by Drago Jancar
The dodgem jockey, clinging uninvited to your car—your one, the one you’ve paid, downpayed for—represents the figure of the stranger lodged within the home. He’s the Unheimliche, the Uncanny, stuck onto you like an incubus. What better image for the gypsy in the popular imagination, its fantasies and fears? Within the fairground, this rickety, nomadic mobile city brought to you on trucks, the bumper-car ride, mise-en-scène of rickety mobility, sits like a miniature reproduction of the whole. These men, then, restlessly moving between moving cars, replicate yet again the overall condition of nomadism: a regressiveness that partakes of infinity. Through such endless repetitions, they both multiply and merge with other quasi-folkloric characters who populate the margins of our consciousness: with cowboys, for example, hired hands exhorting mutinous, anarchic herds to follow a course that, if no two of its individual paths are identical, nonetheless amalgamates to a coherent whole; or logjammers, riding the very masses they prod and corral, skipping between these as they bump and roll, teasing equilibrium from the rim of chaos; or linesmen dangling from pylons as sparks leap into the air around their heads, whispering into their ears (and only theirs) the static, white-noise secrets of the firmament.
In Paul Klee’s famous painting of (and here we loop back, like a dodgem, to an earlier motif) a hovering angel, Walter Benjamin discerns not just any angel: This one, he tells us, is the angel of history, who travels one way while facing the other, backward. Where mortals perceive a chain of separate events that amount to “progress,” the angel sees one single, ongoing catastrophe that piles wreckage upon wreckage, hurling it before his feet. Are dodgem jockeys angels of history too? I would say: Yes, they are. They’ve seen it all before: these circuits blurring into one, these endless crashes, disasters playing out as pleasure, roar of the generator merging with screams of girls, bellows of boys who hope to get into their pants later that night when the ride’s over, generate more generations, send more wreckage the angel’s way . . . They’ve seen the entire tapestry, its pattern. Free-floating witnesses, they were there: at your conception, and the universe’s, when circulating atoms deviated and collided.
[UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]
ROBERT MINHINNICK
Scavenger
1.
A night of fat stars.
The sky full of blister packs.
2.
Just like the sea. There are times when the sea’s as clean as I can remember. Others when it tries to spew everything out of itself. I could build a city from the plastic I kick through at the caves. A million sandwiches still in their packaging. Thousands of planks, six months, twenty years in the water, and yet I smell the forest. Those jewels of resin.
3.
Zigmas drowned. That’s what they said. Even before the deluge and the biggest waves. He could have escaped like the rest but he ran to the ghost train and hid in a carriage on the rail. In the dark.
He was one of the Lits, we all knew, from somewhere in the south of that country. Not the Baltic, where people would have understood the ocean.
Someone said Zigmas had never seen the sea before he arrived at the fairground. He told people his father was a mushroom seller. It seems he thought he might have been safe. But in the ghost train? What can you say about people like that? There was also a girl drowned in the subway, under the school mural. You know, I think they get what they deserve. Why should I worry about those simple kids?
4.
Breathing. That’s what I can hear. The stone, breathing. It’s what I’ve always heard in Pink Bay. No, not the sea sighing, because sometimes the tide is far away. But in this place, where the limestone meets the sandstone, the red bleeds into the grey, I can hear the stone itself. Its ancient exhalation.
I didn’t think like that as a child. It’s something I’ve gradually learned I’m able to do. If I pay enough attention. Because that’s something I’m good at. Paying attention. Yes, if I listen long enough I hear the sound of stone breathing.
But there are so many voices we never hear. Because we’ve forgotten how to listen. I mean really listen. Which is what I do when I come here.
Never alone now, are we? I mean, properly alone. That’s vanished. Think about most people. They have no idea what it’s like to be solitary. Or singular, a better word. What singularity can mean. Another reason to pity them.
5.
We used to bring cheese and bread. Packets of chocolate biscuits with milk for the morning. And booze, of course, that was the point. Dregs of sloe gin, the peppermint schnapps nobody ever drank, advocaat, grenadine. Anything we could filch unnoticed.
How bright those bottles were, our terrible cocktail. When I think of it now, they were the colours in the cave itself, yellows and purples, like bruised flesh. And the stone too, how alike it is to the human body, voluptuous and intricate.
In the candlelight we sang and played guitars, and I’d find my fingers straying to the stone. I’d stroke the stone as if it was alive. No matter the weather, that rock was always wet. And fissured like flesh, I discovered. Yes, one of my great discoveries.
6.
I think I’ve slept. I know I lay down and tried to make myself comfortable. The sandstone is hard. I had a sleeping bag with a blanket but it is so humid now I didn’t need it. The weather again is strange. But the weather’s always strange. These days. Neither was I sure of the tide, because the ocean doesn’t behave as you think it should. As the sea once did. But I know I lay down and thought. And dreamed a shark in the fairground. The mall was flooded, and someone said the types of tides we have today have not been seen since Neolithic times. No, millions of years, they said. It was a voice in my head said that. Someone whispering to me. A lover, almost. Another of my voices. There are so many.
The shark was lost, misplaced from the deeps. Yet a shark still, a shark bewildered, that shark a victim too, but a shark all the same, a grey glimpse, a shadow that shark, out of the dark shoals, a shape in the ruins with all the storm debris, the archipelagos of shit, the new atolls. A shark in the shallows.
So I shivered into and then out of sleep.
When I woke for the last time I tried to open my eyes. But all I could make out was the blood colour of my own eyelids. Exactly what you see when you gaze into the sun. The red colour of sea anemones. Their raw flesh on the rock, shivering to the touch, like wet flowers. And I rubbed my eyes but the red colour remained the same. So I squeezed my eyes and licked my lips, tasting last night’s supper, the wine crust around my lips, a ring of salt. Fierce that salt, its burn, its sting.
And a taste too of Lizzy’s mouth where she had kissed me that time long ago, Lizzy’s own wine-tasting tongue, the tang of her own salt, because all of us must taste the same now, wherever we are, though it’s hard to think many remain. I’d say we taste of salt and sand and cheap whisky, of the smoke we suck into ourselves. Yes, we taste of the sunblock we have to use, even when it rains. We taste of sweat, dirty-sweet, as we tasted of the smoke from our driftwood fire that night, the wrack burning green as iodine. That time we lit the fire. The time Lizzy kissed me.
Once we tasted of the seawater that poured through the kitchen of the Blue Dolphin café. When the drains ruptured and the tide was huge. There used to be a picture of a shark on the wall there. Maybe that’s why I dreamed. About the shark. No, there was no photo of a dolphin. And I tell you, it was real, that flood. Real in my dream. The arcades, the rides, all of it was underwater, and the shark grey in the black waters between the carousel horses and the characters from Star Trek, the horses with their names, Madeline and Myfanwy, painted on the golden poles. Someone said they were still going round, as the different currents pushed them one way and then pushed the other. Think of those dead children. Going round on the carousel.
And those Star Trek heroes? Each was drowned and swollen in the swell. I watched as the bears from the shies washed past, ruined of course, the pandas and koalas, the stuffing oozing out of the bad stitching. What they sold on those stalls was the ch
eapest gear possible. Sewn by slaves in Vietnam and Bangladesh. But imagine everything ruined and everything spoiled. All those prizes.
7.
I had expected the tide to wake me and was ready for that. But I was ahead of myself. Instead I awake to a crimson world, the sandstone redder than any stone I’ve ever seen, the sky pink, yes pink as that flower that grows in the dunes. Soapwort they call it. People long ago used to boil the roots to wash their clothes. I tell you, it’s well known. That pink flower, almost as tall as a man. Or maybe its seeds, I can’t remember, perhaps they boiled the seeds for soap. I’m still thinking about the shark, but finally my eyes are open. As I lie here astonished. By this crimson world.
Molten, this world. And I think, yes, I know this world. As it had been when it first formed. Volcanoes, their rivers of lava like the planet’s blood. This new world is where I lie and have awoken. The shape of the shark is still dark in my dream and the prize bears are floating on the tide, and everywhere the smell of rot. Deep down, the stink of rottenness. And a child’s shoe floating by.
8.
I lie where we always walked. It was a place famous amongst us. Others loved it, yes, generations had walked here, had been drawn to the red beach. There are patterns of white quartz that children always said was writing. I’d thought and said the same myself when I was young, when I looked at the quartz in the rock, a white language in the red sandstone, and tried to make sense of those hieroglyphics. As if it was an explanation. Yes, when I was eighteen I was certain the quartz said and meant something. If only I could decipher it. Which would be the challenge of a lifetime. And become my great work.
I’ve slept here once before, when I lay tracing with a wet forefinger the secret language. Who’s to say it wasn’t a warning? Who can be sure we haven’t already been told what will happen? The white lettering, gleaming, like crystal milk, ignored all this time. And now it’s too late.
That was the first flood. “The inundation” they called it on the news. These days the waves are higher and come further in. But the fairground reopened, as it always does. And the Blue Dolphin started up again, selling its cheap food. That food people around here were brought up to eat, the chips, the faggots, and peas. Twice to my knowledge it’s been flooded out, and twice tried again.
When Zigmas died many other people drowned, but I remember only Zigmas. That strawberry birthmark on his cheek, his hair so blond it was almost white. Yes, it’s only Zig I dream about, a boy running into the ghost train tunnel, thinking he’d be safe. People say the water rose to the roof, the hounds of hell floated away when their chains came loose. The hounds’ eyes were yellow as the quartz in the cave.
Most days now I’m out on the peninsula. Yes, the tides can be huge, but when the water’s low I explore the caves. Chilly places, even when it’s hot. And dark as dungeons. Once I found a drowned porpoise, its beak a mattock of polished bone. But when the sun is in the right place the light shines directly into the cavemouths. That’s when you see the starfish, the anemones.
Violet and red, those creatures. I listen to their breathing, the music they make.
Yes, since the inundation I’ve been relearning the old skills. Teaching myself what we should never have allowed ourselves to forget. That’s the reason I’ve decided to live here. Because my father told me he was a beachcomber. Or that’s what he said I’d become. Yes, he used to say, all of us will be beachcombers, one day. Almost a prophet, I might say. That was my father. And I am his prophecy.
But there’s no food here. And all the world tastes of salt. The caves so smooth, so cold, taste of salt when I lick the crevices in the limestone. The rocks, the starfish, they all taste of salt. Have you ever eaten starfish? Or sea anemones? Boiled or fried I can’t make them taste of anything but salt. Even with a samphire garnish, a side of coralweed.
So we’re all scavengers. Yes, that’s what they call me but that’s merely another word for beachcomber. And if you know your history you’ll be aware how people around here lived. They took whatever washed ashore, the brandies, the silks. Everything a stoven hold supplied. They were wreckers, I suppose. Old skills passed down the generations. How often was the riot act read to clear the beaches of men days drunk? In World War II a cargo of Guinness was lost and divvied up. And there is so much else afloat these days. The ocean’s become a rubbish tip, burning, steaming. Yet still it teems with bizarre creatures. That shark gives me nightmares, but there are sunfish now, swollen like zeppelins. Mola mola they call the sunfish, fat and round and silver with blue tattoos. More like the moon.
I look at the moon from the cavemouth where I camp, sometimes from the red container where the lifeguards kept their gear. All those surfboards and paddles? I burned them on the beach. There are so many camps now in the dunes, or out on the sand, it takes time to learn the protocols of fire.
Last year I came upon a sunfish of monstrous size. Over a ton, it surely was, and stranded on rocks. When ripped open, its belly was full of plastic bags. I dined for three weeks off the creature, as long as I dared. Salty steaks, but that’s how the world tastes now. I had to use my stick against the dogs. These days I carry a piece of lead piping. Perfect heft in my hand, that bludgeon. But there are so many dogs now. Even in the caves I hear them baying at night. Those Alsatians look and sound like wolves. Big as the hounds of hell. Of course I need a weapon.
Nights, I’m sometimes in the cave. The same place Lizzy kissed me, though maybe, look, maybe it was mutual. Or maybe I might have touched. Her. On the breast, perhaps. That’s natural isn’t it? No reason to run away. Was there? But it’s a different world now. I don’t have time to worry about that. The old laws don’t apply.
9.
Zigmas loved the forest. The sawn wood that washed ashore? Those thousands of white planks? It might have been his home over there in Litland. He came to the fairground, beside a foreign sea, to a place where no trees grew and only salt thrived. A world of caves and a prophesy in quartz. Somewhere he could have never imagined. The frayed edge of a continent. Where the land is drowning.
Now look, twenty miles across the bay is the Meridian tower. A splinter, the colour of cuttlebone, built for those who thought they owned all they surveyed. I’ve been there once, a week’s expedition. The dogs are bad but people are worse. There are places where the land’s officially abandoned, but I ignore all that. I picked a way through the rubbish brought ashore by the new tides. Such adventures I’ve had. The faces of the drowned . . .
But I can’t get Zigmas out of my mind. That’s why I dream about him, he’s one of my ghosts, a boy brought up in an ocean of trees who had never seen a beach. They said he couldn’t swim for that reason, and I see the filthy water rising in the tunnel, Zigmas in the dark with all the glass cases smashing as they topple about him, the flood reaching his chin, his eyes. Zigmas in the tunnel with the worst things in the world . . .
10.
The stars have vanished. As they do. I’m awake now on a painted beach. Yes, the stone is breathing. I know the stone is alive. Under my body what’s written in quartz spells out this world’s fate. I feel the letters burning into my skin. Yes, it’s agony, but I will lie here as they brand me, those words, and one day people will come to read the living prophesy.
I used to look at the sky and the jet trails there. I thought that was writing and it was written for me. The white lines were like quartz in the sky. But I was wrong. The prophecies have been here all along, given to me alone to understand. When I move I will be ready. And I am almost ready.
Author Biographies
RUI MANUEL AMARAL was born in Oporto in 1973, where he continues to live and work. He is the author of two books of short stories, Caravana (Caravan), published in 2008, and Doutor Avalanche (Doctor Avalanche), published in 2010. He is also the author of several books on the oral history and folk traditions of the city of Porto.
KJELL ASKILDSEN was born in 1929 in Mandal, in southern Norway. At the age of twenty-four, he published his first c
ollection of short stories, Heretter følger jeg deg helt hjem (From Now on I’ll Walk You all the Way Home, 1953). In the ’60s and ’70s, Askildsen’s output was restricted to short novels inspired by the works of such nouveau roman authors as Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the ’80s, he turned his back on the novel form for good after the publication in 1983 of his much-lauded story collection Thomas F’s siste nedtegnelser til almenheten (Thomas F’s Last Notes to the General Public, translated into English in the collection A Sudden Liberating Thought in 1994), for which he was awarded the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature. His later collections include Hundene i Tessaloniki (The Dogs in Thessaloniki, 1996), Et stort øde landskap (A Great Deserted Landscape, 1991), and En plutselig frigjørende tanke (1987; A Sudden Liberating Thought, 1994).
Askildsen has received numerous literary awards. Among them are The Critics’ Prize (1983 and 1991), the Aschehoug Prize (1991), the Dobloug Prize (1996), the Brage Honorary Prize (1996), the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize (2009) and the Sørlandet Honorary Prize (2010). In 1991, he was nominated to the Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives and works in Norway.
KATYA ATANASOVA was born in Sofia. She has an MA in Bulgarian Literature from Sofia University and an MA in Cultural and Literature Studies from New Bulgarian University. She has taught literature and has worked as a reviewer and editor for the weekly Capital as well as Literature Newspaper, and as producer of the urban culture show Reflex at Radio France International.