Cassandra Voices

Category: Literature

  • Poem: ‘Oblique Landscape’

    Oblique Landscape

    JP Jacobsen, I read your poem
    of a boundless heath with mossy stones
    where you were born and where you returned
    with the tungsind poet
    that ‘died the death, the difficult death.’ 

    Shadowgraph naturalist, translator of Darwin
    enduring sufferer of tuberculosis
    who loved six enraged steadfast women
    for the poet to tune the mood to its core. 

    JP Jacobsen, can you tell me of my oblique landscape?
    the thick darkness envelopes the drastic day
    I am visited by the Intelligent Angel,
    the Neutral Angel, and the Terrifying Angel
    each one brings a gift impossible to decipher.  

    Follow the footprints.
    We are walking.
    Let us be crooked once again. 

    The trembling question is asked
    whether the fourth New Angel is
    localized or metastasized.
    Generalizations are for the Devil. 

    Let’s focus rather on the moment:
    see the spider on the web
    listen to the rain on the window pane
    let’s be wildly polylogic
    my soul-explosion expands in laughter
    and expounds out onto outrageous love. 

    This walk is not straight
    it is a crooked tale
    my feet and fingers wander wayward
    isn’t it good to be lost in the wood?
    with the mind’s ears and eyes of darkness
    the screech owl glides through the dusk
    searching for philosophers who have gone blind
    madness is a forgotten way
    so let us be crooked once again.  

    Pay attention.
    This is my dialectic. 

    Meeting a badger for the first time in the midnight rain
    loping between the wood and the retreating road
    before descending into the multi-chambered sett
    hearing the magnificent frog
    croaking on a leaf in the tepid pond
    then leaps down diving into another world. 

    JP Jacobsen, can you hear me still?
    this is my diremption
    my broken middle
    forever dwelling in the contradiction.

    Bartholomew Ryan is the author of Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa (Reaktion Books, 2024).

    www.bartholomewryan.com

  • Rain in the Face

    Dawn sun, distant mountains, red cliffs near, white clouds scattered, still world, until a breeze caresses the desert floor, and a scorpion awakes, resting on a piece of earth where no human ever stood. In this wilderness stands a horse, and sitting on the horse a rider. Tail swishing, standing still, a motionless man watching, intently, an eagle high above, hunting, alive, living to fly. The warrior wears the painted face and the feathered headwear of his long fathers. He looks up at its broad wings, he smiles, the way eagles can’t.

    The dream maker is hiding. Morning departs, lifest part of the day, sleep distant, last night’s dreams evaporate. The man and his horse make the wilderness less lonely. Every day he starts at dawn. The man is thinking, no words, words know, within their boundaries. He wonders whether his friend, the horse, thinks thoughts. It is his destiny to be chieftain. Kick the stirrup, the horse moves on slowly, distant mountain west, snowy summits beckon, through sand, clip clop, the scorpion lifts her tail, otherwise still, the horse and man wander away, red cliffs of hues, scorpion watching, like she always does.

    Horse walking in the desert, solitary in the wilderness, desert sands have no mind, just beauty, the thirsty horse knows. The thirsty man sees the distant river. The world was made for him. He thinks. He doubts. The dream maker dances in the flames of the fire the man has made, to keep him warm in the night and to ward off evil spirits. He is safe near the fire, under the stars. His tribe is at home, sleeping in the teepee, but he must search, with his horse, for his spirit guide. Then he will discover his name, and finally reach manhood. Now they are far away, beyond horizons, past the setting sun. Four months he has been gone, alone, searching, travelling where the stars are strange, waiting for the spirit guide to reveal itself, now just wilderness, loneliness, risk becoming destiny. Look to the clouds, a formless shape, no sitting bull, no crazy horse, who found their spirits in the shapes of clouds. His spirit is hiding, somewhere in the world. Like the dream maker does.

    The horse drinks from the river, the man stoops beside it, water in a cup of hands, he drinks, life itself returning, fear turns to laughter, there was never a first time, there was never a last. The sun sets, night falls, the universe emerges from the sky, the horse sleeps, the man is awake, seeing other worlds, not understanding, only understanding here, this world that created him, from nothing. He watches the stars at night, he is life, as much as the horse, as much as the river and the forest, the bear, the antelope, the eagle riding high in the morning, and the stars become memory, in his learning mind. At night, by the fire, he searches for his spirit guide in the galaxy rain.

    He raises his head, they see mountains, the horse knows and they walk, through the day, upwards, high near the summit, stone cliff juts, they stand on the precipice together, horse and man, looking out, over the great valley below, and above, the grey wanderers, summoning thunder, electric flashes in the distance, their hair blows, they are unwavering, a galloping storm approaches, they alone are conscious, they remain still in the oncoming storm, the man looks up, the skies open, the spirit guide arrives, he looks to the universe hiding, down comes the water, beating like drums, front hooves rise high, and the man speaks for the first time in months, “Rain in the Face’. It is done.

    Feature Image: Frank Cone

  • Fiction: The Text

    Saturday morning and Lil’Johnny was on his way to work on the Market. He walked along the long curve of street that ran along the bottom of the hill bordering the old marshes where now stood council estates. The tall towers stood like giants against the clear cold blue sky where the first rays of orange-golden sunlight lit up the morning sky. The road was shiny and quiet, anticipating the monotonous roar of traffic that was sure to follow. A pair of skittish wood pigeons leapt from the ground at Lil’Johnny’s approach, the heavy beat of their wings breaking the silence. 

    Lil’Johnny walked the long road until the bend where he turned into the park. The park too stood at the bottom of the hill, a great field ringed by trees. Up on the hill the close-knit silhouettes of Victorian facades looked down into the park and out over the marsh. In the park the sky opened out as if one looked up at an ocean above, a great blue expanse. He crossed the park, entering the walkway beneath the railway line and from there along a long sliver of park-lined path. Then abruptly right heading cross-country to the gate on the far side of a grassy green playing field.

    As Lil’Johnny turned right the Singing Bush tweeted and chirruped making him smile. The Singing Bush is a large undistinguished shrub that emits the sound of chirruping finches although not one of the little birds can be seen, completely invisible in the thicket of branches and leaves. Looking at the Bush one sees and hears a spirited shrub singing.

    Through the gate onto a little path along a row of houses, across the road, down a backstreet and then up the grafitti-ed cobbled alleyway onto the Market. The metallic clink of poles of stallholders erecting their metal-frame structures, greets Lil’Johnny. Boxes litter the road, vans parked across, the movement of bodies, soul music from a radio, a cluster of chain-smoking locals sitting outside the cafe. Lil’Johnny walks briskly down the street, looking neither left nor right, dodging the assorted obstacles living and inanimate.

    Lil’Johnny arrives at the Shop, just one of the hodge-podge of shopfronts lining either side of this mile-long medieval street that acts as Market on some days and High Street on others. “Robert Walkers” is written in large golden letters over the Shop. Below the sign is a large plate-glass window and to the right a single doorway leading inside. The Shop consists of a long wide corridor bordered on either side by high shelves overflowing with cut-price groceries and products – an Aladdin’s cave.  At the far end of the Shop is a wooden table with cash register. Out the back is a vast storeroom.

    Outside, Raja patiently sets up the stall, his slow thoughtful movements speak of his three decades performing this ritual. He turns his old lanky frame and smiles at Lil’Johnny’s approach, revealing a set of brilliant white teeth set against his dark Tamil skin, a sharp hooked nose and streaky black hair combed over his shiny pate. As usual he is smartly turned out in shiny dress shoes, sharp suite trousers, button-down shirt and overcoat. Lil’Johnny salutes him as he passes though the door into the Shop.

    As Lil’Johnny is about to head into the back he brushes against the corner of a shelf inadvertently and CRASH! An avalanche of junk falls off. ‘Fucking, fuck, fuck – Big Johnny you bastard – clean your shit up!’ he curses to the empty shop. He hastily clears up the fallen boxes, dirty plates, cups of mouldy rotting tea-bags and assorted out-of-date packets of god-knows-what. He heads out the back into the storeroom, down the rickety wooden stairs and dumps the smeared crockery in the small sink. “You can clean up this bloody mess yourself,” Lil’Johnny says to the Boss who is not there.

    Thus his workday begins. Lil’Johnny leverages the weighty front door off its hinge and drags it into the  back; he hoovers the floor with the trusty but mutilated Henry patched up with masking-tape; he fills baskets with nuts and, bending over the stall outside, flips the bags expertly into rows. In the middle of his routine Lil’Johnny spies Big Johnny, the Boss, sauntering towards the Shop. The Boss’ belly sticks out before his tall wide ageing frame, his white button-down shirt falling out of his baggy trousers and comfortable shoes adorn his feet. “Here comes Johnny!” calls Lil’Johnny to the approaching figure. “Mornin’” the Boss says by way of return.

    Big Johnny is vexed as usual. “Come on, come on, we’ve got to get this stall out,” he says impatiently, pulling out a box here, dumping something out of another there, rearranging one corner then another in a seemingly pointless haste. Raja gesticulates wildly at the Boss and shouts something about buying too much junk which the Boss ignores. Lil’Johnny smokes an insolent cigarette, watching the passing scene of early shoppers and day-trippers. Lil’Johnny hears the beep-beep of his phone. He pulls out the little brick of plastic and looks into the archaic screen which reads:

    “How was the DJ gig last Saturday? (heart)”

    Yes, there was a gig last Saturday, and yes Lil’Johnny had DJ-ed. But who was the text from? Lil’Johnny hates it when people did not sign off their texts with their name. It made for the situation that had just arisen. The number, ending 611, had not been saved to his phone. He had no idea who had sent it. “Come on, come on,” orders Big Johnny, “Get me a barrel out the back.” Lil’Johnny snaps to attention and rushes out the back leaving the Text till later.

    The stall consists of a long low table out in the street, piled with goods – herbal teas, 2litre olive oil, boxes of latex gloves, bags of sweets, 3kg brown sugar, packets of broken biscuits, nuts and dried fruit, bars of chocolate, spaghetti and lasagna sheets, dried chickpeas and tins of powdered milk. The stall’s flank is protected by a wall of blue barrels. On a stack of yellow crates sits a round battered Quality Street tin which acts as the cash register. Looking behind, Lil’Johnny can see through the door and into the back of the Shop where Raja and Big Johnny stand serving customers; there’s an animated conversation going on Lil’Johnny can’t hear. “Ah – that Text…” he remembers.

    “Sat woz good fun. Sorry u couldn’t make it. What u up to 2nit? Lil’Johnny” he punches into the keypad – Send – thinking, thinking – Sent.

    This gets Lil’Johnny wondering who it could be. Marta –lovely long legs, wide strong back, cute bob? Sally – older, tresses of long golden hair, a subtle bust he hasn’t quite figured out yet? Or one of those random meetings in the pub which had lead to a conversation and exchange of numbers? It puzzled Lil’Johnny. “Stop slacking and serve that customer,” barks Big Johnny pointing to a woman at the end of the stall holding out a box of tea. Yikes! Lil’Johnny pulls out a blue plastic bag and slopes across the stall with a servile “Madam…”.

    Thereafter the trade begins. “Yes sir, that’s £1….4 for £1 on those Madam….Would you like bag?……The price of the oils? £7 for the Extra Virgin, £6 otherwise…..Oi kid stopping hitting that packet…..What’s it like? I am afraid I can’t eat it for you sir, you need to decide for yourself……That’s £3.50, you’ve given me £10, £6.50 change coming….No Madam we don’t take cards, only cash…..A bank transfer? Sorry we only take hard currency ……Price for that? Let me check” – Lil’Johnny holds the item high in the air and shouts into the back of the Shop; Big Johnny signals with his fingers ‘4’ which Lil’Johnny repeats verbally to the customer. “It’s cheaper in the supermarket,” gripes the customer and walks off. “Yeah well buy it from there then” Lil’Johnny imagines himself saying.  Things quieten down and Lil’Johnny pulls out his phone. There is a message waiting. It reads:

    “Hey – that’s great. At the Bolton Arms tonight. There is a good band lined up. Hope to see you down there?! xx”

    “Bah! Sign your name!” thinks Lil’Johnny aloud. He wasn’t really planning on heading so far from his usual stomping grounds. The Bolton was an old Victorian pub someway along the path that runs beside the Great River. Would it be worth it? It all depended who it was on the other side of that number – 611. The number started to fascinate him. “Who are you Madam 611? I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to know,” he concluded with a determined air.

    The day proceeded in its timeless routine. Come 4pm Lil’Johnny starts packing up the stall, moving its constituting parts into the back of the Shop. By 5pm he is supping on a can of beer. By 6pm Raja has surreptitiously handed Lil’Johnny a little bundle of cash that constitutes Lil’Johnny’s wages. Lil’Johnny carefully deposits the cash in his secret pocket. Then there passes much banter and familial conversation between the three as they wait for the last of the custom to evaporate. At last they vacate the darkened Shop and lock up. Raja’s nimble fingers weave the weighty metal chain through gaps in the shutter and with the ‘snap’ of the lock, Lil’Johnny feels released.

    ————————————

    The Oxford Arms sits on a forgotten corner between a busy road, a raised railway line and the Creek. It’s a spit-and-sawdust, no frills live music pub. Lil’Johnny decides to go there first. At the end of a road coming off the Market sits the handsome, lonely building acting as a beacon for pirates and other ne’r-do-wells.

    Lil’Johnny enters, orders a lager and slips back outside. He sups the clear pishy liquid quenching a thirst more mental than physical. He takes a deep pull on a spliff and breathes a deep sigh of relief.

    Inside the pub there is a band playing some of sort of naff pseudo-punk. One of their songs is called “Wisdom of the Blues”. Lil’Johnny goes in. The lead singer struts his stuff on the dance floor while an older crowd bop to the music. It’s boring music – a mish mash of everything and nothing at all – a noisy mess, played overloud. Two sexy older ladies dance, mobile phones in hand. Members of the band strut off the stage whacking people in the face with their instruments. “Thank you, good night”. “One more” the crowd shout. This last song has a terrible guitar solo.

    Phil Sick – critic, DJ, music nerd – arrives. He is short with a great bush of ratty white hair; he wears glasses, long shorts, canvas Converse trainers and a black-and-white polka dot shirt. “Oi oi, Sick” calls Lil’Johhny. Phil starts waxing lyrical about the “orgasmic” female noise artist he has just seen at a bar at the end of the road; he describes the dry-ice and strobe in the dark basement. “It was loud,” he says looking up at Lil’Johnny with a glow of euphoric bliss. Sick then goes to stand in front of the speakers waiting for the next band looking like an untidy teenage girl.

    The pub is busy. DJ Toffee is playing between sets, a munchkin of a man peeping out from behind the decks. There the crackle from his overworn records. He plays an eclectic mix of: “The Israelites”, “I want to hold your hand”, “Disco inferno”, “Leader of the pack”, “How long has this been going on…” and “Black Betty” in succession. The Soundman moves about the pub like a malevolent force, vexed because he can’t play HIS playlist of neurotic trance. Will – patron saint of the Oxford Arms – is at his usual seat at the bar wearing a camouflage baseball cap, pint in hand, looking on blankly.

    Lil’Johnny looks up at the clock on the wall – it reads 8:00pm. “Time to move on me’thinks. Don’t want to be too late, just fashionably” he says to himself. The Coyote Men, a four-man Newcastle rock band, its members dressed in tutu’s and Mexican wrestling masks, come on stage. They start playing a surfy caveman rock with a funky rolling bassline; Americana rock-and-roll with a Mexican twist. As Lil’Johnny leaves through the side door, he catches a line from one of their songs: “Loopy Loopy Lopez \\ Break my heart, I break your legs..”. “Geez! Just when the bands were getting good. Oh well, it can’t be helped.”

    *************

    Along the Creek and over it, through the busy town centre and onto the path that runs alongside the Great River. The almost-full moon hangs high and bright in the inky-black sky; Lil’Johnny salutes it. The Great River is at high-tide and tonight it has a flat, reflective surface like a field of mud – smooth and defined. One can just hear the rushing river like the rustling of paper over the mournful drone of the air traffic above.

    Beams of light shine across the River, shimmering pillars. On the other side skyscrapers are lit up like constellations organized by bureaucrats, geometric glittering anthills. Its dark by the river and people cut figures against the glowing skyline. Cylindrical metal buoys pockmarked with raised ridges make black patches against the luminescent river as if mines waiting for contact. A river bus pulls out of the quay and rides gracefully up the river trailing waves in its wake. A few seconds later the Great River speaks: the lapping of water, gurgle – slap – wash – the elemental crashing of waves.

    Lil’Johnny stops along the path, leans against the balustrade and looks out over the Great River, that still molten pond of glass. It exudes its primal silence. Lil’Johnny gets to thinking: “What the hell am I doing? Does it really matter? I wouldn’t be out this evening if I didn’t have this mission to fulfill, this mystery to solve.” “My little manor,” he thinks panning from the hills behind to the Great River before him. “I hardly ever leave this place. My little corner of the Earth. Some people want to travel but I just want is to follow my little circuit, see me old muckers, listen to music and dance the night away. In short – to party. Am I looking for love tonight? I don’t know. I’m looking for something….I’m just not sure what it is yet. An answer, a sign, an auspice, destiny?!”

    The stupid clump of a jogger and their loud rasping guttural breathing disturbs Lil’Johnny’s train of thought. Then the gabble of voices in the dark, moving forms. Lil’Johnny pulls himself together and continues along the river path, gazing dreamily up at the evening star stuck up in the sky like a brilliant satellite.

    Off the river path, halfway down a side street, a corner pub sits – a dumpy Victorian relic – painted black. It’s the Bolton Arms and Lil’Johnny quickens his pace because he knows he’s late. In through the door and straight to the bar; he’s gasping for a drink. The pub is packed.

    Lil’Johnny looks around making a visual inspection of the punters. While he is never good at remembering names or numbers, Lil’Johnny has an uncanny memory for faces – he knows that if Madam 611 is there, he’ll know. She is not there in that mass. While Lil’Johnny waits to be served he surveys his surroundings. The pub is painted in a dark coat; there in one corner a raised stage stands with a cut-glass mirror behind and neon-red lights spell out “Bolton” above – the red light reflects off the black ceiling and splashes across tables. A discoball, small and lonely, hangs high above the stage. There is a band setting up. Fairylights strung from the ceiling reflect in the large handsome windows creating a starry infinity. A big stuffed fish sits in a glass case above the bar.

    “What you having?” asks the young barmaid. “Pint of the pale ale please”. Pour – clunk – “Cash or card?” – beeeep! Lil’Johnny takes a long sip and returns to surveying the pub. People wearing leather jackets and denim shirts, young men with long hair, quiff’s black and grey, blonde bobs, pates, leopard print, glasses of white wine, teeth, smiling faces. There a mobile phone so sparkly that a magpie would be off with it. At the bar long blonde hair frames an angelic face with long eyelashes. A wealthier set than Lil’Johnny is used to. They talk and eat and generally look bored.

    Its the “Magic City Trio” playing tonight. Lil’Johnny knows them. A husband and wife outfit who sing and play guitar. The band includes a double bass, brass and drums. There are lots of pairs of glasses in the band. The husband wears a floral-print Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, tall with big lips and long greying hair; she is short and wears a glittery silver dress. They start off with “Spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you…”. Their sound is a vibrant country honky-tonk with drawling vocals and twangy guitars. A mother with a snub nose sitting near the stage covers her young daughter’s ears with her hands; the child has a big unhappy look on her face. The young child looks askance at an older lady dancing wildly in front.

    Lil’Johnny decides to go out into the garden – a strip of gravel on which sit rows of wooden picnic benches. He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag and watches the curling of smoke rising and dissipating into the sky. Looking up he sees the sweep of new build flats. From the flats emanates a dull green-grey light punctuated by chaotic, disjointed, angular shapes of the stuff inside;  there the flitting light of a large TV screen. “Sorry, the girls are coming with me” says a lady to some leery lads chatting up her friends perched on the benches nearby. Lil’Johnny surveys the garden and no Madam 611.

    The reader may ask why Lil’Johnny doesn’t just text Madam 611? Why not just ask who she is and where she is? That would be unthinkable to Lil’Johnny. He believes in fate, in chance – what adventure would there be if we just got all our answers from pressing some buttons on a phone? Its a matter of principle. If Lady Luck should favour him tonight he will meet up with Madam 611. She will appear from around a corner, they will recognize each other, embrace and sit down to talk; they will move closer to one another and nuzzle. Lil’Johnny must continue on his mission until the battle is won or lost.

    The beer has loosened Lil’Johnny’s hips and inhibitions. He joins the throng of dancers inside. “Burning ring of fire…” plays from the stage. Being the hill-billy he is, Lil’Johnny slaps his thighs and keeps time to the music with his stomping feet. He sees the back of bobbing heads and heads and heads behind which the band can just be seen. Closing his eyes the rhythm runs through him and into his moving body. Things become fuzzy, ephemeral and euphoric, the spirit of Dionysus unleashed. Around him bodies pop, shuffle, jiggle and jive. Shaking hips, dancing bums, tossed hair and furtive glances. Lil’Johnny is carried away, lost in the scene.

    Time passes and the band has come to an end. The Strokes plays softly off a playlist. Lil’Johnny falls into a large leather armchair and once more surveys the pub. The crowd has thinned and empty glasses fill the tables. Lil’Johnny strikes up conversation with a pretty lady sitting nearby. They get to talking about how they each came to be here this night. “Well, I got this text from a number ending 611 and I had to see who she was…”. The lady looks at Lil’Johnny biting on her curled finger, laughing. “I was just being honest…” protests Lil’Johnny feebly. She leaves shortly thereafter and he is alone once again. An old couple trundle out of the pub, fingers intertwined in a caring embrace.

    Lil’Johnny gets his things and pats his secret pocket to see that his wages are still safe – all is well. He does one more circuit of the pub. Just as he thought – Madam 611 is not there. He knows the routine – she won’t text him again, he won’t text her, a stalemate of obstinate wills – such is the way in this cosmopolitan dump. He will now never know who Madam 611 is, she will be just another unsolved and soon forgotten mystery of his life. Despite his inebriated state, Lil’Johnny He takes his leave of the Bolton and joins the darkness of the river path. The moon has shifted round and the tide on the Great River has dropped. Lil’Johnny is drunk, happy and alone. He walks along the dead quiet river path homeward bound with an uneven swinging step, singing that classic reggae song out loud: “I got money in my pocket // But I just can’t get no love….”

    —

    Feature Image: Katerina Holmes

  • The Dog that Sang the Blues

    It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

    It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

    The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

    We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

    At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

    We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

    I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

    The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

    As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

    I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

    The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

    “Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

    ‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

    Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

    Feature Image: Hector Perez

  • Horses

    Linda phoned me. They found him lying on the ground again. It seems like he’s serious this time. As we were saying goodbye she said, “Tell me if you need money.” I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but I only said, “All right, thanks.” I don’t know what I expected from her. Apparently Papà fell while he was out on his bicycle. Not that he fell off his bicycle. He just fell. At six o’clock he still hadn’t come back so Amos went to look for him and found him by the Dora, lying against the fence. Then my aunt called to tell me that she couldn’t cope anymore and we would have to deal with him. “There are those damned horses too,” she added. As she was talking to me, I looked out the window, trying not to slam the phone down. Anyone would have thought she’d just been waiting for this moment to have a go at me. I told her I was coming back to the village. She snorted and started grumbling again. I said goodbye and put the phone down. I wanted to cry, but the moment passed. I lit a cigarette and looked for the train timetables. Papà is still alive, and I bet she won’t even let him drink a glass or two. She’s that stupid.

    I went to work and, without really thinking about it, I told them my dad was dying and that I needed at least a week off. Lots of people shook my hand, like when I manage to close a deal.
    In the end they gave me the time off. I accepted a few more demonstrations of respect caused by the imminent death of Papà, and left.

    The mist still hasn’t evaporated and I don’t think it will today. I pull my cap down over my forehead until it’s just above my eyes. The air smells damp, fending off the sun. I’ll get the 11.20 train.
    As soon as I get home I call my aunt.
    “Zia, pass me Papà please,” I say.
    “Your father’s tired and won’t get up,” she says.
    “Just pass him to me.” I can hear Papà saying something in the background.
    “Come here so you can talk to him,” says Zia.
    She’s worried I might change my mind and not go to free her from that burden. What can I do? Take Papà with me and show him the shithole I live in? No, I know she wants something else.
    “So you’re not going to let me talk to him?”
    “Your dad’s unwell, why won’t you understand?”
    “It’s going to go like this: if you don’t pass him to me now, I’m not coming.”
    “You’re irresponsible, your dad doesn’t deserve this.”
    “Ok, goodbye Zia Say goodbye to him from me.”
    I put the phone down, and make myself a cup of tea. Then, I don’t know why, but I turn the radio on and end up with one of those singers who put vocal embellishments on every line, and wonder why I bothered. I roll a little joint, light it and a swirl of blue-white smoke floats halfway between the floor and the ceiling of the living room. The radio grates a little but perhaps it’s better like that. Then I feel the telephone vibrating. It’s Zia’s number.
    “Hi Jimmy.”
    “Hi Pa. How are you?”
    “I want a little drink.”
    “As soon as I get there we’ll have a couple of glasses.”
    “Can you bring something? Marina doesn’t approve.”
    “Ok.”
    “It’s been two days since anyone saw to the horses.”
    “What about Amos?”
    “I don’t trust Amos.”
    “Got it.”
    “When will you get here?”
    “Around one. Shall we eat something together?”
    “You can forget that. She has me eating at half past eleven.”
    “Don’t worry, see you soon.”
    “‘Bye.” I put out what’s left of my joint in the ashtray and open the window. I’m a little bit fuzzy and my tea is getting cold. I realise I should get a load going in the washing machine. My clothes stink.

    I must have made the journey at least three hundred times. Each time the same as the last. I’m in a compartment with two kids skipping school. They’re a little bit drunk. The man sitting next to me has a crooked nose and pockmarked cheeks. He’s wearing a pair of too-big corduroy trousers. Every part of him is jiggling, he can’t stay still. It looks like his clothes are causing it. The train enters the plains like a blade, cutting through newly frosted fields, and the horizon looks very close, just a few metres from the tracks. The man with the corduroy trousers unintentionally kicks me. I don’t even turn though I hear his whispered “sorry”. Papà was happy when I left our village. So was I. He told me not to worry because he had his horses. He’d made an effort after Ma passed, and had fixed up our grandparents’ old house. It was a small property outside the village. In winter evenings it had always seemed enormous and menacing in my eyes. Zia and Amos had left him to it, and it was too late when they realised that Papà had absolutely no intention of renovating the house. In fact he actually knocked down some of the walls and built a wooden hut. He spent nearly a year getting it into shape. Of the old house only the portico remains, with Virginia creeper climbing all over it; and my grandparents’ living room where Papà has put a bed, his bottles, a gas heater, an old radio, a gas ring, and various books. He always said he wanted to be left to read in peace. He told me he wanted to read the classics. When I asked him what exactly, Papà sighed instead of answering, something he did quite often when I was small too, in the most unexpected moments. Sighing was his way of retreating from things, or that’s what I think now.

    The train is crossing the bridge over the Dora. The river is a bed of mist. I can’t see the water. The man in the corduroy trousers is looking out the window too, but when our eyes meet, reflected in the glass, he snaps his gaze away and goes back to looking straight ahead.

    Papà pulled down the posts that held up the grape vines and freed the garden from grass and weeds, leaving only an old oak tree growing in the middle. In the summer it gives a bit of shade. Then he bought four male horses: three big ones and a smaller one, not Shetland small, but a pony rather than a horse. I’ve never understood anything about horses, even though Papà explained to me meticulously what to give them to eat, how to ride them and how to clean them. All I remember is that I felt really sorry for them in the summer when they would surrender to the heat and stand under the oak tree, flies buzzing around their eyes. Papà said that when you come into contact with horses you feel a strange sensation you can’t describe. You feel a long way from everything and everybody – they’re solitary beasts.

    Every now and then he would ride into town. I think people thought he was a bit crazy. They probably thought he had lost his mind without Ma. People always need to find reassuring explanations. Papà asked me to take some photos of him riding by the river. One of them had come out really well: my old man bending over a black horse, eyes small and sharp, and behind them spring nature, dirty and wild. Now that photo is hanging above my bed.

    The train starts to hiss and tilts slightly on the inclined tracks. I get up from my seat. Every now and then I like to imagine that while I’ve been away something’s changed even though I know it won’t have.

    I’ve brought Papà a bottle of red wine and a bottle of vodka that someone gave me. Along the way from the station to Zia’s house a bicycle makes a hole in the fog and passes me. I’m beginning to get hungry. The village I was born in has no points of interest, it doesn’t even have a story to tell. Every time I go back it always looks old and tired. It takes ten minutes to walk from the station to Zia’s house, and everything looks the same.

    The house has two storeys, upstairs, which is where my family lived before Ma passed away, is not lived in any more. Zia prefers it to be empty rather than renting to strangers. Her dream is for me to go back and live up there and look after Papà, and that all of a sudden things will start to go really well in every way. Of course she’d also be perfectly happy to send Papà to a retirement home or something like that. Even if she can’t say so. Also she’d like to get rid of the damned horses and sell my grandparents’ house. Except, because of what Papà has done to it, she’ll be selling the land, not a house any more.

    I ring Zia’s bell. I can hear the sound of her wooden clogs coming to the entrance.
    “Thank goodness you’re here!”
    “Your old man doesn’t want to eat. He wants to wait for you.”
    “How is he?”
    “Oh Gianmarco, I don’t know what to do. The doctor came, he said Pietro has to take things easy. But you know what he’s like, he gets so worked up.”
    “Is he taking anything?”
    “The doctor gave him Vigabatrin. Come in, it’s cold.”
    The fire is crackling in the fireplace. The kitchen is stale with the smell of soup and closed-in spaces.
    “Are you hungry?”
    “Where’s Papà ?”
    “He’s in there, watching sport. Tell him to come and eat.”
    Papà is sitting in a rocking chair. He is wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare jeans.
    He is skinnier than last time I saw him.
    He really does look like a sick man.
    “Hi.” Papà turns his head a little and just hints at a hello. I put my backpack on the floor and crouch down next to him, resting a hand on his arm.
    “Can you smell the stink of that stuff?”
    “The soup?”
    “Liquids are for drinking, you eat solid stuff, not the other way around,” he says.
    “How are you then?” he asks me. I can’t tell him the truth.
    “Well enough.”
    “Ah, me too, well enough. Bad enough.” Papà laughs and grips my arm. Then he comes closer to my ear.
    “Have you brought anything to drink?” I nod.
    “What do you want to eat, Gianmarco?” Zia asks from the kitchen. I look at Papà . He shakes his head.
    “I’m not hungry right now, Zia,” I say.
    “But it must be half one.”
    “I ate something on the way here.”
    “At least tell your father…”
    “If I eat I’ll die,” my father interrupts.
    “Oh get away with you…”
    “You’ll have me on your conscience…”
    “Pietro!” Papà mimes putting two fingers down his throat. He is happy to see me and is behaving like when I was a child. He always did want to make me laugh. Not that I gave him much satisfaction on that front. Then he comes closer to my ear.
    “Let’s go eat with the horses. Bring the bottles.”
    Papà gets up, giving himself a push with his hands.
    “Give me a shoulder, I get a bit dizzy when I stand up.”
    I put an arm around his shoulders, a bit clumsily. I can feel the outline of his protruding shoulder blade. Zia has turned back to the stove, but as soon as she hears us get up she asks us where we think we’re going.
    “Can’t I spend some time with my son?”
    “Gianmarco, be careful.”
    “Papà, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go out.”
    “Ah, neither do I. But it’s not good to stay at home either, watching television all the time. It makes your eyes burn.”
    “You see, Gianmarco, he’s always wanting to go out. You try to tell him.”
    “Zia, Papà isn’t a child…”
    “Look at you, always defending him…”
    I can hear a hint of self-satisfaction masked as indignation in her tone, the martyr of the family, what’s left of it, in knowing that the two of us are for some reason together.

    Papà and I leave and start walking through the weeds alongside a ditch. My socks are getting wet.
    “I’m not at all well,” he says.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I’m not doing great.”
    “Are you taking your medicine?”
    “Jimmy…” I understand what he means. The houses peter out and the fog gets lower and denser. We’re shut in a box without walls.
    “What have you brought me?” he asks.
    “A bottle of wine and a bottle of vodka.”
    “Vodka?”
    I open my backpack and hand the bottle to Papà. He’s finding it hard to unscrew so I make him give me back the bottle and open it. Papà wets his lips with it, clicks his tongue, then takes a more determined pull. He sighs. “Where did you get this?”
    “It was a gift.”
    “It’s good,” he holds the bottle by the neck with both hands and raises it slowly to his mouth.
    “Marina wants to sell the horses. She says they’re a burden.”
    Papà takes a sip. I don’t say anything.
    “She says at the rate I’m going, trying to look after those horses will kill me. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get anything.”
    We have reached the front of my grandparents’ old house. The paint on the door is peeling off leaving a layer of rust. Papà struggles to open the door, he has to push it with his foot. The house is just as I remembered it. There’s a dog too.
    “You don’t know him. His name is Hanky.”
    He’s a handsome sheepdog with a leonine mane and big expressive eyes. “Hanky, this is Jimmy” Hanky comes closer. I brush his head with my hand. “I got him from the dog’s home, they wanted to put him down.”
    “You did the right thing.”
    “He is my right-hand man with the horses,” says Papà . Hanky follows us into the living room.
    “Shall we eat something?” Papà asks. I nod.
    “The dog’s hungry too,” he says.
    “Go and get some water.”
    Grabbing a large saucepan, I go into the garden. The water pump is next to the horses’ barn. I take a peek inside. One is eating something and doesn’t seem to have noticed me. The others are standing still. Just one is a little smaller. I go back. Papà has filled two glasses with vodka. I light the little gas ring.
    “I saw the horses,” I say.
    “Did you see the criollo?”
    “Papà, I don’t know anything about horses.”
    And he sighs.
    “Ah, as far as that goes, neither do I,” he says, “I’ve never understood anything. I thought maybe you could tell me which one it is.” Papà laughs and drains his glass. Hanky is watching him intently.
    “Which one is the criollo?”
    “It’s the brown one with the black mane. The biggest one. What were they doing?”
    “Nothing, they were just standing still. One of them was eating.”
    “Do me a favour would you, open that cupboard door.”
    Papà gets up, takes a packet and pours it into the pan I brought the water in. Hanky barks. I go to the table and drain my glass of vodka. Papà says to follow him. We go out. There are bales of hay leaning against the back of the barn and Papà sticks the hay fork into one and lifts. His back bends, I can see the line of his spine. I try to lift a bale of hay with my hands. It’s bulky but I manage. Hanky follows us without making a sound. I wonder why the horses prefer to stay in the shadowy interior of the barn rather than going out into the garden. Papà puts the hay down in front of one of the horses that were standing still. The horse that was eating neighs and almost rears. Hanky barks. I go to Papà .

    “Where will I put this?”
    “Leave it there.”
    The smallest horse comes towards me. He reaches my shoulder. I gather up a handful of hay and hold it out to him. He bares his gums and opens his mouth. His breath is really warm. He chews noisily, opening his mouth in an exaggerated way. Papà heaves himself up.
    The one that must be the criollo is looking at me. His muzzle twitches.
    “Are you hungry too?” Papà asks me.
    The packet he emptied into the pan is an oat, spelt, and chickpea soup. He pours a ladleful into his plate, one into mine, and one into Hanky’s bowl. I open the bottle of wine. The soup is insipid but hot, and that’s enough. We eat in silence. Papà has already finished when I’m only halfway through, and he fills his glass.

    “So how’s it going with you?”
    I answer, “I don’t know,” which seems the most honest answer I can give.
    “You start.” I say.
    That sigh, again. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I only know I like horses. No other reason. Y’know, I thought I might come to understand some things. I researched breeds, their feed, how to behave around them. And, perhaps that I would become a better person. Then I discovered I can’t understand them. I can’t teach them anything either.”
    I fill my glass. The afternoon outside is already making room for darkness. I go to the window. Hanky barks. He’s finished his soup.
    “We are just lonely beasts, like the horses, and whoever doesn’t admit it is only being unfair to themselves. There are people who become passionate about something, people who keep warm, who eat, who drink, who work, and people who think about money. They’re all lonely beasts, too, hunting for anything to relieve their solitude.”
    The front door creaks.
    “Did you leave it open?” He asks.
    I go out to check. The wheel of a bicycle is coming across the doorstep. It’s Amos. He rests the bicycle against the wall. His fingers are thick and rough and when he shakes my hand, he almost crushes it.
    “Hi, Gianmarco. How are you?”
    “Well,” I answer, “and you? You’re looking well.”
    “Ahh, working as hard as a mule.”
    Amos is still shaking my hand.
    “Is your father here?”
    I nod. “He’s inside.”
    He shakes his head gently.
    “Your old man should be taking it easy,” he says. “Did they tell you that the other day we couldn’t find him? It’s not the first time either. I was out for two hours looking for him. Luckily I saw him before it got dark. He has blackouts, loses his balance, y’know.”
    Hanky runs out barking. I calm him, stroking his head. “I’ve brought his medicine,” Amos says.
    Amos and I go into the living room but Papà isn’t there. “Now where’s he got to?”
    “I’ll give him his medicine, Amos.”
    “Gianmarco,” he says, “your sister is coming to dinner tonight. It would be nice if you and your father…”
    “Of course, we’ll be home in about an hour.”
    Nice for who, I wonder. I say goodbye to Amos as I accompany him out, then I go to the horses. Papà is standing there stock-still, a concentrated expression on his face. I show him his medicine. He grimaces slightly.
    “Is Linda coming?”
    “Yes.” Papà takes a tablet and flings it far away from him. For a moment I’m tempted to tell him off, then I decide to leave it be.

    When we get home Ricky’s car is already parked outside in the street. On our way there Papà didn’t say a word. I try to clear my mind as much as possible. An early evening frost is tickling the edges of the ditch. You can see the prints of Ricky’s BMW tyres on the road. It will be like Christmas dinner, I think as I ring Zia’s doorbell.
    “Gianmarco, is that you?” she asks.
    The door clicks as we go through. Linda appears at the front door. She’s wearing a checkered apron, but her high heels betray her.
    “Jimmy, Dad, where have you been?” By the expression on her face anyone would think Papà and I are about to be washed away by a river in flood, without any chance of resisting. Actually, I don’t get a chance to reply before she yells at her kid and turns back to the stove. Papà says hello, Linda tells him off for something, then kisses him on the cheek, while Zia mutters something under her breath, as if she’s addressing God. It’s a script they always follow. My nephew is playing on his iPad. Linda scolds him because he hasn’t said hello to grandpa or his uncle. He says hello without lifting his gaze. It’s far too hot in the kitchen. The male component of the family is missing from the roster, they must have gone together to check out a water leak in the garage or something. On these occasions I am a kid, and have been for years now, I’ll probably never be a man and Papà has regressed to an infantile state, a few steps below mine. Linda is so upright and maternal with us poor orphans.
    “Guys, it’s ready,” she yells, “c’mon Tommaso, you too!” she says trying to shake my nephew from his listlessness.
    “Jimmy, you’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says.
    “I’ve been doing a lot of sport,” I answer.
    “You should strengthen your shoulders a bit … Papà , what are you doing?” Papà is leaving.
    Zia who when Linda is here has no choice but to retreat to a supporting role, manages to grab him by the arm.
    “Pietro, where do you think you’re going?” she says. Linda unties her apron. But Papà can’t get out because in the meantime the men arrive. Ricky is wearing a pair of red trainers.
    “Hello,” he says and shakes my hand. He picks up my nephew and brings him to the table. Then he greets Papà affectionately. He calls him Papà. A stupid laugh escapes me. Linda notices and asks me if I can give her a hand in the kitchen.
    “Jimmy, Ricky loves dad. Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?”
    My blood runs cold.
    “Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?” She doesn’t have the least idea that she’s a bit of a bitch. I don’t understand how she doesn’t. Linda doesn’t even consider that being a bitch is part of her. It’s incredible. There’s no sense in answering her. She’s won. I follow her and we sit at the table. Amos is already sitting down and eating bread sticks.
    Papà’s place is at the head of the table. The veins on his temples are standing out.
    “What a nice party,” he says.
    Zia brings two serving trays of raw meat and flakes of Parmesan to the table. Tommaso has started playing with his tablet again and says raw meat tastes of iron and he doesn’t like it. Linda is talking about the gym. Ricky, apart from having the hint of a tan and the gaze of an accomplished man, every now and then shows small signs of crumbling. He blinks and has minute nervous tics. I think, day after day, he’s realising he has made some terrible mistake, though he doesn’t remember what. Zia is proud of Linda and the little boy, who is decidedly too quiet for a five year old. Amos’ conversation varies from politics to work, from young people to football. All I can do is listen in silence. Every now and then I nod. Linda is talking about investments. She says that she and Ricky are thinking of expanding. Then the conversation turns to me. Linda asks me if I’m working. Amos says something about young people. Zia says I never get in touch. Ricky says everything is going well, next year they’re going to open another gym. Linda is talking about the difficulties of finding reliable employees. Then she asks me again if I’m working.
    I have a project, I tell her, and leave it at that. Amos says young people have to be encouraged. Zia is faded in the background, but she seems to be reassured by seeing the situation is under control. Papà eats, bent over his plate. Amos pours a glass of wine for Papà even though Zia seems against it. Papà is taking very small bites. Then Zia brings in the agnolotti. Linda says they are exquisite. Ricky compliments Zia. Amos tries to say something to the kid, but nothing doing. I’m thinking about the horses. Linda says we have to talk. She starts saying we all love Papà and we’re all interested in his well-being. Papà looks at me.
    “So we thought he needs to be in a place where someone can look after him. One of our clients, a good person, has a villa in the hills. It’s not a retirement home, it’s a kind of residence, with a bar, televisions in the rooms, and a restaurant. We can go and visit him whenever we want, and he can walk in the garden which is huge because it used to be one of the Savoia hunting lodges.” There we go.
    “Linda,” I say, “I know you love him, but I have to remind you that as well as being your father and my father he’s also a person, with his own will.”
    “Jimmy,” her voice rises, “I am trying to help him. Papà needs …”
    “Tell him, tell him what he needs. He is here, tell him to his face…”
    “Jimmy stop using that tone of voice!” says Zia.
    “Papà, as you’re not stupid, you must have understood what your daughter is saying …”
    Papà is chewing slowly.
    “I don’t know why you always have to behave like a child …” says Linda.
    “Come here Tommaso,” says Ricky. The kid snorts and asks if he can take his tablet. Ricky says ‘no’ sternly, and they leave the room together. Amos pours himself another glass, waiting for the right moment to add his two cents.
    I take a breath.
    “Linda, I promise I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to shatter your illusions, and you’re my sister, but I have to tell you. Linda, you’re some bitch.” Zia jumps to her feet and tells me I should be ashamed of myself. It’s a pity Ricky isn’t here, I’d love to see him struggling to repress his desire to thump me.
    “Guys, we’re not here to argue …” says Amos.
    “Jimmy,” says Papà , “your sister is right.”
    “Thank you Papà ,” says Linda.
    “Papà …”
    “No, Jimmy, she’s right.”
    “What about the horses?”
    “Ricky wants to renovate our grandparents’ house,” says Linda, regaining her normal tone of voice, “he says a house with all that space is wasted on housing four horses. He wants to buy some more and open a riding stables…”
    “So?”
    Ricky comes back with the kid. He sits down. It looks like they’d planned this move. The kid picks up the tablet again.
    “Jimmy, let’s talk, man to man,” he says, “once your grandparents’ house has been fixed up it will be half ours and half yours. There will be two apartments with gardens.”
    “And you don’t have to worry about contributing anything for the residence,” Linda adds.
    I look at Papà. He motions me to come closer.
    “Come with me Jimmy, let’s go outside for a bit.”
    It was as if this moment had been in the air.
    “Papà , I don’t understand …”
    “It’s obvious Jimmy, you couldn’t possibly understand.”
    “Don’t you realise they’re treating you like a child?”
    “Won’t you realise maybe I’m ok with that?”
    “[…] What about the horses?”
    “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say they’re mine. They’re free animals.”
    “Papà, do you really want to go to a … residence for the elderly?”
    “Perhaps one day it will happen to you too, and you’ll think of me. Now, I know theses are stupid words but you have to listen carefully. Your grandparents’ house doesn’t belong to the family, it’s mine, and until I die it will stay mine. In my will I’ve stated that that house will be yours, and don’t you dare let Linda and her husband, or your aunt or Amos in. Nobody must go in there, only you. Amos will have Hanky, and I’ve already given the horses away, they’re coming to get them next week.”
    I feel terribly lonely. I light a cigarette and blow out an exaggerated mouthful of smoke.
    “So you knew about everything?”
    “Of course.”
    “And you’re alright with it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s time to experience new things … c’mon, let’s go back in.”
    At the table the situation has calmed down. Amos is telling them about when he goes wild boar hunting. Zia has brought the roast to the centre of the table.
    “Linda,” asks Papà , “when are you taking me to the residence?”
    “Whenever you want Papà .”
    “Tomorrow morning then.”
    “Oh, Pietro!” says Zia, “you’re always exaggerating.”
    Linda’s face lights up and she looks at me.
    “Well done, Papà ,” she says, “then you can take it easy, and enjoy life in peace. And when you want we can come and get you and spend some time together. Isn’t that right, Tommy?”
    “Yeah,” says the kid listlessly. Amos starts talking about something else. I take a slice of roast, but I’m not hungry. I try to listen to what Amos is saying, but his words flow unendingly and I can’t make myself interested in his story. Linda is glowing. Her verve is irrepressible. She tells Zia she’s going to make coffee and asks me if I want to go in and give her a hand. I get up from the table.
    “Jimmy, thank you. I knew I could count on you”, she puts her arms around me but let go immediately. “It’s the best thing for us all,” she says. “Not least because we can’t leave this burden for Zia to carry.”
    I feel terribly lonely again. I let her hug me, but don’t return the gesture. I really can’t show her the same affection she seems to feel for me. I get the six-cup coffee pot ready and she does the four-cup one.
    “We were thinking of taking Papà to the residence at the end of the month. What are you doing over the next few days?”
    “I want to spend some time here with Papà .”
    “Y’know what, I was worried. I thought it was going to be difficult for you.”
    “You’re right, it is.”
    “You’ve always had a special bond with Papà … I’ve never managed to be as close to him as you are.”
    “Linda, if Papà wants to go to a retirement home, it means he’ll go to a retirement home.”
    “Oh, thank you Jimmy …” She hugs me again. “And please, if you need anything you only have to ask. For your project too, all right?”
    “Yes.” The coffee is rising simultaneously in both pots. Linda turns off the gas and pours the coffee into cups. I give her a hand taking the tray to the table. The kid has turned the tablet off and is telling his dad what presents he wants for his birthday. Ricky rests a hand on his son’s head. Amos pours a drop of grappa into his coffee. He asks me if I want some too. I say yes. I think about the photo of Papà riding. I watch him fiddling with his coffee cup. It all seems still, immobile, crystallised. It’s as if time is filling up with tiny, innocuous, totally ordinary gestures, as if everything is already a memory, many years old.

    Translated by Sally McCorry A special thanks to Kevin Hagerty and Tom Hall

  • Poem: Lovely Dead

    Lovely Dead

    If I were to let you go
    who would I show this garden to;
    who would be there to tell me ‘no’
    it’s not enough to say it’s blue

    in June, when echiums greet the bees
    (just as later they give finches seeds)
    and turns yellow in summer sun,
    burns to red with heleniums

    in autumn. I leave their raw
    shaggy stems all through winter now —
    food and shelter for birds and mice,
    hope and remembering too — but more
    for the texture they bring to cold light;
    though to say it’s not enough, I know.

  • Poem: ‘Where beckons the quiver…?’

    _        Where beckons the quiver…?

    Are there no spirits moving in the air
    _                       ruling the region between earth and sky ?

    And do you shine from the sky
    _                       goddess in decay,
    _                                   as respite from the spit of day ?

    For this world could not hold you ?

    Whose arm twitches with your pulse,
    _                       as your ghost drifts through the lining
    _                                   of the throat ?

    Whose voice crackles as it shouts,
    _                       Whose chest wheezes like a blade of grass,
    _                                   split for air to move through ?

    Were they torn by tongues of anguish,
    _                       the remnants of your melody,
    _                                   stretching a voice into a cry
    _                                   thwarting the borders of a heart ?

    You leave behind that crumpled piece of paper,
    _                       Not the wrinkles of your face.
    If language should leave you,
    _                       alone to the touch,
    where beckons the quiver of
    _                       ageless almighty ?

    Each one of us a teardrop,
    _                       enters the world’s heart chamber
    _                       and congeals before your eyes?

    Do you kiss the half-flown ivory tongues
    _                       that swipe across the many lips ?
    And do the stars cluster,
    _                       as though gulls in search of comfort,
    _                       their screams of spirals broken,
    _                       their feathers like stilled flames ?
    And were eternal chasms or a breath
    _                       to fill the shells
    _                       of their lost melodies ?


    Paul Downes’ latest work     Towards a Concentric Spatial Psychology for Social and Emotional Education Beyond the Interlocking Spatial Pillars of Modernism (2024) is an open access book.

    Feature Image: The Flammarion engraving, c.1888.

  • Poem: ‘A Chapter in the War’

    A Chapter in the War
    Appian, 95-165 CE

    Under orders from Octavian, the hardened captains – Pansa,
    Carfulenus – patrolled the narrow pass they had determined to defend,
    with the Martian legion and half a dozen cohorts in their train.

    Surrounded all about by mulling marshland, heavy bogs,
    eight miles south-east of Mutina, their suspicions
    as they carried on were roused on either side

    by movement from the rushes; softly here and there a shield
    or helmet seemed to glint, a fog of shining apparitions.
    Suddenly the Antonian praetorians appeared, in grim array.  

    Having nothing in the way of tactical advantages
    or spaces to maneuver, the men instructed new recruits
    to linger at the rear, lest they lose or hamper the attack.

    Then spreading through the swamp, the veterans
    unsheathed their blades and readied for the fray.
    The massacre was brutal – for these were brotherly

    antagonists, Roman known to Roman, lethally opposed.
    Worse by far than war itself, a savagery incarnate,
    is the rending of a nation from within, neighbour

    killing neighbour – the enmity unending. On this occasion,
    the Antonians resolved on rooting out the ones
    they called defectors, in the name of the republic;

    the Octavians believed themselves entitled to revenge
    for the calamities inflicted at Brundisium. Thus
    the armies clashed ferociously, in silence: because

    of their experience, the soldiers never raised a cry,
    knowing their assailants to be seasoned, unafraid.
    No sound was heard but metal in the mist, the guttural

    alacrities of flesh. Since the sodden ditches offered little hope
    of charging or retreat, the soldiery were locked as in a pit
    together, limb to limb, dealing death between them.

    When one fell downwards, blacking out, another instantly
    stepped up into the gap. None had any need of bidding
    or encouragement, for all became their own commanding

    officers in battle. They fought with the intensity
    and muscled grace of dancers, in a muggy April sun
    that never broke. The novices, obeying their instructions

    from the start, watched in wonder as the butchery continued,
    with everywhere an eerie quiet hovering, a shroud.
    Having gained the upper hand at last, the Antonians caroused

    along the avenue, relieved. But history is fickle as a breeze.
    When Hirtius had word of the catastrophe, from Mutina
    he led a squad of legionnaires in haste, and tracked

    the weary victors down the road. He killed them all,
    methodically reversing the result. Octavian was cheered
    by the intelligence. He slept, that night, as gently as a babe.

     

    Feature Image: Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century

     

  • Dog Years

    Then the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.” – Genesis 18:20-21

    They were an ancient and patient race. Sympathetic. Considered. Sarcastic.

    The first they knew of us were radio waves which pierced their silence like dilating klaxons. At first, they couldn’t fathom the meaning of those faded, tinny excretions. Their initial thought: a cosmic butt-dial of some distant world’s collective mental breakdown. After prolonged examination, the significance of the messages became clear and, even clearer, what they needed to do about them.

    It took time to get psychologically and technologically prepared. There were details to be drawn out. Matters to be pondered.

    Through a freak of physics I cannot explain, they reached Earth long before the messages which dispatched them to us. They were a little disappointed when they learned they would have to wait a while for Eurovision and the last season of Succession and for Dr. Pimple Popper but, as mentioned, they were a patient race and took some comfort in having arrived just in time to witness firsthand the legendary fall of Troy.

    It was to be their first encounter with humanity’s propensity for exaggeration.

    “This shithole?” one of them exclaimed on first sighting the mythical city of horses and discovering it to be a place of meagre towers and ramshackle fortifications, behind whose crumbling walls lay a sprawl of hovels.

    “Neither epic nor poetic,” someone remarked.

    “A packed lunch might be in order,” another cautioned, indicating the worrying proximity of food preparation to sanitation.

    They thought it best not to bust right in. They didn’t quite have the saying “First impressions…” but it was close enough. They brainstormed the best approach and decided to remain in stationary orbit over a different country for fifty years each, and to quietly observe (occasionally shop). They took our word that countries or political states were the best way to chunk the task up. Boy, did they come to regret that.

    They held position above us and watched carefully over years which became centuries and centuries which became millennia, waiting for the right moment.

    They picked up and discarded accents, nurtured short-lived loyalties in the manner of ardent telenovela devotees (which they would also eventually become) and squandered hope on numerous lost causes (including, eventually, many of the aforementioned telenovelas).

    Again and again, they were bemused by our ability to disremember, or to downright forget. They saw whole civilisations lost to memory: Atlantis, Arcadia, dusty old Troy. Again and again, they witnessed reality turned inside-out and history stitched from the torn lining.

    “Do these people write anything down?” they frequently wondered.

    They never failed to be impressed by our ability to bend the truth, to sweep inconvenience beneath the most conveniently located carpet and to normalise the most extraordinary fuck ups.

    Many of our greatest achievements, they viewed with distrust or scorn. Despite having had a ringside seat for the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal, they could only view these projects the way we might a child’s meandering sandcastles: estates driven by ego rather than necessity.

    “Hanging, my arse,” one concluded acidly.

    “Oooh,” another cooed, “you can see it from all the way up here.”

    “Not at all a massive waste of bricks,” someone deadpanned.

    They were stationed over Britain during the industrial revolution and watched with contained alarm as six million tonnes of coal was ripped from the ground each day to feed mankind’s growing appetite for boiling water.

    “You can see why they might think this is a good idea,” one noted.

    “What could go wrong?” another sighed.

    They saw Hitler coming from miles away. Literally.

    “The facial hair doesn’t exactly scream stability,” one observed.

    They were not overly fond of wars or revolutions. Not that they were squeamish; it just meant a lot of re-work. All that coming apart, then coming back together, resulted in devilish admin. Political pacts and alliances meant more red tape. The Foedus Cassianum, Treaty of Versailles, the EU; each gave them pause but, in the end, they stuck to their guns and to fifty years per country.

    In this way, they’d covered sixty-four countries and had been over the sixty-fifth, Ireland, for about forty-five years when word came through.

    It was time.

    Mary and Dessie were given the assignment and they took a small craft down to the surface, coming in low over the Irish capital.

    “Should I engage the cloaking device?” Dessie asked.

    “Have you seen their air force?” Mary said.

    They landed on the grounds of the official residence of the President of Ireland but not before they’d made a spectacular pass over North Dublin.  A group of young men in loose-fitting leisurewear (embellished with the branding of a mid-table American basketball team none of them had ever seen play) briefly suspended their assault on two German tourists to allow their jaws tip wordlessly open as the silver craft banked overhead with a loud, satisfying whine.

    By the time they disembarked, a hurried cordon had been thrown around the craft, which Dessie had parked somewhat inelegantly between a waterless fountain and a stone bench on the large front lawn of the estate. A steady stream of curious citizens trespassed onto the parklands along the northern boundary, edging closer with each minute, as news of the visitors spread.

    A local news crew had been diverted from interviewing dog walkers about the amount of dog shit on surrounding pavements in the nearby Phoenix Park and now perched at the opening of the cordon, hand-combing windblown hair and assembling game-faces while allowing themselves full-contact daydreams about Sky News discovering them and the opportunity this might afford to invite Mister Feeney, their dictatorial news director, to stick his maggoty job sideways up his hole.

    The president, a short, ancient, scholarly man with a friendly face but accusatory eyes which lurked beneath scurrying eyebrows, tarried on the edge of the lawn, torn between a sudden clench of self-preservation (spawned by vivid recollections of sensationalist Cold War films in which proxy commies in rubber alien outfits rampaged through cities with ray guns) and a bone-deep drive to fulfill his solemn duty as welcomer-in-chief. With a stoicism born of a hundred rugby international red-carpet greetings he came down on the side of duty.

    The president was flanked by his wife, the first lady, and his aide-de-camp, a military woman with a serious, square face, thick angry eyebrows and a ceremonial sword which she stroked mercilessly.

    The president’s wife, a sturdy, astute Cork woman, piloted her husband with the merest contact to his elbow, weaving a delicate path through growing numbers of police, soldiers and officials as a long liquidy gangplank telescoped out from the silver craft and the two occupants made their way slowly and carefully down the ramp towards them.

    The visitors appeared to be a regular man and a woman in their late twenties, dressed in what the president would have called “casual attire” if he hadn’t thought it might earn a tired eye-roll from his wife. The president’s wife recognized the female visitor’s blouse as one she’d considered for her own daughter’s birthday during a shopping trip on Grafton Street a few weeks earlier.

    “Céad míle fáilte,” the president said, bowing somewhat pompously as the two lithe, youthful-looking figures reached them.

    “Go raibh míle maith agat,” Mary answered in stumbling Leaving Cert Irish.

    Dessie smiled and whispered something to Mary but she cut him off with a silent elbow to the ribs.

    “You speak our native language?” the president asked, somewhat confused but permitting his face to emit only professional delight.

    “Just at an Irish level,” Mary answered with an impertinent wink.

    “Excuse me?” the president said.

    “That was a joke,” Mary said. “I meant badly. Like everyone else here.”

    “Ah, right,” the president said with a nervous laugh. He was a proud Gaeilgeoir but wasn’t sure his beloved cultural heritage warranted a full-blown inter-galactic diplomatic incident so he pumped a curious, jolly smile into his face and said, “Very good. I’m glad to see you share our…” he hesitated, “Earthling sense of humour.”

    The visitors exchanged a brief smirk and the president’s wife observed a florid diffusion in her husband’s cheeks.

    “Well,” Mary said, “You might say we are distant kin of yours.”

    “Might you,” the aide-de-camp said, directing an incredulous look towards the president who was too busy casting his hands in small, delighted circles to notice. His wife tightened her smile patiently. She loved her husband but this was his second seven-year term and sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t married into an intricately stitched straight jacket.

    Timid introductions were made. The president’s wife noted the visitors’ accents: the female’s an inner-city crumble, less frequently heard in recent years; the male’s a ringing specimen of the west Dublin twang; machiney and discordant.

    “I must say,” the president remarked excitedly, “I was expecting you to have more…exotic names.”

    “Those names are very exotic where we come from,” Mary said.

    “Ah, of course,” the president said, trying to recall some alien names from what little science fiction he’d seen or read but only coming up with “R2-D2”.

    “We like to adapt ourselves to local customs wherever we go,” Dessie explained. “We’re very…” he cast about for the right word, “adaptable.”

    Mary rolled her eyes and shrugged apologetically.

    “Those names were all the rage when we came to Ireland first, in the early 80s,” she said. “These days,” she offered a small shrug, “not so much.”

    “The 1980s?” the president’s wife exclaimed. “You’ve been observing humankind since then?”

    “Since long before then,” Mary said. “That was only when we came to this country to observe your people more closely.”

    The aide-de-camp fixed Mary with a baleful look.

    “I suppose,” she grumbled, “you’re the ones going around the place abducting innocent folks and subjecting the poor craters to cavity searches and mind probes and who-knows-what indignities.”

    “I can assure you,” Mary said, “we’ve no interest in abducting you and even less interest in your cavities.”

    “Must be someone else,” Dessie assured them.

    The first lady wafted the aide-de-camp’s remarks away with the back of a hand and gave Mary — what she hoped might be — a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

    “J’know, I can’t believe you’ve been here since the 80s,” she said. “Sure, you don’t look a day over twenty-five, dear.”

    Mary’s lips lingered in a smile.

    “Well, you should see the daily beauty regimen I have to go through to look like this.”

    When the introductions had been completed and small-talk indulged, the president suppressed thoughts of ray gun-toting aliens blowing his beautiful furniture to smithereens and gestured towards the Greek-style portico, saying, “Won’t you come inside?”

    The small group made their way past official seals, lithographs and stately pictures, acquiring more unsmiling security and glum secretarial staff as they moved further into the building. The aide-de-camp stroked the brass hilt of her sword urgently now as she entertained visions of alien necks careering against its blade and springing into the air like popped champagne corks. She tipped the silver scabbard forward and back in time to her metronomic step, like the implacable arm of a grandfather clock.

    When they were seated around the large conference table, food and drink was offered but Mary waved it away.

    “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said, “but we have something very important to speak to you about.”

    “We’re all ears, as the Americans say” the president said with a modest guffaw, his palms upturned inoffensively.

    “No doubt, the Americans will be along very soon,” Mary said with a bitter smile. “As will others. This matter affects everyone.” She unclasped her hands and spread them on the table and looked around the room. “Very well. To get right to the point, we are here to let you know that your time is come.”

    There was a collective gasp among the presidential party, security staff, dignitaries, secretaries and service staff.

    An unpretentious tea lady from the Northside of Dublin was in the process of filling the president’s cup. She looked up suddenly and said, “Ya bleedin’ wha’?”

    The misdirected teapot scalded the president’s hand and he released a shrill yelp.

    “Watch what you’re doing, Molly,” the president’s wife scolded as the president hurried the meat of his hand into his gob and the maid withdrew the pot, staring fixedly at Mary with her mouth tipped open.

    “What do you mean, our time is come?” the aide-de-camp prodded.

    “I’m sorry for putting it so crudely,” Mary said with a shrug. “Our leaders felt, given your history, the message might carry more weight if we used stark, biblical language. What I mean is: the human race is to be destroyed. In precisely seven days.”

    A new collective gasp surpassed the first in volume and participation.

    “Destroyed?” the president said removing his burnt hand and emitting a nervous purl of laughter. “This must be an elaborate joke. Why would you want to destroy the human race?”

    “To prevent a fate worse than death,” Mary said.

    “What fate could be worse than the death of billions of humans?” the president asked prodding his burnt hand delicately.

    “The fate which will happen if humans remain on their current path,” Mary said.

    “And what fate is that?” the president’s wife asked, wetting a napkin in a glass of water and dabbing blindly at the burn on her husband’s hand.

    “Untold suffering for humans and the total destruction of all life on this planet,” Mary said as Dessie provided an accompaniment of tight-lipped nodding.

    “That’s a bit vague,” the aide-de-camp said.

    “I doubt you’d enjoy us being more specific,” Dessie said with a wink.

    “How can you be so certain that this is our fate?” the president’s wife asked.

    “Because,” Mary said, “where we come from, this has already happened.”

    “Happened?” the president said, almost in a daze. “To whom has this happened?”

    Mary pointed at him and then allowed her finger to roam about the room,

    “To everyone here. To all of you. It was—will be —a global event.”

    “But that can’t be.” the president spluttered. “That’s simply incredible.”

    The aide-de-camp’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

    “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” she said.

    “You don’t,” Mary answered, “but whether you believe it or not will have little impact on whether it happens. What we are proposing is the only humane option available. Your destruction is happening one-way-or-another. I think you know this.” She looked around the table. “Deep down, you all know we speak the truth.”

    A few people among the wider staff allowed their faces to sink into devastation. Some stood rigid with anger. Most slumped in naked awe, unable to process what they had just heard.

    “Wait,” the president’s wife said. “Does that mean you’ve travelled back in time? Doesn’t that also mean you can go back in time again and change the course of history to avoid this disaster?”

    “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,” Mary said.

    Dessie nodded glumly.

    “Time is a tricky one,” he said, “and time travel a very tricky one. It’s not like your movies. Unpredictable as hell. For example, we’ve been here much longer than we’d intended to be.”

    “How long, exactly?” the aide-de-camp asked.

    Mary and Dessie exchanged a look and Mary nodded her consent.

    “Thirteen or fourteen thousand years,” Dessie said. “Give or take a few hundred years.”

    “Fourteen thousand years!” the aide-de-camp gasped. “For fuck’s sake. Why haven’t you warned us about this before now?”

    “We have tried in many ways,” Mary said, “but you appear to need to be on the brink of destruction before you pay a blind bit of attention to the reality sitting right under your noses.”

    A burst of static came from a red-faced man with a blonde crew cut and a white earpiece and he leaned into the president and whispered something which lifted him out of his seat.

    “POTUS?” the president said breathlessly and the red-faced man turned a shade redder as he nodded carefully.

    The president sped excitedly to the windows, as though the leader of the free world might suddenly spring from behind the emerald green curtains. He performed a rushed, unpersuasive chortle and pointed out the lights of various news helicopters as they dipped and clattered over the nearby parkland.

    “You’ve certainly got our attention now,” he said, turning to them, his face a mask of grim determination. “The world will listen. Humankind will change. I’m absolutely certain of it, given this second chance.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said with a curt shake of her head. “Your destruction is inevitable. This is just us giving you a chance to make peace with your end.”

    The group stared back at her in silence and disbelief and with the helpless anger of those who feel certain they have been cheated by fate.

    Mary looked at Dessie and they exchanged a silent nod.

    “Our leaders thought you might struggle to accept our message,” Mary said. “They felt a parable from your bible might be apt and may help to explain the severity of the situation you face: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; two ancient cities which brought destruction upon themselves through their own actions and inactions. I believe most of you will be familiar with that story?”

    “Of course,” the president said, “the Cities of the Plain in which God—”

    “Oh, shut up Maurice,” his wife scolded, “and let them speak.”

    “Thanks,” Mary said, “but, to be honest, I didn’t have much to add. We just wanted to establish the reference in your minds. We’re not big on unnecessary elaboration.”

    The president fidgeted nervously with his good hand. Like most Irish people of his generation, he was more than a little familiar with those passages of the bible. It was a tale which had scalded many a young mind, including his own.

    “But that story talked about terrible evil,” he said in an imploring tone. “Irredeemable evil. Surely that doesn’t apply in our case. Humanity has made some mistakes, I’ll grant you, but we have so much potential for good.”

    “Unfortunately,” Mary said firmly, “it is your potential for destruction which you seem to have fulfilled.”

    “That’s rather harsh,” the president said belligerently. “Humans have done incredible things. Music. Poetry. Literature—”

    Mary cut him off with a raised hand.

    “Yes, yes, incredible things, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re…” she hesitated, searching for the right words.

    Dessie nipped in.

    “A bag of fucking spanners.”

    “I was going to say terrifying procrastinators,” Mary said, “but that works too.” She turned to the president. “I’m afraid we are not philosophers or debaters. Our people are relatively plain-spoken and among them we are considered direct. We were chosen because it was felt we understood your culture best and might have a better chance of being listened to.”

    “What will happen in seven days?” the president’s wife asked, the simplicity of her question and the terror in her voice provoking a sudden silence in the room.

    “Don’t worry,” Mary said, “it’ll be very peaceful. You’ll barely know it’s happening. It will be as though you’re being swept away in a storm of sweet ecstasy.”

    “Jesus but don’t you make global euthanasia sound fierce comforting altogether?” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly.

    The president’s wife had been raised on the same terrifying Old Testament stories as her husband and struggled to contain images of fire and sulphur raining down on them but, in that moment, the biblical reference suddenly offered a chink of light. She held a single index finger aloft to register her thought.

    “In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said with something approaching a litigious tone, “didn’t God give the citizens a chance of redemption if his angels could find just fifty good people?”

    Dessie nudged Mary but she shook her head as she swished an outstretched index finger decisively before the first lady’s nose.

    “Oh no, no,” she admonished, “you’re not pulling that ‘fifty good men’ shite.”

    She indicated Dessie with a flick of her forehead, “Sure, this eejit would spare the lot of ye just to save Lionel Bloody Messi. No, no, no. We’re not going down that road.”

    Dessie shared a sympathetic frown.

    “It’s not like we’re happy about the situation,” he explained with a shrug. “We’ve become very attached to you and your ways. I mean, I’m only three seasons into Breaking Bad and my team just got a new manager. We might finally get somewhere.”

    “For Christ’s sake,” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly, “mankind’s fate is in the hands of fucking Man U fans and we all know they’d rather the world end than see them relegated.” She glared at Dessie, “Which they fucking will.”

    “Caroline!” the president scolded his aide-de-camp. “These people are still our guests.”

    “Sorry, sir,” the aide-de-camp said as she comforted herself with the molded end of her sword.

    “It’s okay,” Dessie said with a shrug. “She’s probably right about United facing the drop.”

    Mary waved her hands for calm.

    “I am sorry,” she said, “but this is the only way to avoid the terrible conditions which will occur if we don’t intervene. You have seven days. I’m afraid there isn’t much more to say. Of course, we’re happy to reiterate the same message to your television cameras.”

    “Do you think you could hold on a few hours?” the president said, looking nervously at his watch. “The American president is on his way.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said.

    The president’s wife looked around the room at the growing despair and confusion.

    She rose and held her hands out for silence, then faced Mary.

    “I believe you,” she said, with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I believe every word you’ve said. You’re right about us. We can’t seem to stop ourselves acting stupidly. To anyone sane, we must seem hell-bent on our own destruction.”

    Mary nodded quietly to Dessie who nodded back as the president’s wife continued.

    “But we deserve more than seven days to make peace with our end. If you are as straightforward and honest as you say, you’ll have to admit that’s fair.”

    Mary seemed to consider for a moment.

    “How long do you suggest we give you to make a good end?” she asked.

    Without hesitation, the president’s wife said, “A year.”

    The rest of the group exchanged questioning looks and the president’s wife cast an interrogating look back but no one seemed able or willing to provide a correction to her timeline.

    “A year?” Mary repeated and she looked at Dessie who bobbed his head in consideration.

    The president’s wife completed her scan of the room and nodded somberly but certainly.

    “Give us a year to make a good end,” she said.

    Mary rose.

    “We are not negotiators, nor are we empowered to make this decision, but I will take your request to those who are and we will provide an answer within twenty-four hours.”

    “How will we know if you’ve agreed?” the president’s wife asked.

    Mary gave an ironic smile.

    “We will give you a sign,” she said with a light chuckle. “If we agree to your proposal then you will see a red sky at sunset tomorrow evening.”

    “A red sky at night is a common occurrence this time of year,” the president said. “How could we be sure it was your signal?”

    Mary smiled again.

    “I doubt you will have seen a red sky like this one,” she said, “and I doubt a red sky everywhere is a common occurrence. There shouldn’t be any doubt.”

    They held their press conference. By this time, reporters from television stations across the world had gathered and the words of the visitors went out live around the globe.

    The American ambassador was keen to revisit the timelines. His team suggested detaining the visitors — by force, if necessary — until the matter could be thoroughly unpicked but this was politely rebuked by the Irish presidential staff and, with the cameras of the world’s press filming them, the small group made their way back through the crowd towards the visitors’ craft. As if by magic, the silver ramp extended from the ship and touched the grass in front of the party.

    The president’s wife hugged the visitors. Tears jeweled her eyes but she retained a determined look. She pressed Mary’s hands lightly in her own.

    “If we can change in this year, can disaster still be averted?”

    Mary looked at her with pity.

    “You have the means,” she said, “but it is unlikely that you will change. It’s better you make your peace with it. Whatever happens, you will not see us again so I’ll say goodbye now.”

    “All the best,” Dessie said and he pumped the president’s limp arm.

    The visitors waved once and walked up the gangplank through a salvo of camera flashes as the beams from overhead helicopters sliced the thickening gloom as though portioning the very air above them.

    The silver ramp disappeared into the craft and a low drone built as the ship slowly rose into the air above them and spun in a light smooth manner that could not be confused with any human vehicle. The disk bobbled in the air with a fluttering ethereality before surging suddenly into the sky and vanishing in the dark thunderheads which had formed above.

    Every word that had been spoken was reported and analysed in minute detail in the hours and days that followed.

    The American president, along with other world leaders, arrived in Ireland soon afterwards and an emergency summit of countries was hastily convened. The general consensus was that the Irish officials had handled the situation terribly. The Americans, in particular, castigated their hosts for the meek surrender of a one-year extension.

    “Fucking amateurs!” their officials lamented. “The opening pitch should have been ten years minimum. And how the hell did nobody mention money?”

    “It wasn’t that type of discussion,” one Irish official protested.

    “It’s always that type of discussion,” her American counterpart replied.

    But, for all the debate and self-important statements, all watched nervously as the sun set the following evening and crimson streaks filled the sky across the world, as though the sun were a gigantic blob of paint wiped across the firmament by a huge inestimable hand.

    Theologians and scholars scrutinised the visitors’ reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Much focus was given to the use of that story rather than — what many felt would have been — the more fitting tale of the great flood and Noah’s Ark. It was cogently argued by some parties that the visitors had chosen very carefully in order to send a clear message for humanity to get away as fast as possible. Noah, they argued, had taken his time, constructing a vessel enormous enough to contain samples of every animal as well as humanity so that the world could be rebuilt. In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, only Lott and his immediate family were evacuated and this was done with great haste and at the last possible second.

    Despite this, several Ark-like projects were initiated by tech billionaires with the goal of saving mankind, or more specifically, themselves, along with those tiny portions of mankind which might prove useful to a tech billionaire fleeing a doomed planet. Each contemplated the long hibernation necessary to reach distant, uninhabitable rocks with minimal potential for life and all considered the security of their person and their holdings during such a hibernation. Very little consideration was given to more practical concerns or to the fate of those who had no recourse to a tech billionaire. Nor did any of them attempt to save any other species. The visitors had been ambiguous about the prospects for other creatures and this had established a moral vacuum on the matter into which mankind poured their apathy.

    The concept of dog years took hold with many people. This was the idea that one could minimize sleep and use each second of each day more productively to eke out more value from the limited time we had. As with all human undertakings, it was carried out obsessively and profitably. Dog years became a huge industry with plans, training courses, gurus, TV shows and all manner of proselytising. To all intents and purposes, it became a new religion.

    Religions themselves — that is, the more established ones — felt strongly vindicated by these events. Priests and proponents relished the opportunity to say “I told you so” on a global scale but it was something of a pyrrhic victory. Imminent apocalypse had always been more useful when it was less imminent.

    Some efforts were made to change mankind’s path but these remained fragmented and unpopular. Again, the visitors were blamed for being too vague about what needed to change and many governments argued that the lack of specificity was proof that climate change, rampant consumerism or other obvious ills had never been the issue. More coordinated effort was put into the construction of sophisticated weaponry to enable humans to turn the tables on the visitors when they — so to speak — attempted to call time on us. Air forces and militaries spent huge quantities of time, money and effort scanning the skies above and launching physical and electronic attacks at sections of the atmosphere suspected of harboring enemy spacecraft. They were supported in this by a small residue of tech billionaires; those not busy planning their escape from the planet or who hadn’t already decamped to New Zealand in the misbegotten notion that changing their zip code and getting a new passport might spare them. These various maneuvers must have recalled for the visitors that legendary event — which they had witnessed first-hand — of Emperor Caligula’s troops futilely beating back the waves of the English Channel with their swords.

    Governments sent communications heavenward demanding more time or threatening legal action or sharing fudged statistics demonstrating mankind’s steady progress towards net zero, reforestation, world peace or any other targets they felt might sway the visitors. No reply was forthcoming and, as the year progressed, these upward communications became more desperate and self-aggrandising.

    For the majority of people in the world, however, surprisingly little changed. A year was an impossible horizon for those who did not know where their next sip of water would come from or when they might have their next mouthful of food. Also, for those who wondered when they might feel the next sudden kick through a thin, wet sleeping bag, the next rape, the next beating, the next honour killing. For these people, life continued as it was before. For these people, the end of the world was just another unaffordable luxury.

    Of course, the president’s wife was widely vilified for her role in events. Numerous conspiracy theories circulated online and in the pages of sensational publications, accusing her of having been in league with the visitors from the beginning. She was globally decried as a double-agent who had sold out humanity to save herself and her family.

    The president’s wife cared little for these lies. With her husband, she retired from public life. Their daughter made the bold decision to have a baby with her partner and it was as if the daughter’s body understood the great need for haste, because she became pregnant at the first attempt and, although her son was born two weeks premature, he was pink and healthy and went home the very next day.

    They named the baby Cervantes after the author of his mother’s favourite book, and the president’s wife, along with her husband, moved in with her daughter.

    Apart from his initial punctuality, baby Cervantes did not conform to the script demanded by the limited timescales. By day he was sweet and cherubic but, as the sunlight waned, he transformed into a despot and a sadist. All household members were called into action to walk, rock and coo the tiny screaming dictator into an unattainable sleep. They no longer spoke of dates or calendars anymore and, in their own exhausted way, found the dog years others craved.

    Sometimes, when the president’s wife saw her daughter with Cervantes, she wondered if they would all have been better off if she’d not asked for the extension, if it might have been easier to accept a single week to make their peace with everything, but she quickly dismissed these thoughts and joined her daughter and together they smiled and cooed at the child and spoke of a future that would never be. As all people must.

    Feature Image: Mark Bryan, Prime Directives.

  • A Grand Lady Must be a Hundred Years Old

    I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942, the place, Staraya Russa.

    But Staraya Russa is not the way to begin this story; it belongs in the second part of the middle, closer to the end.

    The beginning was in Moscow, a few years before the October Revolution, yet I won’t begin this story in Moscow either. I’ll begin it in Riga, Latvia, with my grandfather Stephan taking my seven-year-old father to Old Town Riga. My young father was happy because he knew they would go to a stamp store after his father’s grown-up business appointments. My seven-year-old father loved nothing more than looking at stamps and nudging his father, “Look at this one!” or “This one, from England, is the most beautiful one ever!” There were also stamps from Russia, from the time before the Bolsheviks, and they were not at all old, as you might think, reading these lines in the 21st century, which is the only century in which you can read them. Stephan Kossman, my father’s father, didn’t like the Russian stamps, even though he had lived in the center of Russia’s capital for years, which was quite unusual for a Jew since in Czarist Russia, Jews were not allowed to live in the capital. My grandfather Stephan was a merchant of the First Guild, which was why he and his family could live in Moscow, in the very center of it, on Pervaya Meshchanskaya Street, in a ten-room apartment, which my young father remembered very well, no matter that he was only two and a half years old when, in February 1918, they had fled in a hurry, leaving everything behind, and made their way to Riga in a cattle train, commonly known as teplushka, which was not at all the way his parents used to travel, as his mother was an aristocratic lady who read Heine every night before bedtime; who dressed like a German countess, in beautiful floor-length dresses and elaborate hats, and treated her servants with that special gentleness, a sign of a very well-brought-up lady. They had three live-in servants in their Moscow apartment: his mother’s maid, a governess, and a cook. Sometimes his mother mentioned a fourth one – a maître d—but my father did not remember him, and he told us only of the ones he could remember himself. In London, where Stephan, my grandfather, lived before his marriage, with his father Leontii, his mother Rebeka, and his seven brothers and sisters, the number of servants must have been greater, but, as I said, my father told us only things he had remembered and seen with his own eyes.

    “Papa!” my seven-year-old father would say, pointing at Russian stamps from “that time,” as he called the time before the revolution when his family had still lived in Moscow, “Please Papa!” But when Papa said no, he seemed to become hard of hearing and, at the same time, very kind, as though by refusing, he was becoming aware of a debt he owed his son, and then he would buy all the new stamps in the store, the ones that came the week before, since their last visit. But he wouldn’t buy the Russian stamps for his son. “Why not the Russian stamps?” my seven-year-old father whined on their way out of the stamp store.  “Because … you know, Lyonia, if Mama sees them, she might become upset. She has memories of …” His voice trailed off.

    My seven-year-old father knew why his mother might become upset looking at the Russian stamps.

    ***

    My father’s sister Nora, who was just five years older than him, liked to pretend that he was just a little boy and that she was a grand lady.

    “Some grand lady! A grand lady must be a hundred years old,” my father (who was this little boy) would say to her, “Not seven!”

    She laughed and told him that he didn’t know a thing. She said almost no one lived to be a hundred. “You can be a grand lady at twenty, fifteen, or seven; all it takes is having enough of the grand-lady material inside yourself.” And she had it, she said, and he didn’t because he was just a little boy. “You’ll never be a grand lady,” she said.

    The little boy who someday would be my father countered, “Who wants to be a lady anyway?” He would be a grand lord instead of a lady because lords were in charge of things, and ladies weren’t.

    She said again that he was just a silly two-and-a-half-year-old little boy and didn’t even have a governess. “Our governess is just for me,” she said. She went on and on like this, teasing him and saying things she knew he didn’t want to hear like French was only for girls, and that’s why Mademoiselle gave French lessons only to her, not to him.

    He wanted to say: Mademoiselle teaches you French not because you’re a girl but because you’re older! But as soon as he opened his mouth to say this, he stopped his tongue and said to himself: don’t say this to your sister, or she will win, and you don’t want her to win, do you? You don’t want her to say that you admit you’re just a little boy, that you’re only two-and-a-half.

    So, he bit his tongue and didn’t say anything. Sure, he could say all sorts of things to her, for example, that he may be only two and a half, but someday he would be a journalist! But then she’d say, “No one becomes a journalist at two and a half!” And then he would say, “And what do you know, you’re just a little girl yourself! Uncle Nikolay promised to take me to the scary places he wrote about! And Uncle Nikolay is a real journalist! He says he might go to jail for that! He says in our country, they put only real journalists in jail, not just anyone! Only if you write the truth! He says that going to jail for journalism is like a batch of honor in our country! That’s what Uncle Nikolay says, and he can’t be wrong!”

    His sister would laugh at him. “A badge of honor, not a ‘batch,’” she’d say, and that’s why the little boy who someday would be my father didn’t say anything about Uncle Nikolay this time.

    ***

    My father (who was still a child, remember?) admired Uncle Nikolay because he was a journalist and a traveler. Yet, he was not the only one in the family who admired Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist.  Uncle Zhenia also admires Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist.  Although both Uncle Zhenia and my father looked up to Nikolay for being a journalist, there was a big difference between the two, my father and Uncle Zhenia, simply because Uncle Zhenia was Uncle Nikolay’s brother. Besides, Zhenia was an adult, and my father was a child – a little child, as all members of his loving family loved to repeat. And every time he said, “Don’t call me little! I’m not a child,” they just smiled and touched his head in that caring gesture they called “гладить,” which means “to stroke” in Russian, my father’s third native language. His second native language was Latvian, while his first language was German. He knew German better than Russian or Latvian because he spoke it with his mom. She was from Riga, where the educated class spoke German as their first language, and she wanted her children to know it; therefore, she spoke only German at home, and everyone understood her, even if they replied in Russian. Mademoiselle was the only exception: she was the only one who responded to his mom in French. The little boy (who someday would be my father) didn’t like French.  If you asked him why, he’d say only Nora, his older sister, got to learn French at home, that’s why. It’s not that he wanted to learn French, he just didn’t like being left out. He heard so often that he was just a little child and that, as such, he couldn’t understand grown-up things that sometimes he began to believe it, and to stop believing it, he made up stories in his mind about the future, about knowing what will happen someday. And the strange thing is that some of these stories came true, not because he had foreseen them but because they had already been written into the fabric of reality when they had occurred to him! For example, he knew that his Uncle Nikolay would emigrate to Austria and that he would write for a newspaper called Neue Freie Presse. He also knew that Uncle Nikolay’s first book would be titled “Uncle Joe,” the first book ever to tell the naïve Westerners that a monster ruled Russia. He knew this book would become famous in Austria and Germany in the period between the wars. Years later, as an adolescent living in independent Latvia, my father learned that poor Uncle Zhenia called his brother Nikolay from a Moscow phone booth and paid with his life for a few plain words he said to his brother. Like many phones in Moscow in those years, the phone had been bugged. Uncle Nikolay would continue writing for Neue Freie Presse, while poor Uncle Zhenia, who loved him so much, would be shot v zatylok – in the back of his head – at Lubianka prison, where tens of thousands were shot v zatylok in those years. As an adolescent in Riga, my father would think of his Uncle Zhenia, who was not a journalist, a writer, a politician, or an artist––just a regular guy, a bit of a drifter, a bit of a dreamer, and my adolescent father would ask myself why Uncle Zhenia was killed for a simple phone call to his brother Nikolay. Many more years would pass, and, as an adult living, once again, in Moscow, he would be given only silence to answer his old questions. The silence was useless to his intellect and to that deeper part of him which the nineteenth-century Russian poets called “soul,” which had fallen into а strange disuse by the middle of the twentieth century.

    ***

    As I said, my grandparents’ apartment in the center of Moscow had ten rooms, no matter that more than half a century later, my father remembered only three of them: his nursery, the dining room, and the kitchen, which could have accommodated some twenty people and was ruled by the family cook Dasha’s iron hand. That dining room had stained glass windows or, as everyone called them, vitrazhi––a French word with a plural Russian ending. My father (who was still a child, remember?) spent hours looking at them, not only during family meals but whenever he had nothing else to do, and as a very little boy, he had days with nothing to do. Vitrazhi were made of many colorful pieces of glass that formed a picture in which images shifted depending on where in the room he was sitting or standing when looking at them.  In the center of the main vitrazh, was a horse which changed into a wolf, but the wolf appeared only when my father was in a bad mood after hearing his parents talk about scary monsters they called “Bolsheviks” who would kill them if they stayed in Moscow. Most of the time, though, it was just a horse with muscular legs that were a different brown shade of than the rest of its body. On top of it sat a man. A horseman. Mother said he was St. George – Georgii Pobedonosets—and Mademoiselle Duzhar said, “Ce n’est pas Georges Pobedonoset. It’s a headless horseman who appears in times of trouble”. Mother said, “S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle, don’t scare the children! How can he be headless? There, I see his head. It’s where it’s supposed to be. On his shoulders.” Sometimes my father (who, as we pointed out earlier, was a child at the time) could see the horseman’s head, just like his mother did, where it was supposed to be, sometimes he couldn’t, like Mademoiselle Duzhar, who was so scared of the “Bolsheviks” that she acted like a kid herself, or like little Lyonia, my father, who saw scary things instead of beautiful horses and horsemen in the dining room vitrazhi. Poor Mademoiselle was so terrified of my grandparents’ plans to leave Russia that whenever she thought she was alone where no one could hear her, she talked to herself, which was how my father and his sister Nora learned that she would have nowhere to live and nothing to live on if they were to abandon her. She whispered furiously, “Who needs a French governess in this terrifying city now? Who will take me in? I can’t flee anywhere, where can I go? Où, où mon Dieu?” Many years later when my father came back to Moscow after the war, no one knew what happened to Mademoiselle Duzhar. She disappeared like so many others in that time and place.

    ***

    In this part of my story, my father is no longer a small child in his parents’ Moscow apartment on the eve of their escape from Russia in February 1918.  He is a young man in Riga, trying to talk his mother into escaping back to Russia before the Germans enter Riga. She said no, she would not leave Riga.  He knew she would say no, and she did, but he wanted to try one more time to talk her into escaping. She remembered too well fleeing from Moscow on that teplushka train and had ample reason to believe that the Bolsheviks would be after her, not only for being a “burzhuika” (a lady bourgeois) but, most importantly, for leaving Russia twenty-three years ago. That is why, in the summer of 1941, she opted to stay in Latvia. Like many others who chose to stay, she believed the Germans were a civilized nation, especially compared to the Bolsheviks, and she feared them less than the Soviets. My father thought he was the only one in real danger because his work as a reviewer of Riga’s Jewish Theater productions for Cīņa, a Communist Latvian newspaper, made him a prime target. He thought he had missed the right moment to leave because boarding a train to Russia was getting harder each day. The place was empty when he walked into the editorial offices of Cīņa with an article about a recent production at the Jewish Theater. He thought everyone had already escaped; why else would it be so empty?  Yet when he left the building, he saw a car parked in a side street, and there was the whole staff of Cīņa, about to depart. This was his last chance to leave Riga before the German army entered it, but he couldn’t leave without trying, one last time, to talk his mother into leaving. He went back into the building and made one last phone call. As before, he was expecting her to say no and wasn’t surprised when she did. If she could have seen the future, her no would have turned into a yes in a split second. But the terrible future would not reveal itself to her, and even if it did, she would not have believed it. He went back outside. Cīņa editors made room for him in the back seat, and as soon as he got in, they drove off, past buildings set on fire in anticipation of the Nazi takeover. They spent three days in that car, driving past Latvia’s forests and villages, crossing borders – first the Estonian border, then the Russian one. On July 1, 1941, the day the German army occupied Riga, they made it into Russia, abandoned the car, and boarded a train going east.

    There was not much to do on the train, and the editor-in-chief of Cīņa entertained his friends with antisemitic jokes. He had spent many years in jail for political activities where the daily fare of antisemitic jokes was simple entertainment. He should have known better, but he didn’t, and neither did his colleagues. My father didn’t miss an opportunity to part from them, and when the train stopped in Nizhny Novgorod, and everyone got a chance to stand on the platform for some ten minutes, he left the station and walked to the city. His Russian wasn’t so good yet, but he hoped it would suffice for simple communication. In Nizhny Novgorod, he developed a terrible headache, and since he didn’t know anyone there and had nowhere to go, he went to a police station. He just walked in and asked for help. A militsioner* promptly took him to a nearby hospital where he spent the next few days. He was discharged with two young men from Riga who, like him, had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. They didn’t have a lot of options, and after weighing what little they had, they decided they had more chances of finding a place to stay in a small town rather than in a big city like Nizhny Novgorod. They each went to a small town of his choosing, and my father went to Chkalovsk, a small town not far from Nizhny. Its small size was helpful: wherever he went, he was still in the center, so he had no trouble finding Ispolnitelnyi Komitet*. He was promptly given coupons for dinner at a local dining place and an address to get a bed for the night. Several families lived there, and an elderly couple took him in. My father ate from a common pot with his hosts. There were no plates; everyone put their spoons in the common pot. That common pot was my father’s first encounter with Russia. He stayed with the couple for two weeks until one fine day when he walked to the pier and boarded a ship to Astrakhan, an old Russian city on the Volga. He was young and wanted to see the world, even if the world was in the middle of the biggest war ever. Onboard the ship, he met a kind lady. They talked, and although he didn’t mention it, the lady understood that he had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. She spoke with a cook, and my father was given free meals in the ship’s dining hall. Another woman on the ship gave my father her address in Astrakhan. When he got off the ship in Astrakhan, he went to her place, hoping to get a place to sleep, but soon enough, he realized that the woman expected him to become her lover. He thanked her for offering him a place to sleep and returned to the pier to wait for a ship back to Nizhny Novgorod.

    In Nizhny Novgorod, he met the dean of the law department of the University of Riga, where he had studied before the war. Of course, the dean was no longer the dean but a refugee, like my father. They spoke German with each other, and the former dean showed my father where he lived and invited him to visit. That night my father slept in the park. At about 10 am, he decided to visit the dean. Just as he rang the dean’s bell, he was approached by a militsioner, told he was under arrest, and given a German newspaper. “Read it aloud!” said the militsioner. My father had no time to think this over and decide what to do.  If he read the German text aloud, the militsioner would think he was a German spy. Therefore, he said, “I can’t read this because I don’t know the language it is written in.” A couple of minutes later, he was free again.

    He spent the rest of the day searching for a place to stay, but he didn’t know the city and found nothing.  Finally, he asked two female passersby where he could find a room. They said, “Take streetcar 12 and get off at the last stop.” So he took streetcar #12 and got off at the last stop. It was a good neighborhood, with many new apartment buildings and trees. Nearby he saw a group of boys playing soccer. My father was wearing a Belgian jacket, and it was this Belgian jacket that got him in trouble. A Soviet citizen would not wear a Belgian jacket. A Soviet citizen would not even have a Belgian jacket! A Soviet citizen would denounce a capitalist jacket! Soon, he was surrounded by a crowd of some fifty people shouting, “Take the German spy to the police station!”  The crowd made way for a militsioner who told my father to follow them. When they arrived at the police headquarters, the militsioner said,
    “You must understand that telling us what brought you here is in your own interest.”
    My father said he had nothing to tell except that he was a Latvian refugee looking for a room and had been told to take streetcar #12.  But the militsioner didn’t believe him and demanded to see his documents. The only document my father had on him was a letter from the Latvian newspaper he had worked for. It was written in Latvian and had a hammer and sickle on top. To verify my father’s identity, the militsioner called the Evacuation Committee, where all refugees had to be registered on arrival, and gave my father’s name. It took them half an hour to find my father’s registration card. “Next time, be more careful,” the militsioner said. When my father left the police precinct, it was late evening, and he still had nowhere to stay for the night.

    Finally, he realized there was nothing for him in the Volga region and that the army was the only place where he would have a place to sleep. It was evening when he arrived at the Latvian division headquarters. He was given a uniform and sent to his unit. Soldiers slept in tents. My father found a tent where he would spend his first night.

    ***

    I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942; the place, Staraya Russa. My father was taken to a field hospital where a young surgeon from Moscow drilled a hole in his skull, without anesthesia, to extract a bullet that, if it had gone just one-tenth of a millimeter deeper, would have been fatal. After the bullet had been extracted, he was put on a train for wounded soldiers and taken to the Far East.

    My father’s only words were, “Am I going to die now, tovarish lieutenant?” “You’ll live, Kossman!” was the response of the lieutenant, who would be killed in battle two days later, together with most men of the Latvian division. (Only six survived).

    My father’s inadvertent savior was Gottlieb, a fellow soldier whose tobacco my father had borrowed for a minute. Several things happened simultaneously: Gottlieb was cleaning his gun; my father was returning Gottlieb’s tobacco; Gottlieb leaned on his gun to take back the tobacco from my father; Gottlieb’s gun fired; my father fell, bleeding from the head. That same day, Gottlieb was sent on a reconnaissance mission as punishment for endangering his comrade’s life through negligence. Sending a man on such a mission in Staraya Russa, a town in the Novgorod area, where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers fell between 1941 and 1943, and where even today, more than eighty years later, kids stumble upon skulls and rusting helmets in local forests, was an equivalent of a death sentence. It goes without saying that Gottlieb never returned from his mission. His name is absent from the Book of Memory, which lists the names of Latvian Jewish soldiers who perished in the war. (I was asked to translate these lists a few years ago here in New York). Perhaps Gottlieb’s body had never been found and is awaiting one of those nostalgic youngsters who join an annual search for soldiers’ remains. If found, the remains are reburied with Soviet-era pomp, usually without a name, because only the lucky few are discovered with their papers, still legible, on them.

    Wherever you are now, Private Gottlieb, greetings from the daughter of the man you saved with that stray bullet.

    NOTES

    *Militsioner – a Soviet policeman
    *Ispolnitelnyi Komitet – an executive committee, usually known as “ispolkom.” Every Soviet city and town had one.

    Feature Image: Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1944