Tell it to The Dog

by Robert Power

  It was mid-afternoon and the couple decided to have a break. They left the car and headed down the sloped grassland that led to a small reservoir. They looked at each other without saying a word, but both had the same sense. Something terrible had happened here. It was in the air. It was in the stillness. It was reflected on the surface of the water. She bent down and picked up a jawbone. The few remaining teeth were molars and the jaw was cracked. A sheep? A goat? They walked on in silence, slightly apart. There was a quality of cold all around. A stifled moment. They headed back to the car. He opened the door and she sat in the passenger seat. He looked once more back down the hill as if he expected to see something else. Then he got into the car. She turned to him. Then she spoke.

  BISHKEK

  The national flag has thirty-five flames, one for each of the country’s nomadic tribes. Even during the Soviet days the old ways continued, Kyrgyzstan being so very far from the seat of government and control in Moscow. So now, many years after the fall of the USSR, this proud people are being squeezed and starved by a presidential elite. Tonight we assemble in the opera house to witness Spartacus, the ballet. The auditorium is grand and sumptuous; the frescoes on the domed ceiling are brightly coloured and evocative. The seats are full with families who have grown to love fine culture and art: a true legacy of the Soviet era. I sit in the front row and can see directly into the orchestra pit. The performance progresses and the Greek army dances back and forth across the stage, depicting the apocryphal story of the courageous and brave overcoming the greater avaricious foe. I am taken by the young oboist in the orchestra. He plays his part, then slumps forward, closes his eyes and seems to sleep, only then to sit up a bar or two before his next contribution to the score. He seems so tired, so weary. When the show is over he is the first to vacate the orchestra pit.

  Later that night, in the ‘jazz bar’ in town, there’s the same young man, playing a Western medley on the piano. In the midst of his improvisation I pick out ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Cry Me a River’. He looks spent and dispirited: the monkey chained to the organ grinder.

  In a month’s time I’ll be back in my hometown, watching on the television news as the violent revolution unfolds on the streets of Bishkek. The president is overthrown and his palace is ransacked. An iconic photo circulates of a group of revolutionaries in the president’s private office. Papers are strewn on the floor, furniture is broken and the portrait of the leader is defaced. There in the group is the young musician, bright-eyed and smiling, no instrument in sight.

  BINOCULARS ON THE VOLGA

  Volgograd. Stalingrad. What history. What stories. Standing on the edge of the Volga River I watch the crowds walk by on the opposite bank. My new binoculars bring the faces into sharp relief. It is the older people I seek out. Those who may have been children as the siege and bombardment ensued: the starvation, the city crushed to rubble and dust. I zoom in on a man sitting on a bench, leaning against a walking stick. His face is worn and deeply lined. A few wisps of white hair hang from the crumpled beret he wears. I do the maths in my head. If he is eighty, which he looks to be, he would have been a teenager or younger during the battle of all battles. What might he have done? What would he have seen? Smelt? Heard? Felt? Tasted? …

  ‘Ooooh!’ There’s a mighty thump in the small of my back and I am hurtled forward. Stumbling to keep my balance, I turn to face the aggressor. Standing facing me is a ragged man on crutches. He has only one leg, which he thrusts back and forward with threatening intent. He has long, wild, straggly hair and wilder eyes. He lurches forward again, aiming his foot at my chest. I jump backwards as he hurls abuse at me in a garbled Russian I don’t understand. A passer-by joins in.

  ‘Girls!’ she says, spitting the word in my direction.

  She points across to the opposite side of the river where groups of young people are basking on the grass in the sunshine. The man charges again, pivoting on his crutches.

  ‘Nyet, nyet,’ I say, trying to explain, backing off, resisting the temptation to strike out in self-defence. ‘Nyet girls.’ But I don’t have the words. They both glare at me. So I turn and walk away, my binoculars hanging from my neck. I squint, seeking out the old man on the bench. My eyesight is not so good, but there he is, leaning forward as if he too is looking intently across the river, seeking out a face, looking for an answer.

  THE NEW PRESIDENT

  In Monas Park, Jakarta, with the symbolic flame of independence burning high on its obelisk, ‘Joko’, the newly elected president of Indonesia, runs from one end of the stage to the other. He’s a self-professed heavy-metal fan and gives the impression of being the front man scanning his adoring crowd. And adoring they are, in their millions. This is the man of hope. The man from the factory. He who was voted mayor of his small town, catapulted to being the governor of Jakarta and now head of this 250-million-strong country.

  Earlier in the day, the ranks of the power elite, the military leaders and the dynasties that had clasped a stranglehold on government for so long, smiled graciously in their glamour and grandeur as they gathered for the inauguration. Now, out of the limelight, watching the live telecast from the park in the centre of the city, they wait for the time when this Joko leaps into the mosh pit to disappear into the maddening crowd, to be trampled underfoot, and to harken the call from the masses for a return to the rightful order.

  NATIONAL COMPETITION

  It’s the last day of his two-week input for the World Health Organization. As he showers in his hotel bathroom his mind is filled with the challenges of encouraging the Minister for Health to expand the response to HIV beyond the current hospital sites. To make progress we need aggressive and targeted outreach programs. He’s spent all of yesterday at the Medical Academy presenting the latest modelling data that showed the importance of keeping the infection rates below 5 per cent among the highrisk populations. He turns off the slow-flowing tepid water and reaches for the thin scratchy towel hanging from the rack. It’s then he has his moment of inspiration. He’s seen on a poster in the lobby that the national tourist board is running a competition for a slogan to attract visitors. He smiles as he formulates his entry. He runs it around in his mind, letting the words find their place. He grabs a scrap of paper and finds a pen. He will make his mark in this country. He will make a difference.

  Kyrgyzstan is hard to spell – it only has one vowel. We should print the country name on every hotel towel.

  SIX

  Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

  —Virginia Woolf

  WORDS

  Fiction is not true, but it is real. Memoirs may not be real, but might be true. Words to fill a hole in the writer, and, some will tell you, to fill a hole in the reader. This need to create: a blessing and a curse. The strangeness of words, letters, on a page: zoom down, telescope, hone, focus, encapsulate, atomise, firm, make real; experiences, emotions, commonalities, humanness, love, hope, birth, death, marriage, friendship, the x number of stories of human existence, God, spirituality, beauty, food, brutality, time, childhood, ageing, visage, colour, taste, all of worldly and other-worldly experiences and more.

  A cacophonic implosion and explosion of words, letters: an atom bomb of the alphabet.

  THE WORM

  When I read D.H. Lawrence’s poem about the snake, it stirred the smell of the cloying mud of the bombsite we kids played on in the middle of our street in north London. We all knew the World War II story of the doodlebug bomb that had exploded on the five houses (numbers 55 to 63), killing twelve people and bouncing Mr Baker, our next-door neighbour, right out of his bath and onto the tiled floor. The bombsite was a no-man’s-land between the terraced houses and we treated it as such. One group of boys would dig in at one end and be Germans; the others would go to the other side and be British. Rocks and half-bricks would be grenades and mortars. Battle would commence, all the better in the rain or sleet. This particular day I was
on my own, wandering through the mud and debris, imagining myself to be behind enemy lines on a secret, intrepid mission. It was then I saw the worm. It was creamy grey, longer and fatter than usual. I stooped down and touched the circular bands that pulsated as it wriggled along. One bright pink ring was thicker and rawer than the others: a sign that it had been broken in half. I had a stone in my hand in case of German snipers. What enticed me to throw it at the worm I am not sure, but I did. As it squirmed away I picked up a brick and tossed that in the air, narrowly missing it. Then I threw more missiles until the worm was out of sight. I was panting heavily. Exertion? Guilt? Walking home I felt shame and guilt and deep, unknowable sadness.

  Many years later, with new bungalows completing the terrace, I read Lawrence’s poem and marvelled at how commonplace all our lives are, how similar and familiar are the actions and reactions and how beauty and the beast are but a stone’s throw apart.

  MR SOFTEE

  The little boy stood on the street corner, waving for me to stop. He almost stepped out in front of my van. I was slowing down, even though it wasn’t a regular spot, but I had to slow down in order to turn the corner onto Effingham Road. And what with the ice on the road and no gritters anywhere in sight. So I could see the pleading in his eyes and the way he leant towards me, wanting me to stop. So, What the hell, I thought, no one will notice. As I slowed to a halt I could see the happiness on the small boy’s face shrouded in the hood of his duffel coat, standing all alone. Down the road, maybe only fifty yards or so, was the queue of boys and girls waiting patiently for me. I opened the small glass window on the side of the van. The boy held up his hand, coins in palm.

  ‘Can I have an ice-cream, please, Mister Softee?’ he said, his eyes as big as oysters.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but why didn’t you wait with the other children?’

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have any ice-cream left. My dad always says that when you play your tune then you’ve sold all the ice-cream. But you never play the music until after you turn the corner.’

  SEASHORE

  What do you call? From where? A savanna, a plain, a tropical forest. Pineapples and pears and succulent leaves. A crimson, a lemon, a nightingale on a china plate. A frosted-glass window, opaque from the mist of an autumnal dew. Where is the whisper through the tall feathered grasses? A rumble on the crest of a breaking wave. In the night, against the jet-black blanket of the starless sky. Licking the shore and scratching the shingle. On a beach, through the seashells, on the cusp of the moon.

  JAR

  He remembered writing about pickled fruit, trapped in a glass jar. It was in one of the notebooks, in the big wooden chest that a friend traded for one of his pictures of blue tigers. He has put together a collection of short stories called (as a working title) Short, Shorter, Shortest. But he keeps remembering ones that aren’t there. He recollects writing them, but is unsure as to what happened to them. Some, he knows, will be in the wooden box. He imagines himself lifting the lid, taking out the dozens of variously shaped and sized notebooks and searching for lost stories. There he is, on a winter’s night, the radio tuned to the classical music station, a single light on his desk, he mining for hidden treasure, nuggets and seams of gold. The fruit will be long pickled in that jar by now, tucked away somewhere, in the dark, in the corner of a notebook, ripe and ready to nourish and enliven.

  PRESENT

  Sometime in the fourteenth century (or thereabouts). Somewhere in Algeria (maybe). Someone is doing his best to explain himself (Augustine, to be a saint one day, for a certainty). Let’s say the two are walking on a dusty road (possibly). They both wear the robes of monks (imagine). One is taller and older than the other (likely). There is (was) (could be) a warm breeze.

  ‘Let me explain by way of example,’ says (Saint) Augustine. ‘When you told me about that olive tree of your childhood, you talked about visiting your family farm as a man, seeing that tree, running your fingers over the smooth bark, smelling the air. It brought back memories of your boyhood. You were there, as a man, in the present moment, reliving the “past” in relation to then. The “past” became the present past. More than became, it was the present past. Your past in the present moment. Just as your thoughts of the growing tree, the orchard, your family, are – will be – the present future.’

  If he (Augustine; Saint by now) said this, this is how I would have retold it (had I heard it) on a train (probably) on the way to Prague (possibly).

  THE WOOD THAT FRINGED THE TOWN

  Not quite a forest, but more than a wood. Woods. Something between the expanse and extent of the two. A copse in the plural. More of a feeling than a dimension. The woods that swept up the hillside, overlooking the town. Keeping watch. A thick covering of wood and leaf. Deep greens, almost black. A mossy curtain veiling the movement and activity on the ground. The grand deciduous trees that towered over the town, standing silent as tacit observers to the centuries of joy and hope, tragedy and sadness that had been acted out in the streets and houses and parks below.

  A FINE VIEW

  A broadening. A mountain top fringed with a mauve mist that covered the pine trees and hid away the caves and gullies that offered shelter for the weary climber. A vast expanse, dappled and pied blues of azure and Mediterranean hues. A deep valley, from one side to the other. A sky and an orb, a globe and a sphere. A crystal chandelier, glistening and turning slowly in the ballroom, like a waltz: all tails and copious frocks. Music of the mind, as the second hand traces its course around the face of the clock.

  COLOURS

  This is a picture. There is colour on this page. Purple and apricot patches. Lemon groves stand out against a white-blue sky, with mackerel clouds tinged with the black and orange of the tiger that stalks the forest. Rivulets of scarlet and pink oil lace the scape in a spider’s web. Drips like rain cling to the mauve of the mountains, layer upon layer, building a topography with humps of rich and tasty colour. Chocolate browns vie with vermilion as they climb from the canvas. The deep olive green and the red epaulets of the colonel’s jacket in duel; the black-and-white flash of the magpie catches the sun as it flowers in the haze of the valley. There is shape on this page. This is a picture. Angles twist and turn the shades from blue to green, marking out the bright red badge of the robin’s breast as she sits atop the gardener’s spade. Blocks form territories of oval and square, their perimeters marked by the spray and splash of colour, the fence and frame of line. The coral spiral of the sun, a ram’s horn snail of yellow to orange and crimson, a Catherine wheel swirling and pushing the sky and clouds to the edge of the page. And there on the tip of the brush, a drop in the ocean to cool the slate-grey cliff face waiting at the sweep of the bay.

  JOURNEY

  Which train? Which platform?

  The tracks are rusted, empty bottles, a doll, two rats fight over crumbs dropped by passengers, departing, arriving; more debris between the tracks and railway sleepers. Barely lit is the station concourse: a cathedral, an empty space to hold the hopes and dreams, goodbye kisses, welcome embraces. I look up to the departure board, squint and scratch my head. I look at my ticket: again. It bears no link to times and destinations shown. I peel and eat a tangerine I’d kept for the journey. Look again at my ticket lest it has changed in my pocket. No. The juice from the tangerine stings my dry lips. From Platform 1 a whistle blows. Steam rises from the funnel of the train, hisses from the wheels. I take up my suitcase. Walk quickly from the barrier. Board a carriage. Find a seat. Where to? I only know that I must leave.

  LIFE STORY

  I got in a bit of a mess and muddle about words and writing. What it all means: the business of placing one word, one letter, one sentence, paragraph, page, book or library after the other. That kind of thing. Not the first, I know, not by any means. So, along with all the basic existential musings and meanderings, it got me to wonder how succinct it could all be. Not along the lines of tweeting and blogging and all that endless chatter. More to do with ho
w to really use words; to fine-tune, pare down. Then I found this notebook to take on my work trip to Lhasa in Tibet. No lines or blank pages, but rather a grid of eight hundred and sixty-four squares. So I began putting a letter in each square and turn that into a word and build a story using each square. So the little stories grew, letter by letter. A life in a grid.

  FIELDS

  When their father died, each of the five sons inherited an equal share of the farm. They all lived as they had done all their lives, in the big farmhouse that butted onto all the fields. There was little difference between the five portions, but so as to be totally fair, sticks with numbers on them had been drawn to match the five segments. There were no complaints. One built a golf course; the second sold to a developer; the third made a theme park; the fourth, holiday chalets. Only the fifth, the youngest of the brothers, continued to farm. Over time his four brothers got lazy and fat and moved away to the city. Jack, for that was the name of the farmer son, filled the empty house with waifs and strays who had left the city, disillusioned with shattered promises. They worked the fields and grew healthy and strong on the food they produced. Travellers on planes flying overhead marvelled at the rich green patch among the greys and dusty browns.

  THE GHOST PLATES

  Whenever I went to a second-hand shop or a flea market I’d look out for art deco plates. Mainly saucers or side plates. Though I did once pick up a cake stand. I loved the shapes and the patterns. Over time I amassed a nice collection of about thirty or so pieces. I kept them on shelves or in a cupboard in the kitchen. One evening, for no apparent reason and for the first time ever, I brought them all together and laid them out on the large dining table we had in the living room. They made a nice display. This was around the time we spoke of the ghost who lived in the house with us. Margaret, we called her. She was mischievous, pulling blankets off the bed as we slept. And she seemed to always linger in the hallway between the kitchen and the lounge. So when there was an almighty crash in the night and the sounds of shattered crockery, she became the obvious suspect. Hurrying downstairs from the bedroom I found a scene of devastation. A shelf had somehow come loose from the wall above the table, sending a pile of books cascading below. Shards of pottery covered the carpet. There was even shrapnel embedded in the walls. Not one single plate was intact. We looked around at the wreckage, then at each other, saying nothing, waiting to hear the murmur of Margaret’s laughter in the dark.