 
Redjeb Jordania

A Hunting Trip to Daghestan

and other stories

Previously published as a paperback

under the title "Escape from the South Fork"

# Table of Contents

Part One: from far away in time and space...

1. A Hunting Trip to Daghestan

2. Closing the Circle

3. The Music Lesson

4. My Mother was a Cat

5. First Love

6. Adrift

7. Anyone there?

8. A Surprise Party

Part Two: closer to home...

9. An Encounter with the America Cup

10. A Visit to the Dentist

11. Escape from the South Fork

12. Linda Mother-of-God

13. Yellow is the Color of Mourning

14. The Screamers

15. Letter from the New World

© Redjeb Jordania 2008

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# Part One: _from far away in time and space..._

1. A Hunting Trip to Daghestan

There I was, perched on a skinny horse on a skinny path meandering on the skinny crest of a mountain ridge in Daghestan, my swollen right ankle dangling, doing my best to maintain my balance while glancing apprehensively at the chasms beckoning enticingly on both sides. I was no stranger to mountaineering, and normally had no fear of heights. But I was no horseman, and it is amazing how it seems to be so much more precipitous and dangerous when on horseback than when on foot, even though one is barely four feet higher!

I certainly did not foresee this outcome when I accepted an invitation to go bear hunting in the Caucasus, even though I do not hunt and certainly did not expect to start at this late stage of my life.

That summer of 1991 I had organized an intensive course in English as a Foreign Language in Tbilisi, the capital of The Republic of Georgia, to assist the newly independent Georgians in fulfilling their Western-oriented aspirations and help open up to them a world that they had been cut off from for nearly seventy years.

After the course was over I remained in Tbilisi to watch the unfolding of the rebellion against the strong-armed rule of Georgia's President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who would eventually be obliged to flee the country. My sympathies were with the rebels, among whom I counted many friends, but I did not actively take sides: after all, even though I was the son of the very first President of pre-soviet Georgia, Noe Jordania (1918-1921), I was a foreigner in my ancestors' country, born in France, living in East Hampton, barely able to speak the Georgian language.

Among those taking part in the rebellion was David Nadaradze, a young man who had attended our summer English course. David was then about thirty years of age, spoke English very well, but in a stilted manner. Many of his words and expressions sounded rather quaint to our ears because they were often taken directly from his readings of 19th century English literature. He was a lawyer by profession, had had occasion to travel abroad, in Japan in particular, but had never been to America. He was planning to go to the U.S. for further training as an international lawyer, which is why he took our summer course.

We had become friends, and after the course was over he often came to visit me at my hotel, keeping me abreast of the political and military fluctuations of the struggle. Towards the end of that September the fighting in Tbilisi seemed to have calmed down. Taking advantage of the lull and anxious to help me fulfill my wish to visit as much of the country as I could, David invited me to come hunting with him and some friends in the mountains of Daghestan.

Daghestan is a semi-autonomous region of the Russian S.S.R (Socialist Soviet Republic, now part of Russia) It is located high in the Caucasian mountains between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, on the border of the Georgian province of Kakhetia. David explained that the trip entailed driving first to a small village in Kakheti to spend the night at his friend Merab's country house. Early in the morning we would be transported in a special 4-wheel-drive vehicle up to the point where we would start climbing on foot. He added that the hard climb would last no more than one and a half hours, and then it would be easy going. We should reach the camping site two or three hours later.

David's offer sounded very enticing, so I jumped to the occasion, even though, as mentioned above, I had no intention to even try my hand at hunting. I hadn't brought with me any suitable clothes or footwear. I borrowed a couple of heavy sweaters, since it can get very cold at night at 12,000 feet. David procured two knapsacks and somewhere found a pair of lightweight soccer boots for me, the kind with canvas high tops and spikes underneath to dig in the turf, which I would have to wear with heavy socks that he also brought along. We bought all kind of food to take with us, and he also carried his rifle and ammunition, since we were supposed to be hunters.

We left Tbilisi in his old car in the late afternoon on Thursday, stopped on the way at a roadside stand, quite an elaborate affair under a simple roof with long counters where drinks and food were piled high. We had some delicious Mtzvade, a sort of pork meat shish-kebab roasted on open fires with fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and some of the wonderful Georgian bread—the whole washed down with bottled fruit juice and Borjomi mineral water.

We arrived at his friend's village around eight in the evening. Merab's mother, Nino Burgiashvili, was waiting for us. Naturally, in keeping with the norms of Georgian hospitality, even though we just had all that food, Nino insisted upon putting out a lavish spread for us. The only other people there were Merab's wife Ethery, a young Georgian woman who spoke only Russian because she had been raised in Leningrad, and their little daughter, who was about three years old. I was to learn that Merab and Ethery were both opera singers who lived in the city of Kutaisi, where they were employed at the local opera house. Merab had left the day before with a friend to establish camp in the mountains, where we were expected to join them in a couple days. But the Gods had other plans.

After a good night's sleep, at 5.30 in the morning we started on our way by truck: huge wheels heavily studded like a bulldozer, 4-wheel-drive, 16 speeds, two gearshifts, and a cabin good for only two persons since most of the space was taken up by the engine. I don't know if it was really a privilege, but I was invited to sit in the cabin, while David and two other young men climbed onto the open bed behind. What a trip! We started on a track which I thought was very rough, but turned out to be quite good in comparison to what was to come: its only pitfalls were huge pot holes, streams flowing across, and deep mud.

As we went up the mountain the dirt road became more and more horrendous. I never thought a vehicle could negotiate such obstacles: the truck would plunge down into a ravine strewn with man-sized boulders, rear over huge stones, roll from side to side while bucking like crazy, and squeeze between huge trees. The driver meanwhile nonchalantly went on smoking nonstop, lighting cigarette after cigarette, while struggling with the wheel and handling the two gearshifts—one of which was placed behind the engine, so that he had to reach practically behind his back each time he needed it, which was about every twenty seconds. I had to hold on with all my strength, bracing myself with both feet and hands. I could easily have used a couple more. I can't imagine how the guys in the back managed.

That part of the trip lasted a good two hours. By the time we arrived at our destination I felt it was enough work for the day, as I was already stiff and exhausted from my struggle to keep from banging against the sides of the cabin. Incidentally, all this happened without any breakfast whatsoever, unless one can dignify as breakfast the glass of water I managed to gulp before leaving the house.

The end of the so-called "road" was marked by a shepherd's hut: walls made of flat stones piled on top of each other without any attempt to fill the cracks and holes in between; overhead some plastic fabric was stretched between poles to serve as a leaky roof. And that was all. In this part of the world people bring their animals to the mountains in spring and herd them back to the villages in fall before the snow. Perhaps the trek back had already started, since the place was deserted when we arrived, except for a young man on horseback who came galloping through the woods, exchanged a few words with my companions, and galloped off again: a real person on a real horse going about his real business.

David and I shouldered our knapsacks, said good-by to our driver and his companions and started walking. Very soon we were above the tree line, climbing on a path that followed the wide bed of a rock-strewn mountain stream. I could see that David was pacing himself so I could keep up with him. No wonder: he was thirty years old, and I was seventy!

I thought the path was quite steep, but after perhaps one hour, when once again I stopped to catch my breath, I happened to look up, and there looming before me, majestic and straight up, was the mountain we had to surmount to reach the pass into Daghestan. Up, and up, and up: I had to crane my neck back quite far to see the top of that barren mountain, the path zigzagging along its flank. David tried to reassure me: "It is not as far as it seems," he kept saying, "We'll be up in less than two hours." Well, perhaps he could do it in that time, but I had my doubts and rightly so: it would take me a good four hours with many stops, David patiently waiting for me along the way.

Half way up was another shepherd's hut, well guarded with barking dogs. They started their noisy barking while we were still quite far away, no doubt warning all and sundry about the invasion of these strange looking beasts coming up the mountain. And they barked, and they barked nonstop, until finally we got up to the hut, sat down, and talked to them. They reluctantly came close, smelled my hand, and accepted to be petted. There was water from a stream right beside the hut, which incidentally was much better built than the one down the valley. That water tasted delicious!

David then asked: "Would you prefer to have a snack here, or wait until we get to the top?" "But," I said: "It looks still quite far away, and the path is becoming even steeper!" To which David replied: "No, it's not that far, we'll be there soon." So I agreed: "O.K. we'll eat later," and we went on our way.

Indeed it got steeper and steeper, and I reached the point when not only was my heart beating madly, but, try as I might, my legs refused to move! It had never, never happened to me before. I could take - I counted - 60 small steps, and then my legs would just go dead. Never mind going up: I could not even lift my knees. I managed by resting, then taking another 60 steps, then resting, repeating this painful pattern again and again. David became very concerned: "Will you be able to make it? Perhaps we should turn back," he offered. But I reassured him that I would make it, that he only had to give me time. And while I was struggling, what really hurt my feelings was that a bunch of cows, who hardly seemed to move their legs, contentedly chewing their cud, caught up from behind, passed me and leisurely continued climbing up the mountain, disappearing behind the trees!

Actually there was a reason why the cows started following us: part way up, seeing we would not reach the pass anytime soon, we stopped for something to eat. David left his knapsack some 30 feet from where we were sitting. I happened to turn around, and yelled: "David! A cow is stealing our bread!" He ran up, and wrestled the loaf of bread from the cow's mouth, rescuing about half. After that there was no stopping the herd: they all followed David and his knapsack, sometimes sneaking up to him from behind and nudging him, until he lost his patience and with stones and yells shoed them away; that is until they passed me going up the mountain!

Finally we got to the top. Pausing to look back, I could see the vast expanse of the grassy mountain dropping seemingly vertically under me, rocky ridges rearing here and there; far below meandered the bed of the mountain stream, in contrast appearing rather flat, and even lower the thick forest sloping toward an unseen horizon. The climb had taken me four and a half hours, instead of the one hour and a half that David had said it would take. As for the young man in Tbilisi who claimed he could climb it in 30 minutes, that's sheer Georgian boasting: even running all the way up no one could have done it in that time.

The weather was still very nice, the sun shining in an incredibly blue sky with scattered white clouds, but it was a bit chilly with a crisp breeze channeled by the rocky peaks looming on each side. "Up there is where we used to go to hunt ibex —Caucasian mountain goats", David told me. "That's a really challenging hunt, as they are very hard to approach. Now there are not so many, so we don't even try anymore."

On the pass we met a man on horseback coming our way. His name was Hamlet: There are quite a few Hamlets in Georgia, and also Othellos, Desdemonas, Ophelias: Oh, the far-flung Shakespearean influence! Our Hamlet, it turns out, was the shepherd who lived in the hut we had visited half way up the mountain. We chatted for a few moments. He asked David — under the impression I didn't understand Georgian: "How old is he?" To which I answered: "I am 70." "Oh, not bad," he said approvingly, but I don't know if he approved of my speaking some Georgian or of my climbing the mountain at that advanced age. Anyhow, before taking his leave he insisted upon giving me his walking stick, which came to be more useful than he ever expected! He had fashioned it from a tree branch and carved on its entire length intricate traditional Caucasian designs, into which he had incorporated his name in Georgian script.

The pass proper was perhaps one mile long. What a pleasure to walk on a more or less level surface, not to have to summon one's last ounce of energy just to raise one's knee for the next step. The path meandered between hillocks, alongside ponds of fresh water where our cows already were quenching their thirst. There were no trees, of course, since we were way above the tree line, but there were scattered bushes and many wild flowers. From the base of the rocks above came some shrill whistling: "Do you hear that?" asked David. "The marmots are objecting to our presence." We soon reached the other side of the pass, and for the first time I could contemplate the mountains of Daghestan rearing majestically as far as the eye could see.

All my life I had heard about Daghestan, with its lofty mountains, beauty, greatness, immensity, and its fierce mountaineers, most of whom are Sufis, a peculiarly esoteric branch of Islam. One of the most romantic figures of my childhood was the Imam Shamil, the famous Chechen-Daghestanian hero of the uprising of the North Caucasian tribes. Shamil fought the Russians for some 40 years, until he was finally captured and sent under escort to St. Petersburg, where he died in a somewhat golden captivity. Legend has it that after arriving in that town, Shamil was granted an interview with the Tsar. Having spent many weeks in a horse drawn carriage crossing the vast Russian steppes from the Caucasus to the Baltic, Shamil exclaimed: "Oh Great Tsar, you who own such immensity, why, oh why did your soldiers fight for so long in order to capture that insignificant kingdom of mine?"

From then on the walking was indeed much easier; the path followed the crests with a gentle gradient going down most of the way. Like all mountain paths, it was basically just a few inches wide, often with a precipitous drop on one side or sometimes even on both sides.

After a while we reached a place where a few small streams crossed the path. "What about some lunch?" David asked. To which I replied, "How long to where we're going?" He explained that from where we were to the campsite would take about two more hours. "But at my speed?" I objected. "Well, probably three hours," he said. "But we have plenty of time. It's only one o'clock; there are still at least 6 hours of daylight." I thankfully unloaded my knapsack, David also. He had taken most of the supplies, so that his load was much heavier than mine. And in addition he carried his heavy rifle. We then partook of a leisurely lunch of suluguni cheese, sausage, fresh tomatoes and cucumber, and the bread the cows had kindly left us.

After a short rest, I got up to fill my canteen at one of the wonderful streams running down the mountain. As I was crossing a gently inclined flat rock, my left foot slid brutally sideways, the spikes on my soccer shoes failing to get a purchase. I didn't fall, but somehow this slide caused my right foot to twist severely. I felt a sharp pain shooting up my leg, sat down, hurriedly took off shoe and sock, and started massaging my ankle. David scrambled down and helped me apply cold compresses; indeed one of the streams was just a couple of feet away, and the water descending from the summits was ice cold, probably no more than 35 degrees.

Half an hour went by; my ankle was still in pain, but there was no swelling. I tried walking, leaning on Hamlet's providential stick. I could do it, but very slowly. We held a war council: what to do? The campsite, three hours away when I was OK, would now be too far to reach before nightfall, assuming I could walk the distance. To go back was out of the question, since the base was even farther away. From where we were we could see another shepherd's hut with sheep grazing on the slopes above it. David estimated that we could reach it in about one hour. It was in the same direction as the campsite. We decided to proceed. If, when we arrived close to the hut, my foot felt well enough, we would continue towards our original destination. If not, we would ask for shelter.

By the time we arrived at the nearest approach to the hut, my foot was getting worse: the ankle was quite swollen, and I could hardly hobble along. We decided to try to stop for the night. The hut was quite a ways down from the path, located at the bottom of a valley near a stream running between the mountains. The slope down was very steep, so much so that most of the way I had to slide on my backside. We had hardly started down when out of nowhere three dogs appeared, barking furiously, snarling, and approaching as much as they dared. They were just doing their job, guarding the sheep and warning of the presence of dangerous strangers, yet that nonstop barking was extremely annoying, even nerve wracking. Half way down I sat on a rock to rest, while David went ahead to investigate the situation. After a while he came back: "There was only a boy at the hut," he said, "the others are down by the stream washing their clothes and doing chores. But we are welcome to stay." And he added: "You know, these shepherds are not Georgian, they are Avar, so be careful: these people steal everything."

At that point it was only three o'clock. The valley was so deep and narrow that the hut was already in the shadows, so we stayed for a while where we were, in the sun. Toward six we went down to the hut, me sliding on my backside all the way. By that time we could see the shepherds returning, and the dogs had mercifully abandoned us to attend to their evening duty, which consisted of bringing the scattered sheep back to the compound all by themselves, without the help or direction of a human being.

Getting closer we could see that the shepherds' encampment consisted of a canvas tent, set on poles and anchored in the usual way, which we later learned was only for sleeping. Next to it was a sort of kitchen/living hut built of shoulder high walls of flat stones, with a canvas roof flopping in the wind. Inside a large flat stone served as a table, and all around other stones covered with mangy sheepskins served as seating. All in all, a scene straight out of the Flintstones! The stone walls were riddled with gaps through which the evening breeze merrily whistled. One wall was higher, in which a hearth had been hollowed for cooking. But there was no chimney, not even an opening above the hearth, so the smoke would billow right back into the "room", to eventually escape through the many holes in the canvas top and the walls. The system worked well enough, if you didn't mind a lot of smoke in your eyes—as seemed to be the case with our hosts.

So there we were in Daghestan. Our shepherds were Leke, one of the more than 40 national groups who live side by side in the territory. Each group has its own culture and its own distinct language, some of which are spoken by less than 10,000 people. Since the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century, the common language throughout the area has been Russian.

Our hosts Ahmed and Mohammed proved to be very hospitable: Mohammed led me inside the stone hut and handed me a Burkha, a marvelous cape made of tightly woven felt, reaching to the ankles. As soon as I put it over my shivering shoulders—the temperature in the shade must have been barely above freezing—I felt a welcome warmth spread throughout me.

Ahmed seemed to be in charge of domestic arrangements. While Mohammed and the boy, whose name I never did get, went out to lock the sheep in their corrals, Ahmed busied himself organizing things and cooking. But before that he explained to me in broken Russian, our only common language, that he had some talent for curing people, which he had inherited from his grandmother and his mother, who were very famous healers. (This is not a put down of his linguistic abilities. My Russian is just as broken as his, or even worse, but in a different way.)

"I am far from being as good as they are," he said," but I know a little, and I think I can help your ankle." He made me take off my shoe and sock, and very gently rubbed in some sort of cream he took out of an old glass jar. He went on massaging. "What I am doing is calming down the flesh that got bruised before the hurt reaches further and gives the bone the idea that it too should start feeling bad. Only then will I be able to attend to the real hurt," he explained. Very gently then, he massaged all around, slowly getting to where it was the most painful. He went on massaging that spot, while he directed Mohammed to take my foot in his hands and exert a steady pull at first, then in a semi rotary direction. That hurt a lot, but the kind of hurt that you know is good for you. Indeed after a few minutes the pain subsided. Ahmed then rubbed on more of his cream, to which he added a handful of salt, bandaged my ankle tightly and explained that I would feel much better in a few moments. To celebrate the occasion, David pulled from his knapsack a bottle of cognac, which we all proceeded to drink. Indeed my foot soon felt much better, but whether it was thanks to Ahmed's ministrations or the cognac, I couldn't say.

Night was coming. Ahmed threw more wood on the fire, above which he suspended a kettle full of water—the smoke all but smothering me to the point that I had to hobble outside. We were by that time in deep shadow, but the top of the mountain across from the stream was still in full sunlight. And there, way up, I could see two men leading a couple of horses slithering down the path. Mohammed explained that these were the other two shepherds who had left a few days before to look for a runaway horse. "Why did it take them so long to find the animal?" I asked. "They probably collared him right away", he said, "but then decided to go the village down the mountain. They'll be here by the time supper is ready." To my eyes they seemed very near, but indeed two full hours elapsed before they appeared in the hut.

When I came back into the hut, the water in the kettle was boiling, and Ahmed was washing dishes on the slab of rock that served as a table. It was perhaps four by six feet, fairly flat, with many names and other words engraved on its surface, some in Russian, one or two in Georgian, but most in a script I did not recognize—possibly Avar, Chechen, or Ingush. "We didn't have time to wash the dishes earlier," he apologized, "because we were busy doing our laundry and washing ourselves." He continued by way of explanation: "We are planning to go to the Georgian village and then to Tbilisi as soon as our comrades return. Since you have a bad foot, we can take you with us on horseback." On horseback! On these mountain paths no wider than my hand! And I am no horseman; in fact my idea of mounting an animal is limited to a little donkey, not one of these big brutes! Yet if my foot would still be bad in the morning, I would have no choice... Oh well, qué será, será!

The dishes washed and the dirty water disposed of by the simple expedient of pouring it right under the "table"—where it promptly seeped away between the stones—Ahmed proceeded to make buns. From a burlap bag he poured a quantity of flour on the table, moistened it with water from a pitcher, made dough, and fashioned bread balls the size of tennis balls. As he finished each, he placed it on a rocky ledge I had not noticed before, right above the hearth, presumably so that it would be warm enough for the dough to rise. After replenishing the kettle and hanging it over the fire to boil, he went out to get our main dish: that turned out to be a sheep he slaughtered then and there by chopping off its head with one blow from his khandjal, a sort of short scimitar. He then skinned it, cleaned it, butchered it, and left the rough hewn pieces outside on top of a stone wall, not without throwing the offal to the dogs who had watched the operation with great interest.

Coming back in, he added wood to the fire, made sure the water was boiling, and one by one threw in the buns he had prepared. After about twenty minutes he started fishing them out. To make sure each was cooked he used a thin pointed bone with a small notch. This he would thrust into a bun and lift it. If the bun came out, it was cooked, if it slipped back in the water, it needed a little more time: simple, but efficient!

About that time the wandering shepherds appeared. They came into the hut, took off most of their outer clothes, which by the way were not at all picturesque, consisting of western suits with trousers and rather torn jackets covering sweaters underneath. After saying hello all around, they pulled out a bottle of chacha, a fiery brew favored in the Caucasus Mountains. Welcome it was despite the previous cognac, since by that time night had fallen, and it was now really cold with the wind still whistling merrily through the many holes of our walls. But I was quite content: the Burkha was keeping my body warm from the outside, while from within the chacha was working its wonders.

Once the bread was made, Ahmed added water to the kettle, and when it reached a boil, threw in slabs of lamb. They were merry, our shepherds. They had practically nothing, all their possessions being on their backs. The only sign of the 20th century was a small pocket radio that didn't work. Yet they felt content and rich. "Money? That's nothing," said Mohammed. "These days the kilo of lamb sells for 50, 60 rubles. What more can you ask?" And indeed at that time I had met many people whose salary was a 70 or 80 rubles a month!

Ahmed pronounced the meat ready, and everybody sat down for supper. My companion David pulled salami, cheese, and bread, out of his knapsack, which for our shepherds was a welcome change from their usual diet of boiled mutton and boiled buns. Mohammed kept offering me greasy slabs of meat, saying: "Eat! Eat! You have to eat the fat, it's good for you!" And indeed I remembered that, when I was twenty years old in war-torn France with little to eat, any fat, animal or vegetable, tasted just marvelous! I must say, however, that this evening my stomach was not too happy with all that greasy boiled mutton, particularly since the head of the sheep with its raw smells had been positioned on the wall right next to my face. But with chacha flowing freely, we all had a merry time in that smoky stone hut with only the fire in the hearth for illumination.

Ahmed said that he and Mohammed wanted to get to Tbilisi to buy a few supplies, since within a few days it would be time to start the long trek back home to Mahakhala. "How many days will that take?" I asked. "Perhaps 20 days or more, depending on the weather," replied one of the shepherds. "You know, sheep don't walk very fast, and you have to give them time to graze on the way." Ahmed and Mohammed said that the others would start the trek without them, and that they would catch up later with the supplies. That's why Ahmed and Mohammed were taking horses along. "But only one of them is strong enough for you to mount. The others are just pack horses," explained Ahmed.

I retired before the others. They kindly gave me some sort of straw pad to put under me in the sleeping tent, and with my sleeping bag and the Burkha to keep me warm, I promptly fell asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night half frozen. The Burkha had slipped off, and no matter how I tried to arrange it, a part of me remained cold...until it dawned on me to install the Burkha under me, since the cold was seeping up from the ground. It must have been close to freezing, and the thin mountain air probably contributed to my discomfort. Yet I fell asleep again and woke up to another glorious day.

What a sight! We were still in the shadows, but above us the sun illuminated the mountains, and the sheep were scattered on the green slopes like balls of fluff. Already smoke was rising from our "living-room kitchen", and soon Ahmed called us for a breakfast of what else? Boiled mutton and water. No tea, no coffee.

David had not slept at all. After supper he had gone down to the creek to lie in ambush for bears. The shepherds told us that indeed bears would come up the stream from below and try to sneak into the pen to snare a sheep. The dogs were always on watch, of course, but nevertheless once in a while the bears succeeded.

"They are very intelligent," said Mohammed. "One of them would creep close on one side, so that the dogs would rush in that direction, barking madly, and then another bear would sneak in on the other side! Also, I don't know how they would know, but if there would be a gun in the encampment, the bears wouldn't come close. Perhaps they can smell the powder or the oil on the gun?" And indeed David, armed with his rifle, stayed in ambush the whole night in vain.

Departure time came. My foot was still hurting quite a bit, and I could hardly put any weight on it. A horse it would be! My only previous experience on horseback was climbing up to the Citadelle in Haiti. There, however, the road was wide enough for a jeep to go through, and on the steepest parts I could dismount and walk alongside. But here...

My horse was very quiet, very steady, but remembering the narrow paths we came on, I was rather apprehensive. The first part was uphill, not too steep, which is a lot easier on horseback than going downhill—at least for me. Ahmed was leading my horse by the bridle, but even so in quite a few places I had to dismount and climb around rocky spurs as best I could, since the horse could barely make it through on its own.

We went along the mountain path, and in two hours we reached the pass on top of the huge mountain that it had taken me over four hours to climb. What a sight! What a slope! No way would I be able to negotiate my way back down on horseback. Indeed the horses had a hard time making it on their own. I dismounted, and, ignoring the zigzagging path, preceded straight down hill on my behind, my bad foot up in the air. It was so steep in places that—remembering an old technique from my mountaineering days in the Alps—I would crouch on one foot, lean my body backwards on Hamlet's stick, and let myself slide downhill in a small avalanche of pebbles, controlling my speed by putting more or less weight on the stick. With faithful David keeping a watchful eye on me, I thus got to the bottom much faster than I went up. I think the total drop was at most 1500 meters, five times the Empire State Building, but it seemed like a lot more.

At the shepherd's hut midway down I could mount again, and we continued down the steep path, me leaning way back with the stirrups almost to the horse's head, while it prudently negotiated its way among boulders and rolling stones. Finally we reached the place where the truck had dropped us off the day before. David explained: "We have a choice now. We can camp here until tomorrow, when the truck is slated to come back to pick us up. Or we can continue, and we'll somehow manage to reach the village by early afternoon. It's up to you."

I felt fine: I had expected my behind to be sore from bopping on a horse and bouncing down the mountain, but no, all was well, so we decided to proceed. From this point on the path was alongside the stream, meandering though a thick forest. What a delightful ride! It was still going downhill, but not so steeply. No more rolling stones and rocks to negotiate, no more deep chasms on each side threatening to engulf me. Now I could relax, and enjoy the balmy weather and the sensation of proceeding forward with no effort on my part, a living body under me doing all the work.

In a short time we came upon a group of men busy slaughtering a bull, whose severed head had been placed on a tree stump right there on the path, clouds of flies buzzing angrily about. They gave us directions to a farm one hour away, where they would soon bring the meat, and from where a tractor could take us to the village where we had spent the night before. The weather was still splendid; the sun shone brightly between the branches. The path was mostly in the shade, occasionally crossing the river bed. The little horse knew the way without anyone guiding it, unerringly choosing the right path at the infrequent crossings. Ahmed taught me how to tell the horse to stop or go forward: strangely, these "words" or rather noises, sounded exactly the same as what I remembered from my childhood in France. Thus I tried my French on the horse, and it worked! Do horses the world over speak the same language?

Soon we reached the farm, where our shepherds arranged to leave the horses until they came back. Presently a tractor pulling a wagon rumbled into life, and we all piled in. The ride to the village took another two hours, at a speed of 6 miles an hour at best. The scenery was extraordinarily beautiful: meadows, fields, forests, streams, all lush and green, filled with flowers, and the stark mountains of the Caucasus looming in the background. But what a shaky ride! Of course the wagon had no suspension, so that while the road was not too bad, every bump or gully sent shocks up my spine. To spare my bad ankle I had to stand on one foot all the way, hanging onto the high sides of the wagon with both hands. By the time we got to our destination, I was exhausted. Give me a horse any time!

We got off at the entrance to the village, as the tractor was going to an outlying farm. Ahmed and Mohammed had brought a bag with perhaps 20 - 25 kilos of mutton to sell or swap. That was their only luggage, even though they intended to be away several days. In general people here go traveling with no luggage, only what they have on their backs. It is for us surprising: we are so used to lugging all kinds of gear that we forget how much easier it is to take nothing at all. So what if one has to wear the same clothes for a few days?

David went to get his car, which he had left at his friends' house. It was an old battered Soviet made Lada that had seen better days, with broken windows, holes in the floor, crumbling seats, non-existent suspension. Yet it felt like the height of luxury after the truck, the horse, and that horribly bumpy ride in the tractor-pulled wagon. We all piled in, dropped the shepherds at their friends' house, and proceeded to the house where we had stayed before. Our hostess again prepared an excellent dinner, and we spent a very nice evening recounting our adventures and speculating on the political situation. She wanted us to stay with them for a few days: "It gets a little boring when we do not have guests."

That house was very interesting: it was quite substantial, made of stone, with two stories. The ground floor consisted of a large kitchen, a dining room, and a sort of living room, I say "sort of", because the ground was beaten earth. Yet the furniture was solid and good. The second story was surrounded by a balcony on all four sides, which overhung the ground floor, providing shade and shelter. There was electricity, but no running water. Our hostesses kept a supply of water in pails, which a boy fetched for them every morning from a hand pump several hundred feet away. There was of course no bathroom, but rather an outhouse, with a simple hole in the center of a sloping cement floor. With my bad foot it was not too easy to manage! The house was surrounded by a vegetable garden with tall corn stalks and fruit trees. Squawking chickens and a couple of pigs kept getting under foot outside, but none of them dared set a paw inside the house. Everything was very clean, and smelled good with nature's bounty. I understood that the owners lived in Tbilisi, but would spend four months of summer here in the village.

We were to leave in the morning for the capital, but departure proved not to be easy, in part because I had to take care of my foot, which did not feel any better, and in part because of Georgian hospitality. It was Sunday and people were getting together for a Sunday fete. After a substantial breakfast we went to pick up our shepherd friends. It was only about ten in the morning, but already their hosts were throwing a keipi (dinner) outside in their yard with over 25 persons sitting, eating, and drinking! They all greeted us vociferously, insisted on kissing me and honoring me as the first American to ever come to their village. We had to sit down with everybody, drink our way through many toasts in the Georgian manner, even though we all were keen to be on our way. When we finally managed to say goodbye other neighbors were waiting for us outside. They tried to take us to their own house "just for ten minutes". We well knew, however, that these ten minutes really meant three hours, so at the risk of being rude, we made our excuses and managed to go on our way, David driving, me next to him, and in the back our two shepherds and an older lady who was going back to Tbilisi with us.

We made it back to the city in due time, not without my having to drive for a while because David kept falling asleep at the wheel. I knew he had not slept the night before, but what had he been doing last night? I did not dare ask. Driving his car was quite an experience: it was very, very cramped, so that I had trouble shifting my foot from gas pedal to brake. The fact that it was my bad foot didn't help. The wheel was terribly loose, and the brakes quite slippery. I did all right, however, but when we reached Tbilisi and the traffic became much heavier, I woke up David. I was not about to drive in town with all these crazy Georgian drivers who zoom through red lights, while often unexpectedly stopping at the green! "Why do they do that?" I asked David, who explained. "You never know when one of these maniacs will go right through the red, so we stop at the green just in case."

The following day David brought Ahmed and Mohammed to visit me. They had had haircuts, had shaven, and altogether looked respectable. At first they were quite subdued in what was for them a luxurious suite in a hotel. But I put out wine and other goodies, and soon they became their usual selves. "You know, we thought we would find many things we needed in such a big city, but the stores are empty! We have the money, but cannot spend it!" they told me with great surprise. "Six months ago we could get everything!" This shows how swiftly the economy was disintegrating. After awhile I took them out to a comparatively lavish dinner in a cooperative (non-government) restaurant to try to repay a little of their hospitality, and before we said goodbye gave them a small radio, a flashlight, and my Swiss army knife. They were delighted and made me promise that next time I came to the Soviet Union I would visit them in their home town Mashakhala, the capital of Daghestan on the Caspian Sea.

Thus ended my so-called hunting expedition in the Caucasus. I was extremely pleased that things had turned out the way they did. If I hadn't twisted my foot, I would never have sampled the hospitality of Daghestanian shepherds, never experienced the way they lived in the mountains, and David would have remained with his prejudices against all Avars and Lekes. Now he knew that they were good people, that they were not inveterate thieves, as he had thought. He said that if the next year he would go hunting, he would make a point of finding their camp and bringing them some gifts.

Alas, David never went back. The following June, as he was standing guard over the television station, a small band of the deposed President Gamsakhurdia's supporters staged a raid. They were easily repulsed, but David was killed, the action's only casualty. Even sadder: he had just been awarded a scholarship to study law in the United States, as he had always dreamed to do, starting in October...

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2. Closing The Circle

## Lanshkhuti, Republic of Georgia, November 1990

They stood to the side. In a semi-circle. Talking in whispers. Respecting my silence. Respecting my retreat into the tumultuous memories summoned by the stone jutting out of the fading grass. "The circle has been comp1eted... seventy years already... But the circle has been, finally, completed..." A circle without a beginning, although it had clearly reached its end. A circle closed upon itself, holding me the man, me the child, whole at long last within myself. "They tried to erase all traces of your family," I had been told many times.

"They" were the Georgian communists, those Makharadze, Orjonikidze, Stalin, who seven long decades ago had helped organize the Red Army invasion, the conquest of their own country by the Russian Soviet forces. "Your father's house was here," pointing to a grassy lot where a pair of long-haired black piglets were scurrying, hunting for chestnuts.

"They even demolished your grandfather's and your brother's graves," that brother I never knew, but whose ghost overshadowed my whole childhood. "All that remains is this corner of a headstone stubbornly sticking out of the ground. And they didn't think to chop down the magnolia your father planted. There it is, regal now, behind the flower stand."

That autumn Sunday the village of Lanshkhuti was almost deserted. The local soccer team was playing that day in Tbilisi, the capital, in what was the most important match of the season; and all the locals, led by the town dignitaries, had set out to support their heroes. No mayor, prefect, police chief, party secretary. I was relieved: there would be no solemn ceremonies, no official banquet lasting for hours, no long-winded hypocritical speeches, as generally happened whenever I was recognized. We had done well not to announce our visit. Undoubtedly the first visit in seventy years of the son of the late Georgian President to his father's village would not have failed to spur an overwhelming program of celebrations. Georgian hospitality is not known for moderation: for them, too much is not enough!

It was precisely to avoid this that we had arrived unannounced from Batumi. "We" included my childhood friend Thina, with whom I had been raised in Paris, and whom I had not seen for some 45 years. She had settled in Batumi, a nearby seaside resort. With her came several relatives and friends, since no one does anything alone here; and from Tbilisi, specially for that occasion, had come my relatives Tsira and Marina Gugushvili, together with Leo Jordania, and his wife. Leo was one of Lanshkhuti's most famous sons: at a young age he had become a celebrated soccer player, member of the Georgian national team. Now, that is fame!

All told, ten people considered it their honor and duty to escort me for what was ostensibly my first encounter with the paternal village. They did not realize that of still greater significance for me was confronting the memory of my older brother Andreika. He had died at the age of twelve, before I was born, yet in some way created me, since he wanted a little brother to be named Redjeb, after a great-grandfather of that name whose character and adventurous life he greatly admired.

My father and his friends had often spoken to me about Lanshkhuti, which represented the center of their lives, the locus of their childhood. The details escape me, after so many years, but the impression remained that it was a small village surrounded by fields, where among others lived a whole clan of Jordanias divided into some twenty families, descendants of a common ancestor who had settled there in the 18th century. I remember a certain knoll that the locals had dubbed "Jordania hill", also known as "the Hillock of Thought". There the men gathered towards dusk to solve the world's problems and share the local news, while the women, in the kitchens, ground walnuts and corn before cooking the evening meal.

It is unlikely that these Jordanias were industrious. Nature is generous in Georgia, and little effort is required to harvest its riches. My mother, who was Russian, often told me how, when she first came to Lanshkhuti, she could ot but ask, after a few days: "But where are the peasants?", since she never saw anyone working the fields.

I thus had the impression that Lanshkhuti was but a small village. What a surprise to discover that it was rather a small town, which its inhabitants had ironically but affectionately nicknamed "little Paris." There were fields, all right, but far away, on the outskirts. And my ancestral home—or rather ancestral lot, since the house no longer exists — is located right in the center of town, on the main street, next to City Hall.

The house, which I know only through photographs, was typical of the Guria province, where winters are mild and snowfalls scarce and far-between. It was a one-story wooden house, adorned with a covered porch, standing on a stone platform, and had no basement. One can see houses like that in the villages, still inhabited, but now with electricity and running water. And some unique exemplars have been preserved in ethnographic museums with all the housekeeping details of an extinct lifestyle. Now that the communism is a thing of the past,— we hope for ever—, the city fathers are contemplating establishing a museum in honor of my father and locating it in a replica of the demolished house on its original site.

I find it curious that although the communists demolished house and grave, inexplicably they left the lot vacant, erecting nothing more substantial than a small flower stand. They even left undisturbed the grove of trees and the magnolia that my father supposedly planted ~— an anecdote that seems to me rather apocryphal. True, a tea factory built in the thirties extends onto the property, but only minimally. I also find it interesting that despite their hatred for the Jordanias and the Mensheviks in general, the Bosheviks allowed my grandmother Cristiné to live and die in that same house.

When my parents were forced onto exile in 1921, they wanted to take her with them, but she refused: "I well know that if I don't go with you I'1l loose my son and my grandchildren, whom I may never see again. But if I do go, I'll lose my home, my village, my country, my reason for being..." She thus stayed on, and lived six more years until 1927 without being harassed in any way; it was only after her death that the Bolsheviks destroyed both house and gravesite. It makes one think that in those times even they had a sense of decency.

My grandmother was not buried in the garden, since that was no longer allowed, but in a small cemetery in town. The cemetery was later demolished and replaced by a park with a chi1dren's playground. As for my grandmother's remains, no one knows what became of them...

Thus it was that in November 1990 I stood before the remnants of the grave, in what had been the garden of my father's house, now an untended lot where a grove of slender trees reaches to the sky, including that famous magnolia supposedly planted by my father, in front of which romantically stands a flower kiosk. Nothing marked the spot, except for what appeared to be the corner of an ordinary stone sticking out of the short grass.

"This is actually the tombstone underneath which Andreika and Nikoloz have been put to rest," Leo explained. "We always knew it, but no one ever dared mark the spot in any way or do anything about it. You have no idea what a handicap it was to be a Jordania. It was difficult or impossible to find work; many Jordanias were deported to Siberia, never to be heard of again.

"Children in school were taunted by their comrades, and you know how hard this is for children. Myself, if I had been born earlier, I never could have become a national team soccer player. It is only because Stalin had died, and de-Stalinization took place, with the profound change of attitudes that went with it, that I could succeed. Before that time, my name would have kept me down, as it did many."

Yes, it was for me a trying moment to find myself for the first time in my ancestral village in front of the grave of that 12 -year- old boy who for all eternity will remain the big brother I never knew. He got hurt while playing "giant's steps," a game that consisted of a sort of carrousel revolving high over head around a central pole, and long straps suspended from it—like a May pole. Children would hang onto these straps, running in circles, and when momentum was created, would take giant steps, touching ground only at wide intervals. My brother fell, got a concussion, meningitis followed and, given the state of medicine in those times, died. What a tragedy to die so young! For him, for my parents, and also for me, even though I was not yet born...

When I was a child, I hated Andreika. I hated him because his presence in our house was overwhelming. There was a painting of him on his deathbed hanging over my father's bed. There was a sculpture of him dominating the salon, downstairs. And my mother was always telling me how good he was, for ever holding him up to me as an example: everything he did was admirable, and I was made to feel totally worthless in comparison. Poor Andreika! He was only a small boy, when he died; he never did anything to me. Yet there it was...

I thought I had long ago exercised these childish emotions, but there must have been something remaining, since they came surging back with such force. My whole childhood flooded my mind in an instantaneous surge, all my family stories suddenly surfaced. The edge of time past rejoined the present to become a single entity: The circle had been closed! Yes, the circle was, at long last, complete! The physical circle, that brought my flesh back to the place from which it had sprung; and the emotional chasm that had so long remained between my brother and me, the unknowing, was finally bridged. Yes, that circle too was at last completed. Yes, finally I could see Andreika as the small boy he had been, carefree, enjoying life, that small boy who used to tell our parents:

"If I ever get a little brother, I want him to be called Redjeb." And indeed I was born, and my name is Redjeb, and I am now seventy years old and I am standing on the spot where the flesh of my flesh returned to the earth that nurtured it for so many generations.

I stood deep in thought for I don't know how long; stepped towards the kiosk; selected an armful of flowers — Leo rushed forward in order that I not pay — and laid them on the mossy edge of that stone that nothing distinguished from any other. I meditated for a few more moments: no, I wouldn't let myself be overcome here, in front of everybody; no, with a great effort, I bound my childhood memories in a mental shield and put them aside for later.

And I returned to this life, to the friends, the relatives who were waiting there for me, and we continued on our way, the air of Lanshkhuti sweet to my soul...

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3. The Music Lesson

When I was growing up music played an important role in our home. I mean live music, no matter how badly sounding from a mediocre piano played by clumsy fingers, or how badly warbled by uncertain voices. It was so much more intimate and touching within these limitations than those well-organized, high quality sounds that nowadays reach us so easily from all sides. It was the era of stammering radios, of 78 rpm records made of fragile Bakelite that could play for three minutes top, of mechanical phonographs, of movies that had just learned to talk. It was the time when the film "Carnegie Hall", with Leopold Stokowski at the podium with its "living" sound transmitted via screen and loudspeakers, filled the crowds with enthusiasm, even those who normally had little appreciation for symphonic orchestras.

Perhaps we had a radio at that time, but I don't remember it at all, undoubtedly because it rarely broadcast concerts. But on the other hand, I clearly remember the day when a friend of my father gave us an electric record player. What marvel of marvels! It was no longer necessary to hand-crank the spring, and the sound itself was so much superior! Our first records were the Red Army Chorus and A Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky; we were amazed by the dynamic contrasts from pianissimo to fortissimo, contrasts that had been impossible on the old phonographs.

But it was live music that remained our daily fare. Our parlor was dominated by a magnificent upright piano, large, heavy, ornamented, topped by candelabras, with a deep and powerful sound that bathed our neighborhood with its sonorous waves... so much the worse for them! – the corner grocer would tell my sister: "Your brother plays so well! We can hear him all the way here!"

When my sister was six or seven, she began to take piano lessons, like all the girls from good families. As I was three years younger, and a boy, I was not included. But undoubtedly out of jealously as much as desire, I insisted on hitting the piano keys all by myself, so that by five or six years of age I also gained the right to take lessons!

As my sister got older, she gave up music to throw herself into the study of metallurgic engineering. She was part of the first graduating class of the Girls' Polytechnic School, which disappeared once women were fully admitted to the regular Polytechnic. But I continued with the piano. I took classes in harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and composition, principally with Nicolas Stein, a flamboyant musician. I was his star pupil—which was not difficult now that I think about it—since I was the only one who remained loyal to him throughout the years, given his very peculiar attitude toward the teaching of music.

The least that one can say is that our lessons were far from being regular or conventional. How many times did I arrive at his house at the prescribed hour to find no one there, or to hear a sleepy voice groan, "Excuse me, I overslept. Would you mind terribly much coming back next week? I worked really late last night!" It wasn't until later that I realized that what he called "work" was more often than not painting the town with some dancer. He loved women, to the great consternation of his wife, Sonia, who had been my piano teacher when I was much younger. As he had chosen to work with ballet companies, a world in which most of the men are gay, the companionship of young women was something that he never lacked, especially as he was very good looking, in the Russian style: broad shoulders, powerful chest, clean-shaven face. He also had the good fortune to wear his naturally silvery hair combed straight back à la Leopold Stokowski. He was between 35 and 40 years old when I first knew him, and his appearance remained almost exactly the same right up to his elderly days.

Like any good Russian, he very much liked to drink, often to the point of not knowing anymore what he was doing or where he was, even and especially in circumstances where he had to make a good impression in his own best interests. A nihilistic character? Nerves? In any case, he had a definite genius for throwing away any opportunity where he might have utilized his talents to their fullest. So that maybe why he always remained a satellite, so to speak, of the ballet maestros; either as an accompanist or as an arranger and orchestrator, tasks that in which he actually excelled. And naturally, busying himself helping the young ballerinas, a job that he was fond of and one that often rewarded him handsomely in more ways than one.

In spite of all this, Nicolas and I managed to make contact once or twice per month, but then it wasn't a simple lesson, but a veritable marathon, often lasting the entire day, from ten in the morning until late in the evening. We went over everything: piano technique, interpretation, fingering skills, Buddhism, harmonic analysis, Gurdjieff, counterpoint, esoterism, science fiction, orchestration, art history, folklore—all of it intermixed with musical anecdotes, gossip about the star dancers and ballerinas he worked with; mystical considerations, which all led right back to Music with a capital M: center of the world, center of the universe, which throughout all his vicissitudes remained ever his great passion.

Thus Nicolas opened up unknown territories for me, offered me unheard-of visions, made me penetrate the great composers with all my senses... but I can't say that my musical studies with him were very solid technically. He was quite aware of this, and so to compensate, he had me take private lessons in harmony and counterpoint with a certain Professor Becker of the Conservatory, who was his absolute antithesis: dressed formally, precise, and seemingly without a trace of humor or imagination. I went to take my lessons with him at his ever neat and orderly apartment that perfectly reflected his total lack of personality: a real petit bourgeois.

That was during the war, in the wintertime. I would arrive at his house in the morning, led by his wife to the parlor where he gave my lessons, and where a coal stove occupied the place of honor. This was nothing unusual, since with the restrictions there wasn't any other way to obtain heat, even if the building had, in theory, central heating. Monsieur Becker would arrive, and without saying a word, would take a piece of kindling paper that was prepared in advance, bring it to the stove and light it with his cigarette lighter. Then he would insert the paper into the stove and without hesitation, without checking to see if the fire had caught on, he would turn to me and begin the lesson. In fact, the fire correctly caught on without fail: I had the feeling that the fire would never dare to back up into this room, with its ever so polished and precise décor! Soon a discreet warmth began to spread, just enough to feel that the stove was functioning. Because it would never have been appropriate to get a roaring fire going: waste fuel? What a horror!

Without really being conscious of how cold I was, as the lesson advanced, I felt more and more uncomfortable. Thus, at the end of one hour, as soon as Monsieur Becker rose to signal the end of the lesson, I instantly ran out, and headed numb into the metro in order to warm myself up. In wartime Paris the underground tunnels of the metro were one of the rare places where the temperature was relatively comfortable: even the libraries and the cafés were glacial. In fact, it was not unusual for me to install myself on a bench in a station and stay there for an hour or two with a book, my lessons or a newspaper. I had my favorite stations, be it for the good lighting and overall good conditions or especially because they were perceptibly warmer than the others. La Concorde, on the Porte de Vanves – La Chapelle line, was one, also Saint Michel, which was often the meeting place for me and my friends, or Montparnasse.

Nicolas' home was, on the other hand, total chaos: sheet music parts opened here and there, music scores stacked up on the piano, books scattered all over, dishes and plates piled up in the sink or simply forgotten in some corner, with bottles filled to varying degrees and, naturally, overflowing ashtrays right and left. His apartment was in Boulogne, on the seventh floor, with an open view of the Seine and the Renault factory. Years later, when I became an adult, or nearly, I would stop by from time to time, no longer as a student, but as a friend. As in the past, our discussions revolved around music, now washed down with wine and vodka.

One wartime evening, as Nicolas and I abandoned ourselves to some rather strong musical libations, suddenly a magnificent bombardment took place right before our eyes, right there outside our windows: the Allies were bombing the Renault factory! I use the word "magnificent" advisedly, because if for a moment one reduced all the enormous human suffering and destruction to mere abstractions, the bombing offered an astonishing spectacle of Son et Lumière — Sound and Light. (Is where they got the idea?)

Searchlights crisscrossing the sky; rumbling aircraft motors; flak tracing red, green, and blue trails; flares descending slowly in groups, suspended by their parachutes – they were called Christmas trees, because of the resemblance in shape and brilliance — the sparkling of the bursting shells against the black depth of the night, the deep coughing of the anti-aircraft cannons, the crackling noise of a hail of shrapnel as it fell crackling onto roofs and sidewalks, the clacking of machine guns. And on top of that, that night from Nicolas' seventh floor windows, one could add the marvelous view of the fires that sprang up here and there, the glowing columns of smoke that rose, the scraps of iron and debris that flew up high even before the thunder of the explosions reached our ears through the general cacophony: Concrete music before it got its name, Wagnerian backdrops for an apocalypse of the soul. Anyway, these were the Allies, our friends, that were dropping bombs; they couldn't possibly harm us!

I believe that we went insane: yelling about the harmonies of the sounds that were reaching us, howling about the wonder of it all, Nicolas or I or both of us running to the piano to pound out booming chords in counterpoint to the explosive sounds so close, grinning at the emotions in us that came tumbling out with the blasts and explosions, singing to the tinkling splinters of glass shattering all around us. We drank to the Allies, to the Music, to the airplanes, to the Absolute Spectacle that had been given to us to absorb. And not for one second did we have the slightest feeling of danger.

The bombardment ended. Fires raged under our windows, the _pin-pon_ of fire trucks and the sirens of ambulances lulled us; exhausted, drunk, we fell asleep.

In the morning, we soberly took note that all the windows had been shattered, the furniture overturned; even the piano had been blasted to the center of the room. The floor was covered with plaster and glass shards, the walls and the ceiling showed great gashes, and the façade of the building was pockmarked by shrapnel and machine-gun fire. We learned that all the inhabitants had taken refuge in the basement, and that only Nicolas and I had remained upstairs, spectator-participants, exposed like no one else, way up on our seventh floor.

Truly blessed are fools, drunkards and musicians!

_______________________________

4. My Mother was a Cat

Anush was a Persian Blue. I cannot picture her in my mind as the kitten she must have been when she first appeared in my young life. For me she will always be the Mother Cat, affectionate but stern. Not only was she a mother to her own offsprings, whom she fabricated twice a year regular as clockwork, but she was also a mother to me, to the family dog, and even to a sick chicken that my mother installed under the kitchen sink in an attempt to save its life. Anush adopted it immediately, and I carry inside me the image of this tiny yellow chick tucked between the enormous front paws of that monster cat who licked it tenderly while it kept sneezing because the whiskers tickled its nose. I do not remember what happened to the chicken; for all I know, it died of old age, since my mother tended to keep her pet poultry and rabbits forever.

Soon another addition to our household appeared: Minush, who, for some reason, was the only one of Anush's offspring to remain with us. Minush was also a Persian Blue, -- by some vagary of genes, since Anush was by no means choosy about her suitors. But while Anush remained always slender and quick-moving, Minush was plump, slow, and easy-going; and while Anush's expression was always firm, stern, and decisive, Minush's remained at all times vague and somewhat nonplussed. Of course Anush lorded it over Minush, never allowing her to forget the respect and obedience that parents were then used to expect from their children.

Twice a year, for as long as I can remember, Anush and Minush would disappear for days at a time in response to the ancient call of nature. Anush would reappear first, prim and proper, as if nothing had happened. Minush would come back days later, unashamed of the state she was in: sloppy, dirty, mangy, her fur matted here and there by some unspeakable goo, -- no doubt, given the smell, the result of some male cat's possessive spraying. Usually she would be given a bath. A bath! To a cat! But then, Minush was in such a state of bliss and exhaustion that she didn't seem to mind. The bath was of course necessary before allowing her in the house. One whiff of her interesting fragrance would have been enough to chase even a skunk away!

With free access to the big wide world yonder, both Anush and Minush would become pregnant and give birth at practically the same time. In those days it was the custom to get rid of all but one kitten out of each litter (I never wondered how), since to eliminate them entirely would be cruel to the mother, and who could afford to take care of them all? A brief calculation shows that if each litter consists of an average of four kittens, half of which are female, a single mother cat would beget 1458 offsprings in three years! This system worked quite well with Minush, who could not count.

But Anush knew quite well when she didn't have her right number of babies. Not being given to complaints, she'd take action: she would find Minush's nest, grab the lone kitten that was there, and bring it to her own secret abode. Even if she could not count, though, poor Minush well knew the difference between the positive and the negative, between one or more kittens and no kitten at all. But she could never figure out what had happened, and there she was forlornly wandering throughout the house wailing her sorrows. In self-defense, everybody would embark on a hunt to find Anush's hiding place, grab that extra kitten, and return it to Minush so she would shut up. Of course, as soon as Minush had to leave her baby even for a few moments, there was Anush kidnapping it anew, and the whole rigmarole had to be gone through again.

Not only would Anush rule Minush and whichever kittens happened to be living with us, but she would ·also terrorize the neighborhood dogs, and of course the family pooch, Lady. Lady was black, nondescript, temperamental, and given to snip at people from behind. She had a perennial skin affliction which was usually treated with some foul-smelling substance, and, despite many attempts, refused to have anything to do with any male dog, so that she remained a virgin all her life.

In theory Lady lived in a sort of doghouse under the porch's stone steps. In practice she lived in the basement where, in winter, she would find a comfortable nook right next to the furnace. Lady had thus no particular attachment to her private apartments under the porch, except twice a year: that was when Anush decided to take them over as a perfect place to raise her offsprings. Lady would then feel being taken advantage of, and would bother the whole neighborhood with her moans and whimpers, not daring to come anywhere near her doghouse, from the entrance of which Anush would be calmly watching her antics.

This would go on for some weeks. Then, the kittens old enough to go out and play, Anush would abandon the doghouse, in which Lady would immediately loose all interest. By then, though, she had learned her lesson anew, and would never dare harm the kittens, who used to play with her tail or clamber all over her, Anush, never entirely trustful, vigilantly sitting by her head as if to say :"Behave yourself, or else!"

I have only faint recollections of being caressed or kissed by my mother, nor do I remember any particular feelings of tenderness and confidence towards her. Not that she did not love me in her own way, but she was always busy with politics as well as with the chores of everyday living. She was in fact quite a remarkable woman whom I learned to accept and respect later in life. Is that why I used to feel closer to animals and children than to adults, even when I became one myself?

In any case it is upon Anush and Minush that I bestowed my affections and from whom I received the warmth and emotional support that I didn't get from the family circle. How many times have I not buried my face in the moist and fragrant fur of Anush's belly? How many times did I not confide in her, protected by her purring presence, the childish sorrows that descended upon me, which I only know begin to realize influenced so much my whole life? To wake up in the morning surrounded by the warm presence of my two mother-cats was to color the day with diaphanous light. Minush used to crawl under the sheet and settle alongside my legs, occasionally kicking a fuss because she would forget how to crawl out again... while Anush, more independent-minded, would settle on the pillow right against my head, which would reverberate with her approving purrs...

One of the happiest memories of my childhood comes back fresh to my mind. I open my eyes, wide awake. Moonlight is streaking into my bedroom through the half open French window. On the night—table next to me is Anush, straight and intent. Minush is in her usual sloppy sitting posture at the foot of the bed. Rhythmic dull sounds break the stillness: it is Lady's tail thumping on the carpet. Several kittens are madly playing throughout the room. (Why more than two? I don't know.) They bounce from bed to table and from rug to chair, they run across my body, they sneak through Lady's legs. Well trained by Anush, Lady doesn't dare take part in the game, but follows it with great attention. It is a living painting, suspended in an eternal instant.

I think I am remaining awake, but I must have fallen asleep since all of a sudden the scene has changed without my being aware that time has elapsed. The moon rays reach the room in a much sharper slant. In instant before they traced an oblong on the floor, now they stretch thinly across table and chair. There is a black stain on the rug: Lady, sleeping all curled-up. The kittens also are sleeping, bunched together in the hollow of my knees. Minush is still at the foot of the bed, but Anush has disappeared. I just know she's at work, patiently waiting in front of a mouse hole somewhere, a posture she's quite able to sustain for a whole day and night without twitching a whisker. The room is now completely silent. I feel surrounded by the living warmth of my tribal friends. Calm, drowsiness, fading moon-rays... In the morning I go to school, all alone.

Even as a child playing the piano was for me a source of joy but also, all too often, a real chore: to study the piano while my buddies were playing soccer or wandering the streets, having fun? What slavery! But there was no escaping: everyday, no matter what, my mother would oblige me to practice for a least a whole long hour. While I was thus chained to the piano bench, my two cats never failed to help me bear my fate.

I can still see myself practicing Czerny's exercises, these little horrors, with Minush sprawled on my knees, drowsily purring, and Anush perched on top of our old upright piano all a-carve with cherubs and rococo ornaments —- perhaps the most handsome instrument I have ever seen. Anush must have liked the vibrations, since she would assume a posture quite uncharacteristic of her anywhere else: stretched on her belly, her front paws dangling right in front of the score I was supposed to be studying. Both cats would stay put as long as I was practicing, so that I would sometimes lengthen my daily penance so as not to disturb my furry music lovers.

I don't remember exactly when and how our long association came to an end. I was over 20 years old, probably closer to 23. My parents were still living in the same house with Anush and Minush. Lady had disappeared long before, hit by a bus, I was told. As befitted my young manhood I used to wander the world, living here and there, but always coming back for a day or two at a time.

When I was back the old relationship with my mother-cats resumed as if no time had passed, including playing the piano with Minush on my lap and Anush perched on top. Eventually my returns became less and less frequent. During that period, somehow, somewhere, Anush and Minush departed the house and life, discreetly, all by themselves, as proper cats are wont to do.

My mother lived on many years, active and involved, until the ripe age of 90. To this day, though, if I think of a child's need for love and affection, it is Anush and Minush who spring to mind, forever alive in my inner eternity.

________________________

5. First Love

We are lying on a bed, side by side. We don't even touch. Simply to be thus, so close, without talking, without moving, without thinking, gives me a warm feeling of well-being without the slightest hint of illicit aspirations.

I am perhaps 12 years old. She is the same age, or near enough. I can still see her, a bit dumpy, straight auburn hair framing her face, splotched complexion, dressed with a long-sleeved blouse and a skirt reaching to mid-calf, of a brownish color. It was the era when the rule was for children to take a siesta after lunch, at least during vacations. And thus automatically, without even thinking about it, as if it was our right, we dutifully obey... together, of course, as we were all day together ever since she arrived in the boarding-house my mother organized every summer in order to be able to take us out of Paris for the long vacations.

I don't remember her name. That's not surprising, you would say, since it was almost three quarter of a century ago! But when that episode would occasionally come back to me throughout the years, not a single time could I remember it... which tends to show that her identity didn't matter much, even though she was everything for me in that eternal slice of time, that was nevertheless oh so short. She thus remains without a name, without characteristics, with nothing surrounding her. SHE in capital letters, as the 19th century romantics would have baptized her. A SHE in a pure state, since she was a SHE that I had interiorised, representing all my aspirations, all that I was missing, all that I needed in order to complete myself.

We are thus lying on that bed, side by side, the door of the room wide open, this July afternoon, in the country house close to the Yonne river that my mother had rented for her summer boarding-house. Victor happens by in the corridor, sees us lying there, steps into the room. He is a grown-up, in my eyes he is a man, although he must have been no more than eighteen. He comes closer, looks at us, and says: "Don't do anything stupid". He lingers a bit. We don't move. After a few moments he goes away. I remain lying out there, not moving, in total incomprehension: "Anything stupid? What can he mean?" And I forget him immediately. I feel so good just like that, alongside her. Time slows down, the siesta lasts, and lasts...

It must be a few days later. We are in the woods, she and I, not too far from the house, sitting on a rock, holding each-other tightly, face against face, body against body. My left arm is around her, my right hand is nestled on her naked thigh against her buttock, a place oh so warm, so delicious. I can still see her coarse white cotton panties, but how comes I see them, since we are embracing so closely, cheek to cheek?

We do not kiss. I do not think we ever kissed, not on the mouth, not even on the cheek or anywhere else. As for me, and perhaps she also, I feel nothing of what I later would learn to be sexual desire. Really nothing, nothing at all, no physiological, nor even mental manifestation.

We remain thus, in each other's arms, without thinking, without moving. Once again time does not exist. I vaguely realize that daylight is fading, that night is getting closer, but just like that, in an abstract fashion that does not apply to me, to us. It is the height of summer, daylight lasts until 10 p.m. We have missed dinner, they must wonder where we have disappeared. After all we are only 12 years old!

But that thought would come to me only much later. At the moment I just am, we just are. And since we are we need nothing, we have no desire, no wish to change position, move, explore by touch any part of the other's body. We are, in the twilight.

And then Victor appears, softly walking on the path cushioned with pine needles. He stops in front of us – we don't move --, and simply says: "Oh! Here you are! Well, time to go home."

We unglue ourselves, we separate. With Victor we come back to the house, one or two kilometers away. No one says anything, nobody scolds us, reproaches us for anything, even though for two hours everybody was searching for us, fearing a drowning in the nearby Yonne river or another accident. Simply they separate us without fuss, I in my room, she in hers.

The following day she had disappeared. I imagine her parents took her away. I never saw her again. The most surprising, when revisiting this episode, is that I never missed her, that I never regretted her, at least consciously.

But I keep for ever the memory of our short magnetic embraces, and above all I can still feel that hand on her naked thigh, not moving, not seeking, just resting there, in total bliss...

_________________________________

6. Adrift

The perspective was disconcerting. So was the situation. There I was, slowly drifting above the rooftops of the Serrano neighborhood, each street I was crossing opening like a yawning canyon under me as my vision senses came abreast of the protruding balcony lines, vertically plunging into the chasm.

It was hard to realize that these figures below were persons, cars, dogs, busses, all going about their business without a thought for the strange sight I must have been, should anyone chance to glance aloft, purposefully swimming above the roofs of Madrid, in full daylight, under the relentless sun of midsummer madness.

I had no fear, no apprehension, contrary to what happened in most of my dreams of flying. I felt no anguish that the magic sustaining me would somehow cease to function and precipitate me onto the hard concrete way down below, there to smash my bones so the marrow of my soul would splash out of my mangled head while I was watching, horrified. In fact, I did not even feel there was anything particularly magickal about my drifting thus, in a definite though unknown direction, above the whites of this sun dazzled city.

There was no feeling of dream, of unreality, not even of strangeness. Everything happened exactly as if I were actually floating there, in a body somehow rendered lighter than air and infinitely controllable. For instance, I could no more see around a corner than I could in real life. I had no more inkling as to what the next minute might bring about than one normally has in the everyday world, ruled as it is by tremendous odds against happenstance.

I had no sort of premonition whatsoever, no impression of telekinesis, of levitation. No ESP. It was "I", the everyday "I", who was drifting above the rooftops, and the only unusual thing about it was the fact of drifting thus and the perspective, everything and everybody foreshortened down below, the trees seen from top of their spreading foliage, new vistas swimming into my field of vision in the same way as if I were just strolling along, instead of lazily floating, effortlessly.

As yet another canyon opened below me, my motion forward stopped. In that sudden lull, my inner kinetic sense took hold. It told me that should anyone have chanced to see me from above, I would have appeared as a grossly bloated, fuzzy edged body and head, spread-eagled belly down, arms and legs ending in vague blobs, a silvery streak sneaking away towards the other side of the city, for all the world like an umbilical cord. I was also aware that this "I" who was about to watch what was going to happen down below did not bear much outward resemblance to the person I appeared to be in my ordinary self, that person that others could see, even if it was the same "I" that I had been using for most of my 25 years of life.

A movement below attracted my attention. A limousine had drawn up to the curb; a few persons were coming out of that posh building of the Calle Serrano which I recognized with a slight sense of shock. There was the Princess Dowager, hard to make out from this angle, hidden as she was under one of those flowered hats that seemed then to be the fashion for ladies of quality. There, was the Colonel Prince, easily recognizable by his shining pate, bald as the eagle whose profile he resembled, and whose piercing blue eyes chanced to look in my direction (how come he does not see me?). There appeared, in a hurry, the Princess, holding on his leash the fat Chow Chow she had smuggled in from America by drugging him and locking him in a suitcase, so that he slept for the whole length of the 18-hour Clipper journey.

They all climbed into the car, the Colonel-Prince at the wheel, and, as they sped away, the force that held me motionless blinked out ... and there I was on my couch, in my darkened room, wide awake, only now realizing the strangeness of the trite experience I had just lived, and which was exactly of the same kind and the same reality as if I had taken a stroll in the Retiro, nothing noteworthy happening during that time.

These were the years of hunger and fun, of drink and poverty, of music and of the occult. A wild energy led to unceasing activity, until late at night in the tascas of Madrid. Everywhere, people bought me drinks. Everywhere, no-one offered any food. Empty, empty stomach! Red, red wine galore! There was, I well remember, a whole month in which I ate a real meal no more than perhaps 10 times! A spoonful of olive oil with sugar mixed in was a delectable nectar, and sustained me many a day! And then, there was Yoga.

A morning meditation, followed by breathing exercises for one hour or so took the place of coffee and cigarette. An afternoon meditation and exercises replaced the sacred Spanish siesta. And a late-at-night session would be conducive to a deep, restful sleep, paradoxically alive with events upon which I could exert a degree of control, and from which I would wake up after just a few hours completely refreshed.

During those times, I experimented an extraordinary clarity of mind and sensual awareness. It is not only that whatever powers are mine were being extended to the utmost, without any feeling of strain, as indeed it can be in ordinary life, but that at the same time I clearly observed as if from the outside those powers in action. A sort of duality-in-one which allowed me to reasonably decide to stretch my awareness in decidedly unreasonable directions. Sitting in my darkened room I would decide, for instance, to let my mind roam the city and find my friend Theimuraz wherever he might be. He was, usually, in one of the many tascas in town, drinking liters of red wine, getting more and more sloshed. Then he would wander away, drop by a friend's house, perhaps, or go to another tasca, or a cafe ... The point is that when I saw him next, I was able to tell him with precision where he had been, and in some detail whom he had seen and what he had done, to his amazement.

This was also the time when I could go to a mysterious library, while ostensibly asleep, drawn there to a certain volume, which I would proceed to read, turning the pages, and remembering what I read, exactly as in normalcy, even after I had finished reading. Alas, when coming back from these exciting nocturnal studies, what remained for me was that they had been exciting and interesting, that I had indeed learned something of great import, but that this learning had sunk into the molecular level, so intimately woven into all parts of my being that it had become inaccessible to my reasoning self.

Theimuraz was also keenly interested in the occult, and together we roamed second-hand bookstores and libraries, in search of nourishment. One book we found revealed a hitherto unsuspected aspect of esoterica. The author, in great detail and in some 800 pages, explained how the skin could be a source of para-psychological phenomenon, without the help of any mental techniques. If I remember well, he advocated hitting lightly but repeatedly certain areas of the skin, in order to obtain distinct results, depending only on the area chosen. Many an hour we spent, Theimuraz and I, hitting each other with small mallets, as per instruction: we experimented with wood; iron; brass; silver; bone; any materials we could think of. We hit feet, ankle, hand, head, nose, elbow, buttock ... We were sure something in the technique eluded us, and persevered, and persevered without any result whatsoever, except the for the occasional blister!

A great source of books on those subjects was Irakli Bagration's private library. At that time Irakli was perhaps 45 years old, and had settled in Madrid where he had married one of the infantas, dona Mercedes de Castilla y Borbon. Irakli claimed he was the legitimate king of Georgia in exile, and indeed he was a scion of the famous Bagratide dynasty, perhaps the oldest documented in the world, as its genealogical tree dates two thousand years. On the strength of that tile, he had courted and won the hand of Dona Mercedes, a very nice woman who was also somewhat deformed with one game foot, an incipient hunchback, and other congenital defects common to the Borbon branch. Indeed one brother of hers was hemophiliac, like several of the family, another was almost deaf and had a harelip.

Irakli had been married before to an Italian who, I believe, had died, and of whom he had a son, who is now pretender to the throne of Georgia. When he settled in Spain and married Dona Mercedes, Irakli, according to Spanish law of that time, had control of his wife's fortune. If I remember correctly, that was not so much the principal, which was protected, but the income, which was considerable. Yet he was very good to us students. In fact, he is the one who arranged for Theimuraz and me to be granted scholarships at Madrid University, which is how we happened to be both in Madrid in that year 1951, after not having seen each other since 1944 in Paris.

Yes, Irakli had been keenly interested in the occult, and had been able to accumulate a considerable library on the subject, in several languages. Personally, before going to Spain, I had read several books on Hinduism. Comes to mind Rene Guenon's Introduction to Hinduism, Sri Ramakrishna's Life, books by Sri Aurobindo and others. I also had experimented various paranormal phenomenon, of which one stands out in my memory because of its recurring nature.

At that time I earned some money by playing the piano for dance classes. That was a low-paying, low status occupation that however suited me when I needed some pocket money and did not want to commit myself for any length of time. One of those classes was from 8 to 10 in the morning, 5 days a week. That was for me awfully early, since I usually didn't go to bed until one or two in the morning. I was not quite awake when I arrived to the Studio Constant, near Place Pigalle in Paris. But by then I knew the class sequence so well that I didn't have to involve my conscious mind at all, playing, stopping, continuing, interrupting, starting again on automatic pilot. And meantime I was watching, fascinated, the Battles of Alexander the Great.

No one ever had the vantage point I had. I could see the armies converging, as if I were in an airplane. I could close up on such and such soldier, or group of soldiers, and follow them into clashes with the enemy. I could backtrack and focus on a particular corner of the action, which I had just glimpsed previously, if I thought I had missed something important. Alexander's attire had no secret for me, nor his tryst with that Persian boy, a story which Mary Renault would later recount. I was with him when he crossed the Euphrates, when he accepted the submission of the Indian princes, and, alas, I was with him when he died, oh so young, leaving his name for ever engraved in succeeding generations: Iskander, Zoltan, Chandor, Iskra, Lexo, Sasha, Sandro, Alexis, everywhere his name has remained, changed to fit the Babel of populations!

Day after day, every morning from 8 to 10 I was with him, watching the grain of the wood on the upright old piano organize itself into warriors, horses, concubines, chariots, desert and oasis, and continue the heroic Tale of Alexander the Great. My friends kept asking me: "Why are you forcing yourself to get up so early, to go earn such a meager pittance? Can't you do better for money?"

Little did they know. Of course, I could do better, of course, I didn't have to sleep so little. But Alexander was beckoning. I well knew that the delicate balance by which he was conjured back every morning could easily be shattered by any upset of my routine. How eagerly I would drag myself out of bed, walk 20 minutes to the subway, ride for a half hour, and sit myself on that piano bench!

Soon I also experienced that hypnagogic state just before falling asleep. There, however, all images were extremely small yet extremely sharp, as if seen through inverted binoculars. I could, up to a point, choose my image, but not by an act of will, which would have had as a consequence of exerting that effort my pulling away from the semi-sleepy state, requisite for hypnagogy. No, rather what I did was somehow orient myself in a certain direction, slyly, from behind, as it were, nudging myself until the image I carefully did not seek on the conscious level would appear, fast solidifying into a perfectly formed person or scene, endowed with free will, moving and evolving of its own accord, nevertheless in the way I really wanted it to go. And from there into sleep, where once again I could occasionally influence my dreams, or even, if I chanced to wake up, go back to sleep in order to finish an interrupted sequence.

I do not recall how or when Alexander the Great slid away from me, never to return. It must have been a change in the balance of living, a combination of another, strong interest with perhaps an end to these particular dance classes. Yet to this day I retain within me the vivid memory of his exploits, in Technicolor no less, engraved for always on that old piano which must have long since vanished into splinters, but whose tinny sounds remain embodied in the flesh of many an aging ballerina.

My interest for things occult and for the paranormal had been with me a long time. But it is in Spain, in the early fifties, that I extended my readings: Hindu doctrines and techniques, occidental explorations such as Tarot, Phrenology, Latran, Rosicrucian, Gurdjief, Russian mystics, hypnotism, multiple personalities, idiot-savants, and, as mentioned above, the weird "hit-the-skin" how-to treatise and other so-called practical manuals. Of Zen, the I Ching, Tai Chi, Macrobiotics, we had never heard. The word "judo" had not reached us, only "Jiu-jitsu." Karate, Kung-fu, Martial Arts were in the future.

Science- fiction, another fascinating realm, was hard to come-by in Franco's Spain, and what we could obtain dealt practically only with what the name implies: fictional science, worthy continuator of Jules Verne, Paul d'Ivoi, H.G.Wells, and other precursors. Few were the Western books dealing with the paranormal, at least in our reach. There was An Experiment with Time, which cost me many a sleepless night, so eager was I to record my dreams on paper that I could not fall asleep. And in fiction, I fondly recall Jack London's The Far-Traveller, which I had read in French under the title Le Vagabond des Etoiles. What a revelation! It was enough to make one wish, like Jack London's hero, to be thrown in prison, in solitary, immobilized in a straight jacket, repeatedly beaten and drenched in icy water by sadistic guards, with no food and no drink for days at a time! Since the rewards were so immense!

It was with this background in books and experience, that I found myself, in Madrid, in the condition I described earlier, with little to eat for weeks and months at a time, with no money even for coffee, with just a few cigarettes. Instead of resenting it and doing something about it, on the contrary I plunged into yoga the same way I had plunged into the Travails of Alexander years before, careful not to change my routine of deprivation in order not to disturb those wonderful happenings of which I was both master and subject. Daily travels through Space, nightly flights through Light, purposeful wanderings in lunar skies, fiery azures over land or starlit waters, but not too far, as if away from human life emanations the umbilical cord might snap, leaving me stranded there by myself, with no port, or at best yanked back brutally, bruised and bewildered, yet little by little expanding my horizons, farther roaming high every time, until I could dare thinking of joining Her, unaware.

Yes, the Waters were the danger. Ominous, when flown over, balmy when plunged into the Mediterranean blues, the body anointed with olive oil spiced with lemon, a ripe tomato rubbed on the skin continuing inside mouth and body the sun of midsummer. But there at night, reclining in this dingy Madrid apartment on the Calle de la Vida, drunks staggering under my windows bellowing valencianas or jotas, there at night, liberated from bodily constraints, I would reach the edge of the eternal Waters, venture forth a spell and, overcome with dire forebodings of terrors to come, pull back. Yet everyday, little by little, further I would dare to push towards Her, oh so far, oh so present...

And then, one day, as if waking up from a long dream, I realized my nocturnal expeditions had ceased to be, that I had not, would not reach Her, of whose absence I had but a faint recollection, like a fugitive caress from a forgotten sun. My life took another turn, I went to Paris, then moved to New York. Here, one evening many years later, a vivid remembrance of those times invaded my meditations, so vivid, so present, that without any conscious effort on my part these magickal experiences of yore came alive again through that other magic, the written word. ___

_____________________

7. Anyone There?

He first realized his peculiar gift at the occasion of the great student manifestation of November 11, armistice day 1940, under the German occupation in Paris. He was then a student at the Lycée Louis le Grand where he was supposedly preparing for the baccalaureate examinations — since the academic routine continued as well as it could under these beginnings of the German occupation. And thus he quite naturally joined this spontaneous manifestation that no official thought to forbid, since how can you forbid something that was neither foreseen nor organized?

Like thousands of young people he went to the Champs-Elysées Avenue, where, in haphazard columns, this first challenge to the occupiers was taking place. Traffic, already very scarce due to the war conditions, was practically stopped, and, as the afternoon advanced, one could see more and more police on the fringes, together with more and more German military police: Dark green helmet, feldgrau uniform, boots, dark green tunic, heavy metal tag hanging over the chest by a chain around the neck, gun in the holster, blackjack in hand. They looked compact, heavy, sinister, powerful, threatening, but for the moment they held themselves apart, in groups, at street corners.

Yet another group of demonstrators came by. These youngsters were equipped with fishing rods, in French "gaule", two each, and rhythmically they shouted:

" _LONG LIVE_... "followed by the gesture of lifting high their two rods, deux gaules = _DE GAULLE!_ And all the onlookers would laugh, clap hands, and join in yelling rhythmically:

_LONG LIVE_.... , but careful not to say the proscribed name symbolized by the fishing rods.

That's when a stampede starts from up the Champs-Elysés. People are shouting: "The krauts!! THE KRAUTS!!" The manifestation unravels, all flee down the avenue, running as fast as they could, boys and girls of the demonstration, gentlemen and ladies spectators, pursued by dozens of feldgraus blackjack in hand, heavy and massive, hurling themselves like human tanks onto the scattering crowd.

By who knows what instinct, instead of panicking like everybody else, he remains rooted in the middle of the pavement, the columns of runaways dividing around him. The feldgraus run after them, they get closer, two of them seem to rush straight at him. He does not move, they separate and pass him one on the left, the other on the right, and continue their chase, ignoring him totally!

A few meters lower they catch up with a group of students, beat them , throw them on the ground, clasp them in handcuffs with the help, one must say it, with the help of French police. That's when calmly, without hurrying, without any quick gesture that could attract attention, he slides over to the deserted sidewalk, then to the buildings alongside, turn into a side street: Saved! His wildly beating heart slowly subsides, comes back to normal... And he reflects: "To be invisible, that's not shabby!"

Some time later, another incident of the same kind : the subway is stopped at a station, policemen at every door. At that late hour the train is not too crowded. There are three cops at each door, to make sure that no one escape their control. One of them holds himself a little behind, an anonymous shape in civilian clothes, sporting an armband, while the two others, in uniform, examine the identity cards that the passengers hold in hand.

He is one of the passengers. Since he is rather tall, he easily towers over any ordinary group. He seems ever taller in this subway car, since right next to him are three small ladies, and an old man, none of them reaching to his chin. Like everybody else, he had his I.D. in hand.

The cops get in the car. Their eyes are everywhere, searching to make sure they are missing no one. They check everybody's papers. They are one step from him, look once more at the papers of the three ladies and the old man. He sees their eyes look at the passengers, skim across his chest .. and they are past, checking the papers of the persons behind, nobody verifying his own! Once again, he is invisible.

These were the good instances . Other times, too many to recount, this invisibility could be rather annoying. In fact, annoying as hell. So often it happened that from behind the counter or the window where he was patiently awaiting his turn, the clerk seemed to look right through him to address the person behind him, as he was not even there! And this even though he is rather tall, sturdy, good-looking, and even though he was directly in front of the employee. It never failed to infuriate him: "Excuse me, here I am, right in front of you. You don't se me, or what?" And the clerk, it he or she was polite, would say: "Excuse me, sir, I didn't notice you!"

This also happened when walking in the street, where he wondered why some people walking toward him seemed not to see him and would aim straight at him, as if he did not exist. But how could he become invisible in such a way, despite himself?

***********************

"And they are still doing it. Several times this morning I was actually forced to step aside to let someone go by, or slow down to avoid crashing into someone's back. Even though I have learned — it took me many a year — how to angle sideways to overtake slow pokes who don't even know that they are supposed to stand aside to let me by. Sometimes these people are so misguided as to also drift sideways, just when I am about to overtake. I used to have to exert the strongest grip on myself to refrain from knocking them aside. Yes, they burn me up, even more than those who, walking toward me, seeing me with their own eyes, yet continue almost straight, with barely a streamlining of their shoulders, forcing me to do the same in order not to collide.

For the longest time I could not understand why, in heaven's name, they would not respectfully give way. I would even have done without the "respectfully". After all, we are in a so-called democracy. No one needs to tug his forelock any longer. But that they would insist upon impeding my progress was beyond me!

Perhaps it is age that brought me understanding, if not wisdom. I can only pity them all, now. They know no better. No wonder, with the sad state of education, where so many high-school, nay, college graduates are illiterate, or practically so, when so many immigrants throng the streets of New York, who do not understand the gringo's body language. How can they be expected to recognize my uniqueness, my peerless value for them and the universe, fated as it is to last only as long as I remain alive? Particularly since nothing in my outside appearance distinguishes me from the teeming millions. Of course I could change that. But I do not will it. I prefer to remain inconspicuous, lest my unique value pushes the throngs to smother me with inane precautions, which their lust for life would unfailingly force them to push on me. No, I do not want them to be aware that their grip on life, on the miseries of life, which they love so much, depends entirely on my tenuous existence. Yet at the same time, cussedly contrary, I marvel that they do not disperse from my path, and act as if I were but one of them, — an illusion I do my best to maintain.

The first inkling of this anomalous situation came to me when a young man. I was handsome, well spoken, and, they all said, shy and reserved. Little did they know! There was never a reason to put myself forward, to push for my share of sunlight, to manipulate them and myself toward my own ends. I am my own end, always was. I am unique, powerful, rich in ways common mortals cannot fathom or understand. So that young me remained oh so surprised that not all pretty girls were throwing themselves at him, not every group wanted to take him in not so much as a leader, an honor that would have been too revealing, but simply as an icon around which to coalesce. So that even then I remained in splendid and miserable isolation so much of the time, base me yearning to belong, yet preempted by real me, who knew all along.

Now, many a decade later, I do not pretend any longer. Let the world go on, uncaring. Let people, in their ignorance, obstruct my footsteps as I walk these thronged pavements. Suffice that I know, and pity them all, doomed to disappear.

Alone I am, alone I am not. Oh, let there be Death after death!

________________________________

8. A Surprise Party

"Above all, if someone happens to ring the bell, you immediately and quietly go upstairs and hide on the second floor, and you don't move," R. explained, as best he could in his faltering English, to the two British pilots who, of course, didn't understand a word of French. "And I mean it literally: you don't move at all! In this house everything can be heard. The walls are thin, the floors creak, so that you must really stay totally still until I come tell you all is well."

The year was 1944. The Allies had started an intense bombing campaign against military and transportation targets in France in preparation for the Normandy landing — not that we knew it at the time, of course. One of the most important tasks of the resistance movement was to recuperate and deny the Germans the allied airmen who had managed to parachute or otherwise escape from their shot- down aircraft, hide them, and eventually help them return to Great Britain.

A recycled pilot was a fearsome warrior, one more plane to continue fighting. By 1944 all of France was occupied by the Germans, who had invaded and seized the Vichy French Free Zone after the Allied landing in North Africa. Thus the escape route that used to go through the South of France had been shunted through the Pyrenean mountains to Spain, thence to Portugal, from where it was legal to sail to England.

R. was not actively part of a resistance network. However his sympathies were very clear : he hated the Nazis, and second to them he hated the Soviet Union, the first because of his deep felt convictions, the second because, contrary to a lot of people who were still hoodwinked by the Soviet propaganda, he knew full well the horrors of the Stalinist Gulag: his parents had been obliged to flee Georgia when the Red Army invaded that small country in 1921. And, even though he had been born in Paris, he had been kept informed of the realities of the Stalinist dictatorship, and he knew that between the Nazis and Stalin there was hardly any difference in the terror they inflicted everywhere.

He was, however, pining for the Allied victory despite their alliance with the Soviets, so that when a friend approached him with a special request it never even dawned on him to vacillate. He was sitting in the café Dupont on the Boul'Mich' — Boulevard Saint Michel —, his usual haunt, when Catherine Pouget, whom he had know for a couple years from the political Sciences Institutes where they were both students, came by looking for him. Making sure no one was within earshot, she asked:

— I'm so glad to find you! Didn't you tell me your parents were out in the country, and that your house is empty except for you?

— Yes, he answers. But why are you asking?

— Well, I am in a quandary. You won't tell anyone, will you?

— Of course not, he said.

— Sure?

— Yes, sure, if you tell me not to.

She then explained that she had in her charge two RAF pilots who had been shot down over northern France, that she was supposed to shelter them for two days and then pass them along into the next stage of their escape. But there was a snag and she didn't know what to do with them.

" I was to bring them to my apartment on Gay-Lussac street and keep them there. Fortunately we were late arriving. As always upon coming back I carefully checked around, just in case, and spotted a police van on a side street, and suspicious-looking cars nearby. I believe my parents have been arrested, and that the Gestapo is still watching. So I left my two guys sitting in the Luxembourg Garden and came here hoping to find you. I really don't know what do with them. I am really at my wits ends."

R. did not hesitate : "Ok, I'll go right back home. Bring them as soon as you can. But will you also stay with us?"

"No, it's better that I do not." Catherine responded. "I'll stay with some relatives and try to learn what really happened at home. But I warn you: if you are caught sheltering them, you will be send in one of these awful concentration camps. As for them, the worst that can happen is that they will be sent to one of the POW camps, where the conditions are infinitely better! So think about it."

"It's all thought out," replied R. "I'm on my way."

And that's how it came to pass that a Saturday of April 1944 he had in his house these two British pilots whom he was to keep safe until they would be picked up two days later.

Despite his bad English, R. understood that the two guys were members of the crew of a De Haviland bomber shot down over Belgium. They had managed to parachute out of their burning airplane, had been found and hidden by some peasants, taken in by the Aureole network – that's the only name they knew – and handed from cell to cell until they had finally reached Paris, to find themselves unexpectedly in R.'s small house.

Finally in a safe place, although only temporary, they could relax a bit, wash, wash their clothes, and sleep. They were brimming with thanks that with the help of the Resistance they would probably succeed in going back to England to again risk their lives, rather than rot away in a stalag.

Calm did not last long. They had hardly been at the house two hours when the doorbell rang, and the invasion took place: a half-dozen of R.'s buddies yelling: "Surprise, surprise!", squeezing inside right past him, not paying any attention to his protests, laughing and brandishing bottles of wine:

\--Come on, we know your parents aren't home; we'll have some fun. The others are coming soon.

And they spilled all over the house, brought glasses from the kitchen, put a jazz record on the turntable, and in no time at all the party was in full swing.

As instructed, the pilots had rushed upstairs as soon as they heard the bell, and remained quiet as mice. But there was no way they could remain hidden for long with all these people in the house, so R. ran up, explained what was happening and told them:

— Above all, don't say a word, not even Oui or Non. Your accent would betray you. I'll introduce you as Georgians who do not speak a word of French. You'll be Merab, and you Tariel. Come on, repeat: Tariel, Merab."

— Merab.

— No, not like that: Mé-rab.

— Merab.

— Again.

— Mérab.

— Ok, your turn now: Tariel.

— Tariel.

— Repeat: Tariel, Tariel.

— Tariel.

— Ok, that will have to do.

Fortunately they were both dark-haired. But as for looking Georgian: "No one in the crowd knows what a Georgian is supposed to look like," he reflected. And he led them downstairs to meet everybody.

By 10 p.m. the party was in full swing: music, dancing, jitterbugging, conversations, drinking, flirting: where could they have found all that wine in these times of scarcity? They were perhaps twenty youngsters all in all. Good friends such as Jean, Marc, Olivier, Gégé, Reine de Mars, who tended to rub herself against all the boys, Muriel, who was wont to recite verses at any occasion, Tedo who all by himself could drink more than six, and did, all the while striking airs to impress the girls, also Huguette the painter, Marik du Troc, as she was called to distinguish from the other Marik, the real one from Brittany, to her disgust, since she considered herself the real Marik, of course.

There were also a few that R. knew only vaguely, by sight, and as always in a surboum — surprise party — several that nobody seemed to know, young people who came to the party just like that, simply because they had heard it was happening.

Among them was a red-haired young man with horn-rimmed glasses, who seemed quite a bit older than most, and who stood out because he was wearing real leather boots. He was better dressed, and appeared in better health than any of the others, with a clear complexion and a well-filled out appearance, rare in these times of extreme scarcity. He had quickly made himself popular by the simple expedient of bringing with him a half-dozen bottles of good wine, which he shared generously.

Everybody was having a good time dancing, drinking, discussing, flirting, singing with the music, that decadent jazz and jitterbug music banned alike by the Third Reich and its arch-enemy the Soviet Union. R. could not manage to have an unabashedly good time, as he was keeping an eye on the two false Georgians, fearful that their flimsy cover could crack at any time. But they seemed to remain totally unconcerned, drinking, dancing, enjoying themselves, and uttering strange nonsense syllables under the impression that the others would think they were talking Georgian.

The party was going great guns, when, around midnight, the doorbell rang peremptorily. "Oh shit, " thinks R. "Who could that be?" He runs to the front door followed by a couple of friends and opens it. There in the street stand two policemen in uniform. They are polite.

—Your neighbors are complaining about the noise you're making: you can be heard all over the block!

—Oh, I didn't realize, says R. apologetically.

— Ok, we understand, youth will be youth," the older one says. "But be nice, try to quiet down everybody and turn down the music, that way there'll be no trouble. We don't particularly feel like busting you all and taking you to the precinct.

R. readily agrees, tells his buddies to get quiet and turn down the music, when a shout is heard that reverberates throughout the sleepy street: "Mort aux Vaches! " —Death to the Pigs!

It is that idiotic Tedo who, perched on the toilet bowl, has managed to stick his bearded head out of the bathroom skylight! And he yells again: "Mort aux Vaches! ", before someone manages to pull him away and shuts him up.

Naturally the police are furious.

— So, that's how you treat us! All right, your ID's! We're checking everybody!" And they push their way into the house.

Catastrophe! R. is at his wits end. What to do? The pilots of course have no papers. Various impractical schemes flash through his head: have them run out of the back door into the yard and jump the wall that separates the villa from the neighbors, or sneak into the cellar somehow without anyone noticing, or slip into the attic. But as soon as a scheme comes to him he must reject it: here they are, the false Georgians, in full view of everybody, not understanding what was happening.

Already the police are in the living room: "Everybody! Your papers!" they order. That's when the young man with boots comes to the fore, plants himself in front of the two policemen, whips up an ID with an official-looking badge and declares in an authoritative tone of voice : " Milice! I am taking responsibility for everything that's going on here!"

Unbeknownst to all, the young man turned out to be a member of the dreaded Milice, the organization composed of French pro-Nazi fanatics and thugs that throughout France collaborated with the Gestapo in the hunting and capturing of all deemed enemies of the Reich. They were considered the worst of the worse, yet had been given authority over all French law enforcement agencies, including the police.

Seething, the two policemen have no remedy but to give back everyone's papers and to leave.

—Ouf! That was a close call!" thinks R., without reflecting any further.

The party continues, quieter, but the mood has been broken. Soon they turn off the music completely; everybody calms down. The milicien leaves together with several of the unknown guests: he has nothing to fear from the curfew. Some friends fall asleep in a corner, others talk in a low voice while waiting for the end of night and the first subway.

Come morning, all have left. The two pilots remain in the house, now quite subdued. They don't dare go outside nor even show themselves at the window. Two days later, as promised, Catherine comes back to lead them to the next cell of the network that will help them get back to England and continue fighting.

When the Allied forces liberated Paris in August, R. was arrested for "collaboration with the Milice."

*************************

_R. did not stay in jail long. Fortunately Catherine was still around; she was considered one of the heroines of the Resistance. As soon as she learned of his predicament she intervened and he was released with apologies. However not everyone in his neighborhood learned the truth, and the false stigma of having collaborated with the_ milice _remained for quite some time._

As for Catherine's father, brother, and mother, they had all been deported to the infamous Mathausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, where they died just a few weeks before the final Allied victory.

______________________

Part Two: closer to home...

9. Escape From The South Fork

Only four cans are left: green beans, Spam, sauerkraut. The last one has lost its label. Looks like Progresso chick peas or beans. We also have two 6-pack of Budweiser and three bottles of Molson Ale. These are for me. Sheila wants to eat everything at once. "No sense starving to death little by little," she insists. "Let's have a feast, then starve all at once. At least we may even feel drunk for a little while."

The proposal is considered, seriously. It makes sense in a weird kind of way. In our weakened state, even one beer would be enough to make us tipsy. After several hours of inert discussion — what else is there to do?— we decide to postpone eating until at least tomorrow evening. We'll first attempt a scavenging foray. Perhaps by now it is not too risky to go out. Even if it is, we have nothing to loose: we won't feel sick for at least a day or two: time enough to enjoy our last meal-and-drunk if we do not find anything. And if we do, the risk is worth it.

I have trouble falling asleep. The thought of food keeps me awake. Our decision seems quite logical, yet a part of me wishes we had followed Sheila's lead. All kinds of alternative images assail me, none making any sense. Kaleidoscopic montage, worthy of the most avant-garde products. Yet no outlet.

Success! Trudi hastens to qualify the word: "Partial success," she says. Still, we can now keep going for a while, unless sickness strikes. We won't know for a day or two, Preston reminds us. Of course, if one of us got really a strong doses, it will show much sooner. It is unlikely, though. It has after all been over six weeks since the Day.

Stanley disputes my figures. He says we have not been here more than three weeks, that we have lost all sense of time. A general argument erupted, Trudi siding with him as always. Preston, on the contrary, affirms we have been here several months. I still think we have been here six weeks, about.

A good (?) result of the discussion: we resolve to keep a calendar. But this leads to another discussion: How shall we know night from day in our black hole? Finally we decide to clear a corner of the cellar window. We'll just have to stay away from it to avoid possible contamination. But who'll do the cleaning?

I must be feeling better. Last night —should I say sleep period? Nobody has yet cleared the window— last night, well, I woke up with a mild erection and a vague memory of erotic dreams. By pre-Day standards, my erection was nothing special, and my erotic dreams ditto: vague, half formulated, tentative images of breasts, mouths, bottoms, yet with a warm relaxed feel. Perhaps there was more to it, but as I try to recreate the event, it fades, elusive. But it is enough that it happened. Must be the food. God knows there was not much, yet it was satisfying, the first time since I don't know when!

A corner of the window is cleared. Gray daylight comes murkily through. It is almost enough to see our way in our cellar. A strange experience. All of a sudden, everything seems a lot closer than what it had by feel and sound. And smell. Everybody is quite happy about it. To thank me, they voted to allocate me a bottle of beer. It turns out to be a whole quart of Ballantine ale, my favorite!

Yes, it is I who did the cleanup. I feel good about it, but I still can't believe I volunteered to do it. Must have been the extra food, the added energy. I sure hope all that dirt and dead leaves I moved from the casement was not contaminated, or I'll be in trouble. Of course I took all precautions. I wore layers of clothing, and several layers of cloth around my face, through which I had trouble breathing, let me tell you! I moved the top layer far away, at the end of a long plank, little by little, careful not raise any dust. Only then did I shovel out the rest of the debris and cleared part of the pane.

Coming back in, with everybody congratulating me, I felt proud of my achievement, yet somewhat apprehensive. What if I had inhaled some contaminated dust? Time will have to tell: we have no Geiger counter, no photographic paper, no way to measure radiation or even to find out if there is any. But we are taking no chance.

Moira asked me what I was writing. I realize that until the windowpane was cleared, no one had seen me writing. Yes, I was writing in the dark! I must go back and read those darkness-written pages — if I can. I hope they are not hopelessly jumbled.

Moira seems to be trying to get close. She finds pretexts to talk to me, sit near me, even touch me. I must say I am somewhat flattered by these sudden attentions. Moira is a most beautiful woman, at least in my present eyes. Yet I find it not in me to respond. The half erection and erotic dreams are but a faint memory. I do hope that sort of energy will come back! For Moira to act that way, I suppose she feels better than the rest of us. Next time there is a difficult chore to do, I'll propose her: it would only be just.

Meantime, once again, I dwell in a sort of half-awake stupor practically all the time. Even though I can now see a little, to write these few lines is all I am capable of. Is it because they are in a similar state that old and sick people do not mind dying? I feel that way too: the why of existence looms weakly unknowable. Better finish with it. Yet I would dearly like to know what tomorrow might bring.

I have read my notes. Strangely enough, I could decipher most of what I wrote in the dark, despite lines riding over each other at crazy angles. No one else could read them, I don't believe.. I should copy them properly if I want to keep a record. Perhaps I'll do that soon. On the other hand, why bother? Only a life-long habit of writing keeps me going. I doubt anyone will see them.

The erotic dream came back. Almost in focus, yet elusive. I try to recapture it in the hypnagogic state that precedes full awakening, but as I strive to remember, it disappears. This is for me nothing unusual: I hardly ever remember my dreams, all I remember is a sort of remembrance of having had a dream. I read somewhere that this happens because my system of mental representation is quite different when awake from the one my unconscious uses when asleep, therefore communication between the two is extremely difficult. Those whose representational system is the same or very similar when asleep or awake remember clearly their dreams

Anyhow, buried in my cave with those gray survivors, I half woke up. Alone, feeling proud of that dream, proud that somehow the mental juices, if not the body ones, had started flowing anew, sickly, but flowing. With a warm glow cocooning me, I thanked that fancy for bringing me back to life, and drifted into a sensuous sleep where vague sexual happenings helped the blood course in my veins. "I really must be feeling better", drifted through my mind...

Our new supplies are almost exhausted. They lasted 22 days by actual count. We can detect no change in the environment, except that, perhaps, the days are getting longer. Even that is not certain: we have no watch! Rather extraordinary, isn't it? In an age when electronic watches are practically given away, among all of us we have no time piece! If I ever get hold of one, I'll keep it precious. Perhaps, come to think of it, I should find a wind-up clock. They were already exceedingly rare before the Day. But if, as we all think, civilization as we knew it is a thing of the past, it will be impossible soon to find batteries, and all these electronic watches will be useless. Except, perhaps, the solar-powered ones. These might last a long time...

I said nothing had changed in those 22 days. Well, it is not really true of our group. Moira now insists upon going around naked. She claims her skin became so sensitive that she cannot stand a stitch of clothing to touch her. She keeps flaunting herself in front of every single person, male or female. It becomes really annoying at times. All the rest of us have a psychological privacy curtain which she occasionally succeeds to tear apart. Perhaps she really needs the human contact that we deny each other?

I now have mildly erotic daydreams a good part of the time. I am however very weak in my responses, psychological and mental. Is impotency like that, a pale yearning sensitized by a faint imagining?

We are to hold a council of war tonight. Supplies are again very low. We have heard or seen no one, not even on the radio. Of course the little transistor we have cannot pull in stations from far away, but before the Day it could receive probably a dozen broadcasts. Now, nothing. Silence. The batteries are still o.k., we know because we tried them on a flashlight. And the set is ok, we can hear static. By now, we have been here 30 days since we started counting, and at least 6 weeks before that. We'll have to act. No one else will act for us.

The council of war ended in disarray. Two main opinions seem to hold sway, none of which is to my liking. One is to stay put, forage some more, since surely there is more food and supplies to be found if only we ventured outside a little further afield, and sooner or later we would be found and rescued. The other proposal is to explore a way of getting to the main land, starting with an expedition to the Montauk docks. Surely some boats would still be workable. And by now radioactivity should have abated to an innocuous level. And if not, we would be just as well of dead as living the way we do, even if we don't starve to death.

My own opinion is different. I am all for escaping from the South Fork, but am convinced Montauk Lake and the docks have been utterly wrecked. After all, that area is that much closer to the submarine base in New London. And I am certain they also nuked the Race, Fisher Island, and Block Island Sound, just in case a sub was on its way there, as I have often seen some. No, I intend rather to check if the Napeague causeway is still open, and work my way toward East Hampton. I suspect though that the isthmus is under water.

The Napeague causeway is no more. What critics were foreseeing years ago finally came to pass with the cataclysmic events of the past few months... Even I can remember the debates that surrounded the building of the causeway, years ago. For the causeway were, naturally, property owners, shopkeepers, hotel managers, in short all those whose living depended on keeping tourism flowing into Montauk at a pace ever quickened by population pressure, shrinking workweek, and above all the slow rise of the oceans and the shrinkage of seashore real estate. Against the causeway were all conservationists, environmentalists, many private property owners, and all those who deemed it wise to let nature take its course. "Let Montauk again become the island it once was," they argued. "Montauk is not geologically part of Long Island, and a causeway would impede the natural flow of water over the Napeague sill, interfere with the breeding grounds, and, if by chance it would be breached, then the tremendous tide differentials would sweep it away and create an even more serious situation." The commercial interests won, the causeway was built, but now Montauk is indeed an island again. If we are to leave, it sure won't be by road!

Lisa is the one who brought the news. For some days, she had been complaining of increasingly distressing symptoms: stomach pain, diarrhea, vomiting. She alternated between bouts of manic energy, when we had to restrain her to prevent her from self-injury, and hours or days of lethargically lying around, softly moaning to herself. Until: "I have to go out, I have to go outside, I have to get out of here, I can't stand it, out, out, outside," she suddenly yelled, rushing to the door, which she tried to wrench open, throwing aside the cartons full of clothing and the bags of sand we had stacked there in a perhaps vain attempt to create a radiation barrier.

Once again we had to subdue her, despite her struggles, we gave her our last two pills of Valium, and she slept-groggy. But this morning: "Please, please let me go outside! I'll become truly crazy if I don't! Don't you want to know what's happening there? If you let me go, I'll come back and tell you, please let me go. I'll take all precautions, but let me go! I am sick as it is, I don't think I'll ever get better, I don't want to die in this hole without seeing again the sky, the earth, the sea. Please let me go out! I don't care if I die a little earlier. What difference will it make to me, to you, to anybody? Please, oh please, I'll be careful, I'll try to come back and tell you, so you can plan ahead."

Poor Lisa! She was so pathetic, we were all so touched. And no doubt the selfish desire to know what was happening out there, what were our prospects, played not a little part in our final decision. I know it did for me, even though all the while I felt ashamed of it. So we let her go ...

****************

"What an eerie feeling to be outside! Even with the many layers of protective clothing, even with the thick dusk mask, the goggles, so that not one corner of skin was in contact with the world, even so the impact of stepping out of that door, in the stairwell staggered me. You probably saw me there, motionless for the longest time, just looking up at the rectangle of sky over my head, heart thumping... After I don't know how long, I heard a strange rasping sound. It took me a while to realize it was my own breathing, shallow and rapid. Yet with all that, through the anguish, an extraordinary sense of peace and serenity penetrated. How right was I to insist to go outside, I thought.... At length my heart clamed down, my head steadied, the sense of peace and serenity became part of myself, became myself ...

"Incredible is the silence of a world without life. You have no idea how noisy it is here, inside. No matter how quite we think we may be, we live, breathe, move, the vibes we broadcast impinge on all of us in this small space, where there is no escape. No wonder we are all crazy. Out there, what peace, what silence. Frightening, but oh so reassuring! It was hard to move, to get going, to shatter the calm with my movements.

"My first task, I thought, would be to find a car in working order. I thought there would be no trouble, except perhaps that the batteries would be dead after all this time...

*********************

Infuriatingly the manuscript stops there. We have no further information. Does anyone know where are located Napeague, Montauk? We suspect somewhere in what used to be the United States of America. Should anyone be able to throw light on the matter, please contact us in the usual way.

— _The Editors,_ Fiji Times _—_

___________________________

10. An Encounter with the America Cup

There we were, leisurely sailing back from a short cruise aboard my trimaran Tlőn that took us around the Elizabethan Islands, Cape Cod and Nantucket. I am in the cabin doing nothing much, perfectly relaxed with that feeling so particular to sailboats in which the _farniente_ becomes a profound satisfaction needing no outside stimulus to reach a perfection hardly ever attained in other circumstances. From the helm P. calls me: "I think I see America Cup boats. Want to watch?"

I come up on deck, and sure enough still far away we can see two elegant sailboats clearly standing out against the clear blue sky. Behind them, coming up on the horizon, but still indistinct, there seems to be a bunch of motor boats. "The spectator fleet," I reflect, and we continue on our leisurely way, a light breeze of 4–5 knots on a beam reach, towards a black and orange navigation buoy we want to get close enough to read its number-- according to the good principle that one should always obtain a positive fix whenever possible, even in good weather, because one never knows. And this is particularly true of the North-East coast of the United States, especially here in Narragansett Bay, where a shining sun can find itself eclipsed by a thick fog in one hour or even less.

As we get closer to the buoy a motor launch sporting flags and pennants showing it belongs to the organizing committee of the America Cup comes along; very politely an official asks us to "please leave free 200 feet on the Southwest and 150 feet to the East of the marker, so that the contenders can without hindrance effect their turn for their close-hauled leg into the wind."

Of course we comply with the request but remain in the vicinity in order to see everything close-by. Here they come: two graceful and beautiful yachts running before the wind, the spinnakers pulling toward the sky, the crew crouching yellow on deck to present the least resistance possible to the wind... and behind them, but we don't pay any attention, the spectator fleet.

We are in a privileged position. The two 12-meters go by less than 300 feet away. They turn around the marker, the spinnakers falling and the genoas rising with a rhythm and ease marvelous to behold. Our eyes are glued on them, me at the helm, P. trying to take photos. (My camera will prove to have malfunctioned. What a pity!)

Suddenly she exclaims: "Good heavens! Look what's coming at us!" And a few hundred feet away, straight toward us rushes the spectator fleet, a huge coastguard cutter in the lead, whence comes a disincarnated voice: "Trimaran ahoy! If you intend to follow the race, fall back under my starboard bow!"

Already they crowd over us, all 500 of them, the lesser of which seems as huge as the Queen Mary – well, perhaps thirty really large power yachts--, with an indescribable roar of motors that fill the waters and skies, clashing and echoing and preventing any thought. "Redjeb! Do something!" yells P. Me too, I am really shaken, but try to maintain my calm. After all, we are under sail, they are under power:

"We have the right of way," I shout, struggling to maintain Tlőn on its course.

We are among them. The waters are green and foamy white, raised high by the conflicting wakes. All of sudden the sea has become rough with steeper waves than in a blow in shallow waters. The motor leviathans pass close enough to touch. Tlőn is squeezed into a sandwich of pair after pair of these monsters navigating the waves created by their own turbulence.

We can see at eye level the color of their underbodies. To this day I can recall the sight of an enormous yacht high perched on a green and yellow breaker, its bluish keel appearing on the verge of squashing Tlőn's starboard float far below in the trough, and, high above in the skies, leaning over us, heads and arms armed with cameras; and an elegant schooner sporting a steadying sail, a distinguished looking lady strolling alone on the poop deck, barely deigning to glance down at us, with the whole boat perched on its wave visible from keel to masthead.

With all that a never-ending roar, a racket not to be believed, with the engines laboring to counterbalance the sudden pressure changes created by the propellers popping out of the waters on all sides because of the turbulence and overlapping swirls and whirlpools. To my mind come visions of buffalo stampedes, of herds of rutting and trumpeting elephants, of war movies in which foot soldiers are pursued by roaring tanks seeking to crush them.

I have a hard time trying to control my trimaran. The contrary currents created by the wakes and the propellers push its prow hither and yon, the abrupt and steep waves make it pitchpole violently, the overbearing hulls on all sides further cut the already weak wind, making Tlőn loose way with her sails flopping helplessly.

I am wearing only an old pair of shorts. Leaning down to grab the main sheet while struggling with the tiller in order not to loose direction, crack! My shorts split in the back from waist to crotch, and I graciously bestow on all these cameras a wonderful sight. Yes, these cameras were eager for worthy subjects, since the spectator fleet is kept at such a long distance from the contenders, and with good reason as this adventure shows, that given the distance these amateur photographers could not expect to get good shots of the race proper; so my backside no doubt adorns someone's favorite photo of that America Cup.

The fleet is past. The waters calm down, peace returns to the placid seas. We are still shaken, P. and I. Tlőn resumes her way towards Groton, her home port, where we will learn that the duel we just witnessed was between Swerige, the Swedish yacht, and Australia. As far as we are concerned the true struggle was between Tlőn and the spectator fleet, with Tlőn the winner, if only because my small trimaran survived without damage, the only casualty my shorts.

_______________________

11. A Visit to the Dentist

He was an old man, white-haired, clean-shaven, ramrod straight, very correctly dressed with coat and tie despite the July heat. He spoke with a strong Brooklyn accent, slowly and deliberately, with long pauses between sentences, as if sinking into an inner world from which he had to drag out the words formulating his thoughts. We were talking in my car on our way to Sag Harbor, a small town on the South Fork of Long Island where I intended to move, and where he had a house for sale that I wanted to inspect. He was describing Sag Harbor and his house with so much love in his halting voice, without any attempt at salesmanship, that I finally asked:

— But if you love your house so much, why aren't you living there? Why did you go back to live in Brooklyn? Didn't you just explain to me that the happiest day in your life was when you left the city for Sag Harbor?

— You're absolutely right, he said. But what can I do? My wife...

— Your wife? She doesn't like Sag Harbor? Or the house?

— No, no, that's not it at all, — he replied. — She really loved the house and the community, she preferred it by far to our place in Brooklyn...

He fell silent, absorbed in his thoughts. As you may well believe, my curiosity was strongly aroused. I prodded him, gently but persistently, until despite his initial reticence he finally told me his story.

"We had been living in Sag Harbor for a couple of years. It was very pleasant. Instead of a cramped apartment, we had a comfortable house, a large garden, trees, flowers. Our children, who are married, often came to visit us, sometimes even leaving our grandchildren in our care for a day or two while they went about their affairs. That was for us a great joy. We had soon made new friends in the neighborhood, without losing track of our old friends and relatives in Brooklyn, so that we never felt alone or cut off from our former life.

"My wife used to go to Brooklyn more often than I did, for two reasons. She had a sister who still lived there, and they got along perfectly. And above all there was her dentist, the only dentist in whom she had confidence, who had been taking care of her since I don't know when.

"One morning she left Sag Harbor to go to her dentist in Brooklyn. By nightfall she had not yet come back, but I didn't think anything of it, since after the dentist she often visited her sister and spent the night there. Around 10 o'clock I received a phone call from my sister-in-law: 'John, I think you'd better come. Leonia's locked herself in my bedroom and refuses to come out or even to unlock the door. When I speak to her she hardly answers, and then only to yell through the locked door: Leave me alone!'

"Naturally that very night I drove over to Brooklyn. My sister-in-law and her family were most upset. It was very late, they wanted to go to bed, but despite all their efforts, despite my prayers, my threats even, nothing doing: Leonia refused to unlock the bedroom door or even to open it enough for some food or toilet supplies. That was ten years ago. My wife is still there!"

And as I was exclaiming in shocked surprise, he added:

"Oh she's much better now. For the last three years she has been going to the bathroom, and she is beginning to venture all the way to the kitchen, but only on the condition that no one see her, and even that no one be in the apartment. Even I, I haven't seen set my eyes on her in all that time!"

He was telling this incredible story very matter-of-factly, as if something ordinary. Of course for him, after ten years, his and his wife's lifestyle had become the norm.

"Yes, at first it was very hard. We thought it was but a passing fancy, that Leonia was going to snap out of it. But a week later she was still locked up in her sister's bedroom, at the door of which we would leave some food, which she hardly touched, as well as the utensils necessary for her toilet. We tried everything: talking to her, exhorting her, scolding, begging, praying: nothing worked. Finally we called a psychiatrist. He had with her many sessions from behind the door, that cost me quite a bit, incidentally. But after some time he said that he could do nothing, that the only solutions were either to commit her and take her away by force to a psychiatric hospital or to leave her alone, that time may smooth the situation.

"Commit her by force, my Leonia, lock her up with all those mad people? Never. We bet upon time. But as you see, we're still waiting."

His sister-in-law had to move to a new apartment with her family. He himself was forced to leave his Morristown house and move to Brooklyn to attend to his wife's needs. For a while he continued going to Morristown from time to time to take care of his house, his garden, his flowers. Then he rented it out.

"But why do you want to sell it now, after all this time?"

"Well, one must give in finally to the facts of life. I always hoped that my wife would get better, that we would eventually go back to Morristown. But almost ten years have gone by. I am now used to Brooklyn. I have my habits there, and I can see that even though Leonia seems better she is by no means ready to move or even to let herself be seen by anybody. So since my tenants' lease ran out and the house is empty..."

I didn't buy the house, and I didn't see my old man again. Yet sometimes I find myself wondering if his wife Leonia is still locked in the bedroom, or even if they are still alive. But above all a question haunts me, that I had not thought to ask: "What could the dentist have done to that elderly woman for her to react in such an extraordinary manner?"

________________________

12. Linda Mother-of-God

She is a young woman in appearance no different from millions of women of her age and social class. She is well read, well educated, well traveled — she was an air hostess — and is married to an architect who, although not a top player, is very successful in his profession. They have several children, all girls.

I met Linda and Tom in East Hampton when they were newly wed. At that time they were living in Manhattan, where they lead the active life of a typical successful couple, hard working, hard playing, with an active social life. One note of differentiation, yet fairly common in a country where any group, whether political, ethnic or religious, is a minority relative to the assembled group of all the others: she belonged to a tiny Protestant sect, the Evangelical Lutherans, the history of which she liked to recount.

As many New Yorkers do, when the oldest girl reached the age to attend school, they decided to leave the city, where the public schools are a real jungle and teaching severely deficient. But, unlike the majority of their peers, rather than settle in an affluent suburb, they bought an old farm some 25 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Tom establishes his architectural bureau.

This is a evangelical area, where from the beginning settled various religious groups. The Pennsylvania Dutch, the largest group, still speak a German-inflicted dialect; the Amish reject all modern inventions and live prosperous in their farms they work with exclusively human and animal labor. There are also the humble Mennonites with their quaint attire, the singing Moravians originating from Bohemia. The Schwenks, now extinct but whose village Schwenksville is still there, were one large tribe where everyone wore the same name.

The intensity of religious sentiments was mirrored by the belief in witchcraft: to this day no building is considered finished before it is decorated with at least one cabalistic "hex" sign against evil fate, that people say they regard as a curious relic of distant times, but at the bottom of their heart, perhaps...? It is also in this region that we find place-names that remind us directly and unabashedly how much sexuality is integral to religiosity. One small town is called "Blue Balls" — it is true that winters are very cold in that area! Another is named "Intercourse". A certain highway is named "Honeyspot Road" – and the honey in question had nothing to do with bees.

Near these places other cities are called, in all modesty, Bethlehem, Emmaüs, or Nazareth. Philadelphia itself is also well known for having been founded by the Quakers, whose very name comes from this physical reaction to repressed sexuality, without any doubt reinforced by the sound diet of Quaker Oats of which my generation suffered so much! And in this vein, let us note that the sect of Shakers is extinct because they repressed sexuality to the point that they segregated men and women at all times, so that they did not have children. They did leave however an inheritance of highly regarded furniture.

Yes, this country of the Pennsylvania Dutch is full of evocative names. At the beginning of the sexual revolution, in the sixties, when Allan Ginsberg published the magazine Eros, so restrained compared to what is being done today, it was mailed to subscribers from one of these small towns — Intercourse, if I am not mistaken – so that the postal stamp would add spice and daring to the publication. Poor Ginsberg! He is the only publisher to do prison time for obscenity, the timid obscenity of Eros!

When I visited Tom and Linda I found them installed in their farm that they had succeeded in modernizing while retaining its old traits: heavy beams, low doorways with clouted oak doors, wide plank flooring with irregular seams, antique American furniture with sober lines and heavy construction combining the practical with the comfortable. Yes, this young couple that had everything for them seemed settled in happiness. After a pleasant short stay in this rolling hills country, I took my farewell, promising to return soon.

And the years went by. I had some indirect news: she would have plunged into religion, things did not go too well between her and her husband. Nothing specific, or sensational. I had almost forgotten their existence when, during a car trip I noticed a road sign: Perkiomenville 8 miles. On the spur of the moment, I decided to pay an unannounced visit.

I drive in the farm yard, get out of my car, look around me. Everything is just as I remembered, but with a neglected feel. The foliage is just hanging there, wild grass and weeds abound, the lawns are badly mowed. Perhaps I had been here in another season? I head toward the farmhouse when I hear a voice behind me. This is Tom in arm shirt calling from in front of the former stables. Greetings, handshakes, exchanges of friendships ... "And Linda? And children? How is everybody?" I sense in him a discomfort, a reluctance.

— Come on in, I'll explain.. Yes, the stables are now my domain...

He leads me to a small apartment above the stables, of a stripped-down appearance astonishing for one who had known the old Tom with his zest for life, hospitability, ready to laugh, to crack a joke, to have a drink: whitewashed walls, an iron bed, a chair, a small table, some shelves with books with severe bindings, an immaculate all-white kitchen corner. It is a kind of monastic cell, a cell where no one has ever lived, where the walls themselves remain cold and detached, without even this austere feeling that only a past human presence can bring forth. A dead cell. "This is where I have been living for several years," said Tom, "ever since Linda banished me from the farmhouse where she lives with her children in the company of a female preacher."

And he added that Linda let him see his daughters only a few minutes a day, that's the time to see them approached, and, as he was anxious not to miss them, why didn't I go say hello to Linda, who probably already knew that I was here? I could come back to see him later.

I felt like staying in this atmosphere like I felt hanging myself, but since I was there ... It was Linda who opened the door and immediately lead me to the living room. The female preacher in question was there. She was a woman of about sixty, simply dressed in a non-descript old-fashioned style – where today could one find this kind of cotton stockings? Her grayish hair fell straight, framing a severe face, sallow but almost without wrinkles. During the entire time of my visit she stayed sitting on the edge of the couch, without saying a word, motionless, her downcast eyes never watching me, never looking at Linda. But Linda constantly glanced at her while speaking to me, obviously on the lookout for signs of approval or disapproval she seemed to read in her physiognomy, which seemed to me totally impassive.

Linda showed me the children. I remembered the two oldest. There were also two smaller ones, all girls, and, to my surprise, Linda said: "There is a new baby, a two-month old girl." Upon entering the room, the children went straight to curtsy in front of the woman preacher, who seemed to me to not even acknowledge their presence. There was none of the spontaneous talk common to children of that age and, after this ceremonial, they were sent to their father, over there, on the other side of the courtyard, for their short daily visit. All this in a constrained, stiff manner, disturbing to witness.

I looked around me. Yes, that living room was just about like I remembered, but with a hard to pinpoint sterile, unhealthy aspect, despite a certain disorder like that normally associated to the presence of small children. I noticed on the coffee table, partly hidden under magazine of a religious appearance, a hunting crop. I was feeling like leaving quickly, as I could not bear this agonizing atmosphere. But Linda talked to me, Linda held me. It was as if she needed to explain, to justify herself, in her eyes as my own, to reassert herself in front of the preacher ...

And so I learned her story, which Tom confirmed later. In fact there not much of a story, but rather one sentence, a single one heard years before, uttered on his deathbed by Linda's father, a severe Lutheran pastor, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, diminished as he was by the disease that killed him. Yes, one sentence, just one, a sort of prediction of a mind disturbed by the approach of death, one short sentence that Linda heard, treasured, tried to reject, but nevertheless penetrated deep within her, where slowly those words burrowed, grew, insidious and hidden, until, many years later, the undermining done, they dared to appear in broad daylight and invade the whole of this young woman in appearance so ordinary.

Those words, she repeated them to me several times while relating the circumstances that surrounded her childhood, the classic circumstances of an austere religious fervor that penetrates everything, suppresses and represses everything and, as a consequence of this repression causes the feeling of sin to surge and affirm itself, that sin which is impossible to escape from. Since if everything human is called sin, then sin is everywhen and everywhere, and will impel to acts which will justify that appellation. The whole history of Puritanism of any religion is there to attest to it.

Yes, it is easy to imagine the impact on Linda, in this kind of atmosphere, of the terrible prophecy spoken on his deathbed by her father the pastor, who united in himself fatherhood, masculinity, the divinity of his severe Lutheranism pushed to the extreme; a prophecy that this oh so young 15 year-old girl could not in any way accept or even consider consciously, which she repressed and hid in the depths of her being, and that one day reappeared in all its power. Because the words were said, the sentence pronounced. Here is that phrase, in its heavy simplicity:

"You will bear in your womb the promised Messiah."

Written just like this, that phrase can make one smile, and I must say that when Linda told it to me I had a hard time not to burst laughing, since how is one to take such silliness seriously ? But for Linda, Tom, their children, their entourage, for what it had done to their lives, there is really no cause for laughter.

It was very natural that as soon as she could Linda wanted to leave behind her puritan youth, with all her strength join modern life: what was more modern than being an air hostess? What was more linked to the most advanced technology? And she met Tom, an architect with a good career, and they lived modern and happy in the cosmopolitan world of New York and the Hamptons. But the decision came to settled away from the big city, and they chose, probably unconsciously, propelled by mysterious and unrecognized inner swarmings and under the pretext of the children's good, they chose that Pennsylvania area heavy with religiosity, witchcraft and sexuality, evangelical countryside where the paternal prophesy could blossom in an eminently favorable climate, until it consumed everything.

And I see my friend Tom, prisoner of his love for his children, prisoner of his upright character, of his love for Linda, of his quasi-existential anguish of Him-that-does-not-deserve, doubtless nurtured and strengthened by Linda, victim and executioner, I see him fighting for a "normal" life. I see him attracted, repulsed, again attracted and again repulsed and even more repulsed by the Monster, until he was physically exiled to the stables, chained there by his deepest feelings.

But to the terrible — or the laughable, depending on one's perspective, is added the grotesque: Linda gives birth only to girls! And how in Heaven could the expected Messiah be a girl? Jesus Christ is a man, he cannot be but a man: Is he not the son of God? Who ever heard of a daughter of God? That is totally unthinkable, impossible. It would be a blaspheme to even think it, it would be the negation of all religion...

« What did I do that God gives me only baby girls ? It is obligatory that my father's prophecy be fulfilled, as this is the definition of any prophecy. If it does not come to pass it is because I am not worthy. This is my punishment, this is my cross that God sends me only girls. I must make myself worthy, worthy. If I am not worthy, I will give birth uniquely to daughters, and my father, my own father, the representative on earth of the divinity, will be proved to be a false prophet. And it will be me who will have betrayed him! "

And Linda redoubles her religious fervor. She lives with her female preacher, she banishes Tom, a man "who attracts me, whom I love so much, oh horror! Let him disappear from in front of my eyes, let the temptation he represents be suppressed, let the remembrances of sin he awakes be kept far away ...."

But she must give birth to the Messiah, the paternal prophecy announced it. Thus, when spring arrives, here is Linda lingering on the porch, who lets herself seen by Tom, who smiles at him, speaks with him at length. The female preacher — how comes?—has disappeared, it is like she had never been there. Linda invites Tom in the living room. Its austerity has been erased, there are no more any religious magazines, no riding crop. There are flowers everywhere, fruits on glass dishes, cookies, music is being played, the music from WFLN, the classical music station that Tom loves so much.

She offers him a drink, allows him to take her hand. And him, poor sap, every time lets himself be caught, every time believes that the bad times are about to vanish. It is like a new honeymoon in this spring that follows the long sad and icy winter. Tom is happy, he entertains new projects, has new ideas, plans new architectural creations. And then, one day he comes back home from his office and light-heartedly rushes to the entrance to the farm, the door opens on the female preacher who brutally signifies him exile.

Nine months later once again Linda gives birth to a girl...

___________________________

13. Yellow is the Color of Mourning

Slide 1:

The wading fountain in Washington square is dry, and many people are lounging on the inner steps, indolently leaning against the circular rim. Some are reading, some talking, most are just drowsing. All are enjoying the warm spring sun playing upon their skin.

In the basin center is a three﷓foot high pedestal covered with an iron grating. There a young woman is stretched on a blanket, face down. Against her dark hair a small curly white dog is sitting, very straight.

Leisurely a few persons walk across the basin. A tall black man raises to his lips a shiny brass saxophone, whence he coaxes appeals melancholy. Searching for who knows what, a dog goes by, energetic.

Calm. Drowsiness. Farniente.

Slide 2:

A young man has jumped onto the pedestal. He wears his blond hair long and his mustache droopy. Hanging from his shoulder, a bag. He is standing at the feet of the reclining young woman. From his right hand stretched straight out yellow filaments are hanging.

He opens his hand. A broken egg falls, splatters on the cement floor.

First yellow stain.

Slide 3:

The young man dips his hand into his bag. He pulls out another egg. His eyes are glued The upon the young woman at his feet. He crushes the egg in his clenched hand. With a flick of the wrist, he throws it behind him..

Second yellow stain on the gray concrete.

Slide 4:

The young man is seized with a feverish agitation. Again he dips his hand in his shoulder bag, pulls out yet another egg, brandishes it over his head. Three times he shouts in a shaky voice: "It's the last one! It's the last one! It's the last one!" And with an immense whirling gesture, smashes it upon the ground.

Third yellow stain, with bursts of yellow spokes.

Slide 5:

He turns toward the young woman stretched at his feet. She has not moved, has not even glanced at him. One instant he leans over her, looks straight at her hidden face. The small curly dog wags his remnant of a tail.

Slide 6:

The young man straightens. His left hand clasping the strap of his bag, his right arm swinging high, he jumps off the pedestal, walks away, with one bound clears the circular rim of the basin, and strides off﷓stage with long nervous steps.

A hundred pair of eyes follow in his wake.

Slide 7:

A blues phrase arises from the shimmering saxophone. The young woman sits up, looks in the direction the young man disappeared. Then, all at once, she lets herself fall on the blanket, her face in the hollow of her arms. Tremors shake her shoulders. The noises of the city come back, compelling.

Sunshine. Egg stains. In certain countries, yellow is the color of mourning...

**________________________** __________ **_**

14. The Screamers

Massive, she steps into the subway car. She fills the whole door frame. Her vast belly continues her vast breasts in a single pendulous lump. Her legs — thick towers — are spread wide apart to balance her immense weight. Her arms hang straight down, pushed open sideways by the rolls of fat, like a dancer's feet in fifth position. Head and face are in proportion, yet surprisingly young looking. Heavily, she pushes into the crowd that pulls aside for her, or rather that she splits open like the bulbous prow of a minesweeper parting the seas. Her expression is hard, stubborn, fierce even behind her iron-rimed glasses.

She is not yet entirely inside when the doors begin to close. Effortlessly, she pushes them back with her elbows. Finally she has made it inside and, furious, hits one of the doors with a brutal open-handed blow that reverberates throughout the car. The doors close, the train starts moving with the deafening noise of screeches and grinds that characterizes New York City's subway; and, above the din, at the top of the audible spectrum, a shrill voice is heard: it is from her, from that obese black girl, that the shrieks are coming.

Impossibly, her voice climbs even higher. Louder and louder she shouts indistinct words where insults can be discerned. She howls her passion. she screams her rage at being a prisoner of her condition in a world where she finds herself assailed from all sides, even by subway doors, locked into the jail of her misery, of the heavy thickness of her own flesh from behind which she cannot escape, she cannot gain freedom, she cannot even reveal herself to herself.

There she goes, making her way down the subway car, striking with her immense fists partitions, seats, windows. She hits so hard, her whole obese mass behind each blow, it is astonishing that nothing breaks ... but soon a glass-pane cracks, then another... Relentlessly, she keeps hitting her fists. Other cracks appear, then still others, a small piece of glass falls off, then another. Her hands are bleeding but she does not feel anything and continues hitting, striking, howling, screaming her pain and her anguish.

Someone has alerted a conductor. The train stops at the next station where MTA police are already waiting. Not without difficulty, they talk to her, get through to her, calm her, and finally take her away, probably to Bellevue, New York City's dump for disturbed persons.

The train continues on. The passengers look at each other. No one says a word.

*********************

Well guarded by its two stone lions, the main branch of New York City' s public library turns its back upon a French-style garden open to the street and occupying the rest of the block. Although it is located in a bustling neighborhood close to Grand Central Station, back then the park had a rather unsavory reputation, so that it was in genera1 avoided, with good reason: as a case in point, the well-known bassoonist and conductor Robert Coles was mugged there in broad daylight and died of the injuries sustained during that attack.

Despite this reputation, every work-day at lunch time, when the weather is good, a numerous audience gathers on the small central mall People settle on the benches or on the ground with their sandwiches and sodas, or remain standing one by one or in small groups. All are there for one reason only: and this good reason promptly appears in the form of a middle-sized, soberly dressed man, a neat beard continuing his Abyssinian profile, who positions himself at the top of a short set of stone steps, and alone, without any musical accompaniment, a1most without motion or expression, sings.

Yes, he sings, and what he sings, in his untutored but rich and powerful voice, are operatic arias! Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Wagner, all the great arias are in his repertory. Occasionally, he does not scorn a whiff of Offenbach, a touch of Frantz Lehar, a medley by Gi1bert and Sullivan. But his main repertory consists of operatic arias, truly grand operatic arias.

He sings without regard for the type of voice required, bass, baritone, or tenor. Not that he has one of those extraordinary voices extending across all ranges. Simply, he transposes those arias into his own possibilities, and indeed why not, if it comes out fine? He can be heard even in the street despite the traffic noise, always heavy at that time of day, so that many a passer-by pricks his ears and comes to join the audience, seduced by our bearded siren.

Power of songs, power of the human voice, magic power of music incarnate! The great majority of the audience would be extremely surprised to learn that what it listens to with great pleasure are operatic excerpts, this snobbish and boring branch of show business reserved for wea1thy New-Yorkers who, from generation to generation, are wont to keep their reserved seats with a plaque to their name at the Metropolitan Opera, shrine of obsolete music.

Yes, they are quite run-of-the-mill, these people who gather around our singer everyday at noon in the unsavory park. No one applauds between arias, nor at the end. When he has finished for the day, he merely comes down his stone steps, exchanges a few words with some acquaintance, and very simply returns to his everyday work, which one would guess is of a modest nature

The groups unravel, each one goes his own way. At one o'c1ock, the park is empty. Apart from a few bums, prostitutes, or sexual deviates, it will remain deserted until noon of the following day, when a new audience gathers for another impromptu recital...

*************************

... and there is an old Ukrainian who, standing at a Lower East Side corner, screams endless discourses in a reasonable yet incomprehensible voice.

... and there is a very correctly dressed man who, all of a sudden, without any change of expression, spews forth foul insults at the top of his voice, then continues on his way as if nothing had happened.

... and there is a tall black man, dancing and singing, furiously snapping his fingers under the nose of terrorized passer-bys.

... and there is this movie in which millions of Americans open wide their windows and scream to the impassive heavens: "I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this any more!"

... and there are all those who, unable to express their rage and their despair, one-good day stride into a school or a mall armed to the teeth and shoot down a dozen fellow students or other bystanders before being shot dead in their turn...

________________________________

15. Letter from the New World

New York, July 4, 1976

Dear Friend:

Today is the bi-centenary of the American declaration of independence, proclaimed on July 4 1776. As befits the occasion festivities of all kinds are taking place throughout the land, the news media has place for nothing else, indeed the topic is on everybody's mind – including mine.

Thus it is that, strolling on Amagansett beach alongside the liquid frontier separating Europe from America, an essential truth was revealed to me that remains unknown from the entire world: there is no such country as the United States!

I fully recognize the paradox. Although my eyes have been opened to the point where I know, intellectually and logically, that this "nation" has no other existence than that we concur into bestowing upon it, on the other hand, physically, emotionally, and as a conscientious consumer, I cannot prevent myself from being caught in the trap and believe that I truly live in this imaginary country, fruit of a monstrous conspiracy, an astonishing commercial and advertising enterprise which is stamped with the sign Made in USA.

Even when living in Europe, like everyone I knew that the Western, this poetic genre, was grounded in no reality, and that the myth of the cowboy holds no other truth than the one bestowed upon it by Hollywood, mother of deception. Yes, a whole region was fabricated from scratch and propagandised (what a beautiful verb) by the movie studios: I am speaking about the Far-west, mythologically located somewhere between the Mid-West and California. Later, I came to live in New York City.

Soon, in part thanks to the famous New Yorker cover by Steinberg that shows the United States consisting only of Manhattan, some vague territory to the West, and Hollywood, I realized that practically nothing existed to the West of the Hudson river except fabulous California.

I must say that, like everybody, I tried to visit on the other side of the Hudson and that, like everybody, I thought I had often done it, but the fact is that I never succeeded. New York is wide open on the Atlantic ocean to the East, but on the other side, the West, where one commonly imagines that a continent spreads out, there is, beyond a magical belt made of deleterious emanations reeking of oil, chemical products, burning garbage, fire-melted tires, there is, then, I finally discovered, ... Hollywood's studios which, in a subtle manner hidden from all but the shrewdest observer, confound everyone and substantiate thanks to very well made mock-ups and _trompe-l'oeil_ what publicity makes people believe. That is: beyond the Hudson River, there exists an enormous region from where come all kinds of industrial and agricultural products.

This publicity is so well made that even the Chinese, pragmatic communists and level-headed businessmen that they are ever since the chopping of protruding heads fell out of fashion after the death of that other advertising campaign named Mao-Tse-Tung — that even the Chinese, then, got caught in the trap and purchased millions of tons of cereals! Just think: it is unbelievable, the degree to which people are gullible!

It is however true that few New Yorkers feel the need to cross the Hudson and go to a country they vaguely mistrust in an manner maybe unreasonable, but nevertheless very real; which indeed shows once again that it is not feasible to completely fool everybody all the time. This feeling allows the Hollywoodian make-believe to be not too sophisticated nor fanciful, particularly since drugs are massively utilized in order to befuddle everybody.

The slightest reflection allows one to realize that no accident, no aberration, no fortuitous series of happenings can explain why and how one would create from scratch a belt of distasteful and dangerous smells and fumes all along one of the most important cities in the world, which is affected by that pollution to a degree nowhere equaled, except perhaps in fabulous California; a pollution that shortens everybody's life, creates at times a thick unbreathable atmosphere, constitutes an everyday danger, is everyday denounced by newspapers, government agencies, and even by industries such as Con Edison itself, yet remains and even increases in level from year to year.

The explanation of this phenomenon is of a childish simplicity, if one but thinks of it: the psychedelics! This zone, this barrier made of noxious fumes is there for no other reason but that of disguising the smell and taste of the drugs that are in the very air that all breathe per force, and which with the help of Hollywood's mock-ups and the advertising campaign mentioned above, help everyone believe in the hallucination now strongly anchored in the American and world collective Maya according to which there exists something between the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, between New York and Hollywood.

Having discovered this interesting phenomenon — it is not for nothing that the world centers of publicity and money are named Madison Avenue and Wall street, both located in New York City — I thought I had solved the American enigma. The United States were constituted in reality by New York City and some territory located between the Hudson river and the Atlantic Ocean, on one hand, and on the other hand by Hollywood, sited on the Pacific ocean, and inventor of the legendary California of the gold rush. Together, in order to bolster themselves, to appear important in the eyes of the world and their own, in order to live well, these territories invented the modern United States through a campaign of illusion and publicity basically very similar to that accompanying the launching of a movie or a television program.

However, knowing that nobody invents anything where there is nothing at all, I had the idea to do some research. I went to the main New York Library, that imposing building on 42nd street, well protected by its two stone lions. Soon I could convince myself that a territory had truly existed, which could have been the Mid-west – as we have seen the Far-west, that poetical invention, has never been anything but a myth.

But all the indications are that this territory had disappeared under the waves of the Pacific Ocean during the great catastrophe of 1906, which publicity and censorship had minimized and disguised under the name of the Great Francisco Earthquake.

The direct reason for such a censorship was the fear that the Japanese, who had just defeated the tsarist empire, would take advantage of the weakness in which this fateful blow had plunged America and, like a human tsunami, would roll in upon the place that had already began to be the world center of illusion: Hollywood's California. (We know only too well how the Japanese attempted that venture in 1941)

I had reached that point with my socio-geographical research, a few years ago, and, by and large satisfied with my explanation, I hardly thought about it any longer. But today, all of a sudden, and this is why I am writing to you, Oh Friend., a supplementary revelation took hold of my dazzled spirit. I had not dared enough. The realization that nothing existed between New York and Hollywood was but a first step, a tentative and timid step. The truth, the real truth, the ultimate truth, is that there is no United States.

As soon as this bold idea took hold of me, I decided to check it as if it were a scientific hypothesis. Once more, I rushed to the Library, greeting in passing the two lions of the wise patience, remembering meanwhile a fact so evident that it is usually not even mentioned: New York is an African city, one of the largest in the world, a Spanish city, also one of the largest in the world, a Jewish city almost larger than the whole of Israel, a Greek Arabic, Chinese city, or any nationality you can think of, but it is by no means a real American city. Is there such a person as an American?

Feverishly, I opened an Atlas: what did I see in the only region that truly exists, the one between the Hudson River and the Atlantic ocean? I quote at random the name of some cities: Southampton, Paris, Berlin, Stratford, Potsdam, Athens ... All European names! Despite all this evidence, I could not believe it. And the atom bomb? chewing gum? Cadillacs? Blue-jeans? Drug-stores? Jazz? Long-gun? A double crime in the rue Morgue? All this had to come from somewhere, no? If the United States did not exist, wouldn't they have to be invented?

With these words, I calmed down. I re-read Voltaire, who had famously written: "If god does not exist, He would have to be invented." I re-read Korzybski, and in particular his celebrated dictum " the map is not the territory," which in this case we can translate by: the American products — the map — are not America — the territory. In other words, it not necessary for America to exist in order to have American products!

This epiphany led me to this other philosopher, this juggler of paradoxes, this pataphysist without par... Yes, it's him, it is Borgés, Jorge-Luis, the man who recounted for us the true legend of those cartographers of a fabulous country who attempted to fabricate a full-sized map, but had to give up after centuries of efforts because, as soon as they would partially reach their aim, the result of their work disappeared within the territory with which it would become one.

Yes, it is Borgés, this traitor, who, through the parable he gave the title of Tlőn, revealed to us the truth about the United States. The complete title of his tale is: Tlőn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Instead of Tlőn, read: the United States. Instead of Uqbar, read: the American continent. And as for Orbis Tertius, you just have to translate from the Latin: the third orbit around the sun, our own little planet, our spaceship earth.

The parallel does not stop here. In the story, Tlőn is revealed to Borgés through a 19th century encyclopedia article. Same thing for the United States. The proof is that I defy anyone to find any mention of the name United States in Diderot's Great Encyclopedia, or in any encyclopedia prior to 1776.

In the tale, little by little other encyclopedia articles about Tlőn appear. Little by little Tlőn acquires substance, shows its own characteristics, and finally is revealed as a real country. The same thing happened in regard to the United States all along the 19th century. In the tale, artifacts and manufactured goods coming from Tlőn slowly appear.

In the same way artifacts and manufactured goods coming from the United States began to spread everywhere in the 19th century, and have now invaded the whole earth. In Borgés parable, the Earth became transformed into the image of Tlőn. In real life, the Earth is in the process of transforming itself into the imaginary image of the imaginary country that is known as the United States of America.

Thus it is thanks to Borgés, that clairvoyant traitor who paid with the loss of his sight his obscure treason that my own eyes have finally been opened. Yes, Oh Friend, read again Tlőn, everywhere replace this name with United States, and you will see how everything fits.

Tlőn was conceived and created by an advertising campaign run by a group of learned and wise encyclopedic scholars who wrote it as a genesis; and Tlőn being written, Tlőn became. Similarly, a group, a previously unheard of conspiracy of 18th century philosophers with their accomplices arrogated the divine prerogative of creation.

In their pride, they launched that gigantic enterprise to which they gave the name of United States, which they wrote and described in a few key documents in which the so-called "Americans" believe with all their being and which they worship like a bible: Declaration of Independence and Constitution. And the United States being written, the United States became!

Just like Heisenberg's celebrated atoms wallow in a quantum fog of possibilities yet manifest themselves in a solid material reality, thus the United States nation, nexus of hallucinated probabilities, nevertheless attain in its manifestations the most concrete although totally illusory existence.

It remains for me to thank here Borgés and the New Yorker for having opened my eyes. . Now that, thanks to them, I know what's what, my decision is taken: I shall escape this endeavor of the encyclopedic Verb and abandon this New York made of mist to go end my days in the solid reality of ancient Europe.

Always Yours,

Red Jeb

P.S. Upon re-reading this letter before mailing it, oh Friend, a dreadful idea came to mind. Would it be possible ... Could Europe itself be ...? I do not dare say it, I do no dare write it, since that would be to acknowledge its reality... But to conceive of something in the secret of one's thoughts, isn't that in itself to create it, even before saying or writing it? Isn't the Verb, above all, an Act? And even if hidden, isn't it nevertheless real?

Well, here goes, I'1l risk it. Did I stumble upon the fact that the United States nation is but an illusion only because it is the most recent? Could it be the same for other nations, other countries, other continents which were once fabulous and became real for us only because we believe in them, because the illusionary process dates from too long ago? Have Europe, China, old Egypt, been created from scratch by some verbalizing Gilgamesh? And why stop there? The earth itself, the planets, the universes, imaginary or real, could they be due to legendary encyclopedists lost in the identical hexagons of the famous absolute library that Borgés — always him — revealed to us, infinite and cyclical?

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