HUMALIT READINGS

Prof. Timothy R. Montes

2016

Numbers correspond 01-45 correspond to the soft/digital copy of the selections. Please download/copy or print
from your class online group.

I. THE SEARCH FOR SELF

A. PERSONAL REMINISCENCES / THE LANGUAGE OF MEMORY

Ian Frazier, “Hometown” (essay) 01
Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory” (story) 02
Gregorio C. Brillantes, “The Light and the Shadow of Leaves” (story) 03
Rene Estella Amper, “Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, Also Called Pete” (poem) 04
Edith Tiempo, “Bonsai” (poem) 05

Film Showing: Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornattore, director [Italian] 1988

Sample Reaction/Reflection Paper: “Paradise Lost” by Seneca Pellano (BACA) 5a

B. INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

William Stafford, “Fifteen” (poem) 06
Myrna Peǹa Reyes, “The River Singing Stone” (poem) 07
William Trevor, “The Wedding in the Garden” (story) 08
David Benioff, “The Affairs of Each Beast” (story) 09
Film Showing:

II. PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

A. PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Dave Barry, “Sophie, Stella and the Bieber Plan” (essay) 10a
Joyce Maynard, “Four Generations” (essay) 10b
Myrna Pena Reyes, “Breaking Through” (poem) 11
Alfred Yuson, “Dream of Knives” (poem) 12
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” (poem) 13
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (poem) 14
Jayne Anne Phillips, “The Heavenly Animal” (story) 15
Film Showing:

B. MEN AND WOMEN: Love, Passion & Desire

A Casebook of Love Poems
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?” 16
e.e. cummings, “somewhere i have never travelled” 17
Wislawa Szymborska, “True Love” 18
Carlos Angeles, “Landscape II” 19
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love is Not All” 20
Bryn Terfel sings “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (audio)
Negotiating Relationships:

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 F. Sionil Jose, “Tong” (story) 21
Anton Chekhov, “The Boor” (drama) 22
Jhoanna Cruz Daliling, “Sapay Koma” (essay) 23
Film Showing:

III. ART, BEAUTY AND LIFE: Fantasy vs. Reality

Robert Frost, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (poem) 24
Charles Johnson, “Moving Pictures” (story) 25
Archibald McLeish, “Ars Poetica” 26
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts” (poem) 27
Mario Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” (essay) 28
Film Showing:

IV. SELF AND SOCIETY: WAR AND ISSUES OF LOYALTY

Thomas Hardy, “The Man He Killed” (poem) 29
Henry Reed, “The Naming of Parts” (poem) 30
Jaime An Lim, “On the Eve of the Execution” 31
Guy de Maupassant, “La Mer Sauvage” (Mother Sauvage) 32
Tim O’Brien, “On the Rainy River” (story) 33
William Manchester, “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All” 34
Film Showing:

V. THE LONG VIEW: CHANCE, FATE& DESTINY

William Butler Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” (poem) 35
Justin Cronin, “My Daughter and God” (essay) 36a
Roger Angell, “This Old Man” (essay) 36b
Somerset Maugham, “Appointment in Samarra” 37
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (poem) 38
Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science” 39
Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot” 40
Film Showing:

NOVELS TO CHOOSE FROM FOR THE FINAL PAPER:

1. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (about women/sisters) EPUB 42
2. Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman (gay novel/Love story) EPUB 43
3. Aura by Carlos Fuentes (men/horror) epub 44
4. Tree by F. Sionil Jose (from Don Vicente: Two Novels) EPUB 45 (Philippine social problems)

MODUS: for thematic discussion and activities

1. Students are expected to READ the assigned selections under each particular theme/topic.
2. The teacher usually gives a check-up objective quiz on the assigned readings before discussing them. No
make-up for missed quizzes. Come promptly if you do not want to miss it.
3. The teacher then gives a lecture to synthesize the ideas from the different selections. He focuses, for
reasons of time, on the poems for analysis.

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 4. A film related to the theme is screened in the subsequent meeting/s.
5. After the screening, the student submits a 1-2 page reflection essay on the film. For a model paper, see
Seneca Pellano’s “Paradiso” 5a

GRADING:
1. Quizzes – 20%
2. Reflection Essays – 40%
3. Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and/or Final Paper on the Novel – 20%
4. Midterm/Final Exams – 20%

N.B. Please be reminded of the policy on absences as stipulated in the student handbook.

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[In the following essay excerpt, Ian Frazier decides to visit Hudson, the town where he grew up.
While driving the town streets at night, he is assaulted by memories that he attaches to each house
he passes by, of small-town characters who lived in them, including that of his own dead parents
and brother.]

HOMETOWN

Ian Frazier

(from The Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1994)

In high school and after, my friends and I drove around in cars a lot. On a summer evening I
would sit on my front stoop waiting for Jimmy or Kent to come by and pick up some other kids, and
ride for hours around Hudson, to neighboring towns, to Cleveland, to the highway sprawl north of
Akron, to shopping malls, to dirt roads in the country, to houses of kids whose parents we knew
weren’t home. One night we put 300 miles on Jimmy’s (father’s) Cougar. Many people in town
recognized us by sight, and sometimes when we waved, an adult would look back at us in the big
car not our own with an expression of helpless exasperation. We always listened to the car radio,
which we called “listening to tunes.” I still use that expression today. We called driving around
“cruising”: cruising and listening to tunes. Sometimes, when the song on the radio was right and the
place in the road and the color of the sky and the smell of the cigarette smoke of the girl sitting next
to me all came together in a certain way I would feel an emotion that was a mile wide but that
turned out later to be an inch deep.

Hudson is about an eleven-hour drive from Brooklyn, where I live now. If I leave home in
the morning, I get there at dusk or dark. I stop again at Merino’s Beer & Wine and talk to Rich or
sometimes to his customers. (Charlie, a plumber who has lived in Hudson for years, says, “This
used to be a nice town, but the real-estate companies ruined it, puttin’ up all these half-million-
dollar houses on half acres of property. I don’t even drive to Route 91 no more, the traffic’s so bad.
Used to be, downtown was a hardware store, a clothing store, a feed store, a grocery store.
Nowadays, when you go downtown, what’re you gonna buy? A house! That’s all you can buy.”)
Then I walk across the street to the town green, by the old town hall, where my mother used to
direct plays and my family used to act in plays. I stand in the dark and drink beer and watch the
traffic jam sort itself out, and I dance around a little bit, and I say “Baby, I’m going to witch you. I’m
going to woo you! Baby, I’m going to kiss you awake!” I used to walk in Hudson at night sometimes
and feel like every front lawn was my own front lawn and every grown-up was my father or mother
and every girl was my girlfriend and I could sleep on any porch and open any door without

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knocking. Now I stand in the dark by the traffic jam in the town I no longer know and an emotion
comes over me and I say, “Baby, I am your heart!”

After a while I walk to the Reserve Inn and have a good dinner for the price of a cab ride in
New York. I get in the car and go to a motel by the turnpike and register. I lie on the bed and watch
TV or talk on the phone until the traffic has eased up. By this time it is usually pretty late. Then I go
for a drive, to the places we used to, in Hudson and beyond. Like me, most of the people I knew
have moved away. Almost no one lives in the same house as when I was a kid. I look at the houses,
and I think:

She was in my fifth-grade class, and one winter day I was walking home without any gloves
on and she saw me, put on gloves, came out her side door, knocked me down, and washed my face
with snow. She grew up to be smart and shy.

He moved to Washington D.C., and got a job at the Pentagon doing research for a colonel
who holds the world’s record for sit-ups.

I danced with her at the Episcopal church square dance one night and liked her a lot. Her
mother liked me but she didn’t. She later became a hippie and went with older guys and got
pregnant or something.

She and I and some other kids ran in the smoke and flames when the farmers were burning
off their pastures along Middleton Road in early spring, and later we roughhoused and I pinned her
to her front lawn under my sooty knees. She inherited a restaurant in Spain.

She was the prettiest girl in town in 1967. She died in a building collapse in New York City.

Taking the SAT tests for college, he got so nervous that he chewed the buttons off both his
shirt cuffs. His mother had no hair and wore a wig and penciled on her eyebrows. They moved
away.

She wore cutoff blue jeans so short you could see the white ends of the pants pockets
underneath. She became a jeweler and married a jeweler.

A friend and I once called him a hood, and he and another guy caught us and slammed us
together, knocking me unconscious. He became a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps and died in
Vietnam.

He--- the kid I was slammed against--- married a popular daytime-television star. I follow
his family’s progress in the soap-opera fan magazines.

She stood by the lockers outside the cafeteria at a high school dance, her hips cocked like a
fist.

She wore white knee-high vinyl boots the time we sat on the hood of a car in the parking lot
behind the academy football field and watched the northern lights. She moved to New York and
became an actor and appeared as a mom in a cough-syrup commercial on TV.

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 She sat on her front porch on hot afternoons reading, holding her long hair up off the back
of her neck with one hand. When we went out together, she decided she didn’t like me, because I
was such a drip around her friends. She told me, “This is what you do--- you stand.”

He once hitchhiked from Hudson to Boston barefoot.

She wore blue jeans so tight that the seam had separated at the hip joint on one side. A
friend of mine who went with her said that sometimes she made his brain so inflamed he could look
up and see his forehead. She works for an advertising company out west somewhere.

She liked horses, and looked kind of like a horse, and we used to whinny at her. She got a
fatal illness in her twenties.

Her grandmother was my piano teacher, and her parents had sent her to Hudson to get over
her boyfriend. One day I was sitting in the parlor waiting for my piano lesson, and she was upstairs
singing “It’s in His Kiss” as loud as she could, and the mailman came and went at the front door, and
she ran downstairs singing to get the mail, and she was wearing nothing but glasses and bikini
underpants, and my piano teacher appeared and screamed, “Renee, there’s a boy here!” and Renee
stopped and looked right at me for a long moment and I looked at her, and then she turned and
went back upstairs.

The stripes on the seat of her bathing suit, like longitude lines on a globe. That tight Mickey
Mouse T-shirt.

She and I used to sit on the grass and talk and smoke cigarettes and pick the vein structures
from broad-leaved weeds.

One summer at the ice-cream social she slid her bare arm to hold my hand. She married a
man named (can this be right?) Bill Shrunk.

I kissed her holding her against the chain-link fence behind the elementary school. She
became a therapeutic masseuse in New York, with her own portable table and towels.

He was a short, skinny kid, and he always said his ambition was to beat up his dad. In high
school he went on a special diet and began to work out, and he grew to the size of a mailbox, and
people said that then he actually did beat up his dad.

He teased me and I got two big kids to hold him and I slugged him in the stomach. His
teacher came to my classroom and complained, but I was in so good with my teacher that nothing
happened. He later became a tour guide in Hawaii.

He was the most talented kid in town. I admired and envied him. He could act, sing, play
guitar, draw, play basketball and baseball. He was funny and had straight brown hair he could
easily fling back from his face. I remember riding with him in his Mustang and discussing the new
TV series Batman. He killed himself, people said for love of an older woman he met during a
production at the local little theater.

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 She teased me and another kid for being nerds. She married a man not from Hudson who
became obsessed with the town and collected its stories and personalities like baseball cards and
now probably knows more about it than anyone.

He and his friends used to hang out on the village green so much that Hudson store owners
complained. He founded a successful punk band and changed his name to something like Flash Pop.

She put her tan bare feet with coral-painted toenails on the dashboard and bumped her
heels in time to the radio. She got sick from something she sprayed on trees while working for a
landscaping company and moved to Atlanta and moved to Buffalo and got married.

He used to say he had drunk so much beer he could piss a pound of foam.

He marked up a friend of mine with Magic Marker for giving him the finger.

When we were little, we used to make fun of him, basically because his family was poor.
The yard of his house was so full of iron junk it appeared to be magnetized. He got into trouble for
stealing returnable bottles from a neighbor’s garage. Years later I ran into him with his wife and
baby in town, and he said he had joined the circus.

To her senior prom she wore a gown made of dyed bedsheets. She became a newscaster in
Florida and shot herself to death on live television.

She sat by the hockey pond on a still night and dangled her feet in the water, and a while
later the ripples made the streetlight on the opposite side of the pond waver. She pushed me into
the pond and thought that was hysterically funny. I thought it was funny too. She moved away.

He used to pick me up when I was hitchhiking, and even though he was almost at his house,
he would give me a ride all the way to my house. He became an Episcopal priest.

She was a dental hygienist, and we flirted so much while she was cleaning my teeth that the
dentist yelled at us. She married a guy named Steve and divorced him and married another guy
named Steve.

When she was about eight years old, she took off all her clothes and tried to slide down a
laundry chute and got stuck and called for help and wouldn’t let her stepbrother pull her out,
because then he’d see her without any clothes on. She married a man who made a lot of money
doing computer graphics for TV, and now she does computer graphics too.

She and I went to a golf course late one night and took off our shoes and ran across the
fairway, and the moon was so bright that when we looked back, we could see our footprints far
behind us in the dew. She liked me, but I didn’t know it, and I liked her, but I didn’t know it. I was
always saying upsetting and competitive things to her. She went to college and became a museum
curator and moved to California and married the son of the discoverer of a polio vaccine.

By this time I am singing along with the radio and rocking back and forth in the seat and
hitting the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. Here and there I see the blue glow of a TV

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through a window; most people in Hudson are in bed. I coast down Oviatt Street and pause in front
of 80 North Oviatt. Her locker was near mine in sixth grade, and one day I asked her for her
telephone number, and she said she didn’t know it, and I said, “You must be pretty dumb not to
know your own telephone number.” Her family had just moved to town, which was why she didn’t.
At a dance at the high school in eighth grade I asked her if she would sneak out of her house later
and climb the town water tower with me, and she said yes, and I went home and snuck out of my
bedroom and walked back to town and threw pebbles at that window, the one above the door to the
right, but she didn’t wake up, so I climbed the water tower by myself. The summer after tenth
grade I saw her at a dance talking to a guy I believed I was cooler than, and I started talking to her,
and the guy disappeared, and I walked her to her house, and we talked some more. I started to
come around her house in the evenings. My dad let me drive his Corvair. Everybody said I would
have a girlfriend as soon as I got my driver’s license, and they were right. I got my license on July 6,
and she and I started going together July 19. That evening I drove by her house and her little
brother saw me and ran inside, and then she came out. She had told him to sit out front and watch
for me. In the glove compartment I had some cigars that belonged to a friend, and I asked her if she
wanted to walk with me to his house to return them. We went via the playing fields and the open
fields behind the high school. On our way back I took her hand. She was wearing a kind of loose
madras dress with a tear in the side. It was just past sunset. I heard voices and I said, “Is that
somebody coming?” We stopped and looked across the fields and she said she didn’t think so. I
said, “In that case---“ and turned and kissed her. Her head turned quickly to me and her hair swung
between us and her tongue pushed into my mouth through strands of hair. She pushed her hair
back behind her ear and we kissed again. We saw each other every day we could for the rest of the
summer. At night we used to say we were going for a walk and then we would lie down in the long
grass behind the garage where her father never mowed. We stayed together all the next school
year, broke up in the spring, and continued breaking up and getting back together for about nine
years. She was engaged to marry someone else in college, returned to town, and got back with me.
Finally, after a lot more happened, she married my friend Kent. They had two kids and moved to
Boulder, Colorado, and divorced. She lives in Boulder and is a licensed nurse. Her name then was
Susie. It became Susan.

I turn right on Aurora Street, heading toward our old house. My father never liked her.
Maybe he was afraid I would marry too young and get stuck in Hudson; I know he thought he was
stuck in Hudson himself. The speed limit on Aurora Street, from the clock tower all the way to the
town line, has been 25 mph for as long as I can remember. My father never drove one mile an hour
over the speed limit on this street. He maintained an unvarying 25 the whole way, both hands on
the steering wheel, both eyes on the road, never a glance at the would-be speeders cooling their
heels behind him. It made no difference how late we were for something, how much in a hurry I
was. People in town dreaded the sight of his car up ahead when they turned onto Aurora. At night,
if one of the streetlights happened to be out, he would slow down while passing underneath it.
Naturally, when I began to drive, I drove much faster, and got a speeding ticket on Aurora Street,
and wrecked a car he was fond of when I missed a turn and rolled twice and ended up in a ditch by
the Little League baseball field. Nobody got hurt (Susie was with me) and he had the car fixed, but
it was never the same. The rear suspension was shot. Now I usually don’t like to drive fast myself,
and I annoy other drivers by poking along. Tonight I drive 25 or slower out Aurora.

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 I continue to Stow Road, and up the hill to Woodbridge Road. The corner of Stowe and
Woodbridge is where I rolled the car. When I ran home and told my father what I’d done, he went
into his room and cried. But once the car had been towed back to our house and he was checking
the engine for damage, he cheered right up; he always liked a good technical problem. I turn onto
our street and creep up it so slowly that if anybody is watching at this hour, they will wonder what I
am doing. Our house looks like a mansion to me now. The driveway is paved--- ours was gravel---
and the landscaping more elaborate, with shrubs and plantings and a lawn trimmed at the edges.
We never trimmed the lawn. When we first moved in, we didn’t even have a lawn. My father
thought it would be better to plant rye grass. We had a field of four-foot-high rye in front of our
house for a year or more. My father used to cut it with a scythe. Somebody is probably asleep in a
bed in my old room. I could just pull into the drive and go through the side door, up the stairs into
my room, into the bed. My father was so glad to move from this house. He took the buyer all over it
and cheerfully pointed out everything that didn’t work or needed repair. The buyer began fixing
the place up before we’d even moved, and he quickly sold it for more than he had paid. My father
used to paint the outside of the house every few years; he dug up the septic tank and the leach bed
from time to time; he fooled with the driveway and the furnace and the pump and the washing
machine. My mother was less sure about moving. She wanted what he wanted.

The truth is, being in Hudson often fills me with anxiety. Feelings rise up, an internal
tantrum of them. Sometimes memories cause me one long, unrelieved wince after the next. I
remember getting into the car to drive home from the hospital after my brother Fritz died of
leukemia. My mother sat in front and we kids in back, our number now permanently reduced by
one, and my father, in the driver’s seat, took his leather gloves from under the visor and put them
on, carefully pulling each finger to. I thought it was remarkable that he could do that after his son
had just died. He bought Fritz a plot in Markillie Cemetery, in Hudson, and at the same time bought
two plots adjoining it. Why two? Why not six, or none? Maybe he couldn’t bear to think of his son
there alone without some of us to keep him company. Maybe he knew that the end of Fritz’s life
meant in some way the end of his, and of my mother’s.

Now I am ready to go back to the motel. I choose a route from our old house that leads past
the cemetery. I don’t look to the right or left; I am fast-forwarding through Hudson. A song that I
like comes on the radio, and I turn it up so loud that the sound vibrates the dash and distorts in my
ears and fits around me like armor. I am roaring and hollering, on general principles, but I can
hardly hear myself. I come down Route 91, streetlights flickering through the windshield, and the
cemetery approaches on the right. The gates are locked. People have built houses all around the
grounds, and backyard decks now overlook the graves. As I drive by, I shout out to my parents and
my brother. ♣

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 A Christmas Memory
by Truman Capote

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years
ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove
is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking
chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis
shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and
sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully
hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun
and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid.
"Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!"

The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are
cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember.
Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and
frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each
other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best
friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child.

"I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a
purposeful excitement in her eyes. "The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And
there were no birds singing; they've gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop
stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We've thirty cakes to bake."

It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially
inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze
of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."

The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it
once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated
baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The buggy is mine; that is,
it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the
wheels wobble like a drunkard's legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to
the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we
pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge
of a creek; it has its winter uses, too: as a truck for hauling firewood from the yard to the
kitchen, as a warm bed for Queenie, our tough little orange and white rat terrier who has
survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites. Queenie is trotting beside it now.

Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall

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pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop
having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard's owners, who are not us) among
the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of
miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory
meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend
sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. "We mustn't, Buddy. If we start,
we won't stop. And there's scarcely enough as there is. For thirty cakes." The kitchen is
growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising
moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we
toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is
empty, the bowl is brimful.

We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow
the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and
canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much
flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we'll need a pony to pull the buggy
home.

But before these Purchases can be made, there is the question of money. Neither of us has
any. Except for skin-flint sums persons in the house occasionally provide (a dime is
considered very big money); or what we earn ourselves from various activities: holding
rummage sales, selling buckets of hand-picked blackberries, jars of home-made jam and
apple jelly and peach preserves, rounding up flowers for funerals and weddings. Once we
won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not that we know a
fool thing about football. It's just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment
our hopes are centered on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a
new brand of coffee (we suggested "A.M."; and, after some hesitation, for my friend
thought it perhaps sacrilegious, the slogan "A.M.! Amen!"). To tell the truth, our only
really profitable enterprise was the Fun and Freak Museum we conducted in a back-yard
woodshed two summers ago. The Fun was a stereopticon with slide views of Washington
and New York lent us by a relative who had been to those places (she was furious when
she discovered why we'd borrowed it); the Freak was a three-legged biddy chicken hatched
by one of our own hens. Every body hereabouts wanted to see that biddy: we charged
grown ups a nickel, kids two cents. And took in a good twenty dollars before the museum
shut down due to the decease of the main attraction.

But one way and another we do each year accumulate Christmas savings, a Fruitcake
Fund. These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient bead purse under a loose board under
the floor under a chamber pot under my friend's bed. The purse is seldom removed from
this safe location except to make a deposit or, as happens every Saturday, a withdrawal; for
on Saturdays I am allowed ten cents to go to the picture show. My friend has never been to
a picture show, nor does she intend to: "I'd rather hear you tell the story, Buddy. That way
I can imagine it more. Besides, a person my age shouldn't squander their eyes. When the
Lord comes, let me see him clear." In addition to never having seen a movie, she has
never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a
telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished

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someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Here are a few things she
has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county
(sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on
her finger, tell ghost stories (we both believe in ghosts) so tingling they chill you in July,
talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe
for every sort of oldtime Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.

Now, with supper finished, we retire to the room in a faraway part of the house where my
friend sleeps in a scrap-quilt-covered iron bed painted rose pink, her favorite color.
Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, we take the bead purse from its secret
place and spill its contents on the scrap quilt. Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May
buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man's eyes. Lovely dimes,
the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek
pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the
house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of
August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride. And, as
we sit counting pennies, it is as though we were back tabulating dead flies. Neither of us
has a head for figures; we count slowly, lose track, start again. According to her
calculations, we have $12.73. According to mine, exactly $13. "I do hope you're wrong,
Buddy. We can't mess around with thirteen. The cakes will fall. Or put somebody in the
cemetery. Why, I wouldn't dream of getting out of bed on the thirteenth." This is true: she
always spends thirteenths in bed. So, to be on the safe side, we subtract a penny and toss it
out the window.

Of the ingredients that go into our fruitcakes, whiskey is the most expensive, as well as the
hardest to obtain: State laws forbid its sale. But everybody knows you can buy a bottle
from Mr. Haha Jones. And the next day, having completed our more prosaic shopping, we
set out for Mr. Haha's business address, a "sinful" (to quote public opinion) fish-fry and
dancing cafe down by the river. We've been there before, and on the same errand; but in
previous years our dealings have been with Haha's wife, an iodine-dark Indian woman with
brassy peroxided hair and a dead-tired disposition. Actually, we've never laid eyes on her
husband, though we've heard that he's an Indian too. A giant with razor scars across his
cheeks. They call him Haha because he's so gloomy, a man who never laughs. As we
approach his cafe (a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish-gay
naked light bulbs and standing by the river's muddy edge under the shade of river trees
where moss drifts through the branches like gray mist) our steps slow down. Even Queenie
stops prancing and sticks close by. People have been murdered in Haha's cafe. Cut to
pieces. Hit on the head. There's a case coming up in court next month. Naturally these
goings-on happen at night when the colored lights cast crazy patterns and the Victrolah
wails. In the daytime Haha's is shabby and deserted. I knock at the door, Queenie barks,
my friend calls: "Mrs. Haha, ma'am? Anyone to home?"

Footsteps. The door opens. Our hearts overturn. It's Mr. Haha Jones himself! And he is a
giant; he does have scars; he doesn't smile. No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes
and demands to know: "What you want with Haha?"

12
For a moment we are too paralyzed to tell. Presently my friend half-finds her voice, a
whispery voice at best: "If you please, Mr. Haha, we'd like a quart of your finest whiskey."

His eyes tilt more. Would you believe it? Haha is smiling! Laughing, too. "Which one of
you is a drinkin' man?"

"It's for making fruitcakes, Mr. Haha. Cooking. "

This sobers him. He frowns. "That's no way to waste good whiskey." Nevertheless, he
retreats into the shadowed cafe and seconds later appears carrying a bottle of daisy-yellow
unlabeled liquor. He demonstrates its sparkle in the sunlight and says: "Two dollars."

We pay him with nickels and dimes and pennies. Suddenly, as he jangles the coins in his
hand like a fistful of dice, his face softens. "Tell you what," he proposes, pouring the
money back into our bead purse, "just send me one of them fruitcakes instead."

"Well," my friend remarks on our way home, "there's a lovely man. We'll put an extra cup
of raisins in his cake."

The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters
whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger
spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to
the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes,
dampened with whiskey, bask on windowsills and shelves.

Who are they for?

Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons
we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President
Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who
lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year.
Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves
with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California
couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant
hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one
we've ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that
these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also,
the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time
communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us
feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.

Now a nude December fig branch grates against the window. The kitchen is empty, the
cakes are gone; yesterday we carted the last of them to the post office, where the cost of
stamps turned our purse inside out. We're broke. That rather depresses me, but my friend
insists on celebrating—with two inches of whiskey left in Haha's bottle. Queenie has a
spoonful in a bowl of coffee (she likes her coffee chicory-flavored and strong). The rest we

13
divide between a pair of jelly glasses. We're both quite awed at the prospect of drinking
straight whiskey; the taste of it brings screwedup expressions and sour shudders. But by
and by we begin to sing, the two of us singing different songs simultaneously. I don't know
the words to mine, just: Come on along, come on along, to the dark-town strutters' ball.
But I can dance: that's what I mean to be, a tap dancer in the movies. My dancing shadow
rollicks on the walls; our voices rock the chinaware; we giggle: as if unseen hands were
tickling us. Queenie rolls on her back, her paws plow the air, something like a grin
stretches her black lips. Inside myself, I feel warm and sparky as those crumbling logs,
carefree as the wind in the chimney. My friend waltzes round the stove, the hem of her
poor calico skirt pinched between her fingers as though it were a party dress: Show me the
way to go home, she sings, her tennis shoes squeaking on the floor. Show me the way to go
home.

Enter: two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald. Listen to
what they have to say, the words tumbling together into a wrathful tune: "A child of seven!
whiskey on his breath! are you out of your mind? feeding a child of seven! must be loony!
road to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Uncle Charlie? Uncle Charlie's brother-inlaw?
shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!"

Queenie sneaks under the stove. My friend gazes at her shoes, her chin quivers, she lifts
her skirt and blows her nose and runs to her room. Long after the town has gone to sleep
and the house is silent except for the chimings of clocks and the sputter of fading fires, she
is weeping into a pillow already as wet as a widow's handkerchief.

"Don't cry," I say, sitting at the bottom of her bed and shivering despite my flannel
nightgown that smells of last winter's cough syrup, "Don't cry," I beg, teasing her toes,
tickling her feet, "you're too old for that."

"It's because," she hiccups, "I am too old. Old and funny."

"Not funny. Fun. More fun than anybody. Listen. If you don't stop crying you'll be so tired
tomorrow we can't go cut a tree."

She straightens up. Queenie jumps on the bed (where Queenie is not allowed) to lick her
cheeks. "I know where we'll find real pretty trees, Buddy. And holly, too. With berries big
as your eyes. It's way off in the woods. Farther than we've ever been. Papa used to bring us
Christmas trees from there: carry them on his shoulder. That's fifty years ago. Well, now: I
can't wait for morning."

Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-
weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild
turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep,
rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first,
paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making
coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack)
above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burrs and briers that catch at our

14
clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there,
a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south.
Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitchblack vine tunnels. Another
creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs
the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther
shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but
enthusiasm. One of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the
pine-heavy air. "We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy'" she says, as though we were
approaching an ocean.

And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red
berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them screaming. Having stuffed
our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set
about choosing a tree. "It should be," muses my friend, "twice as tall as a boy. So a boy
can't steal the star." The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that
survives thirty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a
kill, we commence the long trek out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down
and pant. But we have the strength of triumphant huntsmen; that and the tree's virile, icy
perfume revive us, goad us on. Many compliments accompany our sunset return along the
red clay road to town; but my friend is sly and noncommittal when passers-by praise the
treasure perched in our buggy: what a fine tree, and where did it come from?
"Yonderways," she murmurs vaguely. Once a car stops, and the rich mill owner's lazy wife
leans out and whines: "Giveya two-bits" cash for that ol tree." Ordinarily my friend is
afraid of saying no; but on this occasion she promptly shakes her head: "We wouldn't take
a dollar." The mill owner's wife persists. "A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That's my last
offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one." In answer, my friend gently reflects: "I
doubt it. There's never two of anything."

Home: Queenie slumps by the fire and sleeps till tomorrow, snoring loud as a human.

A trunk in the attic contains: a shoebox of ermine tails (off the opera cape of a curious lady
who once rented a room in the house), coils of frazzled tinsel gone gold with age, one
silver star, a brief rope of dilapidated, undoubtedly dangerous candylike light bulbs.
Excellent decorations, as far as they go, which isn't far enough: my friend wants our tree to
blaze "like a Baptist window," droop with weighty snows of ornament. But we can't afford
the made-in-Japan splendors at the five-and-dime. So we do what we've always done: sit
for days at the kitchen table with scissors and crayons and stacks of colored paper. I make
sketches and my friend cuts them out: lots of cats, fish too (because they're easy to draw),
some apples, some watermelons, a few winged angels devised from saved-up sheets of
Hershey bar tin foil. We use safety pins to attach these creations to the tree; as a final
touch, we sprinkle the branches with shredded cotton (picked in August for this purpose).
My friend, surveying the effect, clasps her hands together. "Now honest, Buddy. Doesn't it

15
look good enough to eat!" Queenie tries to eat an angel.

After weaving and ribboning holly wreaths for all the front windows, our next project is
the fashioning of family gifts. Tie-dye scarves for the ladies, for the men a homebrewed
lemon and licorice and aspirin syrup to be taken "at the first Symptoms of a Cold and after
Hunting." But when it comes time for making each other's gift, my friend and I separate to
work secretly. I would like to buy her a pearl-handled knife, a radio, a whole pound of
chocolate-covered cherries (we tasted some once, and she always swears: "1 could live on
them, Buddy, Lord yes I could—and that's not taking his name in vain"). Instead, I am
building her a kite. She would like to give me a bicycle (she's said so on several million
occasions: "If only I could, Buddy. It's bad enough in life to do without something you
want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something
you want them to have. Only one of these days I will, Buddy. Locate you a bike. Don't ask
how. Steal it, maybe"). Instead, I'm fairly certain that she is building me a kite—the same
as last year and the year before: the year before that we exchanged slingshots. All of which
is fine by me. For we are champion kite fliers who study the wind like sailors; my friend,
more accomplished than I, can get a kite aloft when there isn't enough breeze to carry
clouds.

Christmas Eve afternoon we scrape together a nickel and go to the butcher's to buy
Queenie's traditional gift, a good gnawable beef bone. The bone, wrapped in funny paper,
is placed high in the tree near the silver star. Queenie knows it's there. She squats at the
foot of the tree staring up in a trance of greed: when bedtime arrives she refuses to budge.
Her excitement is equaled by my own. I kick the covers and turn my pillow as though it
were a scorching summer's night. Somewhere a rooster crows: falsely, for the sun is still
on the other side of the world.

"Buddy, are you awake!" It is my friend, calling from her room, which is next to mine; and
an instant later she is sitting on my bed holding a candle. "Well, I can't sleep a hoot," she
declares. "My mind's jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs. Roosevelt will
serve our cake at dinner?" We huddle in the bed, and she squeezes my hand I-love-you.
"Seems like your hand used to be so much smaller. I guess I hate to see you grow up.
When you're grown up, will we still be friends?" I say always. "But I feel so bad, Buddy. I
wanted so bad to give you a bike. I tried to sell my cameo Papa gave me. Buddy"—she
hesitates, as though embarrassed—"I made you another kite." Then I confess that I made
her one, too; and we laugh. The candle burns too short to hold. Out it goes, exposing the
starlight, the stars spinning at the window like a visible caroling that slowly, slowly
daybreak silences. Possibly we doze; but the beginnings of dawn splash us like cold water:
we're up, wide-eyed and wandering while we wait for others to waken. Quite deliberately
my friend drops a kettle on the kitchen floor. I tap-dance in front of closed doors. One by
one the household emerges, looking as though they'd like to kill us both; but it's Christmas,
so they can't. First, a gorgeous breakfast: just everything you can imagine—from flapjacks
and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey-in-the-comb. Which puts everyone in a good
humor except my friend and me. Frankly, we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't
eat a mouthful.

16
Well, I'm disappointed. Who wouldn't be? With socks, a Sunday school shirt, some
handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater, and a year's subscription to a religious magazine
for children. The Little Shepherd. It makes me boil. It really does.

My friend has a better haul. A sack of Satsumas, that's her best present. She is proudest,
however, of a white wool shawl knitted by her married sister. But she says her favorite gift
is the kite I built her. And it is very beautiful; though not as beautiful as the one she made
me, which is blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars; moreover, my
name is painted on it, "Buddy."

"Buddy, the wind is blowing."

The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we've run to a Pasture below the house where
Queenie has scooted to bury her bone (and where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried,
too). There, plunging through the healthy waist-high grass, we unreel our kites, feel them
twitching at the string like sky fish as they swim into the wind. Satisfied, sun-warmed, we
sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort. Soon I forget the socks
and hand-me-down sweater. I'm as happy as if we'd already won the fifty-thousand-dollar
Grand Prize in that coffee-naming contest.

"My, how foolish I am!" my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too
late she has biscuits in the oven. "You know what I've always thought?" she asks in a tone
of discovery and not smiling at me but a point beyond. "I've always thought a body would
have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when he came it
would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring
through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of
that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'11 wager it never happens. I'11 wager
at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they
are"—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie
pawing earth over her bone—"just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I
could leave the world with today in my eyes."

This is our last Christmas together.

Life separates us. Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so
follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer
camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn't count. Home is where my friend is, and there
I never go.

And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone.
("Buddy dear," she writes in her wild hard-to-read script, "yesterday Jim Macy's horse
kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet
and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her

17
Bones...."). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not
as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me "the best of the batch." Also, in
every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: "See a picture show and write me
the story." But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the
Buddy who died in the 1880's; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays
in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when
she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather! "

And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news
some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself,
letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus
on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see,
rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

18
 THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW OF LEAVES
By
Gregorio C. Brillantes

WHEN I first came to the town (his father said in the darkness) it was May in 1923; your Tio
Emong and I took the train from Manila and the bus from Tarlac, because then the railway had
no line to the western towns but cut on straight to Dagupan. A cold rain fell; it was the first rain
of the season, bursting over the city in the night with sharp cracklings of thunder, and it followed
us into Bulacan and Pampanga in the morning dusk. What kind of fiesta are you having anyway
— a river festival? I remarked with what I thought was an ingenious irony. But I shouldn't worry,
your uncle said — the townsfolk would go on with the coronation ball, come fire or high water;
it was the social event of the year; everyone would be at the plaza, even if it meant an affair of
raincoats and umbrellas. Admirable people, I said glumly, imagining myself waltzing away in a
knee-deep flood, wearing a brave absurd smile against the endless rain.
You never knew your Tio Emong. He was the eldest son of Lola Isabel, and he died in an
auto crash before you were born. We were classmates at the University, and stayed in the same
boarding-house in Intramuros; I have this vivid memory of him, in a habitual pose — his
expression half-smiling and thoughtful beneath the brim of his hat, a hand kneading his chin — a
fine young man, and as true and loyal a friend as any one could hope to find in a lifetime. We
were like brothers; I had none; I didn't know it then, in the train in the dim raining day, but his
town would also become my own.
The wet station-sheds, the flat sodden fields cancelled the jubilant spirit in which I had
accepted your uncle's invitation; one didn't travel all these miles just to attend a rain-soaked
fiesta. I tried to console myself: there would be one supremely lovely girl in the crowd, whose
face one will be warmed to remember, whose voice one will never forget. . . Suddenly, past
Angeles, we sped into noon sunlight, we swung from shadow to brightness, the rain dropped
away like some boundary that separated the seasons; it was as though we had moved into another
day. The train seemed to gather more speed, its whistle flying in gay broken pieces over the
windy fields. A man who had been dozing through the sunless morning, his face covered by
a Free Press, jerked awake, lassoed us into conversation; he was incredibly fat, I remember, with
a shock of white hair, and an enormous laugh. He offered us cigars; the pungent tobacco made
me a trifle dizzy, but we had run out of Piedmont cigarettes. He was bound for Pangasinan, he
said, to visit daughter and grandchildren; he had a son, a pensionado, in America; there was a
strained good nature about him, as if he were trying to stifle a loneliness with the weight of his
booming laughter. In Tarlac he shook hands with us rather solemnly, wishing us the best of luck
in the world. You look like my son, tall and young, he said to me; an old man, traveling alone. . .
Emong and I had lunch at the Pantranco station. Our bus left at three, rumbling across the
quiet drowsing provincial capital to the dirt road that began at the other end of town. The
passengers, garrulous and laughing for the first mile or two, were soon stunned to silence by the
hot glare; cogon wilted beside the dusty road; we passed Santa Ignacia, then no more than a
brown cluster of huts, and Santa Ines, more than a decade away from the prosperity of its sugar
mills. Rain had oppressed me in the morning; now a paste of heat coated my skin; the hard

19
quaking bus would never stop. Patience, we are almost there, said Emong. A river gleamed
between bamboo brakes; children paused in their play by the road and waved us on toward the
town. An arch proclaimed welcome in red block letters, and finally the road sloped down to the
river; the bus shuddered to a halt on the clay bank. The bridge had not been built, only a few
piles stood bare in the green water; rafts and outriggered bancas ferried passengers to the
poblacion. It would be years yet before traffic could flow over the finished span.
Somewhere a band was playing a martial version of La Paloma; the dying sun was in my
eyes, and my first view of the town was a golden blur of trees and houses on the opposite bank.
Rockets swished and banged in the clear sky, and a high wind carried the white smoke-puffs into
the sunset haze. Emong knew our boatman and they had a companionable laugh together, talking
in the melodious dialect that I too would soon learn; I trailed my hand in the water, in the deep
river; I felt the warm pull of the undertow, constant and powerful. A fleet of calesas waited for
us, and the silver tinkle of their bells was a welcome, too, along with the fireworks and an aroma
of rice-cakes and the band playing.
We rode down the main street — Calle Simon de Anda: it is called Quezon Avenue now —
the horsehooves clattering on the cobblestones; and I looked at the town in the ancient fading
light, the balconied houses with their broad shell-paned windows, the acacias with the evening
already blue and darkening among the leaves, and the plaza — four hectares, Emong informed
me with a grand gesture — in the center of the town. And there, he said, is the Leonor Rivera
Auditorium, with its glorieta in the'middle, and that is our church, the largest in the province;
while the band played La Golondrina on a platform in a corner of the square and bells clanged
and colored stars drifted down in the early twilight.
I had visited other towns, had gone to other fiestas, like any other young man; but never
before this strange kinship, this sudden happy recognition. Perhaps it was because I had prepared
myself to be disillusioned; the reality was at once a happy surprise, and somehow, a sort of
memory; I felt as though I had lived here before, loved here my deepest love, and I knew the
names of the streets, the history of each house, the blend of light and shadow under the trees. The
destiny that awaited me here must have touched me with its prescient breath; we passed by your
mother's house, and I heard a piano, and Emong said: My cousin Luming, you'll meet her at the
ball tonight — only a name, but soon, after one first glance at her, I would never be the same
again.
Emong's house was a block away from your mother's on Del Pilar Street; a massive house
full of children; they swarmed around us and played their noisy games until your Lola Isabel
shooed them all away.
Through the house ran a festive bustle, doors slamming, people hurrying up and down the
stairs, and I shed off tiredness like a soiled shirt; I was happy I had come. In the warm leaf-
murmuring night beyond the windows music from the plaza throbbed faintly, calling; voices
laughed and called in the lamplit street; something different and luminous and wonderful, it
seemed, had been promised everyone on this summer night. After dinner, bathed and shaved and
pomaded, we set out for the dance in evening attire. We were young and invincible, your uncle
and I, and we would never grow old and know grief and die; and we walked with eager expectant
leisure to the celebrations in the plaza, through the strange and yet so familiar town.
I remember the faraway night with a precise and living vividness, moment by moment, while
time less distant has lost its outlines, more recent faces have become anonymous as in a faded
photograph .. . The auditorium was an island of light set in the middle of the wide plaza; beyond
its skyward glow hung a spray of stars; the orchestra in the kiosko was fiddling a brisk rigodon.

20
Emong pointed out your mother's parents going through the paces of the dance — your
grandmother wore a Maria Clara costume with a noble graceful air; your grandfather was a gaunt
bemustached man. The rigodon ended; at last we can dance, Emong said; but the president of the
Professionals Club had a little speech to make, and after the polite applause, Emong steered me
toward his cousins where they sat in an evening-gowned group, your mother and your Tia Mely
and a flock of cousins from Vigan.
In all my life I have never seen eyes lovelier than your mother's; they spoke a soft, secret
language; I would lose myself in the depths of their meaning. Emong introduced me. I wanted to
talk to her at once, to possess her entire attention. But she turned back to the girlish chatter of her
group; and I could only watch her profile, her lips forming words; I would make her speak her
truest self to me alone. And the music began; but she had promised the first dance to somebody,
she said; perhaps the next? — and she rose and she was tall and even lovelier, and it seemed an
amused question shone for a second in her glance.
She danced with a man from Gerona — a suitor, so she would tell me later; she didn't love
him, although she had felt obliged to reward his fidelity with a measure of friendly affection. But
I didn't know that then; and while they danced they conversed with an earnestness I found
impossible not to resent. Who was this man? What was he in her life?
Already I was jealous; I had fallen in love with her.
I was drawn to your mother as to a vision of a beautiful heart-rending truth that, denied,
could have driven me to despair; it was that way, suddenly, dancing with her in the Maytime
night. I had met other women; I had known the joy and the sadness of their love; but never had
they inspired that irrevocable commitment of one's entire being.
To be happy with her, that was not enough, it seemed; with a little effort, one could be happy
anywhere; I would embrace pain for her sake. We talked about the city, I remember, your mother
and I; about the town, the possibility of rain, about Emong and I turning into dis-reputable
physicians — her nose, I noted with delight, crinkled when she laughed, and she had a slightly
husky voice; small talk, on my part an attempt at wit to fill a silence and an awe within the
enclosing music, while the miserable longing beat in my blood.
Shortly before midnight the dancing ceased, a trumpet and a flourish of drums stilled the
crowd, and the entourage of the fiesta queen entered glittering through the gate. Puring Cabrera
was the queen that year and Manoling Santos her tuxedoed consort; Mang Tacio, the town poet,
declaimed fervently on her myriad charms and then Governor Agana placed the crown on her
royal head. And the dancing was resumed with a vengeance, on the violin waves of melodies one
hears only in dreams now, "Sweet Hawaiian Moonlight," "The Song of the Volga Boatman"; and
she would foxtrot with the young man from Gerona, and waltz with me, and tango to the other
side of the pavilion with someone else in love with her. If the night should never end — but a
group rose to leave, and another, and another followed. She must go, she said; her cousins were
waiting for her.
We escorted them home, Emong and I, and the suitor from Gerona; in the cool dawn there
were only our voices and the slow shuffle of our walking and the passage of a wind in the
tunneled trees. A life, a time of careless wandering youth was over for me; I walked, through the
town with your mother, into the years of the future. The porch light shone through the low-
hanging branches of the acacia in the yard; we said good night in the soft light and darkness; I
managed to touch her hand, I could only touch her hand, briefly, for all the love that burned in
me; and before she was lost in the leafshadows it seemed the gentle inquiry twinkled again in her
eyes. I stood in the empty street, looking up at your mother's house, at an illumined window

21
veiled by leaves — and I could have remained standing in front of the house like a drunken fool
till morning, breathing my love up toward her window, if Emong had not been there to pull me
away. . .
But I would see her again, and I would write her reams of letters from the city, humble and
extravagant, fierce and hopeful and lonely; I would come to the town on weekends, as often as I
could, that year, and the next, to visit her, in the house on Del Pilar Street, in the high-ceilinged
sala with the pedestaled ferns and carved formal furniture; and stiff in a starched collar and the
rather cramped americana of those days, beneath the stern portraits of another generation, I
would sit listening with a careful alertness to your grandfather's discourse on Mr. Leonard Wood
and Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmena and complete, immediate independence from America,
while he stroked his mustache and glared about him as though to challenge any contrary opinion;
until your mother would come to the room at last and he would give me one final suspicious
scrutiny before leaving the two of us together — a marble-topped table separated her from me,
like some uncompromising chaperone guarding her against the rage of my love.
Rain and sun and the train; the unbridged river, the lamp of a calesa swinging down a street,
cicadas in the peaceful trees, and a tracery of light and leaf darkness moving across your
mother's face on an evening late in December when she said she loved me too — all of it (his
father said) haunts me still, the tone of that distant time; the day dims softly, suddenly, as though
shadows of clouds were passing at noon over the quiet town.

22
Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, Also Called Pete
By Rene Estella Amper

Pete, old friend,

there isn’t really much change
in our hometown since you left.

This morning I couldn’t find anymore

the grave of Simeona, the cat we buried
at the foot of Miguel’s mango tree,
when we were in grade four,
after she was hit by a truck while crossing
the street. The bulldozer has messed it up
while making the feeder road into the mountains
to reach the hearts of the farmers.
The farmers come down every Sunday
to sell their agony and their sweat for
a few pesos, lose in the cockpit or get
drunk on the way home.

A steel bridge named after the congressman’s wife

now spans the gray river where Tasyo, the old
goat, had split the skin of our young lizards
to make us a man many years ago.

The long blue hills where we

used to shoot birds with slingshot or spend
the summer afternoons we loved so much doing
nothing in the tall grass have been bought
by the mayor’s son. Now there’s a barbed wire
fence about them; the birds have gone away.

The mayor owns a big sugar plantation, three

new cars, and a mansion with the gate overhung
with sampaguita. Inside the gate
are guys who carry a rifle and a pistol.

We still go to Konga’s store for rice

23
and sardines and sugar and nails for the coffin.

Still only a handful go to Mass on Sundays.

In the church the men talk, sleep; the children play.
The priest is sad.

Last night the storm came and blew away

the cornflowers. The cornfields are full of cries.

Your cousin, Julia, has just become a whore.

She liked good clothes, good food, big money.
That’s why she became a whore.
Now our hometown has seven whores.

Pete, old friend,

every time we have good reason to get drunk
and be carried home in a wheelbarrow
we always remember you. Oh, we miss
both Pete and Pedro.

Remember us to your American wife,

you lucky bastard. Islaw, your cock-eyed
uncle, now calls himself Stanley
after he began wearing the clothes you sent
him last Christmas.

P.S. Tasyo, the old goat,

Sends your lizard his warmest congratulations.

24
Bonsai
- Edith L. Tiempo

All that I love

I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?

Why, yes, but for the moment ---
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a young queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It’s utter sublimation

A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size,

Till seashells are broken pieces

From God’s own bright teeth.
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

- Edith L. Tiempo

25
SAMPLE REACTION/REFLECTION PAPER ON A MOVIE

Seneca N. Pellano 06-95028

Paradise Lost

If I could disentangle the yarn of life I knitted for myself, I would always go back revisiting
our cinema paradiso at our small village in Titay, Zamboanga del Sur. Back then, I had always
thought that the medium-sized nipa house of “Nang Abad” was the center of the town. Located just
a few meters from our hut, the family of Nang Abad owned the one and only Betamax in the area.
I remembered how I used to desperately long for Fridays when my father would come home
from his weekly assignment in another town – as it would mean seeing Nang Abad’s home
transform into a town cinema. It is vivid in my memory how properly dressed me and my siblings
were as we would patiently wait to hear my father’s footsteps from outside. I knew we were off for
our family night-out the moment he would turn off our house’s only light bulb signaling us to come
out for a walk in a dead night to Nang Abad’s.
It was there I had come to hate adults and their backs. It was frustrating to stand on my
father’s lap, stretching my neck just so I could watch Rambo’s violent combat. It was also equally
frustrating to breathe in cigars from men smoking on fully packed benches, hooting whenever a
sexy actress shows up onscreen. However, I learned not to mind all of these eventually because
there at Nang Abad’s, I came face to face with my first crush – Romnick Sarmenta. It’s funny but for
two pesos and a movie at Nang Abad’s, my childhood was partly defined by discovering fantasies
and finding simple joys watching films every Friday with my family.
This recollection of how I could immediately associate most of my childhood memories at
Nang Abad’s goes to show the kind of emotional impact that Cinema Paradiso brought into the lives
of people at Giancaldo. I could relate how a town cinema unites young and old, joys and sorrows,
rich and poor, families and individuals in one avenue for entertainment. There is just this certain
magic of the cinema which inspires people simply by projecting a movie on screen.
The movie was so powerful that it was able to show different aspects and interplay of life
and love – between father and son, romantic love between a man and a woman, a person and his
love for movies, and one’s connection with where he came from. For Toto, the journey of life
discovery can be traced back to his experiences in the cinema, his great love for movies, his focus on
listening to Alfredo’s stories, and his intense admiration for Elena.
All these have been perfectly portrayed in a movie so brilliant that it made me ponder how
our lives are crafted by the place we come from and the people we meet. I was moved to the idea
that some people could in fact control the direction of our lives based on their own understanding
of what is right for us.
True, Toto may have attained success and fame but was he genuinely happy in the end? Was
he completely satisfied with a career without having the one true love of his life? These questions
provide me reasons to think that Alfredo is a frustrated man. What is wrong with someone’s
frustration is that it is being passed on to control a person’s direction in life. In the movie, Toto’s
success was bittersweet because his life was written for him by someone else.
Although the rusty anchors in the film represented the force that prevents him from
achieving his dreams if he stays in his town, I also think that fate has a way of leading us to our
dreams without necessarily sacrificing a true love – which, if at all, we rarely find in our lifetime.
Love does not hinder our dreams all the time. In some cases, love inspires people to work hard and
achieve their dreams.
Seeing Toto watch a montage of kissing scenes compiled by Alfredo ironically intensified
what clearly was lacking in his life – a genuine romantic passion and the love of his life.

26
It was a sad film, Toto’s life.

27
Fifteen
By William Stafford

South of the bridge on Seventeenth

I found back of the willows one summer

day a motorcycle with engine running

as it lay on its side, ticking over

slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.

I admired all that pulsing gleam, the

shiny flanks, the demure headlights

fringed where it lay; I led it gently

to the road, and stood with that

companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.

We could find the end of the road, meet

the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about

hills, and patting the handle got back a

confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged

a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.

Thinking, back further in the grass I found

28
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped

over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale—

I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand

over it, called me good man, roared away.

I stood there, fifteen.

29
The River Singing Stone
by Myrna Pena-Reyes

Through brush and over boulders

we followed the sound of water
hidden in trees.
The natives we met on the narrow trails
carrying chickens and bananas
to sell in the city answered,
“the waterfall? — not too far,
after the next hill.”
We walked to he hill, and the next,
and the next.

You were annoyed.

You had said you would find it easily,
having gone there often in your youth.

We stopped counting the hours,

kilometers we walked uphill and down,
forward and back, pursuing that sound.
We couldn’t just follow the river –
there were boulders, thickets, cliffs,
and we, no longer young.

Winded and sweaty, we rested.

Such trickery – was it near,
did we hear the roar of the falls,
or just the sound of water
pounding rocks into pebbles,
grinding gravel into sand?

But it was late.

We had to go home.
We listened
to the river singing,
the river singing stone.

30
 The Wedding in the Garden

Ever since Dervla was nine the people of the hotel had fascinated her. Its proprietor, Mr
Congreve, wore clothes that had a clerical sombreness about them, though they were of a lighter hue
than Father Mahony’s stern black. Mr Congreve was a smiling man with a quiet face, apparently not in
the least put out by reports in the town that his wife, in allying herself with a hotel proprietor, had
married beneath her. Ladylike and elegant, she appeared not to regret her choice. Mrs Congreve
favoured in her dresses a distinctive blend of greens and blues, her stylishness combining with the hotel
proprietor’s tranquil presence to lend the couple a quality that was unique in the town. Their children,
two girls and an older boy, were imbued with this through the accident of their birth, and so were
different from the town’s other children in ways that might be termed superficial. ‘Breeding,’ Dervla’s
father used to say, ‘The Congreves have great breeding in them,’

She herself, when she was nine, was fair-haired and skinny, with a graze always healing on one
knee or the other because she had a way of tripping on her shoelaces. ‘Ah, will you tie up those things!’
her mother used to shout at her: her mother, big-faced and red, blinking through the steam that rose
from a bucket of water. Her brothers and sisters had all left the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street by
the time Dervla was nine; they’d left the town and the district, two of them in America even, one in
London. Dervla was more than just the baby of the family: she was an afterthought, catching everyone
unawares, born when her mother was forty-two. ‘Chance had a hand in that one,’ her father liked to
pronounce, regarding her affectionately, as if pleased by this intervention of fate. When his brother
from Leitrim visited the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street the statement was made often, being of
family interest. ‘If her mother didn’t possess the strength of an ox,’ Dervla’s father liked to add, ‘God
knows how the end of it would have been.’ And Dervla’s Leitrim uncle, refreshing himself with a bottle
of stout, would yet again wag his head in admiration and wonder at his sister-in-law’s robust
constitution. He was employed on the roads up in Leitrim and only came to the town on a Sunday,
drawn to it by a hurling match. Dervla’s father was employed by O’Mara the builder.

Even after she went to work in the Royal Hotel and came to know the family, her first image of
them remained: the Congreves in their motorcar, an old Renault as she afterwards established, its
canvas hood folded back, slowly making the journey to the Protestant church on a sunny Sunday
morning. St Peter’s Church was at one end of the town, the Royal Hotel at the other. It had, before its
days as an hotel, apparently been owned by Mrs Congreve’s family, and then people in the grocery

31
business had bought it and had not lived there, people who had nothing to do with the town, who were
not well known. After that Mr Congreve had made an offer with, so it was said, his wife’s money.

The motor-car in the sunlight crept down Draper’s Street, the bell of St Peter’s Church still
monotonously chiming. The boy – no older than Dervla herself – sat between his sisters in the back; Mr
Congreve turned his head and said something to his wife. Daddy Phelan, outside Mrs Ryan’s bar, saluted
them in his wild way; Mrs Congreve waved back at him. The boy wore a grey flannel suit, the girls had
fawn-coloured coats and tiny bows in their pigtails. The motor-car passed from view, and a moment
later the bell ceased to chime.

Christopher couldn’t remember the first time he’d been aware of her. All he knew was that she
worked in the kitchen of the hotel, walking out from the town every day. Playing with Molly and
Margery-Jane in the shrubberies of the garden, he had noticed now and again a solitary figure in a black
coat, with a headscarf. He didn’t know her name or what her face was like. ‘Count to ten, Chris,’
Margery-Jane would shrilly insist. ‘You’re not counting to ten!’ Some game, rules now forgotten, some
private family game they had invented themselves, stalking one another among the bamboos and the
mahonias, Molly creeping on her hands and knees, not making a sound, Margery-Jane unable to control
her excited breathing. The girl passed through the yard near by, a child as they were, but they paid her
no attention.

A year or so later Mary, the elderly maid whose particular realm was the dining-room, instructed
her in the clearing of a table. ‘Dervla,’ his mother said when the older waitress had led her away with
cutlery and’ plates piled on to her tray. ‘Her name is Dervla.’ After that she was always in the dining-
room at mealtimes.

It was then, too, that she began to come to the hotel on a bicycle, her day longer now, arriving
before breakfast, cycling home again in the late evening. Once there was talk about her living there, but
nothing had come of that. Christopher didn’t know where she did live, had never once noticed Thomas
MacDonagh Street in his wanderings about the town. Returning from boarding-school in Dublin, he had
taken to going for walks, along the quay of the river where the sawmills were, through the lanes behind
Brabazon’s Brewery. He preferred to be alone at that time of his growing up, finding the company of his
sisters too chattery. The river wound away through fields and sometimes a dog from the lanes or the
cottages near the electricity plant would follow him. There was one in particular, a short-tailed terrier,
its smooth white coat soiled and uncared for, ears and head flashed with black. There was a mongrel
sheepdog also, an animal that ceased its customary cringing as soon as it gained the freedom of the
fields. When he returned to the town these animals no longer followed him, but were occasionally

32
involved in fights with other dogs, as though their excursion into the country had turned them into
aliens who were no longer to be trusted. He went on alone then, through darkening afternoons or
spitting rain, lingering by the shops that sold fruit and confectionery. There’d been a time when he and
Margery-Jane and Molly had come to these shops with their pocket-money, for Peggy’s Leg or pink bon-
bons. More affluent now, he bought Our Boys and Film Fun and saved up for the Wide World.

His sisters had been born in the Royal Hotel, but he – before his father owned the place – in
Dublin, where his parents had then lived. He did not remember Dublin: the hotel had become his world.
It was a white building, set back a little from the street, pillars and steps prefacing its entrance doors. Its
plain façade was decorated with a yellow AA sign and a blue RIAC one; in spring tulips bloomed in
window-boxes on the downstairs windowsills. The words Royal Hotel were painted in black on this white
façade and repeated in smaller letters above the pillared porch. At the back, beyond the yard and the
garden, there was a row of garages and an entrance to them from Old Lane. The hotel’s four employees
came and went this way, Mrs O’Connor the cook, whatever maids there were, and Artie the boots.
There was a stone-flagged hallway with doors off it to the kitchen and the larders and the scullery, and
one to the passage that led to the back staircase. It was a dim hallway, with moisture sometimes on its
grey-distempered walls, a dimness that was repeated in the passage that led to the back staircase and
on the staircase itself. Upstairs there was a particular smell, of polish and old soup, with a tang of porter
drifting up from the bar. The first-floor landing – a sideboard stretching along one wall, leather
armchairs by the windows, occasional tables piled with magazines, a gold-framed mirror above the
fireplace – was the heart of the hotel. Off it were the better bedrooms and a billiard-room where the
YMCA held a competition every March; above it there was a less impressive landing, little more than a
corridor. On the ground floor the dining-room had glass swing-doors, twelve tables with white
tablecloths, always set for dinner. The family occupied a corner one between the fire and the dumb-
waiter, with its array of silver-plated sugar castors and salt and pepper and mustard containers, bottles
of Yorkshire Relish, thick and thin, mint sauce in cut-glass jugs, and Worcester sauce, and jam and
marmalade.

When Christopher was younger, before he went away to school, he and Margery-Jane and Molly
used to play hide-and-seek in the small, cold bedrooms at the top of the house, skulking in the shadows
on the uncarpeted stairs that led to the attics. Occasionally, if a visitor was staying in the hotel, their
father would call up to them to make less noise, but this didn’t happen often because a visitor was
usually only in the hotel at night. They were mainly senior commercial travellers who stayed at the
Royal, representatives of Wills or Horton’s or Drummond’s Seeds, once a year the Urney man; younger
representatives lodged more modestly. Insurance men stayed at the hotel, and bank inspectors had
been known to spend a fortnight or three weeks. Bord na Mona men came and went, and once in a
while there was an English couple or a couple from the North, touring or on their honeymoon. When
Miss Gilligan, who taught leatherwork at the technical college, first came to the town she spent nearly a
month in the Royal before being satisfied with the lodging she was offered. Artie the boots, grey-haired

33
but still in his forties, worked in the garden and the yard, disposed of empty bottles from the bar and
often served there. Old Mary served there too, and at a busy time, which only rarely occurred, Mrs
O’Connor would come up from the kitchen to assist. Dr Molloy drank at the Royal, and Hogarty the
surveyor, and the agent at the Bank of Ireland, Mr McKibbin, and a few of the other bank men in the
town. The bar was a quiet place, though, compared with the town’s public houses; voices were never
raised.

The main hall of the hotel was quiet also, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock and its
chiming. There was the same agreeable smell there, of soup and polish, and porter from the bar. A
barometer hung beneath a salmon in a glass case, notices of point-to-point races and the Dublin Spring
Show and the Horse Show hung from hooks among coloured prints of Punchestown. The wooden floor
was covered almost completely with faded rugs, and the upper half of the door to the bar was
composed of frosted glass with a border of shamrocks. There were plants in brass pots on either side of
a wide staircase with a greenish carpet, threadbare in parts.

‘Your inheritance one day,’ Christopher’s father said.

It was very grand, Dervla considered, to have your initials on a green trunk, and on a wooden
box with metal brackets fixed to its edges. These containers stood in the back hall, with a suitcase, at the
beginning of each term, before they were taken to the railway station. They stood there again when
Christopher returned, before Artie helped him to carry them upstairs. On his first day back from school
there was always a great fuss. His sisters became very excited, a special meal was prepared, Mr
Congreve would light cigarette after cigarette, standing in front of the fire on the first-floor landing,
listening to Christopher’s tale of the long journey from Dublin. He always arrived in the evening,
sometimes as late as seven o’clock but usually about half past five. In the dining-room when the family
had supper he would say he was famished and tell his sisters how disgraceful the food at the school was,
the turnips only half mashed, the potatoes with bits of clay still clinging to their skins, and a custard
pudding called Yellow Peril. His mother, laughing at him, would say he shouldn’t exaggerate, and his
father would ask him about the rugby he had played, or the cricket. ‘Like the game of tennis it would
be,’ Artie told her when Dervla asked him what cricket was. ‘The way they’d wear the same type of
clothing for it.’ Miss Gillespie, the matron, was a tartar and Willie the furnace man’s assistant told
stories that couldn’t be repeated. Dervla imagined the big grey house with a curving avenue leading up
to it, and bells always ringing, and morning assemblies, and the march through cloisters to the chapel,
which so often she had heard described. She imagined the boys in their grey suits kneeling down to say
their prayers, and the ice on the inside of the windows on cold days. The chemistry master had blown
his hair off, it was reported once in the dining-room, and Dervla thought of Mr Jerety who made up the
prescriptions in the Medical Hall. Mr Jerety had no hair either, except for a little at the sides of his head.

34
 Dervla managed the dining-room on her own now. Mary had become too rheumaticky to make
the journey at any speed from the kitchen and found it difficult to lift the heavier plates from the table.
She helped Mrs O’Connor with the baking instead, kneading dough on the marble slab at the side table
in the kitchen, making pastry and preparing vegetables. It took her half a day, Dervla had heard Mr
Congreve say, to mount the stairs to her bedroom at the top of the hotel, and the other half to descend
it. He was fond of her, and would try to make her rest by the fire on the first-floor landing but she never
did: ‘Sure, if I sat down there, sir, I’d maybe never get up again.’ It was unseemly, Dervla had heard old
Mary saying in the kitchen, for an employee to be occupying an armchair in the place where the visitors
and the family sat. Mr Congreve was devil-may-care about matters like that, but what would a visitor say
if he came out of his bedroom and found a uniformed maid in an armchair? What would Byrne from
Horton’s say, or Boylan the insurance man?

In the dining-room, when she’d learnt how everything should be, ‘the formalities’, as Mr
Congreve put it, Dervla didn’t find her duties difficult. She was swift on her feet, as it was necessary to
be, in case the food got cold. She could stack a tray with dishes and plates so economically that two
journeys to the kitchen became one. She was careful at listening to what the visitors ordered and
without writing anything down was able to relay the message to the kitchen. The family were never
given a choice.

Often Christopher found himself glancing up from the food Dervla placed in front of him, to
follow with his eyes her progress across the dining-room, the movement of her hips beneath her black
dress, her legs clad in stockings that were black also. Once he addressed her in the backyard. He spoke
softly, just behind her in the yard. It was dark, after seven, an evening in early March when a bitter wind
was blowing. ‘I’ll walk with you, Dervla,’ he said.

She wheeled her bicycle in Old Lane and they walked in silence except that once he remarked
upon the coldness of the weather and she said she disliked rain more. When they reached the end of
the lane he went one way and she the other.

‘Hullo, Dervla,’ he said one afternoon in the garden. It was late in August. He was lying on a rug
among the hydrangeas, reading. She had passed without noticing that he was there; she returned some
minutes later with a bunch of parsley. It was then that he addressed her. He smiled, trying to find a
different intonation, trying to make his greeting softer, less ordinary than usual. He wanted her to sit
down on the brown checked rug, to enjoy the sun for a while, but of course that was impossible. He had
wanted to wheel her bicycle for her that evening, as he would have done had she been another girl,

35
Hazel Warren or Annie Warren, the coal merchant’s daughters, or a girl he’d never even spoken to,
someone’s cousin, who used to visit the town every Christmas. But it hadn’t seemed natural in any way
at all to wheel the bicycle of the dining-room maid, any more than it would have been to ask a kitchen
maid at school where she came from or if she had brothers and sisters.

‘Hullo,’ she said, replying to his greeting in the garden. She passed on with her bunch of parsley,
seeming not to be in a hurry, the crisp white strings of her apron bobbing as she walked.

In her bedroom in the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street she thought of him every night
before she went to sleep. She saw him as he was when he returned from his boarding-school, in his grey
long-trousered suit, a green-and-white-striped tie knotted into the grey collar of his shirt. When she
awoke in the morning she thought of him also, the first person to share the day with. In winter she lay
there in the darkness, but in summer the dawn light lit the picture of the Virgin above the door, and
when Dervla felt the Virgin’s liquid eyes upon her she prayed, asking the Holy Mother for all sorts of
things she afterwards felt she shouldn’t have because they were trivial. She pleaded that he might smile
when he thanked her for the rashers and sausages she put in front of him, that his little finger might
accidentally touch her hand as only once it had. She pleaded that Mr Congreve wouldn’t engage her in
conversation at lunchtime, asking how her father was these days, because somehow – in front of him –
it embarrassed her.

There was a nightmare she had, possessing her in varied forms: that he was in the house in
Thomas MacDonagh Street and that her mother was on her knees, scrubbing the stone floor of the
scullery. Her mother didn’t seem to know who he was and would not stand up. Her father and her uncle
from Leitrim sat drinking stout by the fire, and when she introduced him they remarked upon his
clothes. Sometimes in the nightmare her uncle nudged him with his elbow and asked him if he had a
song in him.

‘That young Carroll has an eye for you,’ her father said once or twice, drawing her attention to
Buzzy Carroll who worked in Catigan’s hardware. But she didn’t want to spend Sunday afternoons
walking out on the Ballydrim road with Buzzy Carroll, or to sit with his arms around her in the Excel
cinema. One of the Christian Brothers had first called him Buzzy, something to do with the way his hair
fluffed about his head, and after that no one could remember what Buzzy Carroll’s real name was. There
were others who would have liked to go out with her, on walks or to the pictures, or to the Tara Dance
Hall on a Friday night. There was Flynn who worked in Maguire’s timber yard, and Chappie Reagan, and
Butty Delaney. There was the porter at the auction rooms who had something the matter with his feet,
the toes joined together in such a peculiar way that he showed them to people: And there was Streak

36
Dwyer. ‘You’re nothing only a streak of woe,’ the same Christian Brother had years ago pronounced.
Streak Dwyer had ever since retained the sobriquet, serving now in Rattray’s grocery, sombrely weighing
flour and sugar. Dervla had once or twice wondered what walking out on the Ballydrim road with this
melancholy shopman would be like and if he would suggest turning into one of the lanes, as Butty
Delaney or Buzzy Carroll would have. She wouldn’t have cared for it in the Excel cinema with Streak
Dwyer any more than she cared for the idea of being courted by a man who showed people his toes.

‘Dervla.’

On a wet afternoon, a Tuesday in September, he whispered her name on the first-floor landing.
He put his arm around her, and she was frightened in ease someone would come.

‘I’m fond of you, Dervla.’

He took her hand and led her upstairs to Room 14, a tiny bedroom that was only used when the
hotel was full. Both of them were shy, and their shyness evaporated slowly. He kissed her, stroking her
hair. He said again he was fond of her. ‘I’m fond of you too,’ she whispered.

After that first afternoon they met often to embrace in Room 14. They would marry, he said at
the end of that holidays; they would live in the hotel, just like his parents. Over and over again in Room
14 the afternoon shadows gathered as sunlight slipped away. They whispered, clinging to one another,
the warmth of their bodies becoming a single warmth. She sat huddled on his knee, holding tightly on to
him in case they both fell off the rickety bedroom chair. He loved the curve of her neck, he whispered,
and her soft fair hair, her lips and her eyes. He loved kissing her eyes.

Often there was silence in the bedroom, broken only by the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-
Jane playing in the garden. Sometimes it became quite dark in the room, and she would have to go then
because Mrs O’Connor would be wanting her in the kitchen.

37
 ‘Not a bad fella at all,’ her father said in Thomas MacDonagh Street. ‘Young Carroll.’ She wanted
to laugh when her father said that, wondering what on earth he’d say if he knew about Room 14. He
would probably say nothing; in silence he would take his belt to her. But the thought of his doing so
didn’t make her afraid.

‘Oh, Dervla, how I wish the time would hurry up and pass!’

Over the years he had come to see the town as little better than a higgledy-piggledy
conglomeration of dwellings, an ugly place except for the small bridge at the end of Mill Street. But it
was Dervla’s town, and it was his own; together they belonged there. He saw himself in middle age
walking through its narrow streets, as he had walked during his childhood. He saw himself returning to
the hotel and going at once to embrace the wife he loved with a passion that had not changed.

‘Oh, Dervla,’ he whispered in Room 14. ‘Dervla, I’m so fond of you.’

‘Well, now, I think we must have a little talk,’ Mrs Congreve said.

They were alone in the dining-room; Dervla had been laying the tables for dinner. When Mrs
Congreve spoke she felt herself reddening; the knives and forks felt suddenly cold in her hands.

‘Finish the table, Dervla, and then we’ll talk about it.’

She did as she was bidden. Mrs Congreve stood by a window, looking out at people passing on
the street. When Dervla had finished she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. Her
thin, pretty face had a frightened look, and seemed fragile, perhaps because she had paled. She averted
her gaze almost as soon as the mirror reflected it. Mrs Congreve said:

‘Mr Congreve and I are disappointed that this has happened. It’s most unfortunate.’

38
 Turning from the window, Mrs Congreve smiled a lingering, gracious smile. She was wearing one
of her green-and-blue dresses, a flimsy, delicate garment with tiny blue buttons and a stylishly stiff
white collar. Her dark hair was coiled silkily about her head.

‘It is perhaps difficult for you to understand, Dervla, and certainly it is unpleasant for me to say:
But there are differences between you and Christopher that cannot be overlooked or ignored.’ Mrs
Congreve paused and again looked out of the window, slightly drawing the net curtain aside.
‘Christopher is not of your class, Dervla. He is not of your religion. You are a maid in this hotel. You have
betrayed the trust that Mr Congreve and I placed in you. I’m putting it harshly, Dervla, but there’s no
point in pretending.’

Dervla did not say anything. She felt desolate and alone. She wished he wasn’t away at school.
She wished she could run out of the dining-room and find him somewhere, that he would help her in
this terrifying conversation.

‘Oh, Christopher has done wrong also. I can assure you we are aware of that. We are
disappointed in Christopher, but we think it better to close the matter in his absence. He will not be
back for another three months almost; we think it best to have everything finished and forgotten by
then. Mr Congreve will explain to Christopher.’

Again there was the gracious smile. No note of anger had entered Mrs Congreve’s voice, no
shadow of displeasure disrupted the beauty of her features. She might have been talking about the
annual bloodstock dinner, giving instructions about how the tables should be set.

‘We would ask you to write a note now, to Christopher at school. Mr Congreve and I would like
to see it, Dervla, before it goes on its way. That, then, would be the end of the matter.’

As she spoke, Mrs Congreve nodded sympathetically, honouring Dervla’s unspoken protest: she
understood, she said. She did not explain how the facts had come to be discovered, but suggested that
in the note she spoke of Dervla should write that she felt in danger of losing her position in the Royal
Hotel, that she was upset by what had taken place and would not wish any of it to take place again.

39
 ‘That is the important aspect of it, Dervla. Neither Mr Congreve nor I wish to dismiss you. If we
did, you – and we – would have to explain to your parents, even to Father Mahony, I suppose. If it’s
possible, Dervla, we would much rather avoid all that.’

But Dervla, crimson-faced, mentioned love. Her voice was weak, without substance and seeming
to be without conviction, although this was not so. Mrs Congreve replied that that was penny-fiction
talk.

‘We want to get married, ma’am.’ Dervla closed her eyes beneath the effort of finding the
courage to say that. The palms of her hands, chilled a moment ago, were warmly moist now. She could
feel pinpricks on her forehead.

‘That’s very silly, Dervla,’ Mrs Congreve said in the same calm manner. ‘I’m surprised you should
be so silly.’

‘I love him,’ Dervla cried, all convention abruptly shattered. Her voice was shrill in the dining-
room, tears ran from her eyes and she felt herself seized by a wildness that made her want to shriek out
in fury. ‘I love hint,’ she cried again. ‘It isn’t just a little thing.’

‘Don’t you feel you belong in the Royal, Dervla? We have trained you, you know. We have done
a lot, Dervla.’

There was a silence then, except for Dervla’s sobbing. She found a handkerchief in the pocket of
her apron and wiped her eyes and nose with it. In such silly circumstances, Mrs Congreve said,
Christopher would not inherit the hotel. The hotel would be sold, and Christopher would inherit nothing.
It wasn’t right that a little thing like this should ruin Christopher’s life. ‘So you see, you must go, Dervla.
You must take your wages up to the end of the month and go this afternoon.’

The tranquillity of Mrs Congreve’s manner was intensified by the sadness in her voice. She was
on Dervla’s side, her manner insisted; her admonitions were painful for her. Again she offered the
alternative:

40
 ‘Or simply write a few lines to him, and we shall continue in the hotel as though nothing has
happened. That is possible, you know. I assure you of that, my dear.’

Miserably, Dervla asked what she could say in a letter. She would have to tell lies. She wouldn’t
know how to explain.

‘No, don’t tell lies. Explain the truth: that you realize the friendship must not continue, now that
you and he are growing up. You’ve always been a sensible girl, Dervla. You must realize that what
happened between you was for children only.’

Dervla shook her head, but Mrs Congreve didn’t acknowledge the gesture.

‘I can assure you, Dervla – I can actually promise you – that when Christopher has grown up a
little more he will see the impossibility of continuing such a friendship. The hotel, even now, is
everything to Christopher. I can actually promise you, also, that you will not be asked to leave. I know
you value coming here.’

At school, when he received the letter, Christopher was astonished. In Dervla’s rounded
handwriting it said that they must not continue to meet in Room 14 because it was a sin. It would be
best to bring everything to an end now, before she was dismissed. They had done wrong, but at least
they could avoid the worst if they were sensible now.

It was so chilly a letter, as from a stranger, that Christopher could hardly believe what it so very
clearly said. Why did she feel this now, when a few weeks ago they had sworn to love one another for as
long as they lived? Were all girls’ as fickle and as strange? Or had the priests, somehow, got at her, all
this stuff about sin?

He could not write back. His handwriting on the envelope would be recognized in the hotel, and
he did not know her address since she had not included it in her letter. He had no choice but to wait,
and as days and then weeks went by his bewilderment turned to anger. It was stupid that she should
suddenly develop these scruples after all they’d said to one another. The love he continued to feel for
her became tinged with doubt and with resentment, as though they’d had a quarrel.

41
 ‘Now, I don’t want to say anything more about this,’ his father said at the beginning of the next
holidays. ‘But it doesn’t do, you know, to go messing about with the maids.’

That was the end of the unfortunateness as far as his father was concerned. It was not
something that should be talked about, no good could come of that.

‘It wasn’t messing about.’

‘That girl was very upset, Christopher.’

Three months ago Christopher would have said he wanted to marry Dervla, forced into that
admission by what had been discovered. He would have spoken of love. But his father had managed to
draw him aside to have this conversation before he’d had an opportunity even to see her, let alone
speak to her. He felt confused, and uncertain about his feelings.

‘It would be hard on her to dismiss her. We naturally didn’t want to do that. We want the girl to
remain here, Christopher, since really it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup.’

His father lit a cigarette and seemed more at ease once he had made that pronouncement.
There was a lazier look about his face than there had been a moment ago; a smile drifted over his lips.
‘Good term?’ he said, and Christopher nodded.

‘Is it the priests, Dervla?’ They stood together in a doorway in Old Lane, her bicycle propped
against the kerb. ‘Did the priests get at you?’

She shook her head.

‘Did my mother speak to you?’

42
 ‘Your mother only said a few things.’

She went away, wheeling her bicycle for a while before mounting it. He watched her, not feeling
as miserable as when her letter had arrived, for during the months that had passed since then he had
become reconciled to the loss of their relationship: between the lines of her letter there had been a
finality.

He returned to the hotel and Artie helped him to carry his trunk upstairs. He wished that none
of it had ever happened.

Dervla was glad he made no further effort to talk to her, but standing between courses by the
dumb-waiter in the dining-room, she often wondered what he was thinking. While the others talked he
was at first affected by embarrassment because at mealtimes in the past there had been the thrill of
surreptitious glances and forbidden smiles. But after a week or so he became less quiet, joining in the
family conversation, and she became the dining-room maid again.

Yet for Dervla the moment of placing his food in front of him was as poignant as ever it had
been, and in her private moments she permitted herself the luxury of dwelling in the past. In her
bedroom in Thomas MacDonagh Street she closed her eyes and willed into her consciousness the
afternoon sunlight of Room 14. Once more she was familiar with the quickening of his heart and the
cool touch of his hands. Once more she clung to him, her body huddled into his on the rickety chair in
the corner, the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane gently disturbing the silence.

Dervla did not experience bitterness. She was fortunate that the Congreves had been above the
pettiness of dismissing her, and when she prayed she gave thanks for that. When more time had gone
by she found herself able to confess the sinning that had been so pleasurable in Room 14, and was duly
burdened with a penance for both the misdemeanours and her long delay in confessing them. She had
feared to lose what there had been through expiation, but the fear had been groundless: only reality
had been lost. ‘Young Carroll was asking for you,’ her father reported in a bewildered way, unable to
understand her reluctance even to consider Buzzy Carroll’s interest.

43
 Everything was easier when the green trunk and the box with the metal brackets stood in the
back hall at the beginning of another term, and when a few more terms had come and gone he greeted
her in the hotel as if all she had confessed to was a fantasy. Like his parents, she sensed, he was glad her
dismissal had not been necessary, for that would have been unfair. ‘Did my mother speak to you?’ The
quiet vehemence there had been in his voice was sweet to remember, but he himself would naturally
wish to forget it now: for him, Room 14 must have come to seem like an adventure in indiscretion, as
naturally his parents had seen it.

Two summers after he left school Dervla noticed signs in him that painfully echoed the past. An
archdeacon’s daughter sometimes had lunch with the family: he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Serving
the food and in her position by the dumb-waiter, Dervla watched him listening while the archdeacon’s
daughter talked about how she and her parents had moved from one rectory to another and how the
furniture hadn’t fitted the new rooms, how there hadn’t been enough stair-carpet. The archdeacon’s
daughter was very beautiful. Her dark hair was drawn back from a centre parting; when she smiled a
dimple came and went in one cheek only; her skin was like the porcelain of a doll’s skin. Often in the
dining-room she talked about her childhood in the seaside backwater where she had once lived. Every
morning in summer and autumn she and her father had gone together to the strand to bathe. They piled
their clothes up by a breakwater, putting stones on them if there was a wind, and then they would run
down the sand to the edge of the sea. A man sometimes passed by on a horse, a retired lighthouse
keeper, a lonely, widowed man. Christopher was entranced.

Dervla cleared away the dishes, expertly disposing of chop bones or bits of left-behind fat. Mary
had years ago shown her how to flick the table refuse on to a single plate, a different one from the plate
you gathered the used knives and forks on to. Doing so now, she too listened to everything the
archdeacon’s daughter said. Once upon a time the Pierrots had performed on the strand in August, and
Hewitt’s Travelling Fun Fair had come; regularly, June to September, summer visitors filled the
promenade boarding-houses, arriving on excursion trains. Garish pictures were painted with coloured
powders on the sand, castles and saints and gardens. ‘I loved that place,’ the archdeacon’s daughter
said.

Afterwards Dervla watched from an upstairs window, the window in fact of Room 14. The
archdeacon’s daughter sat with him in the garden, each of them in a deck-chair, laughing and
conversing. They were always laughing: the archdeacon’s daughter would say something and he would
throw his head back with appreciation and delight. Long before the engagement was announced Dervla
knew that this was the girl who was going to take her place, in his life and in the hotel.

44
 The Archdeacon conducted the service in St Peter’s, and then the guests made their way to the
garden of the hotel. That the wedding reception was to be at the hotel was a business arrangement
between the Archdeacon and Mr Congreve, for the expenses were to be the former’s, as convention
demanded. It was a day in June, a Thursday, in the middle of a heatwave.

Dervla and a new maid with spectacles handed round glasses of champagne. Artie saw to it that
people had chairs to sit on if they wished to sit. The archdeacon’s daughter wore a wedding-dress that
had a faint shade of blue in it, and a Limerick lace veil. She was kissed by people in the garden, she
smiled while helping to cut the wedding cake. Her four bridesmaids, Molly and Margery-Jane among
them, kept saying she looked marvellous.

Speeches were made in the sunshine. Dr Molloy made one and so did the best man, Tom
Gouvernet, and Mr Congreve. Dr Molloy remembered the day Christopher was born, and Mr Congreve
remembered the first time he’d set eyes on the beauty of the Archdeacon’s daughter, and Tom
Gouvernet remembered Christopher at school. Other guests remembered other occasions; Christopher
said he was the lucky man and kissed the archdeacon’s daughter while people clapped their hands with
delight. Tom Gouvernet fell backwards off the edge of a raised bed.

There was an excess of emotion in the garden, an excess of smiles and tears and happiness and
love. The champagne glasses were held up endlessly, toast after toast. Christopher’s mother moved
among the guests with the plump wife of the archdeacon and the Archdeacon himself, who was as frail
as a stalk of straw. In his easy-going way Christopher’s father delighted in the champagne and the
sunshine, and the excitement of a party. Mr McKibbin, the bank agent, was there, and Hogarty the
surveyor, and an insurance man who happened to be staying at the hotel. There was nothing Mr
Congreve liked better than standing about talking to these barroom companions.

‘Thanks, Dervla.’ Taking a glass from her tray, Christopher smiled at her because for ages that
had been possible again.

‘It’s a lovely wedding, sir.’

‘Yes, it is.’

He looked at her eyes, and was aware of the demanding steadiness of her gaze. He sensed what
she was wondering and wondered it himself: what would have happened if she’d been asked to leave
the hotel? He guessed, as she did: they would have shared the resentment and the anger that both of
them had separately experienced; defiantly they would have continued to meet in the town; she would
have accompanied him on his walks, out into the country and the fields. There would have been talk in
the town and scenes in the hotel, their relationship would again have been proscribed. They would have
drawn closer to one another, their outraged feelings becoming an element in the forbidden friendship.
In the end, together, they would have left the hotel and the town and neither of them would be
standing here now. Both their lives would be quite different.

45
 ‘You’ll be getting married yourself one of these days, Dervla.’

‘Ah, no no.’

She was still quite pretty. There was a simplicity about her freckled features that was pleasing;
her soft fair hair was neat beneath her maid’s white cap. But she was not beautiful. Once, not knowing
much about it, he had imagined she was. It was something less palpable that distinguished her.

‘Oh, surely? Surely, Dervla?’

‘I don’t see myself giving up the hotel, sir. My future’s here, sir.’

He smiled again and passed on. But his smile, which remained while he listened to a story of
Tom Gouvernet’s about the hazards to be encountered on a honeymoon, was uneasy. An echo of the
eyes that had gazed so steadily remained with him, as did the reference she had made to her future.
That she had not been turned out of the hotel had seemed something to be proud of at the time: a
crudity had been avoided. But while Tom Gouvernet’s lowered voice continued, he found himself
wishing she had been. She would indeed not ever marry, her eyes had stated, she would not wish to.

A hand of his wife’s slipped into one of his; the voice of Tom Gouvernet ceased. The hand was as
delicate as the petal of a flower, the fingers so tiny that involuntarily he lifted them to his lips. Had
Dervla seen? he Wondered, and he looked through the crowd for a glimpse of her but could not see her.
Hogarty the surveyor was doing a trick with a handkerchief, entertaining the coal merchant’s daughters.
Mr McKibben was telling one of his stories.

‘Ah, he’s definitely the lucky man,’ Tom Gouvernet said, playfully winking at the bride.

It had never occurred to Christopher before that while he and his parents could successfully
bury a part of the past, Dervla could not. It had never occurred to him that because she was the girl she
was she did not appreciate that some experiences were best forgotten. Ever since the Congreves had
owned the Royal Hotel a way of life had obtained there, but its subtleties had naturally eluded the
dining-room maid.

‘When you get tired of him,’ Tom Gouvernet went on in the same light manner, ‘you know who
to turn to.’

‘Oh, indeed I do, Tom.’

He should have told her about Dervla. If he told her now she would want Dervla to go; any wife
would, in perfect reasonableness. An excuse must be found, she would say, even though a promise had
been made.

‘But I won’t become tired of him,’ she was saying, smiling at Tom Gouvernet. ‘He’s actually quite
nice, you know.’

46
 In the far distance Dervla appeared, hurrying from the hotel with a freshly laden tray.
Christopher watched her, while the banter continued between bride and best man.

‘He had the shocking reputation at school,’ Tom Gouvernet said.

‘Oh? I didn’t know that.’ She was still smiling; she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t true.

‘A right Lothario you’ve got yourself hitched to.’

He would not tell her. It was too late for that, it would bewilder her since he had not done so
before. It wouldn’t be fair to require her not to wish that Dervla, even now, should be asked to go; or to
understand that a promise made to a dining-room maid must be honoured because that was the family
way.

Across the garden the Archdeacon lifted a glass from Dervla’s tray. He was still in the company
of his plump wife and Christopher’s mother. They, too, took more champagne and then Dervla walked
towards where Christopher was standing with his bride and his best man. She moved quickly through
the crowd, not offering her tray of glasses to the guests she passed, intent upon her destination.

‘Thank you, Dervla,’ his wife of an hour said.

‘I think Mr Hogarty,’ he said himself, ‘could do with more champagne.’

He watched her walking away and was left again with the insistence in her eyes. As the dining-
room maid, she would become part of another family growing up in the hotel. She would listen to a
mother telling her children about the strand where once she’d bathed, where a retired lighthouse
keeper had passed by on a horse. For all his life he would daily look upon hers, but no words would ever
convey her undramatic revenge because the right to speak, once his gift to her, had been taken away.
He had dealt in cruelty and so now did she: her gift to him, held over until his wedding day, was that
afternoon shadows would gather for ever in Room 14, while she kept faith.

From The Collected Stories of William Trevor

47
The Affairs of Each Beast
by David Benioff

The dogs had gone feral. They roamed the countryside in packs, their claws grown long, their fur thick
and unbrushed and tangled with thistles. When the soldiers began marching at dawn, Leksi counted
each dog he spotted, a game to help the time pass. He quit after forty. They were everywhere: crouched
and watchful in the snow; racing through the shadows of the towering pines; following the soldiers,
sniffing their boot prints, hoping for scraps.

The dogs unnerved Leksi. From time to time he would turn, point at the closest ones, and whisper,
“Stay.” They would stare up at him, unblinking. There was something strangely undomestic about their
eyes. These dogs lacked the wheedling complicity of their tamed brothers; they were free of the
household commandments: Do not shit in the kitchen. Do not bite people. A silver-haired bitch still wore
a purple collar, and Leksi imagined that the other dogs mocked her for this badge of servility.

Of the three soldiers, Leksi, at eighteen, was the youngest. They marched in single file with ten-meter
intervals between men, Leksi in the rear, Nikolai in the middle, Surkhov in front. They wore their gray-
and-white winter fatigues, parkas draped over their bulky packs to keep everything dry in case of
snowfall. We look like old hunchbacks, thought Leksi. His rifle strap kept slipping off his shoulder, so he
ended up holding the gun in his gloved hands. He still wasn’t used to the rifle. It never seemed heavy
when he picked it up in the morning, but by noon, when he was sweating through his undershirt despite
the cold, his arms ached from the burden.

Leksi, along with all of his school friends, had eagerly anticipated enlistment. From the age of
fourteen on, every girl in his class had been mad for the soldiers. Soldiers carried guns, wore uniforms,
drove military vehicles. Their high black boots gleamed when they crossed their legs in the outdoor
cafés. If you were eighteen and you weren’t a soldier, you were a woman; if you were neither soldier
nor woman, you were a cripple. Leksi had not been back to his hometown since enlisting. He wondered
when he’d get to cross his legs at an outdoor café and raise his glass to the giggling girls.

Instead he had this: snow, snow, more snow, snow. It all looked the same to Leksi, and it was endless.
He never paid attention to where they were going; he just followed the older soldiers. If he were ever to
look up and find them gone, Leksi would be lost in the wilderness, without any hope of finding his way
out. He could not understand why anyone would want to live here, let alone fight for the place.

He had first seen the Chechen highlands a month before, when the convoy carrying his infantry
division across the central Caucasus stopped at the peak of the Darial Pass so that the men could relieve
themselves. The soldiers stood in a long line by the side of the road, jumping up and down like madmen,
pissing into the wind, hollering threats and curses at their hidden enemies in the vast snowy distance.

48
 He had been cold that afternoon, he had been cold every morning and night since then, he was cold
now. He was so cold his teeth were cold. If he breathed through his mouth, his throat hurt; if he
breathed through his nose, his head hurt. But he was the youngest, and he was a soldier, so he never
complained.

Surkhov and Nikolai, on the other hand, never stopped complaining. They shouted to each other
throughout the morning, back and forth. Leksi knew that armed guerrillas lurked in these hills; he heard
they were paid a bounty for each enemy they brought to their chief, the vor v zakone, the “thief-in-
power.” The bodies of Russian soldiers were sometimes found crucified on telephone poles, their
genitalia stuffed into their mouths. Their severed heads were left on the doorsteps of ethnic Russians in
Grozny and Vladikavkaz. Leksi couldn’t understand why Surkhov and Nikolai were so recklessly loud, but
they had been soldiers for years. Both had seen extensive combat. Leksi didn’t question them.

“Put Khlebnikov in charge,” Surkhov was saying now, “and he’d clean this place up in two weeks.
There’s twelve pigfuckers here that tell all the other pigfuckers what to do. You put Khlebnikov in
charge, he’d get the twelve, ping ping ping.” Surkhov made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and
fired at the invisible twelve. He wasn’t wearing gloves. Neither was Nikolai. Leksi got colder just looking
at their bare red hands.

Surkhov was skinny but tireless. He could tramp through deep snow for hours without break, bitching
and singing the whole way. His face seemed asymmetrical, one eye slightly higher than the other. It
made him look perpetually skeptical. His shaggy brown hair spilled out from below his white watch cap.
The caps were reversible- black on the inside for nighttime maneuvers. Leksi, whose head was still
shaved to regulation specifications, felt vulnerable without his helmet, which he had left behind after
Surkhov and Nikolai kept throwing pebbles at it. None of the older soldiers wore helmets. Helmets were
considered unmanly, like seatbelts, fit only for UN observers and French journalists.

Nikolai’s hair was even longer than Surkhov’s. Nikolai looked like an American movie star, strong-
boned and blue-eyed, until he opened his mouth, which was jumbled with crooked teeth. If the teeth
bothered him, it didn’t show—he was constantly flashing his snaggle-toothed smile, as if daring people
to point out the gaps. Nobody ever did.

“They’ll never bring Khlebnikov here,” said Nikolai. “You’re always talking Khlebnikov this, Khlebnikov
that, so what? Never. Khlebnikov is a tank. They don’t want tanks here. This...” and here Nikolai
gestured at himself and Surkhov, their march, ignoring Leksi, “this is not relevant. This is a game. You
want to know the truth? Moscow is happier if we die. If we die, all the newspapers rant about it, the
politicians get on TV and rant about it, and then, maybe, they begin to fight for real.”

Whenever Nikolai or Surkhov said the word Moscow it sounded profane. Actual curses rolled from
their tongues, free and easy, but to Moscow they added the venom of a true malediction. Most of the
older soldiers spoke the same way, and the intensity of their emotion surprised Leksi. Nikolai and
Surkhov took almost nothing seriously. Surkhov would read aloud the letters he got from his girlfriend,

49
affecting a high-pitched, quavering voice—“I long for you, darling, I wake in the morning and already
long for you”—and then he and Nikolai would burst into laughter. One night Nikolai described his
father’s long, excruciating death from bone cancer, and then shrugged, sipping from a mug of coffee
spiked with vodka. “Well, he outlived his welcome.”

A week ago they had been marching down an unpaved road. They walked in the tracks of an armored
personnel carrier because the grooved and flattened snow gave better traction. Coming across a skinny
dead dog, Surkhov dragged it by its front paws into the center of the road. Blackbirds had pecked out
the eyes and testes. Surkhov, one hand on the back of its neck, lifted the dog’s frozen corpse onto its
hind legs and used it as a ventriloquist’s dummy to sing the Rolling Stones: “I can’t get no sa-tis-fac-tion,
I can’t get no sa-tis-fac-tion, I have tried, I have tried, I have tried, I have tried, I can’t get me no...”

Nikolai had laughed, bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, laughing until the blackbirds circling
overhead winged away. Leksi had smiled, because it would be rude not to smile, but he could not look
away from the dog’s eyeless face. Someone had shot it in the forehead; the bullet hole was round as a
coin. One of the soldiers from the APC, taking target practice.

Leksi was deeply superstitious. His grandmother had taught him that the world was full of animals
and that the animals all knew each other. There were secret conferences in the wild where the affairs of
each beast were discussed and argued. A boy in his school had pegged a pigeon with a slingshot, killing it
instantly. A year later the boy’s older sister died in a car accident. Leksi did not believe it was an
accident; he was sure the other birds had conspired and gained their revenge.

“Aleksandr!”

Leksi looked up from the snow and realized that he had fallen far behind Nikolai. He rushed forward,
nearly tripping. Carrying the rifle disrupted his balance. When he was again ten meters behind the older
soldier, he stopped and nodded, but Nikolai summoned him forward with curling fingers. Surkhov
squatted down and observed them from his position, grinning.

“Who’s watching my back?” asked Nikolai, when Leksi approached him.

“Me. I’m sorry.”

“No, again, who’s watching my back?”

“Me.”

Nikolai shook his head and looked at Surkhov for a moment, who shrugged. “Nobody’s watching my
back,” said Nikolai. “You’re watching the snow, you’re watching the dogs, you’re watching the sky. So,
OK, you are an artist, I think. You are composing a painting, maybe, in your head. I appreciate this. But
then tell me, if you are making this painting, who is watching my back?”

50
 “Nobody.”

“Ah. This is a problem. You see, I am watching Surkhov’s back. Nobody can attack Surkhov from
behind, because I would protect him. But who protects me? While you paint this masterpiece, who
protects me?”

“Sorry.”

“I will not die in this shit land, Aleksandr. You understand? I refuse to die here. You guard me, I guard
Surkhov, we all live another day. You see?”

“Yes.”

“Watch my back.”

Only after they began marching again, after Surkhov and Nikolai began singing Beatles songs,
replacing the original lyrics with obscene variations, did Leksi wonder who was watching his own back.

The three soldiers stopped less than a kilometer downhill of the mansion, at the edge of a dense
copse of pines. A high wall of mortared stones surrounded the property; only the shingled roof
and chimneys were visible from the soldiers’ vantage point. A long field of snow lay between
them and the house. The shadows of the tall trees stretched up the field in the last minutes of
sunlight.

Surkhov took the binoculars back from Leksi and stared through them. “They can watch the entire
valley from there. No smoke from the chimneys. But they know we’d be looking for smoke.”

Nikolai had pulled a plastic bag of tobacco and papers from Surkhov’s pack; he leaned against a tree
trunk now and rolled a cigarette. Leksi could roll a decent number if he were warm and indoors, sitting
down, the paper flat on a tabletop. He was always amazed that Nikolai could roll them anywhere, in less
than a minute, never dropping a flake of tobacco, no matter the wind or the darkness. Nikolai could roll
a cigarette while driving a car over a dirt road and singing along with the radio.

He gripped the finished product between his lips while returning the plastic bag to Surkhov’s pack.
Leksi lit it for him and Nikolai inhaled hungrily, his stubbled cheeks caving in. He released the smoke and
passed the cigarette to Leksi.

“Intelligence said no lights in the house the last three nights,” said Nikolai.

Surkhov spat. “Intelligence couldn’t find my cock if it was halfway up their ass. Fuck them and their
patron saints. Aleshkovsky told me some of them flew a copter to Pitsunda last weekend, for the

51
whores. We’re down here freezing our balls off and they go whoring.”

“So,” said Nikolai, “they send three men. The way they see it, (a) the place is empty, we take it, fine,
we have a good observation post for the valley; (b) half the terrorist army is in there, we’re dead, fine.
All at once, we are relevant. We are martyrs. The real fighting begins.”

“I don’t want to be relevant,” said Leksi, handing the cigarette to Surkhov. The older soldiers looked
at him quizzically for a moment and then laughed. It took Leksi a second to realize they were laughing
with him, not at him.

“No,” said Nikolai, clapping him on the back. “Neither do I.”

After nightfall they unrolled their sleeping bags and slept in turns, one man always keeping watch.
Leksi pulled the first shift but could not sleep after Nikolai relieved him. Every few minutes, a dog would
howl and then his brothers would answer, until the hills echoed with lonely dogs calling for each other.
An owl screeched from a perch nearby. Leksi lay in his bag and stared up through the pine branches. A
half-moon lit the sky and he watched the silhouetted clouds drift in and out of sight. He lay with his
knees pressed against his chest for warmth and flinched every time the wind blew a stray pine needle
against his cheek. He listened to Nikolai puffing on another hand-rolled cigarette and to Surkhov
grinding his teeth in his sleep.

In a few hours he might be fighting for a house he had never seen before tonight, against men he had
never met. He hadn’t insulted anyone or fucked anyone’s girlfriend, he hadn’t stolen any money or
crashed into anyone’s car, and yet these men, if they were here, would try to kill him. It seemed very
bizarre to Leksi. Strangers wanted to kill him. They didn’t even know him, but they wanted to kill him. As
if everything he had done was completely immaterial, everything he held in his mind: the girls he had
kissed; the hunting trips with his father; the cow he had drawn for his mother when he was seven, still
hanging in a frame on her bedroom wall; or the time he got caught sneaking glances over Katya
Zubritskaya’s shoulder during a geometry test and old Lukonin had made him stand up right there and
repeat, louder and louder, while the students laughed and pounded their desks: I am Aleksandr
Strelchenko and I am a cheat, and not even a good cheat. These memories were Aleksandr Strelchenko,
and so what? None of it mattered. None of it was real except here, now, the snow, the soldiers beside
him, the house on the hilltop. Why did they need the house? To observe the valley. What was there to
observe? Trees and snow and wild dogs, the Caucasus Mountains looming in the distance. Leksi curled
up inside his sleeping bag and pictured his severed head resting on a Grozny doorstep, his eyes the eyes
of a dead fish on its bed of ice.

At 3 a.m. they climbed the hill. They left their packs behind, wrapped tightly in waterproof tarps

52
and buried below the snow, marked with broken twigs and pinecones. The moon was bright
enough to make flashlights unnecessary. Surkhov and Nikolai seemed like different people now;
since waking they had barely spoken. They had blackened each other’s faces and then Leksi’s,
pocketed their watches, reversed their caps.

They reached the stone wall and circled around to the back gate. If there were any guard dogs, they
would have already begun barking. That was a good sign. They found the gate unlocked, swinging back
and forth in the wind, creaking. That was another good sign. They crept onto the property. The grounds
were sprawling and unkempt. A white gazebo stood by an old well; the gazebo’s roof sagged from the
weight of the snow.

The house’s large windows were trimmed in copper. No lights were on. The soldiers took positions by
hand signal: Surkhov approached the back door while Nikolai and Leksi lay on their stomachs and aimed
their rifles past him. Surkhov looked at them for a moment, shrugged, and turned the knob. The door
opened.

Nobody was home. They attached their flashlights to their rifle barrels and split up to check both
floors and the cellar, slowly, slowly, looking for the silver gleam of a trip wire, the matte gray of a
pancake mine. They searched under the beds, in the closets, the shower stalls, the wine racks in the
cellar, the modern toilet’s water tank. When Leksi opened the refrigerator he gasped. The light came on.

“Electricity,” he whispered. He couldn’t believe it. He walked over to the light switch and flicked it up.
The kitchen shined, the yellow tiled floor, the wood counters, the big black stove. Surkhov hurried in, his
boots thundering on the tiles. He turned off the light and slapped Leksi in the face.

“Idiot,” he said.

When the search was completed, Nikolai radioed their base. He listened to instructions for a
moment, nodded impatiently, signed off, and looked up at the other two, who were gathered
around him in the library. “So now we sit here and wait.”

The walls were bookshelves, crowded with more books than they were meant to hold, vertical stacks
of books on top of horizontal rows of books. Books were piled in corners, books lay scattered on the
leather sofa, books leaned precariously on the marble fireplace mantle.

Leksi’s face was still flushed from embarrassment. He knew that he had deserved the slap, that he
had acted stupidly, but he was furious anyway. He imagined that Surkhov slapped his girlfriends that
way if he caught them stealing money, and it burned Leksi to be treated with such disrespect, as if he
were unworthy of a punch.

53
 Nikolai watched him. “Look,” he said, “you understand why Surkhov was angry?”

“Yes.”

“Did you check the refrigerator before you opened it?” asked Nikolai. “Did you check to see if it was
wired? And then you turn on the lights! Now everyone in the valley knows we are here. You need to pay
attention. You never pay attention and it’s going to get you killed, which is fine, but it’s going to get us
killed also, which is not fine.”

Surkhov smiled. “Tell me you’re sorry, Leksi, and I’ll apologize too. Come on. Give me your hand.”

Leksi was unable to hold grudges. He extended his hand and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Fool,” said Surkhov, ignoring Leksi’s hand. He and Nikolai laughed and walked out of the library.

They washed off the face paint in a blue-tiled bathroom, using soap shaped like seashells, drying
themselves with green hand towels. Afterwards they searched the rooms for loot. Leksi took the
second floor, happy to be alone for a while, pointing his flashlight at everything that interested
him. In one grand room, where he assumed the master of the house once slept, he stared in
wonder at the bed. It was the biggest bed he had ever seen. He and his older brother had slept in
a bed one-third this size until his brother got married.

Blue porcelain lamps stood on the night tables. A tea cup sat on a saucer beneath one of these lamps.
The cup’s rim was smudged with red lipstick, and some tea had spilled into the saucer.

A heavy black dresser with brass handles stood against one wall. On top of the dresser were pill
bottles, a brush tangled with long gray hairs, a china bowl filled with coins, a cut-glass vial of perfume, a
jar of pungent face cream, and several silver-framed photographs. One of the photographs caught
Leksi’s eye, an old black-and-white, and he picked it up. A raven-haired woman stared at the camera.
She looked faintly bored yet willing to play along, the same expression Leksi saw on all the beautiful
young wives in his hometown. Her dark eyebrows plunged toward each other but didn’t meet.

Leksi had the eerie sense, examining the photograph, that the woman knew she would be seen this
way. As if she expected that a day would come, years and years after the shutter clicked, when a
stranger with a rifle strapped to his shoulder would point his flashlight at her face and wonder what her
name was.

He checked the other rooms on the floor and then went downstairs, not realizing that he was still
holding the framed photograph until he entered the dark library. He saw a match flare and he pointed
his flashlight in that direction. Surkhov and Nikolai were sprawled on the leather sofa, their boots and
socks kicked off, their stinking bare feet on the glass-topped coffee table. They had removed their
parkas and sweaters; their undershirts were mottled with sweat stains. They were smoking cigars. On

54
the floor beside them was a heap of silver that glowed cool and lunar when Leksi aimed his flashlight at
it: serving trays and candlesticks, tureens and ladles, napkin rings and decanters. Leksi wondered how
they expected to carry all that loot home with them. Maybe they didn’t, maybe they just liked the sight
of it, the piled treasure. A two-foot-tall blond china doll wearing a white nightdress sat on Nikolai’s lap.
His hand was massaging the doll’s thighs. He winked at Leksi.

“Aren’t you hot?”

It was true; Leksi was hot. He had been cold for so long that the heat had been welcome, but now he
leaned his rifle against a bookcase, carefully set the photograph on the mantle, and shrugged out of his
parka.

“They must have run off in a hurry,” said Surkhov. “Left the electricity on, left the heat on.” He
inspected the glowing ash on the tip of his cigar. “Left the cigars.”

Nikolai leaned forward and lifted a wooden cigar box off the coffee table. “Here,” he said to Leksi.
“Take your pick.”

Leksi selected a cigar, bit off the end, lit it, and lay down on the rug in front of the dead fireplace. He
turned off his flashlight. They puffed away in the darkness and did not speak for a time. It was very good
to lie there, in the warm house, smoking a good cigar. They listened to the wind gusting outside. Leksi
felt safer than he had in weeks. The other two were tough on him, it was true, but they knew what they
were doing. They were making him a better soldier.

“Leksi,” said Surkhov, sleepily. “Leksi.”

“Yes?”

“When you opened the refrigerator, what did you see?”

Leksi thought this was probably another trick. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about the-”

“No, what was inside the refrigerator? Did you get a look?”

“Lots of stuff. A chicken.”

“A chicken,” said Surkhov. “Cooked or uncooked?”

“Cooked.”

“Did it look good?”

For some reason Leksi thought this was a very funny question and he began to laugh. Nikolai laughed
too, and soon all three of them were shaking with laughter.

55
 “Ay me,” said Nikolai, sucking his cigar back to life.

“No, really,” said Surkhov. “Did it look like it’d been sitting there for months?”

“No. It looked very good, actually.”

Leksi lay on his back with his hands behind his head and thought about the chicken. Then he thought
about his feet. He unlaced his boots and pulled them off, and the wet socks as well. He shone his
flashlight on his toes and wiggled them. They were all there. He hadn’t seen them in a long time.

“Well,” said Surkhov, sitting up. “Let’s get that chicken.”

They ate off bone-china plates, with silver forks and wood-handled knives, at the long dining-
room table. The sun was beginning to rise. The crystal chandelier above the table refracted the
light and created multicolored patterns on the pale-blue wallpaper. Nikolai’s blond doll sat in the
seat next to him.

The roasted chicken was dry from sitting in the refrigerator, but not spoiled. They chewed the bones,
sucking out the marrow. The soldiers had found a nearly full bottle of vodka in the freezer and they
drank from heavy tumblers, staring out the windows at the valley that opened before them.

The snow and trees, the frozen lake in the distance, everything looked beautiful, harmonious, and
pure. Nikolai spotted an eagle and pointed it out; they all watched the bird soar high above the valley
floor. When they were finished eating, they pushed the plates to the center of the table and leaned back
in their chairs, rubbing their bellies. They exchanged a volley of burps and grinned at one another.

“So, Aleksandr,” said Nikolai, picking at his teeth with his thumbnail. “You have a girlfriend?”

Leksi took another drink and let the alcohol burn in his mouth for a moment before answering. “Not
really.”

“What does this mean, ‘not really?’”

“It means no.”

“But you’ve been with women?”

Leksi burped and nodded. “Here and there.”

“Virgin,” said Surkhov, carving his name into the mahogany tabletop with his knife.

“No,” said Leksi, undefiantly. He was not a liar and people eventually figured this out. Right now he

56
was too warm and well fed to be goaded into irritation. “I’ve been with three girls.”

Nikolai raised his eyebrows as if the number impressed him. “You must be a legend in your
hometown.”

“And I’ve kissed eleven.”

Surkhov plunged his knife into the table and shouted, “That’s a lie!” Then he giggled and drank more
vodka.

“Eleven,” repeated Leksi.

“Are you counting your mother?” Surkhov asked.

“I’m a very good kisser,” said Leksi. “They all said so.”

Nikolai and Surkhov looked at each other and laughed. “Excellent,” said Nikolai. “We’re lucky to have
such an expert with us. Could you demonstrate?” He reached over and grabbed the doll by its hair and
tossed it to Leksi, who caught it and looked into its blue glass eyes.

“I don’t like blondes,” said Leksi. The other men laughed and Leksi was very pleased with the joke. He
laughed himself and took another drink.

“Please,” said Nikolai. “Teach us.”

Leksi supported the doll by the back of its head and leaned forward to kiss its painted porcelain lips.
He kept his eyes closed. He thought about the last real girl he had kissed, the eleventh, the night before
entering the Army.

When Leksi opened his eyes Nikolai was standing, hands on his hips, frowning. “No,” he said. “Where
is the passion?” He grabbed the doll by the shoulders and pulled it from Leksi’s hands. He stared angrily
at the doll’s face. “Who do you love, doll? Is it Aleksandr? No? Is it me? I don’t believe you. How can I
trust you?” He cupped the doll’s face in his palms and kissed it mightily.

Leksi was impressed. It was a much better kiss, there was no question. He wanted another chance but
Nikolai tossed the doll aside. It landed on its back on the oaken sideboard. Surkhov clapped and
whistled, as if Nikolai had just scored the winning goal for their club team.

“That is a kiss,” said Nikolai, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You must always kiss as if
kissing will be outlawed at dawn.” He seized the vodka bottle from the table and saw that it was empty.
“Surkhov! You drunk bastard, you finished it!”

Surkhov nodded. “Good vodka.”

Nikolai stared sadly through the bottle. “There was more in the freezer?”

57
 “No.”

“There’s all that wine in the cellar,” said Leksi, looking at the doll’s little black shoes dangling over the
sideboard’s edge.

“Yes!” said Nikolai. “The cellar.”

Leksi followed Nikolai down the narrow staircase, both of them still barefoot. The cellar was
windowless, so Nikolai turned on the lights. The corners of the room were cobwebbed. A billiard
table covered with a plastic sheet stood against one wall. A chalkboard above it still tallied the
score from an old game. In the middle of the floor a yellow toy dump truck sat on its side. Leksi
picked it up and rolled its wheels; it would make a good gift for his little nephew.

One entire wall was a wine rack, a giant honeycomb of clay-colored octagonal cubbies. Foil-wrapped
bottle tops peeked out of each. Nikolai pulled one bottle out and inspected the label.

“French.” He handed it to Leksi. “The French are the whores of Europe, but they make nice wine.” He
pulled out two more bottles and they turned to go. They were halfway up the stairs when Nikolai placed
his two wine bottles on the step above him, drew his pistol from his waist holster, and chambered a
bullet. Leksi did not have a pistol. His rifle was still in the library. He held a bottle in one hand and a toy
truck in the other. He looked at Nikolai, not sure what was happening.

“Leksi,” whispered Nikolai. “How do they play pool with the table jammed against the wall?”

Leksi shook his head. He had no idea what the older man was talking about.

“Get Surkhov. Get your rifles and come down here.”

By the time Leksi had retrieved Surkhov from the dining room and their rifles from the library, and
returned to the cellar staircase, Nikolai was gone. Then they heard him calling for them. “Come on,
come on, it’s over.”

They found him standing above an opened trapdoor, his pistol reholstered. He had shoved the
billiards table aside to get to the trapdoor, a feat of strength that Leksi did not even register until a few
minutes later. The three soldiers stared down into the tiny subcellar. An old woman sat on a bare
mattress. She did not look up at them. Her thinning gray hair was tied back in a bun and her spotted
hands trembled on her knees. She wore a long black dress. A black cameo on a slender silver chain hung
from her neck. Aside from the mattress, a small table holding a hot plate was the only furniture. A
pyramid of canned food sat against one wall, next to several plastic jugs of water. A short aluminum

58
stepladder leaned against another wall.

“Is this your house, grandmother?” asked Surkhov. The woman did not respond.

“She’s not talking,” said Nikolai. He crouched down, grabbed the edge of the trapdoor frame, and
lowered himself into the bunker. The woman did not look at him. Nikolai patted her for weapons, gently
but thoroughly. He kicked over the pyramid of cans, checked under the hot plate, knocked on the walls
to make sure they were not hollow.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get her out of here. Come on, grandmother, up.” The woman did not move.
He grabbed her by the elbows and hoisted her into the air. Surkhov and Leksi reached down; each
grabbed an arm and pulled her up. Nikolai climbed out of the bunker; all three men stood around the
old woman and stared at her.

She looked back at them now, her amber eyes wide and furious. Leksi recognized her. She had been
the young woman in the photograph.

“This is my house,” she said in Russian, looking at each man in turn. She had a thick Chechen accent
but she articulated each word clearly. “My house,” she repeated.

“Yes, grandmother,” said Nikolai. “We are your guests. Please, come upstairs with us.”

She seemed bewildered by his polite tone, and let them lead her to the staircase. When Nikolai
retrieved his wine bottles she pointed at them. “That is not your wine,” she said. “Put it back.”

He nodded and handed the bottles to Leksi. “Put them back where we got them.”

When Leksi came upstairs he heard them talking in the library. He went there and found the old
woman sitting on the sofa, rubbing her black cameo between her fingers. It was hard to believe that she
had once been beautiful. The loose skin of her face and throat was furrowed and mottled. At her feet
was the piled silver, glittering in the sunlight that poured through the windows.

Surkhov had pulled a leather-bound book from a shelf and was skimming through it, licking his
fingertips each time he turned a page. Nikolai sat on the floor across from the woman, his back against
the marble side of the fireplace. He held an iron poker in his hands. The silver-framed photograph still
rested on the mantle. Leksi waited in the doorway, wondering if the old woman saw her picture. He
wished he had never moved it. There was something terribly shameful about forcing the beautiful young
woman to witness her future. The vodka, which Leksi had drunk with such pleasure a few minutes ago,
now burned in his stomach.

“Don’t do that,” said the old woman. The soldiers looked at her. “This,” she said angrily, licking her
fingertips in imitation of Surkhov. “You will ruin the paper.”

Surkhov nodded, smiled at her, and returned the book to its shelf. Nikolai stood, still holding the

59
poker, and gestured to Leksi. He ushered him out to the hallway and closed the library doors behind
them. They went into the dining room. The dirty plates, littered with broken chicken bones, still sat in
the middle of the table. Nikolai and Leksi looked out the high window at the snow-covered valley.

Nikolai sighed. “It is not a pleasant thing, but she is old. Her life from now on would be very bad. Give
her back to her Allah.”

Leksi turned and stared at the older soldier. “Me?”

“Yes,” said Nikolai, spinning the poker in his hands. “It is very important that you do it. Have you shot
anyone before?”

“No.”

“Good. She will be the first. I know, Aleksandr, you don’t want to kill an old woman. None of us do.
But think. Being a soldier is not about killing the people you want to kill. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? If
we only shot the people we hated. This woman, she is the enemy. She has bred enemies, and they will
breed more. She buys them guns and food, and they slaughter our men. These people,” he said, pointing
at the ceiling above them, “they are the richest people in the region. They have funded the terrorists for
years. They sleep in their silk sheets while the mines they paid for blow our friends’ legs off. They drink
their French wine while their bombs explode in our taverns, our restaurants. She is not innocent.”

Leksi started to say something but Nikolai shook his head and lightly tapped Leksi’s arm with the
poker. “No, this is not something to discuss. This is not a conversation we are having. Take her outside
and shoot her. Not on the property, I don’t want the blackbirds coming here. Bad luck. Take her into the
woods and shoot her and bury her.”

They were quiet for a minute, watching the distant lake, watching the wind-blown snow swirl above
the pine trees. Finally Leksi asked, “How old were you? The first time?”

“The first time I shot someone? Nineteen.”

Leksi nodded and opened his mouth, but forgot what he had meant to say. Finally he asked, “Who
were we fighting back then?”

Nikolai laughed. “How old do you think I am, Aleksandr?”

“Thirty-five?”

Nikolai smiled broadly, flashing his crooked teeth. “Twenty-four.” He pressed the poker’s tip against
the base of Leksi’s skull. “Here’s where the bullet goes.”

When they brought her into the house’s mudroom and told her to put on her boots, she stared up

60
at the soldiers, her hands trembling by her side. For a long while she stared at them, and Leksi
wondered what they would have done to her if she had still been young and beautiful. And then
he wondered what they would do if she simply refused to put her boots on. How could they
threaten her? Would they shoot her there and carry her into the woods? He hoped that would
happen, that she would fall down on the floor and refuse to rise, and Nikolai or Surkhov would
be forced to shoot her. But she didn’t, she simply stared at them and finally nodded, as though
she were agreeing with something. She sat on the bench by the door and pulled on a pair of fur-
lined boots. They seemed too big for her, as if she were a child trying on her mother’s boots. She
tucked the black cameo on its silver chain inside her dress and pulled on a fur coat made from
the dark pelts of some animal Leksi could not name.

A heavy snow shovel hung on the wall, blade up, between two pegs. Surkhov took it down and
handed it to the old woman. She grabbed it from him and headed out the door without a word. Leksi
looked at his two comrades, hoping they would tell him it was all a prank, that nobody would be killed
today. Nikolai would punch him on the arm and tell him he was a fool, and everyone would laugh; the
old woman would pop back into the mudroom, laughing- she was in on it, it was a great practical joke.
But Surkhov and Nikolai stood there, still barefoot, their faces expressionless, waiting for him to leave.
Leksi walked out the door and closed it behind him.

The old woman dragged the shovel behind her as if it were a sled. The snow came up to her knees;
she had to stop every minute for a rest. She would take several deep breaths and then continue walking,
the shovel’s blade bouncing over her footprints. She never looked back. Leksi followed three paces
behind, rifle in hand. He followed her out the back gate and told her to turn right, and she did, and they
circled to the front of the property and then down the hill.

Every time she stopped, Leksi would stare at the back of her head, at the gray bun held in place with
hairpins, with growing fury. Why had she stayed behind in the house when everyone else had left? She
hadn’t been abandoned. Somebody had helped her down into the subcellar; somebody had dragged the
billiard table over the trapdoor. It must have been pure greed, a refusal to give up the trinkets she had
accumulated over the years, her crystal and her silver and her French wine and the rest. The others must
have urged her to come with them. She was stubborn; she would not listen to reason; she was a fanatic.

“Why did you stay here?” he finally asked. He had not meant to speak with her; the question came
out unbidden.

She turned slowly and stared up at him. “It is my house,” she said. “Why did you come?”

“All right,” he said, pointing the rifle at her. “Keep moving.” He did not expect her to obey him, but
she did. They were walking down to where the three soldiers had hidden their packs, about a kilometer
away; Leksi would carry them back up and save Surkhov and Nikolai a trip. It would be hard going,
carrying three packs uphill, but he thought it would be much better than this walk downhill. Because
Leksi did not doubt for a second that what he was doing now was a sin. This was evil. He was going to
shoot an old woman in the back of the head, watch her pitch forward into the snow, and then bury her.

61
There was nothing to call it but evil.

He had long suspected that he was a coward. His older brother would tell him ghost stories in the
night and Leksi would lie awake for hours after. Sometimes he would shake his brother awake and make
him promise that the stories were lies. And his brother would say, “Of course, Leksi, of course, just
stories,” and hold his hand until he fell asleep.

“They chose you because you are the baby,” said the old woman, and Leksi squinted to look at her
through the glare of sunlight reflecting off the snow.

“Just walk.”

She hadn’t stopped walking, though, and she continued talking. “It’s a test for you. They want to see
how strong you are.”

Leksi said nothing, just watched the shovel skip down the slope.

“They don’t care if I live or die, you must know this. Why should they? Look at me, what can I do?
They are testing you. Can’t you see this? You are smart, you must see.”

“No,” said Leksi. “I’m not smart.”

“Neither am I. But I’ve lived with men for seventy years. I understand men. Right now, they are
watching us.”

Leksi looked up the hill, to the mansion at its crown. He suspected she was right, that Nikolai was
watching them through his binoculars. When he turned back the old woman was still trudging forward,
her breath rising in vapors above her head. She seemed to be moving more easily now, and Leksi
decided that she was in better shape than she had pretended, that her constant pauses were not caused
by exhaustion but rather by an attempt to delay what was going to happen. He understood that. He,
too, dreaded the ending.

“But at the bottom of the hill,” the old woman said, “they won’t be able to see us. That is where you
can let me go. They expect you to. If they wanted you to kill me, would they have let you go by yourself?
Why would they want you to take me so far away, out of sight?”

“They don’t want the blackbirds to come near the house,” said Leksi, and when he said it he realized
it made no sense. He was going to bury her. Why would the blackbirds come? Besides, Nikolai was not a
superstitious man.

The old woman laughed, the gray bun at the back of her head bobbing up and down. “The blackbirds?
That is what they said, the blackbirds? This is only a joke, boy. Wake up! They are playing with you.”

“Grandmother,” said Leksi, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. She stopped and turned
again to stare at him, smiling. She still had all her teeth but they were yellowed and long. The sight of

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the teeth infuriated Leksi; he rushed down the hill and jabbed the muzzle of his rifle into her stomach.

“Keep walking!” he yelled at her.

When they were halfway from the bottom she asked, “How will my grandchildren know where to
come?”

“What?”

“When they come to visit my grave, how will they know where it is?”

“I’ll put a marker up,” said Leksi. He had no intention of putting a marker up, but how else could he
answer such a question? His fury had already disappeared and he was disgusted with himself for letting
it go so quickly.

“Now?” she asked. “What’s the good of that? When the snow melts the marker will fall.”

“I’ll put one up in the spring.” He knew this must sound as ridiculous to the woman as it did to him,
but if she thought his assurance was preposterous she gave no sign.

“With my name on it,” said the old woman. “Tamara Shashani.” She spelled both names and then
made Leksi repeat it.

Leksi had known a girl named Tamara in school. She was fat and freckled and laughed like a braying
donkey. It seemed impossible that this woman and that girl could share a name.

“And my hometown,” added the old woman. “Put that on the marker, too. Djovkhar Ghaala.”

“You mean Grozny.”

“No, I mean Djovkhar Ghaala. I was born there, I know the name.”

Leksi shrugged. He had been in the city four days ago. The Chechens called it Djovkhar Ghaala; the
Russians called it Grozny. The Chechens had been driven out; the city was Grozny.

“Tell me,” said the old woman. “Do you remember everything?”

“Tamara Shashani. From Djovkhar Ghaala.”

Leksi followed behind her, eyes half closed. The sunlight’s glare was making his head hurt. The
shovel’s blade carved a little trail in the snow and he tried to step only in that trail, not sure why it
mattered but anxious not to stray outside the parallel lines.

“Do you know the story of when the Devil came to Orekhovo?”

“No,” said Leksi.

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 “It’s an old story. My grandfather told me when I was a girl. The Devil was lonely. He wanted a bride.
He wanted company for his palace in Hell.”

From the manner in which the old woman spoke, Leksi knew that she had told the tale many times
before. She never paused for thought; she never needed to search for the right phrase. He pictured her
sitting on the edge of her children’s beds, and then her grandchildren’s, reciting their favorite
adventure, the story of when the Devil came to Orekhovo.

“So he gathered his minions, all the demons that wandered through the world spreading discord. He
brought them into the meeting hall and asked them to name the most beautiful woman alive. Naturally,
the demons argued for hours. They never agreed on anything. Brawls broke out as each championed his
favorite. The Devil watched, bored, tapping his long nails on the armrest of his throne. But finally, after
tails had been chopped off and horns broken, one of the senior demons stepped forward and
announced that they had chosen. Her name was Aminah, and she lived in the town of Orekhovo.”

Leksi smiled. He had heard this story before, except that in the version he knew the beautiful woman
lived in Petrikov and was called Tatyana. He tried to remember who had told him the story.

“So the Devil mounted his great black horse and rode to Orekhovo. It was a winter’s day. When he
got there he asked a child he met on the road where the beautiful Aminah lived. After the boy gave
directions, the Devil grabbed him by the collar, slashed his throat, plucked out his blue eyes, and
pocketed them. He threw the boy’s body into a ditch and continued on his way.”

Leksi remembered that part. Don’t talk to strangers, that was the lesson. He looked uphill and saw
that the mansion was no longer in view. If he did let the woman go, who would know? But she would
seek out her people and tell them that three Russians had occupied her house. Perhaps there would be
a counterattack, and Leksi would die knowing that he had orchestrated his own doom.

“When the Devil found Aminah’s house, he hitched his horse to a post and knocked on the door. A fat
woman opened it and invited him inside, for the Devil was dressed like a gentleman. She stirred a pot of
stew that bubbled above the fire. ‘What are you seeking, traveler?’ she asked. ‘I seek Aminah,’ said the
Devil. ‘I have heard of her great beauty.’

“‘She is my daughter,’ said the fat woman. ‘Have you come to ask her hand? Many suitors wait upon
her, yet she has refused all. What do you have to offer?’ The Devil pulled out a purse and undid the
strings. He dumped a pile of gold coins onto the floor. ‘Ay,’ said Aminah’s mother. ‘At last I am wealthy!
Go to her, she is at the lake. Tell her I approve of your suit.’ When the woman sat on the floor and began
counting her gold, the Devil crept up behind her and slashed her throat. He plucked out her blue eyes
and pocketed them. He ladled himself a bowl of stew and ate until he was full, and then he left the
house and mounted his black horse.”

Never invite a stranger into the house, thought Leksi. And never count your gold while someone
stands behind you. The more he considered it, the more he doubted that the Chechens would attack the

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house. Why should they? Any direct assault would result in a quick reprisal, so they couldn’t keep the
house if they did take it. There was too much risk involved for such a cheap reward: three Russian
soldiers without vehicles or artillery.

“The Devil came to the lake and saw his prize. His demons had done well: Aminah was more beautiful
than all the angels the Devil had once consorted with. The lake was frozen over and Aminah sat on the
ice pulling on her skates. ‘Good afternoon,’ said the Devil. ‘May I join you?’ Aminah nodded, for the
Devil was handsome and dressed like a gentleman. He walked back to his horse, opened his saddlebag,
and pulled out a pair of skates, shined black leather, the blades gleaming and sharp.”

When Leksi listened to the story as a child he asked how the Devil had known to bring his skates.
Whom had he asked? His mother! He could picture it now; she was sitting at the edge of the bed while
Leksi and his brother fought for the blanket. He asked how the Devil knew to bring the skates, and his
brother groaned and called him an idiot. But his mother nodded as if it were a very wise question. He
could have pulled anything from that saddlebag, she told Leksi. It was the Devil’s saddlebag. If he had
needed a trombone he would have found it there.

“Aminah watched the Devil carefully,” continued the old woman. “She watched him sit down on the
ice and pull off his boots, and she saw his cloven hooves. She looked away quickly, so he would not
catch her spying. They skated out to the center of the lake. The Devil was fantastic. He carved perfect
figure eights, he pirouetted gracefully, he sped across the ice and jumped and spun through the air.
When he returned to Aminah’s side he pulled a necklace of great blue diamonds from his pocket. ‘This is
yours,’ he told her, placing it around her neck and fastening the clasp. ‘Now come with me to my
country, where I am king. I will make you my queen, and you will never work again. All of my people will
bow before you, they will scatter rose petals before your feet wherever you walk. Anything that you
desire will be yours, except this- when you take my hand and come to my land, you can never go
home.’”

Leksi and the old woman were walking in a narrow gully now, over slippery stones. Snow melted in
the sun and streamed weakly over the rocks. It was treacherous footing but the old woman seemed to
handle it with ease; she was agile as a goat.

“Aminah smiled and nodded and pretended that she was thinking about it. She skated away at a
leisurely pace, and the Devil followed behind her. She skated and skated and the Devil pursued her,
licking his sharp teeth with his forked tongue. But he did not know this lake, and Aminah did. She knew
it in summer, when the fish leapt up to catch flies and moths, and she knew it in winter, when the ice
was thick in some places and thin in others. She was a slender girl and the Devil was a big man; she
hoped he was as heavy as he looked.”

Listening to the story now and remembering how it ended, Leksi felt sorry for the Devil. Was the Devil
really so terrible? True, he had murdered the innocent boy on the road. But Aminah’s mother had
deserved it for selling her daughter so cheaply. And what the Devil desired-who could blame him? He

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wanted to marry the world’s most beautiful woman. What was wrong with that?

Just let the old woman go, thought Leksi. Just let her walk away. The odds are good she’ll never make
it to shelter before nightfall. I’d be giving her a chance, though, and what more could she ask of me?
That would be mercy, to let her walk. But then Leksi thought of Nikolai. Nikolai would ask how it had
gone and Leksi would be forced to lie. Except he could not imagine lying to Nikolai. Leksi never lied; he
wasn’t good at it. He pictured Nikolai’s face and Leksi knew he could never trick the older soldier. And
he could not go back to the mansion and admit that he had disobeyed a direct order.

“Finally, Aminah could hear the ice beginning to crack beneath her skates. The Devil was right behind
her, reaching out for her, his fingernails inches from her hair. Just as he was about to grab her the ice
beneath him gave way and he fell with a cry into the freezing water. ‘Aminah!’ he yelled. ‘Help me!’ But
Aminah skated away as fast as she could. She reached the edge of the lake, took off her skates, put her
boots on, and left the town, never to return.”

She kept the diamonds, thought Leksi. Maybe they turned back into eyeballs. He remembered being
disappointed, as a child, that the Devil could be so easily trapped. Why couldn’t he just breathe fire and
melt all the ice?

The runoff from the melting snow had created a shallow stream in the gully that rose halfway up
Leksi’s boots. He worried about falling and twisting an ankle—how could he climb back uphill with a
sprained ankle? Still, it was less exhausting than trudging through the wet snow. He remembered
waking early on summer mornings with his brother, searching under rocks in the woods for slugs and
beetles, pinning them on fish hooks, wading into the polluted river, and casting their lines. They never
caught anything—the waste from the nearby paper plant had poisoned the fish—but Leksi’s brother
would tell jokes all morning, and then they would lie on the riverbank and talk about hockey stars who
played in America and actresses on television.

“What happened next?” Leksi asked the old woman. He couldn’t remember if there had been an
epilogue.

The old woman stopped walking and looked skyward. A blackbird squawked on a pine branch above
them. “Nobody knows. Some say the Devil swam under the ice and back to Hell. They say that every
winter he returns, looking for Aminah, calling out her name.”

The Devil really loved her, decided Leksi. He always rooted for the bad men in fairy tales and movies,
not because he admired them but because they had no chance. The bad men were the true underdogs.
They never won.

Leksi and the old woman stood motionless, their breath curling about their heads like genies. Leksi
heard growls and turned to see where they came from. In the shadow of a great boulder twenty meters
away, three dogs feasted on a deer’s still steaming intestines. Each dog seemed to sense Leksi’s gaze at

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the same time; they lifted their heads and stared at him until he averted his eyes.

Leksi looked uphill and realized they were no longer standing on a hill. Panicked, he searched for
footprints, but there were none on the gully’s wet stones. How long had they walked in the stream?
Where had they entered it? All the tall pine trees looked identical to him; they stretched on for as far as
the eye could see. Nothing but trees and melting snow littered with broken twigs and pine cones. The
dogs watched him and the blackbird squawked and Leksi knew he was lost. He strapped the rifle over his
shoulder, pulled off a glove, and began fumbling in his parka’s pockets for his compass. The old woman
turned to look at him and Leksi tried to remain as calm as possible. He pulled out the compass and
peered at it. He determined true north and then closed his eyes. It didn’t matter. He had no idea in
which direction the house lay. Knowing true north meant nothing.

The old woman smiled at him when he opened his eyes. “It’s an old story. Of course,” she said, letting
the shovel’s long handle fall onto the wet rocks, “some people say there is no Devil.”

Leksi sat on the bank of the now bustling stream. If he could organize his thoughts, he believed,
everything would be all right. Unless he organized his thoughts he would die here in the nighttime, the
snow would drift over his body and only the dogs would know where to find him. He stared at his lap to
rest his eyes from the glare. Feeling hot, he laid his rifle on the ground and shrugged out of his parka.
The sun was heavy on his face and he could feel his pale cheeks beginning to burn. He listened to the
countryside around him: the dogs snarling at the blackbirds; the blackbirds flapping their wings; the
running water; the pine branches creaking. He sat in the snow and listened to the countryside around
him.

When he finally raised his head the old woman was gone, as he knew she would be. Her shovel was
half submerged in the stream, its handle wedged between two rocks, its metal blade glinting below
water like the scale of a giant fish. The sun rose higher in the sky and the snow began to fall from the
trees. Leksi stood, pulled on his parka, picked up his rifle, and started wading upstream, searching for
the spot where his footprints ended.

He hadn’t gone far when he heard a whistle. He crouched down, fumbling with the rifle, trying to get
his gloved finger inside the trigger guard.

“Relax, Leksi.” It was Nikolai, squatting by the trunk of a dead pine. The tree’s bare branches reached
out for the blue sky. Nikolai tapped off the ash of the cigar he was smoking. He was in shirtsleeves, his
rifle strapped over one shoulder.

“You followed me,” said Leksi.

The older soldier did not reply. He squinted into the distance beyond Leksi and Leksi followed his
gaze, but there was nothing to be seen. A moment later a single gunshot echoed across the valley floor.
Nikolai nodded, stood up, and stretched his arms above his head. He picked a bit of loose tobacco off his
tongue and then tramped through the snow to the stream. Leksi, still in his crouch, watched him come

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closer.

Nikolai pulled the shovel out of the water and held it up. “Come over here, my friend.”

Leksi heard singing behind him. He wheeled about to find Surkhov marching toward them, singing
“Here Comes the Sun,” twirling a silver chain with a black cameo on its end.

Nikolai smiled and held out the shovel. “Come here, Aleksandr. You have work to do.”

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FOUR GENERATIONS

Joyce Maynard

My mother called to tell me that my grandmother was dying. She had refused an operation that
would postpone, but not prevent, her death from pancreatic cancer. She could no longer eat, she had
been hemorrhaging, and she had severe jaundice. "I always prided myself on being different," she told my
mother. "Now I am different. I'm yellow."

My mother, telling me this news, began to cry. So I became the mother for a moment, reminding her,
reasonably, that my grandmother was eighty six, she'd had a full life, she had all her faculties, and no one
who knew her could wish that she live long enough to lose them. In the last year or so my mother had
begun finding notes in my grandmother's drawers at the nursing home, reminding her, "Joyce's husband's
name is Steve. Their daughter is named Audrey." She rarely saw her children anymore, had no strength
to cook or garden. Just the other week she had said of her longtime passion, Harry Belafonte, "I gave him
up." She told my mother that she'd had enough of living.

My grandmother's name was Rona Bruser. She was born in Russia, in 1892, the eldest daughter of a
large and prosperous Jewish family. But the comfort didn't last. She used to tell stories of the pogroms
and the Cossacks who raped her when she was twelve. Soon after that her family emigrated to Canada.
Her youngest sister was so sickly her mother was going to leave her behind, but Rona, at thirteen,
promised to hold and care for the baby for the entire duration of the ocean crossing, and against all
predictions, the baby survived.

My mother has shown me photographs of my grandmother in the old days. Today a woman like her would
be constantly dieting (as my mother does), but back then her stout, corseted figure was the ideal. She
had a long black braid and the sort of strong-jawed beauty that would never be described as fragile. She
was pursued by many men, but most ardently by Boris Bruser, also an immigrant from Russia, who came
from a much poorer country family, and courted her through the mail, in letters filled with his watercolor
illustrations and rich, romantic prose. "Precious Rona," his letters begin. "If only my arms were around
you." "Your loving friend," they end, (as little as one week before the wedding), "B. Bruser."

My grandfather, like the classic characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, concerned himself more with
dreams than with life on earth. He ran one failing store after another, moving his family from town to town
across the Canadian prairies, trusting the least trustworthy of customers, investing in doomed
businesses, painting gentle watercolors and arranging canned goods in artful pyramids in whatever store
hadn't gone bankrupt yet, while his wife tried to balance the books and baked the knishes.

Their children, my mother in particular, were the center of their life. The story I loved best as a child was
of my grandfather opening every box of Cracker Jacks in his store in search of the particular toy my
mother coveted. Though they never had much money, my grandmother saw to it that her daughter had
elocution lessons and piano lessons, and the assurance that she would go to college.

But while she was at college my mother met my father, who was not only twenty years older than she
was, and divorced, but blue-eyed and blonde-haired and not Jewish. When my father sent love letters to
my mother (filled, as my grandfather's had been, years before, with poems and the most wonderful
drawings), my grandmother would open and hide them, and when my mother told her parents she was
going to marry this man, my grandmother said if that happened, it would kill her.

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Not likely, of course. My grandmother was a woman who used to crack Brazil nuts open with her teeth, a
woman who once lifted a car off the ground when there was an accident and it had to be moved. She had
been representing her death as imminent ever since I could remember, and had discussed, at length, the
distribution of her possessions and her lamb coat. Every time we said goodbye, after our annual visit to
Winnipeg, she'd weep and say she might never see us again. But in the meantime, while nearly every
other relative of her generation, and a good many younger ones, had died (nursed in their final illness,
usually, by her) she kept making borscht, shopping for bargains, tending the most flourishing plants I've
ever seen, and most particularly, spreading the word of her daughters' and granddaughters'
accomplishments.

On the first real vacation my grandparents ever took, to Florida -- to celebrate their retirement, the sale of
their last store, and the first true solvency of their marriage -- my grandfather was hit by a car. After that
he began to forget his children's names and could walk only with two canes. After he died my
grandmother's life was lived, more than ever, through her children, and her pride, her possessiveness,
seemed suffocating. When she came to visit, I would have to hide my diary. She couldn't understand any
desire for privacy. She couldn't bear it if my mother left the house without her. Years later, in the nursing
home, she would tell people that I was the editor of the New York Times and my cousin was the foremost
artist in Canada. My mother was simply the most perfect daughter who ever lived.

This made my mother furious (and then guilt-ridden that she felt that way, when of course she owed so
much to her mother). So I harbored the resentment that my mother, the dutiful daughter, would not allow
herself. I, who had always performed specially well for my grandmother -- danced and sung for her,
offered up my smiles and kisses and good report cards and prizes, the way my mother always had --
stopped writing to her, ceased to visit.

But when I heard she was dying I realized I wanted to go to Winnipeg to see her one more time. Mostly to
make my mother happy, I told myself (certain patterns being hard to break). But also, I was offering up
one more particularly successful accomplishment: my own dark-eyed, dark skinned, dark-haired
daughter, whom my grandmother had never met.

I put Audrey's best dress on her for our visit to Winnipeg, the way the best dresses were always put on
me for visits twenty years before. I made sure Audrey's stomach was full so she'd be in good spirits, and I
filled my pockets with animal crackers in case she started to cry. I scrubbed her face mercilessly (never
having been quite clean enough myself to please my grandmother). In the elevator going up to her room,
I realized how much I was sweating.

For the first time in her life, Grandma looked small. She was lying flat with an IV tube in her arm and her
eyes shut, but she opened them when I leaned over to kiss her. "It's Fredelle's daughter, Joyce," I yelled,
because she didn't hear well any more, but I could see that no explanation was necessary. "You came,"
she said. "You brought the baby."

Audrey was just one year old, but she had already seen enough of the world to know that people in beds
are not meant to be still and yellow, and she looked frightened. "Does she make strange?" my
grandmother asked.

Then Grandma waved at her -- the same kind of slow, finger-flexing wave a baby makes -- and Audrey
waved back. I spread her toys out on my grandmother's bed and sat her down. There she stayed most of
the afternoon, playing and humming and sipping on her bottle, taking a nap at one point, leaning against
my grandmother's leg. When I cranked her Snoopy guitar, Audrey stood up on the bed and danced.
Grandma couldn't talk much any more, though every once in a while she would say how sorry she was
that she wasn't having a better day. "I'm not always like this," she said.

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Mostly she just watched Audrey. Over and over she told me how beautiful my daughter is, how lucky I am
to have her. Sometimes Audrey would want to get off the bed, inspect the get-well cards, totter down the
hall. "Where is she?" Grandma kept asking. "Who's looking after her?" I had the feeling, even then, that if
I'd said "Audrey's lighting matches," Grandma would have shot up to rescue her.

We were flying home that night, and I had dreaded telling her, remembering all those other tearful
partings. But in the end, when I said we had to go, it was me, not Grandma, who cried. She said she was
ready to die. But as I leaned over to stroke her forehead, what she said was, "I wish I had your hair," and,
"I wish I was well."

On the plane flying home, with Audrey in my arms, I thought about mothers and daughters, and the four
generations of the family that I know most intimately. Every one of those mothers loves and needs her
daughter more than her daughter will love or need her someday, and we are, each of us, the only person
on earth who is quite so consumingly interested in our child. Sometimes, now, I kiss and hug Audrey so
much she starts crying, which is in effect what my grandmother was doing to my mother all her life. And
what makes my mother grieve, I know, is not only that her mother will die in a day or two, but that once
her mother is dead, there will never again be someone to love her in quite such an unreserved and
unquestioning way. No one to believe that fifty years ago she could have put Shirley Temple out of a job,
no one else who remembers the moment of her birth. She will only be a mother, then, not a daughter
anymore.

As for Audrey and me, we stopped over for a night in Toronto, where my mother lives. In the morning, we
headed to a safe deposit box at the bank to take out the receipt for my grandmother's burial plot. Then my
mother flew back to Winnipeg herself, where, for the first time in anybody's memory, there was waist-high
snow on April Fool's Day. But that night, she fed me a huge dinner, as she always did when I came for a
visit, and I ate more than I do anywhere else. I admired the Fiesta-ware china (once my grandmother's)
that my mother set on the table. She said (the way Grandma used to say to her of the lamb coat),
"Someday it will be yours."

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Dave Barry

SOPHIE, STELLA AND THE BIEBER PLAN

In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson plays a father whose daughter is kidnapped by evil pervert
sex traffickers with foreign accents. Fortunately, Liam’s character is a former spy, and he uses his
espionage skills to go on a desperate quest, during which he terminates an estimated 125 bad guys
with his bare hands before he finally tracks down his daughter and saves her.

Taken is on cable a lot, and every time I stumble across it I watch the whole thing because it
combines two artistic themes with classic enduring appeal:

Liam Neeson beating the crap out of foreign perverts, and

Fatherhood.

If you’re a man with a daughter, you can’t watch this movie without imagining yourself in
Liam’s position—wondering how far you would go for the sake of your daughter, what desperate
life-threatening measures you would be willing to take.

Well, I don’t have to wonder anymore. I know exactly what I would do because I have already
made the ultimate sacrifice: I took my daughter to a Justin Bieber concert.

How bad was it? you ask.

It was so bad that I cannot hear you asking me how bad it was. My hearing has been destroyed
by seventeen thousand puberty-crazed girls shrieking at the decibel level of global thermonuclear
war. It turns out that the noise teenage girls make to express rapturous happiness is the same noise
they would make if their feet were being gnawed off by badgers. Also, for some reason being happy
makes them cry: The girl next to me spent the entire concert bawling and screaming, quote, “I LOVE
YOU!” directly into my right ear.

She was not screaming to me of course. She was screaming to cute-boy Canadian heartthrob
Justin Bieber, as were all the other girls, including my daughter Sophie and her BFF,* Stella Sable.
Sophie and Stella wore matching purple tutus (purple, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin’s
favorite color) and spent the entire concert bouncing up and down, shrieking and vibrating like
tuning forks. They are big fans. Sophie has covered one corner of her room—she calls it the Corner
of Appreciation—with pictures of Justin Bieber gazing at the camera with the soulful expression of
a person who truly believes, deep in his heart, that he is the best-looking human ever. On March 1
(which, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin Bieber’s birthday) Sophie posted on Instagram* that he
is, quote, “the perfectest person on the planet.”

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 One day, while I was looking at the Corner of Appreciation, Sophie and I had the following
exchange:

Me: You know, Justin Bieber doesn’t have any idea who you are.

Sophie: Not yet.

This exchange disturbed me. I don’t want my daughter’s life goal to be to meet (and I say this
respectfully) an overhyped twerp. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those fathers who think no
man will ever be good enough for their daughters. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who is
worthy of Sophie, and I sincerely hope that she meets him someday, with “someday” defined as
“after I have been dead for a minimum of three months and all efforts to revive me have failed.”
Even then, if Sophie is going to go on dates with this male, I want to go along. My body can ride in
the backseat, with an air freshener.

Speaking of death: My wife nearly experienced it before the concert started. I have seen my wife
perform some amazing physical feats; I once saw her produce, from somewhere inside her body, a
live human being. But nothing I’ve seen her do was as brave, if not foolhardy, as what she did when
we got to the Justin Bieber concert; namely, she purchased officially licensed Justin Bieber
merchandise for Sophie and Stella. To do this, she had to battle her way through what was basically
a mom riot—several hundred frenzied women* engaged in a desperate elbow-throwing struggle
against other moms to reach the merchandise counter so they could pay upwards of fifty dollars
apiece for Justin Bieber T-shirts for their daughters.

God forbid this should happen, but: If we ever go to war with Japan again, and they embed their
forces deep inside heavily fortified caves on Iwo Jima again, instead of sending in the Marines, all
we need to do is put the word around that the Japanese forces are in possession of overpriced Justin
Bieber merchandise. Within minutes they will be overrun by moms fully capable of decapitating an
opposing shopper using only their MasterCards.

The concert itself was also pretty brutal, lasting (this is an estimate) twenty-seven hours. We
had to stand the whole time because everybody else stood the whole time because that is how
excited everybody was. Justin Bieber was preceded by two lesser heartthrobs. You could tell they
ranked below Justin because they had fewer backup dancers. Your modern singing star does not go
to the bathroom without backup dancers. Your modern musical concert consists of the singer
prancing from one side of the stage to the other accompanied by a clot of dancers, everybody
frantically performing synchronized dance moves and pelvic thrusts, looking like people having sex
with invisible partners while being pursued by bees. At times the dancing looks silly, but it serves a
vital artistic function; namely, keeping you from noticing that the music (and I say this respectfully)
sucks.

OK, perhaps “sucks” is too strong a word.* Perhaps I am just being a flatulent old fossil clinging
to memories of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll, back when I was young and all four Beatles were
alive and nobody I knew had ever heard of gum disease. Musical acts in those days didn’t have to

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distract you with dancers because, goldarnit, they had talent. When you went to see, for example,
Sly and the Family Stone, you did not go expecting to see dance routines. You went expecting to see
a funktastic band made up of highly entertaining musical performers who, in all probability, were
not going to show up.

Headline acts that failed to appear were a distinguishing feature of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’
Roll. Back then, the concertgoing experience often consisted of sitting in an auditorium amid dense
clouds of smoke, listening to some nervous promoter announce, for the eighth time in three hours,
that the headline act was at that very moment en route to the venue, when, in fact, the headline act
was passed out facedown in a puddle of vomit in an entirely different time zone.

But my point is that during the G. A. of R. and R., on those occasions when the headline
acts did show up, they didn’t race all over the stage inside a clot of hyperactive backup dancers.
They stayed in one place, which made them easy to keep track of, which was helpful if you had
spent some time inside the smoke cloud, if you know what I mean. Here’s an example of what I
mean: In approximately 1969, I attended a performance by Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods
at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, and I was able to watch the entire show lying on my back on
the floor next to the stage pretty much directly underneath one of the Youngbloods, who was
known as “Banana.” I did get stepped on occasionally, but overall I had a relaxed, mellow
experience as well as an excellent view of the band, which stayed in one place the whole night and
never attempted any dance maneuvers, and which for all I know is still standing in basically the
same spot at the Electric Factory.

If I had lain on the floor at the Justin Bieber concert, within seconds I would have been trampled
into human lasagna. I had to stay on my feet in the throbbing, screaming crowd, which shrieked
even louder whenever Justin and his backup dancers pranced past, or when Justin did something
especially awesome, such as remove his sunglasses. The most exciting moment, which caused a
level of shriekage that I’m sure alarmed dogs as far away as Canada, came when Justin took off his
shirt and revealed his physique, which reminded me (and I say this respectfully) of the Geico Gecko.

But as thrilling as that was, it was not the highlight of the concert. The highlight, for me at least,
came toward the end, when Sophie and Stella decided to execute their plan to invite Justin Bieber to
their bat mitzvahs.* They had both brought large square white envelopes containing official

invitations: On Stella’s envelope, she had written, “Justin please come to my bat mitzvah .”

Sophie’s envelope said “I you! Please come to my Bat Mitzvah!” Their plan was to somehow
get the invitations to Justin Bieber, who would read them and decide to attend their bat mitzvahs.

Sophie and Stella spent the entire concert clutching their envelopes, vibrating and shrieking and
watching the Bieber/dancer clot prance back and forth. But they couldn’t get near the stage because
the crowd was too thick. Finally, as Justin Bieber went into his last song, they realized that their
opportunity was slipping away. They shouted something to my wife and me—I couldn’t hear a
word—then they turned and plunged into the crowd, lost from our view. A minute later, the dancer
clot came prancing back in our direction. The mob of shrieking fans surged forward, and for just an

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instant, through an opening in the mass of heads in front of me, I got a clear view of Justin Bieber. In
that same instant, I saw two large square white envelopes arc through the air and into the spotlight,
then flutter to the stage near his feet.

Guess what happened next.

If you guessed that, against all odds, Justin Bieber glanced down and, somehow, amid all the
dancing and shrieking, noticed these two adorable purple-tutu-clad girls in the crowd, then
suddenly stopped—that’s right, stopped, right in the middle of the song—and then, with a winning
smile and a wink to Sophie and Stella that was easily the greatest thrill of their young lives, reached
down, picked up the bat mitzvah invitations and stuck them into his pocket, then you are (and I say
this respectfully) an idiot. Rock-star pants don’t even have working pockets. Bieber and the clot
pranced right on past, leaving the envelopes lying on the stage.

I assume Bieber never saw the invitations. I know he didn’t come to Sophie’s bat mitzvah party.
Which was his loss because it was a fine event, except for a terrifying few seconds when I was
hoisted into the air on a chair being thrust wildly up and down* by a group of men who had
consumed so much tequila that they could easily have launched me out a window without noticing
it until they put the chair down empty. (“Hey! Where’s Dave?” “Dave who?”)

But other than that, the party was wonderful. The best part, for me, was the last dance of the
night, the Father-Daughter Dance. That’s when I got to hold Sophie in my arms, gaze into her
smiling face and marvel at the fact that my daughter—who five minutes ago was a little red poop
factory I carried around like a football—had somehow transformed into this radiant, beautiful,
poised young woman, getting ready to go out in the world and break many hearts.

She’ll probably have her own heart broken a few times, too. But she’ll do just fine out there in
the world, Sophie will, I’m sure of that, because she’s a strong, sensible and self-confident person.
Also, if any man even starts to treat her wrong, I will summon my inner Liam Neeson and wreak
vengeance upon that man, even if I am eighty-six years old and have to use a weaponized walker.
Because she’s a special girl.

And Justin, if you’re reading this: You had your chance.

Postscript

Since I wrote this essay, things have changed between Sophie and Justin. She no longer thinks
he’s the perfectest person on the planet. In fact, she now thinks he’s kind of a jerk, and she has
uninstalled the Corner of Appreciation. I’d be thrilled about this, except that the place in Sophie’s
heart formerly occupied by Justin has been taken over by a boy band called One Direction. There
are five of them.

[From You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty by Dave Barry]

75
76
BREAKING THROUGH

By Myrna Pena-Reyes

Haltingly I undo the knots

around your parcel that came this morning.

A small box should require little labor,

but you’ve always been thorough,

tying things tight and well.

The twine lengthens,

curls beside the box.

I see your fingers bind and pull,

snapping the knots into place

(once your belt snapped sharply against my skin).

You hoped the package would hold its shape

across 10,000 miles of ocean.

It’s not a bride’s superstition

that leaves the scissors in the drawer.

Unravelling what you’ve done with love

77
I practice more than patience

a kind of thoroughness

I couldn’t see before.

I shall not let it pass.

My father, this undoing is

what binds us.

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DREAM OF KNIVES
By Alfred Yuson

Last night I dreamt of a knife

I had bought for my son. Of rare design,

it went cheaply for its worth—short dagger

with fancily rounded pommel, and a wooden sheath

which miraculously revealed other, miniature blades.

Oh how pleased he would be upon my return

from this journey, I thought. What rapture

will surely adorn his ten-year princeling’s face

when he draws the gift the first time. What quivering

pleasure will most certainly be unleashed.

When I woke, there was no return, no journey,

no gift, and no son beside me. Where do I search

for this knife then, and when do I begin to draw

happiness from reality, and why do I bleed so

from such sharp points of dreams?

79
 Those Winter Sundays

by Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

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 My Papa’s Waltz

by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

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 THE HEAVENLY ANIMAL
By Jayne Anne Phillips

Jancy’s father always wanted to fix her car. Every time she came home for a visit, he called her
at her mother’s house and asked about the car with a second sentence.

Well, he’d say. How are you?

Fine, I’m fine.

And how’s the car? Have any trouble?

He became incensed if Jancy’s mother answered. He slammed the receiver down and broke the
connection. They always knew who it was by the stutter of silence, then the violent click. He lived alone
in a house ten blocks away.

Often, he would drive by and see Jancy’s car before she’d even taken her coat off. He stopped
his aging black Ford on the sloping street and honked two tentative blasts. He hadn’t come inside her
mother’s house since the divorce five years ago. He wouldn’t even step on the grass of the block-
shaped lawn. This time Jancy saw his car from the bathroom window. She cursed and pulled her pants
up. She walked outside and the heavy car door swung open. Her father wore a wool hat with a turned-
up brim and small gray feather. Jancy loved the feather.

Hi, she said.

Well, hi there. When did you get in?

About five minutes ago.

Have any trouble?

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 She got into the car. The black interior was very clean and the empty litter bag hung from the
radio knob. Jancy thought she could smell its new plastic mingling with the odor of his cigar. She leaned
over and kissed him.

Thank god, she thought, he looks better.

He pointed to her car. What the hell did you do to the chrome along the side there? he said.

Trying to park, Jancy said. Got in a tight spot.

Her father shook his head and grimaced. He held the butt of the cigar with his thumb and
forefinger. Jancy saw the flat chewed softness of the butt where he held it in his mouth, and the stain
on his lips where it touched.

Jesus, honey, he said.

Can’t win them all.

But you got to win some of them, he said. That car’s got to last you a long time.

It will, Jancy said. It’s a good car. Like a tank. I could drive that car through the fiery pits of hell
and come out smelling like a rose.

Well. Everything you do to it takes money to fix. And I just don’t have it.

Don’t want it fixed, Jancy said. Works fine without the chrome.

He never asked her at first how long she was going to stay. For the past few years she’d come
home between school terms. Or from far-flung towns up East, out West. Sometimes during her visits
she left to see friends. He would rant close to her face, breathing hard.

Why in God’s name would you go to Washington DC? Nothing there but niggers. And what the
hell do you want in New York? You’re going to wear out your car. You’ve driven that car thirty thousand
miles in one year--- Why? What the hell for?

The people I care about are far apart. I don’t get many chances to see them.

Jesus Christ, you come home and off you go.

I’ll be back in four days.

That’s not the goddamn point. You’ll get yourself crippled up in a car wreck running around like
this. Then where will you be?

Jancy would sigh and feel herself harden.

I won’t stay in one place all my life out of fear I’ll get crippled if I move, she’d say.

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 Well I understand that, but Jesus.

His breathing would grow quiet. He rubbed his fingers and twisted the gold Masonic ring he
wore in place of a wedding band.

Honey, he’d say. You got to think of these things.

And they would both sit staring.

Down the street Jancy saw red stop signs and the lawns of churches. Today he was in a good
mood. Today he was just glad to see her. And he didn’t know she was going to see Michael. Or was
she?

What do you think? he said. Do you want to go out for lunch tomorrow? I go down to the
Catholic church there, they have a senior citizen’s meal. Pretty good food.

Jancy smiled. Do you remember when you stopped buying Listerine, she asked, because you
found out a Catholic owned the company?

She could tell he didn’t remember, but he grinned.

Hell, he said. Damn Catholics own everything.

He was sixty-seven. Tiny blood vessels in his cheeks had burst. There was that redness in his
skin, and the blue of shadows, gauntness of the weight loss a year ago. His skin got softer, his eyelids
translucent as crepe. His eyelashes were very short and reddish. The flesh drooped under his heavy
brows. As a young man, he’d been almost sloe-eyed. Bedroom eyes, her mother called them. Now his
eyes receded in the mysterious colors of his face.

OK, Jancy said. Lunch.

She got out of the car and bent to look in at him through the open window.

Hey, she said. You look pretty snappy in that hat.

Tonight her mother would leave after supper for Ohio. Jancy would be alone in the house and
she would stare at the telephone. She tore lettuce while her mother broiled the steaks.

I don’t know why you want to drive all the way up there at night, Jancy said. Why don’t you
leave in the morning?

I can make better time at night, her mother said. And besides, the wedding is in two days. Your
aunt wanted me to come last week. It’s not every day her only daughter gets married, and since you
refuse to go to weddings…

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 She paused. They heard the meat crackle in the oven.

I’m sorry to leave when you’ve just gotten here. I thought you’d be here two weeks ago, and
we’d have some time before I left. But you’ll be here when I get back.

Jancy looked intently into the salad bowl.

Jancy? asked her mother. Why are you so late getting here? Why didn’t you write?

I was just busy… finishing the term, packing, subletting the apartment---

You could have phoned.

I didn’t want to. I hate calling long distance. It makes me feel lost, listening to all the static.

That’s ridiculous, her mother said. Let’s get this table cleared off. I don’t know why you always
come in and dump everything on the first available spot.

Because I believe in instant relief, Jancy said.

---books, backpack, maps, your purse---

She reached for the books and Jancy’s leather purse fell to the floor. Its contents spilled and
rolled. She bent to retrieve the mess before Jancy could stop her, picking up the small bottles of pills.

What are these? She said. What are you doing with all these pills?

I cleaned out my medicine cabinet and threw all the bottles in my purse. They’re pills I’ve had
for years---

Don’t you think you better throw them away? You might forget what you’re taking.

They’re all labeled, Jancy said.

Her mother glanced down.

Dalmane, she said. What’s Dalmane?

A sleeping pill.

Why would you need sleeping pills?

Because I have trouble sleeping. Why do you think?

Since when?

I don’t know. A long time. Off and on. Will you cut it out with the third degree?

Why can’t you sleep?

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 Because I dream my mother is relentlessly asking me questions.

It’s Michael. Michael’s thrown you for a loop.

Jancy threw the bottles in her purse and stood up quickly. No, she said. Or yes. We’re both
upset right now.

He certainly is. You’re lucky to be rid of him.

I don’t want to be rid of him.

He’ll drive you crazy if you’re not careful. He’s got a screw loose and you know it.

You liked him, Jancy said. You liked him so much it made me angry.

Yes, I liked him. But not after this whole mess started. Calling you cruel because he couldn’t
have things his way. If he was so in love it would have lasted. Cruel. There’s not a cruel bone in your
body.

I should never have told you he said those things.

Why shouldn’t you tell me? Her mother asked quietly. If you can’t talk to your mother, who can
you talk to?

Oh Christ, Jancy said. Nobody. I’m hungry. Let’s eat and change the subject.

They sat down over full plates. There was steak when Jancy or her brothers came home. Their
mother saved it for weeks, months, in the freezer. The meat sizzled on Jancy’s plate and she tried to
eat. She looked up. The line’s in her mother’s face seemed deeper than before, grown in. And she was
so thin, so perfectly groomed. Earrings. Creased pants. Silk scarves. A bath at the same time every
morning while the Today show played the news. At night she rubbed the calluses off her heels carefully
with a pumice stone.

She looked at Jancy. What are you doing tomorrow? She asked.

Having lunch at the Catholic church, Jancy said.

That ought to be good. Canned peaches and weepy mashed potatoes. Your father is
something. Of course he doesn’t speak to me on the street, but I see him drive by here in that black car.
Every day. Watching for one of you to come home.

Jancy said nothing.

He looks terrible, her mother said.

He looks better than he did, said Jancy,

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 That’s not saying much. He looked horrible for months. Thinner and thinner, like a walking
death. I’d see him downtown. He went to the pool hall every day, always by himself. He never did have
any friends.

He did, Jancy said. He told me. In the war.

I don’t know. I didn’t meet him till after that, when he was nearly forty. By then he never
seemed to belong---

I remember that weekend you went away and he moved out, Jancy said. He never belonged in
this house. The house he built had such big rooms.

Did you know that house is for sale again? Her mother asked. It’s changed hands several times.

I didn’t know, Jancy said. Let’s not talk about it.

Her mother sighed. All right, she said. Let’s talk about washing these dishes. I really have to get
started.

Mom, Jancy said, I might call Michael.

What for? He’s five states away and that’s where he ought to be.

I may go up there.

Oh, Jancy.

I have to. I can’t just let it end here.

Her mother was silent. They heard a gentle thunder.

Clouding up, Jancy said. You may have rain. Need help with your bags?

The car’s already packed.

Well, Jancy said.

Her mother collected maps, parcels, a large white-ribboned present. Jancy heard her mother
moving around and thought of waking at night in the house her father had built, the house in the
country. There would be the cornered light from the bathroom in the hall. Her father would walk
slowly past in slippers and robe to adjust the furnace. The motor would kick in and grunt its soft hum
several times a night. Half asleep, Jancy knew her father was awake. The furnace. They must have
been winter nights.

Can you grab this? Her mother asked.

Jancy took the present. I’ll walk you out, she said.

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 No, just give it to me. There, I’ve got it.

Jancy smiled. Her mother took her hand.

You’re gutsy, she said. You’ll be OK.

Good, said Jancy. It’s always great to be OK.

Give me a hug.

Jancy embraced her. How often did someone hold her? Her hair smelled fragrant and dark.

Jancy left the lights off. She took a sleeping pill and lay down on the living room couch. Rain
splattered the windows. She imagined her father standing by the dining room table. When he moved
out he had talked to her brothers about guns.

One rifle goes, he said. One stays. Which do you want?

Jancy remembered cigarette smoke in the room, how it curled between their faces.

It doesn’t make any difference to me, he said. But this one’s the best for rabbit.

He fingered change far down in his trouser pockets. One brother asked the other which he
wanted. The other said it didn’t matter, didn’t matter. Finally the youngest took the gun and climbed
the steps to his room. Their father walked into the kitchen, murmuring, It’ll kill rabbits and birds. And if
you go after deer, just use slugs.

Jancy heard water dripping. How long had it gone on? Rain was coming down the chimney.
She got up and closed the flue, mopped up the rain with a towel. The pills didn’t work anymore. What
would she do all night? She was afraid of this house, afraid of all the houses in this town. After
midnight they were silent and blank. They seemed abandoned.

She looked at the telephone. She picked up the receiver.

Michael? She said.

She dialed his number. The receiver clicked and snapped.

What number are you calling please?

He’s gone, thought Jancy.

Hello? What number---

Jancy repeated the numerals.

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 That number has been disconnected. There’s a new number. Shall I ring it for you?

The plastic dial of the princess phone was transparent and yellowed with light.

Ma’am? Shall I ring it?

Yes, Jancy said.

No one home.

Jancy took a bottle of whiskey off the shelf. She would drink enough to make her sleep. The
rain had stopped and the house was still. Light from streetlamps fell through the windows. Jancy
watched the deserted town. Heavy elms loomed over the sidewalks. Limbs of trees rose and fell on a
night breeze. Their shadows moved on the lit-up surface of the street.

A black car glided by.

Jancy stepped back from the window. Taillights blinked red as the car turned corners and
passed away soundelessly.

She picked up the phone and dialed. She lay in the cramped hallway while the purr of a
connection stopped and started. How did it sound there, ringing in the dark? Loud and empty.

Hello?

His voice, soft. When they lived together, he used to stand looking out the window at the alley
late at night. He was naked and perfect. He watched the midwestern alleys roll across eight city blocks
paved in old brick. Telephone poles stood weathered and alone. Their drooping wires glistened,
humming one note. He gripped the wooden frame of the window and stood looking, centaur, quiet, his
flanks whitened in moonlight.

Jancy, he said now. It’s you, isn’t it.

Jancy wore a skirt and sat in the living room. Her father would pull up outside. She would see
him lean to watch the door of the house, his head inclined toward her. His car shining and just washed.
His hat. His cigar. His baggy pants bought at the same store downtown for thirty years.

89
 Jancy walked outside to watch for him. She didn’t want to jump when the horn sounded. And it
suddenly hurt her that her father was always waiting.

Did he know their old house was being sold again? He had contracted the labor and built it
himself. He had designed the heating system, radiant heat piped under the floors so the wooden
parquet was always warm. He had raised the ceiling of the living room fifteen inches so that the crown
of her mother’s inherited antique bookcase would fit into it. He was a road builder, but those last few
years, when Jancy was a teen-ager, he’d had a series of bad jobs--- selling bulldozers, cars, insurance---
After they’d moved he stopped working altogether. . .

The horn sounded suddenly close and shocked her.

Jancy?

Now why did you do that? I’m standing right here, aren’t I?

Are you asleep?

No. I just didn’t hear you pull up. But you didn’t have to blare that horn at me. It’s loud
enough to wake the dead.

Well, he said, I thought you needed waking, standing there staring into space like a knothead.

Right, said Jancy. She got into the car and he was still smiling. She laughed in spite of herself.

I’m a little early, he said. They don’t open at the church till noon. Do you want to go for a drive?

Where to?

We could drive out the falls road, he said.

That would take them past the old house. The hedges and trees would be larger than Jancy
could believe, lush with new leaves, and rippling. Her father had planted them all.

I don’t think so, said Jancy.

The house is for sale.

I know.

Dumbest thing I ever did was to let your mother talk me into selling that house.

I don’t want to hear about my mother.

I’ll hate her for the rest of my life for breaking up our family, he said, his breathing grown heavy.
He scowled and touched the ridges in the steering wheel.

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 Jancy leaned back in the seat and watched clouds through the tinted windshield. Remember
when you built roads? She asked.

He waited a moment, then walked over at her and pushed his hat back. I built a lot of them
around here, he said, but the state don’t keep them up anymore. They closed the graveyard road.

He’d taught her how to drive on that road, a narrow unpainted blacktop that wound under train
trestles and through the cemetery. He said if she could drive on that road she could drive anywhere. He
made her go that way, cutting across a blind curve up the sudden hill of the entrance, past the carved
pillars with their lopsided lamps. This way, he’d said, and she’d pulled off onto a gravel road path that
turned off sharply along the crest of a hill. Tombstones were scattered in the lumpy grass. Far below
Jancy saw the graveyard road looping west by the river, on through woods to the country towns of Volga
and Coaltown and Mud Lick.

Stop here, her father directed. He nodded at a patch of ground. There we are, he said, this is
where we’ll be.

Jancy was sixteen; she stared at him and gripped the steering wheel.

All right, he’d said. Back up. Let’s see how you do going backward.

Now her father started his black Ford and they passed the clipped lawns of houses. He drove
slowly, his cigar in his mouth.

What will they have to eat at the church? Jancy asked.

Oh, he said. They publish a menu in the paper. Meat loaf today. Fifty cents a person over sixty.
Not bad food. Cooks used to work up at the junior high. But we don’t have to go there. We can go to a
restaurant if you want.

No, I’d rather go where you usually go. But are you sure I’m allowed?

Certainly. You’re my guest. A dollar for guests.

They pulled into the church parking lot. The doors of the rec center were closed. They sat in the
car and waited. Jancy remembered dances held in this building, how she was thirteen and came here to
dance with the high school boys. They danced until they were wet with sweat, then stepped outside
into the winter air. Girls stood by the lighted door and shivered while the boys smoked cigarettes,
squinting into vaporous trails of smoke rings.

What about your car? Asked her father.

What about it?

I’m going to take it up to Smitty’s and have him go over it.

No. Doesn’t need it. The car is fine. I had it checked---

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 I’ve made arrangements with Smitty for today. He’s got room and we better---

But the last time he fixed it, one of the sparkplugs flew out while I was driving on the interstate--
-

Don’t you be taking off on Smitty, her father said. He’s done us a lot of good work on that car.
I’m trying to help you. You don’t want my help, why just let me know and I’ll bow out anytime.

Jancy sighed. Her father held his hat in his lap and traced the faint lines of the wool plaid with
his fingers.

I appreciate your help, she said. But I don’t know if Smitty---

He might have made a mistake that one time, her father said. But he usually does real good by
us.

Volkswagen buses of old people began to pull up. Drivers opened the double doors of the vans
and rolled up a set of mobile steps. Old ladies appeared with their blond canes and black-netted pillbox
hats. They stepped out one after another, smiling and peeking about.

Where are the old men? Jancy asked.

I think they die off quicker, her father said. These same old dames have been coming here ever
since I have. They just keep moving.

Inside were long rows of Formica tables. Eight or nine elderly people sat at each. There were
rows of empty chairs. Women with a cashbox between them sat beside the door. Jancy’s father put his
arm around Jancy’s waist and patted her.

This is my daughter, he said.

Well, said one of the cashiers. Isn’t she pretty? The women nodded and smiled.

Jancy signed the guest book. Under ‘address’ she wrote ‘at large.’ Her father was waiting at
one of the tables. He had pulled a chair out for her and was standing behind it, waiting to seat her. The
women were watching them, like the circling nurses that day at the hospital. Her father lay in bed, his
arms so thin that his elbows seemed too large.

This is my daughter, he’d said to the nurses. She came all the way from California to see me.

Isn’t that nice, they said. Is she married?

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 Hell no, her father had laughed. She’s married to me.

Now Jancy felt the chair press up behind her legs and she sat down. Her father took his hat off
and nodded at people across the table. She saw that his eyes were alight.

Aren’t you going to have to get yourself a summer hat? She asked.

I reckon so, he said. I just can’t find one I like.

Behind the waist-high counter, Jancy saw the fat cooks spooning peaches onto plates from
metal cans. They were big women, their hair netted in silver nets, faces round and flushed from the
ovens. They passed out cafeteria trays premolded for portions.

I used to eat out of those trays in grade school, Jancy said. Are they going to make us sing ‘God
is Great?’

No, her father said. But go ahead if it makes you feel better.

He chuckled. The last time they’d eaten together was last December. Michael had come home
with Jancy and they’d gone out with her father at the Elks Club. Afterward he had held Michael’s coat
for him and eased it onto his shoulders. He’d never done that for anyone but his sons. Later he’d asked
her, Are you going to marry this man?

Jancy? Aren’t you going to eat? Her father was leaning close to her, pointing at her plate.

What? Oh. I ate a big breakfast. Here, you eat the rest of mine.

You should eat, said her father. Your face looks thin. Have you lost weight?

Maybe a little.

You run around too much. If you’d stay in one place for a while you’d gain a little weight and
look better.

Jancy picked up her fork and put it down. Her father had always made her feel uneasy. He went
into rages, especially in the car. If he couldn’t pass or the car in front slowed suddenly for a turn, he’d
turn red and curse--- Goddammit, you son of a bitch, he’d say. That’s right, you chucklehead--- That
word ‘chucklehead’ was his utmost brand of contempt. He said it stressing the first syllable, fuming like
a mad bull.

Jancy? You finished? Ready to go?

Her father pushed his plate away and sat watching her, touching the rim of his empty glass with
a finger. She couldn’t answer him. She knew that she would leave to see Michael. When she told her
father, he would shake his head and stammer as he tried to talk. She got up and started for the door.

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 Jancy’s father burned a coal fire past mid-May. He picked up a poker and stabbed at white
embers clinging to the grate. Flakes of ash drifted into the room.

How long will you be up there? He asked.

I don’t know, she said.

Christ Almighty. What are you doing? If this thing between you and him is over, just forget it.
Why go chasing up there after him? Let him come here, he knows where you are.

I don’t have a place for him to stay.

Why couldn’t he stay up at the house with you and your mother?

Because we don’t want to stay with my mother.

He clinched his fists and glowered into the fire. He shook his head.

I know you’re an adult, he said. But goddammit, Jancy, it’s not right. I don’t care what you say.
It’s not right and it won’t come to no good.

It already has come to good, Jancy said. She looked at him until he broke their gaze.

Why don’t you give it up? He asked. Give it up and marry him.

Give what up?

All this running around you’re doing. Jesus, Honey, you can’t do this all your life. Aren’t you
twenty-five this summer? I won’t be here forever. What’s going to happen to you?

I don’t know, Jancy said. How can I know?

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clasped his hands. You need a family, he said. No one
will ever help you but your family.

Maybe not, said Jancy.

She thought of the drive. Moving up the East Coast to Michael. She would arrive and sit in the
car, waiting to stop the trembling, waiting for twelve hours of hot road and radio talk to go away. She
would want Michael so much and she would be afraid to go into the house.

She looked up at her father.

I have to do this, she said.

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 What time are you leaving?

Five A.M.

Does your mother know you’re going?

I told her I might.

Well. Come down by and we’ll hose off the car.

No, you don’t need to get up that early.

I’m always awake by then, he said.

Her father was sitting outside on the porch swing as she drove up. He motioned her to pull into
the yard under the buckeye tree. The sky had begun to lighten. The stars were gone. The air was chill,
misted. He wore a woolen shirt and the hat with the feather nearly hidden in the brim. Before Jancy
could get out of the car he picked up the garden hose and twisted the brass nozzle. Water streamed
over the windshield. Jancy watched his wavering form as the water broke and runneled. He held the
cigar between his teeth and sprayed the bumpers, the headlights, the long sides of the car. He sprayed
each tire, walking, revolving his hand on his hip, the hat pulled low. His face was gentle and gaunt. He
would get sicker. Jancy touched her eyes, her mouth. A resignation welled up like tears. He was there
and then he was made of moving lines as water flew into the glass. The water stopped slowly.

Jancy got out of the car and they stood looking up at a sky toned the coral of flesh.

It’s a long way, he said. You’ll get there while it’s light?

Yes, Jancy said. Don’t worry.

The car sat dripping and poised.

It looks good, Jancy said. I’m taking off in style.

She got in and rolled the window down. Her father came close.

Turn the motor on, he said, then nodded, satisfied at the growl of the engine. Above them the
buckeye spread out green and heavy.

When are the buckeyes ripe? Jancy asked.

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 Not till August.

Can you eat them?

Nope, her father laughed. Buckeyes don’t do a thing, don’t have a use in the world.

He bent down and kissed her.

Take your time, he said. Go easy.

She drove fast the first few hours. The sun looked like the moon, dim, layered over. Morning
fog burned off slowly. Maryland mountains were thick and dipped in pockets of fog. Woods stretched
on both sides of the road. Sometimes from an overpass Jancy saw straggled neon lights still burning in a
small town. No cars on the highway; she was alone, she ate up the empty ribbon of the road.

She drove up over a rise and suddenly, looming out of the mist, the deer was there. She saw the
sexual lines of its head and long neck. It moved into her, lifted like a flying horse. She swerved. The
arching body hit the fender with a final thud and bounced again, hard, into the side of the car. Jancy
looked through the rearview mirror and saw the splayed form skidding back along the berm of the road,
bouncing twice in slow motion, twirling and stopping.

The road seemed to close like a tunnel. The look of the deer’s head, the beginning arch of the
body, was all around Jancy. She seemed to see through the image into the tunneling road. She heard,
close to her ear, the soft whuff of the large head bent over grass, tearing the long grass with its teeth.

She pulled off the road. I should go back and see what I’ve done, she thought. She turned the
motor off. She felt she was still moving, and the road shifted into three levels. Wet grass of the road of
the road banks was lush. The road shimmered; one plane of it tilted and moved sideways into the other.
Jancy gripped the vinyl seat of the car. She was sinking. The door wouldn’t open and she slid across to
get out the other side. She stood up in the cool air and there was total silence. Jancy tried to walk. The
earth and the asphalt were spongy. She moved around the car and saw first the moonish curve of the
dented fender. The door was crumpled where the deer had bounced back and slammed into her. Jancy
imagined its flanks , the hard mounds of its rump. The sheen of it. She staggered and stepped back.
The sudden cushion of the grass surprised her and she fell. She saw then the sweep of short hairs
glistening along the length of the car. The door handle was packed and smeared with golden feces.

There was really nowhere to go.

Once it was Christmas Day. They were driving from home, from the house her father had built
in the country. A deer jumped the road in front of them, clearing the snow, the pavement, the fences of

96
the fields, in two bounds. Beyond its arc the hills rumpled in snow. The narrow road wound through
white meadows, across the creek, and on. Her father was driving. Her brothers had shining play pistols
with leather holsters. Her mother wore clip-on earrings of tiny wreaths. They were all dressed in new
clothes, and they moved down the road through the trees. Ω

97
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise,
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

98
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

99
True Love
Wislawa Szymborska

True love. Is it normal

is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,

drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.

Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go

if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?

Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love

100
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

101
LANDSCAPE II
Carlos Angeles

Sun in the knifed horizon bleeds the sky,

Spilling a peacock stain upon the sands,
Across some murdered rocks refused to die.
It is your absence touching my sad hands
Blinded like flags in the wreck of air.

And catacombs of cloud enshroud the cool

And calm involvement of the darkened plains,
The stunted mourners here: and her, a full
And universal tenderness which drains
The sucked and golden breath of sky comes bare.

Now, while the dark basins the void of space,

Some sudden crickets, ambushing me near,
Discover vowels of your whispered face
And subtly cry: I touch your absence here
Remembering the speeches of your hair.

102
LOVE IS NOT ALL

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

103
 TONG by F. Sionil José

Conrado Lopez fell deeply in love for the first time when he was thirty. It was one of those beautiful things destined to bleakness
and from the very beginning, he had an inkling that this was how it would be. And all because Alice Tan was Chinese.
When he first saw her, it seemed as if she had blossomed straight out of a Chinese art book; she had a complexion as clear as it
was fair. When he got to know her better, he used to trace the blue veins in her arms, the blood vessels in her cheeks. Her nose
was perfect, and her Chinese eyes had a brightness that could dispel the gloom which came over him. Long afterwards, when he
remembered her eyes, how she looks, how she smiled, an intense feeling akin to physical pain would lance him.

Alice Tan’s parents used to run a small grocery store in Ongpin; both came from Fookien and Alice could trace her family back to
Amoy. Conrado Lopez did not know his lineage beyond his great grandfather and not interested in the Chinese traditional kinship
system. But he got so interested afterwards, he started to delve into his own background. He lived with his spinster sister,
Remedios, in a small house in Makati, a sidestreet parallel to Rizal Avanue in Santa Cruz. He had inherited the house with its
pocket-size yard from his parents. The lower floor which had its own entrance was rented out to a lawyer who was adept at fixing
things at City Hall. He and his sister lived in the second floor which had two bedrooms, a living-dining room and a toilet and kitchen
with antique fixtures. His sister looked after the house, his clothes and his general well being. Conrado had finished accounting at
one of the Azcarraga universities and would have accounted to something more than being an accountant in Makati and his older
sister whom he supported. It was because of such a responsibility that he had never really been serious with any girl.

He was unprepared for Alice Tan; in fact, in the beginning, he was not sure at all about his feelings for her. It started in March when
brownouts were frequent so that when the lights went out that early evening, he thought it was another brownout. But he noticed
that the lights in the other house were on so he immediately concluded there must be something wrong with the fuse so he threw
the main switch off and change it. But he had hardly thrown the switch on when the line on the ceiling started sputtering. Then a
loud report and darkness.

By now, Meding was alarmed but Conrado assured her the house would not burn down as long as the switches were off. He dashed
off to Bambang two blocks away to one of the electrical shops there.

He had passed the New Life Electrical Supply a few times but had rarely looked in; for once, he never bought electrical supplies in
the neighborhood as he always bought them in the supermarket in Makati. It was then that he saw Alice Tan; she was in jeans and
a katsablouse with a high, lace collar and long sleeves that imparted to her an appearance at once regal and demure.
It was not a big shop. It carried hardware, nails, ropes, flashlights, but mostly electrical goods. She sat behind the glass counter
and when he came in, she put down the weekly women’s magazine she was reading.

“I don’t think I would need an electrician,” he said. “It is just a burned line, I think. I put the switch off.”

“That is the first thing one should do,” she said with a professional tone. “I think you will need rubberized tape, and a pair of new
fuses.”

“I am sure of that,” he said. “But how do I go about fixing it?” He was not sure now, having forgotten most of his physical classes in
high school, the positive, the negative . . .

“Simple,” she said, bring out a roll of blue tape from the counter. “The lines should never get mixed up. When the covering is worn
out and they cross each other, that’s when the trouble starts.”

“It is like a boy and a girl then,” he said with a laugh. “If they really get mixed up, there’s bound to be some result . . .”

She smiled at his little joke. “I hope you are not fooling me.” She said

“You can come to my house – its close by, in Makati,” he said. “It is dark.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Well then, first see to it that the main switch is off. Then look for the line that was burned. Sometimes
rats gnaw the line. If you touch it and it is live . . .”

“I will not forget that,” he said.

“Clean the wires, then tape them individually. See to it that they do not meet. That they do not touch.”

“No touch, no fireworks,” he said. “Thanks for the lesson.”

In three months, Conrado Lopez learned a bit more about electricity and a lot about Alice Tan. She was studying in one of the Recto
universities in the morning and in the afternoons, immediately after school, she came to the shop where she had lunch, usually
cooked by her aunt. At eight in the evening, she walked to Avenida for her ride to Ongpin and the apartment she shared with her
brothers. She seldom went out even on the Sundays when the shop was closed. She looked at televisions or play Ping-Pong in one
of the Chinese clubs in Binondo.

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Conrado Lopez took to having a late merienda at the shabby Chinese reataurant across the street. The restaurant was never full –
there was always an empty table dirty with noodle drippings and dried blobs of beef, the loud of jeepney drivers who frequented
the place, and the juke box oozing Rico Puno and Nora Aunor songs. It was a good place to watch Alice Tan as she went anout her
chores.
Many a night, too, he would return to the restaurant for a cup of bad coffee and wait for her to leave and walk the short stretch to
her jeepney stop, sometimes with him just a few steps behind.

In three months, too, Conrado could have opened a small shop for electrical supplies. He was buying yet another light bulb when
Alice finally accosted him.

“I will not sell it to you,” she said simply.

He was taken aback

“I don’t know what you are trying to do but I know that you are not buying the goods to use. You don’t need all those bulbs. I have
been counting them. A light bulb lasts more than six months. You have bought more than a dozen in a month.”

“I like changing them, you know different watts.”

“Mr. Lopez, tell me the truth.”

“I also like collecting lengths of electric wires, sockets, rubber tapes. Have you heard of Thomas Alva Edison? Maybe, I am an
inventor . . .”

“You are a liar,” Alice Tan said, her eyues crinkling in a smile.

Conrado Lopez melted. “Yes, a terrible liar, am I not?”

“What are you really trying to do?”

Conrado Lopez stammered. “I . . . I wanted to talk to you. I want to see you. I enjoy talking with you. That’s the simple truth.
Believe me. And I don’t mind buying all this useless stuff as long as I can see you . . .”

“But you can talk with me anytime as long as there are no customers. My uncle does not mind . . .”

He sighed. “That is good to know. But I was not sure. You are Chinese . . .”

“I am a human being.” She said. “Will you stop buying things then?”

“No, I cannot come here without a reason. I must talk with you again even if I have to spend doing it . . .”

She appeared thoughtful. “All right, as long as it is not too often. And there are no customers . . .”

The door at the rear opened and Alice’s uncle came into a cup of coffee. He looked at Conrado without a flicker of recognition then
sat before his table, impassive and still.

“Thank you, Miss Tan,” Conrado said gratefully.

The following night, he finally found the courage to walk up to her. She thought, perhaps, he was one of those bag snatchers who
had became a blatantly open, her first impulse was to hold her bag tightly and draw away when he moved closer to greet her.

“You frightened me, Mr. Lopez,” she said.

Bambang was never brightly lit. They walked slowly. “I would to take you home,” he said. “But I don’t have a car. We can take a
taxi if you like.”

“I prefer calesas,” she said,” but it is such a fine evening, can we walk?”
Indeed, an evening washed with rain, the street glistening. Home was quit a distance but it pleased him nonetheless for they would
have a lot of time to talk.

He asked how long she had lived in Ongpin and she said, all her life, that she was familiar with its alleys, its shops, just as he knew
Makati and Bambang and Misericordia – these were the names of the streets of his boyhood as he remembered them.

“We are Ongpin Chinese,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

He shook his head.

“That means we are not rich,” she said. “The rich Chinese are in Greenhills. That’s where they live anyway. Before the war, they
said it was in Santa Mesa.”

He did not realize there were social Distinctions among the Chinese, too; he had always thought they were all same class, that they
were all Fookienese, and that to a man, they lokked down on Filipinos, what with their Chinese tong associations, their schools.

105
He wondered if this was the time to bring out his clinché sentiments and he eorried that if he did, he would be creating a barrier
between them. He decided it was better to be frank, to be honest.

His difficulty was that he could not quite trust his feelings no matter how strong they were; he did not know enough about the
Chinese really. “I must just as well admit, Alice,” he said, “that I have some views on our Chinese problem. I am really glad that
the Chinese schools should have been closed a long time ago . . .”

“What don’t you like in us?” she asked, looking at him briefly, a smile darting across her face, a smile so prêt that it disarmed him
completely.

“Your clannishness, for one,” he said.

“But you are clannish, too,” she said. “Look at all the people in power, they are either Ilokanos or from Leyte.”

“Chinese girls never marry Filipino Boys. It is always the other way around.”

“You call us Intsik Baboy.”

“Because it is true – you are filthy. No, not you personally.”

“And the Filipinos are stupid. Not you personally,” she mimicked him.

He checked himself. “Hey,” he said, “on our first time together – and look, we are quarreling.”

“You started it,” she petulantly.

“I don’t like quarrels. Can you imagine how it would be if we are married?”

“You are going too fast,” she said. “Now, you are talking about us being married. We barely know each other.”

“After all those things I bought from you? I could start another store . . .”

“I don’t want you money wasted,” she said.

“Give them back to me and I will sell them for you.”

They had reached Recto and had crossed over, the air around them now thick with the scent of rotting vegetables and chicken
droppings as they passed the public market. They walked on through a dimly lit neighborhood, the street pocked with craters, the
gutter slimy with refuse and mud. Beyond, the lights of Ongpin shone. Chinese characters in red and blue. Now, the sidewalk was
red brick, the shops bright with red candles, gold leaf pictures. Calesasjostled each other on the street and the uneven sidewalk
was crammed with fruit stalls. Around them, the smell of Chinese cooking, of incense and acrid oils, the wail of Chinese flutes. They
went beyond a stone arch, bright green and red, and creek which befouled the air, then turned right and after a few steps, she
stopped. “This is as far as you go. I live over there,” she said, pointing to an alley.
“But I want to see you to your door. I am not hiding. I am a bachelor. My intentions are honorable. I would like to visit your house,
maybe not tonight, but someday, meet your parents . . .”

“I have no parents,” she said. “I have three brothers and I am the youngest. My uncle – Mr. Tan, you have seen him in the store,
he is our guardian; he took care of us when we were young . . .”

“I still would like to see where you live.” He said.

“No.” she was firm and there was an edge to her voice. “This is as far as you go, or you will not walk me home again.”

He did not argue. “Is it because I am Filipino?” he asked dully, as she turned to go. She took three, four steps, and then she
turned, and shook her head.

He watched till she entered the alley and disappeared in its black maw. He stood there for a while, taking in the huddle of houses,
the people talking in a language he could not understand, absorbing the feet of exotic distances. Then it started to drizzle.

***

The following evening, Conrado Lopez passed by the shop before proceeding to the Chinese restaurant across the street. Her uncle
was not there but Alice was and as he passed, their eyes locked. He positioned himself in the restaurant, toying with his cup of
coffee, and watched her reading a magazine. Soon it was time to close. Mr. Tan went out to close the steel accordion door shut,
and it was then that Conrado noticed the black Mercedes in front of the shop to which, as if she was in a hurry, Alice went. She sat
in front with the driver and as they drove off, in the soft dark, he could see her turn and take a last look at him.

He now realized with some apprehension, of panic even, that she was being cordoned off, and he wondered if this was her doing, if
she did not really want to talk with him again. He reproached himself for having talked so openly when what he should have done
was to say the usual niceties. In his office that Saturday, he asked to be excused in the afternoon. He proceeded to Bambang at
once; he must see her, apologize to her, anything to have her talk with him again, walk with him again.

106
She was at the store and he was vastly relieved when he saw that her uncle was not at his table. The moment Conrado went in,
however, her eyes told him that this was not the time to talk. “I am sorry,” he said, barely raising his voice above a whisper, “but I
would like to see you again.”

He could not continue for the door at the rear opened and Mr. Tan came in, a coil of electric wiring in his arms.

Without telling her, Alice stood up, got a bulb from the shelf and tested it. “It is three pesos and eight centavos,” she said,
wrapping it in a sheet of old newspaper. She took some time writing receipt while Mr. Tan brought down another roll of writing from
the rack and started measuring a length.

“It is in the receipt,” she told Conrado, handling him the receipt. “The receipt,” she repeated with a smile.

That evening, as he and his sister sat down to dinner, he told her about Alice Tan. “I have been thinking about our life,” he said. “I
don’t think we would need to spend much more if I got married . . .”

Meding looked at him; she was fifteen years older but she had taken good care of herself and really looked no older that forty or so.
She could have easily got married – there was still that chance if she had a mind to – but she had been reclusive. It had often
bothered Conrado to think that she had not got married so that she “could take care of him.”

“And if I go get married, you will continue to live with us, of course, like it always has been. How does the idea look to you, Ate?”
He had expected her to sulk and was pleasantly surprised when she beamed. “I have often wondered when it would be,” she said.
“I am sure by now you know the right kind of girl . . .”

It was then that he told her she was Chinese, that he was interested in having them meet . . . he did not realize till then the depths
of his ignorance about his sister’s feelings, but from the expression on her face, he knew at once that Alice Tan – if and when the
moment came – would have difficulty living in the same house with her.

Through the night, he could not sleep, wondering how he would be able to talk with her, to see her without that Mercedes tailing
them, without Mr. Tan eavesdropping on them. Sunday morning, he decided to go to Ongpin, to the maze of wooden houses and
shop that made up Chinatown. He went up the alley where she had disappeared in the nigh; it was a dead-end, a dark and
dispirited place, flanked by decrepit apartment houses, with laundry in the window and a pile of garbage at the end. Children were
playing in the alley, and the houses were filled with people who did not once look at him as he passed. He peered briefly into open
doorway, and soon reached the dead-end without seeing her. He walked back to the main street clogged with calesas and vehicles
and entered the first movie house he passed. It was a Kung Fu movie in Chinese, without subtitles and he could not understand a
word but with all that action, dialog was hardly necessary. It was when he finally went out long past noon, that he remembered
how Alice gave him his receipt. She had repeated, “the receipt,” Then, it struck him, what she was trying to say. He grabbed a taxi
and hoped to God that his sister had not emptied the wastebasket where he had thrown the piece of paper. Breathless, he dashed
to his room and was greatly relieved to find the receipt still there. Sure enough, in her legible penmanship: “Rizal Park Post Office,
Sunday four p.m.”
He looked at his watch; it was three fifty. By no miracle could he get there in ten minutes by just the same, he raced down to
Avenida and told the taxi driver to hurry, in heaven’s name. it had started to rain when they crossed the Pasig and it was really
pouring when he reached the Park Post Office in front of the Manila Hotel. He was also fifteen minutes late. He dashed from the cab
to the shade of the Post Office marquee. He cursed himself not so much for not bringing an umbrella but for being so stupid not to
have understood what Alice wanted to know. She must have got tired waiting and had left. He sat, wet and forlorn, on the stone
ledge. Maybe, if he went to her apartment – that was what his sister always said that a man whose intentions are honorable should
always visit the girl in her house.

The rain whipped the Park in gusty sheets. It was stormy weather and beyond the Park. The Walled City and all of Manila seemed
enveloped with mist. But in half an hour, the rain diminished, then stopped altogether and in the direction of the Bay, the dark
clouds were rimmed with silver.

It was Alice Tan who was late and it was good that he did not leave; he saw her get out of her taxi and his heart leaped and
pounded so hard he could hear it. He ran to her and hardly heard her apologies, how she had difficulty leaving; he was aware of
nothing else but this creature who had come bringing light to this dismal afternoon.

They walked to the sea and now, with the rain that still threatened the city, they had the whole sea-wall to themselves.

“I am stupid,” he said, “for not having understood when you said, it is in the receipt.”

“I was worried about that,” she said, sitting close to him so that their arms touched. “Filipinos are like that, anyway. Gong.”
“What’s that?”

“Stupid, like you said.”

“Now,” he said. “I hope we will not start an argument again. What don’t you like in us, anyway?”

“First,” she said, “you are lazy. You don’t know what industry is – and this is why, no matter what your leader say, you will never
amount to anything.”

107
“You don’t know what you are saying. We work very hard.” He said. “Our farmers work very hard.”

“My father used to wake up at four in the morning.” Alice Tan said with pride. “And we never went to sleep earlier than eleven
o’clock at night.”

“Many Filipinos are like that.”

“Show me,” she said. “And then, you are so corrupt. Why, almost every week, someone goes to the shop – policeman, revenue
agents, all of them. All they want is money. My uncle always gives of course. And every time, he increases the price of what we
sell. In the other end, it is the customer who suffers.”

“He is just as then,” Conrado told her.

“My father had to pay a bribe of ten thousand pesos – way back in 1950 – for his citizenship. It almost broke him.”

“So you are a Filipino citizen then,” he said. “This is where you make your living, where the rich Chinese and your uncle make their
money, exploiting the country, its resources, and its people. If you don’t like it here – why don’t you go back to Peking or Taipei,
whichever you choose?”

“Be careful now,” she told him. “You misunderstood me completely. My oldest brother – he was very impressed with what the
communists were doing in Peking. He went there and returned, disillusioned. It was not so much that the life there is harsh . . . it
was that he did not feel at home. Can you not see, Conrado? Our home is here. China – it would be foreign to me, although I could
get sentimental about it. I just want this country to have better things – less corruption, less enmity, less poverty . . .”

He realized then that he had spoken again in a way that wouldn’t endear him to her. He was determined to salvage the afternoon.
“It is just as well that we have our arguments now. For when we get married . . .”

The waves lapped on the rocks below them. She turned to him, wonder in her eyes. “Please don’t talk about something impossible,”
she said. “Let us just be friends . . .”

“But I am serious,” he said. “a am not making a lot just a thousand and a half a month. Plus that four hundred pesos rent from the
house. I can support you, not in style. But I have a career still ahead of me. You can go on with your schooling if you want to. We
may have some problems with my sister but she will adjust. Why don’t we go and meet her? There’s just the two of us . . .”

It was then that she told him. “It cannot be, Conrado. I have been promised in marriage to someone already. There is just a little
time for us . . .”

***

For the rest of his life, Conrado Lopez would never really know why Alice Tan saw him again, and still again, every Sunday at four
p.m. in the park. When he took her back to Ongpin that evening, she had extracted from him a promise that he should never go to
the shop again, or sit like some corner thug in that restaurant across the street where it was obvious to her uncle even that he was
watching her. He got her address in Ongpin and he promised too that he would never go there unless it was for some very, very
serious reason. She would see him again that Sunday and the Sundays thereafter. Now, at least, Conrado Lopez had something to
look forward to. He went eagerly back to his history books, to the references on the Chinese, Limahong, the Parian, the galleon
trade which carried Chinese silks and other luxury goods to Mexico thence to Europe. He asked the Chinese embassy in Roxas for
handouts and in the bookshops in Avenida, he searched for pocketbooks and other bargains that described China. He even fancied
himself learning Mandarin and going to a Buddhist temple although Alice Tan had told him that she was Protestant.

On the next Sunday, the sun was out; a storm had just blown over and the grass was soggy. Alice Tan arrived in a blue print dress;
it was the first time he saw her in a dress and her legs, as he has always suspected, were shapely. They went to the Manila Hotel
for a cup of coffee – that was all that he could afford when he studied the menu and he warned her about it. This time, they did not
argue. Instead, she told him about herself, that it was her dream – as it was the dream of most Chinese girls – to get married and
raise a family. She had gone out with Chinese boys to discos in Makati and had exchange confidences with her Chinese girlfriends
who had dated Filipino boys and they were all agreed that their Filipino dates were more interesting, for the Chinese dates talk
nothing but business. And yes, she said with a slight laugh, they told her, too, that Filipino boys were quicker and that they made
better lovers.

“And now,” he said, “you would like to find out for yourself.”

She unwrapped her special hopia that she had brought while an amused waitress looks on. A couple of Chinese boys passed; they
stared at her so she whispered to him: “See?” they never like Chinese girls to date Filipino boys. They think Filipino boys are just
making fools of us . . .”
“Am I?” he asked.

She reached across the table and almost spilled the goblet, held his hand and pressed it.

108
On the fifth Sunday, Conrado Lopez took Alice Tan to one of the motels on M. H. del Pilar. The August sky was threatened with rain
clouds, it had become dark and they had embraced behind the palms near the sea-wall. He had told her simply that he wanted to
hold her, make love to her and she had not replied but had, instead kissed him with passion. They walked to the boulevard and
hailed a taxi. She sat wordless beside him, and even when they had finally entered the motel garage, and the door had shut behind
them, still, she did not speak.

Only when they were finally in the room, her face flushed, his hands eager and his whole being inflame, did she tell him that she
had expected this to happen, but not too soon.

She was a virgin and the sheet was soiled. They lay together for a long time and he told her what he knew of the old days, how the
Filipino groom would hang the blood-stained blanket by the window the following morning for all his relatives to see. And she said it
was the same Old China.

It was when they made ready to leave that she started to cry, the sobs torn out of her in pain and trembling. He embraced her,
kissed her cheeks wet with tears, her hair.

“We will get married in the morning – if this is what worries you,” he said. “Now – if you wish, we can walk to Malate Church and
ask. I did not do this to take advantage of you, to fool you . . .”

“I know,” she said, pressing closer still to him.

“Then what are you crying about?”

“I cannot marry you,” she said.

He drew away and looked at her tear-stained face.

“Is it because you are Chinese?”

She nodded.

“But you love me, you said so. I am not rich but you will not starve . . .”

“It is not the money.”

“If it is not the money . . .?”

“Tradition, custom. Whatever you call it.”

“Hell with it!” Conrado cursed in his breath.

Then it came out. “My uncle, Conrado. He took care of us when we were orphaned. I told you. And there is this rich Chinese who
live in Greenhills. He is a widower. He has helped my uncle. Given my brother very good jobs . . .”

He drew farther from her, looked at her, beautiful and true then he went to her, hugged her. “Don’t Alice,” he said in a voice hoarse
with entreaty. “Let us elope. Let us go to my house now. They cannot find you there . . .”

She looked at him and shook her head. “I am Chinese,” she said simply.

***

When he passed the shop that Monday, he was surprised to see she was not at the counter; he hurried around the block, and when
he got to the shop again, she was still not there. He returned shortly before eight when Mr. Tan would bring the accordion iron
shutter down but neither the black Mercedes nor Alice were there. Every day that week, he passed by the shop. Sunday, he went to
the Park and stayed there till dark.

That Monday afternoon, straight from his office, he went to see Mr. Tan. There was no hint of recognition in the face of Alice’s uncle
– just this bland, expressionless mien, as Conrado introduced himself.

“Where is Alice, Mr. Tan?” he finally asked.

He replied in excellent Tagalog; Alice was no longer working in the shop.

“Where can I find her then?”

The Chinese shook his head and did not reply.

“Mr. Tan,” he said in a voice which quavered “I know you don’t like a Filipino husband for your niece. But I love her and I want to
marry her. You think I am interested in her money – then don’t give her any dowry. No dowry, is that clear?” He took his wallet out
and drew a calling card, laid it on the counter, “I have a good job with a big firm. I am young and industrious. A can support her
and I can even continue sending her to school. I know you took care of her and I am grateful.”

109
The Chinese shook his head again and this time, he smiled, gold teeth flashing, and held Conrado Lopez’ arm across the counter.
“Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “But you are very, very late. You must leave and don’t bother us anymore. There is nothing I can
do for you . . .”

“What don’t you like in me?” he asked tersely as he backed away into the noisy sidewalk.

He had memorized the address which she had given. He took a taxi to Ongpin. It was very dark, the neon lights were on. He
walked up the alley, and when he got to the door, 14-D, on it was posted a sign in Chinese. A young man was at the next door
playing a guitar and he asked where the people next door were. “They have moved,” he said, “to Greenhills.” Did he know the
street? The number? No. and what is this sign? “For rent,” the young man said.

For many days, it was as if Conrado Lopez was in a daze, in a limbo without rim. After office hours, he would wander around the
shop in Binondo in the hope that he would see her visiting the old neighborhood. He made a list of the best Chinese restaurants in
the city and on occasion, visited them especially at night when there were parties attended by the wealthy Chinese. He would wait
in their lobbies, watching, searching.

On Sunday and holidays, he frequented the supermarket in Greenhills knowing this was where the wealthy Chinese shopped and
many a time, he would hurry after what seemed a familiar back, a turn of the head, only to find it was not her.

He took to compulsively reading on China until he was quite familiar with contemporary happenings there. On Sundays, he made a
round of Ongpin and even got to visiting funeral parlors – “La Paz” particularly, where the Chinese held the wake for their dead.
And twice, he went to Benavides, to the air-conditioned Protestant chapel there, hoping that Alice would attend a service.

He no longer went to the Park except one Sunday in mid-February; it was a cool, pleasant afternoon with a pure blue sky. He sat
on the stone ledge as he had done in the past. It was four and for a time, he was lost in reverie, remembering how it was the first
time, the splashing rain, the anxiety that he would miss her.

It was then that he noticed the black Mercedes parked at the edge of the green and beyond it, Alice walking to the car, her arm
held by a fat, bald Chinese, old enough to be her father. She was big with child and as she looked at Conrado, there was this brief,
anguished look on her face which told him not to move, not to speak. She got into the car, her husband after her, and as they
drove away, he still stood there reeling with emotion, knowing clearly now what it was all about, the tong that must be paid, the life
that must be warped because it had to be lived.

110
 THE BOOR

by: Anton Chekhov

This English translation was published in Contemporary One-

Act Plays. Ed. B. Roland Lewis. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1922.

PERSONS IN THE PLAY

HELENA IVANOVNA POPOV, a young widow, mistress of a
country estate

GRIGORI STEPANOVITCH SMIRNOV, proprietor of a country

estate

LUKA, servant of MRS. POPOV

A gardener. A Coachman. Several workmen.

TIME: The present.

SCENE: A well-furnished reception-room in MRS. POPOV'S home. MRS. POPOV is

discovered in deep mourning, sitting upon a sofa, gazing steadfastly at a photograph.
LUKA is also present.

LUKA: It isn't right, ma'am. You're wearing yourself out! The maid and the cook have
gone looking for berries; everything that breathes is enjoying life; even the cat knows
how to be happy--slips about the courtyard and catches birds--but you hide yourself
here in the house as though you were in a cloister. Yes, truly, by actual reckoning you
haven't left this house for a whole year.

MRS. POPOV: And I shall never leave it--why should I? My life is over. He lies in
his grave, and I have buried myself within these four walls. We are both dead.

LUKA: There you are again! It's too awful to listen to, so it is! Nikolai Michailovitch
is dead; it was the will of the Lord, and the Lord has given him eternal peace. You
have grieved over it and that ought to be enough. Now it's time to stop. One can't
weep and wear mourning forever! My wife died a few years ago. I grieved for her. I
wept a whole month--and then it was over. Must one be forever singing lamentations?
That would be more than your husband was worth! [He sighs.] You have forgotten all
your neighbors. You don't go out and you receive no one. We live--you'll pardon me--
like the spiders, and the good light of day we never see. All the livery is eaten by
mice--as though there weren't any more nice people in the world! But the whole
neighborhood is full of gentlefolk. The regiment is stationed in Riblov--officers--
simply beautiful! One can't see enough of them! Every Friday a ball, and military
111
music every day. Oh, my dear, dear ma'am, young and pretty as you are, if you'd only
let your spirits live--! Beauty can't last forever. When ten short years are over, you'll
be glad enough to go out a bit and meet the officers--and then it'll be too late.

MRS. POPOV: [Resolutely.] Please don't speak of these things again. You know very
well that since the death of Nikolai Michailovitch my life is absolutely nothing to me.
You think I live, but it only seems so. Do you understand? Oh, that his departed soul
may see how I love him! I know, it's no secret to you; he was often unjust to me,
cruel, and--he wasn't faithful, but I shall be faithful to the grave and prove to him
how I can love. There, in the Beyond, he'll find me the same as I was until his death.

LUKA: What is the use of all these words, when you'd so much rather go walking in
the garden or order Tobby or Welikan harnessed to the trap, and visit the neighbors?

MRS. POPOV: [Weeping.] Oh!

LUKA: Madam, dear madam, what is it? In Heaven's name!

MRS. POPOV: He loved Tobby so! He always drove him to the Kortschagins or the
Vlassovs. What a wonderful horseman he was! How fine he looked when he pulled at
the reigns with all his might! Tobby, Tobby--give him an extra measure of oats to-
day!

LUKA: Yes, ma'am.

[A bell rings loudly.]

MRS. POPOV: [Shudders.] What's that? I am at home to no one.

LUKA: Yes, ma'am.

[He goes out, centre.]

MRS. POPOV: [Gazing at the photograph.] You shall see, Nikolai, how I can love
and forgive! My love will die only with me--when my poor heart stops beating. [She
smiles through her tears.] And aren't you ashamed? I have been a good, true wife; I
have imprisoned myself and I shall remain true until death, and you--you--you're not
ashamed of yourself, my dear monster! You quarrelled with me, left me alone for
weeks--

[LUKA enters in great excitement.]

LUKA: Oh, ma'am, someone is asking for you, insists on seeing you--
112
MRS. POPOV: You told him that since my husband's death I receive no one?

LUKA: I said so, but he won't listen; he says it is a pressing matter.

MRS. POPOV: I receive no one!

LUKA: I told him that, but he's a wild man; he swore and pushed himself into the
room; he's in the dining-room now.

MRS. POPOV: [Excitedly.] Good. Show him in. The impudent--!

[LUKA goes out, centre.]

MRS. POPOV: What a bore people are! What can they want with me? Why do they
disturb my peace? [She sighs.] Yes, it is clear I must enter a
convent. [Meditatively.] Yes, a convent.

[SMIRNOV enters, followed by LUKA.]

SMIRNOV: [To LUKA.] Fool, you make too much noise! You're an
ass! [Discovering MRS. POPOV--politely.] Madam, I have the honor to introduce
myself: Lieutenant in the Artillery, retired, country gentleman, Grigori Stapanovitch
Smirnov! I'm compelled to bother you about an exceedingly important matter.

MRS. POPOV: [Without offering her hand.] What is it you wish?

SMIRNOV: Your deceased husband, with whom I had the honor to be acquainted, left
me two notes amounting to about twelve hundred roubles. Inasmuch as I have to pay
the interest to-morrow on a loan from the Agrarian Bank, I should like to request,
madam, that you pay me the money to-day.

MRS. POPOV: Twelve-hundred--and for what was my husband indebted to you?

SMIRNOV: He bought oats from me.

MRS. POPOV: [With a sigh, to LUKA.] Don't forget to give Tobby an extra measure
of oats.

[LUKA goes out.]

MRS. POPOV: [To SMIRNOV.] If Nikolai Michailovitch is indebted to you, I shall,

of course, pay you, but I am sorry, I haven't the money to-day. To-morrow my
manager will return from the city and I shall notify him to pay you what is due you,
113
but until then I cannot satisfy your request. Furthermore, today is just seven months
since the death of my husband, and I am not in the mood to discuss money matters.

SMIRNOV: And I am in the mood to fly up the chimney with my feet in the air if I
can't lay hands on that interest to-morrow. They'll seize my estate!

MRS. POPOV: Day after to-morrow you will receive the money.

SMIRNOV: I don't need the money day after to-morrow; I need it to-day.

MRS. POPOV: I'm sorry I can't pay you today.

SMIRNOV: And I can't wait until day after to-morrow.

MRS. POPOV: But what can I do if I haven't it?

SMIRNOV: So you can't pay?

MRS. POPOV: I cannot.

SMIRNOV: Hm! Is that your last word?

MRS. POPOV: My last.

SMIRNOV: Absolutely?

MRS. POPOV: Absolutely.

SMIRNOV: Thank you. [He shrugs his shoulders.] And they expect me to stand for
all that. The toll-gatherer just now met me in the road and asked why I was always
worrying. Why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't I worry? I need money, I feel the knife at
my throat. Yesterday morning I left my house in the early dawn and called on all my
debtors. If even one of them had paid his debt! I worked the skin off my fingers! The
devil knows in what sort of Jew-inn I slept; in a room with a barrel of brandy! And
now at last I come here, seventy versts from home, hope for a little money, and all you
give me is moods! Why shouldn't I worry?

MRS. POPOV: I thought I made it plain to you that my manager will return from
town, and then you will get your money.

SMIRNOV: I did not come to see the manager; I came to see you. What the devil--
pardon the language--do I care for your manager?

114
MRS. POPOV: Really, sir, I am not used to such language or such manners. I shan't
listen to you any further.

[She goes out, left.]

SMIRNOV: What can one say to that? Moods! Seven months since her husband died!
Do I have to pay the interest or not? I repeat the question, have I to pay the interest or
not? The husband is dead and all that; the manager is--the devil with him!--travelling
somewhere. Now, tell me, what am I to do? Shall I run away from my creditors in a
balloon? Or knock my head against a stone wall? If I call on Grusdev he chooses to be
"not at home," Iroschevitch has simply hidden himself, I have quarrelled with Kurzin
and came near throwing him out of the window, Masutov is ill and this woman has--
moods! Not one of them will pay up! And all because I've spoiled them, because I'm
an old whiner, dish-rag! I'm too tender-hearted with them. But wait! I allow nobody to
play tricks with me, the devil with 'em all! I'll stay here and not budge until she pays!
Brr! How angry I am, how terribly angry I am! Every tendon is trembling with anger,
and I can hardly breathe! I'm even growing ill! [He calls out.] Servant!

[LUKA enters.]

LUKA: What is it you wish?

SMIRNOV: Bring me Kvas or water! [LUKA goes out.] Well, what can we do? She
hasn't it on hand? What sort of logic is that? A fellow stands with the knife at his
throat, he needs money, he is on the point of hanging himself, and she won't pay
because she isn't in the mood to discuss money matters. Women's logic! That's why I
never liked to talk to women, and why I dislike doing it now. I would rather sit on a
powder barrel than talk with a woman. Brr!--I'm getting cold as ice; this affair has
made me so angry. I need only to see such a romantic creature from a distance to get
so angry that I have cramps in my calves! It's enough to make one yell for help!

[Enter LUKA.]

LUKA: [Hands him water.] Madam is ill and is not receiving.

SMIRNOV: March! [LUKA goes out.] Ill and isn't receiving! All right, it isn't
necessary. I won't receive, either! I'll sit here and stay until you bring that money. If
you're ill a week, I'll sit here a week. If you're ill a year, I'll sit here a year. As Heaven
is my witness, I'll get the money. You don't disturb me with your mourning--or with
your dimples. We know these dimples! [He calls out the window.] Simon, unharness!
We aren't going to leave right away. I am going to stay here. Tell them in the stable to
give the horses some oats. The left horse has twisted the bridle again. [Imitating

115
him.] Stop! I'll show you how. Stop! [Leaves window.] It's awful. Unbearable heat, no
money, didn't sleep last night and now--mourning-dresses with moods. My head
aches; perhaps I ought to have a drink. Ye-s, I must have a drink. [Calling.]Servant!

LUKA: What do you wish?

SMIRNOV: Something to drink! [LUKA goes out. SMIRNOV sits down and looks at
his clothes.] Ugh, a fine figure! No use denying that. Dust, dirty boots, unwashed,
uncombed, straw on my vest--the lady probably took me for a highwayman. [He
yawns.] It was a little impolite to come into a reception-room with such clothes. Oh,
well, no harm done. I'm not here as a guest. I'm a creditor. And there is no special
costume for creditors.

LUKA: [Entering with glass.] You take great liberty, sir.

SMIRNOV: [Angrily.] What?

LUKA: I--I--I just----

SMIRNOV: Whom are you talking to? Keep quiet.

LUKA: [Angrily.] Nice mess! This fellow won't leave!

[He goes out.]

SMIRNOV: Lord, how angry I am! Angry enough to throw mud at the whole world! I
even feel ill! Servant!

[MRS. POPOV comes in with downcast eyes.]

MRS. POPOV: Sir, in my solitude I have become unaccustomed to the human voice
and I cannot stand the sound of loud talking. I beg you, please to cease disturbing my
rest.

SMIRNOV: Pay me my money and I'll leave.

MRS. POPOV: I told you once, plainly, in your native tongue, that I haven't the
money at hand; wait until day after to-morrow.

SMIRNOV: And I also had the honor of informing you in your native tongue that I
need the money, not day after to-morrow, but to-day. If you don't pay me to-day I
shall have to hang myself to-morrow.

116
MRS. POPOV: But what can I do if I haven't the money?

SMIRNOV: So you are not going to pay immediately? You're not?

MRS. POPOV: I cannot.

SMIRNOV: Then I'll sit here until I get the money. [He sits down.] You will pay day
after to-morrow? Excellent! Here I stay until day after to-morrow. [Jumps up.] I ask
you, do I have to pay that interest to-morrow or not? Or do you think I'm joking?

MRS. POPOV: Sir, I beg of you, don't scream! This is not a stable.

SMIRNOV: I'm not talking about stables, I'm asking you whether I have to pay that
interest to-morrow or not?

MRS. POPOV: You have no idea how to treat a lady.

SMIRNOV: Oh, yes, I have.

MRS. POPOV: No, you have not. You are an ill-bred, vulgar person! Respectable
people don't speak so to ladies.

SMIRNOV: How remarkable! How do you want one to speak to you? In French,
perhaps! Madame, je vous prie! Pardon me for having disturbed you. What beautiful
weather we are having to-day! And how this mourning becomes you!

[He makes a low bow with mock ceremony.]

MRS. POPOV: Not at all funny! I think it vulgar!

SMIRNOV: [Imitating her.] Not at all funny--vulgar! I don't understand how to

behave in the company of ladies. Madam, in the course of my life I have seen more
women than you have sparrows. Three times have I fought duels for women, twelve I
jilted and nine jilted me. There was a time when I played the fool, used honeyed
language, bowed and scraped. I loved, suffered, sighed to the moon, melted in love's
torments. I loved passionately, I loved to madness, loved in every key, chattered like a
magpie on emancipation, sacrificed half my fortune in the tender passion, until now
the devil knows I've had enough of it. Your obedient servant will let you lead him
around by the nose no more. Enough! Black eyes, passionate eyes, coral lips, dimples
in cheeks, moonlight whispers, soft, modest sights--for all that, madam, I wouldn't pay
a kopeck! I am not speaking of present company, but of women in general; from the
tiniest to the greatest, they are conceited, hypocritical, chattering, odious, deceitful

117
from top to toe; vain, petty, cruel with a maddening logic and [he strikes his
forehead] in this respect, please excuse my frankness, but one sparrow is worth ten of
the aforementioned petticoat-philosophers. When one sees one of the romantic
creatures before him he imagines he is looking at some holy being, so wonderful that
its one breath could dissolve him in a sea of a thousand charms and delights; but if
one looks into the soul--it's nothing but a common crocodile. [He siezes the arm-chair
and breaks it in two.] But the worst of all is that this crocodile imagines it is a
masterpiece of creation, and that it has a monopoly on all the tender passions. May the
devil hang me upside down if there is anything to love about a woman! When she is in
love, all she knows is how to complain and shed tears. If the man suffers and makes
sacrifices she swings her train about and tries to lead him by the nose. You have the
misfortune to be a woman, and naturally you know woman's nature; tell me on your
honor, have you ever in your life seen a woman who was really true and faithful?
Never! Only the old and the deformed are true and faithful. It's easier to find a cat
with horns or a white woodcock, than a faithful woman.

MRS. POPOV: But allow me to ask, who is true and faithful in love? The man,
perhaps?

SMIRNOV: Yes, indeed! The man!

MRS. POPOV: The man! [She laughs sarcastically.] The man true and faithful in
love! Well, that is something new! [Bitterly.] How can you make such a statement?
Men true and faithful! So long as we have gone thus far, I may as well say that of all
the men I have known, my husband was the best; I loved him passionately with all my
soul, as only a young, sensible woman may love; I gave him my youth, my happiness,
my fortune, my life. I worshipped him like a heathen. And what happened? This best
of men betrayed me in every possible way. After his death I found his desk filled with
love-letters. While he was alive he left me alone for months--it is horrible even to
think about it--he made love to other women in my very presence, he wasted my
money and made fun of my feelings--and in spite of everything I trusted him and was
true to him. And more than that: he is dead and I am still true to him. I have buried
myself within these four walls and I shall wear this mourning to my grave.

SMIRNOV: [Laughing disrespectfully.] Mourning! What on earth do you take me

for? As if I didn't know why you wore this black domino and why you buried yourself
within these four walls. Such a secret! So romantic! Some knight will pass the castle,
gaze up at the windows, and think to himself: "Here dwells the mysterious Tamara
who, for love of her husband, has buried herself within four walls." Oh, I understand
the art!

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MRS. POPOV: [Springing up.] What? What do you mean by saying such things to
me?

SMIRNOV: You have buried yourself alive, but meanwhile you have not forgotten to
powder your nose!

MRS. POPOV: How dare you speak so?

SMIRNOV: Don't scream at me, please; I'm not the manager. Allow me to call things
by their right names. I am not a woman, and I am accustomed to speak out what I
think. So please don't scream.

MRS. POPOV: I'm not screaming. It is you who are screaming. Please leave me, I beg
you.

SMIRNOV: Pay me my money, and I'll leave.

MRS. POPOV: I won't give you the money.

SMIRNOV: You won't? You won't give me my money?

MRS. POPOV: I don't care what you do. You won't get a kopeck! Leave me!

SMIRNOV: As I haven't had the pleasure of being either your husband or your fiancé,
please don't make a scene. [He sits down.] I can't stand it.

MRS. POPOV: [Breathing hard.] You are going to sit down?

SMIRNOV: I already have.

MRS. POPOV: Kindly leave the house!

SMIRNOV: Give me the money.

MRS. POPOV: I don't care to speak with impudent men. Leave! [Pause.] You aren't
going?

SMIRNOV: No.

MRS. POPOV: No?

SMIRNOV: No.

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MRS. POPOV: Very well.

[She rings the bell. Enter LUKA.]

MRS. POPOV: Luka, show the gentleman out.

LUKA: [Going to SMIRNOV.] Sir, why don't you leave when you are ordered? What
do you want?

SMIRNOV: [Jumping up.] Whom do you think you are talking to? I'll grind you to
powder.

LUKA: [Puts his hand to his heart.] Good Lord! [He drops into a chair.] Oh, I'm ill;
I can't breathe!

MRS. POPOV: Where is Dascha? [Calling.] Dascha! Pelageja! Dascha!

[She rings.]

LUKA: They're all gone! I'm ill! Water!

MRS. POPOV: [To SMIRNOV.] Leave! Get out!

SMIRNOV: Kindly be a little more polite!

MRS. POPOV: [Striking her fists and stamping her feet.] You are vulgar! You're a
boor! A monster!

SMIRNOV: What did you say?

MRS. POPOV: I said you were a boor, a monster!

SMIRNOV: [Steps toward her quickly.] Permit me to ask what right you have to
insult me?

MRS. POPOV: What of it? Do you think I am afraid of you?

SMIRNOV: And you think that because you are a romantic creature you can insult me
without being punished? I challenge you!

LUKA: Merciful Heaven! Water!

SMIRNOV: We'll have a duel!

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MRS. POPOV: Do you think because you have big fists and a steer's neck I am afraid
of you?

SMIRNOV: I allow no one to insult me, and I make no exception because you are a
woman, one of the "weaker sex!"

MRS. POPOV: [Trying to cry him down.] Boor, boor, boor!

SMIRNOV: It is high time to do away with the old superstition that it is only the man
who is forced to give satisfaction. If there is equity at all let their be equity in all
things. There's a limit!

MRS. POPOV: You wish to fight a duel? Very well.

SMIRNOV: Immediately.

MRS. POPOV: Immediately. My husband had pistols. I'll bring them. [She hurries
away, then turns.] Oh, what a pleasure it will be to put a bullet in your impudent head.
The devil take you!

[She goes out.]

SMIRNOV: I'll shoot her down! I'm no fledgling, no sentimental young puppy. For
me there is no weaker sex!

LUKA: Oh, sir. [Falls to his knees.] Have mercy on me, an old man, and go away.
You have frightened me to death already, and now you want to fight a duel.

SMIRNOV: [Paying no attention.] A duel. That's equity, emancipation. That way the
sexes are made equal. I'll shoot her down as a matter of principle. What can a person
say to such a woman? [Imitating her.] "The devil take you. I'll put a bullet in your
impudent head." What can one say to that? She was angry, her eyes blazed, she
accepted the challenge. On my honor, it's the first time in my life that I ever saw such
a woman.

LUKA: Oh, sir. Go away. Go away!

SMIRNOV: That is a woman. I can understand her. A real woman. No shilly-

shallying, but fire, powder, and noise! It would be a pity to shoot a woman like that.

LUKA: [Weeping.] Oh, sir, go away.

[Enter MRS. POPOV.]

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MRS. POPOV: Here are the pistols. But before we have our duel, please show me
how to shoot. I have never had a pistol in my hand before!

LUKA: God be merciful and have pity upon us! I'll go and get the gardener and the
coachman. Why has this horror come to us?

[He goes out.]

SMIRNOV: [Looking at the pistols.] You see, there are different kinds. There are
special duelling pistols, with cap and ball. But these are revolvers, Smith & Wesson,
with ejectors; fine pistols! A pair like that cost at least ninety roubles. This is the way
to hold a revolver. [Aside.]Those eyes, those eyes! A real woman!

MRS. POPOV: Like this?

SMIRNOV: Yes, that way. Then you pull the hammer back--so--then you aim--put
your head back a little. Just stretch your arm out, please. So--then press your finger on
the thing like that, and that is all. The chief thing is this: don't get excited, don't hurry
your aim, and take care that your hand doesn't tremble.

MRS. POPOV: It isn't well to shoot inside; let's go into the garden.

SMIRNOV: Yes. I'll tell you now, I am going to shoot into the air.

MRS. POPOV: That is too much! Why?

SMIRNOV: Because---because. That's my business.

MRS. POPOV: You are afraid. Yes. A-h-h-h. No, no, my dear sir, no flinching!
Please follow me. I won't rest until I've made a hole in that head I hate so much. Are
you afraid?

SMIRNOV: Yes, I'm afraid.

MRS. POPOV: You are lying. Why won't you fight?

SMIRNOV: Because--because--I--like you.

MRS. POPOV: [With an angry laugh.] You like me! He dares to say he likes
me! [She points to the door.] Go.

SMIRNOV: [Laying the revolver silently on the table, takes his hat and starts. At the
door he stops a moment, gazing at her silently, then he approaches her,
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hesitating.]Listen! Are you still angry? I was mad as the devil, but please understand
me--how can I express myself? The thing is like this--such things are-- [He raises his
voice.] Now, is it my fault that you owe me money? [Grasps the back of the chair,
which breaks.] The devil know what breakable furniture you have! I like you! Do you
understand? I--I'm almost in love!

MRS. POPOV: Leave! I hate you.

SMIRNOV: Lord! What a woman! I never in my life met one like her. I'm lost,
ruined! I've been caught like a mouse in a trap.

MRS. POPOV: Go, or I'll shoot.

SMIRNOV: Shoot! You have no idea what happiness it would be to die in sight of
those beautiful eyes, to die from the revolver in this little velvet hand! I'm mad!
Consider it and decide immediately, for if I go now, we shall never see each other
again. Decide--speak--I am a noble, a respectable man, have an income of ten
thousand, can shoot a coin thrown into the air. I own some fine horses. Will you be
my wife?

MRS. POPOV: [Swings the revolver angrily.] I'll shoot!

SMIRNOV: My mind is not clear--I can't understand. Servant--water! I have fallen in

love like any young man. [He takes her hand and she cries with pain.] I love
you! [He kneels.]I love you as I have never loved before. Twelve women I jilted, nine
jilted me, but not one of them all have I loved as I love you. I am conquered, lost; I lie
at your feet like a fool and beg for your hand. Shame and disgrace! For five years I
haven't been in love; I thanked the Lord for it, and now I am caught, like a carriage
tongue in another carriage. I beg for your hand! Yes or no? Will you?--Good!

[He gets up and goes quickly to the door.]

MRS. POPOV: Wait a minute!

SMIRNOV: [Stopping.] Well?

MRS. POPOV: Nothing. You may go. But--wait a moment. No, go on, go on. I hate
you. Or--no; don't go. Oh, if you knew how angry I was, how angry! [She throws the
revolver on to the chair.] My finger is swollen from this thing. [She angrily tears her
handkerchief.]What are you standing there for? Get out!

SMIRNOV: Farewell!

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MRS. POPOV: Yes, go. [Cries out.] Why are you going? Wait--no, go!! Oh, how
angry I am! Don't come too near, don't come too near--er--come--no nearer.

SMIRNOV: [Approaching her.] How angry I am with myself! Fall in love like a
schoolboy, throw myself on my knees. I've got a chill! [Strongly.] I love you. This is
fine--all I needed was to fall in love. To-morrow I have to pay my interest, the hay
harvest has begun, and then you appear! [He takes her in his arms.] I can never
forgive myself.

MRS. POPOV: Go away! Take your hands off me! I hate you--you--this is--

[A long kiss. Enter LUKA with an axe, the gardener with a rake, the coachman with a
pitchfork, and workmen with poles.]

LUKA: [Staring at the pair.] Merciful heavens!

[A long pause.]

MRS. POPOV: [Dropping her eyes.] Tell them in the stable that Tobby isn't to have
any oats.

CURTAIN

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Sapay Koma

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

“I looked at Maria and she was lovely. She was tall…and in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like
a morning when papayas are in bloom.”

Manuel Arguilla

On our first Valentine as a couple, he gave me a bowl of white nondescript flowers. They
had a distinctly sweet but faint scent. I had never been a fan of Valentine’s Day nor of love like a
red, red rose; but that day, I became a believer. He told me they were papaya blossoms from his
mother’s garden. At that moment, I knew I would one day marry him. We had started dating
only three months ago, but I knew I would be Maria to his Leon. Why, he even had a younger
brother the same age as Baldo! And even though they didn’t live in Nagrebcan nor owned a
carabao, the town of Itogon, Benguet was remote enough for me. I have always enjoyed
teaching the Arguilla story for its subversive take on the role that one’s family plays in a
marriage; but having been born and raised in Pasay City, I had no idea what papaya blossoms
smelled like. I imagined that my new boyfriend had read the story in his Philippine literature
class and meant for me to recognize his gift as an allusion. In fact, I imagined we would defy
societal norms and prove that love conquers all. Instead of a “theme song,” our relationship had
a story to live up to. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

In the story, Leon brings his city-girl wife, Maria, home to meet his parents for the first
time. His surly father orchestrates several tests of Maria’s suitability through Leon’s younger
brother Baldo, who is quickly won over by her papaya blossom scent.

The first time I met his parents was on the wedding day of his eldest brother. By then,
we had been seeing each other discreetly for seven months, somehow knowing that no one
would approve of our relationship. In the midst of the beating of gongs and best wishes, his
Kankanaey father only wanted to know two things about me: where I was from and what
language I spoke. I gave the wrong answer on both points. I was a Manileña and I couldn’t
speak Ilocano yet, having only recently moved to Baguio City to rebuild my life after becoming
disillusioned with the institution that had once nurtured my desire to excel. But no love lost, I
was only their son’s “gayyem” (friend), after all. It didn’t help that I was wearing a leopard print
spaghetti-strapped dress, which exposed the tattoo on my back. I reasoned that the Cordillera
culture has a long tradition of body art; so they should appreciate the significance of mine.

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None of us knew at that time that I was already carrying a half-Igorot child in my womb
(which, I imagined, somehow made me an acceptable quarter-Igorot for the nonce).

Against better judgment, we decided to get married. We were under the influence of
hormones, of pregnancy, of the Catholic church, of Manuel Arguilla. We would have gotten a
quickie secret wedding if he were old enough, or I, wais enough; but by law we needed his
parents’ consent. Which they refused to give. For perfectly good reasons.

They could have said, “You shouldn’t marry because he is too young” (and you are ten years
older). Or “You shouldn’t marry because he is still studying” (and you were even his teacher). Or
“You shouldn’t marry because he has a calling” (and you are snatching him from God).

But instead his mother said, “We can’t give you permission because his brother had just
gotten married. In the theology of the Cordilleras, if siblings marry within the same year, one of
the marriages will fail. The community will blame us if we allow you to marry.”

So I called my mother, who promptly came to my rescue, writing them a demand letter
based on a fallacy: “If your child were the woman in this situation, you would rush to marry them!”
I’m sure she was so eager to get me married off because she knew it was a fluke.

What was most ridiculous (though I refused to see it at that time), was that I was a self-
proclaimed lesbian feminist. Despite all the tragic relationships I had had with women, I still
believed that it was worth fighting for the right of a woman to love another woman. What
business did I have getting married to a very young man? And for all the wrong reasons. Must
have been oxytocin overdose sponsored by the baby in my womb. Or a planetary alignment
exerting mysterious forces on my consciousness. Or, gasp—Love!

Whatever it was, it came to pass. My mother didn’t have to bring my grandfather’s rifle.
But I had to do it all on my own: filing the license, finding the Judge, buying the rings, reserving
a restaurant, paying for everything. It was a good thing his parents didn’t allow us to tell
anybody about the marriage – that way I didn’t have to invite anyone -- which lessened my
expenses. I had to understand that they had spent all their savings for his brother’s recent
wedding, where they had butchered eight pigs for a traditional Igorot wedding feast. And after
all, lest we forget, we were getting married against their will. But hey, there they were, on hand
to sign the marriage certificate in the sala of the Honorable Judge Fernando Cabato of La
Trinidad, Benguet.

The ceremony itself was quick – but peppered with omens. First, when the court clerk
asked for my mother-in-law’s name, I told her “Constancia” – because I figured that was where
her nickname “Connie” came from. When I asked my nervous groom, he agreed. When the
Judge confirmed the information, “Constancia” objected because her name is actually
“Conchita.” Judge Cabato made the correction and lectured us about how important it is not to

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make errors in a legal document. Then, when it came to my father-in-law’s name, the Judge
refused to believe that “Johnny” was his real name.

When he asked for the rings, my groom gave him the little box, but when the Judge
opened it, it was empty. The elderly honorable Judge sat down and asked, “Is this a prank?” It
turned out that the rings had slipped out of the box and were floating in my groom’s pants’
pocket.

When it was time for the wedding kiss, the Judge “got even” with us. He pronounced us
husband and wife and then said, “No more kissing, it’s obvious there’s a deposit in there!” Then
he laughed hearty congratulations. I wonder now how many times he has regaled a party
crowd with our story.

At the reception in a Chinese restaurant, we occupied only one round table, with only
ten guests. The pancit canton was very good. We didn’t get any gifts, except for a framed copy of
1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient, love is kind… love does not keep a record of wrongs…” It wasn’t the
wedding of my dreams, but the whole event cost me only Php 2,500. It was as do-it-yourself as
DIY could get. That didn’t include the cost of the wedding rings, for which I had to sacrifice
some of my old gold jewelry. The irony of it escaped me at the time; but for a modern woman
on a budget, there was no room for finesse.

Thus we began our married life: full of contention, confusion, and concealment.

We couldn’t live together immediately; nor was I allowed to be seen in their little
neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone. A very pregnant stranger ambling up and
down the steep Upper Mangga Road would have been a conspicuous mystery. I continued to
live alone in my apartment, with my husband staying weekends, and I pretended in school that
my husband is from Manila. I’m not sure anyone actually believed the drama, but I was bathing
in first-baby-love, so I couldn’t care less.

My other Igorot friends assured me that when the baby is born, my in-laws would
finally accept me as the mother of their grandchild. But as I said, I couldn’t care less. I was a
Manila girl – I truly believed that our marriage would succeed even without his parents’
approval of me. I was used to flouting norms and not needing anyone. And for his part, my
husband argued existentially that we should live by the integrity of our own little family. You
see, he was a Philosophy major under the tutelage of two young Jesuit-educated instructors,
who had come to the mountains from Manila to indulge their fantasies about love and teaching
(in that order). We, the migrant teachers, smiled at each other in the College of Human Sciences
silently acknowledging each other’s foolishness; ignoring the fact that most of the other
“native” faculty members looked askance at the three of us.

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 When our daughter was born, we decided it was time to move into the family home. In
the innocent presence of the new half-Igorot baby, all would be forgiven. It seemed the most
practical thing to do. But I soon realized how naïve we were. We didn’t take into account all the
new wrongs that could be committed while sharing one household.

Before I got married, I had a dog – a black mongrel I had named “Sapay Koma,” which is
Ilocano for “sana.” It is both a wish and a prayer – difficult to translate into English, unless in
context. Koma was my companion throughout the two years I had lived in my dank, quirky
apartment – the mute witness to the drama and dilemma preceding my decision to marry. We
took him along with us in our move, of course. But the five other dogs in the new household
didn’t like him all that much and they all raised such a nonstop racket, none of the humans
could sleep, particularly the newborn baby.

The neighbors offered to buy him for Php 500. Igorots like black dogs because the meat
is tastier. I was aghast. He was my dog, my loyal friend. If anyone was going to eat him, it
should be family. So my husband invited his friends over to put Koma out of his misery.

I locked myself in our little bedroom with the baby, while they did it. But despite the
closed windows, I could still smell the burning hair and later, the meat cooking. The putrid
scent seemed to stick to my nose for days after, accusing me of betrayal. I wept for Koma and
for all that was dying in the fire – all the wishes that had no place in my new life. I decided that
this was the price for what Filipinos like to call “paglagay sa tahimik.”

It took two hours for the meat to be tender enough to eat and when we all sat down to
dinner, I was glad they didn’t expect me to partake of the canine feast. Yet I did. I took one
mouthful, which I swallowed quickly without chewing, so I wouldn’t have to relish the flavors.
I may have had the stomach for it, but I didn’t have the heart. I only wanted to show them that I
respected their culture, even though in fact, I would never belong. Also, I was hoping that this
way, Koma would forgive me for having failed him, for offering him as a sacrifice at the altar of
my marriage. This way, we could be truly together.

For weeks after, every time I overheard my husband reply “Aw, aw” to his father, I
would shiver at the prospect that we would have dog for dinner again. They had five other
dogs, after all. Luckily, it turned out that “aw” only means “yes” in their language, Kankanaey.
Besides, they only butcher dogs on very special occasions. Ordinarily, there was always the
savory chicken soup dish, Pinikpikan, which features a similar charred skin aroma and taste. I
was quite relieved to learn that his father did not require beating the chicken to death with a
stick before cooking, as is customary in the Igorot culture.

To this day, I have not been able to care for another dog. I do, however, have another
child. By the same man. Accidentally. It happened on Father’s Day, when we thought having
sex was a nice distraction from the confusion that arose from our growing discontent with the

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marriage. When we found out about the pregnancy, we agreed, albeit reluctantly, that it was
Divine Intervention – a sign that we should keep trying to save the marriage.

It was not just the food that was strange. I couldn’t understand why everyday, some
relatives would come over and expect to be fed. I had not been raised in an extended family,
and even within our nuclear family, we pretty much kept to ourselves. In my mother’s house,
we were trained to share through “one for you, one for me, then stay out of my bag of goodies.”
You can imagine how I felt the day they served my Gardenia whole wheat bread to the
“relatives,” who promptly wiped it out, because my peanut butter was delicious.

Not that I was being selfish. Aside from the fact that I didn’t have any bread for
breakfast the next day and the house being a ten-minute hike uphill plus ten kilometers to
downtown Baguio City, I fumed about not even being introduced to these relatives as the wife
of their son. They would introduce my daughter and her yaya, but I remained a “phantom of
delight” flitting about the house.

When I confronted my husband about the bread, he explained that in the Igorot culture,
everything belongs to the community. So I took a permanent marker and wrote my name on my
next loaf of bread. It was a Saussurean signifier of sorts – and it was unforgivable.

My father-in-law was a man of few words. In fact, my daughter was already two years
old when he decided it was time to acknowledge my existence and say something to me. In the
past, he would use an intermediary (usually my husband) if he wanted to get information from
me. It wasn’t too difficult because by this time we had already moved to Manila and were living
in my mother’s house – which was another disaster and another story. It was Christmas Eve
and we were spending the holidays in Baguio City. He was watching a replay of a boxing match
and I was playing with my daughter in the living room. He asked, in Ilocano, “Do you have a
VCD player at home?” I was so shocked I couldn’t reply immediately. He repeated the question
in Tagalog. It turned out he was giving us the VCD player he had won in a barangay raffle. That
night, as the entire family sang their traditional “Merry Christmas To You” to the happy
birthday tune, I felt I was finally getting a fair chance to prove that I was worthy of being in
their cozy family.

In our six years together, I can think of more instances in which our separate worlds
collided and caused aftershocks in my marriage. But none of it rivaled what I thought was the
worst affront to me. My mother-in-law is Cancerian, like me, so her house is a pictorial gallery
of her children and their achievements. She had a wall with enlarged and framed wedding
photos of her children. Through the years, her exhibit grew, and expectedly, I and my husband
didn’t have a photo on this wall. I figured it was because we had not had a church wedding. In
fact, when we told them I was pregnant with our second child, they requested that we hold a
church wedding already. They even offered to share the expense. But I preferred to save my

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money for the birth of the baby. However, given my theater background, I once tried to
convince my husband to just rent a gown and tuxedo and then have our “wedding” photo
taken so we’d finally get on “The Wedding Wall.” But he has always been the more sensible
half of our couple.

One day, though, a new picture was added to the wall. It was a studio photo of his
eldest sister, her American husband, and their baby boy. It wasn’t “The Wedding Wall”
anymore; it was now the “Our Children and their Acceptable Spouses” wall. It was their
version of the Saussurean signifier. The message was loud and clear – to me and to other people
who came to visit.

I wonder now why it so mattered to me to be on that wall. I guess I felt that after all
those years, we had been punished enough for defying the culture. Maybe I actually believed in
1 Corinthians 13. Or perhaps I also needed to be reassured that I was indeed happily married.

I confronted my husband about it and demanded that he finally stand up for me and our
family. And he did – he wrote his parents a letter that made his mother cry and beat her breast.
We each tried to explain our sides, finally coming to terms with the bitter past. They told me
that they are simple folk and didn’t mean to ostracize me; that when they agreed to the
marriage, they accepted me as part of the family, no matter what. I believed them. I told them I
was never going to be the woman they had probably wanted for their son; but that I am a
perfectly good woman, most of the time. We tried to make amends. Our family picture was up
on the wall within three days. Our kids were quite pleased.

But it was too late. By then, my husband and I had been grappling with our own issues
for the past five years. He had gotten tired of my transgressions and sought solace with his
friends. After coming home late from another “Happy Hour” with them, I screamed at him,
“What happy hour? Nobody is allowed to be happy in this house!” It was then we both finally
realized that we had to face the truth about our marriage. By the time his parents were willing
to start over in our journey as a family, we had given up on ours.

Most couples find breaking up hard to do. It was particularly hard for us because we
had to convince his parents that it was not their fault. On the other hand, I had to deal with the
fact that maybe my marriage did fail because of the “curse” of the superstition “sukob sa taon” –
that maybe we were wrong to insist on our choice. Yet on good days, I am pretty sure it was a
perfectly “no fault divorce,” if there ever was one.

“Kapag minamalas ka sa isang lugar, itawid mo ng dagat” goes the Filipino proverb.
Perhaps the salt in the sea would prevent the bad luck from following you. So today I live with
my two Igorot children in Davao City – fondly called “the promised land.” Everyone is
astounded when they learn that I had moved even though I knew only one person here – who
didn’t even promise me anything. I just wanted a chance to start over. When we moved into this

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house, it had a small nipa hut in the backyard. The kids enjoyed staying there during the
sweltering hot Davao afternoons, especially when their Daddy called them on the phone. But it
was nearly falling apart and was host to a colony of termites that had actually begun to invade
the house as well.

My generous landlady soon decided it was time to tear down the structure. When I got
home one day, it was gone. All that was left was a dry and empty space in the yard; yet
everything looked brighter too. We missed the “payag;” but soon the grass crept into the
emptiness and we began to enjoy playing Frisbee in the space that opened up. It was a
Derridean denouement of sorts.

Last year, we spent our first Christmas without any family obligations. It was liberating
not to have to buy any gifts for nephews, cousins, in-laws. All the shopping I did was for my
children. I was determined to establish my own Christmas tradition with them. I wanted to
show them we were happy. I wanted them to grow up never having to sing “Merry Christmas
To You” ever again. I decided to cook paella for noche buena as if my life depended on it. I
thought it was simply a matter of dumping all the ingredients in the pan and letting it cook –
like the aftermath of a failed marriage. The recipe was so difficult I ended up crying
hysterically, asking myself over and over, “what have I done?” My kids embraced me and said,
“Nanay, stop crying na.” But I couldn’t. It seemed as if it was the first time I had let myself cry
over what I had lost. I noticed though, that the kids did not cry. Embarrassed with myself, I
picked myself up from the river of snot that was my bed and finished what I had set out to do –
as I always have. It even looked and tasted like paella, despite the burnt bottom. But next year
we’ll just order take-out from Sr. Pedro (Lechon Manok).

That night, my mother-in-law sent me a text message saying they are always praying for
us to get back together, especially for the children’s sake. I do not know how to comfort her,
except to keep saying that we had all done the best we could at the time; that we are always
trying to do the right thing; that despite what happened, or perhaps because of it, we will
always be a family. Of a kind. We are, after all, inextricably linked by a timeless story and
“sapay koma.”

Each of us in this story nurtures a secret wish to have done things differently – to have
been kinder, more understanding of each other’s quirks and shortcomings. But it takes less
energy to wish it forward. Sapay koma naimbag ti biag yo dita -- to hope that your life there is
good.

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Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

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MOVING PICTURES

By

Charles Johnson

You sit in the Neptune Theatre waiting for the thin overhead lights to dim with a sense of
respect, perhaps even reverence, for movie houses are, as everyone knows, the new cathedrals, their
stories better remembered than legends, totems, or mythologies, their directors more popular than
novelists, more influential than saints--- enough people, you’ve been told, have seen the James Bond
adventures to fill the entire country of Argentina. Perhaps you have written the screenplay of this
movie. Perhaps not. Regardless, you have come to it as everyone does, as a seeker groping in the
darkness for light, hoping something magical will be beamed from above, and no matter how bad this
matinee is, or silly, something deep and maybe even too dangerous to talk loudly about will indeed
happen to you and the others before this drama reels to its last transparent frame.

Naturally, you have left your life outside the door. Like any life, it’s a messy thing, hardly as
orderly as art, what some call life in the fast lane---: the coffee and sugar-donut breakfasts, bumper-to-
bumper traffic downtown, the business lunches, and a breakneck schedule not to get ahead but simply
to stay in one place, which is peculiar, because you grew up in the sixties speeding on Methadone and
despising all this, knowing your Age (Aquarian) was made for finer stuff. But not matter. Outside,
across town, you have put away for ninety minutes the tedious repetitive job that is, obviously, beneath
your talents, sensitivity, and education (a degree in English), the once beautiful woman—or wife—a
former model (local), college dancer, or semiprofessional actress named Megan or Daphne, who has
grown tired of you, or you of her, and talks now of legal separation and finding herself, the children from
a former, frighteningly brief marriage whom you don’t want to lose, the mortgage, alimony, tax audit,
the aging gin-fattened face that once favored a rock star’s but now frowns back at you in the bathroom
mirror, the young woman at work, born in 1960 and unable to recall who the President was that year,
who after the Christmas party took you to bed in her spacious downtown apartment, perhaps out of pity
because your mother, God bless her, died and left you with a thousand dollars in debt before you could
get the old family house clear--- all that shelved, mercifully, as the film starts: first the frosty
mountaintop, ringed by stars, or a lion roaring, or floodlights bathing the tips of buildings in a Hollywood
skyline: stable trademarks in a world of flux, you think, sure-fire signs that whatever follows—tragedy or
farce—is made by people who are accomplished dream-merchants. Perhaps more: masters of vision,
geniuses of the epistemological Murphy.

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 If you have written the script of this film, which is possible, you look for your name in the
credits, and probably frown at the names of the Crew, each recalling some disaster during the shooting,
first at the studio, then later on location for five weeks in Oklahoma cowtowns during the winter, which
was worse than living on the moon, the days boiling and nights so cold. Nevertheless, you’d seen it as a
miracle, an act of God when the director, having read your novel, called, offering you the project—a
historical romance—then walked you patiently through the first eight drafts, suspicious of you at first
(there was real money riding on this, it wasn’t poetry), of your dreary novelistic pretensions to Deep
Profundity, and you equally suspicious of him, his background in sitcoms, obsession with “keeping it
sexy,” and love of slapstick comedies. For this you wrote a dissertation on Derrida as a literature major?
Yet, you’d listened. He was right, in the end. He was good, you admitted, grudgingly. He knew, as you---
with your college degree--- didn’t, the meaning of Entertainment. You’d learned. With his help, you got
good, too. You gloated. And lost friends. “A movie?” said your poet friends, “that’s wonderful, it’s
happening for you,” and then they avoided you as if you had AIDS. What was happening was this:

You’d shelved the novel, the Big Book, for bucks monitored by the Writers Guild (West), threw
yourself into fast-and-dirty scripts, the instant gratification of quick deadlines and fat checks because the
Book, with its complexity and promise of critical praise, the Book with its long-distance demands and no
financial rewards whatsoever, was impossible, and besides, you didn’t have it anymore, not really, the
gift for narrative or language, while the scripts were easy, like writing shorthand, and soon--- way sooner
than you thought--- the films, with their lifespan shorter than a mayfly’s, were all you could do. It’s a
living, you said. Nothing lasts forever. And you pushed on.

The credits crawl up against a montage of Oklahoma farmlife, and in this you read a story, too,
even before the film begins. For the audience, the actors are stars, the new Olympians, but oh, you
know them, this one—the male lead—whose range is boundless, who could be a Brando, but who
hadn’t seen work in two years before this role and survived by doing voice-overs for a cartoon villain in
The Smurfs; that one—the female supporting role--- who can play the full scale of emotions, but whose
last memorable performance was a commercial for a deodorant, all of them; all, including you, fighting
for life in a city where the air is so corrupt joggers spit black after a two-mile run; failing, trying
desperately to keep up the front of doing well, these actors, treating you shabbily sometimes because
your salary was bigger than theirs, even larger than the producer’s, though he wasn’t exactly hurting,
no, he was richer than a medieval king, a complex man of remarkable charm and cunning, someone to
both admire for his Horatio Alger orphan-boy success and for his worship at the altar of power. You
won’t forget the evening he asked you to his home after a long conference, served you Scotch, and then,
from inside a drawer in his desk removed an envelope, dumped its contents out, and you saw maybe
fifty snapshots of beautiful, naked women on his bed--- all of them second-rate actresses, though the
female supporting role was there, too--- and he watched you closely for your reaction, sipping his drink,

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smiling, then asked, “You ever sleep with a woman like that?” No, you hadn’t. And, no, you didn’t trust
him either. You didn’t turn your back. But, then again, nobody in this business did, and in some ways he
was, you know, better than that.

You’d compromised, given up ground, won a few artistic points, but generally you agreed to the
producer’s ideas—it was his show—and then the small army of badly-paid performers and production
people took over, you trailing behind them in Oklahoma, trying to look writerly, wearing a Panama hat,
holding your notepad ready for rewrites, surviving the tedium of eight or nine takes for difficult scenes,
the fights, fallings-out, bad catered food, and midnight affairs, watching your script change at each level
of interpretation—director, actor—until it was unrecognizable, a new thing entirely, a celebration of the
Crew. Not you. Does anyone suspect how bad this thing really looked in roughcut? How miraculous it
is that its rags of shots, conflicting ideas, and scraps of footage usually cohere? You sneak a look around
at the audience, the faces lit by the glow of the screen. No one suspects. You’ve managed to fool them
again, you old fox.

No matter whether the film is yours or not, it pulls you in, reels in your perception like a trout.
On the narrow screen, the story begins with an establishing wideshot of an Oklahoma farm, then in
close-up shows the face of a big towheaded, brown-freckled boy named Bret, and finally settles on a
two-shot of Bret and his blonde, bosomy girlfriend, Bess. No margin for failure in a formula like that. In
the opening funeral scene at a tiny, whitewashed church, the camera favors Bret, whose father has died.
Our hero must seek fortune in the city. Bess just hates to see him go. Dissolve to cemetery gate. As
they leave the cemetery and the coffin is lowered, she squeezes his hand, and something inside you
shivers, the sense of ruin you felt at your own mother’s funeral, the irreversible feeling of abandonment.
There was no girl with you, but you wished to heaven there had been, the one named Sondra you knew
in high school who wouldn’t date you for anything, preferring basketball players to weird little wimps
and geeks, which is pretty much what you were back then, a loser to those who knew you, but you give
all that to Bret and Bess, the pain of parental loss, the hopeless, quiet love never to be, which thickens
the screen so thoroughly that when Bess kisses Bret your nose is clogged with tears and mucus, and
then you have your handkerchief out, honking shamelessly, your eyes streaming, locked—even you—in
a cycle of emotion (yours), which their images have borrowed, intensified, then given back to you, not
because the images or sensations are sad, but because, at bottom, all you have known these last few
minutes are the workings of your own nervous system. You yourself have been supplying the grief and
satisfaction all along, from within. But even that is not the true magic of film.

As Bret rides away, you remember sitting in the studio’s tiny editing room amidst reels of film
hanging like stockings in a bathroom, the editor, a fat, friendly man named Coates, tolerating your
curiosity, letting you peer into his viewer as he patched the first reel together, figuring he owed you, a
semifamous scriptwriter, that much. Each frame, you recall, was a single, frozen image, like an

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individual thought, complete in itself, with no connection to others, as if time stood still; but then the
frames came faster as the viewer sped up, chasing each other, surging forward and creating a linear,
continuous motion that outstripped your perception, and presto: a sensuously rich world erupted and
took such nerve-knocking reality that you shielded your eyes when the violin music came up and Bret
stepped into a darkened Oklahoma shed seen only from his point of view—oh yes, at times even your
body responded, the sweat glands swaling, but it was lunchtime then and Coates wanted to go to the
cafeteria for coffee and clicked off his viewer; the images flipped less quickly, slowed finally to a stop,
the drama disappearing again into frames, and you saw, pulling on your coat, the nerve-wracking, heart-
thumping vision for what it really was: the illusion of speed.

But is even that the magic of film? Sitting back in your seat, aware of your right leg falling
asleep, you think so, for the film has no capacity to fool you anymore. You do not give it your feelings to
transfigure. All that you see with godlike detachment are your own decisions, the lines that were
dropped, and the microphone just visible in a corner of one scene. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see
the audience laugh out loud at the funny parts, and blubber when Bret rides home at last to marry Bess
(actually, they hated each other during the shooting), believing, as you can’t, in a dream spun from
accelerated imagery. It almost makes a man feel superior.

And then it is done, the theatre emptying, the hour and a half of illusion over. You file out with
the others, amazed by how so much can be projected on the blank white screen--- grief, passion, fire,
death--- yet it remains, in the end, untouched. Dragging on your overcoat, the images still an afterglow
in your thoughts, you step outside to the street. It takes your eyes, still in low gear, a moment to adjust
to the light of the late afternoon, traffic noise, and the things around you as you walk to your car, feeling
good, the objects on the street as flat and dimensionless at first as props on a stage. And then you stop.

The car, you notice, has been broken into. The glove compartment has been rifled, and this is
where you keep a checkbook, an extra key to the house, and where—you remember—you put the
report due tomorrow at nine sharp. The glove compartment, how does it look? Like a part of your
body, yes? A wound? From it spills a crumpled photo of your wife, who has asked you to move out so
she can have the house, and another one of the children, who haven’t the faintest idea how empty you
feel getting up every morning to finance their lives at a job that is a ghastly joke, given your talents,
where you can’t slow down and at least four competitors stand waiting for you to step aside, fall on your
face, or die, and the injustice of all this, what you see in the narrow range of radiation you call vision, in
the velocity of ideation, is necessary and sufficient to bring your fists down again and again on the car’s
roof. You climb inside, sit, furiously cranking the starter, then swear and lower your forehead to the
steering wheel, which is, as anyone in Hollywood can tell you, conduct unbecoming a triple-threat talent
like yourself: producer, star, and director in the longest, most fabulous show of all. Ω

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137
Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

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A poem should not mean
But be.

139
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
By

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

140
141
Why Literature?

By Mario Vargas Llosa

It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a

gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. "It is for my
wife, my young daughter, or my mother," he explains. "She is a great
reader and loves literature." Immediately I ask: "And what about
you? Don't you like to read?" The answer is almost always the same:
"Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person." I have heard
this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of
men like him have so many important things to do, so many
obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste
their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary
essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception,
literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty and useful for
cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an
entertainment, an adornment that only people with time for recreation
can afford. It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a
game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without scruple
when one "prioritizes" the tasks and the duties that are indispensable
in the struggle of life.

It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female
activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers,
and even in university departments dedicated to the humanities, the
women clearly outnumber the men. The explanation traditionally
given is that middle-class women read more because they work fewer
hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more
easily than men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am
somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into
frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues
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and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and
fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of
readers women predominate.

This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent

survey organized by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed
that half of that country's population has never read a book. The
survey also revealed that in the minority that does read, the number
of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by
6.2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for
these women, but I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of
human beings who could read but have decided not to read.

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure
that they are missing, but also because I am convinced that a society
without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegated--
like some hidden vice--to the margins of social and personal life, and
transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society
condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its
freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature
as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most
primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable
activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic
society, a society of free individuals.

e live in the era of the specialization of knowledge, thanks to

the prodigious development of science and technology and to
the consequent fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels
and compartments. This cultural trend is, if anything, likely to be
accentuated in years to come. To be sure, specialization brings many
benefits. It allows for deeper exploration and greater
experimentation; it is the very engine of progress. Yet it also has
negative consequences, for it eliminates those common intellectual
and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to
communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a
lack of social understanding, to the division of human beings into
ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of
knowledge requires specialized languages and increasingly arcane
codes, as information becomes more and more specific and
compartmentalized. This is the particularism and the division against
which an old proverb warned us: do not focus too much on the
branch or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or too
much on the tree, lest you forget that it is part of a forest. Awareness
of the existence of the forest creates the feeling of generality, the
feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from
disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The

143
solipsism of nations and individuals produces paranoia and delirium,
distortions of reality that generate hatred, wars, and even genocide.

In our time, science and technology cannot play an integrating role,

precisely because of the infinite richness of knowledge and the speed
of its evolution, which have led to specialization and its obscurities.
But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists,
one of the common denominators of human experience through
which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with
each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans,
their geographical and cultural locations, their personal
circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of
their lives, to transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare,
Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time,
and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in
the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as
human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad
range of differences that separate us. Nothing better protects a human
being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political
sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that
invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all
nations and places are essentially equal, and that only injustice sows
among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.

Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural

differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those
differences as a manifestation of humanity's multi-faceted creativity.
Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it
is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human
integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams,
and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our
public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

his complex sum of contradictory truths--as Isaiah Berlin called

them--constitutes the very substance of the human condition. In
today's world, this totalizing and living knowledge of a human being
may be found only in literature. Not even the other branches of the
humanities--not philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the
social sciences--have been able to preserve this integrating vision,
this universalizing discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed
to the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating
themselves in increasingly segmented and technical sectors whose
ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman
and man. Some critics and theorists would even like to change
literature into a science. But this will never happen, because fiction
does not exist to investigate only a single precinct of experience. It

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exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life,
which cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series
of schemas or formulas without disappearing. This is the meaning of
Proust's observation that "real life, at last enlightened and revealed,
the only life fully lived, is literature." He was not exaggerating, nor
was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was
advancing the particular proposition that as a result of literature life is
better understood and better lived; and that living life more fully
necessitates living it and sharing it with others.

The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings,

compelling them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious
of a common origin and a common goal, transcends all temporal
barriers. Literature transports us into the past and links us to those
who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those
texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy
and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human
experience across time and space is the highest achievement of
culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every
generation than literature.

t always irritated Borges when he was asked, "What is the use of

literature?" It seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would
reply: "No one would ask what is the use of a canary's song or a
beautiful sunset." If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to
them, life is even for an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty
to seek practical justifications? But the question is a good one. For
novels and poems are not like the sound of birdsong or the spectacle
of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were not created by
chance or by nature. They are human creations, and it is therefore
legitimate to ask how and why they came into the world, and what is
their purpose, and why they have lasted so long.

Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a

writer's consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of
the unconscious, and the writer's sensitivity to the world around him,
and the writer's emotions; and it is these things to which the poet or
the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body,
movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. An artificial life, to be sure, a
life imagined, a life made of language--yet men and women seek out
this artificial life, some frequently, others sporadically, because real
life falls short for them, and is incapable of offering them what they
want. Literature does not begin to exist through the work of a single
individual. It exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a
part of social life--when it becomes, thanks to reading, a shared
experience.

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One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language.
A community without a written literature expresses itself with less
precision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a
community whose principal instrument of communication, the word,
has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A
humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a
community of deaf-mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous
problems of communication due to its crude and rudimentary
language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not
read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an
impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his
vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.

This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in

intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple
reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of
our condition, do not exist apart from words. We learn how to speak
correctly--and deeply, rigorously, and subtly--from good literature,
and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the
arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people
need to communicate. To speak well, to have at one's disposal a rich
and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate expression for
every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be
better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to
fantasize, to dream, to feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate
in all our actions, even in those actions that seem far removed from
language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and reached
high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of
human enjoyment.

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the
sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature,
eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they
would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the
intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to
say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or
Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than
illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television's soap
operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different
from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude
fulfillment of elementary instincts.

Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this

task of teaching human beings to use with assurance and with skill
the extraordinarily rich possibilities that language encompasses. On
the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words to a

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secondary level with respect to images, which are the primordial
language of these media, and to constrain language to its oral
expression, to its indispensable minimum, far from its written
dimension. To define a film or a television program as "literary" is an
elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary
programs on the radio or on television rarely capture the public. So
far as I know, the only exception to this rule was Bernard Pivot's
program,Apostrophes, in France. And this leads me to think that not
only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full
mastery of language, but its fate is linked also and indissolubly with
the fate of the book, that industrial product that many are now
declaring obsolete.

his brings me to Bill Gates. He was in Madrid not long ago and
visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a
joint venture with Microsoft. Among other things, Gates assured the
members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the
letter "-" would never be removed from computer software--a
promise that allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five
continents to breathe a sigh of relief, since the banishment of such an
essential letter from cyberspace would have created monumental
problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the
Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises
of the Academy, avowed in a press conference that he expected to
accomplish his highest goal before he died. That goal, he explained,
is to put an end to paper and then to books.

In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued that

computer screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that
paper has heretofore assumed. He also insisted that, in addition to
being less onerous, computers take up less space, and are more easily
transportable; and also that the transmission of news and literature by
these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will
have the ecological advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a
cataclysm that is a consequence of the paper industry. People will
continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will read on
computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in
the environment.

I was not present at Gates's little discourse; I learned these details

from the press. Had I been there I would have booed Gates for
proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my colleagues,
the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would
have vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace
the book in all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the
enormous revolution that new technologies such as the Internet have

147
caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information,
and I confess that the Internet provides invaluable help to me every
day in my work; but my gratitude for these extraordinary
conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic screen can
replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary
reading. That is a chasm that I cannot cross. I cannot accept the idea
that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks
neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can
integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words
with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration
and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a
book.

Perhaps this a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a

long association of literature with books and paper. But even though I
enjoy surfing the Web in search of world news, I would never go to
the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by Onetti or an
essay by Paz, because I am certain that the effect of such a reading
would not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it,
that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a
serious blow, even a mortal one. The term "literature" would not
disappear, of course. Yet it would almost certainly be used to denote
a type of text as distant from what we understand as literature today
as soap operas are from the tragedies of Sophocles and
Shakespeare.

here is still another reason to grant literature an important place in

the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is the real
engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would
suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good literature is
radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live.
In all great literary texts, often without their authors' intending it, a
seditious inclination is present.

Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with
their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is
the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities,
the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks
sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be
incomplete. To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the
confused Knight on the fields of La Mancha, to sail the seas on the
back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink arsenic with Emma
Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa: these are all ways
that we have invented to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the
impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the
same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to

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satisfy the many desires that possess us.

Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarily--but in

this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary
illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become
citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We become
more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than
we are in the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the
book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and
compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a
disappointment awaits us! Yet a tremendous realization also awaits
us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is better--more
beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect--
than the life that we live while awake, a life conditioned by the limits
and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature, genuine
literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge
to what exists.

How could we not feel cheated after reading War and

Peace or Remembrance of Things Past and returning to our world of
insignificant details, of boundaries and prohibitions that lie in wait
everywhere and, with each step, corrupt our illusions? Even more
than the need to sustain the continuity of culture and to enrich
language, the greatest contribution of literature to human progress is
perhaps to remind us (without intending to, in the majority of cases)
that the world is badly made; and that those who pretend to the
contrary, the powerful and the lucky, are lying; and that the world can
be improved, and made more like the worlds that our imagination and
our language are able to create. A free and democratic society must
have responsible and critical citizens conscious of the need
continuously to examine the world that we inhabit and to try, even
though it is more and more an impossible task, to make it more
closely resemble the world that we would like to inhabit. And there is
no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the
reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and
independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who
govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual
mobility and a vibrant imagination.

Still, to call literature seditious because it sensitizes a reader's

consciousness to the imperfections of the world does not mean--as
churches and governments seem to think it means when they
establish censorship--that literary texts will provoke immediate social
upheavals or accelerate revolutions. The social and political effects of
a poem, a play, or a novel cannot be foreseen, because they are not
collectively made or collectively experienced. They are created by

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individuals and they are read by individuals, who vary enormously in
the conclusions that they draw from their writing and their reading.
For this reason, it is difficult, or even impossible, to establish precise
patterns. Moreover, the social consequences of a work of literature
may have little to do with its aesthetic quality. A mediocre novel by
Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have played a decisive role in raising
social and political consciousness of the horrors of slavery in the
United States. The fact that these effects of literature are difficult to
identify does not imply that they do not exist. The important point is
that they are effects brought about by the actions of citizens whose
personalities have been formed in part by books.

Good literature, while temporarily relieving human dissatisfaction,

actually increases it, by developing a critical and non-conformist
attitude toward life. It might even be said that literature makes human
beings more likely to be unhappy. To live dissatisfied, and at war
with existence, is to seek things that may not be there, to condemn
oneself to fight futile battles, like the battles that Colonel Aureliano
Buend'a fought in One Hundred Years of Solitude, knowing full well
that he would lose them all. All this may be true. Yet it is also true
that without rebellion against the mediocrity and the squalor of life,
we would still live in a primitive state, and history would have
stopped. The autonomous individual would not have been created,
science and technology would not have progressed, human rights
would not have been recognized, freedom would not have existed.
All these things are born of unhappiness, of acts of defiance against a
life perceived as insufficient or intolerable. For this spirit that scorns
life as it is--and searches with the madness of Don Quixote, whose
insanity derived from the reading of chivalric novels--literature has
served as a great spur.

et us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction. Let us imagine a

world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or
novels. In this kind of atrophied civilization, with its puny lexicon in
which groans and ape-like gesticulations would prevail over words,
certain adjectives would not exist. Those adjectives include: quixotic,
Kafkaesque, Rabelaisian, Orwellian, sadistic, and masochistic, all
terms of literary origin. To be sure, we would still have insane
people, and victims of paranoia and persecution complexes, and
people with uncommon appetites and outrageous excesses, and
bipeds who enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. But we would not have
learned to see, behind these extremes of behavior that are prohibited
by the norms of our culture, essential characteristics of the human
condition. We would not have discovered our own traits, as only the
talents of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, Orwell, de Sade, and Sacher-
Masoch have revealed them to us.

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When the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared, its first readers
made fun of this extravagant dreamer, as well as the rest of the
characters in the novel. Today we know that the insistence of
the caballero de la triste figura on seeing giants where there were
windmills, and on acting in his seemingly absurd way, is really the
highest form of generosity, and a means of protest against the misery
of this world in the hope of changing it. Our very notions of the ideal,
and of idealism, so redolent with a positive moral connotation, would
not be what they are, would not be clear and respected values, had
they not been incarnated in the protagonist of a novel through the
persuasive force of Cervantes's genius. The same can be said of that
small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with
ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to
know through novels. Like a butterfly, she came too close to the
flame and was burned in the fire.

he inventions of all great literary creators open our eyes to

unknown aspects of our own condition. They enable us to explore
and to understand more fully the common human abyss. When we
say "Borgesian," the word immediately conjures up the separation of
our minds from the rational order of reality and the entry into a
fantastic universe, a rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost
always labyrinthine and arcane, and riddled with literary references
and allusions, whose singularities are not foreign to us because in
them we recognize hidden desires and intimate truths of our own
personality that took shape only thanks to the literary creation of
Jorge Luis Borges. The word "Kafkaesque" comes to mind, like the
focus mechanism of those old cameras with their accordion arms,
every time we feel threatened, as defenseless individuals, by the
oppressive machines of power that have caused so much pain and
injustice in the modern world--the authoritarian regimes, the vertical
parties, the intolerant churches, the asphyxiating bureaucrats. Without
the short stories and the novels of that tormented Jew from Prague
who wrote in German and lived always on the lookout, we would not
have been able to understand the impotent feeling of the isolated
individual, or the terror of persecuted and discriminated minorities,
confronted with the all-embracing powers that can smash them and
eliminate them without the henchmen even showing their faces.

The adjective "Orwellian," first cousin of "Kafkaesque," gives a

voice to the terrible anguish, the sensation of extreme absurdity, that
was generated by totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century,
the most sophisticated, cruel, and absolute dictatorships in history, in
their control of the actions and the psyches of the members of a
society. In 1984, George Orwell described in cold and haunting
shades a humanity subjugated to Big Brother, an absolute lord who,

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through an efficient combination of terror and technology, eliminated
liberty, spontaneity, and equality, and transformed society into a
beehive of automatons. In this nightmarish world, language also
obeys power, and has been transformed into "newspeak," purified of
all invention and all subjectivity, metamorphosed into a string of
platitudes that ensure the individual's slavery to the system. It is true
that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come to pass, and
totalitarian communism in the Soviet Union went the way of
totalitarian fascism in Germany and elsewhere; and soon thereafter it
began to deteriorate also in China, and in anachronistic Cuba and
North Korea. But the danger is never completely dispelled, and the
word "Orwellian" continues to describe the danger, and to help us to
understand it.

o literature's unrealities, literature's lies, are also a precious

vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities.
The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the
image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is
the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the
horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark
lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-
Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and
ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is
not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is
the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us,
that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for
transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being;
and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion
to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that
destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not
science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human
mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive
potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery.
A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible
depths, which we urgently need to see.

Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech,

ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world
without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as
its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of
humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely
animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices
of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the
unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be
no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing
monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of

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pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it
will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it.

When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture

primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that
live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and
Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am
warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-
development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience
to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and
speakers, and without books, or a society in which books--that is,
works of literature--have become what alchemy became in the era of
physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media
civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic
world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of
living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized
and utterly soulless--a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons
who have abdicated freedom.

It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever

come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been
written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends
entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the
impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the
precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to
speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom,
then we must act. More precisely, we must read.

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The Man He Killed
By Thomas Hardy

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin! [glass of alcohol]

“But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because---

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was:

That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand-like--- just as I---

Was out of work--- had sold his traps---

No other reason why.

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 “Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat, if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.”

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The Naming of Parts
by Henry Reed

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But today,

Today we have naming of parts. Japonica

Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,

And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this

Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

Which in your case you have not got. The branches

Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released

With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

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 Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

For today we have naming of parts.

[1946]

157
On the Eve of the Execution
By Jaime An Lim

These metals burn like molten lead

upon my breast. This sword, heavy

with tassel and gilt, hampers my stride.

I have not asked for this burden.

I have not wished to alter the lay and order

of the stars, content to let the sun lord the skies,

the sea crawl at the foot of the hills, the eagle

soar no higher than the span of its sight.

Yet what needs to be done has to be done.

Not that I love you any less, you must

believe that, but I love our country more.

You, who have always fought for the good

of the many, should understand this.

Too long the land lies wounded, the house divided:

child from mother, husband from wife, brother

from brother, a scatter of reeds buckling

under the slightest blow. One unfurling

under one sky, hearts beating to one marshal drummer.

Isn’t that your dream, too, worthy of the supreme

158
sacrifice? I have bowed my head in the lonely room

of my conscience. I have looked into the darkness

of my soul and heard my thoughts pace

the long lightless corridors of the night.

And found the only answer you would have wished.

Were I in your place, I would ask for nothing less.

I send you to a hero’s death while I shall remain

a footnote in history, my name shrouded in gross

speculations. My share of our common sacrifice.

So go in peace and meet your destiny, my brother,

for all our sake even as the night bleeds into morning.

Go, Andres. Let the healing begin.

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Mother Sauvage
Guy De Maupassant

Fifteen years had passed since I was at Virelogne. I returned there in

the autumn to shoot with my friend Serval, who had at last rebuilt his
chateau, which the Prussians had destroyed.

I loved that district. It is one of those delightful spots which have a

sensuous charm for the eyes. You love it with a physical love. We, whom
the country enchants, keep tender memories of certain springs, certain
woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often which have stirred us
like joyful events. Sometimes our thoughts turn back to a corner in a
forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard filled with flowers, seen but
a single time on some bright day, yet remaining in our hearts like the
image of certain women met in the street on a spring morning in their
light, gauzy dresses, leaving in soul and body an unsatisfied desire
which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that you have just passed by
happiness.

At Virelogne I loved the whole countryside, dotted with little woods and
crossed by brooks which sparkled in the sun and looked like veins
carrying blood to the earth. You fished in them for crawfish, trout and
eels. Divine happiness! You could bathe in places and you often found
snipe among the high grass which grew along the borders of these small
water courses.

I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead
of me, Serval, a hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of
lucerne. I turned round by the thicket which forms the boundary of the
wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.

Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat,

covered with vines, with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a
dead house, with its skeleton standing bare and sinister?

I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day, the good
woman had given me a glass of wine to drink and that Serval had told me
the history of its people. The father, an old poacher, had been killed
by the gendarmes. The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry fellow
who also passed for a fierce slayer of game. People called them "Les
Sauvage."

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Was that a name or a nickname?

I called to Serval. He came up with his long strides like a crane.

I asked him:

"What's become of those people?"

This was his story:

When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years
old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not
pity the old woman very much because she had money; they knew it.

She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the
village, on the edge of the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of
the same strain as the men folk--a hardy old woman, tall and thin, who
seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The women of the fields
laugh but little in any case, that is men's business. But they
themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy, gloomy
life. The peasants imbibe a little noisy merriment at the tavern, but
their helpmates always have grave, stern countenances. The muscles of
their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.

Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which was
soon covered by the snows. She came to the village once a week to get
bread and a little meat. Then she returned to her house. As there was
talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her shoulder--her son's gun,
rusty and with the butt worn by the rubbing of the hand--and she was a
strange sight, the tall "Sauvage," a little bent, going with slow strides
over the snow, the muzzle of the piece extending beyond the black
headdress, which confined her head and imprisoned her white hair, which
no one had ever seen.

One day a Prussian force arrived. It was billeted upon the inhabitants,
according to the property and resources of each. Four were allotted to
the old woman, who was known to be rich.

They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and blue
eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they had
endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had remained
kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they showed themselves full
of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense and
fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at
the well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great
swishes of water their pink-white northern skin, while La Mere Sauvage

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went and came, preparing their soup. They would be seen cleaning the
kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up
all the housework like four good sons around their mother.

But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with
his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a
roll of black hair upon his lip. She asked every day of each of the
soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: "Do you know where the
French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it."

They invariably answered, "No, we don't know, don't know a thing at all."
And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness--they who had mothers,
too, there at home--they rendered her a thousand little services. She
loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the peasantry have no
patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class alone. The humble,
those who pay the most because they are poor and because every new burden
crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true
cannon's prey because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most
cruelly the atrocious miseries of war because they are the feeblest and
offer least resistance--they hardly understand at all those bellicose
ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those pretended political
combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the conqueror with
the conquered.

They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere Sauvage:

"There are four who have found a soft place."

Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she
observed, far off on the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling.
Soon she recognized him; it was the postman to distribute the letters.
He gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case the spectacles
which she used for sewing. Then she read:

MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you sad news. Your boy
Victor was killed yesterday by a shell which almost cut him in two.
I was near by, as we stood next each other in the company, and he
told me about you and asked me to let you know on the same day if
anything happened to him.

I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you
when the war is done.
CESAIRE RIVOT,

Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.

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The letter was dated three weeks back.

She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and
stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet. She thought: "There's
Victor killed now." Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and
the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful,
torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never
again! The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the
son. He had been cut in two by a cannon-ball. She seemed to see the
thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he
chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments of
anger.

What had they done with his body afterward? If they had only let her
have her boy back as they had brought back her husband--with the bullet
in the middle of the forehead!

But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the
village. She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received
them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.

They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a
fine rabbit--stolen, doubtless--and they made signs to the old woman that
there was to be something good to eat.

She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came to
killing the rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was not the first.
One of the soldiers struck it down with a blow of his fist behind the
ears.

The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the blood
which she was touching, and which covered her hands, and which she felt
cooling and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot, and she kept
seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody, like this still palpitating
animal.

She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not even
a mouthful. They devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves about
her. She looked at them sideways, without speaking, her face so
impassive that they perceived nothing.

All of a sudden she said: "I don't even know your names, and here's a
whole month that we've been together." They understood, not without
difficulty, what she wanted, and told their names.

163
That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with
the addresses of their families, and, resting her spectacles on her great
nose, she contemplated that strange handwriting, then folded the sheet
and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told her of the
death of her son.

When the meal was ended she said to the men:

"I am going to work for you."

And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.

They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to
them that thus they would not be so cold; and they helped her. They
heaped the stacks of hay as high as the straw roof, and in that manner
they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder, warm and
perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.

At dinner one of them was worried to see that La Mere Sauvage still ate
nothing. She told him that she had pains in her stomach. Then she
kindled a good fire to warm herself, and the four Germans ascended to
their lodging-place by the ladder which served them every night for this
purpose.

As soon as they closed the trapdoor the old woman removed the ladder,
then opened the outside door noiselessly and went back to look for more
bundles of straw, with which she filled her kitchen. She went barefoot
in the snow, so softly that no sound was heard. From time to time she
listened to the sonorous and unequal snoring of the four soldiers who
were fast asleep.

When she judged her preparations to be sufficient, she threw one of the
bundles into the fireplace, and when it was alight she scattered it over
all the others. Then she went outside again and looked.

In a few seconds the whole interior of the cottage was illumined with a
brilliant light and became a frightful brasier, a gigantic fiery furnace,
whose glare streamed out of the narrow window and threw a glittering beam
upon the snow.

Then a great cry issued from the top of the house; it was a clamor of men
shouting heartrending calls of anguish and of terror. Finally the
trapdoor having given way, a whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft,
pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like the immense flame of a
torch, and all the cottage flared.

164
Nothing more was heard therein but the crackling of the fire, the
cracking of the walls, the falling of the rafters. Suddenly the roof
fell in and the burning carcass of the dwelling hurled a great plume of
sparks into the air, amid a cloud of smoke.

The country, all white, lit up by the fire, shone like a cloth of silver
tinted with red.

A bell, far off, began to toll.

The old "Sauvage" stood before her ruined dwelling, armed with her gun,
her son's gun, for fear one of those men might escape.

When she saw that it was ended, she threw her weapon into the brasier.
A loud report followed.

People were coming, the peasants, the Prussians.

They found the woman seated on the trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.

A German officer, but speaking French like a son of France, demanded:

"Where are your soldiers?"

She reached her bony arm toward the red heap of fire which was almost out
and answered with a strong voice:

"There!"

They crowded round her. The Prussian asked:

"How did it take fire?"

"It was I who set it on fire."

They did not believe her, they thought that the sudden disaster had made
her crazy. While all pressed round and listened, she told the story from
beginning to end, from the arrival of the letter to the last shriek of
the men who were burned with her house, and never omitted a detail.

When she had finished, she drew two pieces of paper from her pocket, and,
in order to distinguish them by the last gleams of the fire, she again
adjusted her spectacles. Then she said, showing one:

"That, that is the death of Victor." Showing the other, she added,
indicating the red ruins with a bend of the head: "Here are their names,

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so that you can write home." She quietly held a sheet of paper out to
the officer, who held her by the shoulders, and she continued:

"You must write how it happened, and you must say to their mothers that
it was I who did that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage! Do not forget."

The officer shouted some orders in German. They seized her, they threw
her against the walls of her house, still hot. Then twelve men drew
quickly up before her, at twenty paces. She did not move. She had
understood; she waited.

An order rang out, followed instantly by a long report. A belated shot

went off by itself, after the others.

The old woman did not fall. She sank as though they had cut off her
legs.

The Prussian officer approached. She was almost cut in two, and in her
withered hand she held her letter bathed with blood.

My friend Serval added:

"It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the chateau of the
district, which belonged to me."

I thought of the mothers of those four fine fellows burned in that house
and of the horrible heroism of that other mother shot against the wall.

And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the flames.

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 On the Rainy River

This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or
sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of
us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now, I'll admit,
the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying
to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to
relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like
to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and
forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the
summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—
if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of
courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us
in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn
interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be
drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily
courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the
future.

In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I
hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in
Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of
purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in
uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and
when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was
Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva
Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these
and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate
and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental
matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and
still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it
seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and
imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

In any case those were my convictions, and back in college I had taken a modest stand against
the war. Nothing radical, no hothead stuff, just ringing a few doorbells for Gene McCarthy, composing a

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few tedious, uninspired editorials for the campus newspaper. Oddly, though, it was almost entirely an
intellectual activity. I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies
almost any abstract endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis in my life.
Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can't begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing
and dying did not fall within my special province.

The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and
very quiet, and I'd just come in from a round of golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the
kitchen. I remember opening up the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind
my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at
once—I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I
was above it. I had the world dicked—Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude and president of the
student body and a full-ride scholarship for grad studies at Harvard. A mistake, maybe—a foul-up in the
paperwork. I was no soldier. I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out. I hated dirt and tents and
mosquitoes. The sight of blood made me queasy, and I couldn't tolerate authority, and I didn't know a
rifle from a slingshot. I was a liberal, for Christ sake: If they needed fresh bodies, why not draft some
back-to-the-stone-age hawk? Or some dumb jingo in his hard hat and Bomb Hanoi button, or one of
LBJ's pretty daughters, or Westmoreland's whole handsome family—nephews and nieces and baby
grandson. There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's
fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook
up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or
your lover. A law, I thought.

I remember the rage in my stomach. Later it burned down to a smoldering self-pity, then to
numbness. At dinner that night my father asked what my plans were. "Nothing," I said. "Wait."

I spent the summer of 1968 working in an Armour meatpacking plant in my hometown of

Worthington, Minnesota. The plant specialized in pork products, and for eight hours a day I stood on a
quarter-mile assembly line—more properly, a disassembly line—removing blood clots from the necks of
dead pigs. My job title, I believe, was Declotter. After slaughter, the hogs were decapitated, split down
the length of the belly, pried open, eviscerated, and strung up by the hind hocks on a high conveyer belt.
Then gravity took over. By the time a carcass reached my spot on the line, the fluids had mostly drained
out, everything except for dense clots of blood in the neck and upper chest cavity. To remove the stuff, I
used a kind of water gun. The machine was heavy, maybe eighty pounds, and was suspended from the
ceiling by a thick rubber cord. There was some bounce to it, an elastic up-and-down give, and the trick
was to maneuver the gun with your whole body, not lifting with the arms, just letting the rubber cord do
the work for you. At one end was a trigger; at the muzzle end was a small nozzle and a steel roller brush.
As a carcass passed by, you'd lean forward and swing the gun up against the clots and squeeze the
trigger, all in one motion, and the brush would whirl and water would come shooting out and you'd hear

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a quick splattering sound as the clots dissolved into a fine red mist. It was not pleasant work. Goggles
were a necessity, and a rubber apron, but even so it was like standing for eight hours a day under a
lukewarm blood-shower. At night I'd go home smelling of pig. It wouldn't go away. Even after a hot bath,
scrubbing hard, the stink was always there—like old bacon, or sausage, a greasy pig-stink that soaked
deep into my skin and hair. Among other things, I remember, it was tough getting dates that summer. I
felt isolated; I spent a lot of time alone. And there was also that draft notice tucked away in my wallet.

In the evenings I'd sometimes borrow my father's car and drive aimlessly around town, feeling
sorry for myself, thinking about the war and the pig factory and how my life seemed to be collapsing
toward slaughter. I felt paralyzed. All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were
hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight. There was no happy way out. The
government had ended most graduate school deferments; the waiting lists for the National Guard and
Reserves were impossibly long; my health was solid; I didn't qualify for CO status—no religious grounds,
no history as a pacifist. Moreover, I could not claim to be opposed to war as a matter of general
principle. There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve
its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I would've
willingly marched off to the battle. The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose
your war.

Beyond all this, or at the very center, was the raw fact of terror. I did not want to die. Not ever.
But certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war. Driving up Main Street, past the courthouse and
the Ben Franklin store, I sometimes felt the fear spreading inside me like weeds. I imagined myself dead.
I imagined myself doing things I could not do—charging an enemy position, taking aim at another
human being.

At some point in mid-July I began thinking seriously about Canada. The border lay a few hundred
miles north, an eight-hour drive. Both my conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break
for it, just take off and run like hell and never stop. In the beginning the idea seemed purely abstract,
the word Canada printing itself out in my head; but after a time I could see particular shapes and
images, the sorry details of my own future—a hotel room in Winnipeg, a battered old suitcase, my
father's eyes as I tried to explain myself over the telephone. I could almost hear his voice, and my
mother's. Run, I'd think. Then I'd think, Impossible. Then a second later I'd think, Run.

It was a moral split. I couldn't make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I
was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything
that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and
censure. My hometown was a conservative little spot on the prairie, a place where tradition counted,
and it was easy to imagine people sitting around a table down at the old Gobbler Café on Main Street,
coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly zeroing in on the young O'Brien kid, how the damned sissy
had taken off for Canada. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on fierce arguments with
those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless,
automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-
leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want

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to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them—I held them personally and
individually responsible—the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and farmers, the pious
churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
the fine upstanding gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon.
They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of
Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it
required some reading—but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which
was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or
dying for plain and simple reasons.

I was bitter, sure. But it was so much more than that. The emotions went from outrage to terror
to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage. I felt a sickness inside me. Real
disease.

Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth.
How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my
chest. I don't know what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a physical
rupture—a cracking-leaking-popping feeling. I remember dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost
without thought, I took off my apron and walked out of the plant and drove home. It was midmorning, I
remember, and the house was empty. Down in my chest there was still that leaking sensation,
something very warm and precious spilling out, and I was covered with blood and hog-stink, and for a
long while I just concentrated on holding myself together. I remember taking a hot shower. I remember
packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking
carefully at the familiar objects all around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink and
white Formica on the kitchen counters. The room was full of bright sunshine. Everything sparkled. My
house, I thought. My life. I'm not sure how long I stood there, but later I scribbled out a short note to my
parents.

What it said, exactly, I don't recall now. Something vague. Taking off, will call, love Tim.

I drove north.

It's a blur now, as it was then, and all I remember is velocity and the feel of a steering wheel in
my hands. I was riding on adrenaline. A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of
impossibility to it—like running a dead-end maze—no way out—it couldn't come to a happy conclusion
and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do. It was pure flight, fast and
mindless. I had no plan. Just hit the border at high speed and crash through and keep on running. Near
dusk I passed through Bemidji, then turned northeast toward International Falls. I spent the night in the
car behind a closed-down gas station a half mile from the border. In the morning, after gassing up, I
headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me

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separated one life from another. The land was mostly wilderness. Here and there I passed a motel or
bait shop, but otherwise the country unfolded in great sweeps of pine and birch and sumac. Though it
was still August, the air already had the smell of October, football season, piles of yellow-red leaves,
everything crisp and clean. I remember a huge blue sky. Off to my right was the Rainy River, wide as a
lake in places, and beyond the Rainy River was Canada.

For a while I just drove, not aiming at anything, then in the late morning I began looking for a
place to lie low for a day or two. I was exhausted, and scared sick, and around noon I pulled into an old
fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge. Actually it was not a lodge at all, just eight or nine tiny yellow
cabins clustered on a peninsula that jutted northward into the Rainy River. The place was in sorry shape.
There was a dangerous wooden dock, an old minnow tank, a flimsy tar paper boathouse along the
shore. The main building, which stood in a cluster of pines on high ground, seemed to lean heavily to
one side, like a cripple, the roof sagging toward Canada. Briefly, I thought about turning around, just
giving up, but then I got out of the car and walked up to the front porch.

The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life. How do I say this without
sounding sappy? Blurt it out—the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions,
without any words at all. He took me in. He was there at the critical time—a silent, watchful presence.
Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper way to thank him, and I never have, and so, if
nothing else, this story represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue.

Even after two decades I can close my eyes and return to that porch at the Tip Top Lodge. I can
see the old guy staring at me. Elroy Berdahl: eighty-one years old, skinny and shrunken and mostly bald.
He wore a flannel shirt and brown work pants. In one hand, I remember, he carried a green apple, a
small paring knife in the other. His eyes had the bluish gray color of a razor blade, the same polished
shine, and as he peered up at me I felt a strange sharpness, almost painful, a cutting sensation, as if his
gaze were somehow slicing me open. In part, no doubt, it was my own sense of guilt, but even so I'm
absolutely certain that the old man took one look and went right to the heart of things—a kid in trouble.
When I asked for a room, Elroy made a little clicking sound with his tongue. He nodded, led me out to
one of the cabins, and dropped a key in my hand. I remember smiling at him. I also remember wishing I
hadn't. The old man shook his head as if to tell me it wasn't worth the bother.

"Dinner at five-thirty," he said. "You eat fish?"

"Anything," I said.

Elroy grunted and said, "I'll bet."

We spent six days together at the Tip Top Lodge. Just the two of us. Tourist season was over,
and there were no boats on the river, and the wilderness seemed to withdraw into a great permanent

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stillness. Over those six days Elroy Berdahl and I took most of our meals together. In the mornings we
sometimes went out on long hikes into the woods, and at night we played Scrabble or listened to
records or sat reading in front of his big stone fireplace. At times I felt the awkwardness of an intruder,
but Elroy accepted me into his quiet routine without fuss or ceremony. He took my presence for
granted, the same way he might've sheltered a stray cat—no wasted sighs or pity—and there was never
any talk about it. Just the opposite. What I remember more than anything is the man's willful, almost
ferocious silence. In all that time together, all those hours, he never asked the obvious questions: Why
was I there? Why alone? Why so preoccupied? If Elroy was curious about any of this, he was careful
never to put it into words.

My hunch, though, is that he already knew. At least the basics. After all, it was 1968, and guys
were burning draft cards, and Canada was just a boat ride away. Elroy Berdahl was no hick. His
bedroom, I remember, was cluttered with books and newspapers. He killed me at the Scrabble board,
barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing
large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language. One evening, just at sunset, he pointed up at an
owl circling over the violet-lighted forest to the west. "Hey, O'Brien," he said. "There's Jesus." The man
was sharp—he didn't miss much. Those razor eyes. Now and then he'd catch me staring out at the river,
at the far shore, and I could almost hear the tumblers clicking in his head. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt
it.

One thing for certain, he knew I was in desperate trouble. And he knew I couldn't talk about it.
The wrong word—or even the right word—and I would've disappeared. I was wired and jittery. My skin
felt too tight. After supper one evening I vomited and went back to my cabin and lay down for a few
moments and then vomited again; another time, in the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and
couldn't shut it off. I went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn't sleep; I couldn't lie
still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the
beach and quietly push one of the old man's boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward
Canada. There were times when I thought I'd gone off the psychic edge. I couldn't tell up from down, I
was just falling, and late in the night I'd lie there watching bizarre pictures spin through my head.
Getting chased by the Border Patrol—helicopters and searchlights and barking dogs—I'd be crashing
through the woods, I'd be down on my hands and knees—people shouting out my name—the law
closing in on all sides—my hometown draft board and the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It
all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and
ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to—a mainstream life—I loved baseball and
hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was off on the margins of exile, leaving my country forever,
and it seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad.

I'm not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can't remember. On two or three
afternoons, to pass some time, I helped Elroy get the place ready for winter, sweeping down the cabins
and hauling in the boats, little chores that kept my body moving. The days were cool and bright. The
nights were very dark. One morning the old man showed me how to split and stack firewood, and for
several hours we just worked in silence out behind his house. At one point, I remember, Elroy put down
his maul and looked at me for a long time, his lips drawn as if framing a difficult question, but then he

172
shook his head and went back to work. The man's self-control was amazing. He never pried. He never
put me in a position that required lies or denials. To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was typical of
that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held value, and even if I'd been walking around with some
horrible deformity—four arms and three heads—I'm sure the old man would've talked about everything
except those extra arms and heads. Simple politeness was part of it. But even more than that, I think,
the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion. During that
long summer I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a
question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My
conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing
me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not
want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at
the Gobbler Café. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience,
ashamed to be doing the right thing.

Some of this Elroy must've understood. Not the details, of course, but the plain fact of crisis.

Although the old man never confronted me about it, there was one occasion when he came
close to forcing the whole thing out into the open. It was early evening, and we'd just finished supper,
and over coffee and dessert I asked him about my bill, how much I owed so far. For a long while the old
man squinted down at the tablecloth.

"Well, the basic rate," he said, "is fifty bucks a night. Not counting meals. This makes four
nights, right?"

I nodded. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my wallet.

Elroy kept his eyes on the tablecloth. "Now that's an on-season price. To be fair, I suppose we
should knock it down a peg or two." He leaned back in his chair. "What's a reasonable number, you
figure?"

"I don't know," I said. "Forty?"

"Forty's good. Forty a night. Then we tack on food—say another hundred? Two hundred sixty
total?"

"I guess."

He raised his eyebrows. "Too much?"

"No, that's fair. It's fine. Tomorrow, though ... I think I'd better take off tomorrow."

Elroy shrugged and began clearing the table. For a time he fussed with the dishes, whistling to
himself as if the subject had been settled. After a second he slapped his hands together.

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 "You know what we forgot?" he said. "We forgot wages. Those odd jobs you done. What we
have to do, we have to figure out what your time's worth. Your last job—how much did you pull in an
hour?"

"Not enough," I said.

"A bad one?"

"Yes. Pretty bad."

Slowly then, without intending any long sermon, I told him about my days at the pig plant. It
began as a straight recitation of the facts, but before I could stop myself I was talking about the blood
clots and the water gun and how the smell had soaked into my skin and how I couldn't wash it away. I
went on for a long time. I told him about wild hogs squealing in my dreams, the sounds of butchery,
slaughterhouse sounds, and how I'd sometimes wake up with that greasy pig-stink in my throat.

When I was finished, Elroy nodded at me.

"Well, to be honest," he said, "when you first showed up here, I wondered about all that. The
aroma, I mean. Smelled like you was awful damned fond of pork chops." The old man almost smiled. He
made a snuffling sound, then sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper. "So what'd this crud job pay?
Ten bucks an hour? Fifteen?"

"Less."

Elroy shook his head. "Let's make it fifteen. You put in twenty-five hours here, easy. That's three
hundred seventy-five bucks total wages. We subtract the two hundred sixty for food and lodging, I still
owe you a hundred and fifteen."

He took four fifties out of his shirt pocket and laid them on the table.

"Call it even," he said.

"No."

"Pick it up. Get yourself a haircut."

The money lay on the table for the rest of the evening. It was still there when I went back to my
cabin. In the morning, though, I found an envelope tacked to my door. Inside were the four fifties and a
two-word note that said EMERGENCY FUND.

The man knew.

***

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 Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't
happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes
afterward. None of it ever seemed real. During my time at the Tip Top Lodge I had the feeling that I'd
slipped out of my own skin, hovering a few feet away while some poor yo-yo with my name and face
tried to make his way toward a future he didn't understand and didn't want. Even now I can see myself
as I was then. It's like watching an old home movie: I'm young and tan and fit. I've got hair—lots of it. I
don't smoke or drink. I'm wearing faded blue jeans and a white polo shirt. I can see myself sitting on
Elroy Berdahl's dock near dusk one evening, the sky a bright shimmering pink, and I'm finishing up a
letter to my parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I'd
never found the courage to talk to them about it. I ask them not to be angry. I try to explain some of my
feelings, but there aren't enough words, and so I just say that it's a thing that has to be done. At the end
of the letter I talk about the vacations we used to take up in this north country, at a place called
Whitefish Lake, and how the scenery here reminds me of those good times. I tell them I'm fine. I tell
them I'll write again from Winnipeg or Montreal or wherever I end up.

On my last full day, the sixth day, the old man took me out fishing on the Rainy River. The
afternoon was sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came in from the north, and I remember how the little
fourteen-foot boat made sharp rocking motions as we pushed off from the dock. The current was fast.
All around us, there was a vastness to the world, an unpeopled rawness, just the trees and the sky and
the water reaching out toward nowhere. The air had the brittle scent of October.

For ten or fifteen minutes Elroy held a course upstream, the river choppy and silver-gray, then
he turned straight north and put the engine on full throttle. I felt the bow lift beneath me. I remember
the wind in my ears, the sound of the old outboard Evinrude. For a time I didn't pay attention to
anything, just feeling the cold spray against my face, but then it occurred to me that at some point we
must've passed into Canadian waters, across that dotted line between two different worlds, and I
remember a sudden tightness in my chest as I looked up and watched the far shore come at me. This
wasn't a daydream. It was tangible and real. As we came in toward land, Elroy cut the engine, letting the
boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. The old man didn't look at me or speak. Bending down,
he opened up his tackle box and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to
himself, his eyes down.

It struck me then that he must've planned it. I'll never be certain, of course, but I think he meant
to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to
stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself.

I remember staring at the old man, then at my hands, then at Canada. The shoreline was dense
with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries on the bushes. I could see a squirrel up in one of the
birch trees, a big crow looking at me from a boulder along the river. That close—twenty yards—and I

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could see the delicate latticework of the leaves, the texture of the soil, the browned needles beneath
the pines, the configurations of geology and human history. Twenty yards. I could've done it. I could've
jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure.
Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it—the wind coming off the
river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're
twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.

What would you do?

Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your
childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying?
Would you cry, as I did?

I tried to swallow it back. I tried to smile, except I was crying.

Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told this story before. It's not just the
embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always
will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't
comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the chest-chokes.

At the rear of the boat Elroy Berdahl pretended not to notice. He held a fishing rod in his hands,
his head bowed to hide his eyes. He kept humming a soft, monotonous little tune. Everywhere, it
seemed, in the trees and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a
crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before. And what was so sad, I realized, was that
Canada had become a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then, with
the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my
hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a
man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream. Bobbing there on the Rainy
River, looking back at the Minnesota shore, I felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a
drowning sensation, as if I had toppled overboard and was being swept away by the silver waves.
Chunks of my own history flashed by. I saw a seven-year-old boy in a white cowboy hat and a Lone
Ranger mask and a pair of bolstered six-shooters; I saw a twelve-year-old Little League shortstop
pivoting to turn a double play; I saw a sixteen-year-old kid decked out for his first prom, looking spiffy in
a white tux and a black bow tie, his hair cut short and flat, his shoes freshly polished. My whole life
seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to
be. I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't tell which way to swim. A hallucination, I
suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel. I saw my parents calling to me from the far
shoreline. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of
Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies. Like some outlandish
sporting event: everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on—a loud stadium roar. Hotdogs
and popcorn—stadium smells, stadium heat. A squad of cheerleaders did cartwheels along the banks of
the Rainy River; they had megaphones and pompoms and smooth brown thighs. The crowd swayed left

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and right. A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts and uncles were there, and Abraham
Lincoln, and Saint George, and a nine-year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in
fifth grade, and several members of the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ,
and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many
thousands who were later to die—villagers with terrible burns, little kids without arms or legs—yes, and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross,
and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and
an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary Cooper, and a kind-faced woman
carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato's Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all
shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were all whooping and chanting
and urging me toward one shore or the other. I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. My
wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and down, and a drill
sergeant named Blyton sneered and shot up a finger and shook his head. There was a choir in bright
purple robes. There was a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day kill with
a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.

The little aluminum boat rocked softly beneath me. There was the wind and the sky.

I tried to will myself overboard.

I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now.

I did try. It just wasn't possible.

All those eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn't risk the embarrassment. It
was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could
hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate
it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the
shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality.
Embarrassment, that's all it was.

And right then I submitted.

I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.

That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.

Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing. He worked his line with the tips of his fingers,
patiently, squinting out at his red and white bobber on the Rainy River. His eyes were flat and impassive.
He didn't speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And yet by his presence,
his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the
gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.

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 "Ain't biting," he said.

Then after a time the old man pulled in his line and turned the boat back toward Minnesota.

I don't remember saying goodbye. That last night we had dinner together, and I went to bed
early, and in the morning Elroy fixed breakfast for me. When I told him I'd be leaving, the old man
nodded as if he already knew. He looked down at the table and smiled.

At some point later in the morning it's possible that we shook hands—I just don't remember—
but I do know that by the time I'd finished packing the old man had disappeared. Around noon, when I
took my suitcase out to the car, I noticed that his old black pickup truck was no longer parked in front of
the main lodge. I went inside and waited for a while, but I felt a bone certainty that he wouldn't be back.
In a way, I thought, it was appropriate. I washed up the breakfast dishes, left his two hundred dollars on
the kitchen counter, got into the car, and drove south toward home.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and
down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's
not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

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OKINAWA: THE BLOODIEST BATTLE
OF ALL By William Manchester
William Manchester is the author of 15 books, including ''American Caesar''; ''Goodbye, Darkness,'' and ''Visions of
Glory,'' the first volume of ''The Last Lion,'' his continuing biography of Winston Churchill. Published: June 14, 1987
New York Times Magazine

ON OKINAWA TODAY, Flag Day will be observed with an extraordinary ceremony: two groups of elderly
men, one Japanese, the other American, will gather for a solemn rite. They could scarcely have less in
common.

Their motives are mirror images; each group honors the memory of men who tried to slay the men
honored by those opposite them. But theirs is a common grief. After 42 years the ache is still there. They
are really united by death, the one great victor in modern war.

They have come to Okinawa to dedicate a lovely monument in remembrance of the Americans,
Japanese and Okinawans killed there in the last and bloodiest battle of the Pacific war. More than
200,000 perished in the 82-day struggle - twice the number of Japanese lost at Hiroshima and more
American blood than had been shed at Gettysburg. My own regiment - I was a sergeant in the 29th
Marines - lost more than 80 percent of the men who landed on April 1, 1945. Before the battle was over,
both the Japanese and American commanding generals lay in shallow graves.

Okinawa lies 330 miles southwest of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu; before the war, it was
Japanese soil. Had there been no atom bombs - and at that time the most powerful Americans, in
Washington and at the Pentagon, doubted that the device would work - the invasion of the Nipponese
homeland would have been staged from Okinawa, beginning with a landing on Kyushu to take place
Nov. 1. The six Marine divisions, storming ashore abreast, would lead the way. President Truman asked
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose estimates of casualties on the eve of battles had proved uncannily
accurate, about Kyushu. The general predicted a million Americans would die in that first phase.

Given the assumption that nuclear weapons would contribute nothing to victory, the battle of Okinawa
had to be fought. No one doubted the need to bring Japan to its knees. But some Americans came to

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hate the things we had to do, even when convinced that doing them was absolutely necessary; they had
never understood the bestial, monstrous and vile means required to reach the objective - an
unconditional Japanese surrender. As for me, I could not reconcile the romanticized view of war that
runs like a red streak through our literature - and the glowing aura of selfless patriotism that had led us
to put our lives at forfeit - with the wet, green hell from which I had barely escaped. Today, I
understand. I was there, and was twice wounded. This is the story of what I knew and when I knew it.

TO OUR ASTONISHMENT, THE Marine landing on April 1 was uncontested. The enemy had set a trap.
Japanese strategy called first for kamikazes to destroy our fleet, cutting us off from supply ships; then
Japanese troops would methodically annihilate the men stranded ashore using the trench-warfare
tactics of World War I - cutting the Americans down as they charged heavily fortified positions. One
hundred and ten thousand Japanese troops were waiting on the southern tip of the island. Intricate
entrenchments, connected by tunnels, formed the enemy's defense line, which ran across the waist of
Okinawa from the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea.

By May 8, after more than five weeks of fighting, it became clear that the anchor of this line was a knoll
of coral and volcanic ash, which the Marines christened Sugar Loaf Hill. My role in mastering it - the crest
changed hands more than 11 times -was the central experience of my youth, and of all the military bric-
a-brac that I put away after the war, I cherish most the Commendation from Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd
Jr., U.S.M.C., our splendid division commander, citing me for ''gallantry in action and extraordinary
achievement,'' adding, ''Your courage was a constant source of inspiration . . . and your conduct
throughout was in keeping with the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service.''

The struggle for Sugar Loaf lasted 10 days; we fought under the worst possible conditions - a driving rain
that never seemed to slacken, day or night. (I remember wondering, in an idiotic moment - no man in
combat is really sane - whether the battle could be called off, or at least postponed, because of bad
weather.) Newsweek called Sugar Loaf ''the most critical local battle of the war.'' Time described a
company of Marines - 270 men - assaulting the hill. They failed; fewer than 30 returned. Fletcher Pratt,
the military historian, wrote that the battle was unmatched in the Pacific war for ''closeness and
desperation.'' Casualties were almost unbelievable. In the 22d and 29th Marine regiments, two out of
every three men fell. The struggle for the dominance of Sugar Loaf was probably the costliest
engagement in the history of the Marine Corps. But by early evening on May 18, as night thickened over
the embattled armies, the 29th Marines had taken Sugar Loaf, this time for keeps.

ON OKINAWA TODAY, THE CEREMONY will be dignified, solemn, seemly. It will also be anachronistic. If
the Japanese dead of 1945 were resurrected to witness it, they would be appalled by the acceptance of

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defeat, the humiliation of their Emperor -the very idea of burying Japanese near the barbarians from
across the sea and then mourning them together. Americans, meanwhile, risen from their graves, would
ponder the evolution of their own society, and might wonder, What ever happened to patriotism?

When I was a child, a bracket was screwed to the sill of a front attic window; its sole purpose was to
hold the family flag. At first light, on all legal holidays - including Election Day, July 4, Memorial Day and,
of course, Flag Day - I would scamper up to show it. The holidays remain, but mostly they mean long
weekends.

In the late 1920's, during my childhood, the whole town of Attleboro, Mass., would turn out to cheer the
procession on Memorial Day. The policemen always came first, wearing their number-one uniforms and
keeping perfect step. Behind them was a two-man vanguard - the Mayor and, at his side, my father,
hero of the 5th Marines and Belleau Wood, wearing his immaculate dress blues and looking like a poster
of a Marine, with one magnificent flaw: the right sleeve of his uniform was empty. He had lost the arm
in the Argonne. I now think that, as I watched him pass by, my own military future was already
determined.

The main body of the parade was led by five or six survivors of the Civil War, too old to march but sitting
upright in open Pierce-Arrows and Packards, wearing their blue uniforms and broad-brimmed hats.
Then, in perfect step, came a contingent of men in their 50's, with their blanket rolls sloping diagonally
from shoulder to hip - the Spanish-American War veterans. After these -and anticipated by a great roar
from the crowd - came the doughboys of World War I, some still in their late 20's. They were acclaimed
in part because theirs had been the most recent conflict, but also because they had fought in the war
that - we then thought - had ended all wars.

AMERICANS STILL march in Memorial Day parades, but attendance is light. One war has led to another
and another and yet another, and the cruel fact is that few men, however they die, are remembered
beyond the lifetimes of their closest relatives and friends. In the early 1940's, one of the forces that kept
us on the line, under heavy enemy fire, was the conviction that this battle was of immense historical
import, and that those of us who survived it would be forever cherished in the hearts of Americans. It
was rather diminishing to return in 1945 and discover that your own parents couldn't even pronounce
the names of the islands you had conquered.

But what of those who do remain faithful to patriotic holidays? What are they commemorating? Very
rarely are they honoring what actually happened, because only a handful know, and it's not their

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favorite topic of conversation. In World War II, 16 million Americans entered the armed forces. Of these,
fewer than a million saw action. Logistically, it took 19 men to back up one man in combat. All who wore
uniforms are called veterans, but more than 90 percent of them are as uninformed about the killing
zones as those on the home front.

If all Americans understood the nature of battle, they might be vulnerable to truth. But the myths of
warfare are embedded deep in our ancestral memories. By the time children have reached the age of
awareness, they regard uniforms, decorations and Sousa marches as exalted, and those who argue
otherwise are regarded as unpatriotic.

General MacArthur, quoting Plato, said: ''Only the dead have seen the end of war.'' One hopes he was
wrong, for war, as it had existed for over 4,000 years, is now obsolete. As late as the spring of 1945, it
was possible for one man, with a rifle, to make a difference, however infinitesimal, in the struggle to
defeat an enemy who had attacked us and threatened our West Coast. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima
made that man ludicrous, even pitiful. Soldiering has been relegated to Sartre's theater of the absurd.
The image of the man as protector and defender of the home has been destroyed (and I suggest that
that seed of thought eventually led women to re-examine their own role in society).

Until nuclear weapons arrived, the glorifying of militarism was the nation's hidden asset. Without it, we
would almost certainly have been defeated by the Japanese, probably by 1943. In 1941 American youth
was isolationist and pacifist. Then war planes from Imperial Japan destroyed our fleet at Pearl Harbor on
Dec. 7, and on Dec. 8 recruiting stations were packed. Some of us later found fighting rather different
from what had been advertised. Yet in combat these men risked their lives - and often lost them - in
hope of winning medals. There is an old soldier's saying: ''A man won't sell you his life, but he'll give it to
you for a piece of colored ribbon.''

Most of the men who hit the beaches came to scorn eloquence. They preferred the 130-year-old ''Word
of Cambronne.'' As dusk darkened the Waterloo battlefield, with the French in full retreat, the British
sent word to Gen. Pierre Cambronne, commander of the Old Guard. His position, they pointed out, was
hopeless, and they suggested he capitulate. Every French textbook reports his reply as ''The Old Guard
dies but never surrenders.'' What he actually said was ''Merde.'' [Merde is French for “shit.”]

If you mention this incident to members of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, they will immediately
understand. ''Nuts'' was not Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe's answer to the Nazi demand that he hoist
a white flag over Bastogne. Instead, he quoted Cambronne.

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THE CHARACTER OF combat has always been determined by the weapons available to men when their
battles were fought. In the beginning they were limited to hand weapons - clubs, rocks, swords, lances.
At the Battle of Camlann in 539, England's Arthur - a great warrior, not a king - led a charge that slew
930 Saxons, including their leader.

It is important to grasp the fact that those 930 men were not killed by snipers, grenades or shells. The
dead were bludgeoned or stabbed to death, and we have a pretty good idea how this was done. One of
the facts withheld from civilians during World War II was that Kabar fighting knives, with seven-inch
blades honed to such precision that you could shave with them, were issued to Marines and that we
were taught to use them. You never cut downward. You drove the point of your blade into a man's
lower belly and ripped upward. In the process, you yourself became soaked in the other man's gore.
After that charge at Camlann, Arthur must have been half-drowned in blood.

The Battle of Agincourt, fought nearly 1,000 years later, represented a slight technical advance:
crossbows and longbows had appeared. All the same, Arthur would have recognized the battle. Like all
engagements of the time, this one was short. Killing by hand is hard work, and hot work. It is so
exhausting that even men in peak condition collapse once the issue of triumph or defeat is settled. And
Henry V's spear carriers and archers were drawn from social classes that had been undernourished for
as long as anyone could remember. The duration of medieval battles could have been measured in
hours, even minutes.

The Battle of Waterloo, fought exactly 400 years later, is another matter. By 1815, the Industrial
Revolution had begun cranking out appliances of death, primitive by today's standards, but
revolutionary for infantrymen of that time. And Napoleon had formed mass armies, pressing every
available man into service. It was a long step toward total war, and its impact was immense.
Infantrymen on both sides fought with single-missile weapons - muskets or rifles - and were supported
by (and were the target of) artillery firing cannonballs.

The fighting at Waterloo continued for three days; for a given regiment, however, it usually lasted one
full day, much longer than medieval warfare. A half-century later, Gettysburg lasted three days and cost
43,497 men. Then came the marathon slaughters of 1914-1918, lasting as long as 10 months (Verdun)
and producing hundreds of thousands of corpses lying, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote afterward, ''like a
million bloody rugs.'' Winston Churchill, who had been a dashing young cavalry officer when Victoria
was Queen, said of the new combat: ''War, which was cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and
squalid.''

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IT MAY BE SAID THAT the history of war is one of men packed together, getting closer and closer to the
ground and then deeper and deeper into it. In the densest combat of World War I, battalion frontage -
the length of the line into which the 1,000-odd men were squeezed - had been 800 yards. On Okinawa,
on the Japanese fortified line, it was less than 600 yards - about 18 inches per man. We were there and
deadlocked for more than a week in the relentless rain. During those weeks we lost nearly 4,000 men.

And now it is time to set down what this modern battlefield was like.

All greenery had vanished; as far as one could see, heavy shellfire had denuded the scene of shrubbery.
What was left resembled a cratered moonscape. But the craters were vanishing, because the rain had
transformed the earth into a thin porridge -too thin even to dig foxholes. At night you lay on a poncho as
a precaution against drowning during the barrages. All night, every night, shells erupted close enough to
shake the mud beneath you at the rate of five or six a minute. You could hear the cries of the dying but
could do nothing. Japanese infiltration was always imminent, so the order was to stay put. Any man who
stood up was cut in half by machine guns manned by fellow Marines.

By day, the mud was hip-deep; no vehicles could reach us. As you moved up the slope of the hill,
artillery and mortar shells were bursting all around you, and, if you were fortunate enough to reach the
top, you encountered the Japanese defenders, almost face to face, a few feet away. To me, they looked
like badly wrapped brown paper parcels someone had soaked in a tub. Their eyes seemed glazed. So, I
suppose, did ours.

Japanese bayonets were fixed; ours weren't. We used the knives, or, in my case, a .45 revolver and M1
carbine. The mud beneath our feet was deeply veined with blood. It was slippery. Blood is very slippery.
So you skidded around, in deep shock, fighting as best you could until one side outnumbered the other.
The outnumbered side would withdraw for reinforcements and then counterattack.

During those 10 days I ate half a candy bar. I couldn't keep anything down. Everyone had dysentery, and
this brings up an aspect of war even Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Ernest
Hemingway avoided. If you put more than a quarter million men in a line for three weeks, with no
facilities for the disposal of human waste, you are going to confront a disgusting problem. We were
fighting and sleeping in one vast cesspool. Mingled with that stench was another - the corrupt and
corrupting odor of rotting human flesh.

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My luck ran out on June 5, more than two weeks after we had taken Sugar Loaf Hill and killed the 7,000
Japanese soldiers defending it. I had suffered a slight gunshot wound above the right knee on June 2,
and had rejoined my regiment to make an amphibious landing on Oroku Peninsula behind enemy lines.
The next morning several of us were standing in a stone enclosure outside some Okinawan tombs when
a six-inch rocket mortar shell landed among us.

The best man in my section was blown to pieces, and the slime of his viscera enveloped me. His body
had cushioned the blow, saving my life; I still carry a piece of his shinbone in my chest. But I collapsed,
and was left for dead. Hours later corpsmen found me still breathing, though blind and deaf, with my
back and chest a junkyard of iron fragments - including, besides the piece of shinbone, four pieces of
shrapnel too close to the heart to be removed. (They were not dangerous, a Navy surgeon assured me,
but they still set off the metal detector at the Buffalo airport.) Between June and November I underwent
four major operations and was discharged as 100 percent disabled. But the young have strong
recuperative powers. The blindness was caused by shock, and my vision returned. I grew new eardrums.
In three years I was physically fit. The invisible wounds remain.

MOST OF THOSE who were closest to me in the early 1940's had left New England campuses to join the
Marines, knowing it was the most dangerous branch of the service. I remember them as bright,
physically strong and inspired by an idealism and love of country they would have been too embarrassed
to acknowledge. All of us despised the pompousness and pretentiousness of senior officers. It helped
that, almost without exception, we admired and respected our commander in chief. But despite our
enormous pride in being Marines, we saw through the scam that had lured so many of us to recruiting
stations.

Once we polled a rifle company, asking each man why he had joined the Marines. A majority cited ''To
the Shores of Tripoli,'' a marshmallow of a movie starring John Payne, Randolph Scott and Maureen
O'Hara. Throughout the film the uniform of the day was dress blues; requests for liberty were always
granted. The implication was that combat would be a lark, and when you returned, spangled with
decorations, a Navy nurse like Maureen O'Hara would be waiting in your sack. It was peacetime again
when John Wayne appeared on the silver screen as Sergeant Stryker in ''Sands of Iwo Jima,'' but that
film underscores the point; I went to see it with another ex-Marine, and we were asked to leave the
theater because we couldn't stop laughing.

After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Wayne humiliated in person
at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases, were sent

185
there. The hospital was packed, the halls lined with beds. Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Marine
Corps was being bled white.

Each evening, Navy corpsmen would carry litters down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a
movie. One night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted and out stepped John
Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit - 10-gallon hat, bandanna, checkered shirt, two pistols, chaps, boots
and spurs. He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and said, ''Hi ya, guys!'' He was
greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody booed. Suddenly everyone was booing.

This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren't going to listen to
him. He tried and tried to make himself heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left.
If you liked ''Sands of Iwo Jima,'' I suggest you be careful. Don't tell it to the Marines.

And so we weren't macho. Yet we never doubted the justice of our cause. If we had failed - if we had
lost Guadalcanal, and the Navy's pilots had lost the Battle of Midway - the Japanese would have invaded
Australia and Hawaii, and California would have been in grave danger. In 1942 the possibility of an Axis
victory was very real. It is possible for me to loathe war - and with reason - yet still honor the brave men,
many of them boys, really, who fought with me and died beside me. I have been haunted by their loss
these 42 years, and I shall mourn them until my own death releases me. It does not seem too much to
ask that they be remembered on one day each year. After all, they sacrificed their futures that you
might have yours.

YET I WILL NOT BE on Okinawa for the dedication today. I would enjoy being with Marines; the
ceremony will be moving, and we would be solemn, remembering our youth and the beloved friends
who died there.

Few, if any, of the Japanese survivors agreed to attend the ceremony. However, Edward L. Fox,
chairman of the Okinawa Memorial Shrine Committee, capped almost six years' campaigning for a
monument when he heard about a former Japanese naval officer, Yoshio Yazaki - a meteorologist who
had belonged to a 4,000-man force led by Rear Adm. Minoru Ota - and persuaded him to attend.

On March 31, 1945, Yazaki-san had been recalled to Tokyo, and thus missed the battle of Okinawa. Ten
weeks later - exactly 42 years ago today - Admiral Ota and his men committed seppuku, killing

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themselves rather than face surrender. Ever since then Yazaki has been tormented by the thought that
his comrades have joined their ancestors and he is here, not there.

Finding Yazaki was a great stroke of luck for Fox, for whom an Okinawa memorial had become an
obsession. His own division commander tried to discourage him. The Japanese could hardly be expected
to back a memorial on the site of their last great military defeat. But Yazaki made a solution possible.

If Yazaki can attend, why can't I? I played a role in the early stages of Buzz Fox's campaign and helped
write the tribute to the Marines that is engraved on the monument. But when I learned that Japanese
were also participating, I quietly withdrew. There are too many graves between us, too much gore, too
many memories of too many atrocities.

In 1977, revisiting Guadalcanal, I encountered a Japanese businessman who had volunteered to become
a kamikaze pilot in 1945 and was turned down at the last minute. Mutual friends suggested that we
meet. I had expected no difficulty; neither, I think, did he. But when we confronted each other, we
froze.

I trembled, suppressing the sudden, startling surge of primitive rage within. And I could see, from his
expression, that this was difficult for him, too. Nations may make peace. It is harder for fighting men. On
simultaneous impulse we both turned and walked away.

I set this down in neither pride nor shame. The fact is that some wounds never heal. Yazaki, unlike Fox,
is dreading the ceremony. He does not expect to be shriven of his guilt. He knows he must be there but
can't say why. Men are irrational, he explains, and adds that he feels very sad.

So do I, Yazaki-san, so do I.

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William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939 / County Dublin / Ireland)

The Wild Swans At Coole

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,

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By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

189
JUSTIN CRONIN

My Daughter and God

FROM Narrative

FOUR YEARS AGO, driving home from picking up our twelve-year-old daughter from summer camp, my
wife reached into her purse for a tissue and lost control of the car. This occurred on a stretch of
Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio, near the town of Gonzales. The accident occurred as
many do: a moment of distraction, a small mistake, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. My wife and
daughter were in the midst of a minor argument over my daughter’s need to blow her nose. During
high-pollen season, she is a perennial sniffer, and the sound drives my wife crazy. Get a Kleenex, Leslie
said, for God’s sake, and when Iris, out of laziness or exhaustion or the mild day-to-day defiance of all
teenagers, refused to do so, my wife reached for her purse, inadvertently turning the wheel to the left.

In the case of some vehicles, the mistake might have been rectified, but not in the case of my wife’s—
a top-heavy SUV with jacked-up suspension. When she realized her error, she overcorrected to the right,
then again to the left, the car swerving violently. They were on a bridge that passed above a gully: on
either side, nothing but gravity and forty vertical feet of air. That they would hit the guardrail was now
inevitable. In moments of acute stress, time seems to slow. The name for this is tachypsychia, from the
Greek tach, meaning “speed,” and psych, meaning “mind.” Thus, despite the chaos and panic of these
moments, my wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

This didn’t happen, although the accident was far from over. The car did not break through the
guardrail but ricocheted back onto the highway, spinning in a one-eighty before flopping onto its side in
a powdery explosion of airbags. It struck another vehicle, driven by a pastor and his wife on their way
home from Sunday lunch, though my wife has no memory of this. For what seemed like hours the car
traveled in this manner, then gravity took hold once more. Like a whale breaching the surface, it lifted
off the roadway, turned belly-up, and crashed down onto its roof. The back half of the car compacted
like an accordion: steel crushing, glass bursting, my daughter’s belongings—clothes, shoes, books, an
expensive violin—exploding onto the highway. Other cars whizzed past, narrowly missing them. A final
jolt, the car rolled again, and it came to a halt, facing forward, resting on its wheels.

As my wife tells it, the next moment was very nearly comic. She and my daughter looked at each
other. The car had been utterly obliterated, but there was no blood, no pain, no evidence of bodily
injury to either of them. “We’ve been in an accident,” my wife robotically observed.

My daughter looked down at her hand. “I am holding my phone,” she said—as, indeed, she somehow
still was. “Do you want me to call 911?”

There was no need. Though in the midst of things the two of them had felt alone in the universe, the
accident had occurred in the presence of a dozen other vehicles, all of which had now stopped and

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disgorged their occupants, who were racing to the scene. A semi moved in behind them to block the
highway. By this time my wife’s understanding of events had widened only to the extent that she was
aware that she had created a great deal of inconvenience for other people. She was apologizing to
everyone, mistaking their amazement for anger. Everybody had expected them to be dead, not sitting
upright in their destroyed vehicle, neither one of them with so much as a hair out of place. Some began
to weep; others had the urge to touch them. The cops arrived, a fire truck, an ambulance. While my wife
and daughter were checked out by an EMT, onlookers organized a posse to prowl the highway for my
daughter’s belongings. Because my wife and daughter no longer had a car to put them into, a woman
offered to bring the items to our house; she was headed for Houston to visit her son and was pulling a
trailer of furniture. The EMT was as baffled as everybody else. “Nobody walks away from something like
this,” he said.

I was to learn of these events several hours later, when my wife phoned me. I was in the grocery store
with our six-year-old son, and when I saw my wife’s number my first thought was that she was calling to
tell me she was running late, because she always is.

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to say hello, “where are you?”

Thus her first tender steps into explaining what had occurred. An accident, she said. A kind of a big
fender-bender, really. Nobody hurt, but the car was out of commission; I’d need to come get them.

I wasn’t nice about this. Part of the dynamic in our marriage is the unstated fact that I am a better
driver than my wife. I have never been in an accident; my one and only speeding ticket was issued when
the first George Bush was president. About every two years my wife does something careless in a
parking lot that costs a lot of money, and she has received so many tickets that she has been forced to
retake driver’s education—and those are just the tickets I know about. The rules of modern marriage do
not include confiscating your wife’s car keys, but more than once I have considered doing this.

“A fender-bender,” I repeated. Christ almighty, this again. “How bad is it?”

“Everybody’s fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“I get that. You said that already.” I was in the cereal aisle; my son was bugging me to buy a box of
something much too sweet. I tossed it into the cart.

“What about the car?”

“Um, it kind of . . . rolled.”

I imagined a Labrador retriever lazily rotating onto his back in front of the fireplace. “I don’t
understand what you’re telling me.”

“It’s okay, really,” my wife said.

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 “Do you mean it rolled over?”

“It happened kind of fast. Totally no big deal, though.”

It sounded like a huge deal. “Let me see if I have this right. You were driving and the car rolled over.”

“Iris wouldn’t blow her nose. I was getting her a Kleenex. You know how she is. The doctors say she’s
absolutely fine.”

“What doctors?” It was becoming clear that she was in a state of shock. “Where are you?”

“At the hospital. It’s very small. I’m not even sure you’d call it a hospital. Everybody’s been so nice.”

And so on. By the time the call ended, I had some idea of the seriousness, though not completely.
Gonzales was three hours away. I abandoned my grocery cart, raced home, got on the phone, found
somebody to look after our son, and got in my car. Several more calls followed, each adding a piece to
the puzzle, until I was able to conclude that my wife and daughter were alive but should be dead.
I knew this, but I didn’t feel it. For the moment I was locked into the project of retrieving them from the
small town where they’d been stranded. It was after ten o’clock when I pulled into the driveway of
Gonzales Memorial Hospital, a modern building the size of a suburban dental office. I did not see my
wife, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out over the empty fields behind it. I
raced inside, and there was Iris. She was slender and tan from a month in the Texas sunshine, and
wearing a yellow T-shirt dress. She had never looked more beautiful, and it was this beauty that brought
home the magnitude of events. I threw my arms around her, tears rising in my throat; I had never been
so happy to see anybody in my life. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn’t know;
one of the nurses directed us outside. I found myself unable to take a hand off my daughter; some part
of me needed constant reassurance of her existence. I saw my wife standing at the edge of the lot,
facing away. I called her name, she turned, and the two of us headed toward her.

As my wife tells the story, this was the moment when, as the saying goes, she got God. Once the two of
them had been discharged, my wife had stepped outside to call me with this news. But the signal quality
was poor, and she abandoned the attempt. I’d be along soon enough.

She found herself, then, standing alone in the Texas night. I do not recall if the weather was clear, but
I’d like to think it was, all those fat stars shining down. My wife had been raised Missouri Synod
Lutheran, but a series of intertribal squabbles had soured her parents on the whole thing, and apart
from weddings and funerals, she hadn’t set foot in a church for years. Yet the outdoor cathedral of a
starry Texas night is as good a place as any to communicate with the Almighty, which she commenced to
do. In the hours since the accident, as the adrenaline cleared, her recollection of events had led her to a
calculus that rewrote everything she thought she knew about the world. Until that night, her vision of a
universal deity had been basically impersonal. God, in her mind, was simply too busy to take an interest
in individual human affairs. The universe possessed a moral shape, but events were haphazard,
unguided by providence. Now, as she contemplated the accident, mentally listing the many ways that

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she and our daughter should have died and yet did not, she decided this was wrong. Of course God paid
attention. Only the intercession of a divine hand could explain such a colossal streak of luck. Likewise did
the accident become in her mind a product of celestial design. It was a message; it meant something.
She had been placed in a circumstance in which a mother’s greatest fear was about to be realized, then
yanked from the brink. Her future emerged in her mind as something given back to her—it was as if she
and our daughter had been killed on the highway and then restored to life—and like all supplicants in
the wilderness, she asked God what her purpose was, why he’d returned her to the world.

That was the moment when Iris and I emerged from the building and called her name, giving her the
answer.

Until that night we were a family that had lived an entirely secular existence. This wasn’t planned; things
simply happened that way. My religious background was different from my wife’s, but only by degree. I
was raised in the Catholic Church, but its messages were delivered to me in a lethargic and off-key
manner that failed to gain much traction. My father did not attend mass—I was led to believe this had
something to do with the trauma of his attending Catholic grade school—and my mother, who dutifully
took my sister and me to church every Sunday, did not receive communion. Why this should be so I
never thought to ask. Always she met us at the rear of the church so that we could make a quick exit “to
avoid the traffic.” (There was no traffic.) We never attended a church picnic or drank coffee in the
basement after mass or went to Bible study; we socialized with no other families in the parish. Religion
was never discussed over the dinner table or anyplace else. I went to just enough Sunday school to meet
the minimum requirements for first communion, but because I went to a private school with afternoon
activities, I could not attend confirmation class. My mother struck a deal with the priest. If I met with
him for a couple of hours to discuss religious matters, I could be confirmed. I had no idea why I was
doing any of this or what it meant, only that I needed to select a new name, taken from the saints. I
chose Cornelius, not because I knew who he was but because that was the name of my favorite
character in Planet of the Apes.

Within a couple of years I was off to boarding school, and my life as a Roman Catholic, nominal as it
was, came to an end. During a difficult period in my midtwenties, I briefly flirted with church
attendance, thinking it might offer me some comfort and direction, but I found it just as stultifying and
embarrassing as I always had, full of weird sexual obsessions, exclusionary politics, and a deep love of
hocus-pocus, overlaid with a doctrine of obedience that was complete anathema to my newly
independent self. If asked, I would have said that I believed in God—one never really loses those mental
contours once they’re established—but that organized religious practice struck me as completely
infantile. When my wife and I were married, a set of odd circumstances led us to choose an Anglican
priest to officiate, but this was a decision we regretted, and when our daughter was born, the subject of
baptism never came up. Essentially, we viewed ourselves as too smart for religion. I’ll put it another
way. Religion was for people who wanted to stay children all their lives. We didn’t. We were the grown-
ups.

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 In the aftermath of the accident, and the event that I now think of as “the revelation of the parking
lot,” all this went out the window. I was not half as sure as my wife that God had interceded; I’m a
skeptic and always will be. But it was also the case that I was due for a course correction. In my
midforties, I had yet to have anything truly bad happen to me. The opposite was true: I’d done
tremendously well. At the university where I taught, I’d just been promoted to full professor. A trilogy of
novels I had begun writing on a lark had been purchased for scads of money. We’d just bought a new
house we loved, and my daughter had been admitted to a terrific school, where she’d be starting in the
fall. My children were happy and healthy, and my newfound financial success had allowed my wife to
quit her stressful job as a high school teacher to look after our family and pursue her interests. It had
been a long, hard climb, but we’d made it—more than made it—and I spent a great deal of time patting
myself on the back for this success. I’d gone out hunting and brought back a mammoth. Everything was
right as rain.

In hindsight, this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently
ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away,
and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two
things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does. In version one,
the universe is a stone-cold place. Life is a series of accumulations—friends, lovers, children, memories,
the contents of your 401(k)—followed by a rapid casting off (i.e., you die). Your wife is just somebody
you met at a party; your children are biological accretions of yourself; your affection for them is nothing
more than a bit of well-engineered firmware to guarantee the perpetuation of the species. All pleasures
are sensory, since nothing goes deeper than the senses, and pain, whether psychological or physical, is
meaningless bad news you can only endure till it’s over.

Version two assumes that life, with all its vicissitudes, possesses an organized pattern of meaning.
Grief means something, joy means something, love means something. This meaning isn’t always obvious
and is sometimes maddeningly elusive; had my wife and daughter been killed that afternoon on the
highway, I would have been hard-pressed to take solace in religion’s customary clichés. (It is likely that
the only thing that would have prevented me from committing suicide, apart from my own physical
cowardice, would have been my son, into whom I would have poured all my love and sorrow.) But it’s
there if you look for it, and the willingness to search—whether this search finds expression in religious
ritual or attentive care for one’s children or a long run through falling autumn leaves—is what is meant, I
think, by faith.

But herein lies the problem: we don’t generally come to these things on our own. Somebody has to
lay the groundwork, and the best way to accomplish this is with a story, since that’s how children learn
most things. My Catholic upbringing was halfhearted and unfocused, but it made an impression. At any
time during my thirty-year exile from organized religion, I could have stepped into a Sunday mass and
recited the entire liturgy by heart. For better or worse, my God was a Catholic God, the God of smells
and bells and the BVM and the saints and all the rest, and I didn’t have to build this symbolic narrative
on my own. My wife is much the same; I have no doubt that the image of the merciful deity she

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addressed in the parking lot came straight off a stained-glass window, circa 1975. Yet out of arrogance
or laziness or the shallow notion that modern, freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide
these things for themselves, we’d given our daughter none of it. We’d left her in the dark forest of her
own mind, and what she’d concluded was that there was no God at all.

This came about in the aftermath of our move to Texas—a very churchy place. My daughter was
entering the first grade; my son was still being hauled around in a basket. Houston is a sophisticated and
diverse city, with great food, interesting architecture, and a vivid cultural life, but the suburbs are the
suburbs, and the neighborhood where we settled was straight out of Betty Friedan’s famous complaint:
horseshoe streets of more or less identical one-story, 2,500-square-foot houses, built on reclaimed
ranchland in the 1960s. A neighborhood of 2.4 children per household, fathers who raced off to work
each morning before the dew had dried, moms who pushed their kids around in strollers and passed out
snacks at soccer games and volunteered at the local elementary school. We were, after ten years living
in a dicey urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, eager for something a little calmer, more controlled, and
we’d chosen the house in a hurry, not realizing what we were getting into. Among our first visitors was
an older woman from down the block. She presented us with a plate of brownies and proceeded to list
the denominational affiliations of each of our neighbors. I was, to put it mildly, pretty weirded-out. I
counted about a dozen churches within just a few miles of my house—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian,
United Church of Christ—and all of them were huge.People talked about Jesus as if he were sitting in
their living room, flipping through a magazine; nearly every day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that
read, Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned. Stapled to the local religious culture was a
socially conservative brand of politics I found abhorrent. To hear homosexuality described as an
“abomination” felt like I’d parachuted into the Middle Ages. I couldn’t argue with my neighbors’
devotion to their offspring—the neighborhood revolved around children—but it seemed to me that
Jesus Christ, whoever he was, had been pretty clear on the subject of loving everybody.

This was the current my daughter swam in every day at school. Not many months had passed before
one of her friends, the daughter of evangelicals, expressed concern that Iris was going to hell. Those
were the words she used: “I don’t want you to go to hell, Iris.” The girl in question was adorable, with
ringlets of dark hair, perfect manners, and lovely, doting parents. No doubt she thought she was doing
Iris a kindness when she urged her to attend church with her family to avoid this awful fate. But that
wasn’t how I saw the situation. I dropped to a defensive crouch and came out swinging. “Tell her that
hell’s a fairy tale,” I said. “Tell her to leave you alone.”

The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing view of creation—less
hell, more heaven—and over time my wife and I tried to do just that. But when you’re seven years old,
“love your neighbor as yourself” sounds a lot like “don’t forget to brush your teeth”—words to live by
but hardly a description of humanity’s place in the cosmos. As the playground evangelism continued, so
did my daughter’s contempt, and why wouldn’t it? She’d learned it from me. I don’t recall when she
announced she was an atheist. All I remember was that she did this from the back seat of the car, sitting
in a booster chair.

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After the accident, my daughter spent the better part of a week in her closet. From time to time I’d stop
by and say, “Are you still in there?” Or “Hey, it’s Daddy, how’s it going?” Or “Let me know if you need
anything.”

“All good!” she said. “Thanks!”

There were things to sort out: an insurance claim to file, a replacement vehicle to acquire,
arrangements to make for our summer vacation, for which we’d be leaving in two weeks. My wife and I
were badly shaken. We had entered a new state: we were a family that had been nearly annihilated.
Every few hours one of us would burst into tears. Genesis 2:24 speaks of spouses “cleaving” to each
other, and that was what we did: we cleaved. We badly wanted to comfort our daughter, but she had
made herself completely unreachable. Of course she’d be confused and angry; in a careless moment,
her mother had nearly killed her. But when we probed her on the matter, she insisted this wasn’t so.
Everything was peachy, she said. She just liked it in the closet. No worries, she’d be along soon.

A day later we received a phone call from the pastor whose car my wife’s had struck. At first I thought
he was calling to get my insurance information, which I apologetically offered. He explained that the
damage was minor, nothing even worth fixing, and that he had called to see if my wife and daughter
were all right. Perfectly, I said, omitting my daughter’s temporary residence among her shirts and pants,
and thanked him profusely.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “I saw the whole thing. Nobody should have survived.”

He wasn’t the first to say this. The M-word was bandied about freely by virtually everyone we knew.
The following afternoon we were visited by the woman who had collected Iris’s belongings: two
cardboard boxes of books and clothes covered with highway grime and shards of glass, a suitcase that
looked like it had been run over, and her violin, which had escaped its launch into the gulley unharmed.
We chatted in the living room, replaying events. Like the pastor, she seemed a little dazed. When the
conversation reached a resting place, she explained that she couldn’t leave until she’d seen Iris.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

A minute later she appeared with our daughter. The woman rose from her chair, stepped toward Iris,
and wrapped her in a hug. This display made my daughter visibly uncomfortable, as it would anyone.
Why was this stranger hugging her? The woman’s face was full of inexpressible emotion; her eyes filmed
with tears. My daughter endured her embrace as long as she could, then backed away.

“God protected you. You know that, don’t you?”

My daughter’s eyes darted around warily. “I guess.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful life. I just know it.”

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 We exchanged email addresses, knowing we would never use them, and said our goodbyes in the
yard. When we returned to the house, Iris was still standing at the base of the stairs. I had never seen
her look so freaked-out.

“God had nothing to do with it,” she said. “So don’t ask me to say he did.” And with that she headed
back upstairs to her closet.

The psychologist, whom Iris nicknamed “Dr. Cuckoo,” told us not to worry. Iris was a levelheaded girl;
hiding in the closet was a perfectly natural response to such a trauma. The best thing, she said, was to
give our daughter space. She’d talk about it when the time was right.

I doubted this. Levelheaded, yes, but that was the problem. Doing a double gainer with a twist at 70
miles an hour, without so much as dropping your iPhone, was nothing that the rational mind could parse
on its own. The psychologist also didn’t know my daughter like I did. Iris can be the most stubborn
person on earth. This is one of her cardinal virtues when, for instance, she has a test and two papers due
on the same day. She’ll stay up till 3:00 A.M. no matter how many times we tell her to go to bed, and get
A’s on all three, proving herself right in the end. But she can also hold a grudge like nobody I’ve ever
met, and a grudge with the cosmos is no simple matter. How do you forgive the world for being godless?
When she declared her atheism from the booster seat, I’d thought two things. First, How cute! The
world’s only atheist who eats from the kids’ menu! I couldn’t have been more charmed if she’d said
she’d been reading Schopenhauer. The second thing was, This can’t last. How could a girl who still
believed in the tooth fairy fail to come around to the idea of a cosmic protector? And yet she didn’t. Her
atheism had hardened to such a degree that any mention of spiritual matters made her snort milk out
her nose. By inserting nothing in its stead, we had inadvertently given her the belief that she was the
author of her own fate, and my wife’s newfound faith in a God-watched universe was as much a
betrayal as crashing their car into the guardrail over a minor argument. It was a philosophical reversal
my daughter couldn’t process, and it left her feeling utterly alone.

My wife and I felt perfectly awful. In due course our daughter emerged, with one condition: she
didn’t want to discuss the accident. Not then, not ever. This seemed unhealthy, but you can’t make a
twelve-year-old girl talk about something she doesn’t want to. We left for Cape Cod, where we’d rented
a house for the month of July. I’d just turned in a manuscript to my editor and under ordinary
circumstances would have been looking forward to the time away, but the trip seemed like too much
data. Everyone was antsy and out of sorts, and the weather was horrible. The only person who enjoyed
himself was our son, who was too young to comprehend the scope of events and was happy drawing
pictures all day.

The school year resumed, and with it life’s ordinary rhythms. My wife began looking around for a
church to attend. To say this was a sore spot with Iris would be a gross understatement. She hated the
idea and said so. “Fine with me,” she said, “if you want to get all Jesus-y. Just leave me out of it.”

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 It didn’t happen right away. God may have shown his face to my wife in the parking lot, but he’d
failed to share his address. We were stymied by the things we always had been: our jaundiced view of
organized religion, the conservative social politics of most mainline denominations, the discomfiting
business of praying aloud in the presence of people we didn’t know. And what, exactly, did we believe?
Faith asks for a belief in God, which we had; religion asks for more, a great deal of it literal. Christian
ritual was the most familiar, but neither of us believed that the Bible was the word of God or that Jesus
Christ was a supernatural being who walked on water when he wasn’t turning it into wine. Certainly
somebody by that name had existed; he’d gotten a lot of ink. He’d done and said some remarkable stuff,
scared the living shit out of an imperial authority, and given humanity two thousand years’ worth of
things to think about. But the son of God? Really? That Jesus was no more or less divine than the rest of
us seemed to me the core of his message.

We wanted something, but we didn’t know what. Something with a little grace, a bit of wonder, the
feeling of taking a few minutes out of each week to acknowledge how fortunate we were. We decided
to give Unitarianism a shot. From the website, it seemed safe enough. Over loud objections, we made
Iris come with us. The service was overseen by two ministers, a married couple, who took turns speaking
from the altar, which seemed about as holy as the podium in a college classroom. After the hokey
business of lighting the lamp, they droned on for half an hour about the importance of friendship. There
were almost no kids in the congregation, or even anybody close to our age. It was a sea of white-haired
heads. After the service, everyone lingered in the lobby over coffee and stale cookies, but we beat a
hasty retreat.

“Well, that was awkward,” Iris said.

It was. It had felt like sitting in the audience at a talk show. We tried a few more times, but our
interest flagged. When, on the fourth Sunday, Iris found me making French toast in the kitchen in my
bathrobe and asked why we weren’t going, I told her that I guessed church wasn’t for us after all.

“Thank God,” she said, and laughed.

In the end, as in the scriptures, it was a child who led us. To our surprise, our son, Tuck, had become a
secret Episcopalian. His school is affiliated with an Episcopal parish, and students attend chapel once a
week. We’d always assumed this was the sort of wishy-washy, nondenominational fare most places dish
out, but we were wrong. One day, apropos of nothing, as I was driving him home from school, he
announced that he believed in Jesus.

“Really?” I said. “When did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “It just makes sense to me. Pastor Lisa’s nice. We should go
sometime.”

“To church, you mean?”

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 “Sure,” he said. “I think that would be great.”

Just like that, the matter was settled. We now go every week—the three of us. St. Stephen’s is
located in a diverse neighborhood in Houston, and much of the congregation is gay or lesbian. There are
protocols, but very loose ones, and the church has open communion and a terrific choir. Pastor Lisa is a
woman in her fifties with a gray pageboy who wears blue jeans and Birkenstocks under her robe and
gives a hug that feels like falling into bed. She knows I was raised Catholic, and she laughed when I told
her that I didn’t mind that she “got some of the words wrong.” I have my doubts, as always, but it seems
like a fine church to have them in. My son finds some of the service boring, as all children do, but he
likes communion, which he calls his “force field for the week.” He has asked to be baptized next fall.

Will Iris be there? I hope so. But it’s her choice. She has yet to go with us. I know this makes her sad,
and it makes me sad, too. It’s the first thing the three of us have ever done without her.

Three years after the accident, in spring 2012, I failed a blood test at my annual physical, then failed a
biopsy and found myself, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, facing a surgery that would tell me if I
was going to see my children grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said
maybe not. We were spending the summer on Cape Cod, where we’d bought a house, and in late July
my wife and I flew back to Texas for my operation. When I awoke in the recovery room, my wife was
standing over me, smiling. I was so dopey with painkillers that focusing on her face felt like trying to
carry a piano up the stairs. “It’s over,” she said. “The margins were clear. You’re going to be okay.”

Two days after my surgery, I was instructed to walk. This sounded impossible, but I was determined.
With my wife holding my arm, I shuffled up and down the hall of the ward, gritting my teeth against the
discomfort of the catheter, which was the weirdest thing I’d ever felt. The last two months had
pummeled me to psychological pieces, but the worst was over. Once again the car had rolled and we
had walked away.

From the far end of the hall, a woman was approaching. Like a pair of ocean liners, we headed toward
each other in slow motion. She was very thin and wearing a silk robe; like me, she was pulling an IV
stand. Some greeting was called for, and she was the first to speak.

“May I give you something?”

We were within just a few feet of each other, and I saw what the situation was. Her body was leaving
her; death was in her face.

“Of course.”

She gestured downward, indicating the pockets of her robe. “Pick one.”

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 I chose the left. With an uncertain hand she withdrew a wad of white cotton, tied with a bow. She
placed it in my hand. It was an angel, made from a dish towel. To this she’d affixed a heart-shaped piece
of laminated paper printed with these words from the Book of Numbers:

The Lord bless and keep you;

The Lord make his face shine upon you,

And be gracious to you;

May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you;

And give you peace.

When I first learned about my illness, a very smart man told me that I should select an object. It could
be anything, he said. A piece of jewelry. A spoon. A rock. Since I was a writer, maybe something to do
with writing, such as a pen. It didn’t matter what it was. When I was afraid, he said, and thinking that I
was going to die, I should take that object in my hand and put my fear inside it.

Wise as his counsel was, I’d never managed to do this. I’d tried one thing and then another. Nothing
had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

“Bless you,” I said.

Two weeks later I returned to the Cape to complete my recovery. There wasn’t much I could do, but I
was glad to be there. A few days before my diagnosis, I had bought a ten-year-old Audi convertible and
shipped it north. Iris had just gotten her learner’s permit, and after a week of lounging around the
house, I asked her if she’d take me for a drive. The day was sunny and hot. We put the top down and
sped north, bisecting the peninsula on a rolling, two-lane road. From the passenger seat, I watched my
daughter drive. In the past year a startling change had occurred. Iris wasn’t a kid anymore. She was taller
than my wife, with a full, womanly shape. Her facial features had organized into mature proportions.
Her hair, a honeyed red, swept away from her face in a stylish arc. She could have been mistaken for a
college student, and often was. But the difference was more than physical; to look at my daughter was
to know that she was somebody with a private, inner existence. She was standing at the edge of life;
everything was ahead of her. All she had to do was let it come.

“How’s it feel?” I asked. She had perfect motorist’s manners: hands at ten and two, shoulders pressed
back, eyes on the road. She was wearing large tortoiseshell sunglasses that would have been perfectly at
home on Audrey Hepburn’s face.

“Okay.”

“Not scary?”

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 She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

Our destination was a beach on the Cape’s north side, called Sandy Neck. From there, on the clearest
days, you can see all the way from Plymouth to Provincetown. We parked and got out of the car and
walked to the little platform built to take in the view. I knew we couldn’t stay long; even standing was an
effort.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said.

Iris was looking away. “You didn’t. Not really.”

“Well, I was scared. I’m glad you weren’t.”

She thought a moment. “That’s the thing. I knew I should have been. But I wasn’t. I actually feel kind
of guilty about that.”

“There’s no reason you should.”

“It’s just . . .” She hunted for the words. “I don’t know. You’re you. I just can’t imagine you not being
okay.”

She was wrong. Someday I wouldn’t be. Time and chance would do its work, as it does for all of us.
But she didn’t need to hear that from me on a sunny summer day.

“Do you remember the accident?” I asked.

She laughed, a little nervously. “Well, duh.”

“I’ve always wondered. What were you doing in the closet?”

“Not much. Mostly watching Project Runway on my laptop.”

“And being mad at us.”

She shrugged. “That whole God thing really pissed me off. I mean, you guys can believe whatever you
want. I just wanted Mom to feel the same way I did.”

“How did you feel?”

She didn’t answer right away. Boats were creeping across the horizon.

“Abandoned.”

We were silent for a time. I had a sudden vision of myself as old—an old man, being taken to the
beach by his grown daughter. The dunes, the ocean, the rocky margin where they met—all would be the
same, unchanged since I was boy. It was a sad thought, but it also made me happy in a way that seemed
new. These things were years away, and with any luck, I would be around to see them.

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 “Are you doing all right? Do you need to go back?”

I nodded. “Probably I should get off my feet.”

We returned to the car. Three steps ahead of me, Iris moved to the passenger side, opened the door,
and got in.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked around. “Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “I’m the driver, aren’t I?”

She was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d
heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go.

“Yes,” I said. “You are.”

[From The Best American Essays 2015]

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ROGER ANGELL

This Old Man

FROM The New Yorker

CHECK ME OUT. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the KGB. No,
it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the
curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like
a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.

Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling
version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or
head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back
again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-
D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.

I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of
Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting
down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. Shingles, in 1996, with resultant nerve damage.

Like many men and women my age, I get around with a couple of arterial stents that keep my heart
chunking. I also sport a minute plastic seashell that clamps shut a congenital hole in my heart,
discovered in my early eighties. The surgeon at Mass General who fixed up this PFO (a patent foramen
ovale—I love to say it) was a Mexican-born character actor in beads and clogs, and a fervent admirer of
Derek Jeter. Counting this procedure and the stents, plus a passing balloon angioplasty and two or three
false alarms, I’ve become sort of a table potato, unalarmed by the X-ray cameras swooping eerily about
just above my naked body in a darkened and icy operating room; there’s also a little TV screen up there
that presents my heart as a pendant ragbag attached to tacky ribbons of veins and arteries. But never
mind. Nowadays I pop a pink beta-blocker and a white statin at breakfast, along with several lesser pills,
and head off to my human-wreckage gym, and it’s been a couple of years since the last showing.

My left knee is thicker but shakier than my right. I messed it up playing football, eons ago, but can’t
remember what went wrong there more recently. I had a date to have the joint replaced by a famous
knee man (he’s listed in the Metropolitan Opera program as a major supporter) but changed course at
the last moment, opting elsewhere for injections of synthetic frog hair or rooster combs or something,
which magically took away the pain. I walk around with a cane now when outdoors—
“Stop brandishing!” I hear my wife, Carol, admonishing—which gives me a nice little edge when hailing
cabs.

The lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut country road, thanks to a
herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me

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from Gary Cooper to Geppetto. After days spent groaning on the floor, I received a blessed epidural,
ending the ordeal. “You can sit up now,” the doctor said, whisking off his shower cap. “Listen, do you
know who Dominic Chianese is?”

“Isn’t that Uncle Junior?” I said, confused. “You know—from The Sopranos?”

“Yes,” he said. “He and I play in a mandolin quartet every Wednesday night at the Hotel Edison. Do
you think you could help us get a listing in the front of The New Yorker?”

I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the
day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My
conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead
into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the
landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes
to mind.

On the other hand, I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry
cleaner’s today. As of right now, I’m not Christopher Hitchens or Tony Judt or Nora Ephron; I’m not dead
and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t
linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on
short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s
happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe
swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great
you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the
street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads,
“Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”

Let’s move on. A smooth fox terrier of ours named Harry was full of surprises. Wildly sociable, like
others of his breed, he grew a fraction more reserved in maturity, and learned to cultivate a separate
wagging acquaintance with each fresh visitor or old pal he came upon in the living room. If friends had
come for dinner, he’d arise from an evening nap and leisurely tour the table in imitation of a three-star
headwaiter: Everything O.K. here? Is there anything we could bring you? How was the crème brûlée?
Terriers aren’t water dogs, but Harry enjoyed kayaking in Maine, sitting like a figurehead between my
knees for an hour or more and scoping out the passing cormorant or yachtsman. Back in the city, he
established his personality and dashing good looks on the neighborhood to the extent that a local artist
executed a striking head-on portrait in pointillist oils, based on a snapshot of him she’d sneaked in
Central Park. Harry took his leave (another surprise) on a June afternoon three years ago, a few days
after his eighth birthday. Alone in our fifth-floor apartment, as was usual during working hours, he
became unhinged by a noisy thunderstorm and went out a front window left a quarter open on a muggy
day. I knew him well and could summon up his feelings during the brief moments of that leap: the
welcome coolness of rain on his muzzle and shoulders, the excitement of air and space around his
outstretched body.

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 Here in my tenth decade, I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for
rotten news. Living long means enough already. When Harry died, Carol and I couldn’t stop weeping; we
sat in the bathroom with his retrieved body on a mat between us, the light-brown patches on his back
and the near-black of his ears still darkened by the rain, and passed a Kleenex box back and forth
between us. Not all the tears were for him. Two months earlier, a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest
child, had ended her life, and the oceanic force and mystery of that event had not left full space for
tears. Now we could cry without reserve, weep together for Harry and Callie and ourselves. Harry cut us
loose.

A few notes about age is my aim here, but a little more about loss is inevitable. “Most of the people
my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time,
and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy,
but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children,
parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors,
classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day.
It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures
doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to
something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances
and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear
unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.

Our dead are almost beyond counting and we want to herd them along, pen them up somewhere in
order to keep them straight. I like to think of mine as fellow voyagers crowded aboard the Île de
France (the idea is swiped from Outward Bound). Here’s my father, still handsome in his tuxedo, lighting
a Lucky Strike. There’s Ted Smith, about to name-drop his Gloucester hometown again. Here comes Slim
Aarons. Here’s Esther Mae Counts, from fourth grade: hi, Esther Mae. There’s Gardner—with Cecille
Shawn, for some reason. Here’s Ted Yates. Anna Hamburger. Colba F. Gucker, better known as Chief.
Bob Ascheim. Victor Pritchett—and Dorothy. Henry Allen. Bart Giamatti. My elder old-maid cousin Jean
Webster and her unexpected, late-arriving Brit husband, Capel Hanbury. Kitty Stableford. Dan
Quisenberry. Nancy Field. Freddy Alexandre. I look around for others and at times can almost produce
someone at will. Callie returns, via a phone call. “Dad?” It’s her, all right, her voice affectionately rising
at the end—“Da-ad?”—but sounding a bit impatient this time. She’s in a hurry. And now Harold Eads.
Toni Robin. Dick Salmon, his face bright red with laughter. Edith Oliver. Sue Dawson. Herb Mitgang.
Coop. Tudie. Elwood Carter.

These names are best kept in mind rather than boxed and put away somewhere. Old letters are
engrossing but feel historic in numbers, photo albums delightful but with a glum after-kick like a
chocolate caramel. Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left
with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained
cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and
ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment—she’s about
thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away.

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 My list of names is banal but astounding, and it’s barely a fraction, the ones that slip into view in the
first minute or two. Anyone over sixty knows this; my list is only longer. I don’t go there often, but once I
start, the battalion of the dead is on duty, alertly waiting. Why do they sustain me so, cheer me up,
remind me of life? I don’t understand this. Why am I not endlessly grieving?

What I’ve come to count on is the white-coated attendant of memory, silently here again to deliver dabs
from the laboratory dish of me. In the days before Carol died, twenty months ago, she lay semiconscious
in bed at home, alternating periods of faint or imperceptible breathing with deep, shuddering catch-up
breaths. Then, in a delicate gesture, she would run the pointed tip of her tongue lightly around the
upper curve of her teeth. She repeated this pattern again and again. I’ve forgotten, perhaps mercifully,
much of what happened in that last week and the weeks after, but this recurs.

Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another late-afternoon
mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and in the instants before clarity would sense her sitting in her
own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before and in the same instant gone again.
This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn’t last. Then it stopped.

People my age and younger friends as well seem able to recall entire tapestries of childhood, and
swatches from their children’s early lives as well: conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses,
picnics, vacation B and B’s, trips to the ballet, the time when . . . I can’t do this and it eats at me, but
then, without announcement or connection, something turns up. I am walking on Ludlow Lane, in
Snedens, with my two young daughters, years ago on a summer morning. I’m in my late thirties; they’re
about nine and six, and I’m complaining about the steep little stretch of road between us and our house,
just up the hill. Maybe I’m getting old, I offer. Then I say that one day I’ll be really old and they’ll have to
hold me up. I imitate an old man mumbling nonsense and start to walk with wobbly legs. Callie and Alice
scream with laughter and hold me up, one on each side. When I stop, they ask for more, and we do this
over and over.

I’m leaving out a lot, I see. My work—I’m still working, or sort of. Reading. The collapsing, grossly
insistent world. Stuff I get excited about or depressed about all the time. Dailiness—but how can I
explain this one? Perhaps with a blog recently posted on Facebook by a woman I know who lives in
Australia. “Good Lord, we’ve run out of nutmeg!” it began. “How in the world did that ever happen?”
Dozens of days are like that with me lately.

Intimates and my family—mine not very near me now but always on call, always with me. My
children Alice and John Henry and my daughter-in-law Alice—yes, another one—and my granddaughters
Laura and Lily and Clara, who together and separately were as steely and resplendent as a company of
Marines on the day we buried Carol. And on other days and in other ways as well. Laura, for example,
who will appear almost overnight, on demand, to drive me and my dog and my stuff five hundred miles
Down East, then does it again, backward, later in the summer. Hours of talk and sleep (mine, not hers)

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and renewal—the abandoned mills at Lawrence, Mass., Cat Mousam Road, the Narramissic River still
there—plus a couple of nights together, with the summer candles again.

Friends in great numbers now, taking me to dinner or cooking in for me. (One afternoon I found a
freshly roasted chicken sitting outside my front door; two hours later another one appeared in the same
spot.) Friends inviting me to the opera, or to Fairway on Sunday morning, or to dine with their kids at
the East Side Deli, or to a wedding at the Rockbound Chapel, or bringing in ice cream to share at my
place while we catch another Yankees game. They saved my life. In the first summer after Carol had
gone, a man I’d known slightly and pleasantly for decades listened while I talked about my changed
routines and my doctors and dog walkers and the magazine. I paused for a moment, and he said, “Plus
you have us.”

Another message—also brief, also breathtaking—came on an earlier afternoon at my longtime

therapist’s, at a time when I felt I’d lost almost everything. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through
this,” I said at last.

A silence, then: “Neither do I. But you will.”

I am a world-class complainer but find palpable joy arriving with my evening Dewar’s, from Robinson
Cano between pitches, from the first pages once again ofAppointment in Samarra or the last lines of the
Elizabeth Bishop poem called “Poem.” From the briefest strains of Handel or Roy Orbison, or Dennis
Brain playing the early bars of his stunning Mozart horn concertos. (This Angel recording may have been
one of the first things Carol and I acquired just after our marriage, and I hear it playing on a sunny
Saturday morning in our Ninety-Fourth Street walkup.) Also the recalled faces and then the names of
Jean Dixon or Roscoe Karns or Porter Hall or Brad Dourif in another Netflix rerun. Chloë Sevigny in Trees
Lounge. Gail Collins on a good day. Family ice skating up near Harlem in the 1980s, with the park
employees, high on youth or weed, looping past us backward to show their smiles.

Recent and not-so-recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some
1940s Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising
ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s
hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we
sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences,
calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant
whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.

We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders
have learned a thing or two, including invisibility. Here I am in a conversation with some trusty friends—
old friends but actually not all that old: they’re in their sixties—and we’re finishing the wine and in
serious converse about global warming in Nyack or Virginia Woolf the cross-dresser. There’s a pause,
and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at
the point where they’ve just left it. What? Hello? Didn’t I just say something? Have I left the room? Have
I experienced what neurologists call a TIA—a transient ischemic attack? I didn’t expect to take over the
chat but did await a word or two of response. Not tonight, though. (Women I know say that this began

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to happen to them when they passed fifty.) When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my
age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we’re invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite
worth listening to anymore. You’ve had your turn, Pops; now it’s ours.

I’ve been asking myself why I don’t think about my approaching visitor, death. He was often on my mind
thirty or forty years ago, I believe, though more of a stranger. Death terrified me then, because I had so
many engagements. The enforced opposite—no dinner dates or coming attractions, no urgent business,
no fun, no calls, no errands, no returned words or touches—left a blank that I could not light or furnish:
a condition I recognized from childhood bad dreams and sudden awakenings. Well, not yet, not soon, or
probably not, I would console myself, and that welcome but then tediously repeated postponement felt
in time less like a threat than like a family obligation—tea with Aunt Molly in Montclair, someday soon
but not now. Death, meanwhile, was constantly onstage or changing costume for his next
engagement—as Bergman’s thick-faced chess player; as the medieval night rider in a hoodie; as Woody
Allen’s awkward visitor half falling into the room as he enters through the window; as W. C. Fields’s man
in the bright nightgown—and in my mind had gone from specter to a waiting second-level celebrity on
the Letterman show. Or almost. Some people I knew seemed to have lost all fear when dying and
awaited the end with a certain impatience. “I’m tired of lying here,” said one. “Why is this taking so
long?” asked another. Death will get it on with me eventually, and stay much too long, and though I’m in
no hurry about the meeting, I feel I know him almost too well by now.

A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way as well, though we scarcely notice
it. We have become tireless voyeurs of death: he is on the morning news and the evening news and on
the breaking, middle-of-the-day news as well—not the celebrity death, I mean, but the everyone-else
death. A roadside accident figure, covered with a sheet. A dead family, removed from a ramshackle
faraway building pocked and torn by bullets. The transportation dead. The dead in floods and hurricanes
and tsunamis, in numbers called “tolls.” The military dead, presented in silence on your home screen,
looking youthful and well combed. The enemy war dead or rediscovered war dead, in higher figures.
Appalling and dulling totals not just from this year’s war but from the ones before that, and the ones
way back that some of us still around may have also attended. All the dead from wars and natural
events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again
escaped and felt terrible about and plans to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s
never anything new about death, to be sure, except its improved publicity. At second hand we have
become death’s expert witnesses; we know more about death than morticians, feel as much at home
with it as those poor bygone schlunks trying to survive a continent-ravaging, low-digit-century epidemic.
Death sucks but, enh—click the channel.

I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my
coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up
Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to

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memorize shorter poems—by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more—which I recite to myself some
nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy
the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing
below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by
now—late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier op cits? I’m afraid not. The
thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read scripture and cling to no life precepts, except
perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart.
Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

TEACHER: Good morning, class. This is the first day of school and we’re going to introduce ourselves. I’ll
call on you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does
for a living. You, please, over at this end.

SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

TEACHER: A mechanic! Thank you, Irving. Next?

SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer.

TEACHER: How nice for you, Emma! Next?

SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you. We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we, class? Luke, do you
think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

LUKE (seizes his throat): He went “N’gungghhh!”

Not bad—I’m told that fourth graders really go for this one. Let’s try another.

A man and his wife tried and tried to have a baby, but without success. Years went by and they went
on trying, but no luck. They liked each other, so the work was always a pleasure, but they grew a bit sad
along the way. Finally she got pregnant, was very careful, and gave birth to a beautiful eight-pound-two-
ounce baby boy. The couple were beside themselves with happiness. At the hospital that night, she told
her husband to stop by the local newspaper and arrange for a birth announcement, to tell all their
friends the good news. First thing next morning, she asked if he’d done the errand.

“Yes, I did,” he said, “but I had no idea those little notices in the paper were so expensive.”

“Expensive?” she said. “How much was it?”

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 “It was eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I have the receipt.”

“Eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars!” she cried. “But that’s impossible. You must have made
some mistake. Tell me exactly what happened.”

“There was a young lady behind a counter at the paper, who gave me the form to fill out,” he said. “I
put in your name and my name and little Teddy’s name and weight, and when we’d be home again and,
you know, ready to see friends. I handed it back to her and she counted up the words and said, ‘How
many insertions?’ I said twice a week for fourteen years, and she gave me the bill. O.K.?”

I heard this tale more than fifty years ago, when my first wife, Evelyn, and I were invited to tea by a
rather elegant older couple who were new to our little Rockland County community. They were in their
seventies at least, and very welcoming, and it was just the four of us. We barely knew them, and I was
surprised when he turned and asked her to tell us the joke about the couple trying to have a baby. “Oh,
no,” she said, “they wouldn’t want to hear that.”

“Oh, come on, dear—they’ll love it,” he said, smiling at her. I groaned inwardly and was preparing a
forced smile while she started off shyly, but then, of course, the four of us fell over laughing together.

That night Evelyn said, “Did you see Keith’s face while Edie was telling that story? Did you see hers?
Do you think it’s possible that they’re still—you know, still doing it?”

“Yes, I did—yes, I do,” I said. “I was thinking exactly the same thing. They’re amazing.”

This was news back then, but probably shouldn’t be by now. I remember a passage I came upon years
later, in an op-ed piece in the Times, written by a man who’d just lost his wife. “We slept naked in the
same bed for forty years,” it went. There was also my splendid colleague Bob Bingham, dying in his late
fifties, who was asked by a friend what he’d missed or would do differently if given the chance. He
thought for an instant and said, “More venery.”

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no
matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice
Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours.
Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen,
with red lips.”

This is a dodgy subject, coming as it does here from a recent widower, and I will risk a further breach
of code and add that this was something that Carol and I now and then idly discussed. We didn’t quite
see the point of memorial fidelity. In our view, the departed spouse—we always thought it would be
me—wouldn’t be around anymore but knew or had known that he or she was loved forever. Please go
ahead, then, sweetheart—don’t miss a moment. Carol said this last: “If you haven’t found someone else
by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.”

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Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for
deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed
domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car
when coming home at night. This is why we throng Match.com and OkCupid in such numbers—but not
just for this, surely. Rowing in Eden (in Emily Dickinson’s words: “Rowing in Eden—/Ah—the sea”) isn’t
reserved for the lithe and young, the dating or the hooked-up or the just lavishly married, or even for
couples in the middle-aged mixed-doubles semifinals, thank God. No personal confession or revelation
impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret. The invisibility
factor—you’ve had your turn—is back at it again. But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be
with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare
expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the
longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.

Nothing is easy at this age, and first meetings for old lovers can be a high-risk venture. Reticence and
awkwardness slip into the room. Also happiness. A wealthy old widower I knew married a nurse he met
while in the hospital, but had trouble remembering her name afterward. He called her “kid.” An eighty-
plus, twice-widowed lady I’d once known found still another love, a frail but vibrant Midwest professor,
now close to ninety, and the pair got in two or three happy years together before he died as well. When
she called his children and arranged to pick up her things at his house, she found every possession of
hers lined up outside the front door.

But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of
you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever,
or at least until next week. For us and for anyone this unsettles, anyone who’s younger and still squirms
at the vision of an old couple embracing, I’d offer John Updike’s “Sex or death: you take your pick”—a
line that appears (in a slightly different form) in a late story of his, “Playing with Dynamite.”

This is a great question, an excellent insurance plan choice, I mean. I think it’s in the Affordable Care
Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss and are still cruising along here
feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

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 "The Appointment in Samarra"
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and
in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just
now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I
turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening
gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my
fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in
its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me [Death] standing in
the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threating getsture to my
servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was
astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in
Samarra.”

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Do not go gentle into that good night

by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Albert Einstein

‘RELIGION AND SCIENCE’

■ The greatest scientist of the age, he has been called: many would say the greatest scientist of all
time, and few would leave him out of the top three, with Newton and Darwin. Not an
experimentalist, and only an average mathematician, Einstein’s supreme gift was his
unprecedented, unparalleled imagination, guided by a kind of scientifically disciplined aesthetic.
Great scientists look toward the far horizon and see that what is ‘obvious’ to common sense can be
wrong. If you make a wildly counter-intuitive assumption and follow it through to its conclusion,
you can—if you are a genius like Einstein—arrive at a wholly new kind of ‘obvious’. Nobody has
ever done this kind of thing better than Einstein. We will encounter his thoughts on relativity later
in the book. Here I have chosen a meditation on religion—in the special Einsteinian sense of the
word which, despite his notorious fondness for figures of speech such as ‘God’ or ‘The Old One’, is
probably best characterized as ‘atheistic pantheism’. ■

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply
felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to
understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force
behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present
themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and
belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most
varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it
is above all fear that evokes religious notions—fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at
this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human
mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these
fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out
actions and of- fering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to
generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am
speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the
formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the
beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged
class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in
order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common
cause in their own interests.

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The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and
the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and
support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence,
who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the
believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life itself;
the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the
social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral
religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples,
especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion
of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples’ lives.

And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples
purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all
religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of
social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general,
only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to
any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which
belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious
feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as
there is no anthropomorphic conception of God cor- responding to it.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sub- limity and marvelous order
which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses
him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many
of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from
the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which
knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose
central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find
men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by
their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like

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Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to
no definite notion of a God and no the- ology? In my view, it is the most important function of art
and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual
one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as
irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of
the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being
who interferes in the course of events—provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of
causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral
religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a
man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be
responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science
has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical
behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious
basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of
punishment and hope of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.
On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive
for scien- tific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion
without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the
strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities
of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to
understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton
must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of
celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its
practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who,
surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the
world and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid
realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their
purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A
contempor- ary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific
workers are the only profoundly religious people.

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 Carl Sagan

from PALE BLUE DOT

■ Unlike the palaeontologists, Carl Sagan’s poetry of earth came from viewing our planet from the
outside, as the pale blue dot that would be the last thing any of us would see of it if we could ever leave
our native parish and travel outbound through the eternal cold. Read Sagan’s words. Read them again.
Read them for that special kind of humility which only science can give, the special kind of humility
with which this book began, and which we cannot afford to forget. ■

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you
know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The
aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic
doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful
child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’,
every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote
of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all
those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner
of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position
in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great
enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come
from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near
future, to which our species could mi- grate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment
the Earth is where we make our stand.

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It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-build- ing experience. There is perhaps
no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To
me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and
cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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