cardinal sin than the other seven. He accuses me of fraudulent behavior. I’m acting shrewish for no good reason. There is no other woman. He is not avoiding coming home. Our marriage is fine.
I think Sonny has stumbled upon an unkind cosmic truth about much of loneliness – loneliness is something your doppelganger takes on. She’s the one speaking when you’re lonely, standing there in her tight qipao and looking suspiciously like your querulous mother. Loneliness is itself and its opposite simultaneously, just as Hong Kong, as you stand on a promontory gazing down, is a fishbowl and also a sea of people; you can escape neither it nor yourself.
Over the last two years living in Hong Kong, I’ve lost a lot of friends. I don’t keep up with people. I don’t return phone calls. I hardly respond to invites. The ones I did like had children, and it’s true, there’s a deep divide between people with children and people without. That divide is deep and vascular. Truth is, I don’t mind hearing another competitive school story. I don’t mind hearing about another child prodigy. But these women break off embarrassed, as if someone like me without children would never understand that need to brag.
When I think of my friends, it’s curious to note that each one of them is a Chinese woman like me, with the diaspora behind them or who have spent some years abroad, but they’ve all married a Caucasian, like Douglas. Maybe they know something I don’t. I imagine them sitting in a school auditorium with their husbands and their mixed children – a breed unto their own – and I think to myself: individually they might have married for love, but collectively they married for power. Wasn’t it Gertrude Stein who said all relationship was power?
I find receipts in Sonny’s trouser pockets. Receipts from karaoke bars for two of everything: two snifters of Armagnac, two chicken fricassees, two goat cheese salads, one baked Alaska, two mineral waters. Sonny doesn’t eat desserts.
***
It is too hot to remain indoors. A million ants are gnawing at me. So I take the tram to Causeway Bay, letting the hot silty wind ruffle my hair and plaster my face. I used to be shocked at the film of black that comes away from my pores after an afernoon out, but now, I’ve come to embrace even the dirt and filth.
Wandering around Causeway Bay, where the crowd is three-deep on every street, a man pushing a loading trolley of boxes forces me to step out of the way into a dark hallway. It’s a gray, decrepit building, but glancing at the metal directory, I see that the third floor hosts a karaoke bar. It’s dark and vacant, most of its chairs up-ended on tables, and it reeks of stale mustiness and beer. The darkness feels lik e a welcome relief. Here I can take off my blue-tinted Gucci glasses and allow the world to resume normal colors again. Not that the obscure darkness within really lets light in. But that’s also for the best.
The attendant that shows me to a karaoke room is a young adolescent girl with bad acne but beautiful lashes. The girl wears a white long-sleeved shirt, a skinny black tie, and black knickerbockers. It’s an odd choice of fashion, but I’ve grown used to these oddball Hong Kong teenagers with their guileless innocence and desire to be hip. She tells me her name is Shadow; she babbles at me in Cantonese, and I try to make out what she’s blabbing about, and then sudden understanding dawns, as if often does for me even though I resist. She can’t believe I’ve paid but I’m not going to avail myself of the songs. Just drink Johnny Walker in the dark? That offends her Chinese sensibilities of getting a good bargain. After all, what other point is there to life but to sing bawdy karaoke?
A thick laminated folder is thrust into my hands, its plastic making crinkling sounds like smoking ice-cubes. The list of songs on offer is endless. Mandarin, Cantonese, even Indonesian songs, and of course, a long list of oldies. The names bring electric jolts of memory – Michelle by the Beatles, Eternal Flame, Wind Beneath My Wings, Dancing Queen, I Should Be So Lucky, Like A Virgin. My high school best friend Hannah. I suddenly see her in all her teenage glory – hoop earrings, leg warmers, giggling, snuggling in my bed, mooning over Doogie Howser, M.D.
What has happened to me that I’m content to be as fake as Sonny? What have I become? A trophy expatriate wife lazying away her days with lacquered nails and shopping for semi-precious stones? I look up at the thin corrugated pipes snaking along the ceiling, the air-conditioner dripping water and making a humming noise, the dark and dank and cold of the room I’m in. Shadow pokes her head back in.
“You choose song yet?”
I shake my head.
She comes in and slumps down on the greasy vinyl couch. “I help.”
She flips through the laminated folder. Her finger peruses down the list quickly. She jabs at a song she’s chosen. Over her shoulder, I try to read. It’s some Canto pop song. “From Faye Wong. You know Faye Wong?”
Everybody knows Faye Wong if they live in Hong Kong. She claps her hands. She pushes the button on the remote. The video blinks on. A picture of a thin sheba-like creature snaking along a wall painted like a chess set. The music begins. Shadow clears her voice. When the words come on, she cues herself perfectly. Her voice is young, sweet, if a bit off-key. She’s too unabashed and guileless to be self-conscious of her lack of tonal range.
When she finishes, I applaud. She blushes like a winsome bride. “Your turn.”
Why not? I can make it through if I close my eyes and remember Hannah. I clear my throat. I try a note. It comes out reedy, wobbly. Shadow has chosen a song for me at random. Belinda Carlisle’s Mad About You. “You know this one?”
I do know this one. Oh, how I know this one. I begin slow, tentative. And then, there’s no help for it. The beat demands it. The corny pictures of a couple strolling on a beach to a tropical sunset demand that I belt out Mad About You with everything I’ve got, all that my lungs can deliver, even if feeling is lacking. Once again, I am a teenager. A held-up fist as a functioning microphone. One knee thumping up, thumping down. The hair flick. The snazzy elbows cinched close, the knees bumping together, the feet splayed.
The song ends. Shadow stares at me as if I’m a particularly delicious Yangcheng crab. “Wow, you so good. More song?” She drums her feet, left, right, left, right, a rapid staccato. And I too am alive to a curious beat. I’ve just realized that when singing the chorus an image has slipped into my head of cornsilk hair and a stranger’s mismatched eyes. My mind has opened itself like a drawer full of knives.
***
Every afternoon, I ride the tram. Every afternoon, I sing karaoke with Shadow. Every afternoon on the tram, I run into Douglas. He says hello and then leaves me alone.
“Do you mind if I ask you something, Douglas?” It’s an afternoon with few passengers. He sits behind me, hands beating a strange drumbeat on his Bible.
“Sure.”
“How many people have you managed to save on this tram?”
He closes his bible with a snap and tucks it under his arm. “This afternoon, zero. But the afternoon is still young.” He laughs, twitches a little. Even his laugh has an anodyne, unruffled sheen to it, as if he’s not really laughing, merely imitating the sounds. “My job is to plant seeds. I have hope that many of my seeds will bloom.”
“Have you ever considered that God may not exist?” A side of me whispers: it is evil to do this. Stop.
Douglas smirks. “How do you explain creation then if God doesn’t exist?”
I shrug. “The big bang?”
“That’s just a scientific theory. No one has proven it yet.”
“You mean you don’t believe in dinosaurs, and that we’re descended from monkeys?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I believe in evolution, because I believe God created us all. Monkey and its descendants.”
I can do damage, I see that, but I’m needled through with irritation. “Are you really so naïve as to believe there is an Adam and Eve?”
“I believe that every word in the Bible is inspired by God. It is holy. It is God’s instruction to us.”
“Douglas, have you ever considered that it is possible that there’s nothing after this? There is no heaven. We become nothing. Our bodies crumble to dust. And that’s all.”
Finally, an emotion registers behind his opalescent irises – an emotion that contains within itself a flicker of annoyance. “There is a heaven, Lillian. And there is a hell too.”
“You can’t prove it, though, can you?”
He touches his hair, flicks it back, loops it behind his ear in a curiously effeminate gesture. “No. But neither can you prove they don’t exist.” The minute he says this, I realize of course there's a heaven and hell.
My breath lodges, kinks itself. The pain I feel is slamming and sudden, and yet, I don't want him to see this intimate glimpse of me. “So why do you choose to believe in something you can’t prove?”
Douglas bares his teeth. He means it as a smile, but there’s a scintilla of animosity he couldn’t hide. “Faith. God tells us to have faith.”
We look at each other from opposite sides of an impregnable gulf: he is bristling, and I feel deserted, alone, as if I've never before accosted such craggy depth with blue-tinted glasses. I push my Gucci shades up on top of my head so that he can finally see and read my eyes. “Tell me, Douglas, do you have faith in your singing?”
***
It takes a lot to convince Douglas. I am ashamed to admit I used Shadow as a ruse. I tell him there’s someone longing to be saved at this karaoke bar.
Shadow is surprised to see me with a young man. Her mouth opens slightly, her eyes widen. But she’s even more surprised when she takes in his race, his disparate color eyes, the Bible under his arm. When Douglas begins to talk to her in Cantonese though, she’s easily won over. Finally, through Douglas, I learn much more about Shadow than I have done in the last couple of weeks here.
She too grew up in a housing estate in Shatin. She has two brothers but she is the youngest. She failed her O levels. Her father still drives cargo trucks back and forth from the mainland and her mother is a seamstress. In a four-room apartment about four hundred square feet, she lives with her parents, her elderly grandmother, and her two strapping brothers. Dimly, with my childhood growing up in Berkeley, I am aware that there are many lives of penury, people whose lives are limned with a survival prerogative that I do not know. Shadow is oblivious to the extent that she has no ambitions where money is concerned; she accepts her destiny to be poor. She wants to find a boy to marry, a boy to have a family with, a boy who earns enough that she can stop working at this decrepit karaoke bar.
Douglas has stopped translating. He’s conducting now an urgent conversation with Shadow, opening his bible, which I see now is a Chinese-English bible, and the runic characters on the left page look so dense and crawling to me, an unfamiliar place, a place that does not wish to be known, a place not unlike this town. A whiff of strangeness touches me as I watch Douglas’ face – so unperturbed, so calm, so serene, and this whiff contains within it a terrible whisper – the whisper of ineffable sadness.
Shadow opens up like a flower; I don’t think she’s ever heard a Caucasian speak such mellifluous Cantonese back at her. It brings back a memory of Sonny and me in Venice, during our early days together. He serenades me with Italian, something I hadn’t known he could speak. He serenades me in a gondola, and I was bowled over by this dapper Chinese guy with his romantic incantations, and it was only when the gondolier laughed, that I began to suspect that really, Sonny was babbling nonsense.
***
In plain daylight, I see Sonny. He is walking away from me. His hand is resting on the back of a woman with shoulder-length hair, hair-salon curled type of hair. Her skirt is pencil-thin, her legs limber and long in cork wedges. When she turns towards him, I catch sight of a cheek. She is young. Irredeemably young as I am irredeemably middle-aged. I’m wearing tennis shoes. I can catch them. I can shout obscenities. I have good lungs. I can really belt them out. Bastard. Asshole. Goddamn you. But I’ve hesitated a second too long. He has already turned a corner in Happy Valley. The last I see of her is when she picks up her foot to scrape off some gum that’s accidentally stuck to the sole of her wedges. She laughs and swings a plastic bag. Perhaps containing Yangcheng crabs.
***
Shadow invites both Douglas and I over for dinner with her parents. I demur.
But Shadow insists. “I think my parents will really like you.”
“I can’t. I have to cook dinner for my husband.”
“But you tell me he travels a lot.”
“Well, maybe some other time I can come.”
“Is he travelling this week?”
“Well, yes, but I really shouldn’t. I won’t know how to get out to Shatin.” (this part is true).
“I get off work on Wednesday at six. I’ll take you. I can even come to your house to pick you up.”
This does not sound like a good idea to me. I don’t want Shadow to see the palatial apartment I live in at Peninsula Villas. “No, no. I can come here. I’m here till five o’clock a lot of afternoons anyway.”
“Please come. My mother makes a killer shark fin soup. She puts red mehjool dates in them. No one else makes it that way. If you like her soup, she might even give you her recipe.”
It’s the smile that makes me crumble. Shadow, despite her namesake, does not yet know of dark corners and eclipses of the soul. And when Douglas is done saving her soul, I wonder if the cobwebs will finally invade.
***
Douglas, on the other hand, is enthused. More souls to save. Hallelujah.
A Wednesday afternoon, we ride the tram together to Causeway Bay. Shadow comes off work, skipping down the steps. Youthful, exuberant. The two of them converse excitedly in the MTR.
“What are you guys talking about?”
“We’re talking about the soccer game last night. Hong Kong versus Korea. One nil.”
“Hmm…I didn’t know she’s a big soccer fan.”
Douglas rolls his head around his shoulders as if he’s a soccer athlete. “She’s got two older brothers, remember?”
“Will we meet them too?”
He turns to ask Shadow in Cantonese, and it’s then that I see it. The sudden down flicker of her lids, the upturn of her lips, the fading blush down her neck. Shadow has a crush on Douglas.
This unimpeded knowledge feels like a blow to the chest. It leaves me suddenly desirous of more than the stale air of the MTR. I must have gone pale, because Douglas suddenly looks at me with concern. “Are you okay, Lillian?”
“I don’t feel too good.”
There’s no place to sit; no one seems willing to give up his seat either. Typical Chinese. Douglas puts an arm around me. “You can lean on me, Lillian. Lean on me until you feel better.”
And I do. I lean on his young muscular strength. I lean on his faith in the world oh-so-hopeful and benign, his heart that knows only of distant heartbreak and the munificence of a grander being.
The Season For Hairy Crabs was published in The View From Here.
Elaine Chiew is based in Singapore and London and is the editor/compiler of Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015). She won The Bridport Prize in 2008 and Elbow Room Prize (2015). She’s been named Wigleaf Top 50 Microfiction, nominated for Best of Small Fictions 2016 and shortlisted and long listed in other competitions and awards, including Baltic Residencies, Pushcart, Short Fiction, Mslexia, BBC Opening Lines, Fish International Short Stories, among others. Her most recent stories can be found in Potomac Review and Singapore Love Stories (Monsoon Books, 2016) which has been shortlisted for the Singapore Readers’ Popular Choice Awards. She has recently completed an M.A. in Asian Art History from Lasalle College of the Arts (Goldsmiths accr.) and a writer’s residency at School of the Arts, Singapore.
Marooned on a couch brown raft -rocking lle-de-France
Sullen blackboard jazz blowin from across the navy New Orleans seas.
Slo-mo angels doing somersaults on my torn red curtain reverie
in these broken Halloween bones and mask
I rummage through the ashes that crashed me into
this pink, new golden face dawn..
floating past jagged-edged icicles into the night melting
chocolate Clark Terry’s “They Didn’t Believe Me.”
Love lost is something we can never afford
head stuck on a starboard mast
crashing through storm waves painted in dead dreams.
And feeling that familiar frost-bitten regret again- that we never
consummated the close quarters of then,,,what are regrets other than dead
sea gulls floating in a ghost soup sea.
Red Canvas by Richard Tuttle, 1967 (Fair use)
Artwork:
Red Rhythms by Margaret Garrett
INTERNATIONAL VOICES
At the square before Big Wild Goose Pagoda
the crowds jostle and careen
into spring flowers, boom box thumps,
dancer's rumps, and snaking traffic.
One night master Xuanzang, who anchors
the southernmost corner of the square,
quietly steps down from the stone terrace
and hides himself in Ci'en temple.
Translated by David Allen Sullivan
and the Chinese Poetry Co-Translation Collective
【浮躁】
大雁塔广场
游客熙熙攘攘
喷泉，音乐
车水马龙
南广场上站立的玄奘
终于在一个夜里
默默走下石台
躲进了慈恩寺
Xiangying, from Xi'an, Shaanxi province, China, is a graduate of XISU, and works has been published in 普遍立射的年 the New Century Poetry. He was awarded a prize for excellent original poetry in the Xi'an youth poet seminar and the Xinlu poems reading contest.
David Allen Sullivan’s books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. Most recently, he won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his family. For more about his work, visit his poetry website, a modern Chinese co-translation project, and poetry about the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of "Restlessness" and why you translated it?
I taught on a Fulbright for one year in Xi'an, China, home of the Terra Cotta Warriors. I do not speak Mandarin, but taught a seminar in which my graduate students found and translated young Chinese poets for a planned anthology. This was one of the poems they discovered, translated, and then worked with me to perfect into a poem that works in English.
What drew you to poetry?
I began writing in high school, and pursued a PhD in poetry. My first book was published when I was in my late forties, and the response encouraged me to write more. I write because it helps me understand myself, my life, and my world.
You publish "co-translations". Can you share some of your experiences of the translation process? Would you describe that relationship as a collaboration?
I see translation from a language I don't speak as an interactive process whereby we negotiate what the reader of the poem who speaks both languages discovered, my reaction to what they've created, and what of the original can be carried over into a poem that works in English. It is blindly feeling one's way down slippery cellar steps into the root-smelling dank, feeling for the light switch, and seeing the place flash into existence.
Can you tell us about your formative influences? Where you born into a family of writers or artists?
My mother wrote poems, and became an art historian. Together we are creating an anthology of poems. Hey, anyone interested? Here is an invitation to write a poem about one of the paintings by Bruegel or Bosch. Feb. first deadline. No limitation on what painting you choose, or what style of poem (prose? lyric? narrative? etc.) you write.https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website. Her dedication to her work inspires me.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you?
I love all art forms, but particularly painting, film, and novels.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
We are in danger of imploding due to the commercialization of our means of communication. We speak to people who hold our own views, are increasingly directed to mediums we're guaranteed to like, and do not emerge from our bubble except to cast stones at others' bubbles. Only art and literature can challenge our narrowing worlds, open us up to other cultures, beliefs, and religions.
Photos by Piotr Ryczko
Confronted with the unease within
When asked about my novel A child made to order, I would summarise it was a psychological drama/thriller about a woman's inner struggle with her infertility. Upon this statement, I would mostly receive blank stares, followed by an uneasy silence, and the person in question would hurriedly skip to the next subject at hand. Anything which would brush over this anomaly.
Though sometimes, and maybe lucky for me, the more honest ones would spit it right out: "What (the fuck) do you, a 40+ year old male, think you know about infertility?"
Yes, what do I know about something as serious and life-debilitating as the Mitochondrial disease? A rare genetic disorder which renders a woman's offspring crippled. But even more to the point, what do I know about the long-term repercussions this disease has on these women's psyche?
Although this question stung right at my insecurites, being as uncomfortable as it can get, it was also necessary to hear it. This was not only a perfectly valid question, it was a question which struck right at the heart of what we storytellers are trying to do. It demanded answers, why am I doing what I do, writing what I write and telling this story, instead of any other story.
And ultimately it also pushed me further into a confrontation with something which most of all attempt to run away from. Our inner unease.
So with this in mind, I would like to circle around the following questions.
Should we write only what we know? Play it safe and approach matters that we have lived through. Or maybe it's the other way around? We should only write what we don't know? Take a wild chance, put everything on some wild card, anything to blast our way out of the safe and comfy shell of ours, out of our comfort zone.
And if we choose to go down this troubled path, why do we do it in the first place? What drives us into this great black, yawning chasm of this unknown? Why do we write about something which we have no emotional prerequisite to understand? Is it only naive curiosity driven by our sheer stupidity, or is it some random chance? A quantum crap shoot of the universe?
And then maybe, just maybe, it might be something deeper? Something which bubbles up from our subconsious, our heart(?), and attempts to tell us something, to comprehend ourselves better, to expand our inner cosmos?
“It’s a myth that writers write what they know. We write what it is that we need to know. What keeps me sitting at my desk, hour after hour, year after year, is that I do not know something, and I must write in order to find my way to an understanding. This is the essence of all writing, to find a way to an understanding." - Marcie Hershman
It is easy as a writer to get caught up in the bells and whistles of the story. The exquisite intricacies of the thrillerish plot, the suspenseful twists and turns, the amazing hook at the beginning, and the stunning revelations at the end. Or even the beautiful theme which might become the initiating point of the story. I certainly do it more often than not and get so fired up, it becomes notoriously difficult to drag me down to mother earth.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying these skills manifested in our stories. All of them are able to add up to some nifty storytelling. They are the muscles, tendons, eyes, even intellect of the story told. But to get at the core of the story, that part which will not only flabberghast the recipient, but wrench their heart inside out, I believe we need to do some heavy lifting inside ourselves.
We need to dig for the emotional core of our story.
I used the better part of writing my novel to come to terms with why I was writing it in the first place.
There was the initial infatuation with the theme of the current state of Genetics. And it still is. After all, we have a revolution in the making. We are right on the brink of a mile stone in humanity's history, a point where we will be able to rewrite the most basic fibre of our existence, our DNA. This theme sparked off the idea for the book. But this theme, or any other theme ofr that matter, won't cut it for 80.000 words which have to push and pull the reader into a trance-like emotional rollercoaster.
So the writing process ended up being a journey, a self-ransacking. What did I have emotionally in common with such a protagonist like Viola? What was the resonating frequency between us? Or to be more exact, what kind of flaws did I share with my character? What conscious wants did we have in common? And what uncioncious needs overlapped in our characters?
And most of all, why did the writing process about such a woman come so naturally for me? What issues were bleeding over from my personality over to the fictitious universe of my protagonist?
From my experience, only through this uncomfortable digging into our own psyche, do we have a chance at creating a story which will reverberate in someone else. In other words, have a shot at becoming universal. Or to put it in in a different manner: The more I write, and make conscious why I write, the more precise and pinpointed my underlying message becomes.
There are some people, writers, artists, etc, who, in a self exclamatory manner, claim they've conquered their demons. They've become their own Supermen/women, the master's of their own universe.
And it might even be true, I wish that for them. But personally, I believe this process, the confrontation with what's inside us, is never finished. Not because I enjoy the anguish it brings, but because it carries with it a constant self-inquiry. And this is what makes us grow. This mental destress and misery is what pushes us to transcend beyond what we are now.
For me Ernest Hemingway's words bring with them a deep psychological and spiritual truth. They strike right at the heart of the cracks which never quite mend inside us, but instead help us evolve and ascend.
“We are all broken, that's how the Light gets in." - Ernest Hemingway
The Emotional Core of the Story - Part II
Piotr Ryczko is the published author of the London based publishing house The Book Folks. His first novel, a Scandinavian psychological thriller A child made to order was released on Amazon Kindle and Paperback. It placed itself amongst the 100 best novels in its category. The same publishing house plans to release the novel PANACEA at the end of 2017.
His short films have won quite a few international prizes. They can be seen here: piotr-ryczko.com/shorts/
Born in Poland and raised in Norway, he loves both countries, but has a soft spot for his hometown, Oslo. Piotr loves to hear from readers and writers and can be found on Storygeist where he writes flash fiction, html5 stories, non-fiction and screenplays for his films.
He is also an avid photographer which he does as a hobby, as well as a means to communicate his visual ideas during the filmmaking process. www.facebook.com/RyczkoPhoto/
Tony is from Liverpool: he is a boxer, and an actor, and of formidable size. I hardly know him but he takes me to the Turkish Baths on East 12th Street. He throws me in the cold water, then the hot, then the ice. He thrashes me with eucalyptus fronds and massages me in the steam room. He does all this, over and over, for two hours. He takes me into a shower stall and cuts my hair, because he is also, he says, a hairdresser. He lies me in a cot and feeds me carrot juice, and later borscht. When we get outside, he veers into a bookstore and reads me Neruda: In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself….
*
“The Boxer” appeared in 52 Men published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena USA in 2015. 52 Men was featured in an essay by Amanda Fortini in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016. “52 Men suggests that our identity is at least in part a product of our romantic past, and that the particulars we choose to depict that past are significant, comprising a kind of personal psychobiography… Leonard’s focus is zoom-lens tight: she describes the various men, zeroing in on what they said and did -— and how she responded — in a pivotal moment. .. She suffered a grievous early trauma… and she’s wounded. Yet she’s also slyly, coolly observant and has transformed her experiences into art… We know her, ultimately, through the book she has written. The narrative specifics she selects to describe the men are hers, as is the deadpan humor; all of it arises from her artistic consciousness. “Although in style and tone 52 Men differs from either Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, it is, like both of these books, a novel of impressions unified by the author’s sensibility.”
Louise was raised in Manhattan. She was born in New Zealand of British and Maori descent and has traveled widely throughout the world. At 28, she quit full-time magazine work in Manhattan to be a creative writer. Compared in the LARB to Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwicke, she favors the crot and short form; her focus is on men and women, the interior lives of girls, and the experience of extremes. She has lived in New York, Europe, Mississippi, New Zealand and Australia, including in the outback of Western Australia. She lives now on Lake Ontario, New York.
Long before the Me Too movement, you’ve been writing books and coming of age stories [Since You Ask, Miss Me a Lot of] about survivors of assault, abuses of power. Can you tell us a little about the origins of 52 Men and why you wrote it?
I wrote 52 Men while flung out, alienated in the outback of Western Australia. I felt so estranged from my life growing up in Manhattan, it was as if people from my past appeared in hologram in the sky. I had to pay witness to them.
It also seemed to me that these 52 relationships were the fallout of a particularly brutal relationship in childhood. That relationship is in Part 2, though fictionalized. I wonder if all of us have some blight on our childhood, some rupture that destroys what might have been -- and what we therefore, in some ways, always long for. The Garden of Eden lost, the human condition in which good and evil, in us, live side by side.
Why did you become a writer?
Writers, some of us, need to tell our own sides of a story; this need arises from childhood or some wrong, some injustice. It can also come from an experience of ecstasy -- that, by expressing, we prolong or hold onto.
Who were some of your formative influences? And what advice did they give you?
I was lucky. I had a lot of praise, and a lot of encouragement, from early on. This gave me a solid identity and purpose. I was writing for newspapers in Manhattan and New Zealand at 15 and 17 and 18: reviews, interviews, a front page column, a long feature on a boy's prison, which I toured at age 17 with a newspaper photographer. Creative work was more fraught, and personal. I took to heart the advice of my father and of poet Kenneth Koch who I studied with at Columbia College in New York: don't try to write like someone else; write as yourself. It sounds easy, yet it is what all writers strive for: to be distinct, while at the same time not being a virtuoso or resorting to frills and bows. The work I like best is work like the rose created by the blood of the nightingale -- it has to capture that person's soul or life blood.
What other art forms interest you?
All art forms that transcend words attract me; I cannot help but think that visual and musical arts forgo the expectation of making sense of life, of extracting a meaning or lesson. I would prefer not to have this responsibility. That being said, age helps.. Truths I could not see, or would not, have at last forced themselves upon me. It's worth staying alive for, even if painful. I revere the poets who wrote their brilliant work young. But for me, I quote Aeschylus, a favorite in college: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What are you working on now? What are your forthcoming projects?
In 52 Men, the telling in shorts of 52 encounters with men in my life, is the seed of a novel on a reform school boy I met at 14. I've been writing that story ever since ... Innocence, lies, manipulation, sex, violence... all of these took me decades to understand and I hope this will be my next book. There's also a collection of essays I wrote on lovers who enacted joint suicide pacts. They're tragic but oddly beautiful, romantic yet the result of power (usually a man's), delusion (both men and women's) and hope.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
Meanwhile, technology provides a continuous stream of information -- yet still, this only the raw material with which the writer works. It's what you do with it that counts. Beware as one would beware a proliferation of Sirens on the beach.
Stephanie Gangi records every moment of intentional contact in seven days.
I read an article about how couplehood and the attendant touching, not necessarily sexy, increases good health and longevity. I'm single and on the dark side of 60. I'm fine living alone, it's fine, but when Trump got elected, for example, I had no one to gather me up and curl around me to protect me from everything incoming, nukes included. In a less grim example, I'm on a regular schedule of imaging tests for cancer, and I have friends, I have daughters, but reaching out every three months to express my scanxiety and beg for hugs seems overly needy. If I had a partner, in my case, a man, in the next room, I could complain at moments of peak terror and get held and hold on. Maybe live longer in better health. After reading the article, I wanted to know how much human touch I was receiving over the course of a week. Like, data-gathering.
Day one, Sunday
Nothing. No one touches me. I feel flu-ish. I revise my premise from human touch to "intentional" touch, so I can count the dog, although he has to initiate. In fact, the rule is all the touch counts have to be initiated by the other person/animal. Sunday goes from nothing to seven times touched: the dog came to me four times with his muzzle to my hand for petting and two times with his paw on my foot to interrupt me as I wrote, and once on the street he purposefully bumped my thigh to herd me along.
Touches on Sunday: seven.
Monday
In the afternoon I have a manicure and pedicure, and impulsively add a lip wax and a ten-minute massage in the special chair. My Vietnamese nail worker, who is name-tagged "Sharon" for the clients, gets to work. She is rough with my feet and I flinch. We smile, she behind a mask. Sharon adjusts her touch. When she finishes—I love the feel of the twisted paper towel threaded between my toes—she takes my arm to help me from the high chair. In the waxing room, she dabs my upper lip. She moves a strand of hair from my mouth and then uses the flat of her palm to smooth my hair off my face. She applies the wax and presses the gauze and rips it off, one, two, three, four times. She taps my skin with something cool, gelatinous, and helps me off the table and over to a manicure chair.
I have to explain about my trigger thumbs, arthritis, a side effect of an oral chemotherapy drug. I wiggle them: please be careful. She wraps my aching hands in hot cloths. My throat tightens. Next she situates me in the massage chair. My nails are wet so Sharon gathers my hair—which, gone and grown back twice now, is newly thick and wavy and unruly for the first time in my life—and clips it up for better access to my neck and shoulders.
I think of my grandmother. Mary. I don't know why, since I was so small when she died, and only know her through my mother's memories. My mother, Marie, is dead too, so I can't confirm anything. But I picture my grandmother with big hands, wide so that a whole warm palm, doughy, could heal eight children. When she finishes, Sharon smooths my wayward hair. I let out a small sob, sort of. My throat is tight and my eyes are brimming when I hit the street. The dog nuzzles me and paws me and herds me on Monday, too, so I tally seven again.
Times touched, Monday: seven dog and Sharon, to hard to count. I'm calling it fourteen.
Tuesday sucks
Tuesday I commute to the office. That cuts down on the dog count, from seven to three, since I am not at home much of the day. The subway is packed, I am touched a million times but not with intent so, nothing counts. There are shoulder bumps and brushing hands and full strange bodies pressing against mine, nearly head to toe, but no. A woman flips her hair and hits me on the side of my face a couple of times. I spend an entire ride with a man jiggling his thigh against my thigh, and it's hard for me to believe it is not on purpose. I move my thigh a millimeter away, his follows. Maybe that should count. No one touched me at the office. Mohammed the doorman handed me a stack of boxes when I got home and they tipped and he grabbed them and tapped my hand to say, "There you go."
Tuesday, three dog, one Mohammed: four touches.
Wednesday
On Wednesdays, when my insurance is in full effect (there are only so many treatments allowed), I see Shaziya for 55 minutes of lymphatic massage, coded as occupational therapy. I have a little crew of surrogate daughters and Shaziya is tops on the list. I have two actual daughters of my own but one of them, the touchy-feely one, lives on the west coast. The close one is my protector, my supporter, but she is not touchy-feely. Her reserve developed later though, since, first of all, she refused to leave my body when it was time to get born, and had burrowed in so assiduously, she had to be obstetrically yanked out. The nerves along her spine, C5-C6, tore. There is residual deficit, as they say. Also, every photograph I have of this kid when she was little shows her hanging off me, hugging my legs. Yet, when she was four? I went to a Mother's Day breakfast at pre-school, and the children's drawings were hung with quotes about their moms, adorable, transcribed by the teachers. My mom lets me bake. My mom takes me to the park. My daughter's quote was: My mom hates it when I hang on her. I laughed and we still laugh although ouch, then and now. Maybe her quote was her way of processing the doctors and orthopedic braces and surgeries and physical therapy sessions she was enduring. Projecting it on to me, who did not deliver her safely. That's fair.
Anyway. Shaziya. Shaz treats breast cancer women who've had surgery. The surgery—in my case, surgeries—can mess up the lymph system because they remove nodes for testing. Your arm and hand puff up. It's unsightly and uncomfortable, but also, lymphedema is dangerous. Plain old injuries can go gangrenous. I don't have that and I don't want it so every week I take off my blouse and stretch out on her table. She probes deep into my arm on my surgery side. She moves her fingers along my veins. She presses along the striations of scar tissue, pushes into the hollows of my chest and each breast, reconstructed to not great effect. She moves behind me. She moves her hands under my neck and across my shoulders, tight because I write, and also, I hunch them to protect my chest, which has taken the hits. I often drift into tears on the table, not exactly crying, more like expressing whatever from wherever she's probing.
At some point, I realize Shaz's big, pregnant belly has been grazing the crown of my head as she works. I wonder if there's anything out there, myth-wise, about what happens if a baby bump bumps against a head, because I experience an epiphany during Shaziya's bump bumping against mine. The arm problems, surgeries, physical therapies, residual deficits. My daughter and I share them. I cry for real. Although the belly-head rubs were not touching with intent, they were revelatory, so, yeah.
Wednesday's touches: two dog, Shaziya, infinity. I'm starting to question my methodology.
Thursday
The dog does his usual thing. In the evening, I have a date, unusual. I have been set up by a friend with a guy, a journalist, a lawyer. "He's both," my friend says. "Stay open." The journalist-lawyer encourages me to pick a meeting place but dismantles my choice, so we go with his choice although he doesn't even live here. I'm staying open. He's good looking on the internet. Maybe I'll have sex with someone other than myself. I would love to. It's been a while. The prospect makes me feel girlish. I exert special effort, clothes, hair, make-up, to look as effortless as possible. My age but younger. The guy is good-looking in real life, too. We hug. That's one. He guides me with his hand on the small of my back. That's two. We find seats at the bar. He pulls my chair out and says, "Is this okay?" and I say "Very okay," and he then does this thing where he tucks a stray hair behind my ear and I'm thinking, How nice, and that's three, but at the same time I'm thinking, Too soon. He talks a lot and I sip my wine. Sip. Sip. Sip. He's still talking. I slug the dregs. Finally he says, "And you?"
I tell a story, a pretty good one, and in the middle of it he reaches over and takes my hands which I have been using to gesture, to punctuate, and he pushes them down into my lap. Holds them there. He gives me a nod and says, "Now go ahead, keep talking." I try but my face is on fire. I feel like calling the police. He is restraining my hands and smiling as if he's teaching me a lesson in how to be a better storyteller and a more fuckable woman. I take my hands back, dig in my bag for 20 bucks, lay it on the bar and go home. He doesn't text or email or anything. I zero him out, no touches. Or maybe I should count four touches? He touched me, with intent, that's for sure. I hate dating. I don't want to be a couple. I hate this experiment. I decide to erase him.
Thursday: Seven dog touches.
Friday is black
Friday, there is a nor'easter, although it is spring. Friday, after one measly morning nuzzle and a dirty look, the dog goes to the groomer, an all-day proposition. Back home it's so dark I need to turn on the lights in the daytime. I spend the whole day thinking about the journalist-lawyer who touched me in a way that felt like an assault. My internal, eternal, infernal man-manager—the me who makes allowances for men from long, long habit—wonders what I did to provoke it. Yet. I can still feel his hands holding mine hostage. I have spent my whole life finding my voice and using it. Using my hands helps, like massaging my words, like guiding my thoughts. I wrote my first novel at age 60. That's a long time for a writer to not write, that's some hard-core shutting myself up. I'm done with that. I am so mad from the night before I don't notice the dog is giddy with relief when I pick him up from the groomer. He is overjoyed, bumping and nuzzling, licking my hand and leaning against my thigh, pushing his nose into my crotch. I forget to count.
Saturday
I love my dog. He is an affectionate fellow. On Saturday, he lays his head in my hand so I'll scratch his ears, itchy from the groomer yanking the fur out. He head-butts me in the kitchen when I'm making coffee. He wants me to know he's happy to be home with me after his traumatic salon time. He stares into my eyes, watches me intently. I hug him, and even though I've read dogs don't like being hugged, he stands solid for it. He's big so I can lay my cheek along his strong back and wrap my arms around his chest, his heart beneath my hand. He breathes into me, hot, damp. His tail wags, just a little, his own dignified choice. I feel liquid, loved, loving, bonded, connected, attached, just like the couples in the article.
I meet my daughter, the close one, for dinner. We embrace hello. She maintains her reserve but we sit shoulder to shoulder at a bar. She shows me pictures. We bend over her phone and our heads touch. We laugh. I rub her back along the bumps of her spine as she digs into dinner. My fingers stop and rest at C5-C6. I don't think she notices, although she misses nothing. She tells me a story about her dog. We laugh. We talk about my father's coin collection, my Christmas gift to her. We talk about my new hat, her Christmas gift to me. A hat. We talk about her sister, whom we miss. Let's visit together, I say. Yeah, she says, let's. We've had a few. We walk out into night and I take her arm, my deficient right through her deficient left. She hugs me hard. I hang on her as we say goodbye.
I go home to the big dog. I clip the leash. We perambulate like old marrieds down the street to the park, him herding me along, thank god. My phone dings, Love you, Ma. My phone dings, When are you guys coming to visit me? My phone dings, We just talked about it at dinner! My phone dings, I'm jealous, where'd you guys eat? She, my touchy-feely west coast girl, posts a picture of the three of us from another time and tags me. The texts and the tag, the tail's wag, the hat on my head, everything like kisses, everything like hugs, everything like hanging on. It's Saturday night, the week is over, the task, to tally the touches that carry me through, is impossible. The experiment's a failure. To do it right, I'd have to start over. To do it right, I'd have to redefine the terms and I am pretty sure after all that, I would still lose count.
"Times Touched In A Week" was initially published
in the August 15, 2017 edition of Literary Hub.
Stephanie Gangi is a poet, essayist and novelist living and working in New York City.
Her acclaimed debut novel, The Next, was published by St. Martin’s Press in October of 2016. Gangi’s poemFour, was a winner of the Hippocrates Society of Poetry and Medicine Prize in 2015. She is at work on her second novel.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
I published my debut at age 60, so. My creative process is, I've come to learn, fairly standard. All along I just thought I was doing everything wrong but the more I read about "real" writers (ie, career writers) the more I realize all the suffering *is* the process, not warning signs that I am fucking it up. There's procrastinating, agonizing, distraction, self-soothing (and medicating), reading much better writers, lamentation, clicking, staring at many many screens, some blank. There is shame and envy and a competitive streak, core characteristics heretofore hidden. Eventually, there is sheer exhaustion and boredom with myself, and with that, a stillness that allows me to finally shut up and get to work.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of "Times Touched in A Week" and why you wrote it?
I wrote this piece because I hadn't had sex in a while and was feeling mighty sorry for myself anyway, and then someone linked to a Diane Ackerman piece about touch, and all the long-living couples patting and stroking and caressing and hand-holding etc etc, and I'm single, and I thought, heck, how many times do I get touched in a week, being that I live alone and all. And what started as a pretty good feel-sorry essay morphed and bent and glided along into something that I think is joyful. I hope.
Why write?
To slow and muffle the ticking clock, I guess.
Can you tell us about your teaching?
Every single thing I encounter teaches me. My two daughters are my greatest teachers. I teach writing workshops to women navigating breast cancer, finally, something in which I am an expert.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? For you, what makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I have art dates once a week with myself. I'm in NYC, what a gift.
Literature is distinct to me because it echos or amplifies or refutes the voice inside my head. It disrupts my own interior narrative, in a good way. This is not better than other art forms, but different. I also like the order and arrangement of words, so it satisfies a visual need, and I like the rhythms of good writing, so it's musical for me, and I like books as objects, the heft and scent, so there's all that too.
What are you working on now?
I'm writing a second novel. In my mind it is titled The Humbler because it is as difficult – no, more difficult – than the first novel.
You are the odd mom out, the one who doesn’t hang with the pack of moms, the one they don’t really get. You are standing at the lip of the swimming lake. It is a family camp in the summer, you are there with your husband, your kid’s schoolmates, their parents and siblings.
Your girl is dog-paddling near a group of classmates, she is smiling and squealing, a real child. Something has gone right, she is experiencing joy instead of a computer. The temperature is hot, too hot for you who lives by the ocean, and you want to walk into the lake up to your hips, even with your skirt on, even with the fabric hugging your ass and wet and scandalous.
Your husband is drinking beer on the field which means he’s started again and it will be all afternoon, and then through the night. You want him to be above this, but when you married him, you must have known this was part of your arrangement.
And suddenly you remember what it was like to be ten years old at an overnight camp, the one you go to every summer while your mother works full time and on weekends. It starts as soon as the sun sinks, the worries and imaginings about your mother in her car, some truck smashing into it head on because she is drinking and she doesn’t see it. You can’t hear sirens this far up into the hills, city noises don’t reach the camp, so you’ll never know if this is real or just in your mind. Your stomach hurts. You dive down into the pool to cry, underwater.
Bobbing back up from the pool as you sense the pool is emptying. Your eyes sting. A counselor says: okay, let’s go, OUT! You put your towel around your eyes instead of your shoulders. In the dressing room, you hate being naked in front of the girls, you hate the way your thighs and hips look, too defined for your age. You are hating too much about yourself these days and it is out of control. So, you think about bird feathers, how many you might find in the morning before anyone else is awake, the striped feathers, hawks, and how your collection will grow. How you will be alone with those feathers in the field, all yours.
The girls laugh and they are sharing something funny and important, holding hands. Some have breasts. They get each other. You are trying to find a mirror. You want to see how ugly you look. You want to know that it isn’t that bad, because, sometimes you surprise yourself when you look in the mirror and see how blue your own eyes can be, pool-blue. And there is an assistant counselor who tells you how pretty she thinks you are. And funny. She tells you this and you hold her hand and feel both special and weird. Her name is Caroline and she has breasts and she draws owls so well.
But here you are, a mom now, watching your daughter becoming part of a laughing, carefree moment. You are happy about this, because this was never you as a child.
Later, you will have sex with your husband and it will feel better for a little while, especially when sleeping. You have this way about you, you can make people feel good when they are uncomfortable but you can’t save them. And even outside of the lake, even standing there watching, perfectly still, you know that you will someday swim home. You will turn away from his beer breath and sink into sleep. And in that sleepy place you will forgive him.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of "Beer at the Lake" and why you wrote it?
I wrote this as an exploration of emotional time-travel.
Why do you write?
As a shy person, it's important for me to share my thoughts, no matter how odd they are, with other humans. Reading great writing makes me feel less isolated. I'm a fairly reclusive person, and writing had taken me out of myself.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists? What were your formative influences?
My older sisters were both actresses when I was growing up. My oldest sister, Sian Barbara Allen, was a film and TV actress. My other sister, Hannah, was in theater. I loved them and wanted to be like them. I went to an acting conservatory, Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts, in California.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you?
John Darnielle's The Mountain Goats, ELO, Stephin Merrit's The Magnetic Fields, Joni Mitchell, Elliot Smith, Wilco, Frank Black.
What are your plans for the future?
I'm curating the Bath Flash Fiction Award. I've recently moved from San Francisco to a tiny town in the north of England to be with my sweetheart.
Meg Pokrass is the author of four collections of flash fiction, and one award-winning collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas, which received the Bluelight Book Award in 2016. Her stories and poems have been widely published and anthologized in two Norton Anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015) and the forthcoming New Microfiction (W.W. Norton, 2018). Meg is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review and co-founder of San Francisco's Flash Fiction Collective reading series. Currently, she teaches online flash fiction workshops and serves as Festival Curator for the Bath Flash Fiction Festival. You can find her work on her website http://megpokrass.com.
Robbie was seven when he told his first lie. His mother had given him
a wrinkled old bill and asked him to buy her a pack of king-size Kents
at the grocery store. Robbie bought an ice cream cone instead.
Hehid the change under a big, white stone in the backyard of their
apartment building and told his mother that a giant, redheaded kid
with a missing front tooth had kicked him in the shin and taken the
money. She believed him. And Robbie hasn’t stopped lying since.
–ETGAR KERET
"Lieland"
Translated from German by Rachel Hildebrandt
German version
Gudrun Lerchbaum 's Creative Process
Chapter One
Day 1
I meet up with Julia on the bank of the Kaiserwasser the afternoon before the wedding. Kati shows up, too. We toast my old life as a soldier and the new one about to begin. The break is as drastic as the one five years ago, and like that one, this one can only be survived in an inebriated state.
We loll around on threadbare blankets and squint up through the greenery at the sinking sun, the sky bluer than it has been in weeks. I fish the pills out of my hip pack, toss one in my mouth, and swish it down with vodka. Julia snags one, too. Kati doesn’t want any, although she needs to relax more than anyone else. However, my supply is limited, and I don’t force people to take anything, least of all her. Affixed by a narrow band, the topcam’s green light sits like an iridescent third eye on her forehead. It isn’t blinking today, although she’s constantly sharing everything that happens to her on Mindmine. The reality is that Ms. Public Servant doesn't want to be seen out drinking in public. Insufficient role model material.
A small child careens toward us, arms outstretched. He trips over the edge of the blanket and falls onto all fours. I turn in his direction, my head propped on one hand.
“Hey, sweetie!” I click my tongue.
The child crows and bares his four teeth, before crawling toward me. He grabs my shirt and pulls himself upright, legs spread. I stroke his plump cheek with my finger and bury my fingertip in the dimple in his double chin. I will be a mother soon enough, and a little practice can’t hurt. With his puffy little hands, the munchkin pats around on the gun stuck in my hip holster. I pop the strap open and hold the Glock out to him. He chortles and reaches for the barrel.
I have to laugh. “Look at that. You know what it’s all about!”
“Take that thing back!” Kati shrieks at the same moment the mother materializes. Without saying a word, she grabs the child around the waist with both hands and stumbles backward, her eyes wide with panic.
“What? Are you scared we might stick your little dumpling on the grill?” I call after her. “We were just playing around.”
“It would be fun to have a barbecue, though,” Julia adds as she scratches at the stump ending at her prosthesis. Without standing up, she sends a flat stone skipping across the water. Startled, three ducks take flight, forming a squadron to search for a new destination.
I am still struggling with my irritation over Kati’s company. She hangs around Julia like a terrier, refusing to get lost. A terrier whose teeth are sunk into her missing leg.
Julia takes a long swig. “To your big day,” she says and passes me the vodka bottle. “If you’ve found the one, there’s still hope for me.”
“Shut up!” I yank up a handful of grass and hurl it in her direction. “You have work, a real job. I’m just getting married, that’s all. A home, children to take care of… I’d trade places with you if I could!”
Which was a lie, since I still have both legs.
“That’s not true!” Kati cut in quickly, her forehead furrowed disapprovingly. “You’ve always dreamed of getting married, even back in school. The white carriage, a sea of flowers, all of it. It’s the best thing that could happen to you! And now you pretend…”
As if nothing had changed since we were in school. She still knows best. I fiddle around with my gun, throw myself on my back, and take aim through the foliage at a helicopter clattering down Wagramer Strasse.
“I’m not pretending. Doubt is the prerequisite for every advancement.” I swing my gun toward her. “I think, therefore I am. You don’t think, therefore you aren’t. Click!”
Kati’s hands fumble around in the air. “I would be very grateful… put that thing away!”
“Hey, folks, violence is only one solution among many.” Julia grinned. “Stop the shooting! You just have cold feet, girl. Relax.” She motions me over, the bottle clasped in her right hand. “Lie down!” With her left hand, she pinches my nose closed, so I have to gulp for air. She pours vodka down my open throat. I try to swallow and twist my head away, but I’m afraid I might break my nose, which Julia is holding mercilessly. The alcohol dribbles over my cheeks and down my neck. I splutter, choke.
Kati snatches the bottle from Julia and dries it with a corner of the blanket. “So, what’s your dress like?” she asks. Her eyes grow misty. “Do you remember mine? An absolute dream! You were so jealous!”
I wipe my face with my sleeve and my fingers on my pants before I unbuckle my wrist cell and straighten the display. I scroll through the pictures. “There! My mother’s wedding dress. With some extra ruffles at the bottom. It was too short.”
Kati takes the strap from me and wrinkles her forehead. “Have you already posted this?” She holds the picture up for Julia.
I watch them and know what they are thinking. I can hardly recognize myself in the princess with towering curls, sprouting out of the cloudy mountain of ruffles. Squinting, they compare my current condition with the stranger in the photo.
I try to escape their scrutiny by melting into the ground. My camo, which is just as pointless in the city as faith in a higher justice, finally has a purpose here on the gray-green blanket, splotched as it is with light filtering through the leaves above. Starting tomorrow, I will have to make do without its protection, and my days will begin with time spent in my closet, wondering what I should wear. Want to wear. Free to call shots about what I will do on a given day.
“How is he?” Julia wonders.
The vodka still stings my eyes, causing them to tear up. I sit up and cross my legs, taking a sip from the bottle before I hand it back to Julia.
“He’s alright. Except for his damp palms. In bed…” I gulp as I think about the groping and the slobbery kisses. “...well, it’ll be alright. In any case, a 78% character match and an 86% genetic combat… Shit, damn booze - com-pat-i-bil-i-ty. That’s what I meant. Better than what he had with his first wife.” The sun blinds me, and I scoot over into the shade.
Kati’s head sways. She purses her lips and resumes her sweet demeanor. “78 and 86, not bad. We had 81 and 89, but that’s not all that better.”
Julia slugs her on the shoulder. “Has your husband already started looking for your successor? Married for four years and still not pregnant. Watch out!”
“She’s gone,” I say. At least today is supposed to be about me, not Kati.
“Gone? Who?” Julia asks.
“His first wife.”
“What do you mean, gone? Dead?”
“No idea. Maybe in the militia, where all losers end up. A painter or a drinker, barren or a thinker. A stalwart weapon, aiming true, will make a soldier yet of you.” I quote the maxim used in the campaign that had lured me out of my studio five years ago. “Battle hymns cure artists’ dreams.”
“Childbearing or mine burying,” Julia whispers as she hands Kati the bottle with a wink. I don’t know that slogan and suspect she made it up.
Kati’s face now. Despite the fact that as a teacher, she won’t land in the militia, whether she ever has kids or not. Education is a form of national defense. Only those who know their country’s borders can defend them and all that rot. Does she think of these slogans, too? Either way, she’s gnawing on her lower lip and choking back down whatever is on the tip of her tongue. Julia can still say whatever she wants where Kati is concerned. One of the last fading sunbeams sweeps across her gentle features, causing her mocha-colored hair to gleam as the sun sinks behind the Kahlenberg. With my finger, I copy the wave of a curl sweeping across her cheek onto my pant leg. Behind us, the last family gathers up its swimming things and leaves for home.
“Something’s missing,” Julia comments, her eyes fixed on my cell. “No veil, that would be too much. Maybe a white satin band, loosely braided”
I crawl closer to her, as the ground buckles and tips beneath me. The go pill combined with the alcohol and the heat. I have a hard time keeping my balance, but eventually sit upright and prop myself against Julia’s shoulder. She has removed her prosthetic leg. The lower part now lays in the meadow, her turquoise linen shoe tied neatly and cocked at a right angle, the ruffles of a white sock frothing out, just like they did back then. Always the same combination, never changing over the years. All that’s lacking are the red splatters. The bone fragments and bloody tissue are missing from the flesh-colored limb, too.
It occurred around the time that people began to plant mines in their gardens in an effort to protect themselves and their possessions. During the turbulent times around the collapse of the Union, raising a family in the suburbs was no longer such a positive thing. On the other hand, this time was a good one in terms of fashion, as men started to shave off their beards. Any bearded man ran the risk of being taken for an Islamist. The belligerent squads of the Righteous, which were running wild in those days, refused to grant anyone the benefit of the doubt. Distrust, fear, and a sense of pending catastrophe, of a massive war, hung over our childhoods like storm clouds. We did not attach any more significance to this than the threat of a heavy rain shower.
As it turned out, there was no major disaster. At least, not the one everyone was waiting for. The Righteous seized power at the last minute and purged the country, calling every citizen up for duty, drawing boundaries, and building fences.
We were playing basketball outside the garage. Julia, Kati and I. Shirin had already gone home, her parents were constantly worried about her. The ball sailed over the fence. It just sat there, glowing orange, on the grass. The chain link was only chest high, and there was nobody in sight.
Kati should have gotten the ball, since she was the one who had thrown it too hard.
After it happened, I started to pull the arms and legs off my Barbie dolls and recombine them. A black leg for the white Barbie, four white arms for the black torso. I had to sew new clothes for that one. Back then, there were still multiethnic Barbies. I also crocheted a lot.
“A white satin band?” I asked, staring at the wedding dress picture. “I don’t know. Maybe it should be a crown of thorns. Rose stems wound into a wreath, the petals strewn around my feet.”
The shot crashed into the tree right beside us, sending bark fragments and every nearby bird into the air.
“Take cover!” Julia shouts, as she hides behind the trunk.
The guard is standing less than ten meters away, by the fence surrounding the sports field, his semiautomatic trained on us. A bearded seventy-year-old man in the cornflower blue uniform of the civil defense corps. I reach for my weapon, my adrenaline at fighting level, sweat breaking out all over, my dizziness and shaking have vanished. I take aim at him.
“Get out of here, you drunken riffraff!”
Kati gets to her feet and slowly approaches the old man, her arms stretched out like crippled wings, palms up, a cloying smile. “Please excuse us for disturbing you. I teach over there at the high school.” She vaguely points across the water, as if the man with the gun in his hand had just asked for a school recommendation for his grandchildren. “I’m here for a bachelor send-off with my friends over there. A few high spirits are in due order, wouldn’t you say?”
She gives an artificial laugh as she raises her arms and throws her head back. As if she wants to point the old man toward the seventh heaven. He does not lower his weapon, but his shoulders unclench.
“I promise that we won’t be here much longer. After all, I don’t want to be completely wasted at the wedding tomorrow.”
I, I, I, I. All eyes on her, as usual. The bullet puts an abrupt end to her babbling. I drop my weapon, as the guard does his. Watch as she sways, falls. The guard is the only one who can see her eyes. His mouth opens, his jaw unhinged. He looks over at Julia, who is peering out from behind her tree trunk, and finally at me. He staggers back a few steps and dashes away, hunched over and darting erratically like a hare.
Julia creeps out from behind the tree, her eyes flitting back and forth between Kati and me and the spot where the man is about to disappear within the clubhouse. She crawls over to Kati lying motionless on her stomach, and stares at the hole punched into the white blouse, underneath her left shoulder blade. Like a time-lapse film of a rose in bloom, the blood is seeping into the fabric. Julia grasps Kati by the shoulder, attempting to turn her over.
Sobriety rushes through my body like ice water. “Leave it! We have to get out of here before the militia shows up.”
Shoving the Glock back in its holster, I sweep up the prosthetic leg and toss it to Julia. I wipe off the bottle on the blanket to get rid of DNA evidence and fingerprints before I hurl it into the river. I pause for a moment, gasping. How quickly everything can change. The shot had simply gone off. Just like that. I close my fingers around the still-warm pistol, yearning to wipe it down and throw it after the bottle. However, the engraved service number on it will lead straight back to me, even without my fingerprints. Besides, I’m supposed to turn it back in tomorrow when I formally resign my position.
Julia grabs my arm and yanks me away.
Lügenland was published in 2016 by
Pendragon Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany.
Land of Lies is forthcoming from Weyward Sisters
The Creative Process is collaborating with the
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
andWeyward Sisters on global literary initiatives.
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Tag 1
Am Nachmittag vor der Hochzeit treffe ich Julia am Ufer des Kaiserwassers. Kati ist auch da. Wir trinken: auf mein altes Leben als Soldatin und auf den anstehenden Neustart. Der Bruch so drastisch wie jener vor fünf Jahren, auch dieser nur betäubt zu ertragen.
Auf abgewetzten Decken rekeln wir uns, blinzeln durch das Laubwerk in die tief stehende Sonne, der Himmel so blau wie seit Wochen nicht mehr. So blau, wie wir bald sein werden. Ich fische die Pillen aus der Hüfttasche, werfe eine ein und spüle sie mit Wodka hinunter. Julia zieht mit. Kati will keine, obwohl sie es am nötigsten hätte, endlich locker zu werden. Aber mein Vorrat ist begrenzt und ich dränge niemandem etwas auf, ihr schon gar nicht. Das grüne Licht der Topcam, die, an einem schmalen Stirnband befestigt, wie ein schillerndes drittes Auge auf ihrer Stirn sitzt, blinkt heute nicht, obwohl sie sonst jede Lebensäußerung auf Mindmine teilt. Doch beim Trinken in der Öffentlichkeit will die Frau Staatsdienerin nicht gesehen werden. Mangelnde Vorbildwirkung.
Ein Kleinkind taumelt mit ausgebreiteten Armen auf uns zu, stolpert über den Rand der Decke und fällt auf alle viere. Ich drehe mich zu ihm, den Kopf in die Hand gestützt.
„Na, du Süßer!“ Ich schnalze mit der Zunge.
Lachend zeigt das Kind mir seine vier Zähne und krabbelt auf mich zu. Es sucht Halt an meinem Shirt und zieht sich hoch in einen breitbeinigen Stand. Ich streiche mit dem Zeigefinger über seine pralle Wange und lasse die Fingerkuppe in dem Grübchen auf seinem Doppelkinn verschwinden. Bald werde ich selbst Mutter sein, da kann ein wenig Übung nicht schaden. Mit seinen aufgeblasenen Händchen patscht der Zwerg auf die Waffe, die in meinem Hüftholster steckt. Ich öffne den Druckknopf, halte ihm die Glock entgegen. Glucksend greift er nach dem Lauf.
Ich muss lachen. „Ja, du weißt, worauf es ankommt!“
„Nimm ihm das Ding weg!“, kreischt Kati und dann ist auch schon die Mutter da. Ohne ein Wort packt sie das Kind mit beiden Händen um seine Mitte und stolpert rückwärts davon, die Augen panisch aufgerissen.
„Du schaust ja, als hättest du Angst, wir könnten dein Dickerchen auf den Grill legen!“, rufe ich ihr nach. „Wir haben doch nur gespielt.“
„Grillen wär aber auch fein“, sagt Julia und kratzt sich am Stumpf oberhalb der Prothese. Ohne aufzustehen, lässt sie einen flachen Stein über das Wasser hüpfen, der drei Enten aufscheucht. Flatternd steigen sie auf, formieren sich, ein Geschwader auf der Suche nach dem nächsten Ziel.
Ich kämpfe noch immer mit meinem Ärger über Katis Anwesenheit. Wie ein Terrier hängt sie an Julia, nicht loszuwerden. Ein Terrier, der sich in das fehlende Bein verbissen hat.
Julia nimmt einen tiefen Schluck. „Auf deinen großen Tag“, sagt sie und reicht mir die Wodkaflasche weiter. „Wenn sogar du einen findest, kann ich ja noch hoffen.“
„Sei doch still!“ Ich reiße eine Handvoll Gras aus, werfe es in ihre Richtung. „Du hast Arbeit, einen richtigen Job. Ich werde nur heiraten. Haushalt, Kinder … wenn ich könnte, würde ich mit dir tauschen!“
Das ist gelogen, denn immerhin habe ich noch beide Beine.
„Ist doch nicht wahr!“, sagt Kati auch prompt, die Stirn missbilligend gerunzelt. „Du hast doch schon immer vom Heiraten geträumt, damals in der Schule. Weiße Kutsche, Blütenmeer und alles. Ist doch das Beste, was dir passieren kann! Und jetzt tust du so …“
Als ob sich nichts geändert hätte seit unserer Schulzeit. Noch immer weiß sie alles besser. Ich spiele mit der Waffe, lasse mich auf den Rücken fallen und visiere durch das Blattwerk den Hubschrauber an, der die Wagramer Straße entlangknattert.
„Ich tu nicht so. Zweifel ist die Voraussetzung für jeden Erkenntnisfortschritt.“ Ich schwenke die Waffe in ihre Richtung. „Ich denke, also bin ich. Du denkst nicht, also bist du nicht. Klick!“
Kati wedelt mit den Händen herum. „Ich wäre dir wirklich sehr dankbar … leg das Ding weg!“
„Hey Leute, Gewalt ist nur eine Lösung unter vielen.“ Julia grinst. „Schluss mit Schuss! Du hast bloß kalte Füße, Mädel. Entspann dich.“ Sie winkt mich näher, die Flasche in der Rechten. „Leg dich hin!“ Mit der Linken hält sie mir die Nase zu, dass ich nach Luft schnappen muss, mit der Rechten gießt sie mir den Wodka in den Rachen. Ich versuche zu schlucken, dann den Kopf wegzudrehen, doch ich habe Angst, mir die Nase zu brechen, so gnadenlos hält Julia fest. Das Zeug rinnt mir über die Wangen und den Nacken hinunter. Ich spucke, huste.
Kati entwindet Julia die Flasche und trocknet sie mit einem Zipfel der Decke ab. „Und? Wie ist dein Kleid?“, fragt sie. Ihr Blick wird schmalzig. „Weißt du noch – meines? Ein Traum! Du warst so neidisch!“
Ich tupfe mir mit dem Ärmel das Gesicht trocken und wische die Finger an der Hose ab, bevor ich mein Fonband vom Handgelenk löse und das Display gerade biege. Ich wische mich durch die Bilder. „Da! Das Hochzeitskleid meiner Mutter. Mit extra Rüschen unten. War zu kurz.“
Kati nimmt mir das Band aus der Hand und runzelt die Stirn. „Hast du das schon gepostet?“ Sie hält Julia das Bild unter die Nase.
Ich sehe ihnen an, was sie denken, erkenne mich ja selbst kaum wieder in der Prinzessin mit dem aufgesteckten Haarteil über Rüschenwolkenbergen. Unter halb gesenkten Lidern vermessen sie den Ist-Zustand, vergleichen ihn mit der Fremden auf dem Foto.
Ich versuche, ihre Blicke zu ignorieren und mit dem Untergrund zu verschmelzen. Mein Flecktarn, in der Stadt so sinnlos wie der Glaube an höhere Gerechtigkeit, ergibt auf der graugrünen Decke mit den durch das Blätterdach gefilterten Lichtflecken endlich Sinn. Schon morgen muss ich auf seinen Schutz verzichten und jeden Tag vor dem Kleiderschrank grübeln, was ich anziehen soll. Will. Den ganzen Tag selbst bestimmen, was zu tun ist.
„Wie ist er denn so?“, fragt Julia.
Der verschüttete Schnaps brennt noch in meinen Augen, lässt sie tränen. Ich setze mich in den Schneidersitz, nippe an der Flasche und reiche sie an Julia weiter.
„Ganz okay. Bis auf die feuchten Hände. Im Bett …“, ich schlucke, denke an das Getatsche und die viel zu nassen Küsse, „… na ja, das wird schon. Immerhin 78 Prozent Charakterübereinstimmung und sogar 86 Prozent genetische Kombatt… – Scheiße, verdammter Fusel – Kom-pa-ti-bi-li-tät, wollte ich sagen. Mehr als mit seiner Ersten jedenfalls.“ Die Sonne sticht mir in die Augen und ich rutsche ein Stück weiter in den Schatten.
Kati wiegt den Kopf, spitzt die Lippen, tut wieder einmal auf süß. „78 – 86, nicht schlecht. Bei uns waren es 81 – 89, aber so viel besser ist das ja auch nicht.“
Julia boxt ihr auf den Oberarm. „Hat dein Mann sich auch schon nach einer Nachfolgerin umgeschaut? Vier Jahre verheiratet und noch immer nicht schwanger. Pass bloß auf!“
„Sie ist weg“, sage ich. Wenigstens heute soll es um mich gehen und nicht um Kati.
„Weg? Wer?“, fragt Julia.
„Na, seine erste Frau.“
„Wie, weg? Tot?“
„Keine Ahnung. Vielleicht bei der Miliz. Wo alle Minderleister aufschlagen. Ob kunstverseucht, ob bipolar, ob süchtig oder unfruchtbar – die rechte Waffe in der Hand macht euch zum Teil der Heldenschar!“, zitiere ich den Leitsatz der Kampagne, die mich vor fünf Jahren aus dem Atelier geholt hat. „Marschgesang statt Ausdruckszwang.“
„Kindersegen oder Minenlegen“, wispert Julia und reicht Kati anzüglich zwinkernd die Flasche. Den Spruch kenne ich nicht, den hat sie sich ausgedacht.
Katis Gesicht jetzt. Obwohl sie als Lehrerin sicher nicht bei der Miliz landen würde, ob sie nun Kinder bekommt oder nicht. Auch Bildung ist Landesverteidigung. Nur, wer die Grenzen des Landes kennt, kann sie auch verteidigen und all das Gewäsch. Ob sie auch an die Sprüche denkt? Jedenfalls kaut sie auf ihrer Unterlippe und würgt hinunter, was ihr auf der Zunge liegt. Noch immer kann Julia sich bei ihr alles erlauben. Einer der letzten Sonnenstrahlen streift ihr zartes Gesicht, lässt ihr mokkafarbenes Haar aufglänzen, bevor die Sonne hinter dem Kahlenberg versinkt. Mit dem Zeigefinger zeichne ich den Schwung der Locke, die sich über ihre Wange windet, auf mein Hosenbein. Hinter uns rafft die letzte Familie ihre Badesachen zusammen und macht sich auf den Heimweg.
„Irgendetwas fehlt“, sagt Julia, den Blick auf mein Fonband geheftet. „Kein Schleier, das wäre zu viel. Ein weißes Satinband vielleicht, locker eingeflochten.“
Auf allen vieren krieche ich zu ihr, weil der Boden unter mir buckelt und kippt. Go-Pill und Alkohol, dazu die Hitze. Den Kampf mit der Schwerkraft gewinne ich mit Mühe und richte mich auf, stütze mich auf Julias Schulter. Sie hat die Prothese abgenommen. Wie damals der abgetrennte Unterschenkel liegt sie in der Wiese, der türkisfarbene Leinenschuh am rechtwinklig abgespreizten Fuß ordentlich geschnürt, darüber die Rüsche eines weißen Söckchens, seit Jahren gleich. Nur die roten Spritzer fehlen. Und aus der fleischfarbenen Hülle ragen weder Knochensplitter noch blutiges Gewebe.
Es geschah, als die Leute begannen, ihre Gärten zu verminen, um sich und ihre Vorräte zu schützen. In den Unruhezeiten während des Zerfalls der Union war es auf einmal kein so großes Glück mehr, mit Kindern am Stadtrand zu wohnen. Modetechnisch hingegen war diese Zeit ein Gewinn, weil die Männer sich ihre Bärte abrasierten. Schließlich lief jeder Bärtige Gefahr, als Islamist zu gelten. Den Prügelpatrouillen der Aufrechten, die damals außer Rand und Band gerieten, wollte niemand einen Vorwand liefern. Wie Gewitterwolken hingen Misstrauen, Angst und die Erwartung einer Katastrophe, eines großen Krieges, über unserer Kindheit, ohne dass wir ihnen mehr Bedeutung zugemessen hätten, als der Gefahr eines kräftigen Regenschauers.
Es ist ja dann auch nicht zum ganz großen Desaster gekommen. Nicht zu dem jedenfalls, auf das alle gewartet hatten. Gerade noch rechtzeitig hatten die Aufrechten die Macht übernommen und das Land gereinigt, jeden Einzelnen in die Pflicht genommen, Grenzen gezogen, Zäune errichtet.
Wir spielten Basketball bei den Garagen, Julia, Kati und ich. Shirin war schon heimgegangen, ihre Eltern in dauernder Sorge um sie. Der Ball flog über einen Zaun. Orange leuchtend lag er auf dem Rasen, der Maschendraht brusthoch nur und niemand weit und breit zu sehen.
Kati hätte gehen müssen. Sie hatte viel zu scharf geworfen.
Danach fing ich an, den Barbiepuppen die Glieder auszureißen und sie neu zu kombinieren. Ein schwarzes Bein für die weiße Barbie, vier weiße Arme für den schwarzen Torso, dem ich daraufhin neue Kleider nähen musste. Damals hatte es noch fremdethnische Barbies gegeben. Auch gehäkelt habe ich viel.
„Ein weißes Satinband?“, frage ich und starre auf das Brautkleid-Bild. „Ich weiß nicht. Vielleicht eher eine Dornenkrone. Rosenstiele zum Kranz gewunden, die Blütenblätter zu meinen Füßen verstreut.“
Der Schuss kracht neben uns in den Baum, lässt Rindenstücke spritzen und die Vögel im Umkreis auffliegen.
„Deckung!“, schreit Julia und sucht Schutz hinter dem Stamm.
Der Wächter steht keine zehn Meter entfernt am Zaun der Sportanlage, die Halbautomatische angelegt. Ein bärtiger Siebziger in der kornblumenblauen Uniform der Bürgerwehr. Ich taste nach meiner Waffe, Adrenalin auf Kampfpegel, Schweißausbruch, kein Schwindel mehr, kein Zittern. Ich nehme ihn ins Visier.
„Schert’s euch weg, versoffenes Gesindel!“
Kati steht auf und geht langsam auf den Alten zu, die Arme wie lahme Flügel ausgestreckt, die Handflächen offen, klebrig lächelnd. „Entschuldigen Sie, wenn wir Sie gestört haben sollten. Ich unterrichte drüben am Gymnasium.“ Sie deutet mit dem Zeigefinger vage über das Wasser. Als ob der Mann sich mit der Waffe in der Hand nach der besten Schule für seine Enkel erkundigt hätte. „Ich feiere mit meinen Freundinnen hier Junggesellenabschied, da muss es doch ein bisserl poltern.“
Selbst jetzt will sie politisch korrekt sein und vermeidet die weibliche Form, obwohl eindeutig kein Mann unter uns ist. Bloß kein linkes Gendersprech. Sie lacht affektiert, hebt die Arme und wirft den Kopf in den Nacken, als wolle sie dem Alten die Richtung zum siebten Himmel zeigen. Er behält die Waffe im Anschlag, doch seine Schultern entspannen sich.
„Ich verspreche Ihnen, wir bleiben nicht mehr lange. Schließlich will ich morgen bei der Hochzeit nicht völlig verkatert sein.“
Ich, ich, ich, ich. Alle Blicke wie immer auf sie gerichtet. Der Schuss zieht einen endgültigen Schlussstrich unter ihr Geplapper. Ich lasse meine Waffe sinken wie der Wächter die seine, sehe sie taumeln, beobachte ihren Fall. Nur der Wächter kann ihr in die Augen sehen. Sein Mund steht offen, der Kiefer wie ausgehängt. Er sieht Julia an, die hinter ihrem Baumstamm hervorlugt, schließlich mich. Er schwankt einige Schritte rückwärts und rennt dann geduckt im Zickzack davon wie ein Feldhase.
Julia kriecht hinter dem Baum hervor. Ihr Blick hetzt hin und her zwischen Kati und mir und der Stelle, wo der Mann gleich im Vereinsheim verschwinden wird. Sie robbt zu Kati, die reglos auf dem Bauch liegt, starrt auf das Loch, das unterhalb des linken Schulterblattes in der weißen Bluse prangt. Wie eine im Zeitraffer aufblühende Rose breitet sich das Blut auf dem Gewebe aus. Julia packt Kati an der Schulter, versucht, sie umzudrehen.
Wie Eiswasser schwappt Nüchternheit durch meinen tauben Körper. „Lass, wir müssen weg, bevor die Miliz kommt!“
Ich schiebe die Glock in das Holster, greife nach der Beinprothese und werfe sie Julia zu. Die Flasche wische ich an der Decke ab, genetische Spuren, Fingerabdrücke, bevor ich sie in den Fluss schleudere. Keuchend halte ich inne. Wie schnell sich alles ändern kann. Der Schuss hat sich gelöst. Einfach so. Ich lege die Hand an die noch warme Pistole, will auch sie abwischen, der Flasche hinterherwerfen. Doch die eingravierte Dienstnummer führt direkt zu mir, auch ohne Fingerabdrücke, und morgen früh bei meinem Dienstaustritt muss ich sie abgeben.
Julia packt mich am Arm, reißt mich fort.
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The Austrian writer Gudrun Lerchbaum grew up in Vienna, Paris, and Düsseldorf. Before and during her studies of Philosophy and Architecture she held various side jobs ranging from industrial worker to nude model for an art class. After graduation, she took up work as a freelance architect. Confined to bed after a riding accident in 2007 she started writing her first novel and became seriously addicted to the literary process. She currently lives in Vienna with her husband and has two daughters. https://gudrunlerchbaum.com
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of Land of Lies and why you wrote it?
In 2012, I started looking after a 15-year-old Afghan girl who came to Austria as a refugee. Her story, her powerless exposure to cruel decisions by men in her country, made me furious. On her behalf, I searched for a literary voice that would be able to express her longing for a happy, quiet life as well as set free the suppressed aggression which she had buried inside.
To avoid the perception that these problems had nothing to do with our lives in the First World, I situated the story in our midst, in my own country. I wrote a short story about a distraught female protagonist living in a repressive regime in the near future. Her country is governed by a strong leader, whose party's principles echo the right-wing parties of our time. I didn't necessarily expect the future to be like this, but it seemed like one of many possible futures.
After the story was shortlisted in a competition, people started to ask me to continue the narrative. So that was what I did and the story became, with small alterations, the first chapter of my novel. I sent my stubborn heroine on a journey catalysed by a violent incident that cast her out of society, forcing her to reset her life and to take a stand against oppression on a personal level as well as politically.
As I was drawing my novel to a close, reality started to match my story. In some European countries, like Poland, Hungary and Finland as well as in Turkey, right-wing parties were elected to power. In Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands they also gained many votes, and now even the US, former leader of the free world, is ruled by a seemingly unscrupulous right-wing populist. Was the undesirable future I meant to imagine about to come true?
And the refugee girl I cared for? She now lives her life in another Austrian city. She works for her living and she defies every man who tries to limit her life and independence. Sometimes she might even be happy.
Why did you become a writer?
When I was a child I wrote stories, like many children do. They often involved horses and girls and all the sad things that happened to them, due to the fact, that they were mostly surrounded by really bad people. Eventually I stopped writing because there was so much else to do, so many experiences to be had. Finishing school, I had a brief impulse to become a writer. But as nobody encouraged me and I didn't really know what to write about, I cast that dream aside and headed for architecture.
I completely forgot about writing until the mid-2000s. At that time, I was in a relationship with a man who wanted to write a novel, and asked if I would like to contribute. He never got started, so on a lazy Sunday I wrote a few pages using what I thought was his perspective on our relationship. When I showed it to him, he went pale. I had captured his every thought. That was the moment I realized I could do it.
It was a thoroughly unhappy relationship, and we split soon afterward. But the infection had caught me. About a year later, on a riding-holiday with my daughter, I had an accident that prevented me from working and made my every movement painful for a few weeks. Bored, I took out the first pages I had written the previous year and started to develop them into a longer piece. It came as a surprise that the further I strayed from what had actually happened, the more fun writing became. I finished the novel, but it never got published, since the small publisher with whom I had signed a contract went bankrupt during the editing process.
I began to write short stories and to take courses in creative writing. My stories got published, and a few years later, my second novel was ready.
Being asked the question: What does writing give you that life can't? I have to say: Nothing! Writing gives me the same pleasure I get from imagining a building and how people would like to live or work in it. What's better, though: I can do everything on my own, follow every lead I choose. That's an incredible luxury. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite pay off as well financially, but I'll never stop dreaming.
The Art of Translation
For me, language is all about rhythm, and it's incredibly exciting to see it captured in another language. As the process of translation has only just begun, I can't provide any significant insights apart from that.
I work very closely with my translator, which of course is only possible because of my sufficient knowledge of the English language. I definitely enjoy the process and the way it improves my skills. It's hard to imagine how a translation into a language I don't speak would feel, but I look forward to that experience too.
Did your parents encourage you to become a writer?
I was always encouraged to read by my parents. They had nothing to do with writing or other arts, but they loved to read and still do. For many years my birthday presents consisted mainly of books. The occasional girls and horses story was significantly outweighed by adventure and literary children's books. I regretted, though, that girls usually played rather decorative roles in these works. On the other hand, this deficiency made me dream myself into the stories I had read, every evening in my bed when the light went out. This marked the true beginning of me inventing my own stories and switching into faraway worlds.
Which books did you love as a child?
Looking back my favourite book was Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. I also loved everything written by Erich Kästner. Beautifully written, exciting and witty – those were the books I cherished most.
Do you draw inspiration from other art forms?
All art is linked because, one way or another, you need to tell a story. Literature therefore might be the most direct form of art, but in my eyes the creative process is similar in all art forms. At least concerning architecture, I can say that for sure. You have to develop a sense of what you want to achieve, however blurry this picture may be. Eventually an idea materializes. Whether it be a persistent protagonist who struggles in your mind to come alive, or a dance-move that demands to be transformed into a building, or a colour flooding the grey city or ... You follow the lead of your inspiration, and then you have to work on the structures necessary to keep it up, to make it move or whatever it is you desire.
What are you working on now?
My current project is a noir novel featuring a woman who once sympathized with RAF terrorist movement. Now she is confined to a wheel-chair because of Multiple Sclerosis and strives to find the murderer of her ex-husband, a political journalist of Turkish origins, with the help of two equally unlikely allies. I am only halfway through it.
What are your hopes for the future of literature?
In one way or another, literature will always survive because there's an endless flow of stories to be told and an endless need to be told stories. One advantage of literature over film that I see is the fact that books leave you more space for your imagination. I hope people will always feel the need for that, too.
What are your concerns for the future of literature?
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
I believe that technology can change processes but not humanity itself. Whether we chat virtually or over a cup of coffee – it's still communication. In my lifetime, these new forms of communication have become available, and I have benefited greatly. One thing I worry about, however, is the increasing speed and the continuous accessibility eating up the time we need to dream and feed our creativity.
Respect is my keyword for our future, as much as for the present. We need to respect each other and the resources of the planet we depend upon. Every single person is responsible for the future.
i forget my body
and a tree forgets its motion
i forget that i have lived
and the sea forgets its anemones
–LÂLE MÜLDÜR
“A Solar Regression”
Translated by Burak Erdoğdu / Roza Publishing
Read Turkish version
Narin Yükler's Creative Process
I walked gently in the streets that ends up with the same road
Mountain said that she knows the secrets of trees
And she heard what is to be said for tomorrow
The stone was a language that still lives and I kept it for myself
While the history was cleaning his own stains
I have passed through tunnels for reaching myself
And passed through gates which has reliefs
I knew villages thats names rewritten from their seasoning
And I thought that sharp smell of past would be on the road
Will not break my neck at the colonial altar
I thought that İbrahim would split his humpback with his axe
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İbrahim
özenle yürüdüm aynı yola çıkan sokakları
ağaçların sırrına erdiğini söyledi dağ
duyup söylediğini sonraki zamana
sakladım, yaşayan diller sınıfına giriyordu taş
inatçı geçmişle lekesini ovarken tarih
kendime dönmek için tüneller geçtim
geçtim kabartma tarihli kapılardan
ismi değiştirilen köyleri baharatlarından bildim
sandım keskin geçmiş kokusu kalacak o yolda
kırmayacak boynumu sömürge sunağında
sandım elindeki baltayla kendi kamburunu yaracak ibrahim
Narin Yükler was born in Viranşehir of Şanlıurfa in 1988. She graduated from the Tourism and Hospitality Management School of Gaziantep University and from the Faculty of Business Administration of Anadolu University. After graduation, she started to work as a hotel manager. She got married in 2012 and had her daughter in 2014. During that time, she took part in the activities of various non-governmental and human rights organizations, especially women’s rights organisations.
Many of her stories and poems about Middle Eastern–especially Kurdish/Ezidi–women were published in several newspapers and magazines in Iraq, Belgium, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. She held meetings in refugee camps where she read her poems written in Kurdish and Turkish languages. She has written theatrical plays on the human and women’s rights, some of which were staged. Being a woman, a mother and a refugee in the Middle East. Her poetry books include Aynadaki Çürüme and Rê û Rêç. Her awards include KAOS GL Short Story Award – Selection Committee (2015), Hüseyin Çelebi Poetry Prize (2015), Ali İsmail Korkmaz Poetry Prize (2016), Golden Daphne Award For Young Poets – Selection Committee (2016), Arkadaş Zekai Özger Poetry Award (2017) and the Arjen ArÎ Poetry Award (2017).
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MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of this series of poems?
My poetry deals with war, women, and migration.
Why do you write?
To cling to life. I live in the Middle East and have seen many countries in the Middle East. I wrote scripts and poems during these travels. Writing is a way of defending life. And therefore I see literature as necessary. Yes, we can not change the world by typing, but we can tell what causes war and immigration. I want to tell everyone about it.
Tell us about some of your formative influences and teachers who have been important to you.
My teachers encouraged me to read. I started to study philosophy. I write poetry and I cannot write poetry without reading philosophy.
The Future – What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a Kurdish poem. I am living in the heat. I want to develop projects related to refugee flags and children. I am interested in making documentaries, films, and poetry workshops.
Translated from German by Uta Haas
Prologue – The Last Chapter
No dreams. Blank mind. Only darkness.
And suddenly a piercing noise, somewhere out there. But in here he was safely hidden. His eyelids heavy, so heavy. The rest of his body leaden. His heart beating the steady rhythm of a slave galley.
The noise grew louder. LOUDER.
Stop – my ears!
His eyelids seemed stitched together, and he had to separate them forcefully. Opening his eyes, he squinted into glaring white. Anything was better than this erratic noise blaring on and off. He must find the source and switch it off, return to blissful sleep here in –
Where the hell was he?
Slowly things took shape around him. Iron everywhere. Weights, on the floor and on bars. This definitely wasn’t his study. It wasn’t a room he had ever seen before.
The slave galley in his chest skipped a few beats. Adrenaline leaked through a hole somwhere. Not enough for coordinated action but enough to start him thinking. He closed his eyes again. First things first.
– My name is Tarek Waldmann.
Good start. Now slowly put together what had happened last, one step at a time. This routine had been drilled into him when he was a child, for the times when he had carelessly lost his leather E.T.
Last recollection before everything went dark?
– I am a murder suspect.
The leak in the galley got bigger. Panic flooded in.
– Right, how about some more concrete memories?
Let’s start again. Last memory before it all went dark?
– I was in Helga’s flat. Helga, who is supposed to be my mother all of a sudden. She had wanted to tell me the last chapter of my story and explain everything to me.
He snorted a laugh. Now that it was too late, they wanted to explain everything to him.
He had pushed open the door to Helga’s kitchen, his insides bubbling like lava. Calmly, Helga had shut the door of the little stove in the corner and turned to face him, glancing up as she wiped her sooty fingers on her navy-blue trousers. A smile that could read him.
And suddenly he was lying here, a bottomless chasm between the kitchen, and him and Helga. How to bridge that gap now? Too much work. Much better to go back to sleep. He shifted into a more comfortable position, but his back bumped into something soft.
Someone else, right beside him. A heavy arm draped possessively across his upper body, a hand curled around his chest. He took it, chuckling. Lina and her desperate need for physical contact. Her embraces had turned into something like a Heimlich maneuver. He pulled the hand and arm tighter across his chest, like the edge of a blanket, wanting to huddle up against the body behind him. No resistance.
Does that really feel like Lina? something inside him whispered. Or even someone alive?
He blinked, drew himself up, and looked at the hand in his. Strong, straight fingers. Age spots. Definitely not Lina. Without letting go of the hand, he looked over his shoulder.
It was Helga alright. There was his mother, sleeping, her arm strangely twisted in his grasp. She didn’t seem to mind. He pulled at it and shook her, but he suspected what would come next. He knew a few things about dead people by this point. They didn’t wake up in a hurry.
Two in two days, Tarek. What will the two friendly Viennese police inspectors say to that?
Once more, double-edged blades pierced his eardrums. A doorbell, jarring and demanding. Somebody banging on the sturdy door with hands and fists, making it shake. Tarek’s name – Open the damn door!
Adrenaline coursed through his heart, roaring at him to finally feel fear. It was time to accept that no one in Helga’s story was going to live happily ever after, especially someone who was up to his neck in everything. He had to do something, dammit, and at once!
He couldn’t. It was as if someone had shackled his energy and brain, and dumped them into a glassy tank of water. And now here he was, watching the two of them make a last ditch attempt to explain to him who had gotten him into this mess, urging him to get out before it was too late. It certainly didn’t look like a lesson in escapology. With a resigned smile, he patted Helga’s hand.
Oh, Mom, he thought hazily. What have we done?
Für immer mein was published in 2013 by Eire Verlag, Salzkotten.
The Lost Son is forthcoming fromWeyward Sisters
The Creative Process is collaborating with the
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
and Weyward Sisters on global literary initiatives.
Ellen Dunne is the pen name of an Austrian writer, born in Salzburg. Ellen worked as a copy writer in advertising agencies before moving to Dublin, where she worked in various roles at the Google Europe HQ. In 2011, her first novel "Wie du mir" was published with small German press Eire Verlag. "Für immer mein" (German original of The Lost Son) was published in 2013. "Harte Landung", first part of a crime novel series, was published by Insel in 2017. She lived and worked in Berlin, Munich and Mexico City, since 2004 in Dublin.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of The Lost Son and why you wrote it?*: This story originally spun off from me exploring how to turn a piece of family history of my husband's grandparents into a novel. I got fascinated by the idea of one person finding out about their family's past in the form of a self-written biography. Then the idea of a lost child came into the mix, and when I read about forced adoptions in former Eastern Germany and the initiative of a Berlin woman, Katrin Behr, to help people unearthing their stories, the idea for The Lost Son was born.
It is quite a dark story of an adopted (and quite lost) young man who is approached by his real mother under cover, but their reunification gets so marred by the lies and tragedies of the past as well as the inability of all involved to get over their personal hurt, it all goes horribly wrong.
To me, the story is best described as "family noir", and the German title "Für immer mein" (directly translated Forever Mine) reflects the possessive love that both sets of parents feel towards a child that they both deem "theirs". The English title The Lost Son aims more at the melancholic aspect of the story. Despite the dark and inherently sad story, my goal was to make it easy to read, accessible and also entertaining.
Why do you write?
I always loved to read, and also liked to spend my time inside (not too sporty for sure!). The lives of the characters just fascinated me, and also the emotions that well written books could evoke in me. In reality I often was an anxious child - reading made it possible to go places and live through adventures without the frightening reality of living through them myself.
I started my career in advertising, as a copy writer, so I am used to call myself a writer. In a sense of an author of a work of fiction, it definitely took its dear while, as I felt shy about my ambitions for a long time. Only when I started having readers because I got published I got the confidence of calling myself an author.
The Art of Translation
This translation was my first, and it was commissioned by myself, so I guess this made a big difference to the usual process. Uta Haas, my translator, just like myself, is a native German speaker, and it was also her first work of literary translation. I think she did amazingly well. One advantage, especially for the parts when Eastern German Helga was involved, was that she could very well relate and therefore translate the more tough and direct "German English" that makes Helga's language so distinct and compelling. For Tarek's more fluid communication, which is influenced by having grown up in both Austria and Ireland, we also took on board Trish Flanagan, a very capable native Irish editor. So the translation was a real collaborative work. I was fascinated to find out that, being in the English speaking world for so long and reading a lot of books of UK, Irish and US-American writers, the style I would write in English would differ quite a bit from my German writing style, while both influenced each other.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
I was born into a family mainly gifted and active in music. Both my great-grandfather and grandfather were conductors of the local marching bands, my brother is a musician and mixer/producer, while my stepdad was always a connoisseur of classical music. Living in Salzburg, which is steeped in classical music, my parents exposed me very early on to opera, too.
What were some of your formative influences? Which teachers supported you on your path to becoming a writer?
Still, I always read a lot and started my teenage writing "career" after a very engaged project of a former German teacher of mine, who created an anthology of our school essays, taking head shots from us "auteurs" and hand-produced the anthology. I have my copy until today, and from then on I started to write. From the start, I went for the long haul and wrote my first novel with 15. IT by Stephen King, a gift from my brother for my 14th birthday, had kicked off a reading frenzy, mainly horror novels, but also a lot of contemporary pieces. It is hard to single out names, but books that definitely influenced me as a writer and propelled me in certain directions such as Arundhati Roy, Andre Dubus, Northern Irish Bernard MacLaverty, Eoin McNamee, but also German writers such as Robert Schneider. In general, I just enjoy the often more light-hearted approach of UK/Irish writers. I do appreciate humor, especially in the face of darkness.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you?
My second passion definitely is music, and I would find it hard to write without. Lyrics of songs can inspire me but also turn me off a song completely.
What are you working on now?
Currently, I am working on the 2nd novel of my crime novel series around a half German, half Irish policewoman. The first part will be out in August 2017. It is my first major publishing contract after a good couple of years trying to break in, so I am very excited, trying to balance all my hopes with the reality of many books being published at the same time, and still being an unknown author.
What are your hopes for the future of literature?
To me, the future of literature is bright. It might shift its shape and how it is consumed, but there will always be the love for stories - so plenty of room for people who tell them.
So...
It feels, again, like being a silkworm
Cocooned in a shell built upon its own saliva,
Reflecting the memory-aches,
With one thread hanging out of the shell
Living beyond time and space,
Which might be inferred as a calculation inside the cocoon.
The illusion, that it isn't dark, inside, could be smudged easily
For darkness always stays in each corner
Wherever there is the name of a god.
(1)
The 'Roza' felt betrayed for the first time, in the naïve summer,
When the caramel of your lips was offered, a prerequisite.
The religion had died many years ago, in my dry womb,
Before it could see the light of day as an infant,
And, before it could suckle the usual fluid
Of naivety from the nipples of slumber.
In retrospect... I feel, I can do the same again
For that ride to the wonderland. For one kiss.
Feet intersecting, mine placed upon yours,
Souls worshiping the void while standing
In the middle of another void,
With number seventeen at the end of its name.
(2)
The smell of the neon light grows stronger,
More and more intense as time transforms...
I could feel the gangrene
Growing in your stomach
Gesticulating omnipotent.
(3)
The blues stay with us
In the saliva of that one kiss
Which remains our first and last
Ride to the wonderland.
Previously published by https://wordpress.com/post/escritura415.wordpress.com/201
Ramsha Ashraf is a Pakistani poet who tries not to let any tradition confine her individuality. She has one poetry collection, titled as Enmeshed, published to her credit.
BRIEF INTERVIEW - My Creative Process: I think, silkworm could be considered, or at least it appears to me, the most potent metaphor for creativity. It provides you a cage of paradox to live in; a sense of liberation yet a Promethean chain keeps you tied to an unknown responsibility. I write without knowing any legitimate reason to why I write... But, I guess, this is why art and literature is considered an apt barometer of mirroring and measuring what is called, and known in a much simpler context as, life.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of this piece and why you wrote it?
Well, the Muslim month of Ramadan has been observed all over the world. So, it brings a few sweet-bitter memories spent in the arms of a not-so-religious yet pious lover.
Why write?
I guess, I write because I just cannot accept the fact that time is going to erase my voice from the surface. Although, I am fully aware of the futility of my act.
Andreas* is in Greece. I meet him on his yacht, the 218 foot Rosenkavalier, built in 1929. He is one of nine children born to a shepherd. He made his fortune in donuts, and later cream-filled pastry puffs. “Come,” he says, “Sail with me. I will give you your own suite. You can do your work on the aft deck.”
I take a photo of him on a wicker chair, drinking champagne.
The light is gold mixed with silver. His face is dark from tanning. His smile is very white. His wife is Orthodox and will not divorce him. In the morning, he sends me a large stately hardcover cloth book, Burke’s Peerage. There is article on him and his rise from donuts.
In the afternoon, he takes me to a boatyard. His new yacht is there, all steel lines, massive as a ferry. “You will sail on it,” he says. “You will write about it.” He is a small man, with a small bullish chest. He has all his hair and kind dark eyes: not dark like coal or iron ore or night. But brown like a dog’s eyes—a spaniel or beagle.
He has four children. His son’s name is Dionysius. I don’t meet his daughters. When I get home to New York, Andreas calls me up. “I followed you,” he said. “I arrive tonight, via Miami.” He has his own plane.
I take him to the Village Vanguard. It could be wonderful, I think, to sail with him, to have my own suite, to work on the aft deck. He shows me the suite – he has a brochure. The bedspread is shiny black. The drapes are gold. Or, “you could have the petal room,” he says. It is delicate, like tendrils, pale green and yellow. “Lalique,” he says, when I touch the bowl in the photograph. “Fantasia.”
At the Vanguard, it is dark and smoky. A band plays the blues and he likes the blues, he says. He understands the blues. “Do you,” he asks, understand the blues? Perhaps not yet.” He lays out his business card. He adds a number to it. “Come tonight,” he says, meaning to the Mediterranean. “Come next week. I will arrange it.”
We don’t eat. He is past eating. We drink champagne. I am twenty-seven and wearing a short skirt. I am wearing a pale peach silk shirt that is shoulderless and wrapped at the neck. The lights lower. The lights lower again. He has his right arm around my shoulder. He lowers his hand to my breast. He takes his finger and his thumb and squeezes my nipple. He crushes it. Although this hurts so much that I hold my breath, I stay very still, very quiet,
I pretend not to notice. What I do notice is that he has warned me. What I do notice is that never will I sail with him in the Aegean. Never will I swim with him or write about him on his aft deck.
Later, he builds the Alysia. It is 280 feet. It has thirty-six crew. Weekly rental is 661,500 Euros ($820,000). He is in Mumbai at a trade show. He leaves his boat in the harbor and goes in search of a curry to eat. It is 2008 and he dines at the Palace. Islamist fundamentalists overtake the Palace. He and his fellow guests are locked in the basement. Andreas uses his cell phone to call his family and then the BBC. His last words describe a lull in the bombing. You can hear them online**: “All we know is the bombs are next door and the hotel is shaking every time a bomb goes off. Everyone is just living on their nerves.” He is shot five times and dies at seventy-three.
*Andreas Liveras, dies 11/2008
** This live recording could be found online in 2014
*
“The Shipping Tycoon” appeared in 52 Men published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena USA in 2015. 52 Men was featured in an essay by Amanda Fortini in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016. “52 Men suggests that our identity is at least in part a product of our romantic past, and that the particulars we choose to depict that past are significant, comprising a kind of personal psychobiography… Leonard’s focus is zoom-lens tight: she describes the various men, zeroing in on what they said and did -— and how she responded — in a pivotal moment. .. She suffered a grievous early trauma… and she’s wounded. Yet she’s also slyly, coolly observant and has transformed her experiences into art… We know her, ultimately, through the book she has written. The narrative specifics she selects to describe the men are hers, as is the deadpan humor; all of it arises from her artistic consciousness. “Although in style and tone 52 Men differs from either Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, it is, like both of these books, a novel of impressions unified by the author’s sensibility.”
Louise was raised in Manhattan. She was born in New Zealand of British and Maori descent and has traveled widely throughout the world. At 28, she quit full-time magazine work in Manhattan to be a creative writer. Compared in the LARB to Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwicke, she favors the crot and short form; her focus is on men and women, the interior lives of girls, and the experience of extremes. She has lived in New York, Europe, Mississippi, New Zealand and Australia, including in the outback of Western Australia. She lives now on Lake Ontario, New York.
Long before the Me Too movement, you’ve been writing books and coming of age stories [Since You Ask, Miss Me a Lot of] about survivors of assault, abuses of power. Can you tell us a little about the origins of 52 Men and why you wrote it?
I wrote 52 Men while flung out, alienated in the outback of Western Australia. I felt so estranged from my life growing up in Manhattan, it was as if people from my past appeared in hologram in the sky. I had to pay witness to them.
It also seemed to me that these 52 relationships were the fallout of a particularly brutal relationship in childhood. That relationship is in Part 2, and though fictionalized. I wonder if all of us have some blight on our childhood, some rupture that destroys what might have been -- wand what we therefore, in some ways, always long for. The Garden of Eden lost, the human condition in which good and evil, in us, live side by side.
Why did you become a writer?
Writers, some of us, need to tell our own sides of a story; this need arises from childhood or some wrong, some injustice . It can also come from an experience of ecstasy -- that, by expressing, we prolong or hold onto.
Who were some of your formative influences? And what advice did they give you?
I was lucky. I had a lot of praise, and a lot of encouragement, from early on. This gave me a solid identity and purpose. I was writing for newspapers in Manhattan and New Zealand at 15 and 17 and 18: reviews, interviews, a front page column, a long feature on a boy's prison, which I toured at age 17 with a newspaper photographer. Creative work was more fraught, and personal. I took to heart the advice of my father and of poet Kenneth Koch who I studied with for at Columbia College in New York: don't try to write like someone else; write as yourself. It easy, yet it is what all writers strive for: to be distinct, while at the same time not being a virtuoso or resorting to frills and bows. The work I like best is work like the rose created by the blood of the nightingale -- it has to capture that person's soul or life blood.
What other art forms interest you?
All art forms that transcend words attract me; I cannot help but think that visual and musical arts forgo the expectation of making sense of life, of extracting a meaning or lesson. I would prefer not to have this responsibility. That being said, age helps.. Truths I could not see, or would not, have at last forced themselves upon me. It's worth staying alive for, even if painful. I revere the poets who wrote their brilliant work young. But for me, I quote Aeschylus, a favorite in college: " Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'
What are you working on now? What are your forthcoming projects?
In 52 Men, the telling in shorts of 52 encounters with men in my life, is the seed of a novel on a reform school boy I met at 14. I've been writing that story ever since .... Innocence, lies, manipulation, sex, violence... all of these took me decades to understand and I hope this will be my next book. There's also a collection of essays I wrote on lovers who enacted joint suicide pacts. They're tragic but oddly beautiful, romantic yet the result of power (usually a man's), delusion (both men and women's) and hope.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
Meanwhile, technology provides a continuous stream of information -- yet still, this only the raw material with which the writer works. It's what you do with it that counts. Beware as one would beware a proliferation of Sirens on the beach.
The Creative Process: Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
