We were approaching the lynx cage. Despite a certain embarrassment, I felt joy. Now the nightmare of so many days was about to disappear down the lynxes’ throats. I thought: here I was, accompanying my aunt on her final passage and I felt sorry that I might be saying goodbye to the corpse, to all that struggle, which had cost me so much effort and energy. Father, as if eavesdropping on my thoughts and hearing the word “funeral,” took his hat off and followed the cart bareheaded. The Girl let go of my hand and lowered her head. Crows cawed among the treetops.
The lynxes, furry and excited, their eyes burning with a healthy appetite, crowded at the bars. Father raised the metal trap door at the bottom of the cage and slid in the torso. The animals began to eat. We watched how quickly and skillfully they dealt with the awkward body, how before our eyes the corpse was changing and losing its form. When the female ate her way through the side bearing the marks of my old girls’ teeth, I sighed a sigh of relief. The corpse lost its attributes, was stripped of its personality. Finally, there was just a heap of bones of the floor of the cage. Father unbuttoned his sheepskin, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I looked into his eyes and recognized them; he winked at me discreetly. His waistcoat was red. The Girl cuddled up to me and put her arm around me.
We became a family.
13
AUNTIE RETURNED FROM THE SANATORIUM ALL WARM AND tan. She wrapped herself around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. I felt a little awkward with her. I was at a loss how to explain the presence of her corpse in the bathtub, and then I was a little thrown by her new shawl and beret, the new buttons on her familiar coat. A long absence always creates that sort of distance. But Auntie was practical and good-natured, as usual.
“I haven’t seen you for so long,” she was speaking quickly, “how have you been getting on, my boy? I bet the flat is a dump, God have mercy on me. Why haven’t you written? I was beginning to get worried, believe it or not. Have you been attending your lectures? I presume the place is just as I left it.”
Weighed down by Auntie’s bag I walked beside her, smiling. I didn’t even try to answer any of her questions, knowing she wouldn’t give me time to form a sentence. Auntie took me under my arm and chattered away.
“Shall we take a taxi? But I see they’re all taken. We’ll take a droshky, or let’s go on foot. Such wonderful sunshine. Let’s run.”
Holding me fast by my arm she broke into a trot. She was running down the pavement, sweeping the passersby out of her way. Auntie’s heavy bag dragged me down, knocking about my knees. I was beginning to run out of breath. I watched Auntie’s face, hoping it would soon be covered in sweat, and she would run out of breath too. Nothing of the sort. Auntie was trotting along, splashing mud with her boots. Apparently the sanatorium did her a lot of good. Before I knew it I was hanging off her arm, shuffling my feet just fast enough to keep my balance.
“How about some coffee?” Auntie screamed into my ear.
We were just approaching a coffee shop. I couldn’t answer. I could hardly breathe and my eyes were watering. We burst into the coffee shop like a hurricane. Auntie ordered two coffees and two cakes. Munching forlornly on the cake, I listened to the outpouring of words from my auntie. There was no way I could get a word in edgewise or explain anything. At least I was pleased I didn’t have to run with a heavy bag down a muddy street.
We covered the distance from the coffee shop to home at a more reasonable pace. Once inside, without taking her coat off, Auntie went into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed. Climbing up the stairs had taken some air out of her at last. Inside the four walls of our flat, I began to see the old signs of tiredness and age in her features once again. The moment of rest didn’t last long, though. She got up, took off her coat and boots and began pottering about the flat. I didn’t help her with her coat. At that point, my smallest gesture would have been irrelevant and meaningless before the decisive, impending moment. I sprawled on the bed, listening to Auntie clattering around in the kitchen. I was waiting.
At last the door to the bathroom squeaked. I got up. I couldn’t resist participating in the most dramatic moment of the whole adventure. Auntie stood over the bath, shaking her head.
“Boy, boy, boy,” she said with reproach, “why did you bring all these plants in here? And how could you clutter the whole bathtub like this? I bet you didn’t take a single bath while I was away, did you, you dirty boy. Help me move these plants.”
With some reluctance I began to shift the old araucaria while Auntie picked up the two cacti and we took them back to the room. My little altar ceased to exist. The scraps of the corpse littering the bathtub among the ice were cold and devoid of any charisma. Auntie clutched at her head.
“Jerzy,” she cried, “what have you been doing here? Get the brush, let’s clean it quickly. Pull up your sleeves, you’ll get your shirt dirty.”
I got down to cleaning the bathtub. The torso presented the biggest problem. Though gutted, it was still quite heavy. But Auntie helped me. We carried it onto the kitchen balcony and hung it out on the balustrade.
Just then, on the neighboring balcony, Mrs. Malinowska was beating her carpets. Seeing Auntie, she sent her a radiant smile and the two ladies exchanged pleasantries. I took the last remains outside in a bucket and chucked them into the rubbish bin.
Auntie poured half a packet of cleaning powder into the bathtub and, armed with brushes, we started scrubbing it clean.
GUYS LIKE ME BY DOMINIQUE FABRE
Dominique Fabre, born in Paris and a lifelong resident of the city, exposes the shadowy, anonymous lives of many who inhabit the French capital. In this quiet, subdued tale, a middle-aged office worker, divorced and alienated from his only son, meets up with two childhood friends who are similarly adrift. He’s looking for a second act to his mournful life, seeking the harbor of love and a true connection with his son. Set in palpably real Paris streets that feel miles away from the City of Light, a stirring novel of regret and absence, yet not without a glimmer of hope.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/guys-like/
I CALLED HIM NECKTIE BY MILENA MICHIKO FLAŠAR
Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents’ home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a salaryman who has lost his job. The two discover in their sadness a common bond. This beautiful novel is moving, unforgettable and full of surprises.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/called-necktie/
WHO IS MARTHA? BY MARJANA GAPONENKO
In this rollicking novel, 96-year-old ornithologist Luka Levadski foregoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Martha—the last of the now-extinct passenger pigeons—died. Levadski himself has an acute sense of being the last of a species. This gloriously written tale mixes piquant wit with lofty musings about life, friendship, aging and death.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/martha/
ALL BACKS WERE TURNED BY MAREK HLASKO
Two desperate friends—on the edge of the law—travel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov’s younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov’s business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn’t help that a beautiful German widow is rooming next door. A story of passion, deception, violence and betrayal, conveyed in hardboiled prose reminiscent of Hammett and Chandler.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/backs-turned/
ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER BY Y
ITZHAK GORMEZANO GOREN
This is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes sexual hypocrisies and portrays a vanished polyglot world of horse-racing, seaside promenades and nightclubs.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/alexandrian-summer/
COCAINE BY PITIGRILLI
Paris in the 1920s—dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero, Tito Arnaudi, invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and retains its venom even today.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/cocaine/
SOME DAY BY SHEMI ZARHIN
On the shores of Israel’s Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Some Day is a gripping family saga, a sensual and emotional feast that plays out over decades. This is an enchanting tale about tragic fates that disrupt families and break our hearts. Zarhin’s hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel’s larger national story.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/some-day/
THE MISSING YEAR OF JUAN SALVATIERRA BY PEDRO MAIRAL
At the age of nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of canvases on which he detailed six decades of life in his village on Argentina’s frontier with Uruguay. After his death, his sons return to deal with their inheritance: a shed packed with rolls over two miles long. But an essential roll is missing. A search ensues that illuminates links between art and life, with past family secrets casting their shadows on the present.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-missing-year-of-juan-salvatierra/
THE GOOD LIFE ELSEWHERE BY VLADIMIR LORCHENKOV
The very funny—and very sad—story of a group of villagers and their tragicomic efforts to emigrate from Europe’s most impoverished nation to Italy for work. An Orthodox priest is deserted by his wife for an art-dealing atheist; a mechanic redesigns his tractor for travel by air and sea; and thousands of villagers take to the road on a modern-day religious crusade to make it to the Italian Promised Land. A country where 25 percent of its population works abroad, remittances make up nearly 40 percent of GDP and alcohol consumption per capita is the world’s highest – Moldova surely has its problems. But as Lorchenkov vividly shows, it’s also a country whose residents don’t give up easily.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-good-life-elsewhere/
KILLING THE SECOND DOG BY MAREK HLASKO
Two down-and-out Polish con men living in Israel in the 1950s scam an American widow visiting the country. Robert, who masterminds the scheme, and Jacob, who acts it out, are tough, desperate men, exiled from their native land and adrift in the hot, nasty underworld of Tel Aviv. Robert arranges for Jacob to run into the widow who has enough trouble with her young son to keep her occupied all day. What follows is a story of romance, deception, cruelty and shame. Hlasko’s writing combines brutal realism with smoky, hard-boiled dialogue, in a bleak world where violence is the norm and love is often only an act.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/killing-the-second-dog/
FANNY VON ARNSTEIN: DAUGHTER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT BY HILDE SPIEL
In 1776 Fanny von Arnstein, the daughter of the Jewish master of the royal mint in Berlin, came to Vienna as an 18-year-old bride. She married a financier to the Austro-Hungarian imperial court, and hosted an ever more splendid salon which attracted luminaries of the day. Spiel’s elegantly written and carefully researched biography provides a vivid portrait of a passionate woman who advocated for the rights of Jews, and illuminates a central era in European cultural and social history.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/fanny-von-arnstein-daughter-of-the-enlightenment/
To purchase these titles and for more information please visit newvesselpress.com.
Killing Auntie Page 10