Cassandra Voices

Tag: old

  • 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

  • Poem: Old Road Sign

    Old Road Sign

    The sere severed plywood sign painted a modest white
    was nailed once to spindly posts among the water oaks.
    Now by accident it dangles, peeling and warped.
    Underbrush too dense perhaps to let the fool board fall.
    The paint is blanched so that it fairly imitates the mists
    oft seen in bayous chockablock with oaks and black gums
    and strands of gray-green moss on cypress limbs,
    but five large letters—grim reminders of ill will—
    still glare as bright as the morning when the prophet shoved
    cheap pine posts down in the weedy grass and muck.
    Broad feverish strokes in a harsh shade of red,
    they’re there for homeless ducks and long-haul truckers—grunts,
    dogsbodies, quacks—to read and contemplate…REPEN.
    While stenciled on the far edge of the broken sign,
    the faded letters barely legible…JESU.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Fiction: Old Poetry

    It was because of Daniel that Mary Ann remembered Tom again; because she’d found out about Daniel’s latest affair. “Latest” was how she would position it to everyone now; one of an incalculable number—whether spaced apart or pressed together didn’t matter anymore because Mary Ann could only see a faceless mass of paramours sprawled one across the other like bacteria floating desultorily beneath a microscope.

    Daniel had played the only card he had left, complaining about how long she’d sat on the knowledge and how she’d chosen to confront him when he was about to catch a flight to visit his sick mother, probably to see her for the last time. He’d used the word “scheming” as he punched his arms into his jacket, and she’d laughed at his big baby anger. But, as he stepped his shoes on, he seemed to think his way into a movie scene and returned to place his hands on her shoulders and to tell her he was sorry, and that he loved her.

    “I’ll call you when I land,” he’d said.

    “I’ll put you onto the girls,” she’d replied, closing the door slowly but firmly.

    She’d heard his shoes crunch forlornly and forcibly on the gravel driveway and heard him grunt “Bitch!” before the clunk of a car door and the long electronic whine of his Uber leaving.

    Alone, she poured a glass of white wine and watched a reality TV show about affluent Londoners almost half her age where the weekly relationship melodrama depended on the word-of-mouth testimony and half-remembered memories of a hard-drinking and careless cast. Of course, she’d always accepted that the premise of the show would disintegrate if the cast members were allowed to sprint pitch side to confirm what had really happened, like a referee in a football match ruling out an offside call. In this way, she’d allowed herself to enjoy the participants’ antics without committing to the idiocy of the premise, but the sudden debilitation of her own love-life had brought the previously unappreciated reality element of the show into sharp relief and after twenty minutes of rumour-fueled enchantment followed by a series of cruel and common betrayals she switched the TV off and turned on her laptop.

    She mixed a loose gin and tonic and surfed old 90s music online; frantic, dancer-laden and game semi-or-fully-dubbed live performances from shows like Top of The Pops. Even though, in some cases, the recordings were almost thirty years old, the participants still glowed with the sheen and irrepressible beauty of youth.

    The Spice Girls daisy-chaining to “Wannabe” like a toolbelt of pop perfection, Britney rocking her wireless headset like a sexed-up call center operator. Saffron from Republica performing “Ready to Go” and attempting to gin up a listless audience by shrieking repeatedly into the front row.

    She didn’t recall Tom until she hit Suede’s Saturday night, the opening guitar riff and the light yearning of Brett Anderson’s falsetto melting into her ears.

    He’s not her usual type. She normally goes for clean-cut, blonde, smart-casual types but he’s slim and dark-featured, his black denim shirt spilling over his blue jeans, the top button undone, the dark gully of his tanned neck visible in the sticky light of Coppers nightclub.

    He’s moving rhythmically and casually towards her, passing in and out of view as he rolls through the crowd with an ease that makes everyone around him seem insubstantial. Everyone but her, because the dark, smiling eyes stay on her as he navigates the swaying press.

    Now, he is so close, she can see the tiny circles of light swaying in the darkness of his irises.

    As the song builds, he takes her hand in his and she feels the warm curl of his palm as their fingers interlock and the tiny overture of a nail travels along her spine and he moves into her space and she into his and they inhabit the music while their lips, at first tentatively, seek, then fiercely, pursue.

    The sun empties upon their naked bodies as they wake in her single bed, unknotting slowly and experimentally while they exchange amazed smiles, as though recipients of an unexpected gift.

    Even dressed, he takes five attempts to finally leave, returning each time to touch noses and kiss her and to remind her how beautiful she is and, each time, she replies with a bright, clerical “Why, thank you” which makes him grin until finally he is gone and she examines his name—his full name—and phone number carefully inscribed on a torn section of tissue box and she swings her naked legs about and laughs.

    For their first real date, they go to the cinema. The film is a mainstream romantic vehicle; his suggestion but while they get drinks and popcorn, he stands apart from her with his head down as though hiding his identity. The shyness of the brightly lit foyer gives way to the comfort of darkness, and they touch and kiss and might even pretend the burgeoning onscreen romance bears some affinity to their own until, at the moment of consummation, as a slow song beckons the first onscreen kiss, the voice of a man in the audience nearby launches a distinctive, full-throated and uncontrollable laugh which the rest of the audience, including them, join into until the whole theatre is a roaring, hooting, vibrating mess. The romantic denouement, when it comes, plays out beneath an undignified aftershock of giggles.

    She goes back to his flat in a three-story Georgian house on the Southside. The downstairs hallway smells of curry and old smoke damage and the corners rattle with the enraged dither of trapped bluebottles, but his apartment is surprisingly spacious and clean, and she feels an exotic charge as they undress slowly in front of each other under the high ceiling with the bulbs blazing around them.

    Afterwards, she is lying against him, a pond of blond hair spilling over his chest. The main lights have been turned off and the orange glow from the lamp reminds her of a spotlight and lends a theatrical immediacy to their conversation.

    She points at the wall of books.

    “Have you read them all?”

    “They’re mostly to impress my sexual conquests.”

    She strokes his face to hers and gives him a long teasing kiss.

    “Mmmm, it’s working.”

    “You’re a scientist, right?” he says.

    “Student scientist,” she corrects.

    “You think the World Wide Web will kill off bookshops?”

    “I don’t think so.” She smiles. “People will always need places. We met in a place, didn’t we?”

    “What a place.”

    “My grandfather used to say that we’re only ever born in one place but when we die, we die everywhere.”

    He stares thoughtfully into the shadows on the edge of the lamplight.

    “Your grandfather sounds very wise.” He laughs. “And a bit dark. If this internet thing of yours catches on, maybe that’ll change and we’ll finally be able to die in one place, though knowing my luck it’ll probably be Geocities.”

    She gestures to the wall of bookshelves.

    “If it does catch on, I can always come to your place to get my fix of old-fashioned printed words.”

    “Anytime. You know old-fashioned printed words can save your life?”

    “Oh yeah?”

    She is waiting for him to make a playful joke. Instead, he slowly disengages from her, from them, and, still naked, scans the shelves gravely and returns with a slim, unadorned paperback. When he’s reintegrated beneath her, he hands her the book and she studies the title conscientiously.

    “Darkness Visible?”

    “Uh huh.”

    She turns it around and reads the blurb and the reviews on the back then turns to look him in the eyes.

    “This saved your life?”

    He nods shyly and she caresses his cheek and ear and kisses him tenderly.

    “Oh baby.”

    But she has imprecise reservations.

    He is everything she isn’t. Dark. Wounded. Opaque.

    When she talks about her family and their modest but supportive upbringing, he nods and smiles but she can see in his eyes that he has no frame of reference for this, and she may as well be relating a popular myth which he is only hearing for the first time.

    He says next to nothing about his family, except to imply he hasn’t seen them in a while and what he hears of them now are whispers he would prefer remain unamplified.

    She tells him about her college courses, specialties and plans; plans that stretch into a far flung tomorrow of homes and children. He is amazed that anyone can plan so far ahead and in such detail. All his plans begin in maybes and end in places that sound like the start of a movie in which the protagonists all die horribly.

    “Maybe you can come visit me over there someday,” he says but then shakes his head, embarrassed at fastening her to such whimsy.

    “Someday,” she says with a smile and a kiss.

    They have their first fight a week later. They’re in Coppers again and they’ve both drunk too much. He’s angry about the never-ending parade of guys hitting on her every time he returns from the toilets.

    “What can I do?” she says.

    “You could try not being so damn friendly,” he says. “You like those guys in t-shirts that are two sizes too small for them. Wait and see: you’ll end up leaving me for one of them.”

    She laughs but her denial isn’t quick or passionate enough for him because they end up exchanging mis-heard provocations in the club then shouting at one another, no less incoherently, on the street outside and she cries and takes a cab home alone. He lights a cigarette and smokes sullenly as she gets into the taxi and she imagines him watching as her cab is absorbed into the exodus of lights on Harcourt Street.

    The next morning, she mopes around her apartment, finally drawn to the mailbox downstairs where she finds a hand-written unstamped envelope with her name on it. She recognises his handwriting.

    She extracts and unfolds a single sheet of white paper with a poem carefully handwritten on it:

    Breakfast, Morning After

    Everything on this plate is overcooked,

    I am too.

    Last night’s sentimentality boiled over,

    Now, it’s stuck on the pan of our two minds,

    Like incomprehensible glue.

     

    It’s the first time she’s received a poem that wasn’t written by a greeting card company.

    She returns to her apartment and dials his number, which is on the same piece of cardboard he’d first written it on, and which has sat by the phone since she got home the night before.

    His phone rings for an antagonistically long time but she keeps it to her ear until, finally, his downstairs neighbour answers it by bellowing the name of his company followed by his own name.

    Before either of them can say anything else, she hears a noise in the background and a smile in the neighbour’s voice as he somewhat demurely adds, “He’s coming now.”

    A few seconds later Tom’s voice gasps, “Mary Ann?”

    “I got your poem.”

    “I need to see you.”

    They last another two weeks. Two weeks of late-night club-crawling followed by all night lovemaking and all-day shut-ins. She misses so many classes that the head of her department calls to check if she’s okay and, at Tom’s encouragement, she bereaves herself of a beloved aunt-or was it was an abhorred uncle?

    Both feel themselves on the cusp of something, but neither can square the circle of difference that lies between them; the forking of paths already beneath their feet.

    Fittingly, it ends in Coppers.

    They both sense what’s coming and this foreknowledge lends an astral tenderness to the night. They sit in the beer garden so they can speak.

    She breaks the deadlock.

    “I’ve got to go back to classes or they’re going to turf me out.”

    He laughs and takes her hands in his.

    “I’ve got my plane ticket,” he says.

    “You’re really going? That’s great, baby. I’m so happy for you.”

    “I guess you shamed me into it with all those plans of yours that stretch into 2050.”

    They drink and make out and, near the end of the night, Suede’s “Saturday Night” is played. They rush inside and slow dance to it, folding into the mass of people on the floor until it feels like they are alone, the pirouetting axis of a cosy circle of darkness.

    Her memories slip on the gleaming surface of the past and when she recovers the memory, he is walking her to the taxi rank one last time, made debonair in her reconstruction with his jacket on her shoulders against the sudden cold.

    “I’ve got a confession to make,” he says.

    “What’s that?”

    “You know that movie we went to, where the guy started laughing during the love scene?”

    “Yeah.”

    “I went to see that film the day before I brought you, to make sure it was romantic enough to take you to. It’s not really my area so I needed to do a bit of research.”

    She stops to caress his cheek.

    “Oh, that’s so sweet baby.”

    “It was, until that guy tore the arse out of it.”

    “I guess now we know why he was laughing.”

    “Yeah,” he says. “I guess we do.”

    She reaches the head of the queue and hands him his jacket and they kiss one last time.

    “Good luck with the future,” he says.

    “You too,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see you in a place there someday.”

    “Someday.”

    She imagines herself not looking back and allowing him to disappear unseen into the anonymous crowd, but she can’t help seeing him standing there, staring at her taxi as it fades into the night, so perhaps she did look back one last time. She imagines their eyes meeting in that final look and something, unsaid, passing between them but can’t remember if that’s really what happened or only what she wanted to have happened.

    Mary Ann snaps back into the moment. Her phone shows three missed calls from Daniel but she scorns them and the voice in her head and pours herself another drink.

    She searches the internet for Tom using his full name and studies the images that come back, trying to match them to an imagined Tom who is 24 years older or to remove 24 years from the faces she sees but none of them have the dark eyes she remembers so vividly.

    She feels wrong about Googling the poem after all this time but a sudden wave of doubt that it might not have been original persuades her to search for it and the resulting screen of irrelevances prompts a loud sigh of relief.

    She searches Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, imagining as she does a settled-down but still-handsome Tom, spared a paunch and receding hairline with the concession of just a few strategically placed lines about the eyes and an intrigue of grey above one temple. A Tom who is finally free of doubt, hauling a wife and kids into a boring, normal future. A Tom who offers chirpy updates or pithy quotes. But this Tom is nowhere to be found on Google or social networks or anywhere else on the internet so, with a narrow pout of satisfaction, she imagines an unplugged free spirit in a remote beach bar on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and she imagines a transistor radio on the small bar playing Suede’s “Saturday Night” and this Tom pausing to remember her, perhaps even this very night.

    She goes back to YouTube and replays the song and closes her eyes, remembering again the two of them dancing inside that cosy circle of darkness.

    But Tom is not sitting at a beach bar by the Caribbean Sea. He’s not had a wife or kids and he’s never used Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because in 2003, when Mary Ann was on secondment for her company in Seattle, Tom was walking his dog by the Grand Canal in the early hours of the morning, not two miles from where she is at this moment, and the dog jumped into the water by the lock. And Tom, without a moment’s hesitation, dived in after it and got into trouble, the dog somehow escaping but Tom’s hands scrabbling uselessly at the slippery walls until the air poured out of him and he sank into the dark water, the circle of light, that was the sun, diffusing into darkness above him.

     

     

    Feature Image: René Magritte, The Lovers II, 1928.

  • On Being Old

    Oscar Wilde said  that the tragedy of being old is that one is still young.

    I am eighty-six, going on nineteen. Is this a record?

    I’ve been pruning and wood carving with my chainsaw for years. There is no shortage of wood from the trees that I planted thirty years ago. The resultant grotesque heads are visible all around my garden (all wearing face masks – you must keep a sense of humour).  Now they mock me.

    In the week before Christmas I took out my chain saw to clear away two full-grown pine trees that had fallen on our oil tank.

    Everything went well until I became ambitious. For the first time, instead of placing the machine on the ground with my foot on it, I tried to start it as they do in the movies: hold the machine in my left hand, push it down while pulling up on the starter with the right hand. That’s what the pros do. I had never tried it before.

    The result was dramatic. There was a sharp crunch in my left shoulder, plus pins and needles in my hand. A month later that is still my painful condition.

    On that day before Christmas I admitted for the first time that I’m old and it got me thinking about the disparities between age and youth.

    Demographically speaking, we oldies will soon outnumber youngsters. This is because young females are postponing reproduction until their mid-thirties. The costs of childcare and housing are prohibitive, there is a lack of confidence in the future. Also, many want an independent career. It’s a first world scenario.

    Women traditionally reproduced at about 25 years of age. Now it’s their mid-thirties and two kids are the ideal. However, since 1981 the worldwide replacement rate for us humans is down to 1.58 kids per woman. Ultimately that is not enough to prevent the extinction of the race.

    Demographics is destiny

    Thanks to modern medicine we superannuated oldies will soon outnumber fit young workers; the latter group’s taxes keep our health service going. We non-taxpayers (if you overlook  VAT) will soon consume over 50% of health costs.

    Will this trend continue? Probably. The young don’t vote enough. The seniors vote early and sometimes often. Governments know that older voters tend towards the status quo and shape their manifestos accordingly. This ensures that conservative policies preserve existing evils as distinct from liberal policies which wish to replace such evils with others. In the end the government always wins.

    We used to worry about overpopulation in the world; now we are in reverse gear, or at least the wealthy West is. I’ve cooperated in the production of six children, so I can’t really be blamed.

    But the centre cannot hold.

    The gaps in the supply services, witnessed by the shortage of truck drivers during the pandemic, are a symptom of the new malaise. Older skilled workers are retiring with few to take their place. Employers are desperate for employees.

    Don’t worry, I hear, the immigrants will eventually make up the numbers. Already they are the prime carers – for us, the oldies!  Now a world of opportunity is there for immigrants (and about time too). Instead of denigrating them, fighting to keep them out,  we will have to compete for their services, especially the skilled tradesmen.

    How many of us can fix a puncture, replace a fuse, stop a leak, change a tyre, do any of the tasks that were once second nature to my generation? Very few. We have all become a dysfunctional, middle-class burden on the young and fit. Have we passed on these humble skills? No, the young have been too absorbed in their screens to learn such mundane tasks. Now we don’t repair; we replace with newer models which are programmed to break down after the guarantee expires. Thanks to the advertising industry the world of the consumer is chasing its tail. Everybody knows.

    Is this an argument for despair?  Not at all. Some oldies have opted for the Zurich solution but most of us will cling on desperately to the last vestiges of our functionality.

    Unless euthanasia and trips to Zurich become mandatory…

    Featured Images: Carvings by Boby Quinn: ‘De Profundis’; ‘After Brancusi’; ‘Me Worry’.

  • Old Headscarf

    At thirty-two, after decades of sporting a headscarf, I abandoned the practice and exposed my bad hair days. There was a short-lived, still humongous, stir. At home, there was one overriding fear: “And what will people say?”

    I had long interpreted the headscarf as a politico-cultural expression of Islamic modesty; for years though, I never risked taking it off. The spectre of community disapproval deterred me, but then, so did the thought of selling out. That I could enact the archetype of Muslim woman unshackling her chains, could endorse the cardboard tropes, bothered me. When I finally stopped caring and took the plunge, my entire conception of reality shifted.

    Four years on and my experience equips me with insight. A hijabi when headlines hyped the War on Terror, I already know that all are prey to mainstream conditioning; that IQ, educational, or professional qualifications are not automatic safeguards against ignorance. In my life as it unfolds post-headscarf, the comic sea-change in strangers’ attitudes towards me, I can vouch that opting out of norms incurs social penalties. I have witnessed polarities in treatment, know a hunger for acceptance, and appreciate anyone’s pressure to conform to the crowd.

    By interrogating the headscarf as immutable religious law, I am reminded that beliefs and identities are products of historical, political, and cultural forces, configured by upbringing and environmental backdrop. I observe that too many of us outsource our critical faculties in blind deference to expert authorities, subscribing to the fallacy that appointed ‘philosopher-kings’ must comprehend something we can’t, that the structural asymmetry of information serves anything other than vested interests. Hence, if Imperial College London plots a graph about it, or a man in spectacles rattles off numbers, or a stack of death certificates signed by frontline heroes just says so, we’ll dig no deeper; we’ll admire the emperor’s new threads as he stands naked in plain sight.

    So now as I stride into shops, into salons; down hospital corridors; onto Dublin’s public transport, my face unmasked, not even pretending to be sorry, the waves of hostility, the missiles of verbal abuse, are (stifle yawn) old headscarf to me.

    I can hush attacks with official paperwork—I’ve secured a medical exemption. What’s troubling is the visceral nature of the onslaught. Where dishonouring the dead and the vulnerable enters the equation, I see how my behaviour signifies a disregard for the common good. The shock value speaks more to the success of the global fear campaign than to an informed understanding. I don’t blame anyone for adhering to public health guidance, but when inquiry into its validity is cast in tin foil hat terms, when scrutiny of the doublespeak and the doublethink provokes outrage, when repurposing masks as an instrument of control is the step too far; then even the most credulous need to wonder. When a conscientious refusal to play along counts for little more than petulance, an attention-seeking stunt at best, and those, masked up, cruising solo in their cars, represent virtue, then the time for reflection is long overdue.

    The transition from denial to acceptance is a scary leap: shaking off the programming, rearranging beliefs, remodelling the systems on which we have staked our lives, our livelihoods, our selves, is a terrifying task. Or is it because the conspiracy realm is traditionally populated by weirdos that it’s easy to dismiss the evidence? That Bill Gates is up to nothing other than philanthropy is the comfort of faith. Klaus Schwab will spell out The Great Reset in a how-to guide, but the idea of a technocratic agenda still sounds like hogwash. PCR is not fit for purpose, but we accept the reported case numbers. An mRNA vaccine, rushed, and proudly ‘experimental’ may be a gamble, but we’ll roll up our sleeves, we’ll take a jab —make that two—for  the team. Big Pharma, absolved of liability, is fattening that bottom line, but call it old -fashioned opportunism if you must, not an orchestrated end.

    The Orwellian echoes lend an aura of irony to the occasion, more than mobilise action it seems; and so, is the question that nobody sees it, or really that they’d just rather not? A recent encounter gives me heart: Lolloping down a supermarket aisle, shoppers lunging out of my path, I near collided into a fellow unmasked objector. We shared a moment, grinning at one another; armed with the knowledge, that acquiescence, is always a choice.

    Editor’s Note: A report of the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention: Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19 published in February 2021 concluded:

    The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.

    Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Featured Image: Anna Shvets Photography

  • Old School

    I felt him sliver under my shirt as she belted me in with a quicksilver click. The shoulder strap muffled my mouth and eclipsed an eye. Mom sipped her coffee, singing along to the song on the radio, ‘One less egg to fry … ’ Only half of what lay ahead was in sight, but one wide eye watched her cigarette ashes take flight and land in one hundred percent humidity on the dashboard. Sticky plastic sword in hand, I grappled with an apple for breakfast in our Volkswagen, spieling, ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ all the way uptown. The Beetle was a shade of blue I think you’d call Tiffany.

    The epiphany that something sublime writhed round my collarbone, that I hadn’t come alone occurred before lunchtime. Frank and furtive, Alfred recoiled pretzel-like in the well of my tender clavicle, his tiny tongue darting at everyone in my kindergarten. Fraulein’s wrists regrettably garbled into a sort of swastika, as she hissed, ‘It won’t be long now.’ The kids thronged to see me prove the venomous Frau wrong. To her dismay, I displayed his length, with all the strength of my Lilliputian limbs. Adamant even, that while he had not a leg to stand on, my king snake, Alfred the Great’s congenital regalia exhibited double genitalia. I was only bested by Mom’s suggestion I stroll my two-penised pet in the yard. I’d hardly let go when he stole away, and you know, I bet she planned the hole thing.

    ‘Roll’ simpered the director. I’d been pimped and primped, as per the script. It was cool to skip school and spend all day in a pool of hot light. The blazing burlesque began with the future governor grilling me over an antique desk. He gave me the third degree and being only four, I took The Fifth. If the camera had closed in tightly on Edwin Edwards, it might’ve seen the politician took pains to burn book learning into my brain. The necessary votes were sustained, note not without substantial commercial gain. The campaign to elect the high roller hit a nerve. As 50th Governor of Louisiana he served an unheard of four terms during a legendary sixteen years. I fear that’s longer than he spent pent up in federal prison for conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, extortion and fraud. The ‘Silver Zipper’ is still lauded to this day for his rebuke of the KKK’s David Duke, ‘We’ve both been wizards under the sheets.’ This is my ode to a sweltering state still sheltered by Napoleonic Code.

    A child is a sponge, able to absorb the plethora of Playboy and Cosmopolitan’s iconic chronicles accumulating on the coffee table. These juicy pages, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare’s complete works and other tearjerkers make for a berserk library. Wary I’d acquired precocious social skills, my father enrolled me in an experimental public school program where pupils deemed pliable were thrilled to be drilled under controlled conditions. Seditious teaching techniques were scrutinized, I expect for their effect on us like fruit flies in an elite Petrie dish. We learned Latin in togas, and outside in the arena, laughing like hyenas, lay the hoi polloi. We graduated to the vulgar gate of a junior high school, massive and without barriers to entry, except for the metal detectors at the door. The Creole elite monopolized the air-conditioned gym, while the Latinos rolled in the leafy shade of live oak trees outside. One hot day, I pushed a fellow, pell-mell, out of a second floor window, garnering for myself an enduring infamy as a ruffian, a femme fatale, gone feral. Maintaining my new found tough talking notoriety mortified my mother. Veering around in her Volvo, she voiced her vexation that my vocabulary had evolved.

    Mom resolved to commit me for a stint at a sporty Spartan school, just south of Bayou Sauvage. Not for fauves, was this amply proportioned concentration camp on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, presided over by a megalomaniac vegan grammarian on mega-doses of vitamin C. At lunch break, saving me for last, Mr. Bentham spanked the bad boys’ backsides, swinging that baseball bat in a tiny room at the top of a tower, underpinned by bunkers where a curious curriculum was cobbled together by his wife. It operated like a panopticon, from which he took a jocular view through his binoculars. Noontime came soon enough, confined with the solitary Dr and his most contrary students. Stockholm syndrome smarts, but art transmogrifies the purge of pubescence, and it seems there’s really no scourge for true incandescence.

    The time was right to wear black and white. I was in like Flynn with the Dominicans. The inquisitive sisters came from Dublin’s Cabra convent, to cope with girls who hoped to propagate with Jesuit-made men. Something about that sub-tropically pugnacious khaki uniform issued by Saint Ignatius drove me right up the nearest palm tree. So much better was it built than our off-kilter tweedy chastity belts, I confess to cross-dressing. Borrowed one from a boy named Boyle. The nuns were sore. Defrocked my puerile attire at the door, but not before Harry Connick Jr picked me out. Don’t doubt he had sonic pitch way before he got hitched. Back then, the seminarian parked his bike on my porch. We sat scorching on the swing, talking about most anything from Buddha to the birds and the bees. Pleased as rum punch, Harry had that hunch to go hear the now dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson at Tulane University. Perverse Promethean. Slurred convictions. Should we blur fact with friction? Bless the good doctor’s heart, before I tested his best thesis, Hunter self-canonised. Rest in pieces.

    Image (c) Mike Skinner.

    Without a real care in the world, I twirled my pencil and stared at the exchange student’s daring hairdo. It was an iron curtain beehive and I didn’t behave. I connived to perform a vivisection, a dissection on something alive. Why stab a frog when you can go whole hog on the foreigner? Who knew she had haemophilia? My heresy hastened a schism with Superior Sister Delia. Habitual offenders get sequestered until the end of the semester. Clearly the clergy weren’t big on surgery, and saw me as the straw that broke the Carmelite’s back. Sacked in March, I was informed the Archdiocese would have one girl less.

    Yes, knowing the New Testament by heart, I had a strong start at my next school. When they mentioned the Second Coming I didn’t dumb down. A class clown, I waywardly won the award for Wit and asked the valedictorian to the prom. A ticking bomb squad, we patrolled the bars in a police car. Arguably an all-nighter, it was getting lighter when I limped in to the parents. An errant heir, in their purview, I’d scantly measured my curfew, and was out of control, ergo, out on my ear. No clocks to tick-tock, no loud locks to click, nor bones to pick. Newly emancipated, it went undebated, I dinner dated and drank Chablis insatiably.

    The class voted me Best Personality. There was no award for promiscuous thighs, but the guys prophesied when my dimples were done I’d contemplate a wimple. Be a nun, take the cloth. In a slothful simulation, one day I’ll mirror the moth. Before it’s too late, negate earthly aggravation, and commune with the moon for celestial navigation.

    Did the university need another Margaret Mead, who can’t stand the ant in Anthropology? Documentaries about Mbuti Pygmies put a bee in my bonnet, and I wrote sonnets about insects being my bugaboo. Through Totem and Taboo, I found Freud, the human zoo and allow me to assure you in our age, the cage is online.

    Flunking math, my path went west, for the best PhD at a mountain monastery. Those Jesuits wouldn’t quit till I’d got the gist of Psychology. One day my professor tidied his toupee, promising that with a little private practice he could improve my score by 69. I dodged the codger’s inclination to roger. Not a priest in the least, he’d hoisted his own petard, ignited by my vapid paper, ‘The Southern Belle: An Exaggerated Sex Role and its Indications for Therapy’.

    God gave me sisters, but I relate to baroque A-listers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico’s Tenth Muse was a philosophical feminist who knew foolish men were led by a thread through love’s labyrinth. Not full of papal bull, through a plague this phoenix flew till she too was dead. Would Wicklow Head’s Pharos light the shipwreck of my lustrated soul’s intellect? Erudite. An Anchorite. Can I join that club? A Petrarchan archetype parked at the pub, gallivanting like Dante. A dilettante, my Ezra Pound of flesh extracted, exacting in the end. Outspoken. Unbroken. A bar nun.

    I hear after the hurricane hit New Orleans, some of the Dominican mendicants came back to their convent in Ireland. I hear too, albino crawfish are indigenous to our bit of the Liffey. The river runs under this old school house where I live, and shiver about how much there is to know. So I claw my way to the water’s edge on dodgy days and see no smart salmon but I crane for cunning crustaceans. Trust the clever are forever caught up in what we’re taught, lest our thoughts paint palimpsests. Suggest we cut class but keep an eye out for that old snake in the grass.

    Featured Image (c) Sonny Carter.

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