Book749.pdf
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a magazine of the printable arts
volume two · number one · $2.00
editors
David Ferguson, Editor in Chief
Mary Maud Ferguson, Executive Editor
Patricia Eakins, Editorial Director
Anderson Craig, Senior Editor
Elizabeth Culbert, Senior Editor
Marc Rangel de Algeciras, Senior Editor
Leonard Todd, Art Director
Pat Bell-Murray
Jane Bloom
M. Elizabeth Clifford
Janden Hogan
P. Raymond Marunas
Tim McDonough
Margaret Roe
associate editors
Joan Fernandes
Carol Ann Friedman
Peter Friedman
Alke Heep
Hans Heep
Linda Steenstrup
The editors of BOX 749 are grateful for the generosity of Bruce Buckley, Edward Kulkosky, Stanley
Ledbetter, Laurie Lisle, Albert Litewka, Jerome Clifford Nathanson, Anthony Pelosi, Jr. and Saul
Stieglitz, and would like to thank Richard Graf, Jean Hebb, Catherine Kernan and Gael McCarthy
for their time and support.
Published by Seven Square Press of The Printable Arts Society, Inc., a not-for-profit organization.
Subscription $7. 00 (four issues). Single copy $2. 00. Mailing address: Box 749, Old Chelsea Station,
New York, New York 10011. Manuscripts returned only if accompanied by self-addressed stamped
envelope. Telephone: (212) 989-0519.
© David Ferguson, 1975. All rights reserved,
contents
WARREN SILVERMAN
photograph ..... , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cover
SU-LI SLOAT
woodcut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
WALTON VAN WINKLE
fiction: Silent Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
ROBERT WALCH
photographs: Windows .... , .•........ 6
DAVID FERGUSON
poems ..... , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
PAUL DEJOHN
play: The Cell .........•............ 10
VINCENT GORMLEY
drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
DANIEL JAHN
song: Morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . 14
ANDERSON CRAIG
fiction: The Late Reverend
Christos (iii) .•.. 16
SHERRY MILLNER
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7
RICHARD SLOAT
drawings: New York ...•.......... , .. 28
BEVERLEE HUGHES
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
MICHAEL B. WILLIAMS
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
RICHARD HOFFMAN
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
LEROY V. QUINTANA
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
EMILIE GLEN
poems ....................................................... 31
STEPHEN DIXON
fiction: The Killer ...•..............• 32
MARC GRABLER
drawings: Man and Beast ......•...... 36
MARGARET A. ROBINSON
fiction: The Grady Gazette ....•.•.... 38
RICK SMITH
poems ..........•.......•........•.• 40
KARL KROLOW (translated
by DAVID NEAL MILLER)
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
D. F. PETTEYS
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
JOHN R, HALL
poems . I •• " II ••• " ••••• " ••••••••• " •••• 41
ALAN BRITT
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
PAUL ROTH
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
SILVIA SCHEIBLI
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
DAVID KASTIN
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
JULIE GASKILL
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
JAY DE VOE
etching .......................••..•. 43
JANET CAMPBELL HALE
fiction: Wapato ..•..•.......•........ 44
BETTY BRESSI
grids: Alhambra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
JEROME CLIFFORD NATHANSON
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
TOM HANSEN
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 48
TIM McDONOUGH
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
NORMAN MOSER
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
HARLAND RISTAU
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
DENNIS ROMEO
poems ...... o • • • • • • " • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 50
GUY R. BEINING
poems ... I •••••••••••••••••••••••••• 51
ERNEST LARSEN
fiction: Bakunin at the Beach .•.••...• 52
PATRICIA EAKINS
song: Pierrot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
NICHOLAS SPERAKIS
woodblock prints: Thanatos . . . . . . . . . . . 56
PER OLOV ENQUIST
(translated by JAN RING)
fiction: The Anxiety of the
Loyal Souls ...... 58
NICHOLAS PAPAYANIS
photograph ....•......•......•..•.... 7 3
HALE CHATFIELD
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4
ELIZABETH CULBERT
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
MARLENE GERBERICK
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ 7 5
VAUGHN KOUMJIAN
poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5
JOHN MILISENDA
photographs: Family Album ....•..... 7 6
LYN LIFSHIN
poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
RICHARD GREENE
play: The Window .................•. 80
FRED GUTZEIT
drawing •••. •••·••••••••••· .......... 83
CONTRIBUTORS
biographical notes ..•....•.....••.... 84
1
. '.\'•· ..
,·
.l
...
\
su-li sloat
..
walton van winkle
SILENT SEA.
I
A gull soaring silently slipped through the
gloom, grabbed the bread he had thrown into
the water, and flew away, its gray body melting
back into the gray mist, He was alone again,
The clams were scattered over the small
deck. He rose slowly from the cabin, one hand
holding a sandwich and the other gripped tightly
on the beam over the door. His back ached.
He stood by the clams while he bit into his
sandwich. It was stale, He threw it as far out
as he could and spat what was in his mouth into
the water. He knew he would not make much
money if he did not catch more than he had that
morning. No, he would never be able to leave;
his wife had told him that.
He was away when she died. They sent him
a telegram but he didn't come in time. She
had been dead three days when he stood over
her grave with his gray felt hat resting against
his leg and the bald spot in the middle of his
hair shining brightly. He couldn't believe it was
her but the stone had her name on it: April.
And his name: Wife of Alfred Freeman.
He looked up from her grave and noticed
the monotonous rows of white stones, all of
them plain and undecorated. Then he called
one of the attendants and asked him why there
wasn't a space left next to his wife's grave: he
was to have been buried next to her. The
attendant told him that he knew nothing about
it and stood there wheezing quietly, Freeman
wasn't sure, but he thought the attendant was
laughing.
When he got home that day he remembered
the mask he had bought when she was still
alive and how he had put it on before entering
the house and how, when he walked in, his wife
was sitting in her chair by the lamp reading one
of her books, wearing a pair of reading glasses.
She put her book down and looked over the rims
of her glasses at him and smiled,
He sat in her chair now and thought of how
quiet the house was, had always been, and how,
sometimes, it had seemed like no one lived
there at all--the two of them sitting in the room
together not saying a word, Then, sometimes,
he would look at her and she would smile and
he would reach over and touch her hand and
wonder why he had never heard her laugh.
He rose slowly from the chair an_d walked
up the stairs to her bedroom. When he opened
the door he noticed that the room hadn't changed
much. The shelves were cluttered with books
and magazines and her desk was in the corner
with its back to the window. There was a book
by Proust on the desk. He thought his wife
might have mentioned the name to him once but
he wasn't sure. He picked up the book and
placed it carefully on OFJ.e of the shelves. He
stood by the shelf with his hand still on the
book thinking that he should have never gone,
thinking that he could never get away no matter
how far he ran because it would be the same
everywhere he went and that maybe that was
what she had meant. When he turned around
he saw her nightgown on the floor by her bed,
He picked it up and brushed off the dust with
his hand and thought of April and how he had
never called her by name. Then he wrapped
the gown up in his hands and pressed it to his
face.
II
The bucket fell into the water and he cursed
3
loudly as he tried to get it back but it drifted
out of reach. By the time he got a pole the
bucket had sunk.
A gull was laughing in the grayness
somewhere, Freeman sat amid his clams and
knew that he would never make enough money.
Then, suddenly, without warning, the gull grew
out of the mist, its gray body like ashes over
Freeman's head. It landed on the bow, Freeman
ran to the bow waving his arms over his head,
screaming gull-like, The gull flew away with
a clam hanging from its bill, Damn bird!
Goddamn bird !
Freeman took his clamming tong from the
deck and dropped it into the water, It seemed
heavier than usual, Sometimes he could hear
the moaning sound of another clam boat passing
hidden in the mist and he would think how, on a
clear day, they would pass by his boat and wave,
then he would wave back and yell out the name
of the passing boat and they would each look
over at the other's catch. "Ya goin' to be
rich!" they would shout to one another. They
always talked that way.
He only had three dollars left after paying
for the dinner, then she took him to her
apartment and she asked him in so he smiled
slightly, almost invisibly, beca11se he wasn't
sure what to do because no woman ever asked
him before and because there was April in his
mind still lying under the sto11e with the space
next to hers taken as if he had 11ever been or
as if she had never known him.
He picked the tong slowly out of the water,
but he could see right away that there weren't
any clams in it, The mud was seeping through
the teeth when he dropped the tong back into the
water.
She kissed him after he closed the apartment
door and her lips were warm and moist on his
dry lips a11d April i11 his 111i11d like spring but
she was winter now and she was undoing his
shirt, steady fingers 011 his hot chest sweating,
and he wa11ti11g to feel her body close to his so
he loosened her hloi,se, fi11gers shaking,
stu111hli11g 011 the b11tto11s, and she walking him
to her roo111 with her.hot breath i11 his ear and
the blood rushing i11 his head and her voice
see111i11g strange IIOW, different, like someone
else's but he didn 't ct1re only wanting to crush
his head into hers.
He opened the tong and three clams fell on
the deck with a knocking sound like someone at
a door trying to get in, Without putting them
4
through the screen he could tell that only one
was big enough and that he would have to throw
the other two back. He kicked the three of them
with his bare foot and watched them splash and
fade away.
Freeman laid his tong on the deck. He
cursed himself for not bringing his boots: even
his bones felt the dampness and chill. He
walked to the cabin and leaned against it. He
wore the bottoms of his trousers rolled but
they were still soaked with the salt water he
had splashed on the deck to wash off the mud.
There was still some mud but he didn't have
another bucket.
The afternoon didn't seem much different
from the morning, There was the grayness
melting everything together, the water and the
air, so that he wasn't even ·sure if he was on
the water except that he could hear it quietly
rubbing against his small boat.
He looked in the cabin but there was nothing
there he could wear. Then he saw the clock.
It was getting late, He walked out of the cabin
and shut the door but it wouldn't close all the
way because it was off one of its hinges. Then
he saw the deck and thought that he should
sand it down and paint it some day but he wasn't
sure when.
He wasn't s11re whe11 b11t he knew he had
to leave that he cottldn't stay there with her that
he couldn't love her becattse it was winter now
and it was cold and maybe he forgot how and he
was afraid of being the old fool.
He hit the side of the cabin, chipping the
pale blue paint.
Don't go she said in her pale blue voice but
he said it was late his eyes on her naked breast
swelling and spri11g on his mind and 110w it was
winter and such an icy pale blue.
He stood bent over his tong thinking that
maybe he wouldn't be able to lift it,
The clock was ticking though he wasn't sure
what time it was but he said it was late so he
sat on the chair 7mtting on his shoes trying to
cover the hole in his sock when she said O and
laughed and rubbed the bald spot in the middle
of his head thinning more and graying and she
said he should learn to sew.
He decided to rest a while longer so he
sat down next to the tong and the few clams on
the deck,
He could see the gull on the water fading
I
in and out of the mist. The gull disgusted him.
Then he remembered how beautiful they once
seemed, all white; but this one seemed to
have been born full-grown from earth; fullgrown from sea mud. Its features stuck out
of its body in all directions and its eyes were
hard, cold. It stared at him, waiting.
It was sensele.ss. He knew he wouldn't
work anymore that day. The clams ... the money
to escape; it was senseless.
III
She had come into his room when he was
packing. He told her that it wasn't because he
didn't love her, it was because he wasn't sure
how he felt. His wife watched him quietly as
he packed. When he was done she walked out
of the room. He sat on his bed, staring at a
reproduction of Degas' "Absinthe" that his wife
had hung on the wall, and wondered why it was
so difficult for him to leave. He stood up, took
his suitcase from the bed, and shuffled slowly
out of the room. He left the door open.
When he reached the bottom of the steps
he saw his wife sitting in her chair reading
one of her books. She didn't look at him. He
said good-bye and told her that he would call
but she didn't answer, so he walked out the door
to the cab that was waiting in his driveway and
the cabby yelling at him to hurry or he'd never
get to the train on time.
In the train he wondered if that sense of
emptiness he felt then, while watching the small
town that had become so familiar to him rush
by and fade into the distance, was not the
feeling of escape, of freedom. He had wanted
to leave for a long time, ever since he first
started losing his hair, but his wife told him
he would never be able to leave. Now he was
on the train alone and she was back at the house.
He was leaving her.
They were in love at first but with the
passage of time they became more and more
concerned with other things: she with her books
and translations and he with his balding head
and sense of doom. But now that he was free,
on the train watching the town of his childhood
rush past, he might be able to recapture some
of what he had lost.
Those six months he spent in New York
before her death brought him no closer to the
truth, no closer to finding out exactly what it
was he sought, than he had been before he left.
For six months he sat in his small hotel room,
sat in the dark bar drinking Bloody Marys, sat
in the park feeding pigeons; and for six months
he thought of her, of what she had said; and
even then, after those six long months, nothing
was clear in his mind. If anything he was even
more confused, more uncertain of what it was
he wanted, what it was that kept nagging at him
from the back of his mind, from the back of
that mist .. All he knew, all he was certain of,
was that he was getting old,
Then when he read the telegram he wanted
to cry but couldn't. Instead he sat on his bed
staring at a plastic bird he had bought from an
old man on Forty-second Street, thinking that
he wouldn't go back. He sent a telegram
telling them to bury her as soon as possible.
Three days later he realized what he had done,
but when he got there it was too late. She was
gone.
IV
When he was a child he had a bird. She had
no name; he could not think of one. The bird
never sang. She died when he was in school. He
buried her quietly in his mother's little garden
behind the house.
One day he heard the rain quietly on the
window. He looked through the silver drops. It
ca111e harder and he could hear it sla1ipi11g the
walkway. He ran out the hack door. Ile could
hear his mother calling. Then he knelt in the
little garden. He st11ck his hands in the mud but
it was gone. He co11ld s111ell his house and the
rain crackling 011 the walkway like eggs in a
frying pan.
The gull was laughing somewhere inside the
gray.
Then a strange image flashed in Freeman's
mind: a pair of giant white claws reaching,
shooting across a great black space then
disappearing.
He thought when he buried her that maybe
she would grow out of the mud like the other
plants in his mother's garden.
He walked to the back of the boat where
the motor was. It wouldn't start. He tried
again but it was dead. And the gull was on the
bow with a clam in its bill and there was the
distant moan of a boat reverberating within the
misty air growing hard and cold from the silent
sea, then he remembered a line from a poem
his wife had read him once in some forgotten
time and he thought of how he didn't understand
it then but maybe he did now and he thought if he
heard another human voice he would drown. 0
5
robert waleh
WINDOWS
david ferguson
WALKING
I SHOULD LIVE SO LONG
The wrong was marvelous.
If I could live
to write my own obituary
I would fix the Fates.
Why let them cut me out?
There's always an alternative
mythical hags can't calculate.
Let them diagnose my home
or trace it to my chromosomes,
I'll stumble on
a way to free myself
from their archaic symmetry .
Should I succeed,
they'll call themselves
historians
and come up with a remedy
to find me at the new design,
the place they meant my effort to define.
And so at last
I am part of their embroidery,
the struggle of the ·unicorn
in ancient tapes try,
dancing to the ritual of the past.
I walked to the rhythm
of a stranger
whistling at my back.
The claim, at first, came of itself,
a light arrived
from the other day
informing everything
the casual eye takes in.
She talked of Spain
not to exp la in
the distance that she kept.
Who bothers to imagine
what there is to lose
when any day
the sun may break
like color coming,
to the summer gray
as a photograph.
I have since seen
someone closer
die of such a dream.
We moved as characters,
each in the other's play,
overheard
by a world of dreamers,
wronged and wronging,
no less marvelous,
a w·orld of many, spoiled
by those who dream for others
with tyrannical generosity.
Sometimes even now I stopping hear
oceans crashing in the ear
from a beach somewhere at sea.
Between my room
and the multitude of homes
I walk to work.
The pleasure I take
in walking
changes everything.
There is no other Ithaca.
8
IDENTIFIED
Pillowed by the curb, a man,
red in slashes down his chest.
A handcart, unattended,
piled with salable refuse,
unmolested
sporting sprigs
of gladiolas, red,
what, from a distance
looked like blood.
THE TERMINAL
No crystal palace
but a place
so large
a man
could stand
and not feel small.
I couldn't help
taking it in,
it's coming down.
I caught sunlight
muffled in dust,
billowing up
the ribs, picked clean
to sky. Birds
never flew
from afternoon illumined
rusty rafters,
not till after
the shutter closed.
I wasn't there
when they took
the eagle down
but I remember it
from photographs.
Stones are not as shy.
The lens looked up
an entrance,
as elaborate
and high
as a temple,
in silver scaffolding;
an arch through which to see
a garden
of geometry.
Ragged canvas
snapped
in the wings
of the recent
ruin. I caught
the workman
on a beam
undoing it.
Sparks struck
the set in sprays
of whitehot rain
daylight erased.
Coming up the stair
I caught the very top of it,
the iron pattern
shattered by light
bursting through
the sweep of steel.
Underneath,
a darkened segment
of the coming roof,
signed, Bethlehem.
The eye can't fix
what it takes in.
I caught the clock,
stopping outside,
but failed
in the interior.
Picture it:
that circumscribed
infinity
above the rush
of men, seemingly
unmindful
of this departure.
Commuters
in a certain light,
gray and powdery,
set off two men
down at the center,
a little to the right,
their helmets gleaming
less in the richer
insufficiency- -two men,
the value of Caravaggio,
form,
with the column to their right,
a heavy L
the composure of paint.
A tableau
imposed upon
the disappearing
room ...
But it didn't print.
Nothing there
but the gloss black
negative.
The easy
radical
transformation
could not take place
without more light.
The scene
so nicely placed
upon the scene
is lost and the loss
is placed
upon the scene
for my development.
Contrast makes for art
as we find our way
in the basement
of the onetime day.
The Garden
is under
construction.
Boxes harvest
more efficiently.
There's nothing like
the architecture
of despair
to fill
unnecessary
space.
Two figures
at a transit,
sighting ...
9
paul de john
THE CELL
for joe
(A cell--sink, toilet, bunk bed,
convicts are lying in bunks)
JOE:
Two young
Drip ... drip.,. drip drip ... etc.
VINNIE: Talking to yourself again?
JOE: No ... just listening ... drip ... drip ...
Vinnie?
VINNIE:
name's Joe" ... He started yelling "Let me at
him! Let me at him!" all night long .... Wasn't
long before everybody in that place was yelling
.... (Pause) In city jail they keep a light, a
single light bulb burning in front of your cell
twenty-four hours .... I used to watch it ... spent
hours watching it,
VINNIE: I got drunk one night and kicked the
screen in.
You know what I miss most?
JOE: Huh?
JOE:
Drip ... drip •...
VINNIE:
Television.
VINNIE: The TV, ... The picture wouldn't stay
still so I kicked it in.
JOE: You hear that dripping?
JOE: Never had a TV.
piss ....
VINNIE:
VINNIE: I'd stop beatin' off for a week for a
cold beer,
I used to like to watch it ..•.
This place smells like
JOE: Drip ... drip ..•.
JOE:
Never liked beer ....
VINNIE: Spent hours watching it ••.•
JOE:
Listen,., drip drip •.• hear it ....
VINNIE: It was just a black-and-white set •.. a
Philco ... color hadn't come out yet, ..•
JO~:
That dripping I s driving me crazy ....
VINNIE:
Think about something else.
JOE: Think (Pause) ... Ever been in city jail?
I only spent one night there ... for something ....
They brought a guy in and put him in the next
cell .... I couldn't see his face but I said "Hi, my
10
VINNIE: My car broke down in the desert once
in Arizona and there was this stack a I beer cans
near the side of the road •..• I started putting 'em
under all the gas leaks, oil leaks and water leaks
under the car .•.. I got up to thirty-two cans and
this semi come along and blew all the cans
away ....
JOE: Piss 'n disinfectant •...
VINNIE:
Yeah .. , a cold Miller's ••••
JOE: (Goes to sink) The faucet's busted again
..•. I saw a cop kick a black man away from a
fountain marked "white only," and then he let his
dog drink from the fountain, (Pause) We could
.die a' thirst and they wouldn't give a shit .... You
ever seen an uglier wall? Goddamned cockroach! Jesus all-fucking-mighty!! Did you see
the size of that bastard?
VINNIE: (Turns over on bunk) Didn't see it, ..
don't wanna see it,,,,
JOE:
It went under your mattress ....
VINNIE: (Jumps up) Goddamned fucking roach!
I hate 'em! It's gone, •. , Where'd it go?
JOE:
It's gone, ...
VINNIE: God, I'm thirsty .•..
JOE:
VINNIE: Women are all the same •.•• All they
want is a stiff prick, ...
JOE: She meant it, I think,. , about believing in
me, ... I saw her a coupla years later in a
laundromat. , , . She wasn't wearing no socks so I
knew she was pregnant.,,,
VINNIE: Was she pretty?
JOE: Yeah,.,, She was a year older'n me, ...
She was gonna give me a book to read, ...
(Picks up paper, Reads) "A man's body was
found floating in the East River six a. m. Thursday morning. The dead man's hands were wired
behind his back and there ware two smallcaliber bullet holes in the back of his head ..••
Police suspect foul play .... " (Laughs)
Think about something else, ...
VINNIE: It could be worse huh? Like the
junkies on Fourteenth Street,, .. I heard one of
'em say one night that a buddy OD'd in Brooklyn
, ... Then they all started saying it over and over
again like a bunch a' kids and they all wanted to
know where the guy got his stuff cause if he OD'd
it musta been good ....
JOE: I heard the Germans used to put people in
boxes ... then just leave 'em there without food or
water .. , first they'd eat their shoes and then
they'd drink their own piss,.,.
VINNIE: Hey, .. think about something else ....
JOE: Fuck you .... I had a girl once •..• She
didn't like me to kill roaches .••• I'd kill 'em
anyway, ...
VINNIE: Why do you keep reading that? You've
read it a thousand times, ... (Long pause) What
are we gonna talk about when there ain't nothing
left to talk about?
JOE: I been meaning to ask you something,
What's it like to rob a bank? I been thinking
about it ....
VINNIE:
JOE:
I told you a thousand times •..•
Is that when you hurt your leg?
VINNIE: I don't want to talk about that ... , (Long
pause) I had a girl once too ....
JOE: You know what I miss most? Just being
able to go out .... Anytime you want to.
VINNIE:
Looks like a nickel in the toilet, .• ,
VINNIE: Hate 1 em...•
JOE: One time she said she really believed in
me •••.
VINNIE:
Before or after you stabbed that guy?
JOE: We were in the car one night, ••• She just
said it .•.. Did you cut one?
JOE: With a nickel in my pocket I'd feel like a
king, .. ,
VINNIE: With a nickel bag in my pocket I ~ a
king •...
JOE:
Hey •• ,. You seen my comb?
VINNIE: Anytime--anyplace ....
VINNIE: No.
JOE: Did you take my comb ?
JOE:
I told you not to do that ....
VINNIE:
VINNIE:
Don 1t start ....
I didn't •.•. (Pause)
JOE:
JOE: Water's supposed to be bad for you
anyway.,,,
Did you hide the comb again?
VINNIE:
You're worse than my old m-an,
11
JOE: It's not here ••••
JOE:
Yeah .... That girl ... was she pretty?
VINNIE: It's silly •.•.
VINNIE: Huh?
JOE: You 're silly ••••
JOE: That girl you started to talk about.
never finished .... Was she pretty? •
You
VINNIE: You're stupid •••.
JOE: Don't call me stupid!
(Pause)
VINNIE: It's just a spot .• , looks like a nickel.
(Continues to look in toilet) Hey Joe.,.,
JOE:
I suppose the roach ate the comb •••.
VINNIE: No ... but I loved her ...• She was young
... really young ...• Did you ever love someone
and you were scared shit to let her know? When
she was around l'd--l'd--1 can't breathe .... It's
hard to breathe .... I gotta get outta here .•..
JOE: (Controlling him) Easy ... easy .... Where
would you go ... where the hell is there to go?
VINNIE: Hey Joe, what do I look like?
VINNIE: Someplace where I could sleep •... I
can't sleep anymore ....
JOE: What do you mean?
JOE: (Sings) My baby loves me •.. I know she
loves me ....
VINNIE: What do I look like?
JOE: Do you mean •.•• What do you mean?
VINNIE: I mean .... It's like a mirror •.•. (Still
looking in toilet)
VINNIE: When I was a kid and couldn't sleep
Morn would rub my legs ....
JOE:
We'll ask the warden to give her a cell.
JOE: Wish we had a mirror •..•
JOE: You look young ..••
VINNIE: She's dead .... (Pause) She's dead ....
She died when I was eleven, ... I was on a Pop
Warner football team and we were going to L.A.
to play a team called the Crusaders .... We
stopped at one of those places where you get all
the chicken you can eat and the team said I ate
forty pieces .... My nickname was Superman....
We beat the Crusaders .... I got in for one play
.... That night on the bus we smoked cigars and
I told everybody I had a rough day ahead of me
.... When I got home the relatives were there
and my Uncle Jim had bought me a blue suede
suit ... then we got in the .car and went to the
funeral home .... It was a beautiful sunny day
. ... I don't remember what I was thinking .... I
hadn't seen her in two weeks, before she went to
the hospital. .. It started to hit me as Jim and
Dad took my elbows and we stal-.ted to walk up
the aisle .... The moment I saw Morn's face I
started to scream.... I screamed through the
whole funeral and didn't stop .... The Reverend's
wife tried to tell me that Morn was in a better
place but I didn't stop screaming .•. until Dad
held me over her so I could kiss her goodbye
.... It was like kissing ice ... and that's the day
I went back to our garage and took a hatchet and
told God I'd chop off my arm if he'd give her
back ... and that's the same day I told God to get
fucked .... (Long pause)
VINNIE: Yeah .•..
JOE:
VINNIE: Do I look funny, Joe?
funny?
Joe •.• do I look
JOE: You look the same ••••
VINNIE: How old do I look?
JOE: You always look the same •.••
VINNIE: How old do I look?
JOE: You look like a guy •••.
VINNIE: I didn't take your fucking comb ••.•
JOE: It's OK .•.• (Pause) It's OK.
VINNIE: OK.... (Long pause)
JOE: What do I look like. , ••
VINNIE: Huh?
JOE: Do I look OK?
VINNIE: How do I look? Really ••••
12
Play some gin ....
VINNIE: You flushed the queen of spades down
the toilet, ... Remember?
VINNIE: Hey ... I can hear it ... the drips ....
(Reaches into shirt and takes out comb)
JOE: Rotten whore .... I knew a guy once-when he lost, he'd stick the whole deck in the
freezer.
JOE: There I s no lonelier feeling than being
broke in Vegas ....
VINNIE: Can't play without the queen.
VINNIE: Sounds like a leaky faucet someplace ....
JOE: God, I'm thirsty ... .
JOE: (Reaches under mattress) Look, .. a
Camel,,.we'll split it ... uh ... guess I'll have to
break it .... Here .... Here, take the big half ....
Forgot I had it ... a treat huh? (Looks perplexed) Shit .... We don't got a light. . . . You
got a light?
JOE:
(VINNIE throws his half in the toilet)
VINNIE:
VINNIE:
JOE:
It floats ....
JOE: So did the queen ... for awhile. . . (Throws
his half in the toilet. Pause) I'm gonna ask 'em
to put a light out there ....
VINNIE:
Want a leg rub?
JOE: We ain't run outta things to say yet.
(Pause) Look, a match ... .
VINNIE: Drip ... drip ... yeah ....
I'm glad we don't got a mirror ....
Drip ....
Think I'll get some sleep ....
VINNIE: Hey Joe .... Do you believe in mankind?
JOE: Some of it .... (Pause) I feel that parole
coming .... I'm gonna get me a color TV with a
big screen .... I'll have you over for a few beers
.... Hell ... a whole case a' beer ....
VINNIE:
it is?
Drip ... drip .. ,. What time you figure
VINNIE: It's this place .... How long we been
here?
JOE:
JOE: Ever been in Vegas at night? You can
smell the neon burning ... and the money ....
(Lies down)
VINNIE: (Combing hair) Maybe the roach'll
come back .... Think about something ... think ...
drip ... drip .... Hey Joe? Doesn't matter .... 0
Doesn't matter ....
vincent gormley
13
daniel jahn, music
david ferguson, words
MORNING
.
No-thing
in-to the
per-mis-sive
but the
in-
stars.
shuf-fling
sound of shoes
to
the
sun
just af-ter
the
on the
rain,
in-to the
scen-ted air
So
per-
ny,
in the
tual-ly,
climb
ma-
pe-
blind to the
"--'
so
/
.•
@
I
.ll
.,
'
-
y
them.
~
~
Q
~
,
as I
ma-ny blind
-
Q
have been
/
1;•
~
--
~~
in
ma- ny blind
so
I
oil
~
O'
-
~
~~
-
~
-~
0
to
anderson eraig
THE LATE
REVEREND CHRISTOS
part iii
Our four-part serialization is the first publication of this full-length novel; it will be concluded in the
following issue of BOX 749.
SYNOPSIS:
Christos Andreas was a Greek priest of a
Roman church in a dying Pennsylvania mining town.
The coal mines of Dunham, abandoned with the
coming of petroleum, had not been filled in.
They collapsed often, destroying buildings and
endangering lives, and dark fires burned in old
shafts far beneath the town.
One night in the Corner Bar, Christos'
adopted mission-post, Nikolas the Nut, a psychological casualty, revealed that all his winter's
coal had dropped through the bottom of his cellar
into where the civic rhinoceros had declared no
old mines could possibly be. Christos installed
Nikolas and his pregnant wife Irena, and their
little girl Maria, in some rooms in the rectory
while he went down to the city to do battle with
Edam," the Marshmallow Rhinoceros." (Christos had
invented the name and even the commissioner's
political peers now used it, although none knew
how or when it had come into being.)
The Rhino stormed in from a late lunch that
day. He dimmed a little at the sight of the
priest, but rose as usual to the occasion, beaming and bellowing that "Of course it is a grave
problem ... houses falling into mines! THE HOMES
OF THE PEOPLE! But we can't rush into things
willy-nilly .. .. "
As always, talking with the commissioner
left Christos feeling as if he'd been in a fire
drill. The Rhino, for his part, unable to conceive of altruism, assumed that Christos' angry
visits were designed to get the city to make some
free repairs of the mine-induced cracks in the
rectory walls.
So, while Christos was in Edam's office on
this particular foray, a crew of workmen sent by
the Rhino was in the rectory patching up the wall
©Anderson Craig, 1975.
16
All rights reserved.
with thin cement. That this was unknown to
Christos was unknown to the Rhino. ("What does
he want? A whole new stinking rectory?")
Annoyed, the Rhino sent some thugs who left a
battered Christos and his jeep stuck in a snowbank on a lonely road.
Harry Riker found him and took him back to
the rectory. Christos noticed the mushy cement
on his wall and his rug, and it made him laugh to
know what the Rhino thought his goals were.
It made Harry edgy the way Christos laughed.
Being ill at ease was Harry's normal state.
Never a miner, his father never a miner, he was
accepted in Dunham even though he could never
quite understand when it was his turn to buy the
beers. He sold dreams of higher education that
the townspeople couldn't afford for their children, who left anyway for Newark and the armed
services or for New York.· But no other town had
an encyclopedia salesman and he was theirs.
There were also other town characters waging
their own campaigns of one sort or another ...
Oliver Borden, nee Willie Szpak, abandoned at
thirteen, had hustled and conned his way through
his teens. Hearing about the values of education,
he invented one--including college, degrees, and
a new WASP name. Now he lived in Dunham to
remind himself of the people he was better than.
One of the brightest spots in Oliver's life
was his ward, Bunny, the sixteen-year-old niece
he thought of as "the sweetest little slice of
jail-bait in the country!" She feasted on the
violet airs of true-romance magazines, for which
Oliver was glad, since his verbal appropriation
of their style ("You are my thrilliest torrid
torment") made it easy for him to seduce the unwitting Bunny.
Other characters include the feuding
neighbors, Janowski and Frawley; Mrs. Chairman,
Christos' housekeeper; Weltschmertz, his basset
hound; the Pangolin, Commissioner Edam's
secretary; Dan, the proprietor of the Corner Bar;
and the bar's habitues, among them the Prime
Minister, a whiskered, voiceless ex-mine foreman
who speaks through a voice buzzer; and Jawar,
Kossak and many others.
When Nikolas' wife lay dying from a complicated pregnancy, Christos was forced to decide
who should be allowed to live, the unborn child
or Irena. His calling tells him that "The baby
must be born .... The mother has already had the
blessing of baptism."
Neither Christos' friend, Father Heaume, nor
his dioscesan supervisor, Monsignor Maugham, was
able to reassure the priest against his growing
doubts. No one, it seemed, could help him
retrieve the faith he weekly continued to defend
to his congregation.
chapter xv
Still the days passed and Irena lay quietly,
waiting for the angels. Christos and Nikolas
were by now acting more and more alike. But
only up to a point; beyond that point Nikolas
could withdraw into his cocoon while Christos
could only rage about his study and wish to God
that he could pray. Sometimes he would even
pray for it.
"Dear Lord, 11 he prayed, "if you 're there •••
and if You can hear me ... and if you Listen, ..
and if You Care ... and if You will ... and if You
can ... grant me this prayer, .. that I may pray
to You. 11 Then he would stop short with a
feeling of revulsion.
Still, of course, if there was a God listening one had jolly well better pray and if there
wasn't it wouldn't hurt to try. This idea made
Christos' soul vomit. At such times he had
scant difficulty believing in Hell and understanding the nature of the place. From personal
experience he could write a guidebook.
He felt that he was damned, but to what he
didn~t know. In one of his ungiven sermons he
had described Hell as, above all, a lonesome
landscape. Not black and red with fire. Colors
like that were luxuries of Earth and Purgatory.
Hell was a grey place of doubt, hung with the
last aching shreds of belief.
He had written that you can't get from here
to there in that country. There gets up and
walks off before you can come near. And you
often dissolves before whatever it was gets
wherever. A map of Hell would have only one
point. And that pomt wouldn't be on the map.
After a week of talking with Christos,
Harry, too, was nearly distraught. Not that
Harry's chances of developing a religious
penchant ever got farther than a hair this side
of bare logical possibility, but their desperate
talks and Christos' periods of holy swearing had
had an effect. Harry found old misgivings about
his sales activities reawakening--misgivings
17
that had been laid uneasily away for many long
nights. Fine points of blunted ethics presented
themselves unlooked-for, re-honed.
"Of course I never use the word 'free,' "
he had announced righteously, thumping
Christos' desk.
"And if I just up and leave, what kind of
shambles can the next priest expect to find?"
Christos replied.
"Advertising premiums are advertising
premiums! 11 More thumps.
"Anyway, I can't get out of here while that
fat stiff down in the city is still holding out on
filling in the mines. I grew up here. If I
give up IlOWo. II
"Besides, every other encyclopedia in the
country--every major set--is sold with just
the same gimmick. 11
" ... if I give up now h e ' l l ~ do anything
till the whole damn town falls into the ground. 11
Harry paused in his thumps. "I mean:
'is sold in just the same way. 1 " They paused
for a moment, caught up on what the other had
been saying, and began again.
"But Father, you can't keep it up too much
longer if that's the way you really feel. In
fairness to yourself. You'll pop. 11
"If I thought those books of yours weren't
doing some good for the kids around here, I
would've told everybody I thought you were a
crook long ago. 11
"If you were a layman you could even go
into politics, maybe."
"I know what those things cost. Your books
aren't even overpriced. 11
There came another pause, They were
compelled to laugh; if nothing else, they had
demonstrated that a conversation of sorts can
be conducted 180 degrees out of phase.
Along with everyone else in town, both had
had a miserable week.
"I never cease to be amazed," Christos
took to musing aloud. "People pay us--priests,
ministers, rabbis--to tell them what they want
to hear about their God. We tell them, and so
help me, they believe us ! 11
Harry learned to say nothing when this
particular point was up.
"In any other human situation, proof that a
man has been paid to say a thing is impeaching
evidence of the worst kind. 11
Harry would keep mum.
"Even your customers take what you say
with a grain of salt. They wouldn't be surprised
if you told them your books were solid gold.
They'd say, 'Well of course he says that. He's
a salesman. He's supposed to say that.' 11
Harry would drink his beer.
D
18
"They'd be disappointed if you didn't make
some preposterous claims, 11
Christos tried to comfort Harry when he
could spare the energy, urging him to look into
himself and find what was worthwhile, find
comfort in that. He even told him the Parable
of the Talents, pointing out that there was (as
Harry put it) a flip side to the parable: if you
do use your talents, you're crazy to be
ashamed.
Harry had taken to driving out alone into
the countryside. He often parked on a long
ridge, high over the city. From there he could
see most of Dunham, all of the city and a few
other towns that lay strewn through the valley
and salted into the hills. He could see the scars
on the earth and black man-made mountains of
low-grade coal, smouldering reject of the poor
few mines that were still worked. At night he
could see blue low-oxygen flames that licked up
and down the slopes like hundreds of little ghosts.
Their vapors rose against the stars for a little
while and then flew off horizontally, warm in
the cold wind, to blanket the valley and hills in
a veil of soot.
The hills beyond, covered with snow, dotted
with dark odd shapes of trees, had from a
distance an arctic tranquility. If only for this,
Harry could see why the older generation
refused to leave their homes to seek work in
distant cities.
Backing his car jerkily down the lane from
the top of the ridge to the road one night, he
swung it around and headed it, coughing, out the
road to Nanticoke. The car, a riddled old Nash
with the roar and the horsepower of a lion, had
been sold to him for fifty dollars and the cancellation of a five-dollar debt by a friend named
Bob C., an old-time bookman from the South
with red hair and a ready smile. Like most
bookmen, Bob C. made hundreds each week and
infallibly was broke by payday.
Harry had suggested once: "Bob, why don't
you spend five a week for a personal accountant?
Then you'll know at least, at the end of the week,
where it all went. "
"Harry, my friend, I am cut to the quick by
such a suggestion, 11 had been the reply. "I
refuse to hear of such an extravagance! 11
Bob C. had then piled his whole family and
Harry into the car and taken them all down to
the best restaurant in the city for dinner. At a
cost of about fifty dollars.
"I've never been able to decide," Harry had
confided to Bob C., "whether people who sell
books become big-hearted and oblivious to ·t he
value of money, or whether people who are big-
hearted and oblivious to the value of money
generally take up selling books. 11
Harry crossed a bridge and pulled up before
a solitary house a mile short of Nanticoke; evening was the time for business. He girded himself
for the brief overwhelming he was going to have
to do of the unassuming personalities within.
His conscience twanged. He knocked.
"Who's there?" came a woman's voice from
the inside. The light from the window shone warm
on the cold, planked porch floor. Harry often
envied the lives of the people whose homes he
whizzed in and out of, a euphoria fountain, an
articulating whirlwind, picking up three-hundreddollar contracts as he went. How these people
managed to scrape together their payments he
had never figured out, but unfailingly they did.
"Well, who ~it?" a man's voice called
from farther inside.
"Weston Newman, 11 Harry called out.
"Oh, 11 said a fortyish woman, mildly pleased,
to her husband, "it's Western Union."
"Hope it's nothing wrong," her husband said
with some concern.
The ostensible reason for which most people
bought encyclopedias was to brighten the academic
prospects of their children. Harry often returned
to visit families after the books had been in the
home for a year, pretending to make a service
call, "Just to see that everything is fine. 11 The
real purpose of the return call was that families
often rationalized their purchase by selling a
friend or neighbor on the value of having an
encyclopedia. They would mention the fact to
Harry and such hot leads were as good as money
in the bank.
"Coming, 11 came the woman's voice from
behind the door. (Harry had gotten her name as
just such a lead from just such an old customer.)
Harry needed something to do with his hands
and eyes when making these "service-calls. 11 He
had taken to pulling the index volume from the
bookshelf, opening it and regarding it sagely,
while the people gushed that the . children used it
all the time and that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so
were just dying to have a set. They lied about
the value they got fr~m the set. As Harry
opened the index volume it nearly always
crackled freshly--the books hadn't been used.
"Western Union?" the woman said in a
puzzled tone as she opened the door to find Harry
standing there in a lordly pose, dressed to the
teeth. These poor people hardly ever got to
speak with anyone robed and acting like Harry,
and here was such a person calling on them in
their home! But they had worked all their lives
for bosses who in turn worked for people who
dressed and acted like Harry. When he told
them to "sign here, 11 they signed. And it tore
Harry's guts.
"Weston Newman!" sang Harry. "My
district manager, Weston Newman, has asked me
to call on you tonight and not the other night,
whichever night is tonight is better. I'd like to
see your husband. Is he in? 11 Whoever answered
the door, Harry always asked for the other
spouse. That way the one at the door couldn't ask,
"Well, can't you tell me what it's about right
here?"
"Ah ... ah ... " she faltered. "Why, yes, he is
... I... II
"Fine," said Harry taking a step forward,
handing her his hat and striding in. "May I see
him?"
"Who is it, dear?" the husband called from
the living room, providing Harry with his straight
line.
"Why, I'm Harry Riker, 11 answered Harry.
Waving for the woman to follow him, he strode
past her into the living room and grabbed the man
by the hand. "You're Mr. Gwardowski? 11 Harry
had double-checked the name on the mailbox on
his way in.
"Well ... yes, 11 Mr. Gwardowski confessed.
"We're engaged in advertising-educational
work in the area and we've been asked to drop in
on a few families in the neighborhood just to ask
a few questions. That's all right, isn't it?"
The man and woman and two of their children
looked around Harry for the other person or
persons the "we" might refer to.
''Promotional. Advertising-educational,
advertising-educational-promotional. 11 He kept
up the verbal deluge with little care for syntax
and, probably, little need for any.
"Huh?" said man and wife together.
Harry whipped out a black notebook and a pen.
He looked very serious. "Aha!" he said. "And
how old are the children?" Anyone in a suit who
had a black notebook triggered responses of
compliance.
"Uh ... four, seven and, .. twelve, 11 the
woman answered, nearly mesmerized.
"Er ... what is this about, please, if you
don't mind?" the husband managed as a last
futile gesture to the mastery of his own home.
"About twenty minutes to a half hour, to
the minute, 11 Harry sailed on. "There I s
nothing wrong with that, is there? 11
They stood there in a trance. Nothing like
this had ever happened to their minds before.
Not being able to think of anything intrinsically
wrong with twenty minutes or a half hour, they
shook their heads "no. 11
"Fine," Harry said and invited them to sit
19
down together. "Just like when you were first
married," he said, beaming. They smiled
unsurely. In three minutes, having sat them
down s'ide-by-side on their sofa, turned off
their old television set, sent the children from
the room, cleared their coffee table, covered
their floor with brightly colored posters and
broadsides from his briefcase, practically rearranged their living room and talking a blue
streak, he had disoriented them completely.
By the time they had dimly understood any one
thing that he said, he was a few sentences and
more than a few jumps ahead. But it all
sounded so right! They felt privileged and
happy to be there.
Euphoria flowed and the fountain spun.
"And we are authorized," Harry proclaimed as
if authorized by all mankind, "to place a few
sets--a few of these NEW REFERENCE
LIBRARIES--in each neighborhood. As AN
ADVERTISING PREMIUM. (To those families
who can qualify for the program. )"
They sat stunned, their eyes slightly out
of focus. One of their little daughters came
curious into the room.
"Exactly," Harry proclaimed to the little
girl. "Do you know how to go into the kitchen
and bring out a Pepsi-Cola? 11 The little girl
looked wonderingly to her parents who turned,
dazed, to Harry. "0£ course you do, 11 he
awarded her grandly with a wave of his hand in
the general direction of the kitchen. She left
bewildered. Harry knew how to handle a
potential upstager.
He turned to the parents again. "Now we
must ask you: do you feel the slightest doubt
that this magnificent Home Reference Library
would be of use and value to you here in your
home if we were able to place one here?"
This was the crucial point. If they came to at
this juncture, it was all up. I£ not, they were
ninety-nine percent doomed.
"I£ you feel any slightest question, any
doubt anywhere in you, the answer must be no.
Do you feel any doubt anywhere in you? 11
They felt dutifully around inside themselves
and found nothing they could identify, without
doubt, as doubt.
Their eyes careened from poster to poster,
full color gigantic display to full color gigantic
display, all festooned about their living room by
Harry the Wizard. Everything their glances lit
on sang out rapturously, "BOOKS! BEEYOOTIFUL BOOOOKS !"
"Why," they gasped, "why, who wouldn't?"
They were done £or. "Why," Mrs. Gwardowski
breathed, hopping to defend the position they
20
newly found themselves in, "why, £or the children. For school.''
Now changing his field, Harry tore a
prospectus from his briefcase--a distillate
volume, bound to look like each voluµie in the
set but containing the best of the whole twentytwo volumes. It contained only exciting articles
on easy subjects and most of the entire set's
color pictures.
"The prospectus is representative, 11 he
revealed to them in reverent tones, "of what
you'll find in the Reference Library." It was
representative of the whole twenty-two volume
set, all right, but certainly not of any one
ordinary volume. A fine point to be sure, and
if the Gwardowskis missed it... well, there
were so many other wonderful points crying out
to be made.
Harry had the sample volume spread-eagle
on the floor and was jumping up and down on the
binding and pouring coffee on it to show what it
could take. "There's an actual steel plate in
the binding," he crowed, puffing. The
Gwardowskis looked on, thunderstruck. Surely
so awesomely made a thing must be educational
indeed.
Harry sat down and grabbed the beleagured
book by one page, whirled it about. Miraculously the page didn't rip out.
"Sewn into packets ! " he exulted over the
pages.
"And a steel plate in the back, 11 Mrs. Gwardowski murmered.
"Waterproof and scuff-proof. 11 Harry ran a
handkerchief down the cover and wiped the coffee
clean away.
"Four-color color pictures and maps that
don't get lost in the binding," Mrs. Gwardowski
exhaled, repeating one of Harry's psalms.
"Educational, promotional."
"Promotional, advertisinal," the Gwardowskis replied.
"Promotional-Educational- Libra rial.''
Harry led.
"Advertisinal-Librarial-Referential," they
chanted together.
"HOME-REFERENTIAL," Harry cheered,
practically in orgasm.
They paused. Mr. Gwardowski found himself struggling with an urge to say "Amen. 11
The Gwardowskis' young daughter crept in
wide-eyed from the kitchen. "There isn't any
coke, 11 she said, barely audible. "There's six
cans of Daddy's beer .•.. "
They looked to Harry for forgiveness.
"Would you care for a beer?" Harry offered.
They began to nod and sway indecisively. "When
we 're done then, 11 he supplied.
They grasped at it gratefully, "Yes." Their
eyes shone with relief. "When we're done."
Harry knew he could start counting his
chickens. He told them of the ten-year program
they were about to enter into. The set would be
placed with no charge. Not "free." That was a
bad word. (Local Better Business Bureaus
tended to think so too when they heard about its
being used. ) But as an ADVERTISING PREMIUM, Only the absolutely gratis yearbooks and
Reference-Research Service cost a thing.
"Two-ninety-eight a year. For mailing and
handling, You know, 'Lickin' and stickin'
charges,' 11 Harry lied, The yearbooks cost twoninety-eight a year. Postage paid, Plain and
simple.
And the wonderful Reference-Research, As
long as the program was in effect the company
would use its vast research facilities to answer
the Gwardowskis' questions, would send genuine
research reports on how to lay a brick fireplace
through college or get ahead in the world or
remove unsightly facial hair or those horrid age
spots. And it would cost the Gwardowskis
nothing. Only thirty dollars a year, fifty-seven
cents a week. For ten years. If it would be any
hardship, if it would take any bread off the table
(a mere fifty- seven cents?), or milk out of the
icebox, they shouldn't.
"No, no, it wouldn't be a hardship." Mr.
Gwardowski was very conscious of his role as
provider,
"Coin bank? 11 Mrs. Gwardowski asked as
Harry held one up.
"Absolutely. Each nickel you put in here in
the slot ... here ... moves the date up on the little
calendar on the front ... See?" Harry put in a
nickel, His long-outraged insides began to boil
over.
"Oh, yes," agreed Mrs, Gwardowski, full
of hopeless savvy, "coin bank."
They got to pay for all ten years in only two
years if they were very, very good.
"And the company will let us take care of it
all in only two years? 11 Mrs. Gwardowski
chanted, enraptured.
"And the bookkeeping costs are credited
back to us?" Mr. Gwardowski echoed Harry
worshipfully.
"Only if you qualify, 11 Harry pontificated.
(A straight three-hundred-dollar conditional
sales contract, two-year term. Nobody ever
got to take it over ten years. If a family
insisted on it and couldn't be "converted" to a
two-year basis, they were telephoned the next
day "from the Home Office" and told that they
didn't qualify for the program, )
"Dammit, No!" Harry stood up, not
knowing quite why. "You can't have it!" This
could have been the most effective sales technique in the history of bookmen, But Harry
meant it,
"But, Mr, Riker, we'll do anything to
qualify."
"We'll be a wonderful advertising family."
"Advertisinal-promotional," they pleaded.
Harry grabbed all his posters in a few
sweeps of his left hand, stood up and tore his
full-color displays with his right, "It's all
hokum!"
"No, .. 11 they protested. "Educational!"
Their minds and hearts nearly burst.
"It I s a gyp."
"No!"
Harry stuffed all his paraphernalia into his
bulging bag. "A crooked, shyster gyp! 11 he
cried. "The ads I showed you from the New
York Times are even crooked, The books don't
really sell normally for five hundred dollars,
That's only with leather bindings! Look at the
small print under the books in the ad."
"No, .. " they persisted. "You're testing us
to see if we're a good advertising family."
"It's a fraud!" Harry screamed.
"No! 11 they wept in crescendo, "No!" If it
had never been clear to Harry that no one can be
had who has no larceny in his own heart, it was
clear now,
"Free Books, eh? Is that what you want?
FREE BOOKS?"
"GET OUT," Mr. Gwardowski screamed
back desperately. He was shattered. Harry
grabbed his accouterments and stamped to a
righteous threshold,
"Free? HA!" He slammed the door behind
him.
Tears stood bright on Mr. and Mrs. Gwardowski's faces. Timidly, their daughter came
over to them from behind the cold television set
and helped them cry. Mr. Gwardowski put an
arm around his child and they stood there, betrayed, looking at the absence of Harry. "You're
no Advertisinal-Promotional-Educational, 11 Mrs.
Gwardowski sobbed to the slammed door.
chapter xvi
Irena died in an ecstatic agony that would
have delighted her conscience had there been
room in her mind for anything but sheer,
screeching pain.
The hospital halls slowly fell silent when it
was over. Little sounds that ticked and clinked
21
found themselves out alone. Then, movement by
movement, the bustle of the late afternoon began
again, hesitantly as it does when a well-meaning
but over-stayed caller has finally gone. After
the baptism, Christos, for all the deaths he had
seen, hurried down the hallway to the x-ray
development room and lost his stomach into a
four-foot stainless steel sink. Irena's stillborn
was wrapped up neatly.
Jawor and Kossak found Nikolas in the back
seat of an old faint-blue car in the hospital lot;
he was playing with cigarette butts in a dirty
ashtray and saying nothing. It had stopped
snowing and grey evening flakes lay on things,
cold and dry. Kossak's hand stuck to the door
handle for a moment as he got in with Jawor
behind him. He sat turned-around behind the
steering wheel. Jawor, wool shirt buttoned up
over nose and mouth, leaned his elbows on the
seat back. They watched Nikolas play.
Nikolas looked up at them for a moment,
friendly still, despite their betrayal. Their
betrayal and that of everyone else who was
simply supposed to see to it that everything
like this did not happen.
"She's gone, Nikolas," Kossak told him,
making it official.
Nikolas looked inquisitively to Jawor who
said nothing, then to Kossak again.
"The baby too. They didn't save either one
of them." They didn't have to say they were
sorry. Nikolas seemed to absorb the outcome of
things. They watched him as he took his fingers
out of the ashtray, folded his hands in his lap
as he sat back, looked pleasantly ahead and
went quietly, perfectly insane. There passed
over Kossak and Jawor the impulse to wave
good-by. Jawor, who practically never talked,
seemed nevertheless to want to do something
to help. With hesitation, he stuck a calloused
thumb in the ashtray and took over Nikolas' job
of stirring up the cigarette butts. Looking down
past the ashtray as he sat there like that, one
arm over the seat back, he could see Nikolas'
heavy-shod feet, thick with mud. He began to
wonder where on the frozen hospital grounds
Nikolas had found mud to track in, then let the
thought go.
Ancient Kossak, only partly present, began
to talk of the mines, of days when a strong man
could earn his self-respect. When poverty was
a sign of unwiUingness to work and a man could
earn his daily pride with his back. He talked
of the days when they had all been younger.
When they had crawled deep in the black rock
and delivered the coal from its beds. When
beams and shorings had broken at times and men
had the privilege of dying from the outside in.
22
Jawor's powerful old hand, wrinkled and rough,
dug in the ashtray and Nikolas li;,oked pleasantly
ahead. A rim of water stood on his lower
eyelid, none falling.
An hour later, in the last light of evening,
a slight, strawberry blond young man in cordovan shoes took a taxi home. He had just
finished his day's duties as an intern and he
hadn't even tried asking them to get out of his
car. They sat on all the seats and door sills,
shivering in the cold. The intern had recognized
a voice buzzer in one man's hand and noted that
he wasn't bothering to hold it to his throat as
he talked. The form of a priest had held a
crucifix in one hand and, in his other, the hand
of a man who sat absolutely still. A granitecomplected figure looked up for a moment,
then lowered its snowy head to watch the ground.
It seemed to the intern as if eight or nine
figures of funerary statuary had assembled
themselves in the growing dark. He was very
glad not to be one of them.
Inside the monument, a few low voices
tolled.
"· .. trading the present for God knows
what. Selling today for what can't even be
called tomorrow. Trading it off for 'eternal
life'--a tenuous thing that draws on living life
for its existense and sucks it dry. 11
" ... then your father---rest his soul--and Ostrowski--they knew that section of the
level was going to collapse--they fed that canary
dried-out seed and water. So the bird bloated
up inside and fell over dead. So the company
had to take us all out for coal gas. They thought!
And truth was, near the whole end of that section
did fall in ! "
The dark was complete by the time Christos
had finished delivering his last ungiven sermon
--his first ever delivered--in a low voice to his
crucifix. The Prime Minister continued to
explain without sound to Nikolas why Irena and
the new baby were gone and yet everything was
the way it was supposed to be, And Jawor told
them of their days in the mines. They knew it
all by heart, but he wasn't supposed to stop on
that account. Of what Christos said, no one
understood a word. Most of them thought he was
praying.
chapter xvii
Dear Father Andreas,
A word with you, if I may, about your
duties. That is, about those duties which you
have taken on yourself and those which are yours
already but which you seem disposed to forget.
Am I right in understanding that there was a
morning recently on which no Mass was offered
in Dunham while Dunham's priest spent the
night and morning in a bar? I hear it was a wake.
Is this so? This kind of neglect or contempt for
responsibility cannot be tolerated, as I am sure
you can understand. There was a considerable
number oj. novenas interrupted that day, as I
am more than amply informed.
As to the state of your own conscience
concerning the matter, I am sure that you will
take or have taken that up with your confessor.
On the administrative side of things, I am
afraid that I shall be compelled to take decisive
action should such performance be repeated.
I understand further that you are airing,
publicly, dissatisfaction with various points of
Church Doctrine. May I ask what you are
about? Don't you realize that your people
need to be able to look to you as a constant
touchstone to spiritual stability? They are not
equipped to handle such abstruse philosophical
niceties as might be generating the problems you
seem to be wrestling with now. Are you sure
that your fond hyperaesthesia does not mask an
indulgence in spiritual pride? Do remember that
you are not up there to conduct a seminar with
those people.
From what I can gather from Monsignor
Maugham, you see death and squalor there and
say to yourself that this is real and hence Our
Lord cannot care. Then you see the joy of a
wedding or birth and lament that it is all so
transitory. Pardon me, Father, but are you in
a state of theological doubt or in a funk?
You wrote Monsignor Maugham asking, I
believe (under the circumstances it cannot be
considered that he broke any trust with you),
whether it is proper to entertain doubts. What
is going on in your mind? Our Lord entertained
doubts and overcame them. If doubt and temptation arise that are beyond you, let us know, in
Our Lord's Name. We are here to help you.
Come to us. (This is not a directive--yet.) If
you feel you need a retreat, say so. We 111 try
to work something out in early spring.
You are there to minister to your people's
spiritual needs. There is no question that you
will inevitably become involved in their lives
to an important extent. But you are not to
become so involved as to become part of their
problems. Are you giving strength to those
people--or drawing it from them? As you may
imagine, I have heard from the director of the
hospital there, as well as from the civic
authorities, concerning your political and other
activities. It sounds as if your behavior
borders on a breach of the peace.
Try to remember that you are not running
for office.
Administer the Holy Sacraments, give your
people comfort and let it go at that. You're not
to be Apostle to the Coal Fields at the expense
of your daily mission.
Yours in Our Savior,
Edward Harrigan, Bishop
chapter xviii
The year turned dark as it died. For days
after Irena I s extinction, the air in Dunham had
for miles around had been hot and grisly,
churning slowly and settling out in grime. It
reeked of sulphur as if a peeved Hell had lifted
its scut and farted out its internal vapors as
liberated souls winged their ways upwards. It
was the year of the black snow.
A thermal inversion had trapped whole atmospheres of floating filth beneath a high, dense
layer of cold air. Daytime visibility dwindled to
a few dozen yards, and hundreds lay sweating
and gasping for breath. Food spoiled and mouths
tasted bitter. Irena had to be buried a day early.
Then the cold came. The termal inversion
re-inverted; warm bitter gases parted and high
hard arctic air poured down into the valley,
mixing like t~e flush of a pot from an igloo.
Harry and his car coughed and choked as he
egged it on to its uphill limit of forty miles per
hour.
He peered through a frosted windshield,
clawing at the knobs of his radio as he drove.
What came across as music sounded like a
regiment of dying mice; a rhythm undercurrent,
cattle having their brains clubbed out. Gratefully, he found a news broadcast. Hands back
on the wheel, working at keeping the whole
business on the slippery road, he grimaced.
Icy fumes, drifting above the ground at
about lung-level, corrupted the snow, making it
black, poisonous, sour. Harry thought he had
never seen anything so vile.
Harry's car threatened to curl up in a snowbank till Spring. "Oil, 11 Harry promised it.
"Oil and antifreeze. 11 Tempted, perhaps, it
kept going.
Harry's upper part was warmed in the blast
of his new thirty-five-dollar special experimental model car heater, which would ordinarily
sell for one hundred forty-five dollars but which
he had gotten at that amazingly low price as an
advertising premium. His feet grew numb.
23
Harry ate his liver over his newly reawakened sense of the unsavory in his operations.
He recalled Christos' views on the subject.
"Look, Harry, 11 Christos had said, "I told you if
you use your talents, you're crazy to be
ashamed. If you want to worry about something,
help me worry about the mines and the rotten
state the people in this poor damn town are in.
Or how I'm going to face Nikolas upstairs. I've
been dodging him for days. 11 Christos had lit a
cigarette which already had a light. "Ever
since Irena died, I sneak in and out of here like
a frigging thief. 11
Harry had said nothing.
"Or stand on that chair and read me the
'phone book while I worry about the Man Upstairs.
Look, I'd buy one of your damn sets if the
rectory didn't already come with an old set. 11
"Oh, it's worth the money," Harry conceded.
"I might have bought one myself. If they hadn't
given me a repossessed set as a prize for selling
eight sets in a week."
"Placing," Christos had corrected.
"Huh?"
"Placing eight sets. As advertising premiums. Remember? 11
"See? Even you. 11
Harry had been supposed to laugh. "A
joke ... ho, ho? 11
Harry didn't see it. "If I sell this way, I'm
acting a lie. "
"Listen, Anus-Eyes, you think you've got
hornets in your head! If you can't take it, get
out of it. Don't puke your psyche out on me. 11
Harry took the opening. " I f ~can't take it,
why don't you get out of it and stop puking out
your psyche on you? 11
Christos plucked an ouzo bottle from his
desk and started for Harry. Harry picked up
Weltschmerz from the floor and held him
against his chest.
A moment passed. "I can't strike a dumb
animal, " Christos averred, looking past the dog
and directly at Harry.
"You shouldn't throw your booze around
like that, 11 Harry handed back, pointedly
remarking with his glance the half-emptiness of
the bottle.
"Only a coward would hide behind a skirt. 11
The dog, unaccustomed to being heaved
around by his middle, broke wind.
"What skirt? 11 Harry looked at
Weltschmerz. "What skirt?"
Christos began to circle.
"Take it easy, 11 Harry suggested edgily.
Christos continued to circle. "Come out
from behind that dog. "
They stood facing each other for a moment.
Christos I arm went slack and he laughed. The
24
bottle hung down at his side. Face straight up,
eyes closed, he stood on the floor and howled
at the ceiling. Harry began to chuckle, too.
He put the dog down and chuckled, looking at
Christos whose face had come down from the
ceiling. His eyes were open, wet and black,
crying and laughing. He tossed the bottle
into the magazine rack.
"I've got to get out of here, Harry."
Harry had stopped chuckling. He stood
alone and then made his way down to the
telephone at the Corner Bar to call an old
flame who was never in.
Harry's talents lay in the plausible impossible. The disadvantageous, not the deadly.
Peanuts to anteaters, sandwiches to tigers.
Benevolent illusions, even if the index volumes
did crack freshly when he examined them.
Therefore he was crazy to be ashamed.
Christos was right, Harry realized. He was
not crazy, but he was ashamed.
Now he drove and chewed his animadversions slowly. Among other things to be
ashamed of, he was ashamed of not selling a
set to the Gwardowskis, He had walked out on
his duty. So he ate his liver over that. Reaching the top of the hill he saw the horizon throw
up. Down and away before him, a dung hole
fit for dung hole rats. Populated by people.
Harry applied the brakes and skidded into
the snowbank at the entrance to Nikolas 1
driveway.
"You sound like Heaume, 11 Christos had said.
"Who? 11
"A friend. He told me to get out of it too. "
"I didn't say that. 11
"You did. "
"All right, I did. But I didn 1 t mean it. 11
"You're both right. I should."
Harry regarded Christos newly. "You're
going to quit? As a priest? I didn't know they
could. 11
"Not very well. But I'm not. I can't. 11
Harry wasn't so sure he believed Christos,
Though having no faith of his own, Harry had
seen what it was. He could see Christos I plight.
Stuck protecting others I grip on a faith he had
lost himself. A perfect fraud produced by an
attempt at perfect honesty. Harry shuddered.
At least if he ever got fed up, really fed up,
he could always sell shoes.
Light was going from the sky but no lamps
were lit in Nikolas I house when Harry got there.
Snow blew into drifts against the unwarmed porch
and walls the way it does against a shack or
woodshed. Rattles on the door and window panes
echoing through the house as Harry pounded
brought no response. Still, he had an idea that
Nikolas was in there.
"Nikolas, 11 he called. Nothing. "Nikolas. 11
Still nothing. More pounding and rattling on the
door. "Nikolas, I know you're in there. Let
me in.''
There was a pause. Then a voice croaked
from the inside, "Mister Nikolas."
Harry went along with it. "All right, Mister
Nikolas." No one had seen Nikolas for days.
Another pause. "Mister Riker," the voice
answered. When Nikolas hadn't shown up for
Irena's f:uneral, early though it was, there had
been a search for him. Bundled up forms by the
dozens had tramped cold sidestreets of the town
and crossed hills and fields of slush. Dunham
had looked like a disturbed anthill as great
wooly grubs poked slowly about.
Till now, no one had thought to look for
Nikolas in his house. After all, it was miles
away and empty, with no coal for heat. No one
in his right mind would have gone there. "No,
I'm Mister Riker," Harry yelled.
"I'm Mister Riker, 11 the voice mimicked.
Wind began to get to Harry through his topcoat.
"All right, 11 Harry yelled. "You're Mister
Riker."
There was another long wait. Then,
11 Let me in, 11 called the voice from the inside,
Harry began to know how people he sold books
to felt.
"You let me in, " Harry replied.
"I won't let you in till you stop hitting my
door,"
Harry stopped pounding. The minutes went
by. It became clear to Harry slowly that he had
been had. Nikolas was not going, to let him in,
He had effectively silenced Harry's pounding without giving away anything in return. But Harry
was conversant with cant. "Weston Newman!" he
called. His toes started to change color.
"Weston Newman, 11 Nikolas answered
imitating Harry perfectly but horribly. Moving
things onto the territory of the plausible absurd
didn't work this time. Nikolas insane was a
native there.
Nikolas came to the door and began pounding,
pleading to be let in, "You ~ i n , " Harry called,
called, nearing exasperation, "Come out!"
Nikolas pounded and pled. "Nikolas, you'll die in
there if you stay. You'll freeze."
"Please let me in, 11 Nikolas begged.
Harry tried another tack. "Let me out! 11 he
cried. It didn't work,
"Let us in," Nikolas wept. "Let us both in."
"You'll die if you stay in there, 11 Harry
repeated. "You '11 freeze! 11 Harry wasn't kidding;
he wondered that Nikolas hadn't frozen already.
Then Harry grew. Just a little, but just
enough. "You'll catch cold, 11 he warned. There
was a long pause with complete silence from the
inside, Then the latch clicked and, wrapped and
encumbered in blankets, Nikolas came out.
chapter xix
"Well, I've got him," Harry announced,
poking his head inside the front of the Corner Bar.
"Where was he? 11 Dan asked from behind the
taps.
"At home. 11 Harry paused for a moment and
looked at the old wooden floor. "He says he's
been in bed with his wife. 11 The men in the barroom were very silent.
"Well, bring him in."
"I can't. "
"You can't?"
"He's stuck. 11 And so he was. Swaddled in
all his blankets, Nikolas was wedged into Harry's
right front seat.
"Stuck? 11 Dan asked. All eyes rested on
Harry who began to let go his hold on coherent
speech.
"In car stuck, 11 Harry explained. "Blankets.
Car blankets stuck. Nikolas." Nothing unraveled
Harry more than being suddenly called on to
explain something to more people than he could
look in the eye at one time to judge how he was
doing. The eyes on Harry waited patiently for
him to reassemble himself.
The Prime Minister put his voice buzzer to
his throat. "Well, if he's stuck, let's unstick
him, " he ground out. Several others rose and
followed him to the door, moving around Harry.
Janowski began rolling up his sleeves as he went.
Seeing that he had gotten his message across in
as much detail as he was going to, Harry
turned and followed them out.
At Harry's car it all became clear. Nikolas
was jammed into the front seat like a great
morose pupa. He was nearly prostrate from
heat. Harry's new heater had only two settings:
Off and Full. Nikolas looked pleasantly at the
men who tried to pry him out. For months Harry
had propped his front seat up with lumber. The
bolts had rusted out of the floorboards and any one sitting in the front seat was dumped without
warning into the back. So they knocked out the
lumber, then retrieved Nikolas from Harry's
back seat, having to roll him, practically, from
the car. Nikolas remained placid. Once he
mentioned the name "Maria."
With Nikolas jimmied out and established
25
at his table in the back, Harry and Dan found
time a few moments later to pass a word. Most
of the others were still.
"No, I don't have any idea how he got out
there," Harry said. "I couldn't get much out of
him on the way back. He started screaming at
one point. "
"Did he tell you anything?" Dan asked.
"I mean, can he hear and see you? 11
"He didn't say much, but he talks to me.
And he looks at me, too. I think it's mostly
Father who disappeared. Say, where is Father?
I ought to go tell him to stop hunting."
"Way ahead of you," Dan told him, filling his
glass. "He must have gotten there right after
you left. He telephoned while you were all
busting the wood out of the back of your car. 11
Harry picked up an egg and began shelling it.
"He's back at the rectory, 11 Dan continued.
"Funny you didn't see him on the road."
"Oh, I don't know. I went the long way
round and got pulled over by a cop."
"Ya don't say? What for? Speeding?"
Dan flashed a broad grin. "I always thought the
only speed limit your car could break was a red
light, II
"No. Jaywalking. "
"What? Yeah, sure. 11
"No, really.
Jaywalking. 11
The light snow was completely gone from
the sky outside. Dan reached over to a switch
and flicked on the strings of Christmas lights.
With the black funeral bunting, they hung over
the length of the bar. Responding to several sets
of raised eyebrows, Dan moved down the bar
and refilled a few glasses, made change and
returned to where Harry sat. He picked up a
beer pretzel and bit into it, leaning his elbows
on the bar.
"That's right," Harry repeated. "Jaywalking. II
Dan regarded him, waiting for more.
"What I really got stopped for was running
a red light," Harry admitted. "Or a stop sign
anyway. But before you know it the cop was
grilling me on jaywalking. "
"Jaywalking?"
"Jaywalking. "
"Where was this again?"
"Down in the city. I came the long way.
Didn't want to risk the Long Hill Road. Father
must have come up the Long Hill with his jeep.
He's got some pretty good snow tires on that
thing.''
"So how about jaywalking? In your car?"
"No, that's all there is, 11 Harry shrugged.
"He hates jaywalkers. 11
26
"What?"
"Really. He hates jaywalkers. After I
told him my car skidded on the snow he didn't
seem to mind me going through the stop sign.
He said it could happen to anyone. He just
wanted to know if I was a jaywalker. He hates
jaywalkers. "
"Was he kidding? 11 Dan finished his pretzel.
"I don't know. I don't think so. He says
they're filthy. Maybe it's a problem down in
the city. "
''Mmmmm.''
"I've seen this guy before. When Father
got beat up a while back. Maybe you know him.
He's got a partner who talks funny. Like he has
a mouthful of mush. "
"No, I don't know him, but I'll watch out
for him if I'm down there. 11
"You can probably do anything you like so
long as you're not a jaywalker. He hates jaywalkers. 11
"Yeah," Dan replied. "So you said.
How'd you convince him you weren't one?"
"I didn't. Well, I did and I didn't. Just
when he really got going on it, that was when
Nikolas started screaming. I think Nikolas
scared him. So I told him Nikolas was screaming because he hated jaywalkers. 11
"Oh? II
"He seemed to like that a lot. He said he
was glad to see citizens aware like that. "
"Oh, " said Dan, looking thoughtful. "I
wonder what will happen ·to Maria. "
"I don't know. She's doing all right for now
out at Curley's. Besides, Nikolas isn't that
crazy. He was out there alone, sure, but he was
wrapped in every blanket in the house when I
found him--remember that. He may be crazy,
but he's not stupid." Harry's thought changed.
"Did Father say if he was coming over?"
"No, I think he is going to stay over at the
rectory. He's at the rectory, you know."
"Yeah,. you said that. "
"He saw your fresh tire tracks and footprints
out there in the snow and figured out what must
have happened. You want to call him?"
"Mmmmmm," Harry agreed noncommittally.
"He sounded like he was stewing over things
--you know, Nikolas, Irena, the fires and caveins in the mines and all. He mentioned that
Rhinoceros guy down in the city. You know ...
everything. "
"I know. 11
"That's all I could get, except--! don't get
this--he says No Man is hurting him."
"No man?"
"No, he said it more like it was a name:
'No Man.' " D
With the day and night houses, exaltation and dejection,
This is the way I live now.
No Micronesians committed suicide here,
or sacrificed children
dot
extends, becomes a
piece
of white flannel, peach chiffon, or a
~learn of a diamond
in the morning I awake and
my head and ears
begin to pound .
My past life is, among other things, a record of various coffeemakers ,
Packed with ,mnoth muscle , everywhere
This is the season of
PLANET ARY
CONFIGURATIONS
and
Crisp romaine
but she eats differently from anyone else.
magic was accomplished at night,
IN ROOFTOP OBSERVATORY
She dreamed as soon as she went to sleer
tbat
no sa" s \\ ere allo\, ed to Louch
the \\ ood .
Sherry
millt\ er
riehard sloat
NEW YORK
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heverlee hughes
richard hoffman
IN MY DREAM
FEELING ESPECIALLY:
FORM FOR AN EPITAPH
In my dream the dead wake.
They open their eyes
to the sound of loss,
to the broken touch
of ones they have loved in life,
to the sad personal splendour
of flowers and prayers.
They smile to test
this fragile resurrection.
Never have they known a thing
so sweet, so beautiful.
They ease themselves out of their
caskets, surprised at their bodies
covered in solemn black.
Then they dance around the room
inches above the floor and because
they have died they know the value
of space and the suddenness of silence.
They move to their loved ones and embrace.
In my dream I am the only one afraid.
Gradually, valiantly,
he imagined sense of it,
making a death he could die into
slowly. That was his style.
michael h. williams
leroy v. quintana
ASSURANCE
THE MASONIC
CEMETERY
"The bathroom light is on the left!"
One day NAME was feeling especially
confused, probably because he was quite
concerned about his SITUATION with regard to
his SOMETHING OR OTHER which he
loved more than anything else. The thing
he hated was when EVENT time after time,
making him feel, like today, especially
confused, probably because he was quite
concerned about his SITUATION with regard to
his SOMETHING OR OTHER which he
loved more than anything else.
the masonic cemetary
is a special cemetary
where only masons
can be buried
but i as sure you
that those lying there
are quite dead,
nevertheless
THE RAIN
the rain
a thousand cats
walking by
together
30
emilie glen
PROPERLY
PONYTAIL
Tyranny of tea,
Myra's tea,
American gone British,
She scolds me for the desecration
Of arriving ten minutes early,
Four is to tea
As midnight to Cinderella,
Her ponytail swings
It swings
From the stretcher
Borne bier along the boardwalk
Lifeguards in sun orange
Cortege of the curious
Body blue dead
Ponytail
in iridescent strands
Swinging as if she were running along
Who is with her
To catch up her hair
Swinging
swinging
A bell on the breeze
In out of
Do your own thing,
Street of sun scraps
I dilate my pupils to tealight
About bibelots
From her lost Devonshire estate,
Tunnel back thirty years or more
To Mary Janes not quite touching the rug,
Before steeping
she passed
The Lapsang Souchong around for its bouquet,
A bit like creosote and old rubber tires,
Brew worthy of her Meissen,
Sherry and cheese straws on the side table,
My wrist is slapped with a fan
When I make an unstructured move
Toward the cheese straws,
No no the petit fours with tea come first
Tea served at four yet outside time,
Enter into tea
As into the blooming of a cactus flower,
But you're scattering crumbs,
Spread your napkin instead of rolling it into a ball,
Think yourself into a Chinese prinJ
Like this fisherman sleeping under the moon
In his boat among bamboo shoots,
I slip into the little green boat of child,
And curl asleep among the tea leaves,
Touched by the golden wand of cheese straws
31
stephen dixon
THE KILLER
Falling feet first in the air I get the feeling
if I wanted to save myself I could simply flap
my arms and fly back to the bridge. Fly in
loops and all kinds of stunts around the bridge,
in fact. In fact, if I could fly like that I don't
think I'd want to die that fast. I'd first fly to
wherever in whatever way I wanted to and then
die by flying someplace I could only die by
flying to. I flap my arms. I start to fly. I fall
in the river. But I'm not dead yet. I'm zipping
further down in the water like a heavy spear but
more like a sleek fish. I don't mind drowning
but I wouldn't want to drown that fast if I could
swim for a while like a fish. I'd swim to the
ocean's floor and see its strangest sea creatures and rock formations and flora and then
when I'd seen enough I'd kill myself some way
like swimming deep when I knew I didn't have
the breath to get back to the top in time. Or
else off a huge waterfall to jagged rocks below
or I don't know but somehow like a fish when
I no longer wanted to swim.
I try to swim and start but stop because I
can't and give myself up to drowning, but pop
out of the water like a stick and onto my back.
Somehow I made it to the top, though I didn't
want to. I didn't even want to hit the water
alive from the bridge. I wanted to die in the
air as I thought people did when they jump from
so high a height, as I was sure if the free fall
didn't kill me the impact of my body against
water would. Maybe the way I fell stopped me
32
from being suffocated in the jump, and the way I
landed- -there was barely a splash- -stopped me
from being smashed. But I survived and I'm now
unable to sink. This river is near the ocean
and this ocean might be depositing a lot of its
salt in this part of the river, and that salt bed,
if it's called that, might be keeping me afloat.
But I could be wrong as I know as much about
oceanography, if that is the science that deals
with ocean salts accumulating in the river I s
delta or basin or whatever the right term is for
that river area the ocean flows into making it
even saltier than the ocean, as I do about
aerophysics, if that is the science that deals
with the speed of sixteen feet per second or is
it thirty-two that an object falls at once it
reaches its maximum speed if there are no
obstacles hampering its fall.
I let myself go all over as I do when I want
to completely relax myself, but I still can't sink.
It would be nice, though not as nice as swimming
like a fish or flying with my arms as my wings,
to float around like this for as long as I want,
though only if I was able to navigate myself
and at a considerably faster speed. But I am
able to float, as I wasn't able to swim or fly, so
maybe I should float out to the ocean and somehow across it and then after a long journey down
all those foreign coastlines but more realistically down our domestic ones, to find some way
to kill myself by floating, such as floating up a
river to where the ocean's salt line ends but
making sure when I start sinking that I'm right
in the middle of this very wide river so there'd
be no chance the current could carry me alive
to land.
I try to float faster by kicking my feet but
really can't get up sufficient speed to make
floating interesting enough to want to stay
alive for, so I turn over on my stomach with my
head in the water to drown. But by some
natural means or I don't know what I'm
immediately flipped over on my back. I turn
over and try to swim, thinking maybe the force
of my strokes and kicks will keep me on my
belly long enough to swallow enough water to
drown, but I'm flipped right over and floating
on my back. Now what animal or insect do I
remind myself of and in what environment
does this animal or insect's automatic flippingover movement take place? The closest
recollection I can think of is that of a dead fish
in stagnant water being prodded onto its stomach
by a hand-held stick but once the stick's
removed flips right back over to one of its
sides. And what science would deal with the
phenomenon of my being flipped over
involuntarily and when I in fact fight hard as I
can against being flipped? Probably oceanography again, if that science I thought dealt
with accumulated sea salts and deltas happens
to actually be oceanography.
I turn over on my stomach and while I'm
being flipped back I gulp a mouthful of water,
thinking if I do this enough times I' 11 have
swallowed enough water to drown. But the
moment I'm on my back again I cough the water
up. I try this maneuver again and again but
not even a small portion of water will stay past
my throat.
It seems I'll never have my way in this
water and I'll have to float like this till one of
the river's many boats picks me up or I'm
washed to shore. And either way if I'm found
I'll be pampered with warm drinks and blankets
and eventually word will get back to some newsroom and I'll be made into this dumb folk hero
who nature kept alive despite his strongest
wishes and actions to take his life, making it
even tougher for me in the future to find a quiet
solitary way to die. What I should do is backstroke to some remote shore before daybreak
comes, get back to the bridge and my car and
find some way to kill myself where there'd be
no chance I'd survive.
But which way is shore? It's either east
or west, if I'm still in the river, or north if
the current's carried me past the river points
into the ocean. And if I'm in the ocean and
swim to shore as if I'm in the river, I'll be
on my back all evening without reaching land,
always parallel to shore though perhaps progressively further away from it if the tide
pulls me that way, and so tired by daybreak
that I won't have the strength to bac~stroke to
shore once I sight it or out of range of a wouldbe rescue boat. And if I'm still in the river
and backstroke to shore as if I'm in the ocean,
I'll be swimming all night up the river, also too
tired to swim to shore once I see it or away
from a passing boat. The best thing is to float
till daylight comes, conserving my energy for
the time when I'm able to see where I am.
I close my eyes. Sleep would strengthen me
further and even seems possible. But if I'm now
in the ocean I might float too far out to swim back
to land. I'll wind up floating along till a boat
discovers me or I starve to death. Starving
to death seems the better of those two possi bilities, but how can I be sure I won't be rescued
hours before I'm about to die? Then I'll be
rushed to shore and hospitalized till I recover
and hounded by reporters and a hero-hungry
public and the police who'll want to know what I
was doing in the ocean in the first place and how
come my car was found by the bridge and
several types of scientists who'll want to know
all the scientific reasons why I was able to
survive my jump and stay so many hours if not
days afloat, making it even more unlikely I'll
find for the present the necessary privacy to end
my life.
I decide to swim to shore as if I'm now
in the ocean. That way, if I'm actually in the
river and found there before I reached shore,
I'll probably be considered no more than another
ordinary man saved from a routine drowning,
rather than the celebrity I could easily be turned
into if I was found floating and dying way out in
the ocean. And if I'm really in the ocean, then
by backstroking to shore I'll either reach shore,
by daybrea·k be closer to shore than if I didn't
swim to it, or somewhere in the river between
two shores if I now by some luck happen to be
in the ocean at the river's mouth.
To find land, which is north of the ocean, I
have to find the North Star. And to find that
star I'll have to first find the Big Dipper, as
one of the few things I know about the science of
astrology is that the top front ladle star of the
Big Dipper points directly to the bright North
Star. And to find the Big Dipper I'll have to
find both Dippers to see which is the larger of
the two, because for all I know the Little Dipper
might also have a bright star off its top front
ladle star.
I float several complete circles, but all I
can come up with is a single Dipper. And it
33
isn't a very large Dipper either, as I remember
the Big Dipper seasonally getting, and though I
forget if the Big Dipper gets as large as I
remember it getting in the summer or winter, I
am sure it's one of those two seasons. If the
Big Dipper gets very large in the summer,
then the Dipper I'm looking at and which does
have a bright star off its top front ladle star
would be the Little Dipper, which I know
gets proportionally larger during the season
the Big Dipper does. And if that medium-sized
Dipper up there is the Little Dipper in its
large summer size, then the bright star off the
ladle star isn't the North Star at all.
Instead of swimming to this bright star,
and I figure it's a fifty-fifty chance that's the
North Star, I take what I consider a sixty-forty
chance to reach land and that's to conserve my
energy till morning by floating to wherever
the tide takes me. By my not swimming I
realize I might be reducing my chances of
drowning, since if I swim all night I might get
so tired that the automatic reflex or survival
instinct or whatever it is physiological that's
keeping me afloat and preventing me from keeping the sea water inside, might stop functioning.
But I float, all the time trying to compensate
for the possible decrease in my drowning
chances by keeping a sharp eye on the sky for
that second Dipper. If I find it I'll be able to
make a positive identification of the North Star,
follow it to land, if I'm in the ocean, or up the
river and then to land, if I'm now in the river
or that part of the ocean in front of the river's
mouth, and eventually get to my car, if it
hasn't been hauled away for my illegal parking
by the bridge, and drive it off a cliff somewhere
or better yet into an air - tight garage where I'd
keep the motor running and asphyxiate myself,
something I would have done instead of jumping
if I hadn't concluded beforehand that the surest
way of successfully killing myself was to jump
from the middle off the south .side of that
particular bridge.
I float all night without locating the second
Dipper. The sun rises and I don't see land, but
now knowing where west is I backstroke till I'm
exhausted in the direction of what, because of
the moving sun, is growing to be less of a
chance of being north or south.
I hear a boat. I see it, swim towards it,
thinking if I get on it I'll pretend to my rescuers
that I fell off my own small boat, ask them to let
me rest in a private room as I'm feeling ill and
extremely tired, and in that room find some
means to kill myself--a knife, scissors, piece
of glass which if it isn't broken I'll break soundlessly, a sheet to hang myself with from a pipe
34
or a sturdy hook overhead if they have one,
I get within a few yards of the boat and yell
for help. A man sees me and runs to the front
of the boat, The boat slows down, turns around,
a rope is thrown to me and I climb onto the deck,
The men who help me up speak a foreign
language I've never heard. They pat my back,
rub my hair, kiss my cheeks, crowd around me.
A man who wears what looks like a captain's hat
runs to me from the front of the boat and throws
hi_s arms around me, lifts me into the air and
grunts and smiles this tremendous joy at having
rescued me. I thank him and place my hands
under my chin in a way which in my country
means I'm sleepy, The captain nods and speaks
to one of his crew. The young man goes below
deck and returns with a trayful of food, "No no,"
I say. I yawn and close my eyes dreamily and
snore, which have to be international sounds and
signs. The captain says "Ah oh" and aends the
young man below deck again, The man returns
with bottles of whiskey and glasses for us all,
The captain raises his glass to me and says
something and they all slug their drinks down,
He puts his hand over my lips to stop me from
drinking to the first toast, but to the second,
fo·urth and .sixth I'm allowed to drink. Then he
escorts me to the pilothouse, points to his
wallet and gestures he'd like to see mine, and
begins speaking into a radio set, the only words
I understand being my three names roundly mispronounced,
I yawn and stretch my arms and mime a man
lying down and plumping a pillow and sticking the
pillow under his head and pulling a blanket up to
his shoulders and falling asleep, and the captain
at the end of my act says "Ah oh" and sends the
young man out of the room. The man returns
with dry clothes and sandals. I put them on and
sit in a chair and feign dozing off, hoping they'll
be as nice as they've been and carry me to a room
so I might sleep more peacefully. A blanket is
tucked around my body. I hear shushing sounds
from the men in the room, After about a half
hour of this I stand and beat my chest to show I'm
fully awake and inhale very deeply as if I'd like
some fresh air and· open the door so I can perhaps find some way of killing myself outside
this room, The captain shakes his head and
finger as if he understands what I want and I'm
going about getting it in the wrong way. He walks
me to a water closet and then to a sink to wash
my face and hands and next to a table where he
orders breakfast served.
After breakfast the captain takes me to his
cabin. He points proudly to many photos on a
wall. One is of the captain and a very handsome
woman in a wedding dress arm in arm. Another
of four beaming children sitting on the grass
with the captain and handsome woman hugging
one another behind them. Another inside a frame
bordered with black ribbon of the captain and
pretty woman and four children sitting on the
grass in front of an elderly couple who are
kissing one another's hands.
The captain offers me the top bunk, a brandy,
pulls curtains over the portholes, gets into
pajamas and bed. In the dark he says something
in his language which I suppose means goodnight
or pleasant dreams. I say "Goodnight and
pleasant dreams" and the room is silent. Only
the boat's motor can be heard. For now I'lljust
have to think and then sleep. Later in the day
I'll try and find some way to take my life. A
sharp fishing knife to slash my wrists and slowly
bleed to death in an out-of-the-way section of the
boat. Or if there is no such section, I'll leap
into the ocean when none of the deck hands are
watching and preferably in the night. Maybe
this part of the ocean doesn't have the salt
accumulation the other part had, if that was the
reason I couldn't sink. Or else maybe the reflex
action or survival instinct or whatever it was
that kept me flipping over and stopped me from
keeping down the water I swallowed won't work
so well this time or at all.
But suppose one of the crew finds me after
I've just slashed my wrists or at the last moment
sees me in the water and jumps in and saves me.
Then they'll know I was in the water to commit
suicide the first time they found me and they'll
lock me in an empty room with my arms bound
behind me and take me to wherever the boat's
going or to my country but certainly hand me over
to the proper authorities who deal with people who
try and kill themselves. I'll be locked up in jail
or in a mental institution till those authorities are
quite sure I won't try and kill myself again. That
might be for weeks, maybe even years, because
who knows what standards are used for releasing
potential suicides in the captain's country or my
own. And if these standards are currently fair
and progressive, how do I know they won't be
reversed and even become retrogressive during
the years of my confinement, meaning, for
example, that what would release me today if
let's say I was interned for the same reasons
five years ago, might in the future because of the
increasing harsher standards get me ten years,
fifteen, maybe life.
Or suppose I manage to get away in the
water without anyone seeing me and another boat
comes along and rescues me no matter how I try
and avoid it, or else I get so sick from starving
to death or frightened of being mauled by sharks
I see or irrationally fearful of sharks I think I
see because of the hallucinations that come to
someone starving to death, that I signal that
boat and it rescues me and the new captain
learns I jumped off another boat and possibly a
bridge and I'm locked up and later handed over
to the proper authorities. Or else this new
captain might not learn of my previous attempts
and I again try to commit suicide by slicing my
wrists or jumping overboard and I'm discovered
with my wrists bleeding or saved a third time
from the ocean or else they don't see me in the
water but for the same reasons of sickness,
sharks or good seamanship I'm rescued and
locked in a cell till I'm handed over to the
proper authorities who deal with people who
repeatedly try and kill themselves. No matter
how liberal the standards are in whatever
country I'm taken to, I still won't be released
because of my three to four consecutive suicide
attempts till the authorities are absolutely sure
I won't try and kill myself again. Which in my
extreme case might mean them removing something from my head which would prevent me
from killing myself. Which would mean living
in a total hell for the rest of my life without
any chance of killing myself though perhaps
with occasional dim ideas I should. Or maybe
the brain operations won't work, as my
jumping and drowning attempts didn't work,
and I'll try in some way to commit suicide
again and this time fail because of my own
panic or weakened condition as a result of
those operations. Or else the authorities
might detect through their tests that I'm going
to try and kill myself again, and they'll order
the doctors to cut deeper, pump me up with
chemicals or alter my genetic code, leaving
me for life as much dead as alive, more dead
than alive, but at least not alive enough to try
and take my life.
I never should have jumped. I should have
worked out my suicide better. I certainly won't
try and kill myself on this boat and possibly
bungle the act, maybe even injuring myself
while I'm doing it to the point where even if no
one finds out about the attempt I'll still end up
physically incapable of making another suicide
try. What I have to do first off is contrive some
foolproof excuse as to what I was doing in the
ocean. Another as to why my car was left near
the bridge. Others to cover the possibility of
my footprints being found there or my being
seen on the bridge. And once the press, public
and authorities and scientists are done with me
after I get to land, I must resign myself to
living a quiet, modest though noticeably content
life until the next time I try. O
35
mare grabler
MAN A.ND BEA.ST
margaret a. robinson
THE GRADY GAZETTE
.
Windyhill Farm
East Wapping, Mass.
December 1, 1975
Dear Friends,
It seems like only yesterday that I was
taking pen in hand to catch you up on the doing of
all the Gradys and send you our very warmest
wishes for the holiday season and the new year.
As usual, time has flown and so much has
happened that it will be hard to sum it all up,
especially since Miss Burns, Herb's secretary
who types the Gazette for us, has asked me to
squeeze all the family news into five pages. Of
course sharing our news is not nearly so important as sending you our love and heartfelt
appreciation of the many friendships that have
sustained us through the years. But many of you
have told me how much you enjoy reading all
about our activities and that you don't mind
receiving a mimeographed letter at all--and
38
really it is the only solution since our list has
grown to several hundred names. So I will do
my best.
After a wonderful family Christmas last
year, the year settled down to the more usual
pace of life around Windyhill Farm during the
winter months. It's always sad to have the
chicks depart, but Herb and I have plenty to
keep us busy. Herb is still Chief Designer for
Wilcox Machines, Inc., loves his job and is
looking forward to retirement in two years. I
am kept busy taking care of the house, the
animals, the Fulfillment Committee at the
Community Center and, of course, Herb.
Speaking of animals, Sahib, our five-year-old
Lab, placed fifth in the spring AKC show and
has been to stud four times this year, siring a
total of forty-two pups. We don't show our other
Lab, Flora, but a sweeter pet you couldn't hope
to find. Hund, Ian's dachshund, and Ruffles,
Rita's kitty, are doing fine, though Ruffles is
getting on like the rest of us and isn't what she
used to be with the mice.
We feel very blessed to have gotten
through the year with no family deaths, though
Auntie Boo, Herb's great aunt, his mother's
sister, is failing and in a nursing home now in
Concordville. If any of you would like to write
to her there, I know it would do her a world of
good. The address is Miss Elizabeth J. Hooey,
Concordville Nursing Home, Concordville,
Mass. My mother and Granny P., Herb's
mother, are both doing wonderfully well.
Granny P. still enjoys scuba diving and is
making an impressive collection of abalone
shells. The Miami College oceanographers
have been out to see it and say it is most unusual. Living next door, Mother keeps in close
touch with our family, and we have her to dinner
several nights each week. Her favorites are
hash and creamed dried beef. She is active
with the Golden Agers and recently went on a
shopping spree with them to Cranlotte Village,
where they took the tour of the historic church
and lunched at the Olde Moo and Whistle.
Last summer Herb and I went on our
annual trip to Ishpeming, Mich. , to see his
brother Al, who continues hale and hearty and
still runs his own mink ranch with only two
hired hands to help. Herb and Al got in some
good trout fishing and I took twelve rolls of
color film. The black flies weren't nearly as
bad this year. We came back via Canada and
Mackinac Island, where Dad was so nervous
about parking on the ferry that he let the clutch
out in reverse and caused a little damage to the
car behind us. Nothing that their $500 deductible wouldn't take care of. A wonderful trip. If
you're in our area, stop by and see our slides.
And now for our little pieces of immortality. Our oldest, Pris, is busy being a full-time
mother to Dirk, Alice and baby Mikey and caring
for their beautiful new home in Medford. Her
husband Steve's specialty is Digestive Diseases
and he is increasing his practice as well as
teaching at Tufts. The children are an ever
increasing joy. Dirk enjoys Kung Foo and Little
League, Alice is in first grade and is already
taking ballet, Mikey uses the potty just like a
little man, and the new baby is expected in May.
In addition to bringing up her beautiful children,
Pris writes a gourmet column antl is active in
the Junior League.
Ian and his wife Ruth will be here for
Christmas as well. They left the girls, Buffy
and Joanne, with us this summer and had a
wonderful ten-day tour of Europe, partly
business and partly pleasure, as Ruth took in
Paris, London, Rome and Madrid while Ian
inspected his firm's factories, seeing just
exactly how things were being done. Then he
applied a little of the design sense he inherited
from his Dad and a little American know-how to
their weak spots and usually managed to
increase production by ten to thirty percent.
Buffy is a fourth grader, tall like her Dad and a
good reader. It looks like she got her mother's
teeth and will need braces. Joanne earned her
Guppy Certificate, and in only three weeks.
She's not afraid to put her face in the water and
really knows how to stay under.
Our second daughter Rita is a senior at the
University this year and called last night to say
she's been invited to a young man's home for
Christmas. We'll miss her terribly, but as
Kahlil Gibran says, children are arrows and the
parents, bows. We shoot them out into the air
and they come down we know not where. Rita
had a hard time deciding whether to major in
psychology or religion, but has compromised
with elementary ed and a minor in comp lit.
She spent the summer as a counselor at Camp
Okeynopohoh in New Hampshire, where she had
plenty of valuable experience.
For reasons of his own, Christopher has
asked to be left out of the Gazette this year.
Freddie, our baby, is taking the year off
from Beloit College and is doing a "Bob Dylan
trip," traveling around the country with his
kazoo. We don't know where you are this
Christmas, Freddie, but God is with you and so
is our love. Freddie's last work rotation (they
have a work-study program where the youngsters get some practical experience instead of
staying in the ivory tower) was in a hospital
where he worked as an orderly. Freddie is a
big boy, was a tackle for the East Wapping
Warriors, so he did lots of the heavy work,
turning people with bed sores and the like. The
nurses just loved him, and he became expert
with patients who had passed on.
And so dear friends, as we gather around
the oak fire (a tree we lost in last winter's ice
storm; Dad cut fireplace lengths), we send
warmest greetings for 1976, America's
bicentennial anniversary, from our hearth to
yours. I wish I could respond individually to all
the notes that will be coming in, but be assured
that we look forward to hearing from you with
eagerness and that we treasure every card and
message. May the glow of Christmas shine in
your hearts throughout the year.
Yours very truly,
for the whole Grady family,
Marge
39
rick smith
karl krolow
OLD MAN IN EXILE
EMPTINESS
(apologies to haudelaire)
translated by david neal miller
The sun sweetened your yellow hair
and before your decorated shoulders,
the people froze
in the position of prayer.
You are an old man now;
the wings of madness brush close
at your neck,
To cast your glance
upon a green or red chair.
The time was April.
Flags slipped in and out of the wind
like the faces of your dictators,
You were young then,
you believed each in turn.
From within the thickness of your brochade,
questions of balance arose
like wild northern geese
and left you
light as air.
Slanting light: graphic
of a surviving wall,
Only now do you follow yourself
down to the coast where you sit
and watch Argentina grow pale.
The cold moon is edging
across the Southern sky
in a revolution
you can count on.
Cat smell of the eucalyptus.
Two eyes already see
too much in four corners,
Silent film with
stuffed birds
stalked by a
stuffed marten.
No end after death.
The draped mirror
tries unsuccessfully
to call me back.
LENORE'S POOL
(LM)
To an antique child,
sky gazer,
reaching through creases.
When you bathed your old body,
your arms· came from nowhere;
you gathered yourself
toward other systems.
You invented other sides
and lay in the sun,
You were a waterfall.
40
J
d. f. petteys
john r. hall
LIKE THAT ROBIN
A FINE DISORDER
Like that Robin cantering everywhere
over the grass
on two legs,
quartering the lawn
and questing the damp
for worms
driven by rain
to surface,
I scurry too-head cocked
and popping eyes aglitter,
helter-skelter after you!
Tonight he rides on windows
watching lovers
collect arms and heads.
He draws dirty pictures
on the face of leaves,
cold air turns his skin light blue,
At times
you can hear him scratching notes
on white chunks of breath,
notes like tiny branches in a woman's eye.
HEXAGRAM
FOR BOXING TIJE I CHING
H E
X A G R A M
H E X A G R A M H
H E X A G R A M H E
H E X A G R A M H E X
H E X A
H E X A
H E X A
E X A G
H E X A
X A G R
H E X A
A G R A
E
X A G
A G R A
X A G R
A G R A
A G R A
A G R A
G R A M H E X A G R A
R A M H E X A G R A
A M H E X A G R A
MHEXAGRA
TONIGHT HE RIDES ON
WINDOWS
This is the summer
discussed oddly
between the earth and sun,
punctuated of birds.
The fine disorder
of piles of leaves
piebald with a kick,
And a neighbor
who had brain surgery
and studied birds all his life
walks to his car backwards
because he's moving furniture,
Only the broken coffee cup
and the cracker crumbs on the floor
seem right
in this odd summer of me.
HOW COULD THE WIND
How could the wind,
on occasion to traveling,
make such a nuisance of leaves?
In my yard
according to the joy
of washed windows
a million parades
of nature
prepare for rain.
41
alan britt
paul roth
I HOLD THIS MOMENT
THE STRAGGLER
I hold in my hands this moment
of crushed oak seed;
knowing it can never dig
its future roots
into the black voice
under my flesh
before the heron flies
from dead oaks,
and all forever lost
having never seen
the thin-legged star that shivers
on November's forehead.
The obedient teachers will come,
will pull away from his hands
the solution to the pollen in a rose;
one by one
will pluck the thorns become of his fingernails,
and pull away from his hands
whatever death there is to answer for his name.
{
ONLY DARKNESS
I do not own a shape
only darkness
on my fingers
as I watch the outline
of ferns
crawl
up the bottom of a white wall
and twist seeds
from my dead language
silvia scheibli
JUNE
The sun makes everything invisible.
By afternoon my eyes are grey stones.
SOMETIMES ....
Nothing remains except the smoke
surrounding the fig trees. There are
I have heard you say
A jar of water on the table
where a pelican stands:
a bent shadow
What no one desires
Sometimes your body a flower twig
behind an opened window
That is why cranes fly
through the bones
sometimes a poem appears
sometimes I am on the verge
of poems ...
42
blisters on the bark summer's teeth marks.
I hear strange humming; either
flames in the sand are spreading rapidly,
or the jimsonweed flowers
ignited.
,
I
david kastin
julie gaskill
THE BHIKKU'S FIRE
CAROLINA AVENUE
The fire makes a hole in the night
and blows the leaves above in storm
-- all around it is still,
A child, and handlebars held like a shield
against this summer roadside scene:
both of the broken cars gone,
some curious people lingering.
Through the night this chipped glass formed
like an extraordinary lichen on the oily street,
and the thin little pools are blood-red springs
that sprouted before the morning's heat-the child looks up as though for rain
(the air sweet and heavy as old burst fruit)
and winds his bicycle through glass grains
either he or birds lightly whistling.
HYDRA
on this island
streets are set
hard and straight
as a fish skeleton
combing back the sea waves
curling the surf
from its pale neck.
Greece, 197 3
•
II
)
,
jay de voe
43
janet campbell hale
WAPATO
Lilli Lee hated the city, hated the apartment,
hated the junior high school she was forced to
attend. It was the third school she'd gone to
since last January; the other two were in
Oregon and she'd liked one--the big one with
all the Italians in Portland, She wasn't sure
exactly why they moved around so much, It
seemed they were just drifting around all the
time from place to place like they had no real
roots, no real place that was home, but that
was not true, Their roots were very old and
deep, Their roots were on the reservation
back in Idaho. Idaho was their real home.
No place was ever right, ever, no matter
how much it seemed like it would be. There
were always things very wrong with every
place they lit, Lilli sat watching the rain
outside hitting the pavement, not listening to
her mother's ranting and raving which was so
usual it was hard to pay attention to,
"By God," her mother vowed, pacing back
and forth with heavy steps and wringing her
hands, "I wish I could leave. Just up and
leave. Right now," Although her parents
were well into their fifties and married for
thirty years still they often separated and
threatened to divorce, This had been going
on all of Lilli's life as far back as she
could remember and seemed a normal
occurrence, Her mother was saying now
how if she had the money she would go get
on the bus and go to Wapato, Wapato was a
small town just over the mountains where
44
Lilli's married sister lived, Wapato, Lilli
thought, was a very pleasant little place,
located on the Yakima Indian reservation,
If they went there then they would be out of
the city. Lilli would have friends again, a
place where she belonged, There were
other Indians in Wapato, lots of them, not
like the white-black place they lived now,
"I have some money, Ma," she said, The
rnpney was meant to buy her a new coat when
the weather got bad,
•
"You? You have money?" her mother
asked suspiciously. "And where might I ask
did you get this money? 11
"I saved it, Ma, From my lunch money,
you know I've been on a diet and not eating
lunch. And I thought we might need the
money, that it might just come in handy!"
"Oh?" Lilli's mother fell quiet in her
pacing and her puffy face looked thoughtful,
"How much?"
"Oh, about twenty-five dollars and
thirty-two cents. 11
"Well, Lilli, I just don't know, I wonder
how it would work out?"
"Just fine, I'm sure." Lilli's father was
gone at the time, out drinking again which was
the reason her mother felt like leaving.
"Okay. Let's get packed up and leave.
Phone the bus depot, will you, and find out when
the next bus leaves, 11
There was a pan of baked chicken being kept
warm for dinner in the oven. Lilli wrapped
several pieces in aluminum foil and put them
in a brown paper bag to take along. She was
going to be glad to see the last of this place.
"What are you doing?" her mother asked
accusingly, nearly shouting.
"Wrapping some chicken to take along.
You know, in case we get hungry later."
"Always thinking of eating, 11 her mother
said tiredly, disgustedly, in an I-give-up tone
of voice, "always thinking of stuffing your face."
She shook her head sadly. But later, on the
bus that night, as they were crossing over
the mountains, Mrs. Lee ate heartily of the
chicken her daughter had brought along.
It was daylight when they reached Wapato
and already the day was hot, almost
uncomfortably so. They didn't know exactly
where to begin looking for Andrea. Mrs. Lee
sighed. "First let's have breakfast," she
said and they went looking for a place that was
open, Lilli carrying two shopping bags filled
with belongings, her mother a large, battered,
brown suitcase that was secured with a belt
fastened around it because it would stay closed
no other way.
It was in the cafe that they found Andrea,
waiting on tables. She was surprised to see
them. "What are you guys doing here? 11
"We left again, " Lilli answered. Her
mother glared contemptuously at her and she
was sorry for having answered. They
ordered breakfast and when it was ready
Andrea came and sat with them in their booth
and drank a cup of coffee.
"So, what are you going to do? 11 she asked
her mother slowly.
"Oh, I don't rightly know, Andrea. Get
a job I guess," Mrs. Lee said, looking into
her dark steaming coffee.
"I see, 11 Andrea said. Her mother was in
her mid-fifties now and the only work she had
ever done was the scrubwoman and chambermaid sort. That was years and years ago,
though, before her back and knees got so bad.
Andrea didn 1t look well. She 1d just started
her shift an hour or so before but she seemed
tired and worn-out already.
"Why did you leave, Ma? What was it
this time ? 11
"Oh, you know, the same old stuff. Only
worse now that he doesn't work steady any
more. He has more time on his hands these
days--more time to think up insulting things
to say, more time to drink and perform
ar.o und, No more of that for me, I am through.
I have had it! 11
"I see, 11 Andrea said quietly. "Well, Ma,
I've got to get back to work now." She looked
up to the big electric clock on the wall above
the door. Almost eight. Andrea gave
directions how to reach her place: down
across the tracks, turn left at the crossroads market, down the graveled road there
to the cabin court at the edge of town, The
baby was at the babysitter's cabin, the first
one as you turn into the court.
"It must get high, paying a babysitter, 11
Mrs. Lee commented.
"Yes."
"Well, now I'm here. I can help out and
watch her for you. 11
"Yes."
"Dear, are you alright?" Andrea's face
seemed pale to her.
"Yes, mother. 11
"You, don 1 t look well at all, " she looked
worriedly, searchingly across the table.
"Truly, Ma, I'm fine, really. Now, go
on, you two. I've got to run. See you around
four, okay? 11 She smiled and stood up from
the booth, ending the conversation,
It was a long walk from the cafe to the
cabin court and very hot; the shopping bags
became heavy and the handles cut into the palms
of Lilli's hands. After they crossed the tracks
and passed the potato packing shed, open fields
could be seen--brown, plowed, empty fields
stretching two miles or more to the new
highway, orchards of peach and cherry on the
other side; and beyond them rose the high,
yellow-red velvet hills, The valley was a
big produce center, irrigated former desert
land of fertile volcanic ash. The air was still
and dry and hot and fresh. Lilli Lee put down
the bags and breathed deeply. The air smelled
good.
"Hurry up!" her mother called, not stopping,
not turning around, but continuing on. Her
mother walked fast and Lilli could tell it was
with a great deal of effort. Lilli picked up the
two bags again. She was sweating by now. The
sun was really beginning to beat down hard.
She hurried to catch up with her mother,
The cabin court came into view now, about
half a mile more on down the road. That would
have to be it. The court consisted of six small,
recently whitewashed cabins looking to be
probably one-room affairs, with tarpapered
roofs and small porches. Tall trees rose up
around the circle of cabins offering a lot of
shade. There was no grass anywhere nearby, only
dust, thick and dry and white. Several dogs lay
sleeping near one of the cabins. Lilli wondered
how much hotter the day would become. 0
45
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betty bressi
A.LHA.MBRA.
jerome clifford nathanson
tom hansen
PENGUINS
IN SASKATCHEWAN
ANOTHER END
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
did heretofore declare
that pompous, pedantic penguins,
in pompous, pedantic air
would have the right
to cluck all night:
this I swear.
Moravian mobs
in sweaty underwear
imparted their views
& heard the bad news:
no franchise for them Central Europe was in deep despair.
Be a penguin, be a man:
that I can foresee.
But a penguin I s not a man
not thee, not me,
not for all Saskatoonians in the world!
I'm pompous & pedantic,
& I swear,
that, penguins there
have more in common with posterity
than Moravians in obloquy,
lions in their lair to this, you might agree,
& find a tune or two,
a zephyr,
in Saskatchewan, cozy, there.
The r1s1ng sap runs down.
Summer's gaudy girls are gone.
Winter's first white
Breaks light and dies.
Windy footprints.
The peace of ice,
Peace of the frozen thirst.
The benign indifference
Of the mute brooding earth.
ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
s
e
d
u
i i i
s u i C i u s
i i i
d
u
d
e
s
e
e
d
EPITAPH
FOR A ROAD HOG
Walt, you mouthy old coot,
Button up and be done.
I've got a few poems of my
I wouldn't mind writing.
OW:{l
LATE IN THE DAY
0 gentle foreign queen wrapped in paper,
I am sitting here slightly drunk and
very hungry, hoping I can let it be but
wondering if this is the moment to do
something I will regret tomorrow.
The mouth end of my cigar is almost
obscene and the bottom of the orange
juice is getting chewy.
The sincere
radio lady sings to me, "I could live
without love if I never knew your name,"
and I think I'm finding out.
48
s
norman moser
dennis romeo
ANTHEM TO ITCHIE
WERE I BUT ONE
MEASURE CALMER
So we jus kept on goin,
payin no mind to d fish-scales
broken glass, broken hearts
ear-scratching noises
miles & miles & miles
of concrete strips,
steel buildings,
when
all
the
dancing
globules
turned,
at once
consumed
the dancing elephants
the burning gnats
Then
the toothpaste tubes in town rose up,
filled all the billboards
hereabouts:
NO FAIR EA TING PRESIDENTS!
harland ristau
IN A MENU OF DARKNESS
now he could twist himself to that one shape
mattering in the void .
a circle, and in soliloquies, he would ask
Do zeros need light, love or gods?
only the echo of words hung
on the roof of his mind
and he remembered the words of Jesus
Feed my zeros.
so he went out collecting dreams
from primitive ancestors
and tamed himself to an uneasy silence.
50
Were I but one measure calmer
I would call myself field,
low, through a loon'·s throat,
and that unmeasurable
parallel, abstract, would
stick as light as winter
willow sap
sticks to the wind.
LAST NIGHT I SEDUCED
THE OPERATOR
Last night i seduced the operator
she called me from a long distance
to ask for my number
of lovers i said hand over
the parts you took from my body
i miss them i got to make a call
my heart is rotten from desire
i need a doctoress some information
a pizza the time forget it
this is an emergency hC:ney
give me anesthesia
give me amnesia
hang me up
guy r. heining
ONE-TIME FIGURE
he was to me
to be
wisdom,
great-boned earth wonder.
now a star gazer
I sit perched on some crowsnest
pretending to love meteors
because they fall with power
& no disgrace.
CONCRETE DREAM 410
universe taken from stolen dictionaries
across the street
from no liberty
I wearing someone elses hands
the skull reminds me of
my grandmothers resting place;
keep a little more ointment in the corner
for the flies to honor death.
CONCRETE DREAM 269:
HONED THING
women like you have
religious order,
bordering on ice pick witchery,
and so kindled on your bed,
the young, lean, meat, fissures,
fusions, blaring, ball-eyed truckers
looking for muck and gardens of mud fields
to get obsessed with, letting the splintering,
bamboo click of your heels spike
between their ribs, gouting out
a mad assemblage of bones.
the carnal hunt is on as your taste
reams them of their souls;
pages burning in their flat ears.
NUANCE
I
Fall accosts
the spokes of sunlight
and sour skies.
a fortune in
loose leaves
Open letters
smeared words
in trout light
distant rains
pocketing qualm.
UNHEALTHY
KNOWLEDGE
i 'm ta king the
machine apart
eased out of the brain
onto table
a black box
the worlds confusions
having eaten enormous vowels
& the porridge of victorian verse.
all hemmed in/
the plastic flowers wave
in their extra health
of todays cursed weed.
LOST IN DISCOVERY
26
the worms said
no to me
that day
i between
the cold tracks
of lies
& puddles
from the night before.
they wanted clean toes
& a better smell.
51
ernest larsen
BAKUNIN AT THE BEACH
1
The twilight trans-Switz express rolled
slowly into motion. Glancing up from his mug of
coffee where the flat circle of steaming brown
liquid swirled incessantly under the pressure of
his gaze, still Bakunin waited for it to gather
sufficient speed. The station began to spin away
from his attention as his body focused intensively
on the train. He swung his leather bag under his
arm, grazed his chest pocket to as sure his
fingers of the safety of his Italian passport-- F.
Culpa, wine merchant--and trotted out, dropping
en route a few bits of soiled linen before the
jaded eyes of Inspector Dupin. As a gust of his
unfaithful wife's favorite perfume lunged at his
wide Russian nose he leaped the car's steps to
her outstretched arms. Their lips met, their
long hair merging in the windstream. The station
retreated. Locarno was but 100 kilometers
distant; the Bakunins were on vacation.
Inspector Dupin extended his cane, speared
the items and after a moment's examination
tossed them gingerly into the wastebasket. His
cane rejoined the crook of his elbow and he drew
out a small notebook and a pen to scribble some
new bits of information, just in case.
2
From X's diary:
12 August. Before my very eyes Bakunin in
walking shorts, purchasing saltwater taffy at a
stall.
18 August. A sound sleep at last! S. confides in me more and more. Asked me into w. c
to view through the open garret window B. in
walking shorts, devouring steamers.
19 Aug. Our paths cross on Vida Street. I
north B. south. His beard trimmed.
52
22 Aug. The mosquitoes! Bakunin.
23 Aug. S. at last! I bear in my waistcoat
pocket--the one without the hole--a tiny pair of
tangerine underdrawers ! Bakunin at Versailles
Cafe, hands flying, at table with small woman,
evidently his wife, her posture that of a seated
mannequin.
26 Aug. All right I couldn't resist the temptation. But this much was unexpected: he repeated
to me, a complete stranger, his secret plans
for an extended period--! couldn't quite tell how
long.
29 Aug. S. has suddenly become very cold.
My searching looks produce an indifferent re;,;
sponse. On my way I met B. in the street. He
was alone again so I asked him more about his
group. He told me its name but I've forgotten
it.
30 Aug. I sat outside, not my habit, in case
he passed. I waited all afternoon till very late.
3
A manservant opened the door and they led B.
ceremoniously through an arched marble entry to
a monstrous table laden with food, and politely
begged him to choose. Outside Louis Philippe
was already banging his sword on the goldembossed door of the banquet hall. Don't anybody
let Louis in--he makes an awful mess every
time. Unperturbed, B. said ! _want everything,
in a voice loud enough to startle the footman.
After dining he sat on the veranda over a fresh
copy of Jules Verne's Android Attack:
Bursting through the steel-plated
doors of the outer world which gave
way like ice cubes in a fire we hacked
our way toward the city with our automatic scythes and cudgels. In a mass
the populace quit their gruesome tasks
driven to a frenzy by the electrical shock
of the metropolitan broadcasts and fled
to closets and cellars. Stripped, the
city fell and we caught it and squeezed
its entrails until the populace spurted
out and lay steaming on the frozen turf.
The sight set us retching.
4
The sun sits on Echo Lake, a hole filled
with water. Bakunin, shading his eyes, is in
his study sitting on a pile of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, waiting . Tina walks through the
house shutting doors behind her, thinking of
her child and whether the marketplace is still
open.
In particular I remember everything that
could have happened. I was aware as no one
else of the potential for imminent revolt, cycling and recycling my capabilities for collusion, interference, conspiracy, resistance.
Functioning the while as a local synapse for
the propagation of spectacle, After all that
thirty years, animation has resulted in leisure, the motion of individuals precil?itated
to an underequipped sensory apparatus.
5
With a tentative glance Cafiero showed me a
recent English review after breakfast yesterday
--cheese Danish and caf~ au lait, Red ink
hemmed one long article. I discover someone's
produced a novel in the tissues of which I am
embedded. Big cheese. Self-deceiving con
artist. The book structures Russia with blankness, dread and snow. A land stre'w n with
fanatical student bombtossers on the low walls
of whose tiny garrets appear ikons fervently lit
in homage to Saint B. The damage I inflict on
far-off youth held comparable to the manipulation of good pornography. So the article draws
out the story. Stalked into Locarno by a double
whom no one who knows me could recognize-I'll now be recognized by all who don't know
me once the novel makes its expected wave .
Thinly disguised . The novelist who, it says,
writes English with the most painstaking slowness, evidently possesses the talent to glean the
lies from a field of golden rumor, An alternative
me washes on shore to soak up my dissonances
like an acoustical sponge. While I live at least
it eases my conscience. It makes a case for me
without my effort. Enriches my leisure. When
I die maybe it becomes more dangerous. But
I'll outlive it.
6
Everyone in Locarno sleeps.
Bakunin puff-
ing a little is climbing Beech Mountain in dead
of night, stumbling through darkness, tripping
over timberbrush. His hands reach to grip a
jutting rock. Feet hurting, leder.hosen torn,
he is aiming for a view of Echo Lake at dawn.
7
Moving with gravity the cat took his moment
calmly, interrupting my view of the words. I
arrested my hand--raised to shoo--for the
sight of my black fingertips. The cat sat, his
fur brushing the fresh ink, awaiting the moment
to lay. His tail curled this side of my coffee
cup. When my other arm dropped the paper
relaxed and the cat flattened out. The waiter
set the blue-plate before the man at the table
across who started to part the peas from the
carrots with his knife and fork. The cat blinked
his eyes and fell asleep, blocking most of the
page.
It says that the Czar has closed the Sunday
schools again. The notice sieves B. 's memory
and butts against the long hiatus in his career
occasioned by his years of imprisonment. The
Peter and Paul Fortress.
No other torture was so ______ as the
strappado. My gloves are courteous enough to
hide the scars. Once each night if I am able to
fall asleep a creeping sweat bathes the hulk of
my body. I take the attitude of a suppliant,
fingers pointed to the heavens. My head spears
itself on my sharpened spinal cord, The Tsar
asks only for a complete _ _ _ _ _, Michael.
Grant him renewed belief in Tzardom.
8
Cafiero came in out of the sun holding
before him a bad-smelling fish that he'd found,
I murmured something about my allergies, my
lack of appetite, my aversion to mo·st seafood,
He insisted, I took his hand which smelled
powerfully of fish, but my senses betrayed me.
All at once I didn't remember what I'd intended
--how my impulsive gesture . was to give shape
to my lack of emotion. For the first time in
my life I thought of the problem that gifts repre sent, He said Tina was waiting for him so
I let him go. The greenish-gold fish lying on
the wicker rocker was decidedly anomalous,
9
Panslavism is no longer as popular as it
once was but in days gone by nearly everyone of
a real "political" spirit was in some sense a
self-acknowledged panslavist. Bakunin, the
most ardent panslavist of his time, overflowed
its boundaries early on. Bakunin's panslavism
subsumes spontaneous offer of Panslavian
leadership to benevolent torturer Czar Nicholas.
Anarchism rising to the surface, still disguised
and disquieted, still bubbling,
53
10 Bakunin in his wicker rocker the weight of
reverie in his stomach the occasion for escape
from the present moment to the exhilaration of
the past once provisionally felt present. Burning again, the city sent yellow smoke to the sky
and the streets were dense with it. Herzen
fingered the unsigned appeal, waves of nausea
at the fried eggs detached on the plate. The
undersigned respectfully. Overcooked and
adorned with grease the eggs bore a contingent
relationship to food. From an aerial balloon
they were rice paddies in China. The smoke
clung to our clothes our flesh tasted acrid and
gritty. The smell hit Bakunin as he stood waiting his turn to descend the gangplank, Three
months now from the mouth of the Amur, from
West Siberia, We here-by dis-associate ourselves from all programs of random terror,
Still steaming Minister Plehve 's sledge a
blackened rubble and the sooty snow melted
about it left a horizon perfectly circular, Melting from the heat aboard the transcontinental
express from San Francisco expecting to be
encircled by Sioux. A shopwoman nearby tearing yardgoods with her teeth was startled by
the sound of my boot striking the cobbles,
After stooping for a handful of snow I gripped
the charred door the snow sizzled and the door
slid off smacking to the ground. Keep off there
you, Actions of this sort are sheer self-willed
fantasy, Herzen says, picking up his pen, Lead
articl e.
As I descended the gangplank and the city
stretched out before me the darkness gathered
and flung torches the size of courthouses into
the air. The firebombed official buildings facing
each other's flames at the end of the street lit
my way toward Herzen's office. A raw youth
elbowing stacked copies nodded out and sagged
into a dream and the firebomb cover sketches
stretched across the floor sliding
THETHEBBELLTHEBELLTHEBELLBELLLLLL,
And in Italy.
All quiet.
And in Austria,
All quiet.
And in Turkey.
All quiet everywhere, and nothing in prospect,
And what of the fires in the street.
These bombings spell nothing but repression,
disaster .
I walked ten thousand miles through the
streets to get here. There is fear in everyone's
face and they are all wondering what t_h e future
will bring.
54
Things are going to get much worse now,
I don't believe it. These bombings wash
away the grayness in the streets. Everyone's
pushed themselves closer to the verge of living.
They can use their fear. They all long in their
hearts to set up the barricades.
11 He'd find his goggles and his
snorkel and
his old black bathing suit with all the holes in
an old trunk and go down to the lake. He'd
take off his clothes and forgetting the goggles
and snorkel and old suit paddle out further and
further until the dark swallowed him up.
12 In throes of despair--legs
crossed--he
catches himself in absent stares--his haggard
wife big with child in a corner sleeping fitfully
--the Swiss innkeeper athwart a chair propped
tight against the wood door--but he sits
scribbling long pleading exhortatory letters
under the gaslight. Any short-term loan,
His strength flickers as he regards the innkeeper's stiff cucumber fingers. He glances
enviously at Tina. The swollen sac breathes
with a life of its own, He loves her feverishly.
The red sign above the door flares briefly.
Various little stratagems suggest themselves
but they all require assistance and there is no
one else in the room,
13 Bakunin writing a letter in a
code of his
own invention, the handwriting a broad scrawl.
I've been following the cure faithfully- off to the baths every morning- -lost more than
two kilos--but my fretfulness o·nly increases
as time slips away. Many friends have shifted
into town and I have made contacts among the
workers but all hands concede that the possibilities for meaningful action are at the
moment exceedingly slim. Nevertheless I
have divined certain frail stirrings that
discontent may be more widespread than those
closest to the source are able to perceive.
The air is fraught with portents. In the last
four months a severe inflation has sliced real
wages to a tenth of normal. Half a loaf decimates a day's pay. My senses inform me that
any extra burden will topple the bridges of
"rationalism" over the blue lakes of desire, I
am convinced that a revolt is in the wind and
my confederates are ready for a swim, Write
me of my comrades in Geneva.
This new code substitutes a color for a
noun. Replace friends with greens, town with
blue, contacts with reds, workers with browns,
etc. Bakunin writes the code out and encloses
it with letter in the envelope, seals it with a
slap of his tongue. Yours. 0
patrieia eakins, melody
sara teasdale, words
PIERROT
arranged by melvin derwis
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But I am quite forgotten
Under the cherry tree.
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3. Pierrot plays in the garden,
And all the roses know
That Pierrot loves his music
But I, I love Pierrot.
55
/
nieholas sperakis
THANATOS
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per olov enqoist
TBEA.NXIETY
OF THE LOYA.L SOULS
translated by jan ring
Many of these loyal souls are gripped with anxiety when they think they are abandoned by their
masters and protectors. They happily imagine
that the hand of the powerful will also follow
them in the kingdom of death. Their confusion
when they see themselves alone is as touching as
it is comic.
--Bismarck
I
Persistently Herr Bachmann was rescued back
to life.
The first time he had tried the wrists.
Afterward he had curled up on the bed with his
back to the door to hide what had happened, but
the blood had run down onto the floor and someone had looked through the small window in the
door and thus had exposed him. Herr Bachmann,
they had said when they found him, we can do
nothing but reproach you for this. This is in-
tolerable, you must consider what you have
done. While they hastily put temporary bandages on his wrists, he lay very still and gazed
at the ceiling. They were very efficient. He
had the feeling that the guards liked him and
wished him well though they now had a reason to
reproach him. He liked hearing their voices;
they .mumbled to each other while they took care
of him, a woolly gray mumble which was nice to
hear because he was freezing.
They had always been very friendly. At
first they were friendly because he was a sort
of celebrity and had been in all the papers and
because the event had caused edginess and
political rumbling. Then, too, he had the feeling they liked him just because he had fired
those three shots at Herr D and nearly killed
him. Herr D was, to say the least, hated by all
who were not communists. After the first indignation had calmed down and it turned out that
Herr D had survived and that consequently Herr
Bachmann could not be considered a murderer,
everyone was much relieved. Also, he thought,
they liked him because he behaved well in
prison, had never been any bother. This of
course was before the period when they had to
keep saving his life, often under (jifficult conditions.
In the beginning, during the first months
after the shooting, everything had for the most
The Anxiety of the Loyal Souls, from the collection Stories from the Time of the Cancelled Revolts
by Per Olov Enquist, © 1974 Per Olov Enquist, published by AB P.A . Norstedt & Saner, Stockholm.
English translation ©.1975 Jan Ring.
58
part gone well, The air had been full of voices
which were somehow friendly, Although out
there, in the so-called freedom, everything had
been chaotic, inside himself he had been calm.
Indeed everyone had said to him that to shoot
Herr D had been very stupid, but they had said
it in a friendly way and he wasn't quite sure
whether the criticism had been seriously meant,
At night he had been given sleeping pills and had
slept heavily, In general he had no complaints,
All of the newspapers in West Berlin except
Spandauer Volksblatt, which was more vindictive than the others, but nothing to reckon with,
had, to be sure, taken exception to his "desperation born out of the wrath of despair," but had
done so in a cultured and understanding manner.
A lot of letters also had come to hand,
Many complimented him for his direct, albeit
altogether too desperate, demonstration of
opposition to those who were trying to undermine the resistance of West Berlin--the free
city--to communism from within. They wrote
this straight out, To stand up against a rascal
like D, who without any consideration for the
divided city's exposed political situation shamelessly propagated his ideology and would
certainly be willing to do service as a Trojan
horse, meant that Herr Bachmann's actions
were at bottom an expression of civil courage-or so many letters seemed to indicate. If D and
his ilk wanted to live under the benevolence of
communism, then they could very well flee over
the wall of shame, that wall which was called
with unveiled cynicism by those living on the
other side "the anti-fascist rampart."
The letters had been friendly and very
encouraging, Then there had been the trial and
the sentence. About that there was nothing to
say. The guards had continued to behave amicably and correctly, though now at perhaps
more of a distance. Also, time had passed
quickly. After about half a year the encouraging letters had ceased, It became relatively
quiet.
After chaos, silence--that was only
natural,
Then the leftist letters had begun.
This was an altogether new type of letter.
Young academics in West Berlin's leftist organizations had started to write to him. They had
got hold of his address somehow and had somehow got the idea to write to him. Presumably
they had received further instructions from
Moscow--or so one of the guards had humorously suggested to him.
One couldn't help being curious about what
they wrote, so he had read the letters, In the
beginning he had read these leftist letters with a
certain amused attention, since he was interested in what these West Berlin Stalinists (he
would not put it otherwise) had in their hearts.
After about ten letters he comprehended the
situation clearly, and then in a way he had had
enough. They were only interested in waving
their own flag, though he had to admit he was
surprised at the mild tone in the letters. They
did not lay the blame for the attack on him
alone. In various ways they tried to blame the
59
invisible forces and factors of power which
were to be found behind him. That in itself was
nice enough of them, though he had seen
through their tactics: apparently they were
making ridiculous attempts to win proselytes
even here in prison.
The most interesting letter was doubtless
that which came from D himself. When he saw
who the sender was, Herr Bachmann could not
help feeling slightly upset. It was not conscience or regret or anything like that. It was
simply nervousness. He let the letter lie unopened a whole day; then at last he read it,
D of course had a special view of the
event. One relief was that he didn't seem to
feel any personal rancour against Herr
Bachmann--not in this letter nor in any that
followed, His reasoning was otherwise rather
difficult to follow; it was thoroughly academic in
a manner typical of dreamers of this type. In
the first letter he had gone in for a very particular and involved argument which had its
origins in a newspaper article containing biographical information about Herr Bachmann.
This article claimed that Herr Bachmann had
lived his whole life on a one-sided spiritual
diet, that he was so to speak nourished and
brought up on the Springer Press, BildZeitung and anticommunism, and that in his
room had been found pictures not only of
Napoleon but also of German leaders from the
recent historically controversial period. In an
interview his mother had intimated that anticommunism had become for him a matter of
conscience. In itself all this might contain
certain truthful elements that could not be
completely denied, But it was certainly a
mistake to draw such extensive conclusions
from it. To be sure, from that side the world
was usually seen in terms of black and white,
and quite without regard for the human element.
However, he had quite independently made the
decision to shoot D and had been wholly conscious of the sacrificial nature of the act. It
was necessary at some point to put a stop to the
activities of these groups.
He had nevertheless answered Herr D with
a shorter and much more balanced letter, but
had t.h en of course received an even longer
epistle back, This one also was written in a
very friendly manner and had contained many
lines of thought but was naturally of little
factual value. After only a few months Herr
Bachmann was desperately tired of these leftist
letters, their analyses, their attempts to
explain his actions. They gave him insomnia-he just lay and mumbled to himself and stared
at the ceiling, stared and stared and heard how
60
quiet it was starting to become. He then
stopped reading the letters but it was too late.
It was as if a heavy resounding silence were
spreading out even more inside him, taking
increasingly more room, It was s.o strange.
He just lay and listened inwardly. Utterly dead
silent words and sentences rotated like a wheel
of fire within him and he became more and
more nervous.
And so the months passed.
Thus it was not until fifteen months after
the attack on Herr Don Kurfurstendamm that
Josef Bachmann began his persistent suicide
attempts, Just as persistently he was rescued
back to life.
The second time he had tried to cause inner
bleeding: he broke a razor blade in pieces and
swallowed them. He did it while he stood in the
shower. It had been unbelievably painful. He
had begun to hemorrhage, but they got him
immediately into the hospital and there was
never any danger to his life. Unfortunately the
only tangible result of this act was that the
wound in his throat developed into a very painful ulcer which took a long time to heal. Using
a razor blade, he realized later, had been
completely worthless. Also, the guards had
time after time criticized him sharply for it.
He had hardly recovered before he made a
third attempt. He had made a rope, twined and
braided from a pillow case, and tied it securely
to the window. Under the window he had placed
a chair and had got up on it with his throat in
the noose. He had then kicked the chair away,
but unfortunately he had misjudged the height.
His feet reached the floor so that he half hung,
half stood. When they came rushing in a quarter
of an hour later he was, however, unconscious.
He was a pitiful sight--half strangled, shrunk
up like a gunny sack. They rushed in and cut
him loose; he lay, eyes shut, as his face slowly
became pale again while they blew the breath of
life between his lips.
Then he came to. He didn't even need
medical treatment. Despite this they were very
critical. Herr Bachmann, this must stop, they
said sternly to him. This will not do.
When death was no longer so close, had
withdrawn and left him alone, something like
peace was resurrected within him and he
became very weak and still. Then he was like
a child. For several days he was cared for
attentively. He seemed calm and apathetic.
Then everything became as before. By the
eighth day he had made a new attempt, which
was extremely primitive and seemed to have
been made under the influence of an altogether
uncontrolled despair. Late in the evening he
got abruptly out of bed and rushed at the wall
headfirst. This was done with great force and
he fell deeply unconscious to the floor. He
managed to give himself a concussion but came
round. Several of the guards tried to talk sense
to him but neither friendly words nor reproaches seemed to have any effect on his
melancholy for more than a few minutes.
And then a week later a letter arrived for
him. At the time he was being kept strapped
down to avoid new incidents, to give his bedbound body a chance to return to a healthier
condition and to give his shocked and injured
head a few days of rest. The prison authorities
--who were now obliged to check his mail to
prevent any more destructive, psychologically
disturbing political letters from reaching him-found that this letter was completely different
from the others, was harmless and could
perhaps even be useful,
The writer was an elderly woman living in
Kreuzberg, one of the poorer working-class
suburbs of West Berlin. She had enclosed a
photograph of herself. In the picture she was
smiling, almost captivatingly, and her hair was
put up in a bun. It seemed to be gray. In the
beginning of the letter she claimed to have read
in a newspaper an article touching upon Herr
Bachmann 1 s melancholy and his repeatedly
demonstrated wish to curtail his own life. She
therefore expressed a desire to involve herself,
to clasp this opportunity (the language of the
letter was good but not entirely correct) to
address him as a fellow sufferer in distress.
The hand of God stretched even to those who
found themselves inside prison walls, and she
was determined to come in contact with Herr
Bachmann and to bid him listen to the voice of
love in the midst of darkness. Though she did
not consider herself to be a conventional believer, the commandment of love was important.
She herself, she wrote, had suffered in many
ways and understood the meaning of suffering.
And, she added in passing, "not until in what is
probably the evening of my life have I rightly
understood that suffering is not laid upon my
shoulders to expiate my guilt but to punish my
innocence. Punishment befalls the innocent;
suffering therefore feels just--in this way do I
bear my burdens."
The letter was thoroughly read. Despite
repeated analyses the prison authorities could
find nothing in it which could be considered
harmful. The letter was given to Herr Bachmann, He read it and answered it the following
day. Thus began the long correspondence
between Josef Bachmann and Hildegard Meckel.
II
They brought Frau Meckel to the madhouse on
November 22, 1969 and only five days later she
wrote her first letter to Herr Bachmann.
She wrote it by hand, sitting in the common
room. The letter was written in her usual
round open schoolgirl handwriting; she had
written in this style her whole life arid it had
never changed. This she knew with certainty.
She had kept her earliest diary--the one with
the brown cover with a label from a jam jar
pasted on' it- -which was written in exactly the
same style despite the fact that it was more
than thirty years old. The letter to Herr Bachmann, written in that same handwriting,
breathed consideration, optimism and empathy.
The term "madhouse" she herself used in the
letter understanding full well that the term
was misleading. She went voluntarily to the
mental sanitarium in order to gain time for
contemplation. Just before Christmas of 1969
she was released.
Frau Meckel's need for peace and contemplation was fitful.
On the twenty-second of February, 1970,
she went in again, this time for two weeks, In
May, in again, out the twenty-second of June.
So variable could be the warp of life. The
shuttle of destiny wove the thread of life. In
her letters she found words for both resignation
and hope, but the term "madhouse" she used
only in the first letter to Herr Bachmann.
From then on she went over to the word
"home. 11 Actually she experienced the "madhouse, 11 or "home, 11 as a "free city, 11 a refuge
during those short periods when life's swells
sent her there ("and when the waves of life
carry me to this shore .... 11 ). She often used
metaphorical expressions of this sort in her
letters--for example, "my oasis, my little
island in time I s bubbling current, 11
Frau Meckel, born in 1910 in Breslau,
was sixty years old that winter, West Berlin
she had found to be an asylum whose center
contained an even more protected retreat called
"The Home" or "The Madhouse. 11 From the
innermost of these asylums she sent letters to
friends in the outer asylum, Letters were her
way of expressing her reflections. So it was
that Josef Bachmann received her letter in the
wake of his suicide attempt: carefully he read
her reflections, heard in the bare cell how
61
silence thundered within him; her words and the
way she put them together sounded foreign and
mysterious, as if she spoke from another world.
Nevertheless he sat down, he answered and thus
it began.
The dog's nose touched her cheek lightly,
almost imperceptibly. Half asleep she lifted
her hand in the dark and groped for his back,
fumblingly stroked his fur, turned her face
toward him, opened her eyes; she knew rather
than saw how he slowly turned around, crossed
the floor and stopped, his heavy head and
hanging ears like a black shadow against the
filmy gray half-light of the window. She found
the clock and turned heavily in the bed: it was
only 4:30. That was good. She had time,
Frau Meckel always awakened early.
To wake early meant having access to
time. Then she could prepare herself for the
day. Then she could drink her milk, feed the
dog, sit down awhile, think, take down the
brown notebook with the jar label from 1938 and
read a bit. If she could begin the day like this
it was much better. The brown notebook contained her diary from her pregnancy with
letters to the child. For her it contained the
warmth of life. She had wanted to move around
inside life's warmth as a child moves in foetal
water. Softly, with a love which was painfully
unprotected, gently rocking in security. That
was what she had wanted her life to be.
After she had read the day could begin. If
she had time she could walk to work. Since the
flats she cleaned were in the center of the city,
she had to go in toward the c~nter. She used to
take the dog--a basset born with a slightly
defective left leg who had limped through all his
ten years--and go out in the still, silent gray
winter night that hung there steadfastly till sunrise, and walk from Kreuzberg to the center,
Frau Meckel actually didn't like the city;
but certain early winter mornings were at
least bearable. Then she could. walk and walk
and suddenly forget she was in West Berlin.
Then it was as it had been in Breslau.
Winter and snow had come to West Berlin
with full force by December of that year, 1969,
For the first time in decades winter maintained
its grip long into April. Thus the colors were
different from what they used to be--no longer
just black and gray, at any rate not in Kreuzberg. Often snow fell during the night, a clean
white fluffy snow which slowly melted away
during the day. Then it became as before:
dirty dun gray, flecked with white. But the
mornings were quite different that winter. She
62
went out while it was still dark, but the dark
was white and glistened with freshness.
Almost no footprints on the pavement, every
step on that waterlogged snow had a sound-she was utteriy alone with the snow 1 the
cleanliness. When the sun rose the light
became more and more intense until, almost
imperceptibly, the cleanliness diminished,
became soiled and suddenly it was full daylight and the dun gray was visible again. But
by that time she was already at Kurfurstendamm and the blackbirds in the trees on
Meinekestrasse sang with clear defiant voices.
Oh, how she wished that the whiteness
would never end. Snow muffled all sound; the
city seemed enveloped in a white woolly dream
which smothered the aggressiveness and hardness that otherwise frightened her so in West
Berlin.
A white woolly silence under the blackbird's song--that was the kind of winter she
liked in West Berlin,
Frau Meckel was not alone, however, not
even in the mornings. The whiteness was not
entirely white but was spotted with innumerable
small mounds of dog droppings. The dog
droppings mirrored the political conditions in
this city. Because West Berlin in 1970 was a
circumscribed city its population had aged-the younger ones having disappeared to the
west because the future lay there. Those who
were left were the elderly and the restricted
imported workers. And because those who
were old and alone chose to keep dogs for
protection against loneliness, West Berlin was
the most densely dog-populated city in the
world and, therefore, those small black heaps
of shit in front of Frau Meckel reflected a
political reality and a bit of history; the
excrement reflected the Seventies more clearly
than the rebuilt Kempinski did the Thirties,
Frau Meckel had had a dog once before-that was in 1943 during the war- -a shafer
called Bodi. But finally he had been requisitioned and they had come and taken him. A dog
was not a person, yet even now she couldn't
help but think about the terrible destiny he
might have had on the eastern front. Sometimes she got tears in her eyes when she
thought of what had happened. These days
Frau Meckel cried often. Her tears came
easily and abruptly as if sorrow were a sudden
cloud which wafted over her face and drew
forth tears. The tears came quickly and
equally quickly went away, as if sorrow were
as natural and painless as a breeze.
Herr Bachmann, she wrote in her first
letter after leaving the home the day before
Christmas Eve, I wish that you too could cry.
That you could let the tears stream forth from
the well of pain.
She looked at the words, "from the well of
pain, 11 for a long time - -the well of pain. Down
in the yard someone emptied something into the
garbage cans. Deep down there a person
moved, perhaps it was one of the Turks. She
stood at the window and observed him; he
moved soundlessly down there at the bottom of
the narrow yard.
Like a rat trap, she thought suddenly, one
of the open ones where they fall down into a
pitfall,
III
On January 28 he made a new attempt. Every
day for a month he had saved the daily ration of
sleeping pills. That evening he took all of
them. Unfortunately the overdose caused not
only the intended deep, perhaps in time lethal,
unconsciousness, but also as a side effect a
strange attack of cramps which drew the
guards' attention to his plight.
Thus he was once again brought back to
life. In the aftermath of his temporary despair
he felt somewhat calmer and wrote a long
encouraging letter to Frau Meckel in which he
invited her to tell about life in this so tragically divided city and about herself. She
received the letter the same evening, when she
returned from her work, She sat down and
answered immediately,
She was twenty-five years old when she saw
from her lookout behind the tool shed how her
father was taken by the authorities. That was
in 1935. It was the new authorities who took
him. Between 1928 and 1935 he had been
politically active in several communist organizations in Breslau and had been vice-chairman
of the ironworkers I union.
It had happened in the summer. He went
off between them, hadn't even been able to put
on a jacket, She never saw him again.
At the time he had been sitting alone in
the kitchen drinking coffee, and then they had
come and she had become terribly frightened
and had hidden behind the tool shed. They
discovered later that he had tried with a pencil
to write a message to his family but had failed.
Of the scrawled words could be read only,
"They are fetching me now and I. , .. 11
That event, wrote Frau Meckel, had made
an indelible impression on her. "It was," she
said in the letter, "on that occasion that I
understood how important it would be to find a
way out of the jungle of pain and evil and to
realize my ideals of goodness and forgiveness,"
At that time they had lived in a suburb of
Breslau. The suburb lay in the western part of
Breslau and according to her was called
11 Nikolaivorstadt 11 (it is possible that combining
the words is a mistake and that it should read
"the suburb of Nikolai"). They had lived there
until 1938 when the general situation and certain setbacks forced her to move to Gera. Thus
she and her husband (who afterward disappeared during the battles and vicissitudes of
war) had become to an extent rootless. "Herr
Bachmann, 11 she wrote, 11 I want to admit to you
that today just the word politics fills me with
tribulation. Oh, these senseless children who
are so trapped by politics. How I wish that
they could find the need to experience the
nature of love, love's great amplitude in
people's hearts ! 11
Herr Bachmann read her letters with
extreme--and, to the guards, surprising-thoroughness, but without comment. He was
now, after the repeated suicide attempts, quite
weak and in an unsatisfactory physical condition. He ate next to nothing. He lay practically
the whole day with his head against the wall and
pretended to sleep, but when they went in to
check that he had not made another undue
attempt to dis continue his life's adventure, they
saw that his eyes were open and that he was
staring continuously at the wall,
Herr Bachmann, they said seriously to
him, you must eat. You must stop feeling this
anxiety, you must make yourself strong,
strengthen your defenses, These obstructions
to your will to live are simply childish, You
must get yourself together, you must strengthen
yourself. You must now be reasonable.
However, no harsh words were ever exchanged between him and the guards, not even
during the period when he refused to eat. They
came with their bowls, sat by his headrest,
lifted his head and moved the spoons with warm
and nourishing soup toward his tightly pressedtogether lips. They touched the lips carefully,
talking to him. Now you must swallow, Herr
Bachmann, they said. You are still young.
You must be reasonable.
They sat there a long time and finally his
lips parted, he swallowed, he ate; they sup ported his head and he took into hims elf life I s
nourishment. He ate slowly, with his eyes
steeled straight ahead: yes, Herr Bachmann
63
had recovered his reason,
She tried to make the letters as lively and
detailed as possible since she imagined herself
to be his eyes in the free world.
Luckily enough, the nervousness which
had attacked her before Christmas was now
subdued and during January and February she
tried not only to do her work but also to share
with Herr Bachmann her impressions of life in
the free part of the city. In January much snow
fell. She reported that. Details of the singing
blackbirds on Meinekestrasse were repeated
three times. She tried also to describe certain
remarkable political events of that winter: for
example she described in one of the letters how
one Monday morning in January she had tried
to get into the courthouse gallery to witness
one of the great political trials in West Berlin,
the so-called Mahler Process, which was the
legal termination of the student demonstrations
of Easter, 1968.
Windows had been broken in a newspaper
office, someone had been agitating for the
storming of the Springer offices. The trial had
been put off for two years and therefore
occurred simultaneously with the end of the
uproar, the gradual splitting and disintegration
of the Berlin left, and the entrance of certain
groups into armed anarchism.
However, Frau Meckel made no attempt
to report these things. She told how she froze.
She had stood on the street outside the courthouse together with about fifty politically active
students. She felt frightened. She had forgotten her ID card in Moabit and so was not let
in. She wrote in passing about her feelings of
relief: "And I can assure you that on that cold
Monday morning it was with relief and joy that
I saw the gates close in front of me, even
though my heart beat with an anguish and
anxiety I could not explain. "
IV
She read the lines over again. "And you, my
beloved Torilein, I bear a secret. I bear the
knowledge that deep deep within your heart a
light will be preserved which will light the way
to love and to communion and that sometime
you .... "
Frau Meckel once had a dream about good
people being together in a womb of warmth and
love. Every time she was wrenched out of the
64
dream she wept copiously, The letters to Herr
Bachmann were for that reason tormenting and
to lighten the torment during this time she took
to reading, every morning without exception, a
bit from the diary of 1938, It didn't help.
Frau Meckel was thrown off balance.
Political demonstrations always upset her,
tore her apart, and consequently she had tried
up to now to avoid coming anywhere near them.
Flags made her sick with worry. The shouting
frightened her, But now she felt herself drawn
to them, as if the letters to Herr Bachmann
had displaced the barriers of resistance she
had maintained to events like these. It was as
if she were drawn by a magnet.
On the second of February she describes
a fearful and agonizing experience.
She had found herself in the center, had
stood on Kranzlerecke at the corner of Kurfurstendamm and Joachimstalerstrasse. There
were police everywhere--hundreds, maybe
thousands, of policemen, heavily armed,
Panzer tanks stood by along Kurfiirstendamm,
and in the side streets the air was full of
anxiety and malevolence, She had her yellow
handbag with her and, confined among the
spectators, she had stood on the pavement
peering anxiously down the street.
Even when they were still quite far away
she could, much to her horror, hear the shouts.
The shouting came closer, synchronized at a
regular pace--it was like distant, muffled
thunder--chanting which was about freeing
political prisoners. She couldn't always catch
the slogans but the main message was clear
enough: it spoke of violence, agitation,
perhaps also of wholly malevolent actions.
Certain refrains were easy to understand.
A-0-E, .. Springer in der Spree! or the short
ones like Mao ... Tse-tung!
And so the well-organized, militant
marching columns rolled up from Olivaeplatz,
up along Kurfurstendamm and ever closer to
Frau Hildegard Meckel. There was a kind of
merciless precision in the way the two enemy
forces, the demonstrators and the police,
neared each other, For in the two years that
had passed since Herr Bachmann had initiated
with his three shots the first really clear and
violent confrontations, during these two years
Berlin's Left had gotten over its first innocence
and learned the importance of organizing
everything perfectly and with a minimum of
unplanned improvisation,
It was a campaign that was now rolling
ahead.
Every demonstrator was in exactly the
right place, every part of the action was
directed by the appropriately placed officer-incharge with a walkie-talkie, every minute was
calculated, every spontaneous diversion
prepared, every bit of timing checked beforehand. On the side streets the provisional
ambulances were placed and properly supplied:
the demonstrators' ambulance corps had its
bottles of blood plasma at hand because no one
any longer trusted the police to take care of
injured demonstrators. Everything flowed
perfectly; and while this political student
demonstration, well organized in every detail,
flowed the usual route up Kurfiirstendamm
toward the waiting host of heavily armed police
with panzers and water cannons and masks of
plexiglas s and light asbestos shields and tear
gas bombs, while the climax of the confrontation approached calmly and gravely, Hildegard
Meckel stood there on the pavement in her
tight, well-worn coat and with her warm green
woolen cap on her head.
She clasped her hands anxiously together.
Through the openings in the police lines she saw
how the marchers got closer and how the conflict would be altogether unavoidable, and even
before the first tear gas bombs exploded the
tears ran down her cheeks; she shivered and
wept with despair and prayed with dumb lips
that the spirit of love might illuminate all
hearts so that nothing would happen to these,
God's children, so deeply caught in the lethal
maelstrom of politics.
All this she described in letters to Herr
Bachmann.
Frau Meckel had a terrible fear of
politics. "Politics" was a word that made her
disintegrate with anxiety. At the ·same time
she suspected that resolution would follow the
moment she understood her anxiety. Consequently she often wept on those occasions when
politics touched her.
The letter of February 2 is long and
contains a concluding section of reminiscences
which only partly hangs together with the rest
of the letter. She describes her recollection of
one First of May during the Thirties. She
writes:
"This afternoon--again the dense driving
snow storm--what a heavy winter, just think
that this is Berlin! Herr Bachmann, I sorely
hope that I do not tire you, but thoughts fly
about in my head like anxious birds and one
cannot always control their flight! I have in
memory all the First of Mays I have experienced, the different shapes they all took. As a
child I experienced that day, mainly because of
my father's involvement, as the greatest of
festive days. I remember even now with great
clarity the First of May, 1924. I was only
fourteen years old. After the customary
demonstration we went out to the Karten Wald.
I had just learned to cycle. My parents played
ball there with some friends. I rE!call that I
wore a windproof jacket with a Schiller collar.
Oh, how proud I was of that jacket! It seemed
as if that piece of clothing removed me from
the superficialities of life ... I wanted even then
to wander ideal ways--which I also came to do,
too--though how many times have I not lacked
sufficient strength!
"Ah, amongst the memories of the First
of May there is also the one from 1933, Today
when I stood in the sharp wind on the pavement
at Kurfiirstendamm and prayed for those young
people--how well did I not remember that
demonstration, for, oh! that was 37 years ago!
"We had assembled in good time at the
meeting place. It was at Neumarkt in Breslau.
I was then 2 3 years old and belonged to a youth
group in the workers' Sports Association which
called itself 'The Free Swimmers.' At last the
place was full of people. Then suddenly came
the news, like an avalanche for all of us, that
the new Chief of Police, appointed by the new
regime, had forbidden the First of May parades,
The news awakened rebellion, but also a feeling
of helplessness amongst many of us. We young
people had become so used to the First of May
parade that it was for us a part of our lives.
What a hue and cry one heard now, with such
rebelliousness and agitation among so many!
But suddenly, as if we had all been part of one
single will, the demonstration began to move.
A surging movement began when all at once
everyone started to weave from one side of the
street to the other. We never left the block
though we were moving all the time, So we
went side by· side for hours, singing. Even
today I feel that communion of people as a
pulsating heartbeat.
"I remember that First of May best of all
those I have experienced. Unfortunately that
was the last time my young heart was inflamed
by politics."
V
On the walls in the inner room, the one that
was used as a workroom and where the typewriter sat on the table which stood in the
middle of the floor, hung a number of sloppily
tacked and taped-up posters and placards.
Nearly all contained political messages. One
65
obviously represented Marx: the face was
composed of small birds' wings and feathers,
drawn with superficial thoroughness and
precision--the bodies and beaks had been
ingeniously joined together so that the picture
resembled a portrait, Further, there among
the other usual political illustrations was the
poster most common in West Berlin's leftist
circles--the heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Mao, and under them the text, Alle reden von
Wetter, Wir Nicht !
The flat was one of the six that Frau
Meckel cleaned, This flat like the other five
was owned by a West German landlord living in
Frankfurt. He possessed the title of Prince,
he rented out flats, and Frau Meckel was
included in the rental contract along with certain other incidentals, The tenants bound
themselves to accept the owner's assumption of
responsibility for something which was
diffusely called a "Ge sundheitsgarantie "- -which
meant in practice that one paid 112 marks for
housekeeping services to the Prince in
Frankfurt, who then paid Frau Meckel 84
marks per unit. According to the contract she
worked six "units of soundness," or flats, and
for this consequently received 504 marks per
month,
One could live on that if one was alone
with a dog in the suburb of Kreuzberg in West
Berlin, winter and spring, 1970,
E came back to the flat in the afternoon of
February 7 after having bought two loaves of
bread, half a pound of meat, two bottles of beer
and some papers, When he closed the door on
the landing he heard at once from the inner
room a low murmuring which confused him. He
knew that Frau Meckel did her weekly cleaning,
that she was in the flat, but what did that low
mumbling voice mean? It was as if someone
were reading to himself. He took off his shoes,
in stocking feet went quietly to the sliding
doors. He looked through the crack straight
into the room,
Frau Meckel was caught in a moment of
meditation,
She had put the vacuum cleaner in a
corner and had fallen on her knees in the
middle of the floor, Her face was turned
toward the four-headed illustration which
proclaimed Alle reden von Wetter, Wir
Nicht ! Her eyes were shut and she seemed to
be praying or, anyway, to have found herself in
a , state of intensive contemplation. The words
were sometimes possible to understand, though
the voice was low: "and then shall the light of
love stream into this young heart so that he
will be free from temptation and not allow him-
66
self to be seduced by foreign ideologies and all
the promises of politics and so that .... "
The face was uplifted, the eyes shut. The
tears had run over her face and it had an expression of great intensity and gravity. Her
gray hair was held fast in a knot and she wore
a blue sweater with a braided pattern, After
her prayer seemed to be over she got up with
dignity, stood still a moment, and looked at the
vacuum cleaner in the corner with an altogether
neutral yet thoughtful expression. Then she
turned and saw him, He stood in the doorway
and didn't know what to say.
It was as if she hesitated a second. Then
her face lit up with a marvelous smile and she
came toward him with arms outstretched. She
took both his hands in hers and gazed at him
long and silently, with an expression that
reflected great joy and friendliness,
Ah, Herr E, you have just now come, she
said in a low, warm, vibrating voice. I have
prayed for you--you heard it surely. I have
prayed that you might not be driven into evil
ways and that you might be protected from
politics,
She pressed his hands hard, For a
moment he found himself idiotically moved and
didn't know what to do. They sat on the sofa,
she continued to hold his hands in hers and
looked at him searchingly, anxiously. I am so
worried, she said. Yesterday I tied the dog to
a post outside the flat where I was cleaning and
when I came back .... Yes, he said, what
happened? It was gone, someone had let him
loose, Is he still ... ? No, she said shaking
her head, he came home. But now he is back
there, I. ... But why don't you take him into the
flat? The Prince, she said with an utterly
expressionless voice, would certainly not ....
What does he know about it? Well, he would
come to know about it anyway ....
Why did you pray for me? What do you
mean, she said and looked inquisitively at him,
don't you understand? No. In your country,
she began expectantly, is there politics also .. ,.
Then she fell silent; he waited a long time for
her to continue but she seemed to be imprisoned
by a thought and did not come out.
So they sat for a long time while the
afternoon sank into dusk and it became evening.
She told about the letters to Herr Bachmann
and what anxiety she felt for him. He was born
in Niedersachsen, and, when she had read that,
there had been a tug in her heart which had
given her pain. In Peine, in Niedersachsen,
Herr Bachmann was born. He could have been
my child, she said, but the winds of time
drove us west.
She now spoke quietly and calmly. She
continued to hold his hands in hers and the
tears came and went in her eyes. Her eyes
had secret and invisible interlocking channels,
and the movements of the waters of time in the
sea of suffering had made Frau Meckel's tears
rise and fall.
VI
The letter of February 17 is the most detailed
and the most remarkable of all Frau Meckel' s
letters to Herr Bachmann.
There she describes exhaustively the
break-in that happened one night in her little
flat in Kreuzberg. She had awakened about two
a. m. and thought she heard a noise. She had
then got up, gone out to the little hall--and
suddenly saw that her outer door which faced
the landing stood slightly ajar. She saw
something else, which terrified her: someone's
hand had gotten through the opening and was
groping for the chain. The hand made a
determined effort to lift the chain off but failed.
She had then come closer to the door and asked
who was there ("as if I found myself still in a
dream, I approached the door and asked with, I
am certain,· a shaking voice full of anguish ... ").
The hand had immediately drawn back and
she had heard steps withdrawing. When she
opened the door and looked out she had seen a
man disappear down the stairs. He wore a
yellow ulster; he turned and smiled a friendly
and polite smile and nodded to her. He had
made a sympathetic impression, and then he
was gone.
Frau Meckel had closed the door but
couldn't go back to sleep. In the morning her
worry and anxiety had not diminished and later
that day she had asked one of the decent and
respectable people she cleaned for what she
should do.
She had been advised to go to the police.
At the police station they had listened to
her rather long story and with great reluctance
noted down parts of it, and had advised her to
go through the register of criminals herself to
identify the one she had seen. They had taken
her down to the cellar where a large archive
was stored and she had to say how tall the sus pected man could have been, wliat age, what
color hair, what weight. Later they had placed
on a large bench in front of her boxes which
contained all West Berlin's registered criminals
between 174 and 178 centimeters tall, weighing
between 70-76 kilos, age between 20 and 32 and
with light hair. There were about 300.
Frau Meckel began to go through the register, but after a few minutes fell into tears.
The police clerk who was working nearby
saw that she was crying and came at once to her
and asked what was the matter. She pointed to
the cards which lay spread out in front of her
and said with a thick voice, "These young
people, these poor children, look at their
faces. 11 The clerk leaned forward uncertainly
and looked at the pictures but found nothing of
interest and asked, yes? See their young faces,
continued Frau Meckel, sniffing, what suffering,
these once pure faces, so much pain they are
forced to suffer through, why? Why? The clerk
supported her now from the side and put his
arm around her shoulder while he continued to
fix his eyes unhappily on the cards on the table.
She leaned lightly against him, still crying, and
he didn't know what to do. Tell me, she stammered on, are all these young people in prison?
Unfortunately not all, the clerk mumbled.
Oh, you must forgive me, whispered Frau
Meckel, and dried her face with a bit of her
sweater, oh, but I get so upset. Forgive me.
Suddenly much calmer, she looked again at
the cards. The pictures were all taken either
from the front or from the side. In order to
hinder future attempts at identification many
had distorted their faces in deliberate parodies
of insidious grimaces and, because a clear cold
light had beamed on them when they were photographed, the end result was rather terrifying.
No, said Frau Meckel in an utterly factual
voice, I actually cannot recognize him. None of
these is the one I saw. Oh really, said the
clerk, now confused by her sudden calmness,
too bad, but then there's nothing to be done, is
there? No, said Frau Meckel in a clear, light,
almost girlish tone, there is nothing to be done.
The police clerk looked inquisitively at
her. Where do you live? he asked. In Kreuzberg. Oh yes, out there there are a lot of this
sort, he remarked thoughtfully. Of what sort?
Of this sort here, and he waved his hand in an
eloquent gesture at the outspread cards, Foreigners and felons, he added in explanation,
guest workers and such. Frau Meckel looked
with consternation at the cards. Perhaps he
was right. Out there in Kreuzberg there were
many such faces. Though she hadn't ever
really seen it that way before.
Never seen it that way.
Frau Meckel? His questioning, almost
reproachful voice awakened her out of her
thoughts. She looked up at him and smiled
apologetically. You live and work in West
67
Berlin? She nodded, mute. Husband and
children? She shook her head--now for once it
was easy to answer; the words came to her with
complete certainty and without pain. No,
neither. My husband died at the front. And my
only child, she added with a voice that was
clear as glass and free of suffering, I had
already lost, in 19 38. Oh, said the police clerk
in a moderate formal tone--which he must have
learned in the police academy's basic course in
citizen psychology, to be used on occasions of
tragic incidents--so sad, so tragic. And how
old? Still in the womb, she said, equally
succinct and factual. I understand, he said.
Even before ... I received a shock, she explained
with her eyes fixed on his round embarrassed
face. Someone came and told me that my father
had died in a concentration camp. And in my
sensitive condition .... I understand, he said
quickly, so sad, so tragic. He had been
involved in politics, she added in explanation.
They both looked now at the cards spread
out on the table. So many destinies, she said
quietly, so many. If only the light of love could
enter in. She heard him move at her side;
there was a lengthy silence. He had now
removed the protective arm from her shoulders
and held his hands behind his back. She heard
that he snapped his fingers.
But God is love, he said in anticipation.
She looked quickly up at him, not smiling
any longer. She herself had been on the way to
saying just that, but he was ahead of her, and
when the words came from his mouth they didn't
sound right. TI?-ere was something wrong with
them. She examined his face very attentively
and he seemed embarrassed or afraid--perhaps
he was only bothered by her? The light in the
archives was very clear, almost blue-white
clear, and a weak echo was heard from the iron
stairs, sounds of hard metallic footsteps which
were on their way down and would soon reach
them.
Frau Meckel continued to brood over
where the fault lay. The police clerk was her
age, he was almost bald and had nice steelrimmed, lightly-silvered glasses with heavily
corrective lenses. He chewed rhythmically on
his cheeks as if he had decided to say something but hadn't quite reached the point of
executing his decision. At last came the
beginning of a sentence that he had obviously
long thought over. We must understand, he
began, rather formally as if he were speaking
to several people, that in this most controversial and historically meaningful period ... then
he saw how intensively Frau Meckel took him in
and was silenced in the middle of the sentence.
68
The sound of the footsteps came nearer.
Frau Meckel was now certain that she was
about to scream. The footsteps mean that a
person is approaching, she thought, while the
scream slowly climbed up inside her. If they
only manage to get here in time, perhaps I am
saved.
VII
A poison has crept into me, thought Herr Bachmann. I got their innocent letters and read, but
a poison sneaked into me. Words are poison,
knowledge is poison, they poisoned me and made
me uncertain. They were shrewd and now it is
too late. Now I am poisoned, my whole organism is poisoned, now all that is left is to die.
What good does it do that they write to me that I
am innocent, that I was an instrument, that they
forgive me. Forgive me! What cynicism.
They must have understood, of course,
that I had already gone to pieces.
At this point he almost never thought about
the shots. He had stood outside the undertaker's
in that house where the Socialist Student Association also had its quarters. It was Maundy
Thursday and then D came out and took his red,
girl's bicycle and Josef Bachmann fired his
three shots and D fell prone. So simple.
Later the chaos began and he himself was shot.
Unfortunately not lethally. And then the hospital.
If only I hadn't started to read the letters,
he thought. And the books they sent. If I had
held the poison off.
In Peine, he thought, in Peine in Nieder sachsen, there one learned to hold the poison
off. There we learned to hold the words away
from us so the damaging particles might not
penetrate and burst our shells and fill us with
their deadly poison.
Deceived, he thought, I was not deceived,
exactly. But it is damned unjust. When he
thought like this he became numb and at the
same time anxious inside himself; he felt
nervous. Then he couldn't do anything--not
talk, not read. Nothing. At last it got to the
point where Frau Meckel's letters were the only
things he could read. "Unfortunately that was
the last time my young heart was inflamed by
politics."
Why, actually, had she written "Unfortunately"?
They dropped the poison in. A poison, a
suspicion. Deceived, no, perhaps not.
was damned unjust.
But it
On the way to the shower he made the fifth
attempt. He struck both hands right through a
window and, while moaning almost soundlessly,
he hacked through his wrists. The right wrist
got a large, very effective gash which in
minutes drained him of a good deal of blood, To
everyone's amazement, this attempt was almost
successful. However, Herr Bachmann was
again restored to life, and was after only a week
returned to his cell and his prison sentence of
seven years.
There was a new letter from Frau Meckel
waiting for him. He read it with a feeling of
impotent, perplP,xing rage which was incomprehensible even to himself. This Frau Hildegard
Meckel, in her self-appointed ambition to
describe the divided city I s condition for him
(who had, anyway, fallen apart), had taken the
bus out to the border at Checkpoint Charlie,
gone into the little souvenir shop, gone up to the
top floor and parked herself in front of the little
local TV set which, via a TV camera with a
powerful range, sent direct pictures of the
street life on the East German side of Friedrichstrasse,
She couldn't go over herself (she would of
course be taken as a West Berliner), but there
she had sat and watched and watched and then
tried to remember it all when she wrote to him.
It became utterly meaningless, and grotesquely
empty, information, The only thing she offered
was her recollection that there moved figures
which were gray and unclear and incomprehensible and that the distance foreshortened the
objects. Later came the obligatory tirades
about sympathy and love and all that, What did
that serve? What in God's name did that serve?
In the letter were enclosed two souvenir
cards that she had bought in the shop, One
showed a watch tower by the wall, the other was
the classic picture of a fleeing volkspolizist,
poised in the air above a barbed-wire gate with
a machine gun in his hand. Herr Bachmann sat
awhile and looked at the two cards and tried to
calm down. Then as an experiment he put them
over the bed, They refused to be fastened with
a thumbtack. He then asked the guard for a
couple of pieces of tape, and received them.
The next day he took down the cards himself. Once again he was refusing food, He
began a letter--in part very aggressive--to
Frau Meckel but tore it up, At this time he
weighed 11. 3 kilos less than when he came in,
They were worried about him, He showed no
lust for life. He only sat and stared at the
walls. It was inexplicable.
VIII
On Monday morning, February 21, 1970, Frau
Meckel received in a registered letter sent
from Frankfurt the news that she was relieved
from her job until further notice, The reason
given was that her sick leave for nervous
trouble had seriously disrupted the cleaning
cycle for the various dwellings (so it actually
said in the letter). In other words, she was
fired,
It was signed by the Prince himself. She
got the letter in the early morning post and
became very nervous. Mostly she sat and
stared at the signature. Never in all her years
of service had she said one single bad word
about the Prince, though there were many
opportunities, and when she saw the words
"seriously disrupted the cleaning cycle" she
felt vaguely duped, abandoned, and then anxious.
After crying a little while she decided to do
something but couldn't hit upon what. Anyway,
she must have work. What work?
She ·went down to the janitor of the house,
She knew him slightly. She asked whether he
could give her references for suitable cleaning
jobs. The result of this application was that
after a short discussion he kindly but determinedly advised her to contact the tenants
herself on her own initiative. Ask them, he
said; he seemed to be very tired and was very
brief with her--perhaps he had been drinking
the night before--and closed the door.
She began at the bottom, The first door
was not opened. The second door was opened
after a certain hesitation and the person who
opened it looked frightened and confused,
Suddenly Frau Meckel felt utterly dumb,
without words, I come with an inquiry, she
began--and heard that she sounded stiff and
strange--it is about the cleaning. Yes? said
the man in the doorway, who looked like one of
the foreign workers (was he a Turk?). Do you
need a cleaning woman? she asked with a sort
of desperate uncertainty, and the door opened
wider and she could see into the flat.
There was only one room, On the floor
lay mattresses and she could see six, seven
people there. They had all been caught in
various positions and looked directly and
fearfully at her from their sleeping places.
One man was shaving and the others sat and
69
lay in strange attitudes, Cleaning, said Frau
Meckel in a low voice, but the man in the
doorw13-y only shook his head, not understand
your speech. Why are you so many? asked
Frau Meckel helplessly, do you all live here?
Turkey, the man in the doorway answered with
great solemnity, and she saw that several of the
men behind him nodded vehemently and chimed
in, yes, Turkey. They now began to whisper
among themselves, now and then casting a
worried glance at her. Are you legitimate? one
of them asked finally, authorities?
Frau Meckel shook her head. Not
inspection? No.
When they had shut the door she stood
almost a minute and felt her heart thump violently. They were afraid of me. They were
afraid of me !
Then she went straight back up to her flat.
She read over the letter about her dismissal. It was utterly clear. Apart from what
the phrase "disrupted cleaning cycle" actually
meant, the fact of the matter was plain: she had
been fired. She felt completely destroyed and
thought: why should it be like this?
Strangely enough she didn't cry anymore,
It is certainly well and justly deserved, she
thought after she had read through the letter for
the fifth time--well deserved, well deserved,
well deserved, The tears were still in abeyance
and she felt different from the way she was
used to feeling. She thought: I must write a
letter to Herr Bachmann and tell him about this,
A letter to Herr Bachmann. Immediately.
But when she did sit down, pen in hand and
an empty sheet of paper in front of her, she felt
only empty. She couldn't find one word. She
knew at once what it was: she felt herself
entirely without love, And when this feeling did
not dissipate and when she couldn't even cry,
she went to the bureau and took out the notebook, At those times when she felt completely
without love it usually helped to read a passage
from the diary of 1938. She did this when she
felt upset in an uncharitable way or was near to
feeling rage.
The notebook was brown and on the outside
sat the neat little jar label. There it stood:
A QUIET WEB OF THOUGHTS ABOUT
TORILEIN
by Hildegard Meckel
( 19 38)
It was the diary from the time of her pregnancy.
The first page began with words she had read
so many times that she almost knew them by
70
heart: "The day of my great longing shall soon
arrive. In me, under my heart, a new life is
beginning to rise. How clearly the sun shines
suddenly, how joyfully the sunbeams laugh from
every corner of the house! Oh, it must be a
girl! So my lines shall be dedicated to a girl,
my girl. And if it is a boy--who knows ?--so
shall I lay this notebook in a box so that later in
quiet hours I may be reminded of these
wonderful days when I experienced the greatest
and highest of all wonders--the wonder of love,
an emerging life!"
The diary's dun-colored paper had paled
with the years; the handwritten pages were
quite large and she had folded them across in
order to get them in the stiff brown notebook
with the jam jar label. She read on with concentration, trying to avoid thinking about
anything else, especially the letter of dismissal,
"Ah Torilein, so strange life can be sometimes
--I often compare it to the sea. Oh! the sea! I
have still not seen it but I have often felt it--the
sea must be like that! Today it happened again.
I was daydreaming and let myself be driven by
the waves. It was a cradling, a rocking-completely without aim, I let myself be wafted
about and suddenly tlie ocean waves carried me
in among a lot of old houses. Oh, Torilein,
you too will sometime experience these
feelings! I recognized the houses--what I saw
was my childhood! I was back in Nikolaivorstadt, I saw the house where I was born, with
the garden, the outhouse, the trees ! How
wonderful had not ... , "
She suddenly halted in her reading and
began to turn over the pages, nervously, intensively. She was now very upset. Finally
she found a passage she recalled better. She
read it and immediately felt calmer, Perhaps
she should send the whole little diary to Herr
Bachmann? In his last letter he had been so
short, so impersonal. Perhaps these old diary
entries could be of some help to him also?
It was raining outside. The dog slept with
short sniffling breaths and with one large ear
flopped like a blanket over his nose, What
shall become of him now? She looked out of the
window: the back yard was a cramped narrow
well, the houses flaked dull and gray in the
streaming rain, most of the windows had their
curtains drawn. She knew so few of these
people. Practically no one. A deep narrow gray
well where they crowded together without the
light of love being able to reach down to them.
Like a rat trap. One of those that you fall
down into.
What a strange winter it had been. So
uncharitable. What cold gray rain. So still
everything had become.
The letters were round--that was her
handwriting as a young woman. She had written
in ink. The handwriting was easy to read, but
reading became more and more sluggish. It
went so slowly, it was so difficult. Had she
really felt like that?
Like a soft secure cradling sleep--so had
she wanted to see her life.
Had it become so? She read now very
slowly. "What a beautiful time I have experienced, I lay a little tired in both body and soul
in a lounge chair, The May sun warmed my
face and I heard the birds singing. How long I
lay there, between waking and dreaming, I
don't know, So sweet is such a rest for me.
The blanket covered my body and without the
eyes of strangers seeing us, I could touch the
place where you slumber on toward life. Out of
sight of human eyes my hand could caress you
and I talked quietly to you while we were both
enveloped by this sweet rest. Was it not bitter,
oh my Torilein, to be roused out of this slumber
by human voices? by strange people who spoke
to us? How much we both would have rather
slumbt;,red on in this life's sweet warmth."
There she stopped reading. Her glance
had fastened on the last lines and they held her
stubbornly. Life's warmth. Life's sweet
warmth. It continued to rain. She didn't look
up. Thus she sat utterly still and waited for
the meaning of the words to be restored while it
became full day in Kreuzberg, West Berlin,
Herr Bachmann slept and in his dream he was
back in Peine in Niedersachsen. He was home
among his own again and it was Just like both
before and after the episode in West Berlin.
He dreamed that he sat again in his
schoolroom with his classmates. He was again
a pupil behind a desk and everything was very
familiar. They all sat silently reading about
German history. There was an al;mosphere of
quiet expectation in the air. Suddenly the
teacher tapped on the floor with the pointer and
all the children looked up. Would Josef please
come forward? she said. He got up and went to
the front, The teacher, whom he liked very
much, had tears in her eyes, but she was
smiling, Josef, she said in front of the whole
class, we only want to thank you for what you
have done. We only want to tell you that you
belong to us, that we will never forget you. She
held out her arms and came toward him, still
smiling, He blinked, didn't feel at all shy. And
then he felt how she threw her arms around him.
When he awoke it was still early morning.
He lay in the cell and the dream thinned
out slowly and disappeared, After it had completely gone he felt empty and there was nothing
else to do but lie still and look at the ceiling.
That is what he did, Later he sat up. The
floor was cold and he put on a pair of socks. He
put the blanket over his shoulders. He looked
around. Everything he saw was very familiar
now. Everything was exactly as it should be,
It was as it was. On the table - -two books that
he still hadn't opened though they had been
there several days. Over the books--a plastic
bag which had contained almond cakes; but the
cakes were gone and only crumbs were left.
It was silent. He couldn't hear a sound.
It was totally silent.
He sat half an hour and didn't move. Then
he slowly shook off the blanket, leaned forward
and took the bag. It was plastic, He tugged
carefully along the bottom edge but it was
strong and held. So he took the bag and slipped
it over his head.
He now saw everything in less clear
shades: the gray had another grayness, the dark
another darkness. Inside it was calm. As a
test he held the opening, pressed together the
corners and pressed all the harder against his
throat. The plastic bag immediately began to
heave in rhythm with his breathing, pressed
itself against his face, inflated itself like a
balloon, He let go his grip, took off the bag and
regarded it thoughtfully. After awhile he put it
on his head again,. lay on the bed with his head
on the pillow, breathed deeply--both hands
holding fast the bottom of the bag.
He breathed calmly and evenly and with
distended eyes looked right through the plastic
up to the ceiling. After about ten seconds his
breathing quickened, the bag clung to his face
more tightly with every breath, the plastic
became foggier and more opaque. His hands
gripped tighter and tighter around the opening,
his body contracted and, just on the brink of
unconsciousness, his hands slowly-, reluctantly,
opened,
Half unconscious, he rolled over to one
side, the plastic bag still on but now open, The•
blue-red color of his face paled slowly and
became normal again, His chest pumped hard
and almost convulsively; he began to sniffle and
at last he wept openly and with despair.
Later he sat up again. Herr Bachmann
was back to life.
When they came in with the breakfast he
had returned to normal, He was silent and
didn't answer, but to their great astonishment
he ate without resistance. In the middle of the
day he tried to read awhile but could not. Then
71
he sat on the bed,
The plastic bag continued to lie on the
table,
Suddenly he began to think about something, he turned and started searching the wall
behind him. Yes, it was still there, the tape
that had held fast Frau Meckel's cards.
He pulled the plastic bag over his head
again and lay down on the bed. For awhile he
listened for the sound of steps but none came.
Then he took the tape, closed the bag's open
end, wound the tape around it and with his
fingers pressed hard the bunched-together
plastic and tape against his throat.
He now breathed slowly with both hands
clenched against his throat. His eyes stared
large, black, and terror-stricken, straight up
through the plastic, his mouth compressed as if
in extreme determination, He breathed, He
breathed, With every inhalation the plastic
cleaved more and more rhythmically and tightly
against his face--the eyes wildly distended, the
hands clamped rigidly around the bag's taped
opening. His mouth then opened.
He kicked hard with his legs. One sock
fell off, he hit the bed post with his foot but
didn't seem to notice, The mouth bulged more
violently and painfully, the tongue groped
thicker and more desperately for the wrinkles
in the plastic mask which buckled hard inwards,
the hands clenched and relaxed but the opening
remained closed, the head went back, the chest
heaved and so it was over,
At last Frau Meckel had decided, She took the
brown notebook with the jar label, found a large
envelope and put the notebook in it. On the
outside of the envelope she wrote Josef Bachmann's name and address. For a moment she
thought of enclosing a letter or an explanation
but decided the notebook would be enough,
It was now afternoon, She put on her coat
and w ent out. She said to the dog: I am coming
back.
It had stopped raining, She carried the
envelope under her arm, finally found a news paper stand and bought stamps there, I have a
friend who is ill, she said in explanation to the
man in the kiosk. I am sending a book as
encouragement. The man grunted something
indecipherabl~ and gave her the change. Are
you also an unhappy person? she asked kindly.
No, he said curtly and turned away. She
retired a few meters from the kiosk and
counted her money. Twelve marks and sixty
pfennig. The rain had stopped but a heavy
sour fog had replaced it.
72
She stood on the pavement with the
envelope in her hand and suddenly everything
collapsed in on her and she fell to pieces,
What should she do?
She went very slowly along the street and
found herself in the vicinity of Hasenheide,
Here were beer halls and bingo halls--it was
not here she had thought of going,
It isn't right, she said loudly to herself, It
isn't right that I should need to fall apart now.
Not right. Not right. When dusk fell she was
still on her way. She held the envelope under
her arm. Sometimes she thought she could see
herself going up to a mailbox and putting in the
envelope to Herr Bachmann. Nevertheless it
remained under her arm the whole time. At
last she became very tired and tried to find
somewhere to sit.
A street went under the elevated S-track
and just inside the arch she found a bench. It
was actually only a plank laid across two
stones, The train thundered overhead every
five minutes, but it wouldn't rain there anyway.
There she sat. She held the envelope with the
diary hard against her breast, but she had long
ago forgotten that she should send it to Herr
Bachmann. She felt completely dumb and uncharitable and she thought: soon I will also feel
rage. What kind of life is this? Soon I will be
one of those who feels rage. What kind of life
is that?
There she sat and there on the bench they
found her much later, after it had gotten dark
and someone who had seen her there began to
wonder, She still held the envelope with the
diary close to her breast. She could not
explain what had happened but was very calm
and collected. She left her address, asked
them to take care of the dog, and went by
herself without help into the waiting car.
Herr Bachmann lay on his back, his legs drawn
up and his arms pr e ssed to his breast. One
foot was bare and there was blood from a
scratch on the sole of his foot. On the inside
of the plastic bag the breath had become misty,
but later the moisture had collected into small
drops of water and one could see his fac e
clearly. He lay with his eyes open, stonily
fixed on the gray ceiling. His mouth was open,
his tongue still pressed against the plastic .
Like a thin clear sheet of ice the plastic
lay over his face. There inside was Herr
Bachmann and his now terminated life, for so
cleverly had he sealed his bag that the injurious
air was not able to break through and fill him
with its poison. D
nicholas papayanis
hale chatfield
elizaheth culhert
IN OHIO:
A.M., NOVEMBER
MOORINGS
Gunslaps in the frosty morning
in the valley a train
clicking (its wide
cry surrounding it, carrying it
away)
silences:
between this remote
sound (and that)
The slackened lengths of hempen halyard measuring
distances' shores
snarl, twist, knot in tangles:
clumsily the slow rope worms
about barnacled pilings the fishes infest
to come caught, clasp in wreathlike circlings, haltering
firm the careening sea yearn.
one silence
(and another):
glass beads on a string.
0 bent to leeward, my life line went beleaguering
thoroughfares, wharves,
ways stay-weights anchor angles
taut, tied, posted to boat down storms!
Harbouring the belaboured wave, coves of rest
- crest-flung heaviness beneath -
IN OHIO: SUNLIGHT
ON AUTUMN FOLIAGE
imaged masted fastenings
to moor more keen
my return.
The sunlight
does these colors
beyond memory or expectation:
there is no telling
these rages of red and orange
ONCE
ON SO FRAGILE
--except, here and there
in the countryside, a quietness
arises more articulate
than calendars.
Once on so fragile
a windy hour
came an Angel
But then those
damnable meanings
scattered among the trees:
Chorus to sing the
names all things take
on only once upon
those formerly useful
things- those histories.
74
being named for us
to so deflower the
myths they were before
Angels came on
once so fragile
a windy hour.
marlene gerherick
A WINDING SONG
singing through deep winter
sigrid came to rip carpet rags
balls of yellows, purples
oranges grew and grew until
the circles of glowing colors
from old robes and dresses
became the tales of a £inland
none of us had ever seen
but all of us knew was as
miraculous as the rounds
of greens and blues
larger and larger
rounder and rounder
till the whole room
was spinning with
midnight suns
and the reds multiplied
as i wound and wound
my way through all remembers
yesterday and tomorrow
went round and round
and often i slept long
long sleeps with
sigrid's enveloping color
surrounding me
rounding me
round
ONE HUNDRED
PROOF DAY
the world is
reeling hillsides
rolling into gullies
old barns
hiccup
grey boards and rusted nails
shake loose with each spasm
a deer
impales himself on the fence
swallows
falter in mid-air
reeling, rolling
the day continues
vaughn koumjian
CHARLES IVES
He shrewdly waits
And sings songs
Shrouded in a
Voice the hills know:
Sometimes the circuits
Of the ethos jangle
Noisily or break
Into echo of echo
Of march or hymn;
From deep in the woods
It springs into being
And a spirit that
Does not encumber
Or wish to be encumbered
Glows in New England
75
john milisenda
FAMILY ALBUM
lyn lifshin
THE MAD GIRL THINKS OF HERSELF
AS MILKWEED BUT
IT'S SOMEONE ELSE WHO STICKS
TO THE PILLOWS UNDER HER SKIN
LIKE A CAT UNTOUCHED TOO LONG
the leaves change each day here
when i stayed in yoi...r house
it was always the
end of summer david
breaking broken held in a
light like a room in some
museum i wrote the first poems
to find out what i
even your name is some
one else you dissolve in the
suburbs of night pulling
the sloped ceiling down
missed sent them to you
i could have been breathing to
a stone he went back he
said he didn't know you but
after you where we
waited our mouths frost
bitten even
in july
your mother could hardly
remember his sister's
name the poet
who lived there was some
snow in your mother's voice
listening in those tall
rooms for what
we'd never do even the
place she couldn't under
stand why anyone
would care said something
about his depression now
bourbon was hard to
swallow black leaves blew
under the bed where i
kept those white
yr father doesn't leave the
house if i saw you i couldn't
tell you stopped i wonder
you must still touch
cotton pants on making
love cold beer
in the toilet.
you might
wonder why you're in this
women the way you touched
that guitar making wood
that didn't know it could
sing want to
POTATOES
a stone or root,
that 's what I'd
like to be today
burrowing deep
down and quiet
You go for a walk
if you like, I'd
rather stay numb
and dusty, like
potatoes, tho I'm
wondering if they
should be in this
poem, lately they
seem to be in so
many others
poem after so long last
night someone came from your
city said in yr house it seemed
that everything was
79
riehard greene
THE WINDOW
CHARACTERS
(in order of appearance)
alice cellner, age 37
jun me millan, age 38
mort cellner, age 39
(The Cellners' apartment, a tenement apartment
on Second Avenue at Twenty-fifth Street in
Manhattan. It has two rooms: a living roomdining room-kitchen and an offstage bedroom. A
partially successful effort has been made to
transform the tenement into a cheerful apartment. Travel posters hang on the walls. The
room's window faces an air shaft and the window
contains about fifteen plants, some hanging and
others sitting on the sill. The coffee table overflows with travel folders. It is 11:30 a. m., a
weekday morning.
ALICE:
(Breaking away from his embrace)
ALICE CELLNER and JIM McMILLAN are on
the couch, half clothed; they are into the early
stages of lovemaking. THEY undress each other
as they kiss. One of his shoes is off. ALICE
keeps trying to speak to him as they get more
passionate)
(THEY embrace. Someone is heard in the hall,
fumbling with packages and trying to unlock the
door)
©Richard Greene, 1973
80
•
One week or two?
(HE pulls her back.
SHE breaks away)
St. Thomas or Martinique?
(HE pulls her back.
SHE breaks away again)
Then how about the chateau country package?
Dammit, why is he coming home now?
the closet. Quick.
Hide in
(SHE helps him gather his clothes. JIM runs
off into the bedroom. SHE closes the bedroom
asking you to take me away if you come in.
(Calling) Jim, be a man. Help.
(JIM, who is half-dressed and c':rries his
jacket, bolts across the room, picks up his
shoe, and dashes out the door)
(To Jim) For God sakes, maybe you've never
met him; but he's a person. I hear your feet
running down those stairs. You go down those
stairs, forget about seeing your other shoe
again. Coward.
(To Mort) Last week, Dr. Gilles said it seems
I only love you when you're down--stop and
listen--from now on, I'll only love you when
you're up. That means up here. Right now.
Up means up. Get in here.
(MORT has climbed out and is inching his way
along the ledge)
The apartment feels empty already. Think of
me for once. Being in an empty apartment all
day. Cringing every time I pass this window.
Your life insurance doesn't cover suicides,
I'll eventually have to work. I hate typing
letters. You still have a career. Why, if I
were you, I'd come right in just because I have
an interesting career, if no job,
coat. Yellow shoes, No hat. Your right arm
was around her. Fifty-two fifty for that
afternoon, I found the bill. Did I ever say a
word to you? Did I ever make a scene? Did I
ever commit suicide? No. Because I wanted
to save the marriage. So come right in. Now
that you know I know, who are you trying to kid
out there? (Leaning out and looking at him for
a long time. SHE then leans back in) I can't
blame you, I drove you to it, Mort, I have to
level with you. The truth is this: I'm the one
who belongs out there, because, now get a good
grip on the bricks, because I did a terrible
thing. I married you and I never loved you.
Don't take it personally. I never loved anyone,
When you proposed, I wasn't crazy about you,
I thought a young law student would make a lot
of money. Right now you're making zero.
Nothing. Mort, you married a case. There's
no reason to be out there. Nothing in our
marriage has changed. It's always been rotten.
You've lasted eighteen years. Don't give up
now. Mort, this time I'm telling the truth.
Those travel posters I put up, they were for
Jim. I've been saving money out of my food
budget since we've been married. To run away
with some man, None of them would go with
me. I wanted revenge for spending eighteen
years of vacations at your mother's house in
Boston.
Get in here. Oh God, get in. I know, You're
doing this to spite me. Taking your own life.
That's some way to get back at me. What
would Dr. Gilles say? Mort, he wouldn't be
pleased, So come in, come in. I'm going to
panic.
But Mort, forgive me. Forgive me for everything. I know I'm a bitch. Don't you think I
hate myself? Why do you think I dress like
this ? Smoke? Bite my nails?
(His arm appears and HE hands her his watch)
Come inside, we 111 start new. I've saved over •
four thousand dollars. Half of it's yours.
You' re not broke now, you can come in.
Even if you 're only jumping for yourself, get
in. Hurry up.
I'll give you three thousand. OK, Mort, all
four thousand is yours. Aren't you coming in?
(HE hands her his wallet)
Morton Cellner ... I'll do anything for you.
(HE hands her his wedding band)
You could take the g old out of your teeth and
I'd still know you're not being practical. Being
practical is in here. It's coming inside.
All right then. All right. All right . Don't be
so self-righteous. So smug. So noble. I saw
you coming out of the Americana Hotel with a
young woman on March nineteenth. A blue
82
Mort, come in. Mort, you'll find another job.
We'll move to a new apartment in a building
that isn't on its last legs. We'll be just like we
were when we .first met. Maybe I'll even get a
part-time job to help out. Everything I s going
to be wonderful.
(Pause,
Climbing out)
Mort, move over, I'm coming out ,
THE CURTAIN FALLS
fred gutzeit
contributors
GUY R. BEINING has had 600 poems in 200
magazines in the past three years. His work
will be included in the California Review's anthology, Death and Suicide, and Screen Door will
do a chapbook with introduction by Richard Neva.
BETTY BRESSI had two drawings exhibited
at Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana); her
drawings and grids have appeared in Gegenschein
Quarterly and Fifth Assembling and her poems in
Little Review, Small Pond and Jam To-Day.
ALAN BRITT's poems are widely published
in magazines, and he has completed a collection
entitled Incarnation for the Water Lily. He has
been teaching at Bay College of Maryland, and
has worked in the Poets in the Schools program.
HALE CHATFIELD received a 1974-5 grant
for writing from the National Endowment for the
Arts. An associate professor of English at Ohio's
Hiram College, and founder of the Hiram Poetry
Review, he has published three volumes of poetry.
ANDERSON CRAIG showed us how to put a
magazine together. He has sculpted and has
written many short stories and poems as well as
a non-fiction book, Welfare Wasteland.
ELIZABETH CULBERT contributed three
poems to our last issue. She has translated a
book of Puerto Rican folk tales (Three Wishes by
Ricardo Alegda; Harcourt), has had poems in
several journals, including Chelsea, and is the
poetry conscience of this magazine.
PAUL DE JOHN is a poet who makes his
living as an actor and writes plays as a hobby.
JAY DE VOE is a free-lance graphics
designer from Brooklyn.
STEPHEN DIXON's stories are in North
American Review, Transatlantic Review, and
eighteen other magazines, and he has received
an NEA grant for fiction, Five stories are
appearing in Making a Break (Latitudes Press).
MELVIN DERWIS, an architect and administrator, studies piano and music theory with
Eugene Seaman,
PATRICIA EAKINS has had poems in
journals including U-T Review, The Bitter Oleander and Ghost Dance; a short story in Ba.chy;
and an essay in this magazine. A founder of BOX
749, she also studies music with Eugene Seaman,
to whom both she and Melvin Derwis are grateful
for his help with the setting of "Pierrot."
PER OLOV ENQUIST is a Swedish writer
whose novel, The Legionnaires (1968), won
Sweden's most important literary prizes, the
Literary Award of the Nordic Council and the
Swedish Literary State Award. His most recent
novel is The Coach ( 1971 ). A play of his was
84
premiered in Stockholm in September (1975) and
his oeuvre has been translated into several
languages. The Legionnaires is published in
English by Delacorte.
DAVID FERGUSON, Editor in Chief of BOX
749, has had work published in a college-text
anthology, The Now Voices, and in Walter
Lowenfels' Where Is Vietnam? His play, "The
Widows' House," was recently performed off-offBroadway by the Hamm & Clov Stage Company.
JULIE GASKILL has been studying at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
MARLENE GERBERICK, whose art has
appeared in several one-woman shows, is on the
staff of Gravida and runs a prison art workshop.
EMILIE GLEN's poems and short stories
have been widely anthologized and published in
journals around the world. She acts offBroadway; a poem of hers has won the Stephen
Vincent Bene't award.
VINCENT GORMLEY works as an orderly at
a hospital in Yonkers and is a member of the .:::..:!volunteer Yonkers Ambulance Service.
MARC GRABLER cannot stop cartooning.
RICHARD GREENE, Literary Director of
the Triad Playwrights Company, has studied at
the H-B Studio and is now with Milan Stitt.
FRED GUTZEIT has had one-man shows at
the Cooper School of Art (Cleveland), the Paul
Kessler Gallery (Provincetown), and Paley and
Lowe, Inc. (New York); his work has been
exhibited in group shows throughout the country.
JANET CAMPBELL HALE, a Coeur
d'Alene Indian, is studying law at Cal Berkeley's
Boalt Hall School of Law. Her novel, The Owl's
Song, was published by Doubleday in 1974, and
her poems and short stories have appeared in
magazines and anthologies.
JOHN R. HALL has studied with Robert
Peters at the University of California at Irvine
and has had work chosen for a journal of UC!
poets. He is also an engineering draftsman.
TOM HANSEN, Michigander, has been
teaching at Northern State College for seven
years. His writing has appeared in Bleb, Some
and other journals.
-RICHARD HOFFMAN has had poems in
American Review, Carleton Miscellany and
other magazines and in a Prentice-Hall
anthology. He edits Glyph and is working on a
theater-piece about Aztec-Maya civilization.
BEVERLEE HUGHES co-edits Yes and has
had poems in Epos, Minnesota Revi~nd other
magazines, and prose in Center and Tuvoti, She
recently wrote in Provincetown through the Fine
1
J
Arts Work Center.
DANIEL JAHN's Noon Afternoon, a program
of songs set to American poetry, was broadcast
over Boston's Radio WGBH in April. This is sue' s
"Morning" will be part of a similar program.
DAVID KASTIN was a co-founder and
fiction editor of Junction, a Brooklyn College review. His poetry has appeared in several magazines; his writing on music, in The Village Voice.
VAUGHN KOUMJIAN's poetry and fiction
have appeared in The Remington Review, Vagabond and Tri-Quarterly, among journals. He is
on the staff of Ararat, has worked as a police
reporter and studies at the Art Students I League.
KARL KROLOW, born in 1915, is one of
postwar Germany's leading poets (he refused to
let his work be published during the Nazi years).
He is a recipient of the Georg Buechner prize.
ERNEST LARSEN is an anarchist at work
on a book about Ravachol, the great French
criminal anarchist.
LYN LIFSHIN is the author of Upstate
Madonna, Black Apples, Old House Poems and
several other books. She is widely published in
magazines and has read at the Whitney Museum.
TIM McDONOUGH works with visual and
aural language elements.
JOHN MILISENDA has been photographing
his parents for the last seven years. Our
selection is a small cross-section of that work.
DAVID NEAL MILLER is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University
of California, Santa Cruz; his translations have
appeared in Bitterroot, Occident and elsewhere.
SHERRY MILLNER is a feminist artist
living in a desert in California.
NORMAN MOSER's Jumpsongs was recently
issued by Gar Press; other collections of poems
and tales are coming from Thorp Springs and
Desert Review presses. His work has been in
The Living Underground among anthologies; he occasionally prints Illuminations books/magazines.
JEROME CLIFFORD NATHANSON, a BA in
Greek, is working on a doctorate in English at
the University of Cincinnati. His work has been
published in The New York Times, Partisan
Review, Antaeus and other magazines.
NICHOLAS PAPAYANIS is an assistant professor of history at Brooklyn College and has
published several books on modern French social
history. He has appeared in the off-Broadway
production "Moonchildren."
D, F, PETTEYS, Poet-in-Residence at C. W.
Post College of Long Island University, had
poems in the third is sue of BOX 7 49.
LEROY V. QUINTANA, lifelong resident of
New Mexico, served in the infantry in Vietnam
and is an MA in English (New Mexico State U) .
JAN RING, from Montana, has been a literature teacher as well as unofficial therapist/
social worker. Described by the Swedish art
magazine, Paletten, as a "litteraturhistoriker, 11
she lives in Goteborg doing a variety of jobs.
HARLAND RISTAU writes, "my verse has
appeared in The Nation, Christian Century
Today, and abt 400 other mags useless to mention. in another yr i hope to become a myth."
MARGARET A. ROBINSON's work has been
published in Redhook and Aphra.
DENNIS ROMEO lives in New York State
and has poems in anthologies and little magazines
including Hawk and Whippoorwill Recalled.
PAUL ROTH edits The Bitter Oleander and
lives in Syracuse, New York,where he translates
the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, Andre du Bouchet
and Jacques Dupin. His two books are After the
Grape {Flashing Eye Press, 1969) and Basements
of Tears {Ann Arbor Review Press, 1973).
SILVIA SCHEIBLI, a graduate of the University of Tampa who studied under Duane Locke, is
a co-founder of Immanentism, She has had two
books published: Silent Feet on Boarded Fountains and The Moon Rises in the Rattlesnake's
Mouth. She lives in the Mojave Desert.
---WARREN SILVERMAN, since 1967 a freelance photographer in New York, has had work
published in such magazines as Ms., Redhook
and The New York Times.
RICK SMITH's "Lenore's Pool" eulogizes
Lenore Marshall, a poet who lived in Pennsylvania. He has run a writing workshop of women
junkies at Chino (California), co-edits Stonecloud
and does rehabilitation with neurology patients .
NICHOLAS SPERAKIS was awarded a 1970
Guggenheim Fellowship in graphics. His work
is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn
Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Fine
Art, and he has had 38 one-man exhibitions,
WALTON VAN WINKLE, occasional student
at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, works
part-time in a bank. Two of his stories have
appeared in the Fordham Humanities Journal.
ROBERT WALCH is a free-lance photographer living in Brooklyn. A 197 3 NEA grant supplied the impetus he needed to begin a documentation of contemporary American architecture.
MICHAEL B. WILLIAMS, a journalism
student at Ball State University, worked for two
years in a newsroom and is now at Human Aid
{crisis intervention center) in Indiana.
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