by John Freeman
But, most important, she has recovered her memory and her clarity of mind, even though she can’t express them by ordinary language. She can’t read or write either (mixed aphasia is the medical term for her condition) and her CT scan shows a huge eclipse in the left parietal lobe, where the damaged cerebral area was removed. We often joke about that together, saying that she used to talk too much anyway. The few words she can now utter, sometimes repetitively (echolalically) or in a special syntax, are, despite causing her enormous frustration, an endless source of outlandishness, wit and humor. Imagine someone with a complex interior life who can express herself only in semi-haiku with a limited vocabulary.
The stroke made my mother a poet. It was not I who wrote the daily notes that were to become the long fragmentary poem that is my first book, Vîntureasa de plastic, but she who suggested image after image, disclosed metaphor after metaphor, dictated word after word, drumming the rhythm of each line against the hospital bed. I became her voice in another dimension. I just transcribed; I was the carbon paper between her and the rest of the world. That was the reason I kept the manuscript in my desk drawer for six years and published it only when I knew for certain that I had written for my own sake, that I had not traded on my family’s tragedy just to make literature, that I hadn’t flaunted my pain and my despair for the sake of literary glory. Moreover, I needed time to put up with the indecency effect triggered by displaying myself through poetry.
She gave me an artistic voice. Sometimes I think my mother sacrificed her own brain for me to make a proper entrance in literature. And sometimes I think the opposite—that my entry to literature required my mother’s sacrifice. Anyway, I have no idea what kind of writer I would have become without my mother’s metamorphosis and I will never be able to genuinely enjoy the gift of poetry—which I have abandoned ever since, for that matter. With every positive review, with every literary award, with every public reading, with every translation of my poems, I became more certain that I had been given poetry only to renounce it. For how could I have kept writing poetry after that and about something else? If I truly am or if I ever was a poet, then I am the poet of only one book, just as I am the son of only one mother.
In all these years, I must admit, I lost my patience with my mother several times. I was tired and I rebuked her, I yelled at her, I once lost my temper and even bullied her. I apologized in tears and felt ashamed. I feel very ashamed even now, when thinking about it. Actually—what am I saying?—sometimes it was and still is quite hard. But neither my father nor I would ever admit to that. Compassion still embarrasses us; admiration of our devotion embarrasses us even more. Because we love her the way she is, and love is not pompous, it is not inflated, it bears all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Endures all things.
—
Marius Chivu
Translated from the Romanian by Alexandra Coliban
My problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to be for the way I’ve been. I’m either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all sorry.
My problem is some nights I come in late and forget to lock the door behind me. Some nights I leave the porch light on. Some nights I have been touching my knee to another’s beneath a table.
My problem is I spend a great deal of my time curating warm, inviting workspaces that I do not then use. I am always moving my desk from one room to another, always rearranging the furniture then walking into it in the night, always taking over the kitchen table.
My problem is I get an e-mail re: moment of silence but get it too late and the moment has passed and the moment was silent—I can recall it, only a half hour or so earlier—but while the moment was silent, in that I was alone, working, and silent, I did not, I don’t think, use the moment to consider those we’ve lost, their sacrifices, nor the losses and sacrifices of their families, as instructed. At least these were not considered any more so than they ordinarily are, which is a little. My problem is I have my own moment of silence and think not of victims, their families, but of the perpetrators, and the wrong ones, the early ones, their trench coats.
My problem is not that I can’t find my phone, keys, wallet, sunglasses, regular glasses, shoes, purse, book, pen, lipstick, earrings, watch, mug of cold coffee, but that I suspect these things are all hanging out somewhere without me.
My problem is I don’t miss you.
My problem is I could not imagine how final death is and neither could you.
My problem is I have the job she never got to have and the education she never got to have and I’m intimidating and not as nurturing as anyone thought I’d be. My problem is I didn’t convert. My problem is I’m all set.
My problem was born in Las Vegas at University Medical Center on April 28, 1957. My problem was almost fifty. My problem taught me to drive stick shift, to buy two boxes of dye, for we had the same thick hair. My problem taught me the names of all my body parts and that I decided who could and could not touch them. My problem is I never got to say goodbye, or I was always saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye so the meaning absconded, as meaning does.
My problem is I grew up poor. My problem is I’m not as well read as he thought I’d be. My problem is I’m derivative, a copy of a copy, all faded.
My problem is I have the thing where the wires in my brain are crossed and everything that’s supposed to be joyous is frightening. My problem is we married other people. My problem is I am hardly ever putting one foot in front of the other. I have a rock collection of rocks whose names I do not know and do not pretend to know.
My problem is I am only a little bothered by all of this, and want to change not at all.
—
Claire Vaye Watkins
Today we rode in the world’s most beautiful cab. A few minutes after we’d gotten in, the driver—middle-aged, and wearing glasses—passed us a notebook. Soojeong thought for a moment it was a Christian ambush, but the man explained that the book was where his clients wrote messages. While I was adding something, my wife found a second notebook, apparently much older. The first entry was from 2010. Fifteen minutes later we left the cab in Yeouido. Soojeong, who had been reading throughout the entire journey—she never does this as she suffers from car sickness—had tears in her eyes. She had read several messages, and even a short poem about the wind written by the cabdriver. It was a simple poem, pretty, not at all sentimental, she told me. But what impressed her most was that almost every one of the messages had an intimate, confessional tone. It was as if all those people had been waiting for that particular cab to unburden themselves. “I feel alone, my wife is hardly ever home, my son hates me.” “I’ve just come out of hospital. Apparently the diagnosis is more serious than I thought, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.” “On my way to see her for the second time. Very excited. I think she’s the best girl I’ve met in a long time.” “Our mother died today.” I guess it was life in a pure state, and for that reason my eyes also misted.
I once dated a woman who used to wake up in a bad mood because she had been wasting her time having dumb dreams. We argued about this a couple of times. I told her she couldn’t control what she dreamed, so there was no reason to be so enraged. No one dream is better than another. She knew this, but still went on complaining. Carl Jung said dreams aren’t completely personal; in fact, they are part of a great network. During deep, early-morning sleep, for two or three hours, we become tributaries of an interminable river, a universal dream. I woke this morning with the memory of a couple of ordinary, very common dreams. One included a speech by a Colombian politician. I lay there for quite a while, wondering why I had dreamed such a dream. It was uninspiring, and that made me feel ashamed, as if it was my duty to contribute to Jung’s communal experience with more intricate examples, like the one I had last winter, which had surprised me. It involved a town made of paper, and a thrilling escape from North Korea through a tunnel excavated in the floor of a beauty parlor.
We are i
nvited to a birthday celebration in a bar in Gangnam. The place is decorated differently from other establishments in the area: ultramodern lighting, roomy sofas, designer lamps. Ours is a bar for office workers with decor dating back to sometime in the nineties. A lot of wood and wallpaper. I order a whisky. The bow-tied waiter brings me an amber-colored tumbler, and a separate glass with a perfect specimen of ice. It is a single chunk the size of a tennis ball, cut like a diamond. I am obsessed by its geometric form, its many facets. They must have a machine just for making perfect chunks of ice. I pour in the whisky, and the ice glimmers like a star. I get bored. The birthday girl—supposedly a fashion designer—has decided to use her birthday as a sort of hijacking to promote her brand. A clothes rack begins to do the rounds, pushed by a friend who modeled for the catalogue all the guests are handed at some point in the evening. The supposed designer has left her job in a bank and wants to earn a living selling garments. A story shared by thousands of young Koreans fed up with abusive bosses, unpaid overtime, weekends spent in the office, useless meetings in which all that matters is appearances. I get bored. Fortunately there is that marvelous piece of arctic ice.
There was a flyer posted on the door. They’re usually for fast-food delivery services. This one was different. I couldn’t decipher it. I put it on the kitchen table rather than crumpling and binning it. In the evening, when Soojeong came back from the academy, I showed it to her. She explained that it’s a kind of illegal loan scheme. With just one phone call you can immediately obtain a sum of money without a guarantor or any documentation. You just have to sign a piece of paper. It’s a pretty common service. I asked her about repayments. Anyone who falls behind is beaten up, or worse. Before we went to sleep, she told me there was even an old story related to those loans: the debtors are kidnapped and taken to one of the thousands of tiny islands south of the peninsula. There, the loan sharks sell them as slave labor to the owners of anchovy boats.
—
Andrés Felipe Solano
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa in 1981 and moved to London with her family in 1986. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize; was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award; and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in 2013 and was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Mohamed was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. She lives in London and is working on her third novel.
The Stoker
NADIFA MOHAMED
Red brick and leaded glass, the smell of bleach and defeat. The Employment Exchange has the atmosphere of a church; job notices flutter from the walls like paper prayers, and council workers dole out state relief with the aloofness of priests placing wafers into indigent mouths. Out-of-work miners, dockworkers, drivers, handymen, barrel boys, plumbers, and factory workers mill around, avoiding each other’s eyes. The pinewood floor is dented by the tramp of work boots near the counter and littered with cigarette butts and matches.
‘WELDER NEEDED’
‘TEN YEARS’ EXPERIENCE NECESSARY’
‘UNDER 21 YRS?’
‘APPRENTICESHIPS’
‘CARPENTERS NEEDED’
‘GRAVEDIGGING’
Mahmood shoves his hands into his sports jacket and paces from one notice to another, looking for boiler or foundry work. He has only shrapnel in his pocket, having lost the rest at poker. There is nothing worth trying for; none of the usual firms that can be relied upon to take coloured fellas are advertising. He looks again at the grave-digging notice; it’s for Western Cemetery, the pay not half bad, but the thought of shoveling hard, damp earth and filling it with stiff corpses makes him shake his head and mutter, ‘Astaghfirullah.’
Pulling his trilby hat low over his eyebrows he takes a yellow ticket stamped 9 and waits his turn at the counter, standing beside one of the heavy coiled radiators. The heat from the cast iron blasts through his thin trousers and teases his skin, somewhere between pleasure and pain, and he rocks his body back and forth, letting the heat rise and dissipate. On the last tramper he had taken, the owners had installed new boilers and all the brass fittings had shone gold in the white light of the furnaces. He had stepped back to admire the conflagration before shoveling more coal in and turning the white light into an almost sentient, colourless gas that roved backwards and up the chimney like a jinni escaping a lamp. He had birthed that fire and nurtured it from yellow to orange to white to blue and then the colour that had no name, just pure energy. He’d wondered what it would be like to step forward the few inches that separated him from it, whether his skin would just fall from his flesh like a sheet. He had been formed by those fires, turned from a puny pantry boy into a knotted-muscled stoker who could stand at hell’s gate for hours at a stretch, face roasted and grimy with coal dust.
‘Number 9, come forward.’
Mahmood takes the chair in front of counter 4 and places his hat on his knee before handing over his grey identity card.
The woman in front of him wears a brown tweed suit and maroon lipstick, her hair done up with a net over the large bun. She looks at Mahmood over the rims of small wire-framed glasses. ‘What can I do for you, Mr. Mattan?’
‘I need national assistance, no job good for me.’
‘What work can you do?’ she asks, lengthening each word.
‘Boiler work. Quarry.’
‘Let me see if there is anything else we are yet to pin up.’
She looks through the files on her side of the partition; her manner is pleasant, better than that of some of the other clerks, who seem to resent him whether he is looking for work or drawing dole.
‘There is one foundry job here but I don’t think you will be suitable,’ she says, leaving the rest unsaid.
He meets her gaze, swallows a bitter smile.
She stamps his card in the right places and counts out two pounds and six shillings.
‘Have a pleasant day, Mr. Mattan.’
‘And you, madam.’
Mahmood rises and folds the pound notes into his pocketbook before putting on his hat and leaving the melancholia of the Exchange for the thud and clamour of the racetrack.
A good day at the races in the end, just over ten pounds in winnings from an each-way bet on a colt with 11/2 odds. Mahmood had changed his bet at the last moment after catching sight of the fine black colt in the paddock, and he could have sworn the animal nodded to him as it passed by on the groom’s reins. A lucky name too, Abyssinia. Names beginning with an A are always good to him and he has visited Abyssinia, another sign he should lean more on the A’s; so far he has won on
Achtung
Ambitious Daisy
Apache
Artist
Angel Song
Artois
Arkansas’ Pride
Atlantic Revelry
He should also hand over five pounds quickly to Doc Madison for the lodging room in Davis Street before it slips through his fingers and the fool gets on his back. The rest he will spend on the boys and Laura, treat them now that he has paid off the court fine. It had been a mistake that last time, not just theft but sacrilege on the charge sheet; he had taken things too far, and it had turned them all against him. The shoes piled up outside the zawiya on Fridays seemed fair game—you could come with one pair and leave with another with no real bother—but the zakat money was haram. Only Berlin was talking to him now. Passing the cinema, he looks up to see what pictures they have on. The Greatest Show on Earth still, Babes in Baghdad, and Othello. He will watch Babes in Baghdad tomorrow but turns his nose up at Othello when he realises that the turbaned figure on the poster is a white man in dark make-up and a curly wig. The A-boards outside the newsagents are still plastered with
photographs from London: the flag at Buckingham Palace at half-mast, Churchill in his felt stovetop paying his respects, the newly minted queen in the backseat of a car with her eyes fixed ahead; the king’s death turning into a Hollywood production when everyone knows he was a weak man, pampered from birth, unmanned by wealth and too much ease.
Mahmood stumbles over a loose cobblestone and corrects his balance self-consciously, looking left and right. His steps look strange, flat-footed, as painful corns force him to wear shoes too large for his feet. He had learnt to do the black man’s walk early on in Cardiff: to walk with his shoulders high, his elbows pointed out, his feet sliding slowly over the ground, his chin buried in his collar, and his hat low over his brow, giving away nothing apart from his masculinity, a human silhouette in movement. Even now, he flinches when passing gangs of Welshmen when they’ve been at the boozer or on rugby days; everything might seem calm, normal, when suddenly a fist comes into his face as hard as concrete, the shock of it knocking all words out of his head. The laughter as they pass on, the attacker giddy and loud with self-congratulation, the shame hotter than a furnace. Other black sailors keep a knife or razor in a pocket but with him the risks are too high: the police know him by name, they might search for a stolen watch and find the razor or knife and then what? Two years for an offensive weapon. He has perfected not being seen, he knows people call him ‘the ghost’ and this satisfies him, it helps with the work and reminds him of the characters in the comic books he picks up for his eldest boy: Kid Eternity, Grim Reaper, Captain Comet.