Traveller_Levin's Blog

Free Fruit for Young Widows

by Nathan Englander May 17, 2010

When the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were soldiers in the Israeli Army and soldiers in the Egyptian Army who ended up wearing identical French-supplied uniforms to battle.

Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

by Joyce Carol Oates

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk."

Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn't bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn't do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.

The Most Beautiful Woman In Town

Charles Bukowski

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men.

Her sisters accused her of misusing her beauty, of not using her mind enough, but Cass had mind and spirit; she painted, she danced, she sang, she made things of clay, and when people were hurt either in the spirit or the flesh, Cass felt a deep grieving for them. Her mind was simply different; her mind was simply not practical. Her sisters were jealous of her because she attracted their men, and they were angry because they felt she didn't make the best use of them. She had a habit of being kind to the uglier ones; the so-called handsome men revolted her— "No guts," she said, "no zap. They are riding on their perfect little earlobes and well-shaped nostrils...all surface and no insides..." She had a temper that came close to insanity, she had a temper that some call insanity. Her father had died of alcohol and her mother had run off leaving the girls alone. The girls went to a relative who placed them in a convent. The convent had been an unhappy place, more for Cass than the sisters. The girls were jealous of Cass and Cass fought most of them. She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending herself in two fights. There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it. I met her at the West End Bar several nights after her release from the convent. Being youngest, she was the last of the sisters to be released. She simply came in and sat next to me. I was probably the ugliest man in town and this might have had something to do with it.

"Drink?" I asked.

Eminent Domain

BY ANTONYA NELSON

What caught Paolo’s attention was the smile, teeth extravagantly white and large, orthodontically flawless. Expensive maintenance in the mouth of a homeless girl. Around the smile was a pale, animated face, and around that a corona of wild purple hair. The owner of this gleeful mouth was drunk, her flame of a head swaying on the thin stick of her body, lit at nine in the morning on the front stoop of a condemned Baptist church.

This neighborhood was called “transitional.” The church was being destroyed to accommodate a new freeway, and a ramp jutted raggedly into the sky above it, a road to nowhere: eminent domain. Paolo drove past it on his way to the theatre for rehearsals. Every day, the girl balanced on the church steps, surrounded by a shifting group of men. Always the only female, and, as a result, the center of a kind of stunned, stoned, possessive attention. The group surveyed the street, drinking from brown-paper bags, leaning on bundles, panhandling with plastic cups, laughing too loudly, ready to attack anyone who made the mistake of approaching their girl. Some wore hospital wristbands. They adopted dogs and took better care of them than they did of themselves. They, too, were strays—unclaimed, uncollared, trotting purposefully through parking lots or along sidewalks, jauntily dodging danger, their only objective the next meal or drink and a place to lie down. When inspired, the group catcalled in the direction of traffic—provoked by an angry driver, a hand gesture or a shout, the look of fear or disgust on an elderly face, or the mere fact of a particularly ostentatious vehicle, like a Humvee or a Bentley. Other times, they collected aluminum cans in shopping carts. You’d see them paired off on recycling day, scrounging through the green bins left curbside. They were everywhere, like squirrels, Paolo thought, with routines, like mailmen. You could grow so accustomed to their presence that you stopped seeing them.

But Paolo felt he knew the girl. Her animation most likely had to do with being the only female and therefore the source of a kinetic sexual friction, not only among the men in her circle but among the men in the cars passing, and the ones wearing hard hats and safety vests, operating the raucous city equipment, erecting the freeway. She presided in the manner of a stripper before a paying audience. Still, Paolo stared with what he knew to be special interest, drawn by something about her that he alone perceived.

Games at Twilight 

Anita Desai 

It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated with the effort, but their mother would not open the door, everything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke. 

“Please, ma, please,” they begged. “We’ll play in the veranda and porch—we won’t go a step out of the porch.” 

“You will, I know you will, and then——” 

The Blackbird

Robert Musil

The two men whom I must mention in order to relate three little stories, in which the narrative pivots around the identity of the narrator, were friends from youth; let's call them Aone and Atwo. The fact is that such early friendships grow ever more astounding the older you get. You change over the years, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, from the skin's soft down to the depths of your heart, but strangely enough, your relationship with each other stays the same, fluctuating about as little as the communion we each carry on with that diverse host of sirs successively addressed as I. It is beside the point whether or not you still identify with that little blond numskull photographed once long ago; as a matter of fact, you can't really say for sure that you even like the little devil, that bundle of I. And so too, you may very well both disagree with and disapprove of your best friends; indeed, There are many friends who can't stand each other. And in a certain sense, those friendships are the deepest and the best, for without any admixtures, they contain that indefinable essence in its purest form.

The youth that united the two friends Aone and Atwo was nothing less than religious in character. While both were brought up in an institution that prided itself on the proper emphasis it placed on the religious fundamentals, the pupils of that institution did their best to ignore those selfsame principles. The school chapel, for instance, was a real, big, beautiful church, complete with a stone steeple; it was reserved for the school's exclusive use. The absence of strangers proved a great boon, for while the bulk of the student body was busy according to the dictates of sacred custom, now kneeling, now rising at the pews up front, small groups could gather at the rear to play cards beside the confessional boot has, or to smoke on the organ steps. And some escaped up the steeple, whose pointed spire was ringed by a saucerlike balcony on the stone parapet of which, at a dizzying height, acrobatics were performed that could easily have cost the lives of far less sin-burdened boys than these.

One such provocation of the Lord involved a slow, muscle-straining elevation of the feet in midair, while with glance directed downward, you grasped the parapet, balancing precariously on your hands. Anyone who has ever tried this stunt on level ground will appreciate just how much confidence, bravery, and luck are required to pull it off on a foot-wide stone strip up at the top of a tower. It must also be said that many wild and nimble boys, though virtuoso gymnasts on level ground, never did attempt it. Aone, for instance, never tried it. Atwo, on the other hand - and let this serve to introduce him as narrator - was, in his boyhood the creator of this test of character. It was hard to find another body like his. He didn't sport an athletic build like so many others, but seems to have developed muscle naturally, effortlessly. A narrow smallish head sat atop his torso, with eyes like lightning bolts wrapped in velvet, and teeth that one would sooner have associated with the fierceness of a beast of prey that the serenity of a mystic.

The man who could walk through walls

Marcel Aymé

In Montmartre, on the fourth floor of number 75½ Rue Orchampt, there once lived a fine fellow named Dutilleul who had the remarkable gift of being able to pass through walls with perfect ease. He wore a pince-nez and a small black goatee and he worked as a level three clerk in the Registration Ministry. In winter he would take the bus to work, and come summer he would walk, wearing his bowler hat.

Dutilleul discovered his power shortly after he turned forty-two. One evening, the electricity went out briefly while he was standing in the front hall of his small bachelor apartment. He groped around for a moment in the dark, and when the power came back on, he found himself standing on his fourth floor landing. Since the door to his apartment was locked from the inside, this gave him pause for thought. Despite the objections of his common sense, he decided to return home in the same way he left—by passing through the wall. This strange ability seemed to have no bearing on any of his aspira­tions, and he could not help feeling rather vexed about it. The following day was Saturday, and since he worked a five-day week, he sought out the local doctor and presented his case to him. The doctor satisfied himself that Dutilleul was telling the truth, and upon examining him he discovered that the problem was caused by a helicoidal hardening of the strangu­lar membrane of the thyroid gland. He prescribed intensive overwork and told him to take two doses a year of tetravalent pirette powder containing a mixture of rice flour and centaur hormone.

Dutilleul took one dose, then put the medicine in the back of a drawer and forgot about it. As for intensive overwork, his activity as a civil servant followed fixed practices which did not lend themselves to any excess. He spent his free time read­ing the newspaper and working on his stamp collection; these activities did not require him to expend an unreasonable amount of energy either. After a year then, he still retained the ability to pass through walls, but he never used it inten­tionally; he had little interest in adventures and he stubbornly resisted the impulses of his imagination. The idea never even occurred to him to enter his apartment any other way than by the door, and that after having duly opened it using the lock.

Stairway to Heaven

by Aleksandar Hemon October 23, 2006

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burned flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling above my bed, a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees below my window. But the most troubling thing was the ceaseless roll of drums: a sonorous, ponderous thudding that hovered around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I couldn’t tell.

I was sixteen, at the age when fear arouses inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug a brand-new Moleskine journal out of my suitcase, and had just managed to write, on the first page, “Kinshasa 7.7.1983,” when I heard my parents’ bedroom door slam open and Tata cursing and stomping away. I leaped out of bed and followed him into the living room, where he had already flipped on the lights. I bumped into Mama, who was cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms; Sestra was there, too, pressing her face into Mama’s side. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

“Spinelli,” Tata exclaimed. “What a dick.”

The Falling Girl

By Dino Buzzati

Marta was nineteen. She looked out over the roof of the skyscraper, and seeing the city below shining in the dusk, she was overcome with dizziness.

The skyscraper was silver, supreme and fortunate in that most beautiful and pure evening, as here and there the wind stirred a few fine filaments of cloud against an absolutely incredible blue background. It was in fact the hour when the city is seized by inspiration and whoever is not blind is swept away by it. From that airy height the girl saw the streets and the masses of buildings writhing in the long spasm of sunset; and at the point where the white of the houses ended, the blue of the sea began. Seen from above, the sea looked as if it were rising. And since the veils of the night were advancing from the east, the city became a sweet abyss burning with pulsating lights. Within it were powerful men, and women who were even more powerful, furs and violins, cars glossy as onyx, the neon signs of nightclubs, the entrance halls of darkened mansions, fountains, diamonds, old silent gardens, parties, desires, affairs, and above all, that consuming sorcery of the evening which provokes dreams of greatness and glory.

Seeing these things, Marta hopelessly leaned out over the railing and let herself go. She felt as if she were hovering in the air, but she was falling. Given the extraordinary height of the skyscraper, the streets and squares down at the bottom were very far away. Who knows how long it would take here to get there. Yet the girl was falling.

The White Umbrella

by Gish Jen

When I was twelve, my mother went to work without telling me or my little sister.

“Not that we need the second income.” The lilt of her accent drifted from the kitchen up to the top of the stairs, where Mona and I were listening.

“No,” said my father, in a barely audible voice. “Not like the Lee family.”