m JUL international JULY 1986 J F 1/1 JV/U international STEVE NOYES Poetry Editor SARA GADDES Drama Editor LORI THICKE Copy Editor MAIDA PRICE Managing Editor STEVE NOYES Editor-in-Chief DIANNE MAGUIRE Business Manager CHRIS PETTY Fiction Editor GEORGE McWHIRTER Advisory Editor DON DAVIS Art Advisor Editorial Board LINDA COPMAN-SEBESTA HART HANSON WAYNE HUGHES DIANNE MAGUIRE 1/1 AAJ international A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY WRITING PRISM international, a journal of contemporary writing, is published four times per year at the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. v6t 1W5. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, N.Y. Contents Copyright © 1986 PRISM international for the authors. Cover design and artwork: Terry Krysak One-year individual subscriptions $10.00, two-year subscriptions $16.00. Library and institution subscriptions $14.00, two-year subscriptions $20.00. Sample copy $4.00. All manuscripts should be sent to the Editors at the above address. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with Canadian stamps or international reply coupons. Manuscripts with insufficient postage will be held for six months and then discarded. Payment to contributors is $25.00 per page and a subscription. PRISM international purchases First N.A. Serial Rights only. Our gratitude to the Canada Council, Dean Will and the University of British Columbia. Also financially assisted by the Government of British Columbia through the British Columbia Cultural Fund and Lottery Revenues. Second Class Mail Registration No. 5496. July ig86. CONTENTS VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR NUMBER FOUR SUMMER 1986 Roger Nash Three Poems 7 Lorna Crozier Two Poems 11 Libby Scheier "The Nipple" i7 Benny Andersen "Knowledge" 19 Norberto Luis Romero Three Stories: The Plan of the Cities 20 Misprints 23 The Stolen House 26 Sandor Weores Two Poems 3° Imre Oravecz Two Poems 32 Robert Eady Two Prose Poems 35 Dayv James-French An Act of Violence 37 Robyn Sarah Three Poems 51 Ralph Gustafson Two Poems 54 Leona Gom Two Poems 56 Elizabeth Abraham Unsuccessful Translations 58 Bill Gaston Carp 61 Richard Stevenson "Dwarf Fan Palm" 68 Derek Robinson "Abalone" 69 Karen Romell "Death of a Duck Hunter" 7i Katie Trumpener Two Poems 73 Barbara Carey Two Poems 75 PRISM international POETRY CONTEST WINNERS First Place-$500 Second Place-$250 Third Place-$100 Translation—$250 Honourable Mentions: Lorna Crozier Janice Keefer Derek Robinson Robyn Sarah Libby Scheier Glen Sorestad Richard Stevenson Carol Windley Roger Nash, "Night Flying" (p. 7) Lorna Crozier, "Fear of Snakes" (p. 11) Libby Scheier, "The Nipple" (p. 17) Inge Israel, "Knowledge", from the Danish of Benny Andersen (p. 19) "Hands" (p. 12) "Dream" "Abalone" (p. 69) "Point of Departure" (p. 53) "Jacob's Afternoon" "Aide Memoire" "Dwarf Fan Palm" (p. 68) and "Urn Plant" "Los Alamos: Summer, 1945" We wish to thank Erin Moure, our preliminary judge, and Al Purdy, our hnal judge. TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIETY Technology's growing impact upon all societies is profoundly influencing every person's life, thoughts, and dreams. We invite submissions which explore this theme. Poetry, fiction, short plays, translations, and cover art work, in any style or genre, are welcome. Please clearly note "Technology in Society Special Issue" on each manuscript. Deadline for submissions: January 31, 1987. Roger Nash/Three Poems Night Flying Each night, my grandmother prepared for flying the piano, forty quick years ago. Twin barrels were swivelled out above the keyboard, and loaded with candles. Sandwiches and bramble jam scones were stowed in rows on the gleaming top of the instrument, with a large reserve teapot, for use in emergencies. Then the huge machine stood poised and flickering in its hangar of firelight, invisibly shifting weight up its highly-strung legs, awaiting the soft sooty clouds that drifted away with our chimney. She would take her seat briskly, without any ceremony, pushing back black velvet cuffs to an exact calibration that only she knew of. The white lace collar was useful for higher altitudes. When her fingers kneaded the keys together, a motor spoke deep in the mahogany, usually with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, and piano, stool, and my very own grandma rose fearlessly above the distant fields of our Turkish carpet, as I saluted stiffly in my sailor-boy costume, and she floated out of the parlour window, just clear of the rose garden, lurching higher with each crescendo, off behind the lines of every enemy, as only grandmas can do. She could land again only if I went straight to bed and dreamed her a flat and sunny field, with a sailor-suited boy at the end of it. Twenty years after her death, she still comes in to land on occasion, utterly unabashed at no longer being alive, tugging down her cuffs and handing me a heaped dream of hot jam scones. The Robberies There was a robbery at my rabbi's. They stole the footprints of the children from his yard, and left the mud ransacked. They broke the horizon into pieces by his window, and lost one bit. They tore the youngest flames right out of the candlesticks, but left the silver candlesticks themselves, which to him were worthless. There was a robbery at my baker's. They pinched his great nightshirt, as patched as the prairies, from the line; the warmth from his oven and his mistress's arms; even the yeast that made his moustache ends curl. They siphoned a year's aroma of sugared bagels. But they left his good name, which to him was worthless. The day they robbed my girlfriend's, they left behind the flames from strange candlesticks. But the flames were surprised, and got away. They nearly forgot the savour of bagels. But the smell of her perfumes smashed through the window, and they all broke free. It knocked the empty street flat on its back. They carted off the excitement of wind from her legs, and the thoughts from her diary; but left the diary itself, which by now was worthless. They lifted the ceaseless curves of the waves from her breasts, and the consoling taste of salt from her tears. But they left the silver sound of her laugh, which we had thought was electroplated. The Sound of One Hand Clapping The sound of one hand clapping is a small blue cloud fast disappearing over the woodlot. The sound of one hand clapping came suddenly from just behind the toilet bowl, and wouldn't stop. The applause of one hand clapping fills the forest with enormous peace, and always brings me to my feet. The noise of one cloud clapping beats time to the children's skipping. Suns hop the rope too. The tap of one lightbulb clapping is the first encouragement the suicide hears as he fails to take his life. The sound of one smile clapping was the way her eyes moved my feet by a very warm gravity. The sound of one night clapping is when the sky closes throttle on its star machine, and glides endlessly. 10 Lorna Crozier/Ttfo Poems Fear of Snakes The snake can separate from its shadow, move on ribbons of light, taste the air, the morning and the evening, the darkness at the heart of things. I remember when my fear of snakes left for good, it fell behind me like an old skin. In Swift Current the boys found a huge snake by the creek and chased me down the alleys, Harlan Jordan carrying it like a green torch, the others yelling Drop it down her back, my terror of its sliding in the runnel of my spine (Harlan, the one who touched the inside of my legs on the swing, an older boy we knew we shouldn't get close to with our little dresses, our soft skin), my brother saying Let her go and I crouched behind the caraganas, watched Harlan nail the snake to a telephone pole. It twisted on twin points of light, unable to crawl out of its pain, its mouth opening, the red tongue tasting its own terror, I loved it then, that snake. The boys standing there with their stupid hands dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green mouth opening, a terrible dark O no one could hear. 11 Hands i Hands are always travelling. See the maps on their palms, forks in the roads, migratory crossings. When the lights go out in the neighbourhood, they go off in the rain without an umbrella. They head into a blizzard with no weather report, no survival kit. So what if their shoes are full of holes, they don't need them. In the middle of the night, blind and naked, they go their way. Where are they going? To the place where their lifelines meet. Will they come back? If you leave them a skein of wool, a water basin, a little colour for their nails when the moons go out. 12 While you sleep, your hands build a city, a house, a church with a steeple. Inside there is a funeral. One hand preaches, the other lies in a pocket. Inside there is a wedding. One holds a ring, the other weeps in a closed room. The right never knows what the left is doing. In each hand the sound of the sea, wind in a hollow skull, the sound of a thought beginning. Cup one to your ear. It will whisper what the palm says to the fortune teller, what the thumb says to its family of fingers. They turn so easily into animals, into shadows of animals dancing on a wall. 13 There is a rabbit, a fox hunting it out, a caribou, its antlers full of singing birds. The hands themselves are singing. Listen: each finger is a choirboy with a red face, his voice on the verge of changing. The left hand is a trickster. From behind your ear it plucks coins, roses, memories of another country, another age. It is always night, the windows shuttered. The hand walks the street like a soldier, broad-shouldered and swaggering, making you stay inside. You don't know if this is now or long ago. The right hand is a changeling. You find it by your door in a willow basket. Its nails are pink. Someone has scraped away its fingerprints. It is as innocent as anything you've ever seen. 14 Two hands. Open, close, come together. Closer to the dead, the living, than you are they cut the birth cord, they wash the body. The tie the laces of your first your last pair of shoes. The sky is full of hands: the five fingers the points of a star, each nail glowing with its own light, its own small moon that never rises. 15 10 One hand forms a cock, the other a vulva. They bring them together while you lie sleeping. One is the devil's, the other an angel's. From these two hands are born. Each knows exactly what the other is doing. 16 Libby Scheier The Nipple On the bright blue daybed on the Indian rug he massages my breasts. A woman nurses a baby in the English garden. We watch the sucking, the baby's mouth locked on the breast. How does she get the mouth off the nipple without pain he asks. I hold up my little finger. Like this I say and insert it between his hand and my nipple and give a little push. He moves his hand away from my breast. The nipple begins to scale up. It dries and scrolls like parchment. I lift off the topskin and toss it out the window. Then I hold the fresh and moist nipple, peeled like a kumquat, in one hand and with the other cut it off with one clean slice of the knife. There's no blood. 17 A new nipple grows in place of the old one. There's no pain. Here I say and give him the severed cone of breast. He holds the nipple in his open hand and it becomes a bright red scarf with one brilliant yellow flower. I tie it to his wrist and say this is goodbye, Tom. 18 Benny Andersen Knowledge I don't know much about much what I do know is already commonplace imagine being able to know one definite thing that others haven't stumbled on for example the relationship between the spots on a ladybird I wouldn't hold back my knowledge on the contrary now and then I would get up at meetings and conferences and tell about the spots and then sit down without waiting for any special recognition but with that uprightness in my back and firmness in my glance at being able to point straight to ladybirds. Translated from the Danish by Inge Israel 19 Norberto Luis Romero The Plan of the Cities Nineveh, Ecbatana, Cyrene, Samarkand—all were cities which disappeared by sinking. Some of them vanished in an abrupt, surprising way, others slowly. Some, regurgitated, persist as ruins; there are those who are still awaiting their reappearance. These submergences do not always happen in the same way; sometimes cities disappear completely in a brief passage of time, others by zones and by progression. Ecbatana began to sink by peripheral districts and ended with the palaces and temples situated in the heart of the city. Sodom and Gomorrah is the typical case of a sudden vanishing. Often only a part sinks, and centuries, even millenia, pass before another part begins to disappear. Carthage was seven times devoured and seven times regurgitated — so its successive ruins demonstrate. Nothing is gained by being alarmed and almost no one is; only fools and cowards try to flee when rumours of a coming collapse abound: disappearances—and their modes—are unforeseeable. The sinking of a house or temple is not an unmistakeable symptom of the sinking of the entire city. A legend affirms that sunken cities emerge sooner or later in another part of the globe or even in their original place. A proverb which says that for every descending motion there is a corresponding opposite one confirms it. The residents have incorporated that refrain deeply into their common sense and almost no one worries very much. In the seventh century B.C. a splendid city sank into the desert of Thar; eleven centuries later a similar city emerged in the Peruvian Andes. There are researchers and experts knowledgeable about cities who agree that both are the same city. They claim that Constantinople had been, four centuries before, in the Caucasian steppes. They claim that irrefutable proofs exist and that only the ignorant refuse to believe them. But the only possible way to prove such theories would be through the discovery of a certain book from the library of Ashur- banipal. Experts also venture to say that museums of history and anthropology are full of evidence: large and small objects clearly demonstrate that they come from a regurgitated city, but such evidence goes unperceived by most of the world. 20 Great expectation is centered on the announced possible appearance of a city of colossal dimensions, sunken 2400 years ago, whose ruins have never been found. Herodotus in the fourth book of the History describes it in detail and also mentions, although without giving very much importance to the fact, the disappearance of some of its aristocratic houses. Detractors of the Believers in the Plan lean heavily on the fact that Herodotus confesses to not having witnessed it. Nonetheless, the assertions made by some that that city will appear in this century are, from any point of view, rash, since the disappearance as well as the reappearance of cities is completely arbitrary, hazardous, and unpredictable by ordinary mortals. Other phenomena exist— although infrequent, no less curious—which make these supposed predictions impossible: on occasion a city which emerges is not necessarily the original but is formed of parts of two or more cities. Sometimes two or three houses from a city of unique origin are missing; at other times there are too many. At times what is superfluous is not a house but a simple object, like a toy, a plate or a comb. Exactly four years ago a house in the suburbs sank unexpectedly. It was not long before rumours sprang up, assuring that this was the beginning of the sinking of the city, and at once there were plenty who tried to show there had been another sunken house two years before and in that very neighbourhood. A witness who knew the vanished house claimed that on a trip he had made to Egypt two years before, he had seen that very house, solitary and abandoned, on the banks of the Upper Nile. This isolation and neglect corroborates the hypothesis that cities when they emerge do not necessarily do so with their inhabitants. These can be interchanged. This theory can easily be demonstrated by the accidental appearance of foreigners or, contrarily, by the disappearance of entire families or isolated individuals. In any case, whatever the mechanism of cities sinking and emerging, clearly it happens in balanced form, almost symmetrically, as the proverb says. Persons and objects are transferred from one place to another with absolute rigour and by some elaborate plan unknown to men. Often we are surprised when in a city unknown to us, perhaps because we are foreigners or mere visitors, we find a house, an object or a person who is familiar: the existence of the Plan is evident. The improbability of the continuous, regular existence of a city does not hinder us from travelling to another, even distant, nor from planning such journeys far in advance. The gears which give motion to cities' sinkings and reappearances seem to obey laws whose time escapes the dimension of men in all ages. Governments as well as inhabitants do not seem much affected by this dynamic: dependent on the perennial although cyclic nature of the Plan, which defies one group as much as the other, they busy themselves exclusively with their jobs and mundane needs, trying to avoid the subject and trying especially not to interfere with the Plan. 21 People say that in ancient times there were sages who succeeded in discovering—by mathematical deduction—the movements of the Plan of the Cities. We know now that such knowledge remained hidden for centuries in the library of Ashurbanipal the Great, but, as is well known, that library disappeared in 1544 B.C. Therefore, all the theories have advanced no further. Only one event could reveal the mysterious mechanism—the reappearance of that library; but it is possible that this is the last of the planned movements, and we do not know if by chance the treatise may be missing from its shelf. Translated from the Spanish by H. E. Francis 22 Norberto Luis Romero Misprints No one could tell us where the dictionary had come from. My grandmother denied flatly that she was the Adelina whom the dedication mentioned, and she also insisted she didn't know who that Ashurbanipal was. She admitted—yes, of course—that the book had been in the house ever since she could remember. The dedication, in elegant English handwriting, read "For Adelina, on her saint's day, from her beloved Uncle Ashurbanipal." It was clearly a Spanish edition, but it lacked the two or three initial pages where we might have been able to find the publisher and date of printing- "I never had an uncle with such a name," my grandmother defended herself, now ill-humoured and tired of our jokes. My grandmother was certainly not a person to lie for the sake of it, although I must admit that in her last years she had gradually lost her prodigious memory. My sister and I discovered the Ashurbanipal (because that's what we baptized the dictionary from the first moment) when we were already diligent readers in our library at home and also ingenious and tall enough to be able to reach the last shelf, where it had been forgotten for years. Mama assured us that such an old dictionary would be no good to us and nothing justified its use since we had another, modern and complete, which they had bought especially for us. But we preferred to browse through the old Ashurbanipal, falling apart and smelling of mildew as it was, because the book seemed to have a personality, to have a history and tradition, not like that uncomfortable modern encyclopedia bound in plastic with somewhat childish illustrations. Ashurbanipal seemed to have a life of its own: its fine print promised mysteries; it held the enigma of a history of an uncle with an unreasonable, absurd name and a dubiously unknown niece. My sister, Hester, and I wanted to unravel that history. On my grandmother's saint's day nothing better came to mind than buying her a cookbook. She detested cooking. Only goodwill and the low price of the book prompted us to do it. Naturally the book was 23 tossed from one place to the other and never found a permanent spot. When it rained or was too cold, we preferred to stay in and look for something to play at. If we grew tired of reading or games, we turned to making cake. One day Hester's eyes lit up when I appeared in the kitchen with the still-unopened cookbook; it was the first cookbook we'd ever had in the house and we decided to try it for the first time. We chose a strawberry cake because of the appetizing illustration. We opened the book to the right page and laid a knife flat on the book so it wouldn't close. Hester on one side and I on the other, our hands white with flour, pitched into the task. "I don't understand," Hester said suddenly, breaking the calm and the atmosphere we had created. "This must be wrong." I leaned over and read what she pointed out with a white finger: "When the batter is smooth, pour the contents in a previously buttered windowsill." Surely it was a mistake. I assured her that if we kept reading we'd find instructions for putting the cake out to cool on the windowsill. I was wrong. It said nothing about how to cool the cake. The anecdote made us laugh and joke the rest of the day. It wasn't the same a few days later when we discovered the second misprint: where it should have said "cut the strawberries into slices," it said "cut the eyes into slices." It was, from any point of view, a misprint in very bad taste. Hester felt sick and we had to leave the cake half- made. And she didn't want to use the cookbook again—we had to go back to our old, made-up recipes. When we told my grandmother about it, she took it naturally and told us that such things were common these days in cheap, badly printed, badly bound books. However you look at it, the comment seemed to us an indirect slam at our gift. Hester and I exchanged looks of complicity. Later we decided that we'd be able to make up for our lack of tact by giving her another book, one more to her taste though it might be expensive for us. There was a certain look of distrust on her face when we handed her an anthology of English Romantics bound in leather, but immediately she smiled and told us we were the sweetest things. It was during one siesta that we found the third misprint. We were on the portico, napping in the rocking chairs, when a little smothered cry and a quick thud on the tile startled us. We opened our eyes and Grandmother was standing beside her rocker; she was covering her mouth with her hands, shaking her head from side to side. She looked from one to the other—first at us, then at the book thrown at her feet. She stammered several times, "What disrespect! What a lack of respect!" Hester and I didn't know what to imagine. When she seemed to recover her calm and habitual dignity, she said, "Coleridge, Canto Six," and went into the house, her head very high. Immediately she stuck her head out and specified "Page twenty-four." 24 We picked up the book, not without anxiety, and read: Soon a wind blew over me without sound or movement; a blasting fart expelled by the belly through the ass. We went on reading, surprised to note that this was not the only misprint, that they were all as coarse or in very bad taste. We said not a word about this inexplicable incident, least of all to Grandmother, who each time we ran into her threw reproachful glances that filled us with a groundless guilt. One night in the parlour, Papa came in indignant at translations made by amateurs who observe no logic or have no respect for the original work and spirit of the author. He had a book he'd just bought. Grandmother played the innocent, gazed at the weaving she was working on, and adjusted her glasses as she mumbled something I couldn't hear. "Did you hear what Grandmother's saying?" Hester whispered as she handed me the book Papa had handed her so that we might see the stupidities in it. "I couldn't." "I read her lips." "What'd she say?" "Ashurbanipal," she said. When we made sure Grandmother was busy in the gallery, we slipped into the library and took down the book. "Look up cake pan." My fingers were all thumbs as I flicked pages. "Cake makeup ... cake mill... windowsill." "I'm afraid," Hester murmured, yanking the dictionary from me. "Let's look up eye. Eyak ... eyas ... strawberry." Farther on, at the letter C, we found instead of some poems by Coleridge the definition of a word we'd never heard from anybody's mouth in this house. We left the Ashurbanipal on a table. The following day it had disappeared. We looked all over the house and asked everyone about it. Over and over Grandmother Adelina swears she knows nothing about it. Translated from the Spanish by H. E. Francis 25 Norberto Luis Romero The Stolen House I don't remember exactly how many days I stayed in that hospital; the tranquility of that room with great windows which opened onto the tended and always flowering garden and my friends' almost daily visits kept me from fretting and counting the days, kept me from desiring to leave the hospital too soon. I was exempt from all obligation and could consider my brief internment as an off-season vacation. My health was better than ever and my supposed illness turned out to be a false alarm. I soon had reason to repent for that vacation; when I went home I found the house completely ransacked. The thieves had had more than enough time to do a thorough job. Not even when the recently built house had been handed over to me had it been so empty as it was now, on my return from the hospital. Reports and accusations made to the police were useless; they could not come up with a single clue. It took me a long time to buy new furniture, books, clothes, and all the objects I had possessed, not to mention things impossible to restore—keepsakes, gifts, all that constituted my memory; with the robbery a great part of my past was lost forever. A bed with all its coverings, a wardrobe, a table and a couple of chairs were my first acquisitions. Hours at a time I roamed through the empty rooms, reconstructing them in all their detail, roamed along a trail which imagined furniture obliged me to follow. I stopped before the unfaded rectangles on the wall, where paintings and mirrors had been, and tried to recreate them in my mind or find my image reflected in a bit of wallpaper. At dusk, when light poured through the reddish panes which opened onto the greenhouse, the house itself seemed to acquire extraordinary dimensions, space was broken into great blocks of colour and my footsteps echoed, hollow an instant in each of the rooms, as if many inhabitants, one in each room, were imitating my roamings. Night was the saddest time. The empty house seemed to grow immense, the rooms began to stretch high and wide, the walls grew distant as if I were shrinking, as if I had eaten from some of those walls of Alice's mushrooms. The stolen house was foreign to me then; in that 26 immense void I believed I would find something monstrous. My friends must also have received that impression since they began to ask me to meet them in a cafe or at their own houses, which I envied. I understood them. I couldn't stand to stay home either and preferred to spend my time wandering through the park and the streets. What strange nakedness I suffered. What shame these dismantled rooms, which held only insignificant signs of what had been, caused me. And those signs were evident only to me; they went unperceived by those who didn't know the house, who hadn't lived in it—tiny nail holes, a slight stain on a wall, a discoloration of a certain tile in the hall, a bubble in the paint on one of the doors. Discovering and observing these vestiges soon became my greatest pastime; they were my only connections with the past, with what had once been a house, connections which were acquiring greater dimension and importance—a nailhead protruding a couple of millimetres from a wall could fill the entire room, fill an entire free afternoon. A mark left on a wall by the scraping of a piece of furniture took on many shapes—became a face, a fantastic animal, a plant. Soon I had a collection of vestiges. I had them in every one of my rooms, grouped according to shape, meaning, possibilities of being transformed, size or location. I confess that often I was tempted to create my own marks—to cut a little hole in a beam, to plant a barely perceptible stain on a wall, to tear a corner of the wallpaper loose, so that those new marks might link me if not with my lost objects, at least with possible future belongings. One such mark, a tiny scratch on the parquet, brought back the memory of a French desk. Another made by me anticipated a cedar table. My interest in those marks had kept me so obsessed that it hindered my seeing others, until then unrecognized though equally evident, so evident that they had gone unperceived. They were tiny pencilled jots, diminutive numbers and letters on walls, floor and even ceilings. / hadn't made these marks; they were symbols which architects and builders use, measurements and codes of materials and colours or- deredly set out, designed so that they could not be seen at first glance. They made a code whose key I couldn't find. It took time to research and catalogue them and study their combinations, but it was impossible for me to discover their meaning. I merely managed to forget the old markings and stop being obsessed by the empty house. An approximation to this key, I obtained by chance one afternoon when I was in the garden observing an ant carting a leaf several times its own size and weight. It was an ordinary, everyday feat, but I watched the ant, trying to decipher its apparently absurd course. It advanced along the sidewalk tiles surrounding the house; it zigzagged, stopped before an obstacle, dodged other apparent ones, then climbed a wall, withdrawing before an invisible enemy. Suddenly I saw it ad- 27 vancing in a straight line as if headed for a concrete object, stop, and clean its antennae. It stood out against the white wall in full sunlight. The leaf it carried projected a broad shade. Just where the shadows ended I could see with absolute clarity a minuscule number 22 written in red. In no time I discovered other numbers and marks on the outside walls of the house. I deduced that all these signs must be measurements, codes to colours and materials used in its construction. During my stay in the hospital, the house had been raised, measured inch by inch, and they had taken samples of its materials. The very ones who had stolen from me had done that; for some reason that I did not know, they undertook an exhaustive re-elevation, and I had reason to think that perhaps they had drawn up plans with intent to construct another like it—a copied house which they would have filled with my furniture, my clothes, and all my things. Only a rigourous previous organization could carry out so precise a task. Incisions, letters, numbers and small geometric figures now allowed them to know the house better than I myself did. They could make plans and construct its double. The idea of a duplicate house disturbed me. I wanted to get away from it, not think about all those signs again. At times I went off for hours, took any bus for a long excursion with no particular destination. But at heart I was seeking something; without intending to, I was studying the houses along the street as if I wanted to find the image of my own. I got off the bus as soon as I saw one under construction, looked over the layout of the rooms, seeking similar ones, measured the width of the cement, the height of the walls. It was on the return from one of these outings that I encountered the surprise. I cannot define the feelings it stirred in me—more anxiety, I think, than joy. There were all my belongings, set out exactly where they had always been, not a single object having suffered the least change. I thought reporting the reappearance of my possessions (as I had reported their robbery) would be useless, that it would only cause me problems with the authorities. How would I make them understand that the thieves were duplicating my house? The very act of returning my furniture was a proof against me: Why would they want to duplicate my house if they no longer had anything to put in it? That was a contradiction—but only apparently. My capacity for finding marks and deciphering them set me on the trail of what must constitute the thieves' master plan—to duplicate my furniture and my objects too. And sure enough, all my things were covered with measurements and symbols used by carpenters and cabinetmakers. Despite having all my belongings back and recovering my memories, knowing that somewhere a copy of my house might exist, fur- 28 nished similarly, filled with the same objects, brought back my old fears—now the furniture acquired enormous dimensions in what seemed like a dollhouse. Unconsciously I had begun a search but lacked clues offering me the flimsiest point of reference. The city is big and, besides, nothing assured me that the duplicated house would be in this city and not in another, or even in the heart of a desert. Without a base to start from, my work would be preposterous and endless even if I set precise aims and rigourous plans. I went all out in seeking a second clue among the signs left on the house and furniture, an interpretation which might lead me to the heart of the matter. I spent days and nights studying, I filled notebooks with calculations, but I got no further than suppositions. There was not a single clue, or rather the clue was so secretly and finely worked out that I could not discover it. I lost my way among false leads, among apparent solutions which led to new and more complicated labyrinths. Throughout the search I was neglecting my health, I ate at strange hours, ate the wrong foods, I slept almost not at all. My friends noticed it and naturally were concerned and gave me advice. Soon, seeing that I paid no attention, they took my health into their own hands—I couldn't dissuade them from their good intentions, still less convince them of the importance of my work. They did not want to accept, much less understand, the decisive evidence of the marks and symbols or how much they meant to me. In their selfish desire to help me, all they did was stand in the way of my work. I must admit that those marks no longer obsess me, that here, surrounded by these gardens and these birds, I enjoy myself and have managed to put them out of my head; the room is comfortable and I have the company of charming people who care for and respect me, who are always attentive to my requests, but who listen without understanding my new anxieties; this routine they have proposed for me annoys me, this measuring me and taking samples from all over my body, leaving my skin imperceptibly marked with numbers and letters. Translated from the Spanish by H. E. Francis 29 Sandor Wedres/Two Poems Branch Leaning out from a deeper green — a branch in the twilight. Here is what is seen, and I am also there among the leaves. Fused in a single moment within and without— and the space between. 30 Existence Elusive, suspended, like light in crystal — the melody of bells above the field entangles itself in the flight of wild geese — everything moves, and gives a constant message on the run. By the time I think of this I am already thinking of something else. Translated from the Hungarian by Michael Warren 31 Imre Oravecz/Two Poems Nine A.M. Nine o'clock, the radios in the building have shut up, the racket's died down, the doors stopped slamming, the tramping's gone off, nothing's left to be overheard, I sit beside the gasheater, opposite the window in an armchair I always wanted to have recovered because I hated its colour, but it doesn't matter anymore, the sun's glaring through the pane, raising the temperature a lot inside, my neck hurts, probably premature calcification, I lean back, cross my right leg over my left, lay two hands lightly along the armrests, shift around till I find what's comfortable, I had a bad night, I saw a living, transparent wall in my sleep, it was full of veins and it was festering, I float in the light, resting, trying to forget it, a shadow falling on me now and then by the vapour floating up outside from the vent, as though a cloudy veil crossed the bright sky, behind me the bed unmade, breakfast accessories, saucer cup knife spoon, on the folding tray, letters, vase, calendar, lamp, medicaments, paper, pictures of my son, on another armchair coat cap sweater socks gloves scarf and whatever clothes, on the carpet a pile of newspapers, briefcase on the couch, watch, whiskbroom, belt, handkerchief, scissors, string, glue, ignition key, 32 shoes in a corner, skiboots, kitty-corner in the background books I'll never read on bookshelves, I dragged myself to this room because of the cold, to cut the cost of heating, I don't use the others, they don't exist for me, except for the toilet, this is foyer, bed-, living-room, and study too, I sleep here, eat dress undress work, everything I need dumped in these few square feet, utensils thoughts feelings memories, I'd prefer not moving away from here, I'd put in days and nights here, making a virtue out of necessity here, and so getting used to what's waiting for me, retreat, dwindling, disappearing, because this is absolutely what old age without you will be like, so shrunken, tight, pragmatic, so prosaic. 33 By Then You'd Dressed By then you'd dressed and come out of the toilet where you were hiding from me and from yourself, you stood there by the bed in the room, by that bed, you were undeniably there, without makeup, in the same oppressive space in which I was present too, into which, when it became obvious the king was naked, I was finally admitted, you stood around helpless, at arms' length yet immensely far from me, as I paced to and fro, upset, burdened by a sense of futility and pointlessness, and was about to step over to you to help you because you couldn't help me, when surprisingly he spoke up, the bed's owner, whom I hadn't forgotten but who, naturally enough, was kept beyond the reach of my consciousness, asking me if I'd like a glass of wine, yes, that's what he asked, no doubt embarrassed, not for himself but by the fib with which you'd denied his presence, and I'd've been ashamed too were I in my shorts where he was, but, for him to ask that when he could have offered me whatever, a nail, some of the afterglow, a stove or cupboard, but not simply a glass of wine, because anything would have been more apt than the liquid symbol of hospitality by which in that situation he was not merely mocking hospitality but demeaning its symbol too, and, though not caring to comment on the proceedings in that bed before I showed up, I could sense the symbolism in his degradation of the symbol. Translated from the Hungarian by Jascha Kessler with Maria Kbrbsy 34 Robert Eady/Two Prose Poems The Emperor Becomes a God High in his palace room, the emperor nimbly steps outside his body; slowly, a sergeant major inspecting a lance corporal, he walks around the thing. The back of his head is what his subjects see in the polished breastplates of soldiers. His back and ribs, if thumped, would make no magnificent sound. But his eyes are terrible. A faint greyness is emitted from them, the light to be found in jars of warm water where flowers have wilted and died. When he looks into his eyes, the emperor understands why the busts of the Caesars stare in imperial vacuousness. A strange joy seizes his heart. He jumps back into his body and sings absurd songs. He hugs his precious shoulders and vigourously dances around. 35 News of the Void On any autumn day, football games are played with imperfect referees. Strong, cheap emotions change to blackbirds, disappear into abandoned ant holes. On Sundays mock altars sizzle with steaks, ribs and chops. Bibles flap like snared hawks in the fists of evangelists. II Once a hole appeared at night beside the child's bed. A stuffed animal was tossed in and the child leapt into the mother's arms. Now in dreams, the man longs to hear a faint, echoing splash. Ill Someone begins to speak with conviction of heaven on earth. Words spin out of hearing as the sucking maelstrom comes near. Suddenly the body feels as though it's been dipped in alcohol, hung in a brisk wind to dry. 36 Dayv James-French An Act of Violence Tony is killing time. He wanders through the stores in the shopping complex of the building that, above ground, houses Evelyn's doctor. Upstairs, on the seventh floor, she is having examined a small growth on her knee, just where the skin dimples under the smooth curve of bone. Right at this moment, she's doing that. "I'm sure it's nothing," he told her, a week earlier, wanting to laugh at the picture she made, nude and supine on the bed, the reading lamp pulled close to the edge of the night table to angle the light over her leg as she pointed out this flaw to him. It was a tiny mark, barely raised and only slightly discoloured, a weak-tea reddish brown. "Maybe it's a bug bite or something?" "Bug? What bug? No," she shook her head, burrowing a snug nest into the pillow beneath. "It's a rare type of cancer. I know it." Tony was about to suggest it might be a wart, but he stopped himself, knowing she'd rather have the cancer—her rare type would be, of course, easily treated—than a malady suggesting dirty little boys, or the ruined skin on a wino's nose. Witches had warts, not young women with promising careers in real estate. And it would not be, unequivocally, cancer of any sort. That had only been mentioned supersti- tiously. Evelyn takes these chances, second-guessing a greater power, assuming she will be rewarded with a lighter burden if she anticipates the worst. Tony worries that these chances, gambled and won, erode the odds in some unspecified future deal. There are no known rules by which to play this game. Mercy is an unmediated kindness; this is not predictable. A display has been set up in the wide centre mall of the underground complex. Cut logs are propped vertically into a fort-like fence, and over this is a large banner: Doug and Angie's Petting Zoo. There are animals inside the pen: a small pig; a Shetland pony; some large birds like turkeys (one of these might be a pea-hen, dull and clueless, abject); and a llama, its coat already heavily dandruffed with the sawdust spread over the floor of the confined area. In one corner, with its back to the walls, is a beast about the height of Tony's 37 chest. Barrel-shaped, with a fluffy auburn coat, the animal has a strong, square face. There are two tiny horns, the colour of cheese parings, in front of its ears. The animal looks neither happy nor sad, content nor trapped, merely out of place. It needs to be somewhere other than here, and the choices may be too great. "Hey," Tony calls to a woman who is saddling the Shetland. "Are you," he glances up at the banner, "Angie?" "I am," the woman answers, without changing expression, her hands continuing their work with the saddle. "Want your picture taken on a pony?" "Not today," Tony says. "This." He points. "Is this a buffalo?" "That? No. That's a Scottish Highlander calf." "Oh." Tony is curious about his own disappointment. He thinks — he would have thought—domestication was superior to even the most benign captivity. Yet, momentarily, he has no pleasure in the known boundaries of a controlled destiny; the calf s future depresses him, although it lacks the natural threats of another environment. "Well, thanks then." He turns away and continues his wandering, ending up in a kitchen boutique, the kind of shop that specializes in appliances for persons like himself, those with a constant supply of small sums of money, a little left over after each month's expenses. Tony has heard this—having disposable income, more money than he actually needs—described as 'upscale' and rejected the word: 'middle class' seems to him a sufficient accomplishment. He even, sometimes, feels the urge to press an inventory on total strangers. "This," he would say, "this and this. These things are mine." He resists the urge; his pride is in achievement, not possession. After much deliberation, tempted by a sleek pasta maker until he discovered the price of it—the decimal one point too far to the right- Tony settles on an electric coffee grinder. He's seen similar machines, but never one with such a vibrant plastic base, such an understated, clear grey acrylic top. This top doubles as a coffee measure and Tony, charmed, considers the appliance a fixture in his life. This new life, as he sees it, is composed entirely of Sunday mornings, drinking fine, expensive French roasts and working, in pen, the crossword from an out- of-town newspaper. Pleased, he ransoms his car from the underground lot and circles the block, to be at the front of the building when Evelyn steps through the doors and onto the sidewalk. She glances into the back seat before letting herself into the car, a habit Tony knows had been drilled into her by her mother when Evelyn first started to drive. She is looking for rapists, he supposes, but why she should do this when he is in the car is not something he understands. Nor is it anything he questions: everyone is looking for something. 38 "What did you buy?" Evelyn asks. "Something nice?" "Coffee grinder," Tony says, putting the car into gear and checking the mirror before easing back into the road. The traffic is dense, even at this late hour. "Doesn't anyone work anymore?" "Never mind," she says. He turns to her, "How about you?" "Well, it's not cancer. I guess we both knew that, didn't we?" She waits for him to assent to this. "What I have is something called, I think, dermatosis fibrosis. Something like that. I have it written down." "Sounds serious." Tony lifts his foot from the accelerator. "It isn't," she shakes her head. Then she laughs. "In fact, the doctor has three of them, these little bumps. He showed me. A perfect triangle." Tony lets the car reach the speed limit before he turns back to her, his eyebrows raised. "And where on your doctor are these little bumps?" "Don't be like that," she says, putting her cool hand on the back of his neck. "I saw a buffalo this afternoon. In the shopping centre." "You did? I don't think I've ever seen one, not in real life." "It wasn't really a buffalo," Tony confesses. "It was some kind of Scottish calf." "A Scottish calf is okay," she says. "It's no buffalo, to be sure, but it's okay." "It did look like a buffalo," Tony says. Ahead is the turn-off, the street that will take them diagonally across the city to their apartment. He drops his hand to the indicator, then returns it to the wheel. "We could just keep going, west, and see a herd on the hoof." "Like pioneers?" she asks. "Or an early summer vacation?" "God, I hope not like that," Tony says. There had been a morning when he and his brother Ken had been awakened at first light to move through their own house like thieves. While their father loaded the car, their mother made breakfast for the boys. "Finish the milk," she told them. "We can't take it with us." Ken pushed his chair away from the table and stood with his back to the stove, watching his mother. "Are you done? Then go and tell your father his family is ready." Tony reached for the waxed carton of milk, filled his glass, swallowed and swallowed. Outside the city, where the road had been blasted through rock, sheer stone walls rose on either side of the car. At impossible locations, where no man could reach, dark blue paint spelled out messages in giant print: / am the Way and the Life and Ravens 56. Tony, just out of first grade, moved his mouth over these words, unable to pose a question that would come close to asking what he needed to know. The last 39 that he read, before the ground levelled and the roadside was merely forest, stated The Kingdom is Near, muting him completely. Even Ken, eleven that year, was quiet in the car during the long ride to the cabin. Their father, white-knuckled at the wheel, had repeatedly glanced at them through the rear-view mirror, saying, "This is going to be fun," in a disinterested, rhetorical tone, the voice that would ask, "Have you done your homework?" and "Why don't you share with your brother?" "There'll be swimming and fishing," their mother said, turning back from the front seat, holding her hair flat against the drafts and breezes of the car's ventilation system. She was wearing excitement like a new pair of shoes; maintaining her pleasure required she step carefully. "Just look at that scenery." "It's pretty," Tony said. The spring had been filled with whispers; their parents planning this, planning something. Framed by the car window, above the brown dust raised from the dirt road, leafy trees dissolved themselves into a solid block of shades of green, an expanse like the sky, wrongly coloured. He pushed his head back into the car's upholstery, dizzied by the car fumes, by the relentless vibration that blurred his vision. Even with his eyes closed, images jerked in and out of focus. "Fun." The cabin was at the bottom of a narrow trail. Tony stood at the top, beside the parked car, a rolled air mattress on either side of him. His shadow on the ground in front of him looked like the shadow of three people. His father, lifting a cardboard box of kitchen utensils from the trunk of the car, suddenly fell forward, flinging the box away from his body. He stood, brushed at the knees of his slacks, then touched his chin where the skin was split, a thick bubble of blood swelling there. His hand was trembling. Around him, in an eccentric, static orbit, the earth was littered with gleaming metals: knives, forks, spoons. "Already? Already?" Tony's mother hissed, white with rage. "No, I tripped on something. A root or a stone. I swear it's only that. People can trip, can't they?" Tony's mother walked over to examine the ground. Tony hoisted the air mattresses to his shoulders, they were no burden at all, and started down the trail, careful and hesitant. At the bottom of the cabin steps, his brother was sitting on his heels, using a twig to turn over stones set in the musty earth. Whatever he was seeing required all his concentration; his mouth was open with the effort, his lower lip glassy with spit. Then, later, Tony was running down the wooden planking, arcing through the air to be caught and dipped into the lake by his father, who stood at the edge of the dock, his black nylon trunks ballooned above the water's level at the top of his thighs. "Be careful," Tony's mother called. She was sitting in the shade, on a 40 plastic webbing chair, her legs propped in front of her on a styrofoam cooler. A glossy magazine was open in her lap to a full page advertisement of a woman in hat and gloves, high heels, and a long dress with a full, billowing skirt. "I'm catching him," his father said, lifting Tony back up on to the dock. "Come on, get a good running start this time." He turned and cupped one hand to splash a transparent crescent of water over Ken, who stood close to shore, knee-deep and immobile in the lake. "Let's show her how to have fun." Tony propelled himself forward. The dock was warm and rough under his feet. He leapt and was unsupported until his father's hands, still strong, clamped to his rib cage. Tony faced into the land, trying to pick out his mother in the blur of colours, light and dark. In less than a year she would be gone. Sometimes, trying to remember her at this moment, he would picture instead the woman in the magazine, all dressed up and surrounded by empty white space. On the way home, Tony picks up Guatamalan, Columbian, Mocha- Java, and Angolan Black coffee beans. In the kitchen, he grinds a little of each of these, separately, for a taste test, while Evelyn fills out the warranty card in her generous, angular handwriting. "I never thought of this," Tony says, looking at the packages of beans, each white bag labelled with black grease pencil. "It's like a list of repressive Third World regimes. Do you suppose we grow coffee here?" "Those countries need to export," Evelyn says. "Or their economies would collapse." "Don't tell me that," Tony says. "I don't need the responsibility." "Nice," he says, later, his hand cupped over her knee. "That there's nothing wrong." "I want it removed," Evelyn says, shifting her weight from his side. "A little imperfection?" he grins. "It's more interesting." "Don't be like that." "Like what?" Tony sits up, pushing the pillow between his neck and the headboard. "You said your doctor has three. Why didn't he have his removed?" "That's different." "A doctor doesn't take unnecessary surgery lightly?" "It's not surgery." Evelyn makes a face. "It's a simple procedure." "That couldn't be done in a g.p.'s office?" Tony suggests. "It doesn't sound so simple." "Okay, so I have to go to a plastics man." She raises her foot, pointing her toes in a graceful, balletic curve. "I know it's there and I don't want it to be." Tony keeps silent for a moment, trying to gauge her mood. Then, 41 moving quickly, he seizes her wrists and pushes her down on the mattress. "Confess, woman," he leers, "your doctor's bumps are where only his best friends would see them. Yes, yes?" "Would you please let me up?" Evelyn lies under him like a stone. Tony, profoundly embarrassed, releases her. She crosses the room to the bathroom, turning back at the door to add, "You're a crazy person." Tony hears water running into the tub then, with a clanging of the aged pipes, diverted to hiss from the shower head before he says, "Am not." He pictures her white skin, now pink against the real white of the bathroom tiles. Then he adds, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." When Tony was very young, one of the neighbourhood ladies, a Mrs. Audrey Darlington, achieved local celebrity by painting fish on her bathroom wall. "She just picked up a brush and painted fish right on the wall," his mother informed the family at dinner, her tone somewhere between astonished approval and a smug reproachment; she would never paint fish on her wall. But it was a measure of Mrs. Audrey Darlington's new status that the fish were mentioned to the husbands and children at all. Left to their own devices, it was entirely possible they might never have noticed; or, noticing, might have refrained from comment. What the women did was women's business, short of childbirth which occasioned a reluctant celebration, the excitement over the newborn vaguely clouded by the actual process of birth; rather a messy business, that, best to keep it from the men, protect the children. Tony, precocious with new learning, pictured the fish as cartoons, similar to the decals only recently wire-brushed off his own bedroom furniture. He imagined a type of exotic carp, all silky dorsal fins and rubbery, pursed lips. Possibly heavily lashed, coy eyes. Orange, most likely, or a decorator's pink. Playing with Nick Darlington one afternoon in the Darlington's yard, and needing to pee, Tony walked through their house and up to the second floor bathroom. Any house but his own was hushed and private—a museum—and even carefully aiming a yellow line at the side of the bowl Tony was properly diffident, silent. Finished, and zipping his jeans, he looked around to make sure his presence hadn't disturbed the room. There, on the wall directly over the guest towels, were the fish. Not at all the expected cartoons, these were two flat, grey perch, both facing the same direction. Each had a gaping, twisted mouth; each had one smooth, round eye, clouding with exposure to the air. Mrs. Audrey Darlington had painted two dead fish on her bathroom wall. "They made me weak, those fish," Tony tells his brother. They have 42 come from the Cineplex to Little Eden, for a drink after seeing A Woman Under the Influence. (Earlier Tony had been amazed to discover Ken had never seen this before. "Man calls himself a psychologist," he said, "and he's never seen the best film about mental illness in the history of the world.") Now Tony is pontifical with insights, luminous with the possibilities in the story of his own life. "I felt like I'd been confronted with the very nature of women, and that I would always be outside their world. They had their own symbols, their secrets and creations. That's what I thought at the time. I remember." "I don't even remember being told about them," Ken says. "It's interesting you would." "You were older when Mom left," Tony points out. "It was only one of a greater number of episodes for you. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that later I thought I was wrong about being excluded. I decided that the fish were symbols all right, but symbols of the massive boredom of the suburban housewife." "A modern interpretation," Ken nods. "What can I say? You're an Eighties kind of guy." "I'm not, don't say that," Tony insists. He lowers his voice to make his point, speaking in a near-normal voice through the noise around them. "I think changing my mind was wrong. An Eighties adjustment, like you said. Those two fish were meant to be—what is the word I want? —estranging. They were there to beat Mr. Darlington over the head, and Mrs. Darlington wouldn't have to lay a glove on him. It was a cold war." He leans away from the small table between them, unsuccessfully trying to cross his legs in the limited space. "What do you think?" "Idiot savant," Ken says. "The boy who understood women. How often have you seen this movie?" Before Tony can respond, a man squeezing his way through the bar bumps their table. Tony's beer slopes to a high angle in its mug, but doesn't spill over. He looks up at the man, preparing to murmur "No harm done" when an apology is delivered. But the man, instead, stops and looks back and forth from Tony to Ken, then to Tony again. His face, round and flushed, splits into a damp grin. Below this, his shirt collar is unbuttoned, his tie yanked loose, still knotted. The man is in his fifties, middle-management in a small firm, maybe retail sales—carpets or cars; not cameras or stereo equipment—or insurance. He's been here since work, say an hour after the stores closed, and he'll drive home, rather than take a cab or bus. This assessment comes easily to Tony, what Ken would call a 'value judgement.' But Tony has no feeling of superiority or malice; his observation is merely a short-cut that leaves his mind open to process anything beyond appearance. If he left himself always receptive, allowing everything to happen for the first time, he would be no better, he thinks, than an animal or a child, burned, who makes no association between stove and 43 hot. Or, and he's said this about the cataloging system used at the library where he works, "If we don't keep it simple, we'll all overload and die." "You're brothers, right?" the man says. "I could tell that a mile off, you being related." He starts to laugh. "A couple of white guys." "We are pretty pale," Ken says in a reasonable tone. Tony can hardly disagree. He and his brother have inherited hair the colour of rye flour, not blonde but beige, and skin that makes them look like they were, in Tony's phrase, 'carved from a bar of soap.' The man continues to stand in front of them, hilarious as if there is some amusement they are sharing. Tony rolls his eyes at Ken, but his brother is looking up at the man, a non-committal but pleasant expression on his face. "I think that's enough," Tony says coldly. "It's not like we're albinos or anything." "I didn't mean anything," the man says, his contrition as rapid and, perhaps, as sincere as his humour had been. "Yeah, sure. Why don't you just leave?" The man shuffles off with some awkwardness, having to push his way through the people standing between the table and the centre bar. His shirttail has escaped his slacks at the back, and hangs below his suit jacket, a white revelation like the quarter moon. "Christ," Tony says. "I really hate a friendly drunk." "You might have let him have his moment," Ken says quietly. "There are a lot of lonely people in the world." "So why don't they talk to each other? They don't have to go around making me feel like a target." Evelyn made a killing a few months earlier, and unloaded a huge, unsaleable house, very nearly a mansion that while on the market had been divided into four or five apartments. The buyer, according to Evelyn, has spared no expense in re-converting the place into a single residence; knocking down walls, ripping out superfluous kitchens, soliciting advice from no less than six architects on bathroom designs. Now the house is finished, and Tony and Evelyn are invited to the housewarming party. "You must have heard of her," Evelyn insists. "Alicia Keating. She's practically revolutionized the cosmetics world. She has a new line of facial masques coming out in the fall, she told me." "How would I have heard of her?" Tony asks. They are dressing in the bedroom, an activity that usually co-ordinates effortlessly. But tonight, for some reason, he seems to be in Evelyn's way; she continually turns away from him, stepping to one side when he crosses the room to pull a clean shirt from the closet. Taking his cue from her mid-length, Laura Ashley skirt and blouse—her 'school-marm' outfit 44 —he has decided on pleated wool trousers in a muted, autumnal weave, white shirt and tie, tweed jacket. "Are we going to have to try the masques?" "That might be fun." Evelyn laughs. "Just think of it, numbers of people walking around with this orange stuff on their faces. The ultimate anonymity. I'd better make sure I can remember what you're wearing, so I don't leave with someone else." She steps back and exaggerates an appraisal of him, head to toe. "Humn." "Remember that make-up seminar thing you went to? When you came home looking like a Shanghai whore?" "A Shanghai whore! I did not," Evelyn protests. "I looked just fine, it was only the light in here." She raises her arm to indicate the brass ceiling fixture. The move lifts her skirt over the tops of her boots. At the base of her knee, where the skin cups down to the shin, there is a white gauze pad, held in place by a large equal sign of pink adhesive tape. "So." Tony sits carefully on the edge of the bed. "Did it hurt?" "No." Evelyn turns away from him, towards the dresser mirror. She pats at her hair, ruining the effect of several minutes' careful brushing. "Everything is just fine." "I wish you had been able to tell me," Tony says. "I wish you hadn't done it like this." "You'd have worried, or carried on. Besides, it was no big deal." "Letting someone cut you, no big deal?" Tony looks away. "What'll you have now, a scar? That'll be better?" "Just a little one," Evelyn admits. "This is something I'm responsible for, okay? And, yes, that's better." Tony sits with his hands open and empty in his lap, looking down. Mensal, heart, hepatic and brain—these are the lines of the palm, corresponding to destiny, longevity, health and profession. Ken would tell him that palmistry is naive and superstitious. Tony thinks the craft fits neatly into the tenets of psychology: you are born; you struggle, fail or succeed, against influences beyond your control, your fate; then you die. "Don't you see the similarity?" Tony's asked. "You just give people longer—what, the first five years of life?—to be irrevocably shaped." Ken disagreed, of course, "What I teach, not give, is the knowledge of personal control. The shaping you mention is a dynamic process." Tony had raised his hands to cover his ears. "Stop it. Don't tell me it just goes on and on. That's the same as having everything happen all at once." The lines of imagination and generation are revealed on the percussion, or striking edge, when the hand is made into a fist. With some effort, Tony does not fold his fingers down, does not turn his wrist. 45 On Alicia Keating's verandah Tony and Evelyn stand side by side like the figures on a wedding cake, rigid and silent. The door is pulled open from the inside by a young woman who remains behind the oak and stained-glass panels as another woman turns to the door, crying, "Evelyn, honey, usually I'm the one who under-dresses for parties!" It must be Alicia: the vivid woman surrounded by the wide expanse of foyer is quite possibly the most beautiful Tony has ever seen; creating her own cosmetics would be an instinct. Tony puts his hand on the small of Evelyn's back, for support, and she turns to him briefly with a look he can't decipher before stepping down to greet her hostess. "Alicia, already I can tell that it's a masterpiece. And to think no one else even imagined the possibilities." "Oh," Alicia is airily dismissive. "It takes a special eye. One must have a vision." "Yes, yes," Tony agrees too quickly, trying not to stare at the woman. He touches the knot of his tie, anticipating the evening ahead of him. Introductions are hardly necessary: the architects are youngish, new-school professionals in cleaned-and-pressed corduroy; the subcontractor is slightly shorter, slightly heavier than the contractor; the escrow lawyer—a woman named Barb something—might have been unexpected had she not been so obviously dressed-for-success in a navy blue suit, white blouse and flat-heeled shoes. With the exception of a few neighbours (who must have been incredibly inconvenienced during the renovations, yet now appear benignly tolerant) everyone has some connection to the house, or to a person with that connection. Obedient to this connection, they move together in a roughly-shaped mass. Tony lets himself drop to the back of the group, joining the others who are 'with' someone ("And this is Tony," he'd been introduced. "He's with Evelyn, who found this when it was a pile of trash. Just trash.") as they climb the stairs, stand in the hall outside of rooms. Always a room behind Alicia's commentary, Tony leans against door frames, appraising the details to which attention is not called. There are no pictures to break up the expanses of wall; no ashtrays or books clutter the tabletops. The rooms are uniformly white, as sterile as a dentist's office, if not so well lighted. Tony scrubs his front teeth with a forefinger, then rubs his palms against his thighs. He counts five telephones and three televisions before he discovers any reading material and at that, charitably, he is giving credit to a slick Italian magazine of hairdressing designs. He rejoins the group outside the bathroom. Phrases are passed to him in quick, exclamatory gasps: "Wall-to-wall," and "entirely mirrored," and "hand-painted, real bone." Human,Tony thinks, No doubt the bone is human. 46 The group of people reverses itself, and Tony is leading as they enter the dining room. He takes a seat at the far end of the table. The same woman who had let him into the house is now bringing the meal in from the kitchen. There is no seat for her at the table, and Tony is uncomfortable being served this way. He keeps his eyes averted, watching the others. From the corner, with his back to the wall, his view is unobstructed. He grips his wine glass in his hand, ready to cover the lower half of his face, already flushed by what he considers an embarrassment of food. "Kiwis," the lawyer coos. "Craig's lamb," one of the architects offers. And this is the table talk; most of the company too busy discussing the food to eat. Only the sub-contractor, his plate arranged in neat quadrants, devotes his attention to the task at hand with an enviable recreation of manners; his isolation is a pleasure to watch. Tony chews slowly, not wanting to clear his plate prematurely, but the lamb fat congeals like soft frost on the china and he leaves as much as the man on his left, the women on his right. By the time Alicia suggests they move to the living room for coffee, the table has a decided air of erstwhile massacre. "There's a place here," the lawyer says, patting the cushion beside her on the loveseat. She waits for Tony to sit, then holds out her hand, "I'm Barb." "Tony," Tony says, briefly taking then releasing her hand. "I'm with Evelyn." "Evelyn? Oh, yes. The real estate lady. Do you have children?" "I'm sorry?" Tony tilts his head, trying to understand the question. Then, "No. We don't even have a cat." Her expression remains the same, and he qualifies, "We're not married?" to encourage her. After a silence, he asks, "And you?" "Me? No, I'm a lawyer." Tony glances wildly around the room until he spots Evelyn, bent forward to hear something the contractor is saying. He stares at the back of her head, willing her to look up and signal to him that it is time to leave. But an hour passes, more than an hour, before they are in the foyer, saying good-bye. Tony stands with his hands clasped behind his back while Evelyn makes the correct social noises. "A real treat," she says. "Usually the sales just disappear into the ether. It's nice to keep in touch." "Listen," Alicia says. "I was glad for the dry run. I'm giving a party for my friends next month, and I wasn't sure everyone would fit." Tony amends the thought he had earlier: At least the bone is human. Safely home, Tony stretches out on the bed and yawns hugely. "I'm 47 bagged," he says. "I feel like I've been assaulted." "Assaulted, what are you talking about?" Evelyn lets her skirt slide to the floor, bends over to pick it up. She crosses to the closet in her boots and nothing else, hangs the skirt from little loops inside the waistband, then sits on the edge of the bed to pull off her boots. "What assault?" "The whole evening. Didn't you feel a little abused? In the most hospitable manner, of course." "She's a very successful woman," Evelyn says. She lets her boot drop to the floor, rolls down her kneesock. "And success is another country?" Tony asks. "The rules are different there?" "No, of course not," Evelyn shakes her head. "I can't say I thought much of that house as a place to come home to." "But she must have worked very hard to get what she has. She deserves to enjoy it." She raises her knee, peers at the bandage there, picks at one corner of the adhesive tape. "I could learn to enjoy what she has." "Don't mess with that," Tony cautions. "You'll make it worse." "You know what?" Evelyn stretches out on the bed, pushing herself up with her palms to lie beside him. "I think I'm going to have to sleep on my back. And you know what they say." "What do they say?" Tony lifts his weight up on his elbows. His underarms are damp. "They say a change is as good as a rest." She shows him a wicked grin and adds, "Take your mind off feeling assaulted." "Yes," Tony says. "Really, my whole body feels like it's been beaten with a stick. Beaten with chic." He moves closer to her, to narrow the range of his vision, allowing himself this distraction yet sure he will look back at himself with an imagination of motives, a familiar suspicion that control is being lent to him as a manipulation. Twelve days later, when the bandage is removed and the stitches are taken out, Evelyn has a small, shiny mark, like a flattened and sideways S under an umlaut. Despite the finality of marked tissue, the permanence, a scar is no achievement. It is not a conclusion. A scar is one half of a conversation, the probing questions asked by a stranger sharing the confinement of a travelling space, a bus or airplane: What past life is revealed by this? Who are you, to have been thus afflicted? How have you survived? Scarring, like physical perfection, invites prurience. Tony is silenced by those two little white dots, where a sharp point pierced the skin. He's a man on the outside and he feels only a dutiful paternalism. The obligation defeats him—this is not his responsibility —and he hears his father saying, "I won't be blamed. You and your brother walk around the house with those eyes, like two owls on a 48 branch." Tony shook his head, the movement imperceptible in the dimly-lit living room, not wanting to hear this, not wanting to be seen hearing this. His father's voice was thick, each word a sullen, forced, sound, with a tremor that mimicked the palsy of his hands, the ineffectual grasping and releasing of the slack grey flannel of his trousered lap, as if something under the fabric was eluding his hold. "What do you think I could have done, to hold her? You can't imagine what hatred she had for me, for ruining the future she'd planned. So she just left and started over. She didn't even leave me alone, to my own life. Well, go try to find her, if being her son is a job you want to take on. I don't need you to worry about me." Tony leaned forward, into the cone of light from the lamp beside him, preparing a protest, but his father added, "It's not that I ever wanted children at all. No, I never wanted them at all." Ken had warned Tony about these declarations; the clutching at autonomy was as symptomatic as the disease's progression, the slurred speech, the lack of balance, the unco-ordinated motor control. Tony would not believe, or even discuss, his brother's diagnosis. The man was recovering from a stroke, no more or less. He was not young. Two years later, refusing permission for an autopsy, Tony says, "I didn't listen to you then, and I'm not listening to you now." They are in the parking lot of the hospital. Tony will not enter the building. Ken's face is rouged by the Emergency sign, as if lit from within the way it would be if he stretched his mouth over the lens of a flashlight, a thing Tony remembers doing when he was a child, many years ago. "You want proof? Then what? I've done my research on this, Ken. The best we get is a fifty-fifty chance of not developing what you think he had." Tony does not name the disease; he will not allow it that relevance. "You think someone is going to come along and give you some kind of signed guarantee?" "No, that's not the point." Ken puts his hands into his pockets and leans against the hood of Tony's car. "The stroke may have masked the symptoms. The diagnosis might be wrong. It's confirmation we're after, knowing what our own chances are." "That's fifty percent each, Ken, not one of us or the other. We'd still wait it out alone. The laws of mathematics aren't about justice. Even randomness is predictable in its own way. No autopsy is going to certify you're entitled to your three-score-and-ten." "It's better to know," Ken says quietly. "Is it? Always? Nobody can own the future." Tony looks away, to where a small park is visible between the brick hospital buildings. There is enough natural light in the air to silhouette a low wooden bench and the frame of a swing set, the chains unseen from this distance. He adds, bitterly, "This certificate is non-transferable." On Sunday morning, Tony wakes early and pads quietly, barefoot, 49 into the kitchen. At first he thinks the weak light is to blame, is blurring his vision, then he can tell that the coffee grinder is badly scratched. The inside of the cap, formerly smooth and shiny and clear, is now cloudy and rough, ridged with sloppy, non-concentric circles as if it had been clumsily sanded. He knows, even before the proof reaches his nose, almost as if he has been waiting for this information, that Evelyn has used the appliance to mince cloves. He stares at the grinder—worthless junk now, as far as he's concerned—not at all the sleek machine that had pleased him so much. He opens his mouth to call Evelyn and confront her with this, then leaves his jaw slack, remaining mute. The plastic is smooth in his hand; the violated interior is not evident to his touch. If he had less than his five full senses, this moment would pass without notice, exactly as would all the moments of the rest of his life. Such ease is, must be, false. He must plan his escape, he decides, although he loses this conviction almost instantly, in the choice between to and from. A brief image of the gentle swell and trough of the Pacific Ocean fades from his mind and he returns to standing, barefoot, on his own kitchen tiles. In the intensity of his silence he becomes aware that the refrigerator has kicked into a low purring, the motor responding efficiently to task. His arm arcs back and swings strongly forward. The coffee grinder hits the side of the fridge with a disappointing sound of chipping plastic, no great explosive crack. Still, the pieces on the floor are obviously beyond repair. Tony cannot quite manage a smile, his breathing is too wild, but he nods his satisfaction. He may not be home free but he is, for now, in control and very much at home. 50 Robyn Sarah/Three Poems The Distance At mid-day the chill deserts the air, the turning trees and the late roses are bathed in a warm, a dreamy sunlight. This will last for a little longer if we are lucky, as some things do last, as even habit sometimes glows with a warm glow. Yet in the end the distance is all; the colours are contained in it, but they are locked there, they will never fly out like birds or bubbles to gladden air. Only, we can watch them, as through glass, in their circling. We can name them, as we name such stars as the city night will show us. Is this what we came for, then? To look but not to touch, to leave the prints of our fingers singing on a thin clear globe? 51 The Thread Diminutions of autumn. The light makes no apology, falling aslant the bare arms of the trees. They have let slide their holdings; only a rare branch still flames toward sundown, caught at the right angle. The afternoon is private, the sun visits each window, warm with the last warmth of October, the screens tick in their metal frames, mesh hazy with last summer's dust, they ping where a late fly, all buzz and bluster, hurls himself again and again. Now he has crawled down between the screen and outer pane, the sun is moving on, touching the last crescent of screen, a few dust-motes hover there and gleam, pearl-like, before they move out of the light: and see, a single thread of spider-silk, anchored where faintest air stirs it, gleams and disappears, and gleams again. 52 Point of Departure The days folding out of each other like paper flowers. Nothing takes your place, that's finally understood. I kick through leaves my stride churns into a sound like surf. There are many beautiful days, one after another, I lose count of them, why count them? Strange reaches of light across the park, a wind, unseasonably warm, that gets under shirts, balloons them. It is deceptive, this wind. I recognize you from a long way off, turning the corner, shouldering your empty bag. Hours I've wasted. Weeks. How long before snow? The trees expose their nests, their perfect geometry. 53 Ralph Gustafson/Two Poems Late May Four magnolia blossoms showed Beyond the edge of the house, The green hedge behind them, White and suffused pink the petals About to fall so well open Were they—the awkward sun made use of Though this was north. The wheelbarrow Stood empty beside the tree, the shovel Fallen to the ground. It did not matter much, The moment was best left to nature. The usual hummingbird was returned To the lilac though it was not out, Just the lilac leaves. It was an ambiguous, Ambitious moment, nothing much But the green grass between the slates Of the pathway. What you expect Is better. Another month is better. 54 Beethoven as an Example of the Unconditional The absolutes are out of favour: Beethoven who couldn't hear a vocable Though his successive trumpets grew In size, kazoo to bamboozle, Heaven-heard, the questions asked him Written down, the notebooks blank Of answers whose music was the answer. Plug. Plug. Rock against Easter. What is to the heart and ear And touchings true, closed off, The crafty natural out of favour, The apostrophic round and fateful Overtone, blown: flat. 55 Leona Gom/Two Poems Sarah, Emily there must be no wrinkles, things must be kept neat. Sarah smoothes the sheets over and over herself, her body in the bed barely shows, it is how she has always lived, learning to sink into the background, the others were the ones who made decisions. she calls her daughter by the name of her oldest sister, long dead now, asks about horses, have they been fed. Emily says, yes, yes, it's all right, when it's not, Sarah is dying. her fingers pick at something in the air. Emily reaches up, closes her mother's hands inside hers, like a locket. it's all right, she says again, all the machinery of language gearing down to those words of love, of departure. 56 How They get old on you, sneaking it past you slowly, you see your father holding the mirror over his head, sighing at his thinning hair, your mother rubbing oil on the lines starting to dig between her brows, and it seems very funny, they are your parents, it is how they should look, young is for you. only when it is years between your seeing them can you read on their loosening skins the long story of their leaving. 57 Elizabeth Abraham Unsuccessful Translations Italo Calvino is dead. He had a stroke and lapsed into a coma and died. He was reading a newspaper when it happened. I just glanced over my husband's shoulder and spotted Calvino's name among others in boldface. Then I saw the block letters between two thick horizontal lines on the top of the left column: OBITUARIES. He was reading a newspaper in the garden of his villa in Siena. All I know of Siena is from the two things I readjust yesterday. One was a chapter in a novel by Edith Wharton, the first scene of a honeymoon in Siena. He thinks it's romantic and luxurious, she thinks it's dusty and intolerably hot. I wanted to take her place. Then there was a piece from a collection of Italian short stories, about a consumptive young girl whose father makes her sleep with his acquaintances for booze money. She dies. "Sixty-two," my husband reads aloud. I imagine that he, too, measures his age against that of someone who has just died. We are both past halfway. "Sorry, babe," he says. I am also thinking that we've never been to Siena—or Italy, for that matter—and probably never will. During our one European vacation we passed up the tour of Italy for one more week on the beaches of Costa del Sol, in Malaga, where the combination of off-season seclusion and unseasonal weather was too luxurious to leave. "We'll come back," we said. But that was seven, eight years ago, and since then it seems as though a great wall of circumstance has erected itself along the length of the Atlantic and keeps us here in North America, where people in comfortable homes start their mornings with a home-delivered newspaper and read about the deaths of geniuses, and other people, in other parts of the world. I took a year of classical voice lessons in college. At the master class, before singing the aria or recitative we'd prepared for that week, each student would have to recite the libretto as if it were a poem. We'd have to memorize the English translation so that when we read the Italian lines we would know what we were saying. Except for the untranslatable idioms (there was at least one in every piece), the meaning of each phrase would be drilled into our heads, and, consequently, the libretto. Certain phrases are still with me; I know enough Italian to 58 woo a young girl. My pretty one/Do not doubt my love for you . . . Open my bosom/And you will see your name/Inscribed upon my heart... In my heart the flames that burn me/All my soul does so en- ravish . . . And tears are in vain . .. There is no verb in the first sentence of an obituary. For example, it reads, "Italo Calvino, one of Italy's greatest post-war writers, in Siena, Italy, two weeks after suffering a stroke." I read it several times, annoyed. Why be so vague? Must everything be sugar-coated in order to protect the comfortable? Italo Calvino died. Italo Calvino is dead. I put on my robe and leave the bedroom to catch the last of the late morning sun through the living room windows. It lands right on the couch and heats the dark blue corduroy to a cozy degree. I am reading the end of a long short story by Calvino, one I started last week but never had a chance to finish. I've been reading a lot of translations lately, hoping they will open doors for me to other cultures and, ultimately, bring me closer to the authors. But words are poor enough conductors of thought and emotion, and having been filtered through a translator, the words I read are missing something essential, I know it. I feel it. Dead, alive, it doesn't matter. Calvino's mind is light years away from mine, and no translator, not William Weaver or anyone, can close the gap between my living room in peaceable Victoria and the garden of his villa in Siena. Even if I did get to Italy somehow, even if my bus tour stopped at Calvino's villa and they let us get out and take pictures, the distance would remain the same. Yet we will visit the cathedrals and eat in restaurants whose menus have English subtitles, and we'll be puzzled when we see scrawled in red chalk on the white wall outside our four-star hotel, "YANKEES GO HOME FROM AMERICA!" My husband comes in from the bedroom with the Business section, which he tosses on the coffee table in front of me. He is wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt; casual wear for the weekend. I prefer to stay in my bathrobe, if circumstances permit. It's half-past eleven and we haven't eaten anything. We often miss the morning meal on the weekends. He asks me, on his way to the kitchen, if I want more coffee. I listen to the familiar sounds of him filling the kettle with water, grinding the beans, putting the filter and funnel on top of the carafe. My husband never waits until the kettle whistles; he's too impatient. Because of this the second cup isn't as hot as it should be. He comes into the living room with two cups in one hand and the half-filled carafe of coffee in the other. He sits next to me, pours the coffee and hands me one of the cups. I take it from him and he touches the centre of my chest, where the robe doesn't cover. The skin is hot from the sun and his fingers feel cold against it. He takes them away. "Burning," he says. I smile. "What are you reading?" 59 "Calvino." Or is it Weaver? Calvino-Weaver. Calvino-Weaver-Me. "I'm sorry you feel bad, love." He takes a Player's cigarette from the package on the table, offers it to me, but I shake my head. I should think after reading Calvino's obituary he could hold off for a while. I go to the windows and crank open the centre one. Can our sun be the same, I wonder. We just started smoking again a few weeks ago. We go on and off, every few months, every few years. We worry about fertility, then we decide we're not ready for a baby. But it's getting late for me. "I've been thinking," I say, "maybe we should cut the cigs altogether, once and for all. It's just not healthy." "You're probably right, we should," he says sincerely, but his eyes don't rise from the page, not for a second. If Italo Calvino wrote a story about us, it would start something like this: Before astronomer Harlow Shapley studied the pulses of varying luminosity of two stars in the Andromeda Nebula, this and other spiral nebulae like it were considered to be comparatively small and close celestial bodies within our own Milky Way Galaxy. In 1917, however, by comparing the pulse rates to the stars' apparent luminosities, Shapley determined the distances of these stars to be 1,700,000 light years from earth, a distance far greater than the estimated diameter of the Milky Way. Further studies proved the Andromeda to be, in fact, a galaxy in itself. We now know the Andromeda Galaxy to be a sister of our own, larger, galaxy, part of the two dozen or so galaxies which make up The Local Group. It was no surprise to me—Qwfwq recalled—simply a case of history repeating itself. When Copernicus disproved Aristotle's theory of geocentricity, the reaction was the same. We always want to think we're in the centre and everything either revolves around us or is a part of us. Of course, you can understand the general feeling of shock when people heard this nebulous ball of stars we'd taken for granted was actually a galaxy only slightly smaller than our own! As it turned out, the Milky Way and the Andromeda are related in that we're in the same cluster of galaxies, but for so long the distance was completely misunderstood. 60 Bill Gaston Carp "Jhana," Max Betts said to his daughter, "I've just quit smoking, my head's a mess. I've had too many beers today jus' like your mother said. But my life is going to change. From now on it's going to be Japanese. Clean damn Japanese." Clean Japanese. Even when drunk, perhaps especially when drunk, Max Betts had a way with words that made a ten-year-old girl sit up and take notice, if not quite understand. He sat sprawled in his shredding chair, his dirty T-shirt riding up his paunch, his head twisting and nodding radically as he spoke. Because his daughter was blind, he didn't have to care about how he looked. In this regard at least, Jhana's mother—his estranged wife—couldn't berate him for setting a bad example. "Know what I mean, Jhana?" he said, got no answer, then let his head loll back. He spoke to the ceiling. "I need some clean lines, some clean black and white lines. Porcelain, some cold porcelain. Some fish in clear water. Do you remember seeing any Japanese art, Jhana? Straight lines. Japanese. My head's a mess, darling. Your father's head's a mess tonight." He paused for a moment, staring now at his daughter. "Can your mother bring you over again next week, dear?" "I don't know, Dad. She didn't say." Jhana's tone of voice wasn't lost on Max, drunk as he was. For the voice betrayed a secrecy, and an allegiance that had been shifting for two years now. Losing a wife had been quick, clean, violent, a gash that healed; losing a daughter was the hard part, for the knife was tortuously slow in its work. Jhana's mother appeared from the kitchen, her face red and her hands swollen. "Okay, Jhana," she said. Putting on her coat, not looking at her husband, she added, "I should congratulate you Max. The kitchen, again, was unbelievable. Anyway, two hours worth. My roof shakes have been delivered. When can you come? Before it rains, I hope." Their arrangement was such that, during visits with a shared daughter, she would clean his house and he would fix hers. Mother and daughter left and Max was sad, as usual. But glad too, 61 as usual, for now he could break out a bottle. He drank greedily. He had new purpose. In the hour of half-clarity left to him, he decided where in the room the Japanese prints would go, and where he would put the aquarium. It was New Year's Eve. Tomorrow would be 1960. The growing dissatisfaction had been gradual, but by 1959 Max discovered that he profoundly hated his life. He had just turned thirty- five. The past two years had seen his daughter go blind, his marriage break up. He had been fired for drunkenness on the job. He had been rehired, but even that seemed like more bad luck. Longshoreman's work was usually easy, but the men pretended it was always hard, if only to have an excuse to go nightly to the bar. But the marriage, Jhana, the job—those were the obvious horrors. They felt like symptoms of a life's disintegration in general. What Max abhorred most was the quality of his plodding days, the shit-awful hangovers, the packs of numbing cigarettes, the coming home from work filthy with ship rust and sawdust, home to find rooms filthier than he was. So easy, so necessary, to drink; so easy and necessary to shower and meet his friends at the bar where he could eat hotdogs and peanuts for dinner and drink such a life away. But 1959 was becoming 1960. New years were times to resolve; new decades that much better. He had been leafing through a magazine in a gas station bathroom, an arty magazine from New York. There was a pictorial on Beatniks, a cultural oddity that had begun to make quaint sense to the rich and idle in the east. Max was stricken by the pictures. He'd seen nothing like them. One showed an artist's studio, the high walls of which were bright white and unornamented. There were skylights. The only furnishings were two black cushions on the floor and an aquarium, holding two fish. The wood floor gleamed. Max, on the toilet, was dreadfully hungover. The article spoke of the recent influx of Japanese art and style, spawned largely by these Beatniks. There were pictures of Japanese prints: stark clean suns over simple geometric landscapes. A simple twig on which rested a severe black bird. A huge bare canvas of white with but two black slashes, representing leaves, in its upper right corner. Max was surprised by these pictures, by the mode of thought they advertised. He felt suddenly energetic, as if the bathroom stall had received a blast of oxygen. There were no Beatniks in Deep Cove, and none that he knew of in Vancouver. Max searched out the art shops and galleries, found little of interest, little that hinted at oxygen, but through these shops he placed orders to Toronto and to New York City itself. It was February of a new decade, and Max had some friends over after 62 the bar closed. They were stumbling drunk and wild, the kind of Monday night they hadn't seen much of since Male had gone back to England; Male, the mad Brit who claimed to write though no one cared, who in any case had no job to go to in the morning and so was the instigator of many impromptu parties. One summer Max and Male had decided to bury three years' worth of bottles in the backyard—the quantity of bottles hadn't been great, really, but because they'd stolen a backhoe to do the digging, the bottle burial story took on mythic proportions. So it was a Monday night of old. Max, though, was acting strangely. Though very drunk himself he seemed wary of a stack of boxes in the room's corner. He guided reeling friends away from them if they strayed too close. There's an aquarium in there, he said. And at one point in the party he ripped open a box, withdrew from it two black cushions, and suggested they take turns sitting on them. Just try it, he yelled, and no one could tell if he was making a joke, or slipping off into one of his occasional but lately more frequent bouts of weirdness. In the wee hours the party was on the verge of winding down but Max wound it down for good when he donned a long, navy blue kimono, stood facing a wall, held his head tight with his hands and moaned loudly to himself. The carp were beautiful. A rare and expensive breed, midnight black, about five inches long, and they graced the confines of their three-foot home by hanging perfectly motionless. At times, to Max's delight, they would dart this way and that for no apparent reason; surprising bursts, he liked to think, of glee. He did not name them. He had set the aquarium against the front room's largest wall, in the centre. The wall he'd painted bright white, but he'd run out of paint and the remaining three walls remained beige. In a fit of spontaneity Max took up a small brush and on the wall painted a black ring, eight feet in diameter, to frame the fish. At first he'd tried a small ceramic pagoda in the aquarium's right back corner. Its edges were too rounded, cartoonish; it looked tacky. In its place he planted a lone vermilion weed. He fed the carp leftovers. The man at the fish importer's (he'd been Japanese!) had said, "They'll eat anything, they're like goats." Max had felt vague disappointment at hearing this. Sometimes he fed them bits of steak, other times nightcrawlers he bought at the gas station where he'd found the magazine. While Max's wife was off somewhere scrubbing, Jhana was made to sit stiffly erect on a cushion across from her father. She didn't seem to mind. Max went great lengths describing the carp to her. Jhana seemed pleased. She told Max she'd gotten an 'A' in braille. 63 "Well that's just great dear," Max said. "Now I'll brag too. You notice how clean it is in here. The air I mean?" "Yes. You've quit smoking. I'm glad, Dad." Jhana's mother came in from her hour of work. She'd managed to finish only the kitchen. Removing rubber gloves, she surveyed the front room. All the furniture had been removed and stored in Jhana's old bedroom. In its bareness the room seemed huge. Max hoped his wife was noticing how much the room, shot with diagonal sunbeams that were filled with radiant floating dust, looked like one of Emily Carr's cedar forests. "Well this is a switch," Jhana's mother said. "It looks like you're taking care of one room at least." "It's a start," he said. "It's a style for the mind." Max picked a piece of lint from the shoulder of his kimono. He felt content. In fact he found himself fighting smugness. His wife was eyeing him oddly. No doubt she thought he had a new woman, and this was her work. That was fine, he'd let her think that. "My life's changing," he said to them at the door, after kissing his daughter. He smiled at his wife and then shrugged, as if in humility, as if to say that the change was now out of his hands. Max was going to the bar less. As a consequence he ate more at home, something he'd done rarely since the separation. In order to keep the front room perfect he'd moved the eating table to the kitchen where he'd been taking his meals until he decided it was ridiculously cramped. So the table came back to the front room. A minor flaw, he told himself. He tried hard to remember to always clear his dirty dishes off the table, and though he often forgot to do so he decided that he'd use dirty dishes as a sign that his life was, or was not, progressing as it should. Another flaw in perfection arose. The carp ate a lot, and so shit a lot. That was fine, Max thought. That was life, that was order. But the water, though he sometimes did manage to change it on schedule, grew quickly murky. When he phoned the fish importer he was told to purchase a placaustamus, a filtering fish (a "shit-eater," as the Japanese man put it, which made Max no longer like him). That day at a local pet shop he pronounced the name of the fish carefully, and was shown to a tank of dull brown, lethargic creatures clinging to the rocks and glass walls with obscene sucker-like mouths. Fat, soulless and stupid. Max knew he could never allow such a shit-eater in with his carp. He bought the best electric filter the shop had in stock. Once home, though, the filter proved noisy. He tried muffling the tinny whine with wads of cotton and electrician's tape, which only succeeded in changing the tone, not the volume. And the filter looked so awful with its dials, tubes and wires, clinging to the glass wall of art like 64 technology's metallic turd. He threw it out. He'd let the water take its course, going brown as the carp made it so. Then clean again, when he changed it. One into the other, a cycle like the tides, like day and night, perfectly natural. Max had ordered a book on Japanese philosophy and when it arrived he read some of it, closing it only when he saw there was indeed much to ponder. It spoke of the new style, the new way of thinking. He closed the book and gazed through the murk at his carp. Sleek, they hung like streaks of blackest ink. They mouthed the water so calmly, a slow rhythm of Os. Sometimes a tiniest bubble would appear on a lip, and the next closing of mouth would trip the bubble on its tiny way to the surface. So sharp, and yet so calm. Max decided they were mouthing the word Ohm. He woke sweating and shocked by the horrible dream. He got up to survey his front room and aquarium to ease himself before he tried to sleep again. The dream had been this: He was at his table, drunk and eating a steak dinner. He became angry at something, and tossed all his dishes and silverware into the air. Then he went to the bar, but none of his friends knew him. Later, it was days later, he saw that one of the carp was half-dead, with ribbons of flesh and guts trailing from its body. Before he could do anything, the other carp was eating the wounded one, greedily, stupidly, like a goat. He quickly began to change the water. By the time he got it drained only a skeleton remained of the first carp. It flipped pathetically on the sand. The other carp lay on the sand too—it was bloated fat and white and filled the entire aquarium. In the back corner, wedged in against the ceramic pagoda, Max's steak knife stood point-up; it was against this the dead carp had first impaled itself. When he woke in the morning, Max moved the eating table back to the kitchen, cleaning the front room of his nightmare and making it perfect again. The catalogue from which he'd ordered two striking, oxygen-emitting prints also had a section on Japanese erotic art. Max had seen nothing wrong in sending for a selection of them as well. They arrived individually wrapped in tissue and were oddly beautiful. The contorted positions, the grossly enlarged genitalia replete with crimson membranes, blue veins and delicately etched hairs might be taken for pornography by some, but Max understood that it depended on the artistic eye of the beholder. Sex could be simple and clean; it was a question of purity of mind. In fact, Max had deemed it necessary to introduce sex into his new lifestyle. It wasn't natural that he'd been without a woman for months. The book had said nothing about celibacy 65 being part of the stark Japanese way, and these pictures were a colourful hint that sex was indeed to be included. So one night Max brought a woman home from the bar. He had controlled himself, wasn't too drunk, and he wished she'd done the same. She was blonde and giddy-loud, and had small eyes and a big Germanic chin. He came out of the bathroom naked under his kimono. You're fast, she said, and giggled. He led her over to the aquarium. She couldn't see them for the murk, so Max brought a flashlight. In the beam they looked too grey and large, and huddled in the back. "Tell me what they're saying," Max said. She giggled and said he was crazy. But Max insisted. He was drinking whiskey now. "I know," she said at last, pleased with herself, "it's 'Oops'." Max spread a blanket. She asked why not the bedroom, and Max told her it had to be here. He brought out the pictures of Japanese erotic art and showed them to her. You're filthy, she said, but she giggled, shyly and excitedly. It was April, and Max had friends over. All were drunk, and Max especially so. He'd quit smoking again, it had gone a week this time, and tonight he'd thought it only right that since he denied himself tobacco he would let himself drink as much as he wanted. He'd become quickly drunk and by midnight was halfway through a pack of borrowed cigarettes. At first he felt guilty, and then not. For he wore his kimono, and stayed properly silent. Let his friends act like fools, he thought, let them yell and laugh like so many barfing dogs. He would keep his thoughts orderly and clean, and speak only when necessary. His friends were having a good time, he wouldn't stop them. Several women had followed them from the bar, and Max had moved the stereo back into the front room for dancing. He brought two chairs out to stand in front of the aquarium so no one would bump it. He hoped the fish wouldn't be scared by the music and laughter. As Max squeezed half the contents of a beef and bean burrito into the water for the fish to eat, he slopped some sauce down his kimono front. He was proud that he'd decided to clean the stain immediately. Dabbing at himself with a soapy cloth over the kitchen sink, Max saw how dirty he'd let the garment get. He said to himself: I'm slipping. But tomorrow meant a fresh start. Tomorrow he would buy some white paint and do the rest of the front room. He would polish the floor and hang the prints on the wall opposite the aquarium. But first of all he would change the water, which of late was so murky he would see the carp only rarely, when they came forward out of the miasma, gliding black ghosts, to nose the glass. Having decided all this, and feeling better, Max again decided that 66 tonight he would drink and smoke as much as he wanted. Ben Klaus had followed him into the kitchen. Ben seemed on a kind of mission, for on the edge of his thoughts Max had heard others in the front room urging Ben on. Go on, Ben, do it, he'd heard. "Hey Max boy," said Ben now, not smiling. Their shop steward at work, Ben was plump and red, and though he wasn't bright he was courageous in the bar, in fights, with women and on the job. Ben paused now, turned redder, smiled, then asked loudly and quickly: "Hey. Boy, you're actin sort of goof-off lately. So what the hell's the deal? Eh Maxie?" Max regarded him coolly, said nothing. Ben began to fidget, and his smile went stiff and quivered. "Prob'ly wife and kid stuff, eh? Well that's tough, that really is. Prob'ly no one's business but your own, and that's for sure. But, hey Max, you got some friends here...." Max stared at him. In truth he didn't know what to say, or how to say it. Things were wrong, but always had been. But now they were getting better. Was it his fault the man couldn't see that? So he just stared. Silence is the mind's cleanliness, he'd read, and believed. He took a large gulp from his whiskey bottle, winced, and now ignored Ben Klaus altogether. "Right then." Ben turned and left the kitchen, red now with quick anger. Max scanned the empty beer bottles on his counter, heard the thudding music. He thought of running and apologizing to Ben, to all of his friends, but decided not to. For he saw that, like dirt, his words would cloud the front room with cheap sentiment. He recalled with fondness his old pal Male, himself a master of silence. Though Male wrote page upon page by day, by night he knew how to drink and leave things perfectly unsaid. Growing suddenly drunker, Max watched the party disperse, at Ben's urging. Curious murmurs. Angry murmurs. Twenty minutes later the last were out the door, one the blonde German woman with her bra in her hand. Max reeled to the door, opened it and supported himself against the frame. Cars idled out on the dark street, and friends whispered about him from window to window. Overhead, stars swirled, hissed. Max screamed at all of it: "I'm inscrutable, like a chink!" In the morning Max was badly hungover. But he felt good about starting a day afresh. He snuffed out his cigarette, realizing he hadn't been aware of lighting one. He stood in front of the aquarium now. On a whim and smiling, he bowed to it. He began the job of changing the water, which was opaque, almost black. It had been weeks and weeks. Max was shocked to see how much the carp had grown. 67 Richard Stevenson Dwarf Fan Palm (Chamaerops humilus) Ask me! Ask me! the leaves seem to shout—as though these mad fronds were green hands waving for the favour of the botanist teacher's nod. Yes, Chamaerops, tell us about the pleasures of being green. Tell us what it means to be shot out of the cannon of a Chinese thousand-year-old-egg burial urn. To find yourselves like flares exploding—all fingers and palms — in Al Jolson gestures just before the end of your phylum's cracked curtain call. To come up green, leaves sharply creased, and wilt, drip grief like the letters of some spray-bombed line of graffiti on a subway or broken barrio wall. Tell the women—knees crossed on the Hepplewhite, drinking tea. The men feeding papyrus back into the historical grin of a leather briefcase. Tell us what the Chinese meant when they invented fireworks. How ontogeny fails to duplicate the implosion of grace that gutters on its own green stem. Then swallow this glass of water. Wave goodbye to the sun that drags its bleeding stump across the polished tiles. 68 Derek Robinson AB ALONE One side of the shell's dull earth Rugged as mammoth-skin, The inside's polished ice-light Tints of purple, cruel blue Under salt glaze. You hear nothing Of the sea's profound iridescence Who tilt the shell to your ear But the eyes dwell on its Rink of lucent rainbow For hours, until the mollusc Scooped out long ago by a gull Or dissolved by decay Begins to breathe again Its strange life of immersion In the quaking tide. You wonder, How old is it? What ocean did it come from? Could it have grown much larger? The shifting pink green map Of mother-of-pearl Dreams the toppled thunder Of hissing waves— The polar heart of the whirlpool Massing its hammers For a blow on the rock Where the shellfish clings In stubborn tenacity, A blob of albumen Under a hat of bone. 69 (Slowly, it crept Along a barnacled crevice Under writhing Trees of kelp To spend the night alone In a black sea-cave with an eel Or—who knows?—with Triton himself.) So much the eye, Sliding down the shell's Lacquered coasts of oil, Deciphers of it. 70 Karen Romell Death of a Duck Hunter You were surprised when the storm blew up and took your body-heat, your punt and oars, and spat its rude hisses of chill and oblivion. This is how life tilts over the earth's soft edge: your limp legs bandaged in galoshes caught you up in the muck and the brine, the too-crude marsh with its stinking pits, its decays sucked up like a fish, what could you do? All warmth was gone, the heat in your thin skin flew up and out like mist you were lost without it and flailed your canvas hat, your gun. 71 Now in the dark night's eye, the mud abyss, you think peace is whatever unfairness plucked you from knowing your nature, the innocent heart of you to stray with the rest of them, undone with the grasses and reeds and the clean calamity of rain till your white face bloats like a cloud, and you rise to take your place with the eyes of stupefied birds, monotony of tides and beating wings. 72 Katie Trumpener/Two Poems Getting into Shape In the dream I could paint the dead, even their voices. Under the sink the next day I found an old box of watercolours, sat down at the kitchen table to paint what I saw: apples, apricots, the calendar on the window sill. The room was full of more and more things, the peach grown out around its intricate pit, the smell of the peppers, matches standing in the matchbook in neat white lines. My patchwork coat was hung on a chair, crooked shapes of many colors, the sharp glare of pins, long uncut satin threads hanging down. Slivers of broken glass glinted up from the road to the swimming pool. My bicycle spokes cut a path through the air. My body, too, was becoming someone else's, inside the familiar bathing suit, all lines and planes, legs scissoring, arcing, closing behind me, hands reaching ahead to part the invisible, underneath the water where the light is always changing. 73 Small Song Under my hands you slowly become real, with each minute more distinct, a man emerging from water: the surface breaks and gradually your body comes clear Slowly my hands define you till I cannot be sure whether you are changing shape or if it is just my fingers suddenly able to feel 74 Barbara Carey/Two Poems Electricity No light could be left burning but you switched it off, filament ticking softly like a meter as it dimmed I would go from room to room setting the house ablaze with wastefulness while you trailed, hushing the lamps as if they were children, and afraid the respect you bore for the bare fact of a bulb, its blameless shine and my decided opposite — a calibration or what could be saved by darkness, or merely find a hiding place 75 One Explanation of the Universe scientists now suspect an exotic object is agitating at the centre of the Milky Way once my mother, exploring under my brother's bed discovered an exotic object from the back pages of Penthouse a system of ropes and pulleys working on the same principle of silken friction and curiosity at the heart of every agitation there is probably an exotic object zeroing in on us like the needle of a Geiger counter, making us lonely for what we can't explain 76 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Elizabeth Abraham lives in Victoria where she is completing a degree in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. This is her first publication. Benny Andersen is a popular Danish poet and songwriter; "Knowledge" is from his book The Inner Bowler Hat. Barbara Carey lives in Toronto. Lorna Crozier is well-known to readers of Canadian poetry. "Fear of Snakes" won second prize in PRISM's poetry contest. Her latest book is The Garden Going On Without Us (M&S, 1986). Robert Eady's collection of prose poems, The Blame Business, was published by Ouroborous Press in 1985. He is working on another collection entitled The Delegation From Hell. H. E. Francis is a professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His stories have appeared in the 0. Henry, Best American, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Bill Gaston's "Carp" is part of his collection Deep Cove Stories, as was "Gold", which appeared in PRISM 23:4; other stories from the series have appeared in Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine. Leona Gom is the author of six books, the most recent of which are a novel, House- broken (NeWest, 1986), and a collection of poems, Appropriate Behaviour (Sono Nis, 1986). Ralph Gustafson's selected poems, The Moment Is All, have recently been published by M&S. Twelve Landscapes, a limited edition of his poems, was published by Shaw Street Press in 1985. Inge Israel has published two collections of her poetry in France and contributes regularly to several Canadian literary magazines. Her translation of Benny Andersen's poem "Knowledge" from the Danish won the translation prize in PRISM's poetry contest. Dayv James-French, when not writing, "hosts amusing cocktail parties to which others are sometimes invited". Three of his stories are forthcoming in the Oberon Press anthology Coming Attractions Four. Jascha Kessler's translations and fiction have appeared in PRISM many times before. He has recently completed a major translation project: The Face of Creation: 25 Contemporary Hungarian Poets. Maria Korosy collaborated with Jascha Kessler on The Face of Creation. She is a native of Budapest, Hungary. Terry Krysak studied at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary. Primarily a water- colourist, he now lives in Vancouver. 77 Roger Nash won first prize for "Night Flying" in PRISM's poetry contest. His second collection of poems, Psalms for the Suburbs, will be published by Quarry Press in 1986. Imre Oravecz is a young Hungarian poet with several books to his credit. Derek Robinson has published two chapbooks and is now working on another collection. "Abalone" recieved an honourable mention in PRISM's poetry contest. Karen Romell is a Vancouver poet whose work has appeared in Descant and Women and Words Anthology. Norberto Luis Romero is a young Argentinian writer whose book Transgresiones won the Noega Prize for short fiction in Madrid, Spain. Robyn Sarah's "Point of Departure" received an honourable mention in PRISM's poetry contest. Her latest book is Anyone Skating On That Middle Ground (Vehicule, 1984). Libby Scheier won third prize in PRISM's poetry contest for "The Nipple". Her second book of poems, Second Nature is forthcoming from Coach House Press in 1986. Richard Stevenson's "Dwarf Fan Palm" was another honourable mention in PRISM's poetry contest. Stevenson is the author of two poetry collections: Driving Offensively (Sono Nis, 1985) and Suiting Up (Third Eye, forthcoming). Katie Trumpener is working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in NeWest Review, Malahat Review, and other journals. Michael Warren's poetry has been published in several English and Canadian journals. He has also won prizes awarded by Poetry Toronto, Origins, and Cross-Canada Writer's Quarterly. Sandor Weores, now in his seventies, is one of Hungary's finest poets. Other translations of his poems appeared in PRISM 23:3. 78 PRISM international Deadline Dec 1,1986 SHORT $IOOO IstPRIZE $500 2ndPRIZE $250 3rdPRIZE + publication payment For entry form and rules,please send a S.A.S.E. to FICTION CONTEST PRISM International Departmentof Creative Writing University of British Columbia E466-1866MainMall Vancouver B.C. V6T1W5 All entries must be accompanied by $5.00 for each story submitted, plus a $10.00 entry fee. ALL ENTRANTS WILL RECEIVE A ONE-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION (4 issues) to PRISM international. CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS WILL RECEIVE A ONE-YEAR EXTENSION TO THEIR SUBSCRIPTION. There is no limit to the number of stories entered; the entry fee is paid only once. Works of translation are eligible. Judging will be done by the PRISM editorial board with an established short fiction writer as final judge. Results will be announced early in 1987. A winner's list will be supplied upon request; please enclose a separate SASE. DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: DECEMBER 1, 1986 This competition is made possible by the continued support of The Canada Council. 80 IN THIS ISSUE Winners of our poetry contest: Roger Nash, Linda Crozier, Libby Scheier, Benny Andersen and Inge Israel. . . Poems by: Robyn Sarah, Leona Gom, Ralph Gustafson. .. Fiction by: Dayv fames-French, Elizabeth Abraham, Bill Gaston. In Translation: Norberto Luis Romero, Imre Oravecz, Sdndor Webres. IN OUR NEXT ISSUE More of the best in national and international contemporary writing. BACK ISSUES Tennessee Williams 19:3; Contemporary West African Writing 22:4; A Selection of Writing from the Prairies 24:3. $3.50 ISSN OO32.879O