For my birthday, I received several books, one of them:

Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Twenty-four short stories translated from the Japanese by Phillip Gabriel and Jay Rubin.

I'd like to share, copyright issues nor withstanding, one of the artfully crafted short stories in small, hopefully, daily instalments. For those of you familiar with Murakami's writing, the beginning of this short story is par for the course.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked on Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. The other part-time girl had agreed to switch shifts with her as a matter of course: being screamed at by an angry chef while lugging pumpkin gnocchi and seafood frito misto to customer's table was no way to spend one's twentieth birthday. But the other girl had aggravated a cold and gone to bed with unstoppable diarrhea and a fever of 104, so she ended up working after all on short notice.

She found herself trying to comfort the sick girl, who had called to apologise.  "Don't worry about it, " she said. " I wasn't going to do anything special anyway, even if it's my twentieth birthday. "

And in fact she was not all that disappointed.  One reason was the terrible argument she had had a few days earlier with her boyfriend who was supposed to be with her that night. They had been going together since high school. The argument had started from nothing much but it had taken an unexpected turn for the worse until it became a long and bitter shouting match - one bad enough, she was pretty sure, to have snapped their long-standing ties once and for all. Something inside her had turned rock-hard and died. He had not called her since the blowup and she was not about to call him.

Her workplace was one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the tony Roppongi district of Tokyo. It had been in business since the late sixties, and while its cuisine was hardly cutting edge, its high reputation was fully justified. It had many repeat customers and they were never disappointed. The dining room had a calm, relaxed atmosphere without a hint of pushiness. Rather than a young crowd, the restaurant drew an older clientele that included some famous stage people and writers.

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1.2                                    

The two full-time waiters worked six days a week. She and the other part-time waiter were students who took turns working three days each. In addition there was one floor manager and, at the register, a skinny middle-aged woman who supposedly had been there since the restaurant opened --- literally sitting in one place, it seemed, like some gloomy old character from Little Dorrit. She had exactly two functions: to accept payment from the customers and to answer the phone. She spoke only when necessary and always wore the same black dress. There was something cold and hard about her: if you set her afloat on the nighttime sea, she would probably sink any boat that happened to ram her.

The floor manager was perhaps in his late forties. Tall and broad-shouldered, his build suggested that he had been a sportsman in his youth, but excess flesh was now beginning to accumulate on his belly and chin. His short, stiff hair was thinning at the crown, and a special aging bachelor smell clung to him --- like newsprint that had been stored in a drawer with cough drops. She had a bachelor uncle who smelled like that.

The manager always wore a black suit, white shirt, and bow tie --- not a clip-on bow tie, but the real thing, tied by hand. It was a point of pride for him that he could tie it perfectly without looking in the mirror. He performed his duties adroitly day after day. They consisted of checking the arrival and departure of guests, keeping abreast of the reservation schedule, knowing the names of regular customers, greeting them with a smile, lending a respectful ear to any complaints that might arise, giving expert advice on wines, and overseeing the work of the waiters and waitresses. It was also his special task to deliver dinner to the room of the restaurant's owner.

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Thank you, Liz, it's my pleasure. I type it out while having my morning cup of coffee, and waking up slowly to the day. A near perfect morning activity.

I hope that some of my colleagues will share their favourite short story authors in other instalments. I started with 1., and will number each instalment 1.2, 1.3, etc. New stories could perhaps be numbered 2., 2.1, 2.3, etc., which would make it easy to keep track of the different stories and their instalments. 

Nanna

I like the sounds of that, Nanna. Short stories are probably the only reading I take time for these days

Liz

Mange tak, Ann-Christine.

I think it's possible to create 10 or 12 instalments from BIRTHDAY GIRL.

Mine was back at the end of December, but thanks for the good wishes

Nanna

I hadn't thought of it, but that would be just fantastic. Great idea!

Nanna 

Hi Maria Isabel,

I too like Haruki Murakami, a writer I didn't know anything about till I attended an Introduction to Japanese Literature at Rutgers University - now many years ago. The lectures opened a whole new world for me - a world where I felt at home almost immediately.

Nanna 

1.3

"The owner had his room on the sixth floor of the same building where the restaurant was, " she said. "An apartment, or office or something."

Somehow she and I had gotten on to the subject of our twentieth birthdays --- what sort of day it had been for each of us. Most people remember the day they turned twenty. Hers had happened more than ten years earlier.

"He never, ever showed his face in the restaurant, though. The only one who saw him was the manager. It was strictly his job to deliver the owner's dinner to him. None of the other employees knew what he looked like."

"So basically, the owner was getting home delivery from his own restaurant."

"Right," she said. "Every night at eight, the manager had to bring dinner to the owner's room. It was the restaurant's busiest time, so having the manager disappear just then was always a problem for us, but there was no way around it because that was the way it had always been done. They'd load the dinner onto one of those carts that hotels use for room service, the manager would push it into the elevator wearing a respectful look on his face, and fifteen minutes later, he'd come back empty-handed. Then, an hour later, he'd go up again and bring down the cart with empty plates and glasses. Every day, like clockwork.  I thought it really weird the first time I saw it happen. It was like some kind of religious ritual, you know? But after a while, I got used to it, and never gave it a second thought."

The owner always had chicken. The recipe and the vegetable sides were a little different every day, but the main dish was always chicken. A young chef once told her that he had tried sending up the same exact roast chicken every day for a week just to see what would happen, but there was never any complaint. A chef wants to try different ways of preparing things, of course, and each new chef would challenge himself with every technique for chicken that he could think of. They'd make elegant sauces, they'd try chickens from different suppliers, but none of their efforts had any effect: they might just as well have been throwing pebbles into an empty cave. In the end, every one of them gave up and sent the owner some run-of-the-mill chicken dish every day. That's all that was ever asked of them.

Work started as usual on her twentieth birthday, November 17.

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1.4

Work started as usual on her twentieth birthday, November 17. It had been raining on and off since the afternoon, and pouring since early evening. At five o'clock the managers gathered the employees together to explain the day's specials. Servers were required to memorize them word for word and not use crib sheets: veal Milanese, pasta topped with sardines and cabbage, chestnut mousse. Sometimes the manager would play the role of a customer and test them with questions. Then came the employees' meal: waiters in this restaurant were not going to have growling stomachs as they took their customers' orders!

The restaurant opened its doors at six o'clock, but guests were slow to arrive because of the downpour, and several reservations were simply cancelled. Women didn't want their dresses ruined by the rain. The manager walked around tight-lipped, and the waiters killed time polishing the salt and pepper shakers or chatting with the chef about cooking. She surveyed the dining room with its single couple at table and listened to the harpsichord music flowing discreetly from ceiling speakers. A deep smell of late autumn rain worked its way into the restaurant.

It was after seven thirty when the manager started feeling sick. He stumbled over to a chair and sat there for a while pressing his stomach as if he had just been shot. A greasy sweat clung to his forehead. " I think I'd better go to the hospital," he muttered. For him to be taken ill was a most unusual occurrence: he had never missed a day since he started working in the restaurant ten years earlier. It was another point of pride for him that he had never been out with illness or injury, but his painful grimace made it clear that he was in very bad shape.

She stepped outside with an umbrella and hailed a cab. One of the waiters held the manager steady and climbed into the car to take him to a nearby hospital. Before ducking into the cab, the mmanager said to her hoarsely," I want you to take a dinner up to room 604 at eight o'clock. All you have to do is ring the bell, say " Your dinner is here," and leave it.

"That's room 604, right?" she said.

"At eight o'clock," he repeated. "On the dot." He grimaced again, climbed in, and the taxi took him away.

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1.5

The rain showed no signs of letting up after the manager had left, and customers arrived at long intervals. No more than one or two tables were occupied at a time, so if the manager and one waiter had to be absent, this was a good time for it to happen. Things could get so busy that it was not unusual for the full staff to have trouble coping.

When the owner's meal was ready at eight o'clock, she pushed the room service cart into the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. It was the standard meal for him: a half bottle of red wine with the cork loosened, a thermal pot of coffee, a chicken entree with steamed vegetables, rolls and butter. The heavy aroma of cooked chicken quickly filled the little elevator. It mingled with the smell of the rain. Water droplets dotted the elevator floor, suggesting that someone with a wet umbrella had recently been aboard. 

She pushed the cart down the corridor, bringing it to a stop in front of the door marked "604." She double-checked her memory: 604. That was it. She cleared her throat and pressed the doorbell.

There was no answer. She stood there for a good twenty seconds. Just as she was thinking of pressing the bell again, the door opened inward and a skinny old man appeared. He was shorter than she was, by some four or five inches. He had on a dark suit and a necktie. Against his white shirt, the tie stood out distinctly, its brownish yellow coloring like withered leaves. he made a very clean impression, his clothes perfectly pressed, his white hair smoothed down: he looked as though he were about to go out for the night to some sort of gathering. The deep wrinkles that creased his brow made her think of ravines in an aerial photograph.

"Your dinner, sir," she said in a husky voice, then quietly cleared her throat again. Her voice grew husky whenever she was tense.

"Dinner?"

"Yes, sir. The manager suddenly took sick. I had to take his place today. Your meal, sir." 

"Oh, I see," the old man said, almost as if talking to himself, his hand still perched on the doorknob. "Took sick, eh?" You don't say."

"His stomach started to hurt him all of a sudden. He went to the hospital. He thinks he might have appendicitis."

"Oh, that's not good, " the old man said, running his fingers along the wrinkles of his forehead. " Not good at all."

She cleared her throat again. "Shall I bring your meal in, sir?" she asked.

"Ah, yes, of course," the old man said. "Yes, of course, if you wish. That's fine with me."

If I wish? she thought. What a strange way to put it. What am I supposed to wish?

The old man opened the door the rest of the way, and she wheeled the cart inside. The floor had short gray carpeting with no area for removing shoes. The first room was a large study, as though the apartment was more a workplace than a residence. The window looked out on the nearby Tokyo Tower, its steel skeleton outlined in lights. A large desk stood by the window, and beside the desk was a compact sofa and love seat. The old man pointed to the plastic laminate coffee table in front of the sofa.  She arranged his meal on the table: white napkin and silverware, coffee pot and cup, wine and wineglass, bread and butter, and the plate of chicken and vegetables.

"If you would be kind enough to set the dishes in the hall as usual, sir, I'll come to get them in an hour."

Her words seemed to snap him put of an appreciative contemplation of his dinner. "Oh, yes, of course. I'll put them in the hall. On the cart. In an hour. If you wish."

Yes, she smiled inwardly, for the moment that is exactly what I wish. "Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

"No, I don't think so," he said after a moment's hesitation. He was wearing black shoes polished to a high sheen. They were small and chic. He's a stylish dresser, she thought. And he stands very straight for his age.

"Well then, sir, I'll be getting back to work."

"No, wait a moment," he said.

"Sir?"

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1.6

"Do you think it might be possible for you to give me five minutes of your time, miss? I have something I'd like to say to you."

He was so polite in his request that it made her blush. "I . . . think it should be all right, " she said. "I mean, if it's really just five minutes." He was her employer, after all. He was paying her by the hour. It was not a question of her giving or his taking her time. And this old man did not look like a person who would do anything bad to her.

"By the way, how old are you?" the old man asked, standing by the table with his arms folded and looking directly into her eyes.

"I'm twenty now," she said.

"Twenty now," he repeated, narrowing his eyes as if peering through some kind of crack. "Twenty now. As of when?"

"Well, I just turned twenty," she said. After a moment's hesitation, she added, "Today is my birthday, sir."

"I see," he said, rubbing his chin as if this explained a great deal for him. "Today, is it? Today is your twentieth birthday?"

She nodded.

"Your life in the world began exactly twenty years ago today."

"Yes, sir," she said, "that is true."

"I see, I see," he said. "That's wonderful. Well then, happy birthday."

"Thank you, very much," she said and then it dawned on her that this was the very first time all day that anyone had wished her a happy birthday. Of course, if her parents had called from Oita, she might find a message from them on her answering machine when she got home from work.

"Well, well, this is certainly a cause for celebration," he said. "How about a little toast? We can drink this red wine."

"Thank you, sir, I couldn't, I'm working now."

"Oh, what's the harm in a little sip? No one's going to blame you if I say it's all right. Just a token drink to celebrate."

The old man slid the cork from the bottle and dribbled a little wine into his glass for her. Then he took an ordinary drinking glass from a glass-doored cabinet and poured some wine for himself.

"Happy birthday," he said. " May you live a rich and fruitful life, and may there be nothing to cast dark shadow on it."

The clinked glasses.

May there be nothing to cast dark shadow on it: she silently repeated his remark to herself. Why had he chosen such unusual words for her birthday toast?

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1.7

"Your twentieth birthday comes only once in a lifetime, miss. It's an irreplaceable day."

"Yes, sir, I know," she said, taking one cautious sip of wine.

" And here, on your special day, you have taken the trouble to deliver my dinner to me like a kindhearted fairy."

"Just doing my job, sir."

"But still," the old man said with a few quick shakes of the head. "But still, lovely young miss."

The old man sat down on the leather chair by his desk and motioned her to the sofa. She lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the seat, with the wineglass still in her hand. Knees aligned, she tugged at her skirt, clearing her throat again. She saw raindrops tracing lines down the windowpane. The room was strangely quiet.

" Today just happens to be your twentieth birthday, and on top of that you have brought me this wonderful warm meal," the old man said as if reconfirming the situation. Then he set his glass on the desktop with a little thump. " This has to be some special kind of convergence, don't you think?"

Not quite convinced, she managed a nod.

"Which is why," he said, touching the knot of his withered-leaf-colored necktie, "I feel it is important to give you a birthday present. A special birthday calls for a special commemorative gift. "

Flustered, she shook her head and said, " No please sir, don't give it a second thought. All I did was bring your meal the way they ordered me to."

The old man raised both hands, palms toward her. " No, miss, don't you give it a second thought. The kind of 'present' I have in mind is not something tangible, not something with a price tag. To put it simply" --- he placed his hands on the desk and took a long, slow breath --- "what I would like to do for a lovely young fairy such as you is to grant a wish you might have, to make you wish come true. Anything. Anything at all that you wish for --- assuming that you do have such a wish."

"A wish?" she asked, her throat dry.

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1.8

"Something you would like to have happen, miss. If you have a wish --- one wish, I'll make it come true. That is the kind of birthday present I can give you. But you had better think about it very carefully because I can grant you only one." He raised a finger. " Just one. You can't change your mind afterwards and take it back."

She was at a loss for words. One wish? Whipped by the wind, raindrop tapped unevenly at the windowpane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears.

"I have to wish for something, and it will be granted?"

Instead of answering her question, the old man --- hands still side by side on the desk --- just smiled. He did it in the most neutral and amiable way.

"Do you have a wish, miss --- or not?" he asked gently.  

***

"This really did happen," she said, looking straight at me. " I'm not making it up."

"Of course not," I said. She was not the sort of person to invent some goofy story out of thin air. "So ... did you make a wish?"

She went on looking at me for a while, then released a tiny sigh. " Don't get me wrong," she said. " I wasn't taking him one hundred percent seriously myself. I mean, at twenty, you're not exactly living in a fairy-tale world anymore. If this was his idea of a joke, though, I had to hand it to him for coming up with it on the spot. He was a dapper old fellow with a twinkle in his eye, so I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday, after all: I figured I ought to have something not-so-ordinary happen to me that day. It wasn't a question of believing or not believing."

I nodded without saying anything.

"You can understand how I felt, I'm sure. My twentieth birthday was coming to an end without anything special happening, nobody wishing me a happy birthday, and all I am doing is carrying tortellini with anchovy sauce to people's tables."

I nodded again. "Don't worry," I said. "I understand."

"So I made a wish."

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1.9

The old man kept his gaze fixed on her, saying nothing, hands still on the desk. Also on the desk were several thick folders that might have been account books, plus writing implements, a calendar, and a lamp with a green shade. Lying among them, his hands looked like another set of desktop furnishings. The rain continued to beat against the window, the lights of Tokyo Tower filtering through the shattered drops.

The wrinkles on the old man's forehead deepened slightly. "That is your wish?"

"Yes," she said. "That is my wish."

" A bit unusual for a girl your age," he said. "I was expecting something different."

"If it's no good, I'll wish for something else," she said, clearing her throat, "I don't mind. I'll think of something else."

"No, no," the old man said, raising his hands and waving them like flags. "There's nothing wrong with it, not at all. It's just a little surprising, miss. Don't you have something else? Like, say, you want to be prettier, or smarter, or rich: you're OK with not wishing for something like that --- something an ordinary girl would ask for?"

She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.

"Of course, I'd like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can't imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don't really know what life is all about. I don't know how it works."

"I see," the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. " I see."

" So is my wish OK?"

"Of course," he said. "Of course. It's no trouble at all for me."

The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something --- perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down --- floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.

"That did it," he said. "Your wish has been granted."

"Already?"

"Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don't worry, I'll put the cart in the hall."

She took the elevator down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as though she were walking on some kind of mysterious fluff.

"Are you OK? You look spaced out," the younger waiter said to her.

She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. "Oh really. No, I'm fine."

"Tell me about the owner. What's he like?"

"I dunno, I didn't get a very good look at him," she said, cutting the conversation short.

An hour later, she went to bring the cart down. It was out in the hall, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and the vegetables gone. The wine bottle and the coffeepot were empty. The door to room 604 stood there, closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time feeling that it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the cart down in the elevator and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked blandly at the plate: empty as always.

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1.10

"I never saw the owner again," she said, "Not once. The manager turned out to have just an ordinary stomachache and went back to delivering the owner's meal again himself the next day. I quit the job after New Year's, and I've never been back to the place. I don't know. I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition."

She toyed with a paper coaster thinking her own thoughts. "Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was an illusion. It's as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened at all. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knickknack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me too."

The two of us kept silent, drinking our drinks and thinking our separate thoughts.

"Do you mind if I ask you one thing?" I asked. "Or, more precisely, two things." 

"Go right ahead," she said. "I imagine you're going to ask me what I wished for that time. That's the first thing you want to know."

"But it looks as though you don't want to talk about that."

"Does it?"

I nodded.

She put the coaster down and narrowed her eyes as if staring at something in the distance. "You're not supposed to tell anybody what you wished for, you know." 

"I won't try to drag it out of you," I said. "I would like to know whether or not it came true, though. And also --- whatever the wish itself might have been --- whether or not you later came to regret what you chose to wish for. Were you ever sorry that you didn't wish for something else?"

"The answer to the first question is yes and also no. I still have a lot of living left to do, probably. I haven't seen how things are going to work out to the end."

"So it was a wish that takes time to come true?"

"You could say that. Time is going to play an important role."

"Like in cooking certain dishes?"

She nodded.

I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.

"And the answer to my second question?"

"What was that again?"

"Whether you ever regretted your choice of what to wish for."

A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desicated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

"I'm married now," she said. "To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That's the kind of life I'm living now."

"Sounds pretty good to me," I said.

"Even if the Audi's bumper has two dents?"

"Hey, bumpers are made for denting."

"That would make a great bumper sticker," she said. "Bumpers are for denting."

I looked at her mouth when she said that.

"What I'm trying to tell you is this," she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. "No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all."

"That's another good bumper sticker," I said. "No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves."

She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.

She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. "Tell me," she said. "What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?"

"On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?"

"Uh-huh."

I took some time to think about that, but I couldn't come up with a single wish.

"I can't think of anything," I confessed. I'm too far away now from my twentieth birthday."

"You really can't think of anything?"

I nodded.

"Not one thing?"

"Not one thing."

She looked into my eyes again --- straight in --- and said, "That's because you've already made your wish."

***

"But you had better think about it very carefully, my lovely young fairy, because I can grant you only one." In the darkness somewhere, an old man wearing a withered-leaf-colored tie raises a finger. "Just one. You can't change your mind afterwards and take it back."

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- TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN

Thank you, Liz. Though, I've not read anything by Ha Jin, I trust your take on it. I am very pleased that Murakami's story seemed to have broad appeal.

What do you think of Margaret Atwood? 

Anything here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_story_collections_by_Margaret_Atwood

that appeals?

Or here, maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Single-author_short_story_collections

Nanna

“Hey! Give us a song...what’s your name?” Norzhol asked, turning on the light in the driver’s cab. Beside him sat the girl from the grasslands who had just asked him for a lift.

“Nini” she replied, raising her head slightly.

“...Nini? Hey, how about a song, whatever you like. It’ll keep us awake, otherwise we’ll never reach Lhasa going around the plateau like this, in endless circles” Norzhol warned drowsily.

Nini withdrew her curious gaze and, looking around, started to sing. Her voice was so loud that it drowned out the roar of the engine.

Hey! The sun has set behind the snowy mountain
Cattle and sheep have been driven into the pen.
Girls with water barrels on their backs
 Are walking towards the winding river bank...

For a while Norzhol did not speak. “Is that what you call singing?” he complained “Do you think I’m deaf?” 

“I’m not shouting, I’m singing” she muttered.

“Hey girl, do you know what pop songs are sung in Lhasa now?” Norzhol said and began to croon a vivid imitation of a popular song.

“I meet you by chance, you and me...I have a little cough and an itching throat. You get the idea? It’s the modern way of singing. Wow, you country bumpkin, I simply can’t believe that you’ve never been to Lhasa”

“What! What did you say?”

“Oh, I just said...what a pity you’ve never been to Lhasa. Just now you asked me what people in Lhasa are like. Look at me, then you’ll know.” Norzhol produced a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket and was about to put them on when he remembered that their dark lenses would totally obscure his vision.

”Look at me carefully” he said, staring straight ahead, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding open his leather coat to reveal his manly figure. “Japanese hairstyle. Seen the Japanese film Close Pursuit?...No! What a pity. See my shirt? Tartan with a pointed collar, the latest fashion. And check out these, genuine jeans, not bell-bottoms”

“Ah, so that’s what Lhasa people are like” Nini said naively “Lhasa must be an unsafe place then”

“Who told you that? What do you mean by “unsafe”?”

Nini thought for a while, then replied, “Eh....There must be many men there”

“Rubbish! What do you know? How could there possibily be a world without men? Where are you going to stay?”

“I’ve got a relative. He’s a carpenter”

“Why didn’t you start out a few days earlier? Everyone in Lhasa is drinking and dancing. Tomorrow’s New Year. Right now, the only people on this goddam grassland are us. A corner forsaken by love”

“A what?” Nini couldn’t quite catch his words.

"Nothing. It's something written in a novel" Norzhol said vaguely

Such a lovely change of pace. Thank you, Anna Maria.

Nanna

Norzhol held the steering wheel absent-mindedly and went on about how all the offices in the bureau had run out of cow-dung for fuel. As none of the married drivers was willing to spend New Year in the wilderness, the job had naturally fallen to the young unmarried ones. Finally, he declared piously “If I'd remained in Lhasa celebrating New Year, you would have had to wait for days before seeing another truck. And look at the snow – you would have been dead long ago”

Nini opened her mouth and stuck out her pink tongue to express her good fortune and gratitude.Norzhol noticed that her eyes, like a pair of chattering stars, never left his face. Her bold, curious gaze reminded him of a story of the creation of Man told him by a Han friend: Adam woke up in the garden and found Eve staring at him- the first man – with surprise in her limpid eyes.

The truck bumped over a pot hole, swaying from left to right. Nini rolled into Norzhol's arms like a funny, fat panda. Clumsily, she quickly straightened herself up.
“You're a joke. I bet you haven't even had a ride on a bus before, have you?” Norzhol sniggered.
“Yes....ah!” Before she could reply, Nini rolled into Norzhol's arms for the second time. She was angry “Why can't I seat properly?”

“You should hold onto to the handrail..it's there” Norzhol laughed, unable to support himself. His body swayed with the jolting of the truck and a voice began to ring in his head. A bite tells you whether a peach is sour; a kiss tells you whether a girl loves you . Who had sung it? ....Oh yeah, the driver of that jeep – the one of the Beijing bureau. The fragments of the song would linger around the whole day long. The most fragrant thing in the grassland is butter, the sweetest are a girl's lips. Perhaps there was some truth in it. They grew up drinking milk and eating butter, after all. Why not have a try, it wouldn't matter since they were the 80s' generation... My head is hard as bronze, girls' hands are as soft as silk. They won't hurt...go on.

The headlights shone through the swirling snowflakes onto a small ditch ahead. He calculated the distance . As the front wheels of the truck lurched over the ditch, Norzhol turned and quickly planted a firm kiss on Nini's red lips, just as he had bitten into that ripe peach hanging from a tree, in his childhood. He tasted something sweet, knowing that Nini would react the way the girls in Lhasa did: screaming, spitting a stream of curses or even shaking her fist.

Not a sound. Norzhol glanced at Nini: she was lost in though, her cheeks burning crimson. Her wide-open, vacant eyes flashed with a strange light as if she were intoxicated.

Disturbed by Nini's silence, Norzhol felt uneasy and asked, irritated “Are you dumb?”
For a while Nini did not reply.
“Why did you touch my lips?” she asked finally, looking up.
“Ha...so that's how it is. You should be more open-minded, you stupid girl”
“My mother will cry if she knows. You shouldn't have treated me like that...Stop”

Baffled, Norzhol brought the truck to a halt. Nini picked up her bundle from under her seat, got out and climbed into the back of the truck.

“It’s the driver’s cab” Norzhol corrected her.
“I’m afraid...”
Scowling, Norzhol pleaded and promised not to touch her again. “Nini, listen to me. Get down quickly, I beg you, or you’ll be frozen to death”
Nini gave him an odd look. Slowly, she crouched down as if she were about to tumble out, then straightened up abruptly. “No! No!” she shouted.

“All right” Norzhol took off his leather coat and, panting with rage, flung it up to her. “You can go higher up if you want to appreciate the night, you can sing loud enough to wake up the whole world. You’ve got a whole truckload of dry cow-dung all to yourself. Eat it, if you’re hungry, free of charge. And remember, don’t blow up your stomach”

Ahead was a rought stretch of unpaved road and the truck swayed like a drunkard. Norzhol drove, bouring his grievances. He glanced at his watch – it was already 2.40. Outside, the bitter wind swept past, flinging up wet snow onto the windscreen. The temperature had fallen to thirty degrees below zero and the heat discharged by the engine was of no use whatsoever. 
Norzhol’s fingers stiffened with cold and he shivered all over. Worried about Nini, he brought the truck to a halt, opened the door and began to climb up the back. “Come down quickly, Nini” he shouted “We’re running into an icy current, you’ll freeze to death!”

The minute he poked his head up over the edge, he was assailed by a volley of dry cow-dung which hit his nose so hard that it brought tears to his eyes. “Hey” Nini shouted back “don’t come near, don’t touch me or I’ll hit you” She was as fierce as a lion.
Norzhol yelled as continued on up. “Nini, I’m doing this for you, but all you do is feed me cow-dung. Come down quickly. This is my vehicle, you’ve got to listen to me”
“Down! Down!” Nini pushed him furiously.
“You country bumpkin! Wait, I’ll smash you to pieces! You’d better count how many bones you have first!”
Nini went berserk. She untied the ererdou* from her waist and, with a scream, lashed out at Norzhol as if she were punishing a troublesome yak. Each whip lash was as precise and vigorous as his kiss. He fell to the snow-covered ground and lay there for a while, his head in his hands, then leapt up and dashed into the cab like an enraged lion. He accelerated as hard as he could, and, with a howl the truck rushed forward angrily along the faintly visible road.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Nini struck the top of the driver’s cab violently, her shrill cries mingling with a barrage of other sounds,
“Go on, hit as hard as you can. Freezing to death is just what you deserve, and if you fall off and die, it’ll serve you right too. Let the wolves have your bones!” Norzhol roared, his face distorted with rage, his body shaking all over. He seemed to see Nini’s frightened eyes and her desperation. Hands stretched out, she was crying helplessly; the whole load of cow-dung had swept her over like a huge wave; except for her hands, she was completely buried. The truck came to a sharp turn. Norzhol swung the wheel vehemently, without using the brakes. The truck swerved, then whistled past a boulder, shuddering as if it were about to explode. Norzhol was tossed up and down like a ball...

The stormed continued. The truck lurched madly.

* A whip used by Tibetan shepherds – its middle part consists of a leather pouch containing a pebble which is catapulted at the target.

He didn’t know how much time had elapsed by the time the truck had calmed down and his anger had been cooled by the icy snow. The truck came to the end of the rough road and turned onto the smooth asphalt surface. The storm had stopped unnoticed and the white blanket of the plain radiated a crystal light. For a while, his mind was blank and could not remember what happened, feeling nothing but his own existence in the world such as he had experienced countless times before, when he was all alone on those return journeys to Lhasa. Severe loss of sleep had completely dehydrated him. He was like a dried up goat. His blood was cold as if solidified; the skin of his face was unbearably taut and his mouth bitter and puckered. He was in a trance, unconscious of whether he was driving the truck of the truck was carrying him. They were like two fatigued companions dragging each other along the road.
Norzhol suddenly woke up from his drowsy state and his mind began to function normally. He turned off the engine and dashed out, shouting “Nini! Nini!”

A sudden silence descended and filled his hearth with emptiness and despair. Dead, everything was dead. “Maybe I just had a dream, No one asked for a lift. There’s only me, Norzhol, in this truck...its owner and its slave! No, there’s Nini! And her frightened voice, her charming eyes and her ferocious attack...”

“Nini! Where are you? Are you still alive?” Norzhol called out anxiously and clambered up the back. He saw nothing but black cow-dung. Overcome with anxiety, he almost cried. Suddenly, he saw something wriggle under the petrol tank. He went forward, regardless of any impropriety. Nini, wrapped tightly in the greasy leather coat, huddled in a corner, half her body buried in the cow-dung, was there.

“Nini, are you still alive?”

In the chilly moonlight, Nini’s eyes twinkled. She wanted to speak, but couldn’t. “Damn, damn!” Norzhol cursed himself as he pulled Nini out of the cow-dung. He carried her off the truck, but didn’t know where to put her. He circled the snowy ground like a leopard looking for a safe cave, carrying its cub in its mouth. Finally, he dashed towards a slope. He put her down and quickly fetched a large pile of cow-dung and lit the blowlamp. Waves of warmth, flames and moving figures. Soon the night was permeated with life and animation.
“I’m....cold” Nini uttered feebly. Norzhol jumped over and took her in his arms. He was worried his strong arms might crush her ot pieces. “Hurt?” he asked.
Nini was shaking. She shook her hand, her brows knitted, “Cold! Hold me tighter!” she moaned weakly.
Norzhol tightened his hold. “I’m almost frozen to death” Nini groaned in contentment and buried her head deep in his arms. Her skin shone in the light of the fire like a new rose bud.

An hour passed. Nini slowly regained her strenght. She raised her head and looked at Norzhol animatedly. The smile in the corner of her mouth was like the moon sliding out from behind the clouds. She licked her finger and wiped the traces of blood off Norzhol’s neck. “Forgive me” she uttered softly “I hit you too hard. I’ve never used such strenght before. Really, I don’t know why...We country folk are not like you people from Lhasa. My mother told me not to allow men to touch me. I’ve got to listen to her” she said crying “Ah, you’re so strong. No one has ever held me so tightly...You’re so kind. I hit you too hard” she said and sighed with relief.
“No, I’m a disgrace to the Lhasa people. It’s no more than I deserve. I’ve really been a fool. I should have protected you, poor Nini”
“We’re both punished...No! You are a good man, a modern man”

He didn’t know since when Nini had carved this new word in her mind.

“Huh! How can I be regarded as modern? Damn! What about you then?”

“A country bumpkin”

“No! Eve”

“Who is Eve?”

“The first woman”

The sky was studded with stars in the east. At the foot of a distant snowy mountain were a few dots of yellow starlight. Norzhol knew it was a highway maintenance squad. “You must be hungry” he said “Let’s go and get some food”

Nini closed her eyes comfortably and said “Let’s sit for a little while longer”
Norzhol began to feel hot beside the flaming fire. He closed his aching eyes, considering whether he should release her. Suddenly, his forehead was touched by something soft and cool. Opening his eyes, he saw two lively stars sparkling in front of him. Nini took his head in his arms. “Now, we’re good friends” she said and laughed “Let’s touch our foreheads together as blessing for both of us”
“Nini!”
..........

The knocking on the door woke up the couple from the maintenance squad. A faint trace of moonlight glimmered outside the window. The table was littered with cups and plates. They obviously had had a very happy New Year. The man gave his wife a shove.
“Hey! Wake up. It sounds like a truck on its way to Lhasa. Maybe they want to stay”
The wife pulled on her clothes, went out for a while, then came back in, closed the door and slithered under the quilt again. “You’re just lazy” the man mumbled.
“Pooh! Move in a bit. Don’t you see it’s snowing outside?....Phew! It’s really cold”
“How many?”
“They’ve gone. They just had some food, a happy young couple. Don’t know why they spent New Year on the road”
“To be out on New Year’s Eve, they must have done something wicked. Let’s sleep!”

Moments later, as they lay there drifting off, they heard the engine starting up.

The truck drove off towards Lhasa and once again the world was at peace.

Intermission Tale for the Young at Heart

The Elephant's Child 

-Rudyard Kipling

The Yellow Wallpaper

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

3. 1

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, reach the height of romantic felicity – but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly of any talk of things not to be felt and seen or putdown in figures.  John is a physician, and perhaps- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phospites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with the ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

But what is one to do?

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden – large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbours with seats under them.

There were greenhouses too, but they are all broken now.

There was some legal trouble, I believe, some heirs and coheirs, anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don’t care – there is something strange about the house – I can feel it.

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control: so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

I don’t like our room one bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no rear room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

He said that we came here solely on my account, that I was to have a perfect rest and all the air I could get. “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear,” said he, “ and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time. “ So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it. It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.  I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word.

----------

3.2

We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

I am glad my case is not serious!

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,-- to dress and entertain, and other things.

It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.

I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental."

"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."

Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.

It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.

I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.

Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.

I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.

But I find I get pretty tired when I try.

It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.

I wish I could get well faster.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.

I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.

The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother--they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.

But I don't mind it a bit--only the paper.

There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.

She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!

But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.

There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.

This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

There's sister on the stairs!

------------

3.3  

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.

Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.

But it tired me all the same.

John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.

But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!

Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.

I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.

So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal. 

I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps because of the wall-paper.

It dwells in my mind so!

I lie here on this great immovable bed--it is nailed down, I believe--and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.

It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.

I don't know why I should write this.

I don't want to.

I don't feel able.

And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief!

But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.

John says I mustn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.

Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.

He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.

If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise, --but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.

It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here!

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

But I tried it last night.

It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.

John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.

The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.

I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John was awake.

"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that--you'll get cold."

I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away.

"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.

"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you."

"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"

"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"

"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.

"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"

"Better in body perhaps--" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.

"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"

So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

-------------

3.4

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why, that is something like it.

That is, sometimes!

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that first long, straight ray--it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.

That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I wouldn't know it was the same paper.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.

I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.

Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.

It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.

And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.

It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, --that perhaps it is the paper!

I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.

She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry--asked me why I should frighten her so!

Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!

Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.

John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper--he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.

-------------

3.5

I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.

In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.

There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But there is something else about that paper--the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

It gets into my hair.

Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it--there is that smell!

Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.

It is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.

In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.

It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell.

But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.

There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round--round and round and round--it makes me dizzy!

I really have discovered something at last.

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.

The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.

Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.

And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!

If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

I think that woman gets out in the daytime!

And I'll tell you why--privately--I've seen her!

I can see her out of every one of my windows!

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.

And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at a time.

And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!

I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

--------

3.6

If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.

I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much

There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes.

And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.

She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.

John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn't see through him!

Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.

It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this evening.

Jennie wanted to sleep with me--the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.

And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it to-day!

We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.

Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.

She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.

How she betrayed herself that time!

But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me--not alive !

She tried to get me out of the room--it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner--I would call when I woke.

So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.

We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.

I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.

How those children did tear about here!

This bedstead is fairly gnawed!

But I must get to work.

I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.

I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.

I want to astonish him.

I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!

But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!

This bed will not move!

I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner--but it hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.

I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.

I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope--you don't get me out in the road there!

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.

But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

Why there's John at the door!

It is no use, young man, you can't open it!

How he does call and pound!

Now he's crying for an axe.

It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!

"John dear!' said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"

That silenced him for a few moments.

Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"

"I can't", said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"

And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.

"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

-------------------------------

                                                          - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thank you, Liz, for sending me the link to this interesting article:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)

This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

Nanna

Once upon a time there was a town composed of two parallel streets. A Dervish passed through one street into the other, and as he reached the second one, the people there noticed that his eyes were streaming with tears. "Someone has died in the other street!" one cried, and soon all the children in the neighborhood had taken up the cry.

What had really happened was that the dervish had been peeling onions.

Within a short space of time the cry had reached the first street; and the adults of both streets were so distressed and fearful (for each community was related to the other) that they dared not make complete inquiries as to the cause of the furor.

A wise man tried to reason with the people of both streets, asking why they did not question each other. Too confused to know what they meant, some said: "For all we know there is a deadly plague in the other street."

This rumor, too, spread like wildfire, until each street's populace thought that the other was doomed.

When some measure of order was restored, it was only enough for the two communities to decide to emigrate to save themselves. Thus it was that, from different sides of the town, both streets entirely evacuated their people.

Now, centuries later, the town is still deserted; and not so far away are two villages. Each village has its own tradition of how it began as a settlement from a doomed town, through a fortunate flight, in remote times, from a nameless evil.

In their psychological teaching, Sufis claim that ordinary transmission of knowledge is subject to so much deformation through editing and false memory that it cannot be taken as a substitute for direct perception of fact. http://www.soupsong.com/fonion2.html

Previous two tales from Idries Shah: Post #82413, Post #92077

Lao She 老舍 (1899-1966) Crescent Moon 月牙儿

1

Yes, I've seen the crescent moon again --- a chill sickle of pale gold. How many times have I seen crescent moons just like this one, how many times…. It stirred many different emotions, brought back many different scenes. As I sat and stared it, I recalled each time I had seen it hanging in the blue firmament. It awakened my memories like an evening breeze blowing open the petals of a flower that is craving for sleep. 

The first time, the chill crescent moon really brought a chill. My first recollection of it is a bitter one. I remember its feeble gold beams shining through my tears. I was only seven then a little girl in a red padded jacket. I wore a blue cloth hat Mama had made for me. There were small flowers printed on it. I remember. I stood leaning against the doorway of our Mall room, gazing at the crescent moon. The room was filled with the smell of medicine and smoke, with Mama's tears, with Papa's illness. I stood alone on the steps looking at the moon. No one bothered about me, no one cooked my supper. I knew there was tragedy in that room, for everyone said Papa's illness was ... But I felt much more sorry for myself. I was cold, hungry, neglected.

I stood there until the moon had set. I had nothing; I couldn't restrain my tears. But the sound of Mama's weeping drowned out my own. Papa was silent; a white cloth covered his face. I wanted to raise the cloth and look at him, but I didn't dare. There was so little space in our room, and Papa occupied it all.

Mama put on white mourning clothes. A white robe without stitched hems was placed over my red jacket. I remember because I kept breaking off the loose white threads along the edges. There was a lot of noise and grief-stricken crying, everyone was very busy; but actually there wasn't much to be done. It hardly seemed worth so much fuss. Papa was placed in a coffin made of four thin boards; the coffin was full of cracks. Then five or six men carried him out. Mama and I followed behind, weeping. I remember Papa; I remember his wooden box. That box meant the end of him. I knew unless I could break it open I'd never see him again. But they buried it deep in the ground in a cemetery outside the city wall. Although I knew exactly where it was, I was afraid it would be hard to find that box again. The earth seemed to swallow it like a drop of rain.

                                                 ***

Mama and I were both wearing white gowns again the next time I saw the crescent moon. It was a cold day, and Mama was taking me to visit Papa's grave. She had bought some gold and silver "ingots" made of paper to burn and send to Papa in the next world. Mama was especially good to me that day. When I was tired, she carried me piggy-back; at the city gate she bought me some roasted chestnuts. Everything was cold, only the chestnuts were hot. Instead of eating them, I used them to warm my hands. 

I don't remember how far we walked, but it was very, very far. It hadn't seemed nearly so far the day we buried Papa, perhaps because a lot of people had gone with us. This time there was only Mama and me. She didn't speak. I didn't feel like saying anything either. It was very quiet out there. On that yellow dirt road there wasn't a breath of sound.

It was winter, and the days were short. I remember the grave - a small mound of earth. There were some brown hills in the distance, with the sunlight slanting on them. Mama seemed to have no time for me. She set me down on the side and embraced the head of the grave and wept. I sat holding the hot chestnuts. After crying a while, Mama burned the paper ingots. The ashes swirled before us in little spirals, then lazily settled back on the ground. There wasn't much wind, but it was very cold.

Mama began to cry again. I thought of Papa too, but I didn't cry for him. It was Mama's pitiful weeping that brought tears to my eyes. I pulled her by the hand and said, "Don't cry, Mama, don't cry." But she sobbed all the harder and hugged me to her bosom.

4.1

'Tis now for me to take up my parable; which, dearest ladies, I will do with a story like in some degree to the foregoing, and that, not only that you may know how potent are your charms to sway the gentle heart, but that you may also learn how upon fitting occasions to make bestowal of your guerdons of your own accord, instead of always waiting for the guidance of Fortune, which most times, not wisely, but without rule or measure, scatters her gifts.

You are then to know, that Coppo di Borghese Domenichi, a man that in our day was, and perchance still is, had in respect and great reverence in our city, being not only by reason of his noble lineage, but, and yet more, for manners and merit most illustrious and worthy of eternal renown, was in his old age not seldom wont to amuse himself by discoursing of things past with his neighbours and other folk; wherein he had not his match for accuracy and compass of memory and concinnity of speech. Among other good stories, he would tell, how that there was of yore in Florence a gallant named Federigo di Messer Filippo Alberighi, who for feats of arms and courtesy had not his peer in Tuscany; who, as is the common lot of gentlemen, became enamoured of a lady named Monna Giovanna, who in her day held rank among the fairest and most elegant ladies of Florence; to gain whose love he jousted, tilted, gave entertainments, scattered largess, and in short set no bounds to his expenditure. However the lady, no less virtuous than fair, cared not a jot for what he did for her sake, nor yet for him.

Spending thus greatly beyond his means, and making nothing, Federigo could hardly fail to come to lack, and was at length reduced to such poverty that he had nothing left but a little estate, on the rents of which he lived very straitly, and a single falcon, the best in the world. The estate was at Campi, and thither, deeming it no longer possible for him to live in the city as he desired, he repaired, more in love than ever before; and there, in complete seclusion, diverting himself with hawking, he bore his poverty as patiently as he might.

Now, Federigo being thus reduced to extreme poverty, it so happened that one day Monna Giovanna's husband, who was very rich, fell ill, and, seeing that he was nearing his end, made his will, whereby he left his estate to his son, who was now growing up, and in the event of his death without lawful heir named Monna Giovanna, whom he dearly loved, heir in his stead; and having made these dispositions he died.

Monna Giovanna, being thus left a widow, did as our ladies are wont, and repaired in the summer to one of her estates in the country which lay very near to that of Federigo.

Originally written by Anna Maria Paoluzzi on June 1, 2007 10:20 AM unless it's a quiz game....

Let's call it a deliberate element of suspense...

(in this case, am I entitled to participate? )

No way!

The author and the title will duly appear at the end. There will be just three more parts.

Jacek

And so it befell that the urchin began to make friends with Federigo, and to shew a fondness for hawks and dogs, and having seen Federigo's falcon fly not a few times, took a singular fancy to him, and greatly longed to have him for his own, but still did not dare to ask him of Federigo, knowing that Federigo prized him so much. So the matter stood when by chance the boy fell sick; whereby the mother was sore distressed, for he was her only son, and she loved him as much as might be, insomuch that all day long she was beside him, and ceased not to comfort him, and again and again asked him if there were aught that he wished for, imploring him to say the word, and, if it might by any means be had, she would assuredly do her utmost to procure it for him. Thus repeatedly exhorted, the boy said: "Mother mine, do but get me Federigo's falcon, and I doubt not I shall soon be well." Whereupon the lady was silent a while, bethinking her what she should do. She knew that Federigo had long loved her, and had never had so much as a single kind look from her: wherefore she said to herself: How can I send or go to beg of him this falcon, which by what I hear is the best that ever flew, and moreover is his sole comfort? And how could I be so unfeeling as to seek to deprive a gentleman of the one solace that is now left him? And so, albeit she very well knew that she might have the falcon for the asking, she was perplexed, and knew not what to say, and gave her son no answer. At length, however, the love she bore the boy carried the day, and she made up her mind, for his contentment, come what might, not to send, but to go herself and fetch him the falcon. So: "Be of good cheer, my son," she said, "and doubt not thou wilt soon be well; for I promise thee that the very first thing that I shall do tomorrow morning will be to go and fetch thee the falcon." Whereat the child was so pleased that he began to mend that very day.

On the morrow the lady, as if for pleasure, hied her with another lady to Federigo's little house, and asked to see him. 'Twas still, as for some days past, no weather for hawking, and Federigo was in his garden, busy about some small matters which needed to be set right there. When he heard that Monna Giovanna was at the door, asking to see him, he was not a little surprised and pleased, and hied him to her with all speed. As soon as she saw him, she came forward to meet him with womanly grace, and having received his respectful salutation, said to him: "Good morrow, Federigo," and continued: "I am come to requite thee for what thou hast lost by loving me more than thou shouldst: which compensation is this, that I and this lady that accompanies me will breakfast with thee without ceremony this morning." "Madam," Federigo replied with all humility, "I mind not ever to have lost aught by loving you, but rather to have been so much profited that, if I ever deserved well in aught, 'twas to your merit that I owed it, and to the love that I bore you. And of a surety had I still as much to spend as I have spent in the past, I should not prize it so much as this visit you so frankly pay me, come as you are to one who can afford you but a sorry sort of hospitality." Which said, with some confusion, he bade her welcome to his house, and then led her into his garden, where, having none else to present to her by way of companion, he said: "Madam, as there is none other here, this good woman, wife of this husbandman, will bear you company, while I go to have the table set." Now, albeit his poverty was extreme, yet he had not known as yet how sore was the need to which his extravagance had reduced him; but this morning 'twas brought home to him, for that he could find nought wherewith to do honour to the lady, for love of whom he had done the honours of his house to men without number: wherefore, distressed beyond measure, and inwardly cursing his evil fortune, he sped hither and thither like one beside himself, but never a coin found he, nor yet aught to pledge. Meanwhile it grew late, and sorely he longed that the lady might not leave his house altogether unhonoured, and yet to crave help of his own husbandman was more than his pride could brook. In these desperate straits his glance happened to fall on his brave falcon on his perch in his little parlour. And so, as a last resource, he took him, and finding him plump, deemed that he would make a dish meet for such a lady. Wherefore, without thinking twice about it, he wrung the bird's neck, and caused his maid forthwith pluck him and set him on a spit, and roast him carefully; and having still some spotless table-linen, he had the table laid therewith, and with a cheerful countenance hied him back to his lady in the garden, and told her that such breakfast as he could give her was ready. So the lady and her companion rose and came to table, and there, with Federigo, who waited on them most faithfully, ate the brave falcon, knowing not what they ate.

3.

During the next three or four years I somehow never saw the crescent moon.

My new Pa was very good to me. He had two rooms. He and Ma lived in the inner room; I slept on a pallet in the outside one. At first I still wanted to sleep with Mama, but after a few days I began to love "my" little room. It had clean, whitewashed walls, a table and a chair. They all seemed to belong to me. My bedding was thicker and warmer, too.

Mama gradually put on some weight. Colour came back to her cheeks, and the scales left her hands. I hadn't been to the pawnshop in a long time. My new father let me go to school. Sometimes he even played with me. I don't know why I couldn't bring myself to call him "Pa" --- I liked him a lot.

He seemed to understand. He used to just grin at me. His eyes looked very nice then. Mama would privately urge me to call him "Pa". I didn't really want to be stubborn. I knew it was because of him that Mama and I had food to eat and clothes to wear. I understood all that.

Yes, for three or four years I don't recall seeing the crescent moon; maybe I saw it and don't remember. But I can never forget the crescent moon I saw when Pa died, or the one that rode before Ma's bridal sedan-chair. That pale chill light will always remain in my heart, shiny and cool as a piece of jade. Sometimes when I think of it, it seems as if I can almost reach out my hand and touch it.

                            ***

 
I loved going to school. I had the feeling that the schoolyard ,was full of flowers, though, actually, this wasn't so. Yet whenever I think of school I think of flowers. Just as whenever I think of Papa's grave I think of a crescent moon outside the city hanging crooked in the wind blowing across the fields.Mama loved flowers too. She couldn't afford them, but if anyone ever sent her any, she pinned them in her hair. Once 1 had the chance to pick a couple for her. With the fresh flower in her hair, she looked very young from the back. She was happy, and so was I.Going to school also made me very glad. Perhaps this is the reason whenever I think of school I think of flowers.

                                                                                               
                                                                                                * * *

The year I was to graduate from primary school, Mama sent me to the pawnshop again. I don't know why my new father suddenly left us. Mama didn't seem to know where he went either. She told me to continue going to school; she thought he'd probably come back soon.

Many days passed and there was still no sign of him. He didn't even write. I was afraid Mama would have to start washing dirty socks again, and I felt very badly about it.

But Mama had other plans. She still dressed prettily and wore flowers in her hair. How strange! She didn't cry; in fact she was always smiling. Why? I didn't understand. For several days whenever I came home from school, I'd find her standing in the doorway. Not long after, men began to hail me on the street:

"Hey, tell your Ma I'll be calling on her soon!"

"Young and tender, are you selling today?"

My face burning like fire, I hung my head till it couldn't go any lower. I knew now, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I couldn't question Mama, no, I couldn't do that. She was so good to me, always urging, "Read your books, study hard."

But she was illiterate herself. Why was she so anxious for me to study? I grew suspicious. But then I would think she's doing this because she has no way out. When I felt suspicious, I wanted to curse her. At other times, I would want to hug her and beg her not to do that kind of thing any more.

I hated myself for not being able to help Mama. I was worried. Even when I graduated from primary school, what use would I be? I heard from the girls in my class that several of the students who graduated last year became concubines; a few, they said, were working "in dark doorways". I didn't quite understand these things, but from the way my classmates spoke, I guessed it was something bad. The girls in my class seemed to know everything; they loved to whisper about things which they knew perfectly well were not nice. It made them blush, yet, at the same time, look quite self-satisfied.

My suspicion of Mama increased. Was she waiting for me to graduate, so that she could make me-- -? When I thought like this, I didn't dare go home. I was afraid to face Mama. I used to save the pennies she gave me to buy afternoon snacks, and go to physical training class on an empty stomach. I was often faint. How I envied the other kids, munching their pastries. But I had to save money. With a little money I could run away if Mama insisted that I ---

At my richest, I never managed to save more than ten or fifteen cents. Even during the day, I used to gaze up at the sky, looking for my crescent moon. If the misery in my heart could be compared to anything physical, it should be that crescent moon - hanging helpless and unsupported in the grey-blue sky, its feeble rays soon swallowed up by the darkness.

                                                                                         ***

What made me feel worst of all was that I was slowly learning to hate Mama. But whenever I hated her, I couldn't help remembering how she carried me piggy-back to visit Papa's grave --- and then I couldn't hate her any more. Yet I had to. My heart . . . my heart was like that crescent moon --- only able to shine a little while, surrounded by a darkness that was black and limitless.

Men constantly came to Mama's room now; she no longer tried to hide it from me. They looked at me like dogs --- drooling, their tongues hanging out. In their eyes I was an even tastier morsel than Mama. I could see it.

In a short time, I suddenly came to understand a lot. I knew I had to protect myself. I could feel that my body had something precious; I was aware of my own fragrance. I felt ashamed; I was torn by one emotion after another. There was a force within me that I could use to protect myself--- or destroy myself. At times I was firm and strong. At times I was weak, defenseless, confused.

I wanted to love Mama. There were so many things I wanted to ask her. I needed her comforting. But it was just at that time that I had to shun her, hate her - or lose my own existence.

Lying sleepless on my bed and considering the matter calmly, I could see that Mama deserved to be pitied. She had to feed the two of us. But then I would think --- how could I eat the food she earned that way?

That was how my mood kept changing. Like a winter wind --- halting a moment, then blowing fiercer than ever. I would quietly watch my fury rising within me, and be powerless to stop it.

When they were risen from table, and had dallied a while in gay converse with him, the lady deemed it time to tell the reason of her visit: wherefore, graciously addressing Federigo, thus began she: "Federigo, by what thou rememberest of thy past life and my virtue, which, perchance, thou hast deemed harshness and cruelty, I doubt not thou must marvel at my presumption, when thou hearest the main purpose of my visit; but if thou hadst sons, or hadst had them, so that thou mightest know the full force of the love that is borne them, I should make no doubt that thou wouldst hold me in part excused. Nor, having a son, may I, for that thou hast none, claim exemption from the laws to which all other mothers are subject, and, being thus bound to own their sway, I must, though fain were I not, and though 'tis neither meet nor right, crave of thee that which I know thou dost of all things and with justice prize most highly, seeing that this extremity of thy adverse fortune has left thee nought else wherewith to delight, divert and console thee; which gift is no other than thy falcon, on which my boy has so set his heart that, if I bring him it not, I fear lest he grow so much worse of the malady that he has, that thereby it may come to pass that I lose him. And so, not for the love which thou dost bear me, and which may nowise bind thee, but for that nobleness of temper, whereof in courtesy more conspicuously than in aught else thou hast given proof, I implore thee that thou be pleased to give me the bird, that thereby I may say that I have kept my son alive, and thus made him for aye thy debtor."

No sooner had Federigo apprehended what the lady wanted, than, for grief that 'twas not in his power to serve her, because he had given her the falcon to eat, he fell a weeping in her presence, before he could so much as utter a word. At first the lady supposed that 'twas only because he was loath to part with the brave falcon that he wept, and as good as made up her mind that he would refuse her: however, she awaited with patience Federigo's answer, which was on this wise: "Madam, since it pleased God that I should set my affections upon you there have been matters not a few, in which to my sorrow I have deemed Fortune adverse to me; but they have all been trifles in comparison of the trick that she now plays me: the which I shall never forgive her, seeing that you are come here to my poor house, where, while I was rich, you deigned not to come, and ask a trifling favour of me, which she has put it out of my power to grant: how 'tis so, I will briefly tell you. When I learned that you, of your grace, were minded to breakfast with me, having respect to your high dignity and desert, I deemed it due and seemly that in your honour I should regale you, to the best of my power, with fare of a more excellent quality than is commonly set before others; and, calling to mind the falcon which you now ask of me, and his excellence, I judged him meet food for you, and so you have had him roasted on the trencher this morning; and well indeed I thought I had bestowed him; but, as now I see that you would fain have had him in another guise, so mortified am I that I am not able to serve you, that I doubt I shall never know peace of mind more." In witness whereof he had the feathers and feet and beak of the bird brought in and laid before her.

4.4

The first thing the lady did, when she had heard Federigo's story, and seen the relics of the bird, was to chide him that he had killed so fine a falcon to furnish a woman with a breakfast; after which the magnanimity of her host, which poverty had been and was powerless to impair, elicited no small share of inward commendation. Then, frustrate of her hope of possessing the falcon, and doubting of her son's recovery, she took her leave with the heaviest of hearts, and hied her back to the boy: who, whether for fretting, that he might not have the falcon, or by the unaided energy of his disorder, departed this life not many days after, to the exceeding great grief of his mother. For a while she would do nought but weep and bitterly bewail herself; but being still young, and left very wealthy, she was often urged by her brothers to marry again, and though she would rather have not done so, yet being importuned, and remembering Federigo's high desert, and the magnificent generosity with which he had finally killed his falcon to do her honour, she said to her brothers: "Gladly, with your consent, would I remain a widow, but if you will not be satisfied except I take a husband, rest assured that none other will I ever take save Federigo degli Alberighi." Whereupon her brothers derided her, saying: "Foolish woman, what is't thou sayst? How shouldst thou want Federigo, who has not a thing in the world?" To whom she answered: "My brothers, well wot I that 'tis as you say; but I had rather have a man without wealth than wealth without a man." The brothers, perceiving that her mind was made up, and knowing Federigo for a good man and true, poor though he was, gave her to him with all her wealth. And so Federigo, being mated with such a wife, and one that he had so much loved, and being very wealthy to boot, lived happily, keeping more exact accounts, to the end of his days.

-------

You were right. This was Novel IX, the falcon novella, from the Fifth Day of The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), faithfully translated by J.M. Rigg, London, 1921 (first printed 1903), courtesy of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/decameron/engDecShowText.php?myID=nov0509&expand=day05

4.

Before I could think of a solution, things became worse. Mama asked me, "What about it?" If I really loved her, she said, I ought to help her. Otherwise, she couldn't continue taking care of me. These didn't seem like words that Mama could speak, yet she said them. To make it even clearer, she added:

"I'm getting old. In another year or two, men won't want me even if I offer myself for nothing."

It was true. Lately you could see the wrinkles on Mama's face no matter how much powder she used. She no longer had the energy to entertain a lot of men; she was thinking of giving herself to only one. There was a man who ran a steamed bread shop who wanted her. She could go to him right away. But I was a big girl now. I couldn't trail after her bridal sedan-chair like I did when I was a child. I would have to look after myself. If I would agree to "help" Mama, she wouldn't have to go to him. I could earn money for us both.

I was quite willing to earn money, but when I thought of the way she wanted me to do it, it made me shiver. I knew next to nothing; how could I peddle myself like some middle-aged woman? Mama's heart was hard, and the need for money was harder still. She didn't force me to take this road or that. She left the choice to me. Either help her, or we two would go our separate ways. Mama didn't cry. Her eyes had long since gone dry.

What was I to do?

                                                                                       * * *

I spoke to the principal of my school. She was a stout woman of about forty, not very bright, but a warm-hearted generous person. I was really at my wit's end, otherwise how could I have said anything about Mama ... Actually, I didn't know the principal very well, and every word I spoke seared my throat like a ball of fire. I stammered and took a long time to get out what I had to say.

The principal said she was willing to help me. She couldn't give me any money, but she could give me two meals a day and a place to live --- I could move in with an old woman servant who lived at the school. She said I could help the scribe with his writing --- but not right away, because I still needed more practice with my handwriting.

Two meals a day and a place to live --- that settled the biggest problem. I didn't have to be a burden to Mama any more.

Mama didn't ride in a bride's sedan-chair when she left this time. She simply took a rickshaw and went off into the night. She let me keep my bedding.

Mama tried not to cry as she was leaving, but the tears in her heart gushed out after all. She knew I couldn't come to see her --- her own daughter. As for me, I had forgotten even how to weep properly --- I sobbed open-mouthed, the tears smothering my face. I was her daughter, her friend, her solace. But I couldn't help her. Not unless I agreed to something I just couldn't do.

After she had gone, I sat and thought. We two, mother and daughter, were like a couple of stray dogs. For the sake of our mouths, we had to accept all kinds of suffering, as if no other parts of our bodies mattered, only our mouths. We had to sell all the rest of us to feed our mouths.

I didn't hate Mama. I understood. It wasn't her fault; it wasn't wrong of her to have a mouth. The fault lay with food. By what right were we deprived of food?

Recollections of past troubles flooded back on me. But the crescent moon that was most familiar with my tears didn't appear this time. It was pitch dark, without even the glow of fireflies. Mama had disappeared into the darkness like a ghost, silent, shadowless. If she were to die tomorrow, she probably couldn't be buried beside Papa. I wouldn't even be able to find her grave. She was my only Mama, my only friend. And now I was left alone in the world.

5

I could never see Mama again. Love died in my heart, like a spring flower nipped by frost. I practiced hard with my writing so that I could help the scribe copy minor documents for the principal. I had to become useful --- I was eating other people's food. I couldn't be like the other girls in my class, who did nothing but watch others all day long --- observing what other people ate, what they wore, what they said. I concentrated on myself. My shadow was my only friend. "I" was always in my mind, because no one loved me. I loved myself, pitied, encouraged, scolded myself. I knew myself, as if I were another person.

My body changed in a way that frightened and pleased me, yet left me puzzled. When I touched it with my hand it was like cupping a delicate, tender flower.

I was concerned only with the present. There was no future; I didn't dare to think too far ahead. Because I was eating other people's food, I had to know when it was noon and when it was evening. Otherwise I wouldn't have thought of time at all. Without hope there isn't any time. I seemed nailed down to a place that had no days or months. When I thought of my life with Mama, I knew I had existed for fifteen or sixteen years. My schoolmates were always looking forward to vacations, festivals, the New Year holiday. What had these things to do with me?

But my body was continuing to mature. I could feel it. It confused me. I couldn't trust myself. I knew I was growing prettier. Beauty raised my social status. That was a consolation --- until I remembered that I never had any social status to begin with; then the consolation turned sour. Still, in the end, I was proud of my good looks. Poor but pretty! Suddenly, a frightening thought came to me --- Mama wasn't bad looking either.

                                                                              ***

I hadn't seen the crescent moon for a long time. Even though I wanted to see it, I didn't dare look. I had already graduated and was still living at the school. In the evenings I was alone with two old servants - a man and a woman. They didn't quite know how to treat me. I was no longer a student, yet I wasn't a teacher; nor was I a servant, though in some ways I resembled one. At night I walked alone in the courtyard. Often I was driven into my room by the crescent moon. I hadn't the courage to face it. But in my room I would picture it, especially when there was a slight breeze. The breeze seemed able to blow those pale beams directly to my heart, making me recall the past, intensifying my forebodings of tragedy. My heart was like a bat in the moonlight --- a dark thing in spite of the light; black ---even though it could fly, still black. I had no hope. But I didn't cry. I only frowned.

                                                                             ***
I earned a little money, knitting for some of the girl students. The principal let me. But I couldn't make much because they knew how to knit too. The girls only came to me when they were too busy to do it themselves. Still, my heart felt lighter. I even thought --- if Mama could come back, I could support her.

When I counted my money, I knew this was just an idle dream. But it made me feel better anyhow. I wished I could find her. If she would see me, she'd surely come away with me. We could get along, I thought. But I didn't altogether believe this myself. I was always thinking of Mama. Often, I saw her in my dreams.

One day I went with the students on an outing in the country. On the way back, because it was getting late, we took a shortcut through a small lane. There I saw Mama! Outside this steamed bread shop was a big basket with a large wooden object in it painted white to look like a steamed bread. Mama sat by the wall, pulling and pushing a lever that blew up the fire in the oven. While we were still quite a distance away I saw Mama and that white wooden steamed bread. I recognized her from the back. I wanted to rush over and embrace her. But I didn't dare. I was afraid the students would laugh at me. They wouldn't let me have such a Mama.

We came closer and closer. I lowered my head and looked at her through my tears. She didn't see me. The whole group of us brushed by her. Intent on pulling the bellows' lever, evidently she didn't see a thing.

When we were far beyond her, I turned around and looked back. She was still plying that lever. I couldn't see her features clearly; I had only the impression of a few stray locks hanging down over her forehead. I made a mental note of the name of the lane.

                                                                        
                                                                                    ***
                                                                                                                                                               

It was as if a little bug was gnawing at my heart. I had to see Mama or I'd have no peace.

Just at this time, a new principal was appointed to the school. The stout lady who was leaving told me I'd better start making other plans. As long as she remained she could give me food and lodgings, but she couldn't guarantee that the new principal would do the same.

I counted my money. Altogether I had two dollars and seventy some odd cents. This would keep me from starving for the next few days. But where was I to go?

6

I went job-hunting. I wouldn't go to Mama. I wouldn't depend on anyone. I would earn my own food.

Hopefully, I searched for two whole days. But I brought back a harvest of only dust and tears. There was no work for me to do. It was then that I truly understood Mama, really forgave her. At least she had washed smelly socks. I wasn't even able to do that. Mama took the only road that was left. The learning and morality the school had given me were just jokes, playthings for people with full stomachs and time to spare. The students wouldn't permit me to have a Mama like mine; they sneered at women who sold themselves. That was all right for them; they got their meals regularly.

I practically made up my mind --- I would do anything, if only someone would feed me. Mama was admirable. I wouldn't kill myself --- although I had thought of it. No, I wanted to live. I was young, pretty, I wanted to live. Any shame would be none of my doing.

                                                                                              
                                                                                     * * *

Thinking like that, it was as if I had already found a job. I dared to walk in the courtyard in the moonlight. A spring crescent moon hung in the sky. I saw it and it was beautiful. The sky was dark blue, without a speck of cloud. Bright and warm, the crescent moon bathed the willow branches with its soft beams. A breeze, laden with the fragrance of flowers, blew the shadow of the willow branches back and forth from the bright corner of the courtyard wall to the darkened section. The light was not strong; the shadows were not deep. The breeze blew tenderly. Everything was warm, drowsy, yet gently in motion. Below the moon and above the willows a pair of stars like the smiling eyes of a fairy maiden winked mischievously at that slanting crescent moon and those trailing branches. A tree by the wall was a galaxy of white blossoms. In the moonlight, half the tree was snowy white, half was dappled with soft grey shadows. A picture of incredible purity.

That crescent moon is the beginning of my hope, I said to myself.

                                                                                                ***

I went to see the stout lady principal again, but she wasn't home. A young man let me in. He was very handsome and very friendly. Usually, I'm afraid of men, but this young man didn't frighten me a bit. I couldn't very well refuse to answer his questions-- - he had such a winning smile. I told him why I wanted to see the principal. He was very concerned. He promised to help me.

That same night, he came and gave me two dollars. When I tried to refuse, he said the money was from his aunt --- the stout principal. She had already found me a place to live, he added; I could move in the next day. I was a little suspicious at first, but his smiles went right to my heart. I felt it was wrong to doubt a person who was so considerate, so charming.

His smiling lips were on my cheek, and I could see the crescent moon smiling too, upon his hair. The intoxicated spring breeze had blown open the spring clouds to reveal the crescent moon and a pair of spring stars. Trailing willow branches stirred along the river bank, frogs throbbed their love songs, the fragrance of young rushes filled the spring night. I could hear water flowing, bringing nourishment to the tender rushes so that they might quickly grow tall and strong. Young shoots were growing on the moist warm earth; every living thing was absorbing spring's vitality and giving off a lovely perfume. I forgot myself; I had, no self. I seemed to dissolve into that gentle spring breeze, those faint moon beams. Suddenly, a cloud covered the moon. I had lost the crescent moon, and myself as well. I was the same as Mama!

7.

I knew there was no hope from the start. Any wisp or cloud could cover a crescent moon. My future was dark.

Sure enough, not long after, as spring was changing to summer, my spring dream ended.

One day, just about noon, a young woman came to see me. She was very pretty, in a vapid, doll-like way. The moment she entered the room she began to weep. There was no need for her to say anything; I knew already. She hadn't come to raise a row, nor did I want to quarrel with her. She was a simple, honest sort. Crying, she took m hand. "He deceived us both!" she said.

I had thought she was also a "sweetheart". But no, she was his wife. She didn't berate me. She just kept repeating "Please let him go!" I didn't know what to do. I felt very sorry for the young woman. Finally, I consented and, at once, she was all smile. She appeared to be completely guileless, and quite naive. All she knew was that she wanted her husband.

                                        
                                                                                                   ***

I walked the streets for hours. It had been easy enough I agree to what that young woman had asked, but what was I to do now? I didn't want the things he had given me. Since we were parting, I ought to make the break compete. But they were all I had to my name. Where was I to go? Would I be able to get food that day? His gifts at least were worth a little money. Very well, I'd keep them. I had no choice.

Quietly, I moved away. Though I had no regrets, there was an emptiness in my heart. I was like a lone and drifting cloud. I rented a small room. Then I went to bed and slept right around the clock.

                                                                                                  ***

I was good at economizing. Since childhood I had known how precious money was. I still had a couple of dollars, but I decided to go out and look for a job immediately. Though I had no great hopes, it seemed like the safest course.

But job-hunting hadn't become any easier just because I was a year or two older than last time. I kept trying, not that I thought it would do any good, but because I felt it was the proper thing to do.

Why was it so hard for a woman to earn a living? Mama was right. She took the only road open to a woman. Though I knew it was waiting for me, not far off, I didn't want to take that road yet.

The more I struggled, the more frightened I became. My hope was like the light of a new moon; in a little while it would be gone.

Two weeks later, just as I was about to give up, I stood in a line of girls in a cheap restaurant. The restaurant was very small; the boss, who was looking us over, was very big. We were a rather attractive bunch --- all primary school graduates, but we waited for that great broken-down tub of a boss to pick one of us as if he were an emperor.

He chose me. Though I wasn't the least grateful, at the moment I couldn't help feeling good. The girls all seemed to envy me. As they left, some had tears in their eyes. A few cursed under their breath --- "How can women be worth so little !"

8

I became the small restaurant's Second Hostess. I didn't know anything about waiting on tables and I was rather scared. The First Hostess told me not to worry--- she didn't either. She said the waiter took care of that. All the hostess had to do was serve tea, hand out damp face cloths and present the bill at the end of the meal.

Strange. First Hostess wore her sleeves rolled up to her elbow, but the white linings were quite spotless. Tied to her wrist was a fancy handkerchief embroidered with the words "Little Sister, I love you". She was always powdering her face, and the lipstick on her big mouth made it look like bloody ladle. When lighting a cigarette for a customer, she would press her knee against his leg. She also poured the drinks; sometimes she took a sip herself. To some customers she was very attentive; others she would completely ignore. She had a way of batting her eyes and pretending she didn't see them. It was up to me to look after the ones she neglected.

I was afraid of men. I had learned from that little experience of mine - love or no love, men were monsters. The customers at our restaurant were particularly repulsive. They put on a great show of grabbing for the bill. They played noisy drinking games and ate like pigs. They picked fault over the smallest trifles, and cursed and raged.

While serving them tea or handing out face cloths, I kept my head down and blushed. They talked to me and tried to make me laugh. But I wanted nothing to do with them. At nine o'clock, when my first day's work was over, I was worn out. I went to my little room and lay down, without even taking my clothes off, and slept until the next day. When I awoke, I felt better. I was self-supporting, earning my own keep. I retorted for work very early.

                                                                                                                                ***

When First Hostess showed up, after nine, I had already been on the job two hours. Contemptuously, but not altogether unkindly, she explained, "You don't have to come so early. Who eats here at eight o'clock in the morning? And another thing, droopy puss, don't always be pulling such a long face. You're supposed to be a hostess, not a pallbearer. Keep your head down like that all the time and nobody'll give extra tips. What do you think you're here for? You're dressed all wrong, too. Your gown should have a high collar --- and where's your chiffon handkerchief? You don't even look like a hostess!"
I knew she meant well. If I didn't smile at the customers, I'd lose out and so would she, for we all split the tips equally. I didn't look down on her; in one sense, I even admired her, she knew how to earn money. Playing up to men --- that was my way a woman could get along. But I didn't want to imitate her, though I could see clearly that the day might be coming when I would have to be even more free and easy than she to earn my food. But that would be only when all other means failed. The "last resort" was always lying in wait for us women. I was just trying to make it wait a little longer.
Angrily, I gritted my teeth and struggled on. But a woman's fate is never in her own hands. Three days later the boss warned me --- he'd give me two more days; if I wanted to keep the job, I'd have to act like First Hostess. Half in jest, First Hostess also dropped me a hint: "One of the customers has been asking about you. Why don't you quit holding back and playing so dumb? We all know the score. Hostesses have married bank managers-- - there've been cases. We're not so cheap. If we're not too prissy, we can ride around in a goddam limousine with the best of 'em!" That burned me up. "When did you ever ride in a limousine?" I queried. Her big red mouth opened so wide with surprise, I thought her jaw was going to drop off. Then she snapped, "None of your nasty lip. You're no lily-arsed lady. You wouldn't be here if you were!"
I quit. I took my pay - a dollar and five cents -and went home.

                                                                   ***
The final shadow had taken another big step towards me. To avoid it, I first had to come closer to it. I didn't care about losing the job, but I was really afraid of that shadow. I knew how to sell myself. Ever since that affair, I understood quite a bit about relations between men and women. A girl had only to relax her hold on herself a little, and the men would sense it and come running. What they wanted was flesh; when they had satisfied their lust, they would feed you and clothe you for a time. Afterwards, they might curse and beat you, and cut off your income.
That's the way it is when a girl sells herself. At times she's very content. I've known that feeling myself. It's all sweet love talk for a while; later you become depressed and ache all over. When you sell yourself to one man, at least you get words of love and bliss. But when you're on sale to the general public, you don't even get that. Then you hear lots of words Mama never used.
The degree of fear was different too. Though I just couldn't accept the advice of First Hostess, I wasn't quite as afraid of a private affair with one man. Not that I was thinking of selling myself. I had no need of a man --- I was less than twenty. I only thought that it might be fun to go around with one. How was I to know that as soon as I went out a few times with a new friend he would demand what I feared the most!
It was true I had once abandoned myself to the spring breeze, and let a young man have his will. But later I knew he had taken advantage of my innocence, hypnotized me with his honeyed words. When I awoke, I realized it was all an empty dream with nothing to show for it but a few meals and some clothes. I didn't want to earn my food that way again. ". Food was a proper practical object that should be earned in a proper practical way. But if that proved impossible, a woman had to admit she was a woman, and sell her flesh.
More than a month passed. I still was unable to find a new job.

9

I ran into some of my old classmates. A few had gone on to middle school; some were just living at home. I wasn't much interested in them. Talking with them, I could see that I was cleverer than they. In school, they used to be the smart ones. Now the tables were reversed. They seemed to be living in a world of dreams. All very smartly turned out, they were like merchandise in a store. Their eyes shone when they met a young man and their hearts seemed to melt in a poetic reverie.

Those girls made me laugh, but I had to forgive them. Food was no problem to them; it's easy to think of love when your belly is full. Men and women weave nets to ensnare one another. The ones with the most money have the biggest nets. After bagging a few prospects, they leisurely take their pick. I had no money. I couldn't even find a quiet corner to weave my net. But I had to catch someone, or be caught myself. I was clearer on such matters than my ex-classmates, more practical.

                                                                                * * *

One day I ran into the doll-faced young wife again. She greeted me as if I were one of her dearest friends, but there was some confusion in her manner.

"You're a good person," she stammered, very earnest. "I was sorry later I asked you to let him go. I would have been better off if he stayed with you. Now he's found himself another. He's gone away with her and I haven't seen him since!"

Questioning her, I discovered that she and he had married for love. Apparently she still loved him, but he had run off again. I was sorry for the little wife. She was still dreaming; she still believed that love was sacred.

I asked her what she was going to do now. She said she had to find him, that they were mated for life. But suppose you can't find him? I asked. She bit her lips. She had parents and in-laws; she was under their control. She envied me my freedom.

So someone actually envied me. I wanted to laugh. My freedom --- what a joke! She had food, I had freedom. She had no freedom, I had nothing to eat. And the two of us were women.
 

                                                                                 * * *

After meeting the little doll-face, I gave up the idea of selling myself to one man. I decided to play around; in other words, I was going to use "romance" to earn my meals. I couldn't be bothered about moral responsibility any more when I was hungry.

Romance would cure hunger, just as a full stomach was necessary before you could concentrate on romance. It was a perfect circle, no matter where you started from.

There wasn't much difference between me and my classmates and the little doll-face. They had a few more illusions; I was a bit more straightforward. There is no truth more vital than the empty stomach.

I sold my meagre possessions and bought myself a complete new outfit. I didn't look bad at all. Then I entered upon the market.

                                                                                ***

From: 'The Way of the Sufi' by Idries Shah

A powerful king, ruler of many domains, was in a position of such magnificence that wise men were his mere employees. And yet one day he felt himself confused and called the sages to him.

He said: 'I do not know the cause, but something impels me to seek a certain ring, one that will enable me to stabilize my state.

'I must have such a ring. And this ring must be one which, when I am unhappy, will make me joyful. At the same time, if I am happy and look upon it, I must be made sad.'

The wise men consulted one another, and threw themselves into deep contemplation, and finally they came to a decision as to the character of this ring which would suit their king.

The ring which they devised was one upon which was inscribed the legend:

This, too, will pass.

http://www.spiritual-teachers.com/stories/sufi.htm

10

They say some girls can earn a living playing at romance. But I just didn't have the capital; I had to drop the idea. For me it had to be straight business. My landlord ordered me to get out. He was a respectable man, he said. I didn't even give him a second glance. I moved back to the small flat where Mama and my first new Papa used to live. This landlord didn't say anything about being respectable. He was much nicer and more honest.

Business was very good. The cultured types came too. As soon as they found out I was for sale, they were willing to buy. With this kind of arrangement they got their money's worth, with no reflection on their social status.

 When I first started I was very scared. I wasn't yet twenty. But after a couple of days I wasn't afraid any more. I could turn them limp as sacks of wet sand. They were pleased and satisfied; they advertised me to their friends.

 By the end of several months, I knew a lot. I learned to size a man up the first time we met. The rich customer would always inquire about my background, and make it plain that he could afford me. Very jealous, he would always want me all to himself. Even in brothels he wanted to monopolize --- because he had money.

To that type of man I wasn't very courteous. If he raged I didn't care. I could quiet him down by threatening to go to his wife. Those years at school weren't spent in vain. I didn't scare easily. Education has its advantages. I was convinced of that.

Some men would show up with only a dollar in their hands, terrified of being cheated. To this sort, I would explain the terms of our transaction in careful detail. They would then meekly go home and get some more money. It was really a scream.

 The worst of the lot were the small-time punks. Not only didn't they want to spend any money, but they were always trying to make something on the deal --- stealing half a pack of cigarettes, or a small jar of cold cream. It was bad policy to offend these boys --- they had connections. Get tough with them, and they put the cops on you. I didn't offend them. I played them along until I got to know an official on the police force, then I finished them off one by one. It's a dog-eat-dog world; the worse you are the better you make out.

Most pitiful of all were the young student types, with only a dollar and a handful of small change clinking in their pockets, nervous perspiration standing out on their noses. I pitied them, but I took their money just the same. What else could I do?

Then there were the elderly men --- all quite respectable, some of them grandfathers. I didn't really know how to treat them. But I knew they had money; they wanted to buy a little happiness before they died. So I gave them what they were after.

These experiences taught me to recognize the true nature of money and man. Money is the more powerful of the two. If man is an animal, then money is his gall.

I went to the little lane where I had last seen her plying the bellows' lever. But the steamed bread shop had closed down. No one knew where they had moved to. But I persisted. I simply had to find her. For days I roved the streets like a ghost. It was no use. I wondered whether she was dead, or whether the shop had moved to somewhere outside the city, maybe hundreds of miles away.

 In this gloomy frame of mind, I broke down and cried. I put on my best clothes, made up my face, and lay down on my bed and waited for death. I was sure I wouldn't last long.

But I didn't die. There was a knock at the door. Someone had come looking for me. All right, show him in. With all my strength, I gave him a full charge of my infection. I didn't think I was wrong. The fault wasn't mine to begin with.

I began to feel a little better. I smoked, I drank, I behaved like an old hand of thirty or forty. There were dark circles under my eyes, my hands were feverish. I didn't care. Money was everything. The idea was to eat your fill first; then you could talk about other things. And I ate not badly at all. Why not have the best! I had to have good food and nice clothing. That was the only way I could do a little justice to myself.

                                                                                                                          ***

The footsteps approached my door, softly, slowly. I saw a pair of eyes peering in through the door's small glass panel. After a moment, they vanished. I sat listless, too lazy to move. A few minutes later, the eyes came back again. This time I recognized them. I got up and quietly opened the door. "Ma!"

What happened next I can't exactly say. Nor do I remember bow long we cried together. Mama had aged terribly. Her husband had gone back to his native village, sneaking away with out a word. He didn't leave her a cent. She sold the shop's few implements, gave the store back to the landlord and moved into a cheap room.
She had already been searching for me over half a month. Finally, she thought of coming to her old flat, just on the off chance that she might run into me. Sure enough, there I was. She hadn't dared speak to me. If I hadn't called her, perhaps she would have gone away again.

When we stopped crying at last, I began to laugh hysterically. What a farce! Mother finds daughter, but daughter is a whore. In order to bring me up, Mama had been forced to become one. Now it was my turn to look after her, so I would have to remain one.

This oldest profession is hereditary - a woman's specialty!

11

Though I knew that words of comfort were just empty talk, I was hoping to hear them from Mama's mouth. Mama was always good at fooling people, and I used to take her cajolery as consolation.
But now she had forgotten how to do even that. She was scared stiff by hunger, and I didn't blame her.

She began checking through my things, questioning me about income and expenses, apparently not the least troubled by the nature of my work. I told her I was sick, hoping she would urge me to rest a few days. Nothing of the sort. She said she'd buy me some medicine.

"Are we always going to remain in this business?" I asked her. She didn't answer.

Yet, in a way, she really loved me and wanted to protect me. She fed me, looked after my health. She was always stealing glances at me, the way a mother watches a sleeping child.
The only thing she wouldn't do for me was telling me to quit my profession.
I knew well enough --- though I wasn't too pleased about it --- that aside from this, there was nothing else I could do. Mama and I had to have food and clothing --- that decided everything. Mother and daughter or no, respectable or no, the need for money was merciless.

       ***                                   

12

Because I had known so many men, I forgot completely the meaning of love. I loved myself --- no, I didn't even love myself any longer. Why should I love anyone else? Still, if I were to marry, I would have to pretend, to say that I loved him, that I was willing to spend the rest of my life with him.

And that is what I did say --- to several men. I swore it, but none of them wanted to marry me. The rule of money makes men sharp. They were quite willing to have an affair with me. That was much cheaper than going to a brothel.

If it didn't cost anything, I guarantee all the men would say they loved me.

***

Just about this time, I was arrested. Our city's new chief of police is a stickler on morals; he wants to clean out all the unregistered brothels. The licensed women can go on doing business, because they pay tax. 

After my arrest, I was sent to a reformatory where I was taught to work --- washing clothes, cooking, knitting. But I already knew how to do all that. If I could have earned a living by any of those methods, I would have quit my own bitter profession long ago.

I told that to the people at the reformatory, but they didn't believe me. They said I was a loafer, immoral. They said that if I not only learned to work, but also loved to work, I could become self-supporting, or find a husband.

They were very optimistic. I didn't share their confidence. They were very proud of the fact that they had "reformed" about a dozen women and found them husbands. For a two-dollar licence fee and a guarantee from a responsible shopkeeper, any man could come to the reformatory and pick a wife. It was a real bargain --- for the man.

To me it was a joke. I flatly refused to be "reformed". When some big official came down to investigate us, I spat in his face. But they wouldn't let me go. I was a dangerous character. Since they couldn't reform me, they sent me to another place. I went to jail.

                                                                                                                               ***

Jail is a fine place. It convinces you that there's no hope for mankind. Never in my dreams did I imagine any hole could be so disgusting.

But once I got here, I gave up any idea of ever leaving again. From my own experience, I know that the outside world isn't much of an improvement.

I wouldn't want to die here, if I had any better place to go. But I know what it's like outside. Wherever you die, it's all the same.

 Here, in here, I saw my old friend again --- the crescent moon. I hadn't seen it for a long time!

I wonder what Mama is doing.

That crescent moon brings everything back.

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

Lao She, Qingdao , 1935

© by the Lao She Estate

© translated by Sydney Shapiro, 1985

Thanks Anna!

Liz

Henry James (1843-1916)

The Last of the Valerii

1.

I had had occasion to declare more than once that if my god-daughter married a foreigner I should refuse to give her away. And yet when the young Conte Valerio was presented to me, in Rome, as her accepted and plighted lover, I found myself looking at the happy fellow, after a momentary stare of amazement, with a certain paternal benevolence; thinking, indeed, that from the pictorial point of view (she with her yellow locks and he with his dusky ones) they were a strikingly well-assorted pair. She brought him up to me half proudly, half timidly, pushing him before her and begging me with one of her dove-like glances to be very polite. I don’t know that I usually miss that effect, but she was so deeply impressed with his grandeur that she thought it impossible to do him honour enough. The Conte Valerio’s grandeur was doubtless nothing for a young American girl who had the air and almost the habits of a princess, to sound her trumpet about; but she was desperately in love with him, and not only her heart, but her imagination, was touched. He was extremely handsome, and with a beauty which was less a matter of mere fortunate surface than usually happens in the handsome Roman race. There was a latent tenderness in his admirable mask, and his grave, slow smile, if it suggested no great nimbleness of wit, spoke of a manly constancy which promised well for Martha’s happiness. He had little of the light, inexpensive urbanity of his countrymen, and there was a kind of stupid sincerity in his gaze; it seemed to suspend response until he was sure he understood you. He was certainly a little dense, and I fancied that to a political or æsthetic question the reply would be particularly slow. “He is good, and strong, and brave,” the young girl however assured me; and I easily believed her. Strong the Conte Valerio certainly was; he had a head and throat like some of the busts in the Vatican. To my eye, which has looked at things now so long with the painter’s purpose, it was a real annoyance to see such a throat rising out of the white cravat of the period. It sustained a head as massively round as that of the familiar bust of the Emperor Caracalla, and covered with the same dense sculptural crop of curls. The young man’s hair grew superbly; it was such hair as the old Romans must have had when they walked bareheaded and bronzed about the world. It made a perfect arch over his low, clear forehead, and prolonged itself on cheek and chin in a close, crisp beard, strong with its own strength and unstiffened by the razor. Neither his nose nor his mouth was delicate; but they were powerful, shapely, masculine. His complexion was of a deep glowing brown, which no emotion would alter, and his large, lucid eyes seemed to stare at you like a pair of polished agates. He was of middle stature, and his chest was of so generous a girth that you half expected to hear his linen crack with its even respirations. And yet, with his simple human smile, he looked neither like a young bullock nor a gladiator. His powerful voice was the least bit harsh, and his large, ceremonious reply to my compliment had the massive sonority with which civil speeches must have been uttered in the age of Augustus. I had always considered my god-daughter a very American little person, in all honourable meanings of the word, and I doubted if this sturdy young Latin would understand the transatlantic element in her nature; but, evidently, he would make her a loyal and ardent lover. She seemed to me, in her tinted prettiness, so tender, so appealing, so bewitching, that it was impossible to believe he had not more thoughts for all this than for the equally pretty fortune which it yet bothered me to believe that he must, like a good Italian, have taken the exact measure of. His own worldly goods consisted of the paternal estate, a villa within the walls of Rome, which his scanty funds had suffered to fall into sombre disrepair. “It’s the Villa she’s in love with, quite as much as the Count,” said her mother. “She dreams of converting the Count; that’s all very well. But she dreams of refurnishing the Villa!”

The upholsterers were turned into it, I believe, before the wedding, and there was a great scrubbing and sweeping of saloons and raking and weeding of alleys and avenues. Martha made frequent visits of inspection while these ceremonies were taking place; but one day, on her return, she came into my little studio with an air of amusing horror. She had found them scraping the sarcophagus in the great ilex-walk; divesting it of its mossy coat, disincrusting it of the sacred green mould of the ages! This was their idea of making the Villa comfortable. She had made them transport it to the dampest place they could find; for, next after that slow-coming, slow-going smile of her lover, it was the rusty complexion of his patrimonial marbles that she most prized. The young Count’s conversion proceeded less rapidly, and indeed I believe that his betrothed brought little zeal to the affair. She loved him so devoutly that she believed no change of faith could better him, and she would have been willing for his sake to say her prayers to the sacred Bambino at the feast of the Epiphany. But he had the good taste to demand no such sacrifice, and I was struck with the happy significance of a scene of which I was an accidental observer. It was at St Peter’s, one Friday afternoon, during the vesper-service which takes place in the chapel of the choir. I met my god-daughter wandering serenely on her lover’s arm, her mother being established on her camp-stool, near the entrance of the place. The crowd was collected thereabouts, and the body of the church was empty. Now and then the high voices of the singers escaped into the outer vastness and melted slowly away in the incense-thickened air. Something in the young girl’s step and the clasp of her arm in her lover’s told me that her contentment was perfect. As she threw back her head and gazed into the magnificent immensity of vault and dome, I felt that she was in that enviable mood in which all consciousness revolves on a single centre, and that her sense of the splendours around her was one with the ecstasy of her trust. They stopped before that sombre group of polyglot confessionals which proclaims so portentously the sinfulness of the world, and Martha seemed to make some almost passionate protestation. A few minutes later I overtook them.

“Don’t you agree with me, dear friend,” said the Count, who always addressed me with the most affectionate deference, “that before I marry so pure and sweet a creature as this, I ought to go into one of those places and confess every sin I ever was guilty of – every evil thought and impulse and desire of my grossly evil nature?”
Martha looked at him, half in deprecation, half in homage, with an eye which seemed at once to insist that her lover could have no vices and to plead that if he had there would be something magnificent in them. “Listen to him!” she said, smiling. “The list would be long, and if you waited to finish it, you would be late for the wedding. But if you confess your sins for me, it’s only fair I should confess mine for you. Do you know what I have been saying to Marco?” she added, turning to me with the half-filial confidence she had always shown me and with a rosy glow in her cheeks; “that I want to do something more for him than girls commonly do for their intended – to take some great step, to run some risk, to break some law, even! I am quite willing to change my religion, if he bids me. There are moments when I am terribly tired of simply staring at Catholicism; it will be a relief to come into a church to kneel. That, after all, is what they are meant for! Therefore, Marco mio, if it casts a shade across your heart to think that I’m a heretic, I will go and kneel down to that good old priest who has just entered the confessional yonder, and say to him, ‘My father, I repent, I abjure, I believe. Baptize me in the only faith.’”

“If it’s as a compliment to the Count,” I said, “it seems to me he ought to anticipate it by giving up, for you, something equally important.”

She had spoken lightly and with a smile, and yet with an undertone of girlish ardour. The young man looked at her with a solemn, puzzled face, and shook his head. “Keep your religion,” he said. “Every one his own. If you should attempt to embrace mine, I am afraid you would close your arms about a shadow. I am not a good Catholic, a good Christian! I don’t understand all these chants and ceremonies and splendours. When I was a child I never could learn my catechism. My poor old confessor long ago gave me up; he told me I was a good boy, but a pagan! You must not be more devout than your husband. I don’t understand your religion any better, but I beg you not to change it for mine. If it has helped to make you what you are, it must be good.” And taking the young girl’s hand, he was about to raise it affectionately to his lips; but suddenly remembering that they were in a place unaccordant with profane passions, he lowered it with a comical smile. “Let us go,” he murmured, passing his hand over his forehead. “This heavy atmosphere of St Peter's always stupefies me.”

2.

They were married in the month of May, and we separated for the summer, the Contessa’s mamma going to illuminate the domestic circle, beyond the sea, with her reflected dignity. When I returned to Rome in the autumn I found the young couple established at the Villa Valerio, which was now partly reclaimed from its antique decay. I begged that the hand of improvement might be lightly laid on it, for as an unscrupulous old painter of ruins and relics, with an eye to ‘subjects’, I preferred that crumbling things should be allowed to crumble at their ease. My god-daughter was quite of my way of thinking; she had a high appreciation of antiquity. Advising with me, often, as to projected changes, she was sometimes more conservative even than I, and I more than once smiled at her archæological zeal, declaring that I believed she had married the Count because he was like a statue of the Decadence. I had a constant invitation to spend my days at the Villa, and my easel was always planted in one of the garden-walks. I grew to have a painter’s passion for the place, and to be intimate with every tangled shrub and twisted tree, every moss-coated vase and mouldy sarcophagus and sad, disfeatured bust of those grim old Romans who could so ill afford to become more meagre-visaged. The place was of small extent; but though there were many other villas more pretentious and splendid, none seemed to me more exquisitely romantic, more haunted by the ghosts of the past. There were memories in the fragrance of the untended flowers, in the hum of the insects. It contained, among other idle, untrimmed departments, an old ilex-walk, in which I used religiously to spend half-an-hour every day – half-an-hour being, I confess, just as long as I could stay without beginning to sneeze. The trees arched and intertwisted over the dusky vista in the most perfect symmetry; and as it was exposed uninterruptedly to the west, the low evening sun used to transfuse it with a sort of golden mist and play through it – over leaves and knotty boughs and mossy marbles – with a thousand crimson fingers. It was filled with disinterred fragments of sculpture – nameless statues and noseless heads and rough-hewn sarcophagi, which made it deliciously solemn. The statues used to stand in the perpetual twilight like conscious things, brooding on their long observations. I used to linger near them, half expecting they would speak and tell me their stony secrets – whisper hoarsely the whereabouts of their mouldering fellows, still unrecovered from the soil.

My god-daughter was idyllically happy and absolutely in love. I was obliged to confess that even rigid rules have their exceptions, and that now and then an Italian count is as genuine as possible. Marco was a perfect original (not a copy), and seemed quite content to be appreciated. Their life was a childlike interchange of caresses, as candid and natural as those of a shepherd and shepherdess in a bucolic poem. To stroll in the ilex-walk and feel her husband’s arm about her waist and his shoulder against her cheek; to roll cigarettes for him while he puffed them in the great marble-paved rotunda in the centre of the house; to fill his glass from an old rusty red amphora – these graceful occupations satisfied the young Countess.
She rode with him sometimes in the grassy shadow of aqueducts and tombs, and sometimes suffered him to show his beautiful wife at Roman dinners and balls. She played dominoes with him after dinner, and carried out, in a desultory way, a scheme of reading him the daily papers. This observance was subject to fluctuations caused by the Count’s invincible tendency to go to sleep – a failing his wife never attempted to disguise or palliate. She would sit and brush the flies from him while he lay statuesquely snoring, and, if I ventured near him, would place her finger on her lips and whisper that she thought her husband was as handsome asleep as awake. I confess I often felt tempted to reply that he was at least quite as entertaining, for the young man’s happiness had not multiplied the topics on which he readily conversed. He had plenty of good sense, and his opinion on any practical matter was usually worth having. He would often come and sit near me while I worked at my easel, and offer a friendly criticism on what I was doing. His taste was a little crude, but his eye was excellent, and his measurement of the correspondence between some feature of my sketch and the object I was trying to reproduce, as trustworthy as that of a mathematical instrument. But he seemed to me to have either a strange reserve or a still stranger simplicity, to be fundamentally unfurnished with anything remotely resembling an idea. He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears – nothing but senses, appetites, serenely luxurious tastes. As I watched him strolling about while he looked at his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had anything that could properly be termed a soul, and whether good-health and good-nature were not the sum total of his advantages. ‘It’s lucky he’s good-natured,’ I used to say to myself; ‘for if he were not, there is nothing in his conscience to keep him in order. If he had irritable nerves instead of quiet ones, he would strangle us as the infant Hercules strangled the poor little snakes. He’s the natural man! Happily, his nature is gentle; I can mix my colours at my ease.’ I wondered what he thought about and what passed through his mind in the sunny idleness that seemed to shut him in from the modern work-a-day world, of which, in spite of my passion for bedaubing old panels with ineffective portraiture of mouldy statues against screens of box, I still flattered myself I was a member. I went so far as to believe that he sometimes withdrew from the world altogether. He had moods in which his consciousness seemed so remote and his mind so irresponsive and inarticulate, that nothing but some fresh endearment or some sudden violence could have power to arouse him. Even his tenderness for his wife had a quality which made me uneasy. Whether or no he had a soul himself, he seemed not to suspect that she had one. I took a god-fatherly interest in the development of her immortal part. I fondly believed her to be a creature susceptible of a moral life. But what was becoming of her moral life in this interminable heathenish honeymoon? Some fine day she would find herself tired of the Count’s beaux yeux and make an appeal to his mind. She had, to my knowledge, plans of study, of charity, of worthily playing her part as a Contessa Valerio – a position as to which the family-records furnished the most inspiring examples. But if the Count found the newspapers soporific, I doubted whether he would turn Dante’s pages very fast for his wife, or smile with much zest at the anecdotes of Vasari. How could he advise her, instruct her, sustain her? And if she should become a mother, how could he share her responsibilities? He doubtless would transmit his little son and heir a stout pair of arms and legs and a magnificent crop of curls, and sometimes remove his cigarette to kiss a dimpled spot; but I found it hard to picture him lending his voice to teach the lusty urchin his alphabet or his prayers, or the rudiments of infant virtue. One accomplishment indeed the Count possessed which would make him an agreeable playfellow: he carried in his pocket a collection of precious fragments of antique pavement – bits of porphyry and malachite and lapis and basalt – disinterred on his own soil and brilliantly polished by use. With these you might see him occupied by the half-hour, playing the simple game of catch-and-toss, ranging them in a circle, tossing them in rotation, catching them on the back of his hand. His skill was remarkable; he would send a stone five feet into the air, and pitch and catch and transpose the rest before he received it again. I watched with affectionate jealousy for the signs of a dawning sense, on Martha’s part, that she was the least bit oddly mated. Once or twice, as the weeks went by, I fancied I read them, and that she looked at me with eyes which seemed to remember certain old talks of mine in which I had declared – with such verity as you please – that a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, might be a very good fellow, but that he never really respected the woman he pretended to love. For the most part, however, my alarms, suspicions, prejudices, spent themselves easily in the charmed atmosphere of our romantic, our classical home. We were out of the modern world and had no business with modern scruples. The place was so bright, so still, so sacred to the silent, imperturbable past, that drowsy contentment seemed a natural law; and sometimes when, as I sat at my work, I saw my companions passing arm-in-arm across the end of one of the long-drawn vistas, and, turning back to my palette, found my colours dimmer for the radiant vision, I could easily have believed that I was some old monkish chronicler or copyist, engaged in illuminating a mediæval legend.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/books/review/Murakami-t.html?em&ex=1184126400&en=d6911fa3145629ea&ei=5070

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. ...

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way. ...

Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Not long ago, I watched Daniel Barenboim's Piano Master Classes: http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2007/03/master_class.html where Barenboim mentioned 'tempo rubato' which he translated or explained as 'stolen time', something that I've always and without knowing the name for it understood as the sound between the notes, which can perhaps also be grasped and appreciated as the unspoken and the unstated which jumps into your mind when you read Murakami's books.   

Nanna

A comment on some of my stories posted to this thread:

Leading psychologist says little-known literary form develops thinking skills

A form of literature little-known in the West but common in Afghanistan can help develop thinking skills and perceptions, says neuropsychiatric expert Robert Ornstein.

The internationally renowned psychologist, pioneering researcher and author of more than 20 books—including The Psychology of Consciousness, The Roots of the Self and The Amazing Brain—will discuss this form of literature, called the “teaching-story,” at the Library of Congress Friday, Nov. 1, 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the Mumford Room, sixth floor, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. in Washington, D.C.

While Western educators and psychologists are just now beginning to acknowledge the effectiveness of this type of story in developing thinking skills and perceptions, it is still largely unknown here, though it has been used for such purposes elsewhere in the world for centuries, says Ornstein. Although found in many cultures, it is especially prevalent in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East, he notes.

On the surface, says Ornstein, teaching-stories often appear to be little more than fairy or folk tales. But they are designed to embody—in their characters, plots and imagery—patterns and relationships that nurture a part of the mind that is unreachable in more direct ways, thus increasing our understanding and breadth of vision, in addition to fostering our ability to think critically.

“These stories, with improbable events that lead the reader's mind into new and unexplored venues, allow her or him to develop more flexibility and to understand this complex world better,” he says.

Ornstein, who has taught at Stanford, Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco, says psychologists have found that reading teaching-stories activates the right side of the brain much more than does reading normal prose.

“The right side of the brain provides 'context,' the essential function of putting together the different components of experience,” he says. “The left side provides the 'text,' or the pieces themselves.”

Ornstein sees stories as being part of our basic cognitive development, leading the child and then the adult to learn more about what happens in the world, when and how events come together. He points out that the stories of all cultures share more in this regard than they differ, and that an analysis of stories throughout the world shows that the same story occurs time and again in different cultures.

“Stories have been part of all cultures from time immemorial,” says Ornstein, “but only recently has their psychological significance been discovered, especially in teaching-stories.”

Library of Congress Press Release of 10/16/02

From SALAMANDER and other stories

PILGRIMS' INN

Masuji Ibuse

Translated by John Bester

6.1

I am staying here in Tosa on private business. For the most part, I am pleased to say, things have gone most satisfactorily. The only exception is that the day before yesterday, I dozed off on the bus, and instead of getting off at a town called Aki was carried on to a place called Pilgrims' Cape. Thinking to make my way back to Aki, I was told that the last bus had already gone. It was fifteen miles to Aki, they said. So, my affairs being well in hand and with no need to get back quickly, I decided not to rush things but to put up for the night at Pilgrims' Cape.

The collection of dwellings at Pilgrims' Cape is officially known as Kimisaki, in the village of Pilgrims' Cape. There is no fear of losing one's way, for the village has only one street, lined on either side by low, single-story houses. Hoping if possible to fond an inn with a telephone, I asked a passing fisherman, who told me that the only establishment in the village with a telephone were the post office and the police station. I inquired how many inns there were. Only one, he said: a pilgrims' inn.

True enough, at the entrance of the inn where I stayed, there hung a huge sign that said, " Pilgrims' Inn - The Waves." The inn as such had no pretensions of any kind, having a total of only three rooms for guests, but surprisingly enough there are three maids. On the other hand, there is neither proprietor, proprietress, nor proprietor's son. They are all employees, in fact, with no one officially in charge.

--------

6.2

The first thing that occurred to me as I stood at the entrance of the inn was that it must be a fisherman's cottage, made over almost as it stood. It was already dark and I could not see the outside, but the papered sliding doors at the entrance and the low-hanging eaves were in no way different from those of the most ordinary fisherman's home. I opened the sliding doors and stepped into the narrow earthen-floored hallway.

"Good evening! " I called. "Is anybody there? I'd like a room for the night if you . . . ."

A sliding door opened from within, and a woman of around fifty appeared.

"Well, good evening to you!" she said. " A room for the night is it?"

The door she had opened appeared to give onto the living room, and I could see a wrinkled old woman of around eighty and another woman of about sixty sitting by a charcoal brazier inside.

"Well, well, good evening to you!" they exclaimed as soon as they saw me. "Don't stand there now," they added socially. " Come right on through."

To get to the rooms at the back it was necessary to pass through the living room that led off the entrance hall. To complicate matters, the room was small, with small tables of food and a container of cooked rice set out for the evening meal, so that I could only get through by stepping over the charcoal brazier, a lacquered inkstone box and sundry other objects. As I was stepping over the lacquered box, the oldest woman of all said, " Do come through, don't worry about us. But mind where you thread please. The electric lamps don't give off much light these days. " And she rose with dignity to show me to my room.

The three guest rooms stood in a row, separated only by paper-covered sliding screens. The room leading off inside the entrance seemed to serve double duty as a guest room and a family room. A girl of about twelve and a girl of about fifteen were seated facing each other at a low table. They were dictating to each other from a school reader, but seeing me coming through they stopped talking and bowed. Both of them were rather bright-looking children. In the next room, a large man lay on his belly licking a pencil as he stared at an account book open before him.

" Excuse me, " I said politely as I passed through the room.

"Oh? Oh, excuse me," he said absentmindedly. I was shown into the room beyond.  

The very oldest woman got some pale blue quilts out of a closet. " These are for your bed, if you don't mind," she said. She left the room and was replaced by the woman of around sixty, who brought me some green tea.

"The toilet's just outside the sliding doors there, " she said. " People have to come through here if they go in the night, so would you mind leaving the light on when you go to sleep? Will you be up early in the morning?"

I replied that I should probably be sleeping late.

" Well, then, good night to you," she said. Have nice dreams. How about dreaming," she added in an excess of affability, " of a shipload of treasure coming into port? That would be very nice, wouldn't it?"

I have never dreamed of a treasure ship in my life, nor do I ever want to.

---------

"The Magic Horse"

6.3

I spread out on the tatami the quilts the oldest woman had got for me, took off my cloak and haori, and crawled in between the quilts as I was. A thin, hard quilt is often referred to as a "wafer quilt," but those I got into were nothing as much as large dishcloths. I drew up my knees and turned to lie on my right side, facing away from the doors, so as to survey the room's amenities.

The wooden beams in the ceiling were completely exposed, and their blackened surfaces were stuck all over with pieces of paper of the kind that pilgrims making a tour of the shrines leave behind to mark their progress. One gave a name and an address in some country village. Another said simply, " May our great hopes be granted." I reflected on the fact that even people staying at squalid inns like this had their "great hopes" that they wanted fulfilled. Similar papers were pasted on a price list that was stuck on the wall. "Room per night, per person: thirty sen. Meals to order," read the list, which was written rather well in what seemed to be a man's hand. Someone who stayed there had probably done it for them. In one corner of the room stood a board for playing Chinese checkers, the usual massive block of wood, but lacking its four small legs. Being the only piece of furniture in the room, its sole effect was to heighten the melancholy atmosphere.

I closed my eyes, still on my right side, having lost any interest in turning onto my left in order to study the pattern on the sliding screens. In the next room, I could hear the clicking of an abacus and the sound of small change being counted. Suddenly, there came the new sound of someone clapping his hands. The hands were clapped together at least ten or eleven times in succession.

"Yes?" came a voice in reply, from the room by the entrance.

"Bring me some saké!" shouted the man in the room next to mine, in a loud voice.

I draped a handkerchief over my face, and pilled the quilt over that in turn. I must have been very tired, for I felt I would go to sleep without any trouble, and was still congratulation myself on the fact when I dozed off. The next thing I knew, I had got my top half out of the quilts and had been awakened by a voice talking in the next room. It belonged, I felt sure, to the third woman, the one around fifty, who was in deep conversation with my neighbor, keeping him company over his saké.

"No, not here," she was saying. Though people often think so...."

-----

6.4

"...The oldest of the three is Old Okane. The next is Old Ogin, and I'm called Old Okura. All three of us were abandoned here, you see. People who stayed at the inn left us behind. Foundlings, you could call us . . ."

The woman seemed to be drunk; her voice loud and clear, showed no concern for her surroundings.

" Yes, but surely one if the three is officially the proprietress?"

From the way he spoke, the man was drunk too. " Here, Gran," he went on, " have another. They say that saké's a wrinkle smoother, you know."

The woman apparently accepted without demur the saké cup he held out to her. "Wrinkle-smoother ---" she went on, " that's a neat way of putting it. I can't take much myself, but ten years ago Old Okane could get down a pint at a time. if somebody treated her to it, that is."

"Whose daughter is Old Okane then? A pilgrim's, like the rest?"

"There's no way of telling," she said. "The old lady who was here before Old Okane, she too was left behind by someone who stayed here and she lived all her life here till she was old. The old lady before her as well, she started life in the same way. Besides, in this house we never let the babies know who their parents were. We've observed that rule from generation to generation. After all, there was no such thing as an inn register in the old days, was there? So no one knew the names of the foundlings real parents then, and even nowadays we never tell the children their family names or what their parents looked like."

"That means that the girls who live here are foundlings too, I suppose? Now I wonder what kind of people would abandon their children like that? For the life of me, I can't understand the mentality of such parents."  

"Well, it was a good fifty years ago I was abandoned by my parents, so I have no way of knowing what they thought about it. I expect people are on their way to Pilgrims' Cape with a child on their hands and someone tells them about the custom of this inn. Generally speaking, I'd say there's been one baby left behind every tens years or so."

"But isn't it funny that they're all girls?"

---------

6.5

"Boys grow strong and get into trouble, so we chase after the parents and give them back. If we can't find where the parents have gone, we hand them in at the village office."

"How do you register them, then? Even with a girl, you have to register her at the office, don't you? She has to get married some day."

"Oh, no --- we never get married. We consider ourselves as widows from the start; we stay on forever in return for being brought up here. And whatever happens, we never get mixed up with any outsider."

"My, my . . . fancying holding out all those years!"

I draped my face with the handkerchief and pulled up the quilt so that I could sleep again. I found myself wondering at the oddity of the establishment. Even so, I doubted that the old woman had made it all up in a fit of drunken fancy.

The next morning as I was the inn, I compared the faces of the three women. The oldest of them was thin, with a narrow face. The second was short and fat, "barrel" would have described her quite adequately. The third woman was of medium build and height, and her features showed signs of having once been beautiful. The two children were nowhere to be seen.

"Have the children gone out then?" I asked the youngest of the women.

"They're at school," she said. I grinned ruefully at myself for asking a stupid question.

Glancing at the doorway as I left, I saw two nameplates fastened close side by side on the on the pillar. "Oshichi Kanno, Pupil, Pilgrims' Cape Village Elementary School," said one. Okume Kanno, Pupil, Pilgrims' Cape Village Elementary School," said the other. The very oldest woman bowed politely as she saw me off at the entrance.

"Mind how you go, now," she said. "And goodbye."

On a stretch of sandy soil by the side of the inn, countless clumps of a thick-leaved evergreen plant were growing. I was much taken by the contrast between the dark gray of the sand and the green of their leaves.

--------------------

There was once a large village of the MicMac Indians of the Eastern Algonquins, built beside a lake. At the far end of the settlement stood a lodge, and in it lived a being who was always invisible.

He had a sister who looked after him, and everyone knew that any girl who could see him might marry him. For that reason there were few girls who did not try, but it was very long before anyone succeeded.

This is the way in which the test of sight was carried out: at evening-time, when the Invisible One was due to be returning home, his sister would walk with any girl who might come down to the lakeshore. She, of course, could see her brother, since he was always visible to her.

As soon as she saw him, she would say to the girls:
"Do you see my brother?"
"Yes, they would generally reply-though some of them did say "No."
To those who said that they could indeed see him,the sister would say:
"Of what is his shoulder straps made?" Some people say that she would enquire:
"What is his moose-runners haul?" or "With what does he draw his sled?"
And they would answer:
"A strip of rawhide" or "a green flexible branch", or something of that kind.

Then she, knowing that they had not told the truth, would say:
"Very well, let us return to the wigwam!"
When they had gone in, she would tell them not to sit in a certain place, because it belonged to the Invisible One. Then after they had helped to cook the supper, they would wait with great curiousity, to see him eat. They could be sure that he was a real person, for when he took off his moccasins they became visible, and his sister hung them up. But beyond this they saw nothing of him, or even when they stayed in the place all night, as many of them did.

Now there lived in the village an old man who was a widower, and his three daughters. The youngest girl was very small, weak and often ill, and yet her sisters, espically the elder treated her cruelly. The second daughter was kinder, and sometimes took her side, but the wicked sister would burn her hands and feet with hot cinders, and she was covered with scars from this treatment. She was so marked that people called her Oochigeaskw, The-Rough-Faced-Girl.

When her father came home and asked why she had such burns, the bad sister would at once say that it was her own fault, for she had disobeyed orders and gone near the fire and had fallen into it.

These two elder sisters descided one day to try their luck at seeing the Invisible One. So they dressed themselves in their finest clothes, and tried to look their prettiest. They found the Invisible One's sister and took the usual walk by the water.

When he came, and when they were asked if they could see hin , they answered: "Of course." And when asked about the shoulder strap or sled cord, they answered: "A piece of rawhide." But of course they were lying like the others, and they got nothing for their pains.

The next afternoon, when the father returned home, he brought with him many of the pretty little shells from which wawpum was made, and they set to work to string them.

That day, poor little Oochigeaskw, who had always gone barefoot, got a pair of her father's moccasins, old ones, and put them into water to soften them so that she could wear them. Then she begged her sisters for a few wampum shells. The elder called her a "little pest", but the younger one gave her some. Now, with no other clothes than her usual rags, the poor little thing went into the woods and got herself some sheets of birch bark, from which she made a dress, and put marks on it for decoration, in the style of long ago.

She made a petticoat and a loose gown, a cap, leggins and a handkerchief. She put on her father's large old moccasins, which were far too big for her, and went forth to try her luck. She would try, she thought, to discover whether she could see the Invisible One.

She did not begin very well. As she set off, her sisters shouted and hooted and yelled, and tried to make her stay. And the loafers around the village, seeing the strange little creature, called out "Shame!"

The poor little girl in her strange clothes, with her face all scared, was an awful sight, but she was kindly received by the sister of the Invisible One. And this was, of course, because this noble lady understood far more things than the mere outside which all the rest of the world knows. As the brown of the evening sky turned to black, the lady took her down to the lake.

"Do you see him?" the Invisible One's sister asked.
"I do indeed-and he is wonderful!" said Oochigeaskw.
The sister asked: "And what is his sled-string?"
The little girl said: "It is the Rainbow."
"And, my sister, what is his bow-string?"
"It it The Spirit's Road-the Milky Way."
"So you have seen him, said his sister.

She took the girl home with her and bathed her. As she did so, all the scars disappeared from her body. Her hair grew again, as it was combed, long, like a blackbirds wing. Her eyes were now like stars: in all the world there was no other such beauty. Then, form her treasures, the lady gave her a wedding garment, and adorned her.

Then she told Oochigeaskw to take the wife's seat in the wigwam, the one next to where the Invisible One sat, beside the entrance. And when he came in, terrible and beautiful, he smiled and said:
"So we are found out!"
"Yes," said his sister. And so Oochigeaskw became his wife.

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sufi/stories.html

Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.

On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity. (Ibid.)

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sufi/stories.html

Long ago in China, there lived a very rich lord. His house and garden were famous throughout the land for their grandeur and beauty. His clothes were so fine that, as he walked by, people gasped in wonder.

You might think that such a wealthy man would spare a thought now and again for others less fortunate than himself. He might, perhaps, have given alms to the poor, or helped the orphan children of the town. But no, he preferred to do nothing at all.

This meant he was often very bored, so he spent his time trying to think of new ways to amuse himself. And one day, he decided to play a trick on Mullah Nasrudin. He knew that the mullah blamed him for being selfish and lazy, and he wanted above all to make Nasrudin look foolish.

He sent his servants out to buy a great many large, sweet melons. Then he invited a large number of people to a feast- including, of course, Nasrudin.

When the guests were seated, the servants brought in the melons, and the rich man urged them to eat. "Eat your fill, friends!" he said. "There is plenty more."

The guests needed no encouragement. They did not often have a feast such as this, and they were determined to make the most of it.

As they ate, the heaps of melon skins grew taller on each plate. Surreptitiously, the rich man (who had eaten more than anyone else) slipped all his melon skins onto Nasrudin's plate.

When all the melons were eaten, the guests sat back, patting their stomachs, satisfied with their meal. The rich man looked around the table and smiled. This was the moment for his joke.

"Look!" he cried, pointing to Nasrudin's plate and the enormous pile of melon peels. "This man is the greediest person here -- though he teaches us to be generous and kind! Yet he goes and eats more melons than the rest of us put together! What a glutton!"

Everyone began to laugh -- even the Mullah. But as the laughter died away, Nasrudin said quietly:

"But glutton as I may be, I am not the worst one here. For look, I have eaten only the fruit, and I have left the peels uneaten. But our host here -- he's eaten everything -- peels and all!"

And the rich man hung his head in shame. (Ibid.)

One time Juha was praying at home, and he has this neighbor. And Juha's saying, "Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord, give me a million dirhams, and not a million minus one--a full million! If it's missing one, I won't accept it." Juha has this neighbor, and the neighbor is very rich, but he is stingy stingy.

The neighbor heard Juha asking God for this, and he said, "Maybe I will experiment to see if he is honest or not in what he says. I will toss to him only half a million dirhams." And he took half a million and threw it into the house for Juha.

 Juha was praying and saw half a million, and he said, "God! Oh my Lord, thank you. Oh my Lord, you gave me gave me what I requested. You gave me a million!" But he began to count it, and found it only half a million, so he said, "Oh my Lord, I asked you for a million and you gave me half a million, but I accept half a million now. I accept it because [surely] You will give me another half million later." But Juha's neighbor is angry because Juha took half a million from him!

He said, "Maybe he won't take [the money]." So he came and knocked on Juha's house, "Hey Juha, peace be upon you."

Juha said, "Peace be upon you, (miserly--rich, but miserly--) neighbor. What do you want?"

He said, "I want half a million, for it is mine!"

[Juha] said, "God forbid! No, you?"

He said, "It was me who threw the money to you."

[Juha] said, "No, no, I God threw the money to me. I asked God and He gave to me. I asked Him for a million, and He gave me half a million today, and next week He'll give me the other half."

And [the neighbor] said to him, "No, no. It's my money."

[Juha replied,] "No, no, no, no."

[The neighbor threatened,] "I will go to the judge." Then the rich man went and said, "Come on, we're going to the judge."

Juha said, "No, no. I can't; I'm tired. I'm not walking. No. I don't have a horse; I don't have anything at all to ride."

The neighbor said, "I will give you a horse. You ride it and we'll go to the judge."

Juha took the horse and said, "But no, no, because it's cold and I don't have any clothing."

The neighbor said, "I will give you a great outfit--a robe and a silhab. "

Juha said, "Ok, maybe," and he took the robe and the silhab and rode the horse. [Then] he said, "No, no. I'm not going. I can't go with these shoes! These shoes are no good in front of the judge! No, no. I can't. You must give me new shoes."

[The neighbor] replied, "Ok, that's possible. Here, I give you new shoes." Juha took the horse, the robe, the silhab and the new shoes, and they went to the judge. They arrived at the judge's and said, "Peace be upon you, oh qadi," to the judge.

[He asked,] "What do you want?"

The rich man said, "Your honor, I gave half a million to Juha and he doesn't want to give me half a million, but it's my money!"

The qadi asked, "Is this true, Juha?"

Juha said, "No, no, no. No, he's a liar."

The neighbor said, "No, no, no. I'm not a liar!"

Juha said, "Hey qadi, look. Maybe he'll tell you that this horse is his horse."

And the rich one said, "Yes! It's my horse!"

[Juha] said to the judge, "Look! He's crazy! Maybe he'll say this silhab is his silhab!"

And the rich man said, "Yes! It is my silhab! I gave it to you!"

[Juha] said, "He's crazy! Maybe he says this is his robe."

[The neighbor said,] "True! And these are also my shoes, not his shoes!"

Juha said, "Look, oh qadi, at this madman!" The judge got angry and said, "Get out! You're a liar!"

The neighbor went home, and Juha said to his neighbor, "Come and take your robe and take the silhab and take your shoes; but I want you to know that I'm the winner because you're stingy and rich and, therefore, take everything. And next time, please, if I talk with God, don't intervene between me and Him. Only I am between me and God. I don't want some stingy neighbor between me and God."

---------

http://www.cacac.org/juha.htm

Excerpt from the book thief by Markus Zusak. Pages 372-3-4

Death's Diary: The Parisans

Summer came.

For the book thief, everything was going nicely.

For me, the sky was the colour of Jews.

When their bodies had finished scouring the gaps in the door, their souls rose up. Their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some case were nailed into it by the  sheer force of desperation, and their spirits came towards me, into my arms. We climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just keep feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.

I'll never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, I'd think, holding their souls up mid-air as the rest of their being - their physical shells - plummeted to the earth. All of them were light, like the case of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold.

I shiver when I remember - as I try to de-realise it

I blow warm air into my hands, to heat them up.

But it's hard to keep them warm when the souls still shiver.

'God.' 

I always say that name when I think of it.

'God.'

Twice, I speak it.

I say His name in a futile attempt to understand. 'But it's not your job to understand.' That's me who replies. God never says anything. You think you're the only one he never answers? 'Your job is to...' and I stop listening to me, because, to put it bluntly, I tire me. When I start thinking like that, I become so exhausted, and I don't have the luxury of indulging fatigue. I'm compelled to continue on, because although it's not true for every person on earth, it true for the majority - that death waits for no man - and if he does, he usually doesn't wait very long.

On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in German prisons, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, he mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down ...

Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their French words. I watched their love-visions and freed them from their fear.

I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the sky above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.

Sometimes, I imagined how everything appeared above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye.

They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

*

7.1

Stephen Crane

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the horizon, a precipice.

A newly married pair had boarded this coach at San Antonio. The man's face was reddened from many days in the wind and sun, and a direct result of his new black clothes was that his brick-colored hands were constantly performing in a most conscious fashion. From time to time he looked down respectfully at his attire. He sat with a hand on each knee, like a man waiting in a barber's shop. The glances he devoted to other passengers were furtive and shy.

The bride was not pretty, nor was she very young. She wore a dress of blue cashmere, with small reservations of velvet here and there and with steel buttons abounding. She continually twisted her head to regard her puff sleeves, very stiff, straight, and high. They embarrassed her. It was quite apparent that she had cooked, and that she expected to cook, dutifully. The blushes caused by the careless scrutiny of some passengers as she had entered the car were strange to see upon this plain, under-class countenance, which was drawn in placid, almost emotionless lines.

They were evidently very happy. "Ever been in a parlor-car before?" he asked, smiling with delight.

"No," she answered, "I never was. It's fine, ain't it?"

"Great! And then after a while we'll go forward to the diner and get a big layout. Finest meal in the world. Charge a dollar."

"Oh, do they?" cried the bride. "Charge a dollar? Why, that's too much - for us - ain't it, Jack?"

"Not this trip, anyhow," he answered bravely. "We're going to go the whole thing."

Later, he explained to her about the trains. "You see, it's a thousand miles from one end of Texas to the other, and this train runs right across it and never stops but four times." He had the pride of an owner. He pointed out to her the dazzling fittings of the coach, and in truth her eyes opened wider as she contemplated the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil. At one end a bronze figure sturdily held a support for a separated chamber, and at convenient places on the ceiling were frescoes in olive and silver.

--------

7.2

To the minds of the pair, their surroundings reflected the glory of their marriage that morning in San Antonio. This was the environment of their new estate, and the man's face in particular beamed with an elation that made him appear ridiculous to the Negro porter. This individual at times surveyed them from afar with an amused and superior grin. On other occasions he bullied them with skill in ways that did not make it exactly plain to them that they were being bullied. He subtly used all the manners of the most unconquerable kind of snobbery. He oppressed them, but of this oppression they had small knowledge, and they speedily forgot that infrequently a number of travellers covered them with stares of derisive enjoyment. Historically there was supposed to be something infinitely humorous in their situation.

"We are due in Yellow Sky at 3:42," he said, looking tenderly into her eyes.

"Oh, are we?" she said, as if she had not been aware of it. To evince surprise at her husband's statement was part of her wifely amiability. She took from a pocket a little silver watch, and as she held it before her and stared at it with a frown of attention, the new husband's face shone.

"I bought it in San Anton' from a friend of mine," he told her gleefully.

"It's seventeen minutes past twelve," she said, looking up at him with a kind of shy and clumsy coquetry. A passenger, noting this play, grew excessively sardonic, and winked at himself in one of the numerous mirrors.

At last they went to the dining-car. Two rows of Negro waiters, in glowing white suits, surveyed their entrance with the interest and also the equanimity of men who had been forewarned. The pair fell to the lot of a waiter who happened to feel pleasure in steering them through their meal. He viewed them with the manner of a fatherly pilot, his countenance radiant with benevolence. The patronage, entwined with the ordinary deference, was not plain to them. And yet, as they returned to their coach, they showed in their faces a sense of escape.

To the left, miles down a long purple slope, was a little ribbon of mist where moved the keening Rio Grande. The train was approaching it at an angle, and the apex was Yellow Sky. Presently it was apparent that, as the distance from Yellow Sky grew shorter, the husband became commensurately restless. His brick-red hands were more insistent in their prominence. Occasionally he was even rather absent-minded and far-away when the bride leaned forward and addressed him.

-------

7.3

As a matter of truth, Jack Potter was beginning to find the shadow of a deed weigh upon him like a leaden slab. He, the town marshal of Yellow Sky, a man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person, had gone to San Antonio to meet a girl he believed he loved, and there, after the usual prayers, had actually induced her to marry him, without consulting Yellow Sky for any part of the transaction. He was now bringing his bride before an innocent and unsuspecting community.

Of course, people in Yellow Sky married as it pleased them, in accordance with a general custom; but such was Potter's thought of his duty to his friends, or of their idea of his duty, or of an unspoken form which does not control men in these matters, that he felt he was heinous. He had committed an extraordinary crime. Face to face with this girl in San Antonio, and spurred by his sharp impulse, he had gone headlong over all the social hedges. At San Antonio he was like a man hidden in the dark. A knife to sever any friendly duty, any form, was easy to his hand in that remote city. But the hour of Yellow Sky, the hour of daylight, was approaching.

He knew full well that his marriage was an important thing to his town. It could only be exceeded by the burning of the new hotel. His friends could not forgive him. Frequently he had reflected on the advisability of telling them by telegraph, but a new cowardice had been upon him. He feared to do it. And now the train was hurrying him toward a scene of amazement, glee, and reproach. He glanced out of the window at the line of haze swinging slowly in towards the train.

Yellow Sky had a kind of brass band, which played painfully, to the delight of the populace. He laughed without heart as he thought of it. If the citizens could dream of his prospective arrival with his bride, they would parade the band at the station and escort them, amid cheers and laughing congratulations, to his adobe home.

He resolved that he would use all the devices of speed and plains-craft in making the journey from the station to his house. Once within that safe citadel he could issue some sort of a vocal bulletin, and then not go among the citizens until they had time to wear off a little of their enthusiasm.

------- 

7.4

The bride looked anxiously at him. "What's worrying you, Jack?"

He laughed again. "I'm not worrying, girl. I'm only thinking of Yellow Sky."

She flushed in comprehension.

A sense of mutual guilt invaded their minds and developed a finer tenderness. They looked at each other with eyes softly aglow. But Potter often laughed the same nervous laugh. The flush upon the bride's face seemed quite permanent.
    

The traitor to the feelings of Yellow Sky narrowly watched the speeding landscape. "We're nearly there," he said.

Presently the porter came and announced the proximity of Potter's home. He held a brush in his hand and, with all his airy superiority gone, he brushed Potter's new clothes as the latter slowly turned this way and that way. Potter fumbled out a coin and gave it to the porter, as he had seen others do. It was a heavy and muscle-bound business, as that of a man shoeing his first horse.

The porter took their bag, and as the train began to slow they moved forward to the hooded platform of the car. Presently the two engines and their long string of coaches rushed into the station of Yellow Sky.

"They have to take water here," said Potter, from a constricted throat and in mournful cadence, as one announcing death. Before the train stopped, his eye had swept the length of the platform, and he was glad and astonished to see there was none upon it but the station-agent, who, with a slightly hurried and anxious air, was walking toward the water-tanks. When the train had halted, the porter alighted first and placed in position a little temporary step.

"Come on, girl," said Potter hoarsely. As he helped her down they each laughed on a false note. He took the bag from the Negro, and bade his wife cling to his arm. As they slunk rapidly away, his hang-dog glance perceived that they were unloading the two trunks, and also that the station-agent far ahead near the baggage-car had turned and was running toward him, making gestures. He laughed, and groaned as he laughed, when he noted the first effect of his marital bliss upon Yellow Sky. He gripped his wife's arm firmly to his side, and they fled. Behind them the porter stood chuckling fatuously.

------

7.5

The California Express on the Southern Railway was due at Yellow Sky in twenty-one minutes. There were six men at the bar of the "Weary Gentleman" saloon. One was a drummer who talked a great deal and rapidly; three were Texans who did not care to talk at that time; and two were Mexican sheep-herders who did not talk as a general practice in the "Weary Gentleman" saloon. The barkeeper's dog lay on the board walk that crossed in front of the door. His head was on his paws, and he glanced drowsily here and there with the constant vigilance of a dog that is kicked on occasion. Across the sandy street were some vivid green grass plots, so wonderful in appearance amid the sands that burned near them in a blazing sun that they caused a doubt in the mind. They exactly resembled the grass mats used to represent lawns on the stage. At the cooler end of the railway station a man without a coat sat in a tilted chair and smoked his pipe. The fresh-cut bank of the Rio Grande circled near the town, and there could be seen beyond it a great, plum-colored plain of mesquite.

Save for the busy drummer and his companions in the saloon, Yellow Sky was dozing. The new-comer leaned gracefully upon the bar, and recited many tales with the confidence of a bard who has come upon a new field.

" -- and at the moment that the old man fell down stairs with the bureau in his arms, the old woman was coming up with two scuttles of coal, and, of course -- "

The drummer's tale was interrupted by a young man who suddenly appeared in the open door. He cried: "Scratchy Wilson's drunk, and has turned loose with both hands." The two Mexicans at once set down their glasses and faded out of the rear entrance of the saloon.

The drummer, innocent and jocular, answered: "All right, old man. S'pose he has. Come in and have a drink, anyhow."

But the information had made such an obvious cleft in every skull in the room that the drummer was obliged to see its importance. All had become instantly solemn. "Say," said he, mystified, "what is this?" His three companions made the introductory gesture of eloquent speech, but the young man at the door forestalled them.

"It means, my friend," he answered, as he came into the saloon, "that for the next two hours this town won't be a health resort."

The barkeeper went to the door and locked and barred it. Reaching out of the window, he pulled in heavy wooden shutters and barred them. Immediately a solemn, chapel-like gloom was upon the place. The drummer was looking from one to another.

"But, say," he cried, "what is this, anyhow? You don't mean there is going to be a gun-fight?"

"Don't know whether there'll be a fight or not," answered one man grimly. "But there'll be some shootin' - some good shootin'."

The young man who had warned them waved his hand. "Oh, there'll be a fight fast enough if anyone wants it. Anybody can get a fight out there in the street. There's a fight just waiting."

The drummer seemed to be swayed between the interest of a foreigner and a perception of personal danger.

"What did you say his name was?" he asked.

"Scratchy Wilson," they answered in chorus.

"And will he kill anybody? What are you going to do? Does this happen often? Does he rampage around like this once a week or so? Can he break in that door?"

-------

7.6

"No, he can't break down that door," replied the barkeeper. "He's tried it three times. But when he comes you'd better lay down on the floor, stranger. He's dead sure to shoot at it, and a bullet may come through."

Thereafter the drummer kept a strict eye upon the door. The time had not yet been called for him to hug the floor, but, as a minor precaution, he sidled near to the wall. "Will he kill anybody?" he said again.

The men laughed low and scornfully at the question.

"He's out to shoot, and he's out for trouble. Don't see any good in experimentin' with him."

"But what do you do in a case like this? What do you do?"

 A man responded: "Why, he and Jack Potter -- "

"But," in chorus, the other men interrupted, "Jack Potter's in San Anton'."

"Well, who is he? What's he got to do with it?"

"Oh, he's the town marshal. He goes out and fights Scratchy when he gets on one of these tears."

"Wow," said the drummer, mopping his brow. "Nice job he's got."

The voices had toned away to mere whisperings. The drummer wished to ask further questions which were born of an increasing anxiety and bewilderment; but when he attempted them, the men merely looked at him in irritation and motioned him to remain silent. A tense waiting hush was upon them. In the deep shadows of the room their eyes shone as they listened for sounds from the street. One man made three gestures at the barkeeper, and the latter, moving like a ghost, handed him a glass and a bottle. The man poured a full glass of whisky, and set down the bottle noiselessly. He gulped the whisky in a swallow, and turned again toward the door in immovable silence. The drummer saw that the barkeeper, without a sound, had taken a Winchester from beneath the bar. Later he saw this individual beckoning to him, so he tiptoed across the room.

"You better come with me back of the bar."

"No, thanks," said the drummer, perspiring. "I'd rather be where I can make a break for the back door."

Whereupon the man of bottles made a kindly but peremptory gesture. The drummer obeyed it, and finding himself seated on a box with his head below the level of the bar, balm was laid upon his soul at sight of various zinc and copper fittings that bore a resemblance to armor-plate. The barkeeper took a seat comfortably upon an adjacent box.

"You see," he whispered, "this here Scratchy Wilson is a wonder with a gun - a perfect wonder - and when he goes on the war trail, we hunt our holes - naturally. He's about the last one of the old gang that used to hang out along the river here. He's a terror when he's drunk. When he's sober he's all right - kind of simple - wouldn't hurt a fly - nicest fellow in town. But when he's drunk - whoo!"

There were periods of stillness. "I wish Jack Potter was back from San Anton'," said the barkeeper. "He shot Wilson up once - in the leg - and he would sail in and pull out the kinks in this thing."

Presently they heard from a distance the sound of a shot, followed by three wild yowls. It instantly removed a bond from the men in the darkened saloon. There was a shuffling of feet. They looked at each other. "Here he comes," they said.

-------- 

The next to last chapter.

7.7

A man in a maroon-colored flannel shirt, which had been purchased for purposes of decoration and made, principally, by some Jewish women on the east side of New York, rounded a corner and walked into the middle of the main street of Yellow Sky. In either hand the man held a long, heavy, blue-black revolver. Often he yelled, and these cries rang through a semblance of a deserted village, shrilly flying over the roofs in a volume that seemed to have no relation to the ordinary vocal strength of a man. It was as if the surrounding stillness formed the arch of a tomb over him. These cries of ferocious challenge rang against walls of silence. And his boots had red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England.

 
The man's face flamed in a rage begot of whisky. His eyes, rolling and yet keen for ambush, hunted the still doorways and windows. He walked with the creeping movement of the midnight cat. As it occurred to him, he roared menacing information. The long revolvers in his hands were as easy as straws; they were moved with an electric swiftness. The little fingers of each hand played sometimes in a musician's way. Plain from the low collar of the shirt, the cords of his neck straightened and sank, straightened and sank, as passion moved him. The only sounds were his terrible invitations. The calm adobes preserved their demeanor at the passing of this small thing in the middle of the street.

There was no offer of fight; no offer of fight. The man called to the sky. There were no attractions. He bellowed and fumed and swayed his revolvers here and everywhere.

The dog of the barkeeper of the "Weary Gentleman" saloon had not appreciated the advance of events. He yet lay dozing in front of his master's door. At sight of the dog, the man paused and raised his revolver humorously. At sight of the man, the dog sprang up and walked diagonally away, with a sullen head, and growling. The man yelled, and the dog broke into a gallop. As it was about to enter an alley, there was a loud noise, a whistling, and something spat the ground directly before it. The dog screamed, and, wheeling in terror, galloped headlong in a new direction. Again there was a noise, a whistling, and sand was kicked viciously before it. Fear-stricken, the dog turned and flurried like an animal in a pen. The man stood laughing, his weapons at his hips.

Ultimately the man was attracted by the closed door of the "Weary Gentleman" saloon. He went to it, and hammering with a revolver, demanded drink.

The door remaining imperturbable, he picked a bit of paper from the walk and nailed it to the framework with a knife. He then turned his back contemptuously upon this popular resort, and walking to the opposite side of the street, and spinning there on his heel quickly and lithely, fired at the bit of paper. He missed it by a half inch. He swore at himself, and went away. Later, he comfortably fusilladed the windows of his most intimate friend. The man was playing with this town. It was a toy for him.

But still there was no offer of fight. The name of Jack Potter, his ancient antagonist, entered his mind, and he concluded that it would be a glad thing if he should go to Potter's house and by bombardment induce him to come out and fight. He moved in the direction of his desire, chanting Apache scalp-music.

When he arrived at it, Potter's house presented the same still front as had the other adobes. Taking up a strategic position, the man howled a challenge. But this house regarded him as might a great stone god. It gave no sign. After a decent wait, the man howled further challenges, mingling with them wonderful epithets.

Presently there came the spectacle of a man churning himself into deepest rage over the immobility of a house. He fumed at it as the winter wind attacks a prairie cabin in the North. To the distance there should have gone the sound of a tumult like the fighting of 200 Mexicans. As necessity bade him, he paused for breath or to reload his revolvers.

------

7.8

Potter and his bride walked sheepishly and with speed. Sometimes they laughed together shamefacedly and low.

"Next corner, dear," he said finally.

They put forth the efforts of a pair walking bowed against a strong wind. Potter was about to raise a finger to point the first appearance of the new home when, as they circled the corner, they came face to face with a man in a maroon-colored shirt who was feverishly pushing cartridges into a large revolver. Upon the instant the man dropped his revolver to the ground, and, like lightning, whipped another from its holster. The second weapon was aimed at the bridegroom's chest.

There was silence. Potter's mouth seemed to be merely a grave for his tongue. He exhibited an instinct to at once loosen his arm from the woman's grip, and he dropped the bag to the sand. As for the bride, her face had gone as yellow as old cloth. She was a slave to hideous rites gazing at the apparitional snake.

The two men faced each other at a distance of three paces. He of the revolver smiled with a new and quiet ferocity.

"Tried to sneak up on me," he said. "Tried to sneak up on me!" His eyes grew more baleful. As Potter made a slight movement, the man thrust his revolver venomously forward. "No, don't you do it, Jack Potter. Don't you move a finger toward a gun just yet. Don't you move an eyelash. The time has come for me to settle with you, and I'm goin' to do it my own way and loaf along with no interferin'. So if you don't want a gun bent on you, just mind what I tell you."

Potter looked at his enemy. "I ain't got a gun on me, Scratchy," he said. "Honest, I ain't." He was stiffening and steadying, but yet somewhere at the back of his mind a vision of the Pullman floated, the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil -- all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate. "You know I fight when it comes to fighting, Scratchy Wilson, but I ain't got a gun on me. You'll have to do all the shootin' yourself."

His enemy's face went livid. He stepped forward and lashed his weapon to and fro before Potter's chest. "Don't you tell me you ain't got no gun on you, you whelp. Don't tell me no lie like that. There ain't a man in Texas ever seen you without no gun. Don't take me for no kid." His eyes blazed with light, and his throat worked like a pump.

"I ain't takin' you for no kid," answered Potter. His heels had not moved an inch backward. "I'm takin' you for a -- -- -- fool. I tell you I ain't got a gun, and I ain't. If you're goin' to shoot me up, you better begin now. You'll never get a chance like this again."

So much enforced reasoning had told on Wilson's rage. He was calmer. "If you ain't got a gun, why ain't you got a gun?" he sneered. "Been to Sunday-school?"

"I ain't got a gun because I've just come from San Anton' with my wife. I'm married," said Potter. "And if I'd thought there was going to be any galoots like you prowling around when I brought my wife home, I'd had a gun, and don't you forget it."

"Married!" said Scratchy, not at all comprehending.

"Yes, married. I'm married," said Potter distinctly.

"Married?" said Scratchy. Seemingly for the first time he saw the drooping, drowning woman at the other man's side. "No!" he said. He was like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world. He moved a pace backward, and his arm with the revolver dropped to his side. "Is this the lady?" he asked.

"Yes, this is the lady," answered Potter.

There was another period of silence.

"Well," said Wilson at last, slowly, "I s'pose it's all off now."

"It's all off if you say so, Scratchy. You know I didn't make the trouble." Potter lifted his valise.

"Well, I 'low it's off, Jack," said Wilson. He was looking at the ground. "Married!" He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains. He picked up his starboard revolver, and placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away. His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.

Stephen Crane

---------------------------------------------

Somerset Maughan                             

The Lion’s Skin

8.1

A good many people were shocked when they read that Captain Forestier had met his death in a forest fire when trying to save his wife’s dog, which had been accidentally shut up in the house. Some said that they never knew he had it in him; other said it was exactly what they would have expected of him, but of these some meant it in one way and some in another. After the tragic occurrence Mrs. Forestier found shelter in the villa of some people called Hardy, whose acquaintance she and her husband had but lately made. Captain Forestier had not liked them, at any rate he had not liked Fred Hardy, but she felt that had he lived through that terrible night he would have changed his mind.  He would have realised how much good there was in Hardy, not-withstanding his reputation, and like the great gentleman he was he would not have hesitated to admit that he had been mistaken. Mrs, Forestier did not know how she would have kept her reason after the loss of the man who was everything in the world to her but for the Hardy’s wonderful kindness. In her immense distress their unfailing sympathy had been her only consolation. They, who had been almost eye-witnesses of her husband’s great sacrifice, knew as did no one else how wonderful he had been. She would never forget the words dear Fred Hardy had used when he was breaking the dreadful news to her. It was these words that had enabled her not only to bear the frightful disaster, but to face the desolate future with the courage with which she well knew that brave man, that gallant gentleman, whom she had loved so well would have wished her to face it.

Mrs. Forestier was a very nice woman. Kindly people often say that of a woman when they can say nothing about her, and it has come to be looked upon as cold praise. I do not mean it as such. Mrs. Forestier was neither charming, beautiful not intelligent; on the contrary she was absurd, homely and foolish; yet the more you knew her, the more you liked her, and when asked why you were forced to admit that she was a very nice woman. She was as tall as the average man: she had a large mouth and a great hooked nose, pale-blue short-sighted eyes, and big ugly hands. Her skin was lined and weather-beaten, but she made up heavily, and her hair, which she wore long, was dyed golden, tightly marcelled and elaborately dressed. She did everything she could to counteract the aggressive masculinity of her appearance, and succeeded only in looking like a vaudeville artist doing a female impersonation. Her voice was a woman’s voice, but you were always expecting her, at the end of the number as it were, to break into a deep bass, and tearing off that golden wig, discover a man’s bald pate. She spent a great deal of money on her clothes, which she got from the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris, but though a woman of fifty she had an unfortunate taste for choosing dresses that looked exquisite on pretty little mannequins in the flower of their youth. She always wore a great quantity of rich jewels. Her movements were awkward and her gestures clumsy. If she went into a drawing-room where there was a valuable piece of jade she managed to sweep it to the floor; if she lunched with you and you had a set of glasses you treasured she was almost certain to smash one of them to atoms.

--------

8.2

Yet this ungainly exterior sheltered a tender, romantic, and idealistic soul. It took you some time to discover this, for when first you knew her you took her for a figure of fun, and then when you knew her better (and had suffered from her clumsiness) she exasperated you; but when you did discover it, you thought yourself very stupid not to have known it all the time, for then it looked out at you through those pale-blue, near-sighted eyes, rather shyly, but with a sincerity that only a fool could miss. Those dainty muslins and spring-like organdies, those virginal silks, clothed not the uncouth body, but the fresh girlish spirit. You forgot that she broke your china and looked like a man dressed up as a woman, you saw her as she saw herself, as indeed she really was if reality were visible, as a dear little thing with a heart of gold. When you came to know her you found her as simple as a child; she was touchingly grateful for any attention you paid her; her own kindness was infinite, you could ask her to do anything for you, however tiresome, and she would do it as though by giving her the opportunity to put herself out you rendered her a service. She had a rare capacity for disinterested love. You knew that never an unkind nor malicious thought had once passed through her head. And having granted all that you said over again that Mrs. Forestier was a very nice woman.

Unfortunately she was also a damned fool. This you discovered when you met her husband. Mrs. Forestier was American and Captain Forestier was English. Mrs. Forestier was born in Portland, Oregon, and had never been to Europe till the war of 1914, when, her first husband having recently died, she joined a hospital unit and came to France. She was not rich by American standards, but by our English ones in affluent circumstances. From the way the Forestiers lived I should guess that she had something like thirty thousand a year. Except that she undoubtedly gave the wrong medicines to the wrong men, put on their bandages so they were worse than useless, and broke every utensil that was breakable, I am sure that she was an admirable nurse. I do not think that she ever found work too revolting for her to do it without hesitation; she certainly never spared herself and was surely never out of temper; I have a notion that many a poor wretch had cause to bless the tenderness of her heart, and it may be that not a few took the last bitter steps into the unknown with more courage because of the loving-kindness of her golden soul. It was during the last year of the war that Captain Forestier came under her care, and soon after peace was declared they married. They settled down in a handsome villa on the hills behind Cannes, and in a short time became conspicuous in the social life of the Riviera. Captain Forestier played bridge well and was a keen golfer. He was not a bad tennis player either. He had a sailing boat and in the summer the Forestiers gave very nice parties between the islands. After seventeen years of marriage Mrs. Forestier still adored her good-looking husband, and you were unlikely to know her long without being told in that slow Western drawl of her hers the full story of their courtship.  

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8.3

‘It was a case of love at first sight,’ she said. ‘ He was brought in when I happened to be off duty, and when I came on and found him lying in one of my beds, oh, my dear, I felt such a pang in my heart, for a moment I thought I’d been overworking and had strained it. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen in my life.’

‘Was he badly wounded?’

‘Well, he wasn’t exactly wounded. You know, it’s a most extraordinary thing, he went all through the war, he was under fire for months at a time, and if course he risked his life twenty times a day, he’s one of those men who simply doesn’t know what fear is; but he never even got a scratch. He had carbuncles.’

It seemed an unromantic ailment on which to start a passionate attachment. Mrs. Forestier was a trifle prudish, and though Captain Forestier’s carbuncles greatly interested her she always found it a little difficult to tell you exactly where they were.

‘They were right down at the bottom of his back, even farther really, and he hated to have me dress them. Englishmen are curiously modest, I’ve noticed it over and over again, and it mortified him terribly. You’d have thought that being on those terms, if you know what I mean, from our first acquaintance it would have made us more intimate. But somehow it didn’t. He was very stand-offish with me. When I used to get to his bed on my round I was so breathless and my heart beat so I couldn’t make out what was the matter with me. I’m not naturally a clumsy woman, I never drop things or break anything; but you wouldn’t believe it, when I had to give Robert his medicine I used to drop the spoon and break the glass, I couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking of me.’

It was almost impossible not to laugh when Mrs. Forestier told you this. She smiled rather sweetly.

‘I suppose it sounds very absurd to you, but you see I’d never felt that way before. When I married my first husband – well, he was a widower with grown-up children, he was a fine man and one of the most prominent citizens in the state, but somehow it was different.‘

‘And how did you eventually discover that you were in love with Captain Forestier?’

‘Well, I don’t ask you to believe me, I know it sounds funny, but the fact is that one of the other nurses told me, and as soon as she did of course I knew it was true. I was terribly upset at first. You see, I knew nothing about him. Like all Englishmen, he was very reserved and for all I knew he had a wife and half a dozen children.’

‘How did you find out that he hadn’t?’

‘I asked him. The moment he told me he was a bachelor I made up my mind that by hook or by crook I was going to marry him. He suffered agonies, poor darling; you see, he had to lie on his face almost all the time, lying on his back was torture, and as to sitting down – well of course he couldn’t even think of that. But I don’t believe his agonies were worse than mine. Men like clinging silks and soft, fluffy things, you know what I mean, and I was at such disadvantage in my nurse’s uniform. The matron, one of those New England spinsters, couldn’t bear make-up, and in those days I didn’t make up anyway; my first husband never liked it; and then my hair wasn’t as pretty as it is now. He used to look at me with those wonderful blue eyes of his, and I felt he must be thinking I looked a perfect sight. He was very low and I thought I ought to do all I could to cheer him up so whenever I had a few minutes to spare I’d go and talk to him. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of a strong, husky chap like he was lying in bed week after week while all his pals were in the trenches. You couldn’t talk to him without realizing that he was one of those men who never felt the joy of life so intensely as when the bullets were whistling all around them, and the next moment may be their last. Danger was a stimulant to him. I don’t mind telling you that when I used to write down his temperature on the chart I added a point or two so that the doctors should think him worse than he was.  I knew he was doing his damnedest to get them to discharge him, and I though it only fair to him to make sure that they wouldn’t. He used to look at me thoughtfully while I talked away and I know that he looked forward to our little chats. I told him that I was a widow and had no one dependent on me, and I told him that I was thinking of settling down in Europe after the war. Gradually he thawed a little. He didn’t say much about himself, but he began to chaff me, he had a great sense of humour, you know, and sometimes I really began to think that he rather liked me. At last they reported him fit for duty. To my surprise he asked me to dine with him on his last evening. I managed to get leave from the matron and we drove in to Paris. You can’t imagine how handsome he looked in his uniform. I’ve never seen anyone look so distinguished. Aristocratic to the finger-tips.  Somehow or other he wasn’t in such good spirits as I’d expected. He’d been crazy to go back to the front.’

‘” Why are you so down tonight?” I asked him. “ After all, you you’ve got your wish at last.”

‘” I know I have,” he said. “ If for all that, I am a bit blue, can’t you guess why?”

‘I simply dared not think what he meant. I thought I’d better make a little joke.

‘” I’m not very good at guessing,” I said, with a laugh. “ If you want me to know you’d better tell me.”

‘He looked down and I could see he was nervous.

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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/02/25/080225ta_talk_widdicombe

Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then—why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That’s a new book’s premise, anyway. “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs. The forebear, it’s assumed, is Hemingway. (Legend: he wrote a miniature masterpiece. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Slightly sappy, but a decent sixer.)

8.4  (of 10)

‘”You’ve been most awfully good to me,” he said. “ I can never begin to thank you for all your kindness. You’re the grandest woman I’ve ever known.”

‘It upset me terribly to hear him say that. You know how funny Englishmen are; he’d never paid me a compliment before.

‘”I’ve done what any competent nurse would have,” I said.

‘”Shall I ever see you again?” he said.

‘”That’s up to you,” I said.

‘ I hoped he didn’t hear the tremble in my voice.

‘” I hate leaving you, “ he said.

I really could hardly speak.

‘”Need you?” I said.

‘” So long as my King and Country want me I am at their service.”’

When Mrs. Forestier reached this point her pale blue eyes filled with tears.

‘” But the war can’t last for ever,” I said.

‘”When the war ends,” he answered, “ supposing a bullet hasn’t put an end to me, I shan’t have a penny. I don’t even know how I should set about earning my living. You’re a very rich woman; I’m a pauper.”

‘” You’re an English gentleman,” I said.

‘” Will that matter very much when the world has been made safe for democracy?” he said bitterly.

‘I was just crying my eyes out by then. Everything he said was so beautiful. Of course I saw what he meant. He didn’t think it honourable to ask me to marry him. I felt he’d sooner die than let me think that he was after my money.  He was a fine man. I knew that I wasn’t worthy of him, but I saw that if I wanted him I must go out and get him myself.

‘” It’s no good pretending that I am not crazy about you, because I am,” I said.

‘”Don’t make it harder for me, “ he said hoarsely.

‘I thought I should die, I loved him so much when he said that. It told me all I wanted to know. I stretched out my hand.

‘”Will you marry me, Robert?” I said, very simply.

‘”Eleanor,“ he said.

‘It was then that he told me that he had loved me from the very first day he ever saw me. At first he hadn’t taken it seriously, he thought that I was just a nurse and perhaps he’d have an affair with me, and then when he found out that I wasn’t that sort of woman and had a certain amount of money, he must conquer his love. You see, he thought that marriage was quite out of the question.’

Probably nothing flattered Mrs. Forestier more than the idea that Captain Forestier had wanted to have a slap and tickle with her. It was certain that no one had ever made dishonourable proposals to her, and though Forestier hadn’t either, the conviction that he had entertained the notion was a never-failing source of satisfaction to her. When they were married Eleanor’s relations, hard-bitten Western people, had suggested that her husband should go to work rather than live on her money, and Captain Forestier was all for it. The only stipulation he made was this:

‘There are some thing a gentleman can’t do Eleanor. Anything else I’ll do gladly. God knows, I don’t attach any importance to that sort of thing, but if one’s a sahib, one can’t help it, and damn it all, especially in these days, one does owe something to one’s class.’

Eleanor thought he had done enough in risking his life for his country in one bloody battle after another during four long years, but she was too proud to let it be said that he was a fortune-hunter who had married her for her money, and she made up her mind not to object if he found something to do that was worth his while. Unfortunately, the only jobs that offered were not very important. But he did not turn them down on his own responsibility.

‘”It’s up to you, Eleanor,’ he told her, ‘You’ve only got to say the word and I’ll take it. It would make my poor old governor turn in his grave to see me do it, but that can’t be helped. My first duty is to you.”

Eleanor wouldn’t hear of it and gradually the idea of his working was dropped. The Forestiers lived most of the year in their villa on the Riviera. They seldom went to England; Robert said it was no place for a gentleman since the war, and all the good fellow, white men every one of them, that he used to go about with when he was ‘ one of the boys’ had been killed.

--------

8.5

He would have liked to spend his winters in England, three days a week with the Quorn, that was the life for a man, but poor Eleanor, she would be so out of it in that hunting set, he couldn’t ask her to make that sacrifice. Eleanor was prepared to make any sacrifice, but Captain Forestier shook his head. He wasn’t as young as he had been, and his hunting days were over. He was quite satisfied to breed Sealyhams and raise Buff Orpingtons. They had a good deal of land; the house stood on the top of a hill, on a plateau, surrounded on three sides by forest, and in front, they had a garden. Eleanor said that he was never as happy as when he was walking round the estate in an old tweed suit with the kennel-man, who also looked after the chickens. It was then you saw in him all those generations of country squires that he had behind him. It touched and amused Eleanor to see the long talks he had with the kennel-man about the Buff Orpingtons; if was for all the world as if were discussing the pheasants with his head-keeper: and he fussed over the Sealyhams as much as if they had been the pack of hounds you couldn’t help feeling he would have been so much more at home with. Captain Forestier’s great-grandfather had been one of the bucks of the Regency. It was he who had ruined the family so that the estates had to be sold. They had a wonderful old place in Shropshire, they’d had it for centuries, and Eleanor, even though it no longer belonged to them, would have liked to go and see it; but Captain Forestier said it would be too painful to him and would never take her.

The Forestiers entertained a good deal. Captain Forestier was a connoisseur of wines and was proud of his cellar.

‘His father was well known to have the best palate in England, ‘ said Eleanor, ‘and he’s inherited it.’

Most of their friends were Americans, French and Russians. Robert found them on the whole more interesting than the English, and Eleanor liked everybody he liked. Robert did not think the English quite up to their mark. Most of the people he had known in the old days belonged to the shooting, hunting and fishing set, they, poor devils, were all broke now, and though, thank God, he wasn’t a snob, he didn’t half like the idea of his wife getting mixed up with a lot of nouveaux riches no one had ever heard of. Mrs Forestier was not nearly so particular, but she respected his prejudices and admired his exclusiveness.

‘Of course he has his whims and fancies,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s only loyal on my part to defer to them. When you know the sort of people he comes from you can’t help seeing how natural it is that she should have them. The only time I’ve ever seen him vexed in all the years we’ve been married was when once a gigolo came up to me in the casino and asked me to dance. Robert nearly knocked him down. I told him the poor thing was only doing his job, but he said he wasn’t going to have a damned swine like that asking his wife to dance. ‘

Captain Forestier had high moral standards. He thanked God that he wasn’t narrow-minded, but one had to draw the line somewhere; and just because he lived on the Riviera he didn’t see why he should hob-nob with drunks, wastrels and perverts. He had no indulgence for sexual irregularities, and would not allow Eleanor to frequent woman of doubtful reputation.

‘You see,’ said Eleanor, ‘he’s a man of complete integrity; he’s the cleanest man I’ve ever known; and if sometimes he seems a little intolerant you must always remember that he never asks of others what he isn’t prepared to do himself. After all, one can’t help admiring a man whose principles are so high and who’s prepared to stick to them at any cost.’

When Captain Forestier told Eleanor that such and such a man, whom you met everywhere, and who you thought was rather pleasant, wasn’t a pukkah sahib, she knew it was no good insisting. She knew that in her husband’s judgement that finished him, and she was prepared to abide by it. After nearly twenty years of marriage she was sure of one thing, if of no other, and this was that Robert Forestier was the perfect type of an English gentleman.

‘And I don’t know that God has ever created anything finer than that,’ she said.

The trouble was that Captain Forestier was almost too perfect a type of that English gentleman.

--------

8.6

He was at forty-five (he was two or three years younger than Eleanor) still a very handsome man, with his wavy, abundant grey hair and his handsome moustache; he had the weather-beaten, healthy, tanned skin of a man who is much in the open air. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered. He looked every inch a soldier. He had a bluff, hearty way with him and a loud, frank laugh. In his conversation, in his manner, in his dress he was so typical that you hardly believe it. He was so much of a country gentleman that he made you think rather of an actor giving a marvellous performance of the part. When you saw him walking along the Croisette, a pipe in his mouth, in plus-fours and just the sort of tweed coat he would have worn on the moors, he looked so like an English sportsman that it gave you quite a shock. And his conversation, the way he dogmatised, the platitudinous inanity of his statements, his amiable, well-bred stupidity, were all so characteristic of the retired officer that you could hardly help thinking that he was putting it on.

When Eleanor heard that the house at the bottom of their hill had been taken by a Sir Frederick and Lady Hardy she was much pleased. It would be nice for Robert to have a near neighbour someone of his own class. She made inquiries about them from her friends in Cannes. It appeared that Sir Frederick had lately come into the baronetcy on the death of an uncle and was come to the Riviera for two or three years while he was paying off the death duties. He was said to have been very wild in his youth, he was well on in the fifties when he came to Cannes, but now he was respectably married, to a very nice little woman, and had two small boys. It was a pity that Lady Hardy had been an actress, for Robert was apt to be a little stuffy about actresses but everyone said that she was very well-mannered and ladylike, and you would never have guessed that she had been on the stage. The Forestiers met her first at a tea-party to which Sir Frederick did not go, and Robert acknowledged that she seemed a very decent sort of person; so Eleanor wishing to be neighbourly, invited them both to luncheon. A day was arranged. The Forestiers had asked a good many people to meet them, and the Hardy were rather late. Eleanor took an immediate fancy to Sir Frederick. He looked much younger than she expected, he hadn’t a white hair on his close-cropped head; indeed there was about him something boyish that was rather attractive. He was slightly built, not as tall as she was; and he had bright friendly eyes and a ready smile. She noticed that he wore the same Guards tie that Robert sometimes wore; he was not nearly so well-dressed as Robert, who always looked as though he had stepped out of a shop window, but he wore his old clothes as though it didn’t much matter what one wore. Eleanor could quite believe that he had been a trifle wild as a young man. She was not inclined to blame him.

‘I must introduce my husband to you,’ she said.

She called him. Robert was talking to some of the other guests on the terrace, and hadn’t noticed the Hardys come in. He came forward and in his affable, hearty way, with a grace that always charmed Eleanor, shook hands with Lady Hardy. Then he turned to Sir Frederick. Sir Frederick gave him a puzzled look.

‘Haven’t we met before?’ he asked.

Robert looked at him coolly.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I could have sworn I knew your face.’

Eleanor felt her husband stiffen and at once realized that something was going wrong. Robert laughed.

‘It sounds terribly rude, but to the best of my belief I’ve never set eyes on you in my life. We may have run across one another in the war. One met such hosts of fellers, then, didn’t one? Will you have a cocktail Lady Hardy?’

 ---------

Dear Jacek,

I have a weekly corner (well a bit more to be honest) in a Qatari daily newspaper where i write literary critic and review. When I read three weeks ago, the Boccaccio short story you posted here, it reminded me of a weel-known Arabic real story about Hatim at-Taee, famous for his generosity. He received once a guest and had nothing to offer him for food, before asking about the reason of his visit, so he just slaughtered his camel and in another version his horse (beautiful stallion) and offered him food. You imagine the what happened next: the man came to ask the camel or the horse. But it was just a trick of the emperor who heard about his generosity and wanted to test it by asking him the thing he cherished most. the story ends with the messenger saying: dear gentleman, we have seen from you even more than what we've heard about you.

Anyhow, I said to myself, I would translate novel nine, fifth day for Arab readers and write a comparative reading between the two stories.

Happily a friend of mine told me that last year, an excellent translator (Mr. Salah Alamani) translated the whole work of Boccaccio in Arabic, and he brought me the book. So I just cited the translation and quoted the passage when the lover offers his falcon to the lady.

I had a parallel satisfaction: Salah Alamani read the article and sent me an email expressing his appreciation.

For Arabic readers I posted in the Arabic Forum the article published originally on Al-Watan newspaper, Qatar 17/3/2008.

So I owe you a very big;

THANK YOU VERY MUCH MR. JACEK KRANKOWSKI, MY POLISH COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND

Salaam,

Ouadoud

Dear Ouadoud,

How old is the story you are referring to here?

Jacek

Prophet Muhammad PBUH knew the daughter of Hatim Al-Taee and showed respect to the memory of her father. It means that the event happened in the 6th century.

If you are anything like me, you have several books going at the same time. At the moment, I have four books that I read in turn: when the spirit moves me you could say.

While I will, of course, finish Someset Maughan's The Lion's Skin, it doesn't move me at the moment and I admit that I've lost all interest in using part of my Sunday morning typing it up.

What I propose instead is another short story by Haruki Murakami.  

What say you?

Nanna

Although I don't necessarily subscribe to the notion that silence equals consent ... a short story by one of my favorite contemporary writers

----------

Haruki Murakami

Translated by Jay Rubin

THE KIDNEY-SHAPED STONE THAT MOVES EVERY DAY

9.

Junpei was sixteen years old when his father made the following pronouncement. True, they were father and son; the same blood flowed in their veins. But they were not so close that they could open their hearts to each other, and it was extremely rare for Junpei's father to offer him views of life that might (perhaps) be called philosophical. And so that day's exchange remained with him as a vivid memory long after he had forgotten what prompted it.

'Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three that have real meaning for him. No more, no fewer,' his father said - or, rather, declared. He spoke coolly but with utter certainty, as he might have in nothing that the earth takes a year to revolve around the sun. Junpei listened in silence, partly because his father's declaration was so unexpected; he could think of nothing, on the spur of the moment, to say.

'You will probably become involved with many women in the future,' his father continued, ‘but you will be wasting your time if a woman is the wrong one for you. I want you to remember that.'

Later, several questions formed in Junpei's young mind: Has my father already met his three women? Is my mother one of them? And if so, what happened with the other two? But he was not able to ask his father these questions. As noted before, the two were not on such close terms that they could talk to each other heart to heart.

Junpei left the house at eighteen when he went to university in Tokyo, and he became involved with several women, one of whom had 'real meaning' for him. He knew this with absolute certainty at the time, and he is just as certain of it now. Before he could express his feelings in concrete form, however (by nature, it took him longer than most people to put things into concrete form), she married his best friend, and since then she has become a mother. For the time being, therefore, she had to be eliminated from the list of possibilities that life had to offer Junpei. He had to harden his heart and sweep her from his mind, as a result of which the number of women remaining who could have 'real meaning' in his life - if he was going to take his father's theory broadly - was reduced to two.

Whenever Junpei met a new woman after that, he would ask himself, Is this a woman who has real meaning for me? and the question would call forth a dilemma. For even as he continued to hope (as who does not?) that he would meet someone who had 'real meaning' for him, he was afraid of playing his few remaining cards too early. Having failed to join with the very first important Other he encountered, Junpei lost confidence in his ability - the exceedingly important ability - to give outward expression to love at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner. I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away. Whenever this thought crossed his mind - which was often - his heart would sink down to a place devoid of light and warmth. 

And so, after he had been with a new woman for some months, if he should begin to notice something about her character or behavior, however trivial, that displeased him or touched a nerve, somewhere in a recess of his heart he would feel a twinge of relief. As a result, it became a life pattern for him to maintain pale, indecisive relationships with one woman after another. He would stay with a woman as if taking stock of the situation until, at some point, the relationship would dissolve of its own accord. The break-ups never entailed any discord or shouting matches because he never became involved with women who seemed as if they might be difficult to get rid of. Before he knew it, he had developed a kind of nose for convenient partners.

Junpei himself was unsure whether this power stemmed from his own innate character or had been formed by his environment. If the latter, it could well have been the fruit of his father's curse. Around the time he graduated from college, he had a violent argument with his father and cut off all contact with him, but his father's 'three-women theory', its basis never fully explained, became a kind of obsession that clung tenaciously to his life. At one time he even half jokingly considered moving on to homosexuality: maybe then he could free himself from this stupid countdown. For better or worse, though, women were the only objects of Junpei's sexual interest.

----------

I think that in this thread:What are translators reading? http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=281&start=531 you'll find multi-readers crawling out of the woodwork.

Nanna

9.1

The next woman Junpei met was, he soon discovered, older than he was. Thirty-six. Junpei was thirty-one. An acquaintance of his was opening a little French restaurant on a street leading out of central Tokyo, and Junpei was invited to the party. He wore a Perry Ellis shirt of deep blue silk with matching summer sports jacket. He had planned to meet a close friend at the party, but the friend cancelled at the last minute, which left Junpei with time to kill. He nursed a large glass of Bordeaux alone at the bar. When he was ready to leave and beginning to scan the crowd to say goodbye to the owner, a tall woman approached him with some kind of purple cocktail in her hand. Junpei's first thought on seeing her was, Here is a woman with excellent posture.

'Somebody over there told me you're a writer. Is that true?' she asked, resting an elbow on the bar.

'I suppose so, in a way,' Junpei answered.

'A writer in a way.'

Junpei nodded.

'How many books have you published?'

'Two volumes of short stories, and one book I translated. None of them sold much.'

She gave him a quick head-to-toe inspection and smiled with apparent satisfaction.

'Well, anyhow, you're the first real writer I've met.'

'It might be a little disappointing,' Junpei said. 'Writers don't have any talents to offer. A pianist could play you a tune. A painter could draw you a sketch. A magician could perform a trick or two. There's not much a writer can do.'

'Oh, I don't know, maybe I can just enjoy your artistic aura or something.'

'Artistic aura?' Junpei said.

'A special radiance, something you don't find in ordinary people?'

'I see my face in the mirror every morning when I'm shaving, but I've never noticed anything like that.'

She smiled warmly and asked, 'What type of stories do you write?'

'People ask me that a lot, but it's hard to talk about my stories as "types". They don't fit into any particular genre.'

She ran a finger around the lip of her cocktail glass. 'I suppose that means you write literary fiction?'

I suppose it does. But you say that the way you might say "chain letters".'

She smiled again. 'Could I have heard your name?'

'Do you read the literary magazines?'

She shook her head, a small, sharp shake.

'Then you probably haven't. I'm not that well known.'

'Ever been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize?'

'Twice in five years.'

'But you didn't win?'

Junpei smiled, but said nothing. Without asking his permission, she sat on the bar stool next to his and sipped what was left of her cocktail.

'Oh, what's the difference?' she said. 'Those prizes are just an industry gimmick.'

'I'd be more convinced if I could hear that from somebody who's actually won a prize.'

She told him her name: Kirie.

'How unusual,' he said. 'Sounds like "Kyrie" from a mass.'

Junpei thought she might be an inch or more taller than he was. She wore her hair short, had a deep tan and her head was beautifully shaped. She wore a pale green linen jacket and a knee-length flared skirt. The sleeves of the jacket were rolled up to the elbow. Under the jacket she had on a simple cotton blouse with a small turquoise brooch on the collar. The swell of her breasts was neither large nor small. She dressed with style, and while there was nothing affected about it, her entire outfit reflected strongly individualistic principles. Her lips were full, and they would mark the ends of her sentences by spreading or pursing. This gave everything about her a strange liveliness and freshness. Three parallel creases would form across her broad forehead whenever she stopped to think about something, and when she finished thinking, they would disappear.

Junpei noticed himself being attracted to her. Some indefinable but persistent something about her was exciting him, pumping adrenalin to his heart, which began sending out secret signals in the form of tiny sounds. Suddenly aware that his throat was dry, Junpei ordered a Perrier from a passing waiter, and as always he began to ask himself, Is she someone with real meaning for me? Is she one of the remaining two? Or will she be my second failure? Should I let her go, or take a chance?

'Did you always want to be a writer?' Kirie asked.

'Hmm, let's just say I could never think of anything else I wanted to be.'

'So, your dream came true.'

'I wonder. I wanted to be a superior writer.' Junpei spread his hands about a foot apart. 'There's a pretty big distance between the two, I think.'

'Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.' Then she asked, 'How old are you?'

This was when they told each other their ages. Being older didn't seem to bother her in the least. It didn't bother Junpei. He preferred mature women to young girls. In most cases, it was easier to break up with an older woman.

'What kind of work do you do?' he asked.

Her lips formed a perfectly straight line, and her expression became earnest for the first time.

'What kind of work do you think I do?'

Junpei jogged his glass, swirling the red wine inside it exactly once. 'Can I have a hint?'

'No hints. Is it so hard to tell? Observation and judgements are your business.'

'Not really,' he said. 'What a writer is supposed to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgements to the last possible moment.'

'Of course,' she said. 'Alright, then, observe and observe and observe again, and then use your imagination. That wouldn't clash with your professional ethics, would it?'

Junpei raised his eyes and studied Kirie's face with new concentration, hoping to find a secret sign there. She looked straight into his eyes, and he looked straight into hers.

After a short pause, he said, 'Alright, this is what I imagine, based on nothing much: you're a professional of some sort. Not just anyone can do your job. It requires some kind of special expertise.'

'Bull's-eye! You're right: not just anyone can do what I do. But try to narrow it down a little.

'Something to do with music?'

'No.'

'Fashion design?'

'No.'

'Tennis?'

'No,' she said.

Junpei shook his head. 'Well, you've got a deep tan, you're solidly built, your arms have a good bit of muscle. Maybe you do a lot of outdoor sports. I don’t think you're an outdoor labourer. You don't have that vibe.'

Kirie lifted her sleeves, rested her bare arms on the counter, and turned them over, inspecting them. 'You seem to be getting there.'

'But I still can't give you the right answer.'

'It's important to keep a few little secrets,' Kirie said. 'I don't want to deprive you of your professional pleasure - observing and imagining... I will give you one hint, though. It's the same for me as for you.'

'How the same?'

'I mean, my profession is exactly what I always wanted to do, ever since I was a little girl. Like you. Getting to where I am, though, was not an easy trip.'

‘Good,' Junpei said. 'That's important. Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.'

‘An act of love,' Kirie said. The words seemed to have made an impression on her. 'That's a wonderful metaphor.'

'Meanwhile, do you think I might have heard your name somewhere?' Junpei asked.

'Probably not,' she answered, shaking her head. 'I'm not that well known.'

'Oh, well, everybody has to start somewhere.'

'Exactly,' Kirie said with a smile. Then she turned serious, 'My case is different from yours in one way. I'm expected to attain perfection right from the start. No mistakes allowed. Perfection or nothing. No in between. No second chances.'

'I suppose that's another hint.'

'Probably.'

A waiter circulating with a tray of champagne approached them. She took two glasses from him and handed one to Junpei.

'Cheers,' she said.

'To our respective areas of expertise,' Junpei said.

They clinked glasses with a light, secretive sound.

'By the way,' she said, 'are you married?'

Junpei shook his head.

'Neither am I,' Kirie said.

--------

9.2

She spent that night in Junpei's room. They drank wine - a gift from the restaurant - had sex and went to sleep. When Junpei woke at ten o'clock the next morning, she was gone, leaving only an indentation like a missing memory in the pillow next to his, and a note: 'I have to go to work. Get in touch with me if you like.' She had added her mobile-phone number.

He called her, and they had dinner at a restaurant the following Saturday. They drank a little wine, had sex in Junpei's room and went to sleep. Again the next morning, she was gone. It was Sunday, but she left another simple note: 'I have to work, am disappearing.' Junpei still had no idea what kind of work Kirie did, but it certainly started early in the morning. And - no occasion at least - she worked on Sundays.

The two were never at a loss for things to talk about. She had a sharp mind and was knowledgeable on a broad range of topics. She enjoyed reading, but generally favoured books other than fiction - biography, history, psychology and popular science - and she retained an amazing amount of information. One time, Junpei was astounded at her detailed knowledge of the history of prefabricated housing.

'Prefabricated housing? Your work must have something to do with construction or architecture.'

'No,' she said. 'I just tend to be attracted to highly practical topics. That's all.'

She did, however, read the two story collections that Junpei had published, and found them 'wonderful - far more enjoyable than I had imagined. To tell you the truth, I was worried. What would I do if I read your work and didn't like it? What could I say? But there was nothing to worry about. I enjoyed them thoroughly.'

'I'm glad to hear that,' said Junpei, relieved. He had had the same worry when, at her request, he gave her the books.

'I'm not just saying this to make you feel good,' Kirie said, 'but you've got something special - that special something it takes to become an outstanding writer. Your stories have a quiet mood, but several of them are quite lively, and the style is beautiful, but mainly your writing is so balanced. For me, that is always the most important thing - in music, in fiction, in painting. Whenever I encounter a work or a performance that lacks that balance - which is to say, whenever I encounter a poor, unfinished work - it makes me sick. Like motion sickness. That's probably why I don't go to concerts and hardly read any fiction.'

'Because you don't want to encounter unbalanced things?'

'Exactly.'

'And in order to avoid that risk, you don't read novels and you don't go to concerts?'

'That's right.'

'Sounds a little over the top to me.'

'I'm a Libra. I just can't stand it when things are out of balance. No, it's not so much that I can't stand it as -'

She closed her mouth in search of the right words, but she wasn't able to find them, releasing instead a few tentative sighs. 'Oh, well, never mind,' she went on. 'I just wanted to say that I believe some day you are going to write full-length novels. And when you  do that, you will become a more important writer. It may take a while, but that's what I feel.'

'No, I'm a born short-story writer,' Junpei said dryly. 'I'm not suited to writing novels.'

'Even so,' she said.

Junpei offered nothing more on the subject. He remained quiet and listened to the breeze from the air conditioner. In fact, he had tried several times to write novels, but always got bogged down part of the way through. He simply could not maintain the concentration it took to write a story over a long period of time. He would start out convinced that he was going to write something special. The style would be lively, and his future seemed assured. The story would flow almost by itself. But the further he went with it, the more its energy and brilliance would fade - gradually at first, but undeniably, until, like an engine losing speed and coming to a halt, it would peter out altogether.

The two of them were in bed. It was autumn. They were naked after long, warm lovemaking. Kirie's shoulder pressed against Junpei, whose arms were around her. Two glasses of white wine stood on the bedside table.

'Junpei?'

'Uh-huh.'

'You're in love with another woman, aren't you? Somebody you can't forget?'

'It's true,' Junpei admitted. 'You can tell?'

'Of course,' she said. 'Women are very sensitive to such things.'

'Not all women, I'm sure.'

'I don't mean all women.'

'No, of course not,' Junpei said.

'But you can't see her?'

'There are problems.'

'And no possibility those "problems" could be solved?'

'None,' Junpei said with a quick shake of the head.

'They go pretty deep, eh?'

'I don't know how deep they are, but they're there.'

Kirie drank a little wine. 'I don't have anybody like that,' she said almost under her breath. 'I like you a lot, Junpei. You really move me. When we're together like this, I feel tremendously happy and calm. But that doesn't mean I want to have a serious relationship with you. How does that make you feel? Relieved?'

Junpei ran his fingers through her hair. Instead of answering her question, he asked one of his own. 'Why is that?'

'Why don't I want to be with you?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Does it bother you?'

'A little.'

'I can't have a serious everyday relationship with anybody. Not just you: anybody,' she said. 'I want to concentrate completely on what I'm doing now. If I were living with somebody - if I had a deep emotional involvement with somebody - I might not be able to do that. So I want to keep things the way they are.'

Junpei thought about that for a moment. 'You mean you don't want to be distracted?'

'That's right.'

'If you were distracted, you could lose your balance, and that might prove to be an obstacle to your career.'

'Exactly.'

'And so to avoid any risk of that, you don't want to live with anybody.'

She nodded. 'Not as long as I'm involved in my current profession.'

‘But you won't tell me what that is.'

 ‘Guess.'

'You're a burglar.'

'No,' Kirie answered with a grave expression that quickly gave way to amusement. 'What a sexy guess! But a burglar doesn't go to work early in the morning.'

'You're a hit man.'

'Hit person,' she corrected him. 'But no. Why are you coming up with these awful ideas?'

'So, what you do is perfectly legal?'

'Perfectly.'

'Spy?'

'No. OK, let's stop for today. I'd rather talk about your work. Tell me about what you're writing now. You are writing something now?'

'Yes, a short story.'

'What kind of story?'

'I haven't finished it yet. I'm taking a break.'

'So tell me what happens up to the break.'

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