The Moment Before the Gun Went Off

by Nadine Gordimer

Marais Van der Vyver shot one of his farm labourers, dead.

An accident. There are accidents with guns every day of the week: children playing a fatal game with a father's revolver in the cities where guns are domestic objects, and hunting mishaps like this one, in the country. But these won't be reported all over the world. Van der Vyver knows his will be. He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer - a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando - he, shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa. It's made for them. They'll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns. It'll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country. The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at United Nations - he, whom they will gleefully call 'a leading member' of the ruling Party.

THE TEACHER

BY RUTH PRAWER JHABVALAJULY 28, 2008

It was the girls who first brought him here. I call them “girls” because of their girlish temperaments, though they were almost middle-aged. Maeve was by far the more emotional of the two, with a habit of turning her pale-blue eyes upward like a saint or a martyr. Betty was sturdier, with a square muscular body to anchor them both. They shared an old house in the town, one of those run-down, peeling places that smell of mold inside. During the two or three years I had known them, their goodness had made them take up several needy causes in the town: pregnant teens, abandoned families, boys caught stealing for drugs. One time, they sheltered a suspected sex offender, which made them very unpopular; when he turned out to be guilty, they remained unrepentant, unshaken in the faith that they had done the right thing.

They worked at home to make their living. Maeve typed documents on a computer; Betty read manuscripts for a publisher. That was how they had first met Dr. Chacko, by way of his manuscript, which he had submitted for publication. Betty’s own publisher had been too conventional to understand it, and so had several others she had tried. She decided that the appearance of the manuscript may have been at fault—it seemed to be the product of a very old typewriter, with some letters too faded to read. So, in her spare time, Maeve had copied the entire work onto her computer; it was more than seven hundred pages when printed out, but she was as inspired as Betty, and it became their cause, along with Dr. Chacko himself.

They tried to explain his work to me, and it made them laugh that I didn’t understand it. It was so simple, they said—it was life itself, life and death—which I said didn’t sound all that simple to me. For them, they admitted, it was not the work but Dr. Chacko himself who was difficult to understand. But wasn’t it always like that, with rare human beings? They tried to describe him to me, but they couldn’t even say what nationality he was. They had taken him for an Italian, a Sicilian, until they discovered that he was partly Indian, the name Chacko coming from a Syrian Christian community in the south of India. They thought he was also partly Russian—or had he only lived in Russia? He had travelled to many distant places, but it was in England that he had started his first workshop. This had been dissolved, and so had some subsequent ones elsewhere; now they had high hopes for the workshop they had helped him start in New York City, about two hours away from our town upstate.

The Culture House

BY HARI KUNZRU PUBLISHED 30 DECEMBER 2009

I always thought it was a mistake for Nicky to go and live at the Gow House. I didn't mention it to anyone. What would I have said? It wasn't as if I had any concrete objections. Besides, everyone else was so excited. It was a prestigious residency, a chance for a painter to live and work where Gow had lived and worked, six months of peace and financial security.

Nicky was excited. Like all of us, he was broke. Everyone acts like artists are getting away with something. We get up late, express ourselves, go to wild parties. We're supposed to be the young lions of the creative economy, but as far as I can see we're all serving lattes to office workers in the CBD. I work in a clothes store. Three nights a week Nicky did data entry for a bank. He liked it because he didn't have to talk to anyone. You could listen to music. There was no one to stop you going outside for a cigarette.

To understand why I was worried, you have to know about Nicky and you have to know about Gow. Nicky's 90 per cent easy. Art-school boho, collects chopsticks, pictures of wrestlers and cassette-only Eighties industrial singles. Skinny jeans, borderline dyslexic, doesn't speak to his parents, likes to get messed up at weekends. No needles, just booze and pills. Non-driver, of course. That goes without saying. The other 10 per cent is the painting. Nicky would be exactly like the last 20 guys you met at Firenze or the Car Bar, swigging imported beer and nodding their heads to the band, if it weren't for his obsessive dedication to making art and the almost religious awe he accords those artists whose work he admires. Nicky's the real thing. Talented, no question.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

 by Wells Tower

Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver. Scuttlebutt had it that Naddod was operating out of a monastery on Lindisfarne, whose people we’d troubled on a pillage-and-consternation tour through Northumbria after Corn Harvesting Month last fall. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. Salmon were turning up spattered with sores, and grasshoppers clung to the wheat in rapacious buzzing bunches. 

＊ any of various North American aroid plants, esp the green dragon

How Was It To Be Dead?

by Richard Ford August 28, 2006

The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange—in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

Seven months ago, in April of this millennial year, I took a journey down memory lane to an old cadets’ reunion at the brown stucco, pantile-roof campus of my former military school—Gulf Pines, on the Mississippi coast. Lonesome Pines, we all called it. The campus and its shabby buildings, like apparently everything else in that world, had devolved over time to become an all-white Christian Identity school, which had itself, by defaulting on its debts, been sold to a corporate entity—the ancient palms, wooden goalposts, dusty parade grounds, dormitories, and classroom installments soon to be cleared as a parking structure for the floating casino across Route 90.

During this visit, I happened to hear from Dudley Phelps, who’s retired out of the laminated-door business up in Little Rock, that Wally Caldwell, once our Lonesome Pines classmate, but more significantly once my wife’s husband, until he got himself shell-shocked in Vietnam and wandered off seemingly forever, causing Sally to have him declared dead (no easy trick without a body or other evidence of death’s likelihood)—this Wally Caldwell was reported by people in the know to have appeared again. Alive. Upon the earth. And—I was sure when I heard it—eager to stir up emotional dust none of us had seen the likes of.

Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia, and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories—the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us—anything that we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly that we were all of us pretty hard cases when we arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all.)

Distant Relations

by Orhan Pamuk September 7, 2009

 The series of events and coincidences that would change my entire life began on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a purse designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shopwindow as we were walking along Valikonagi Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening. Our formal engagement was not far off; we were tipsy and in high spirits. We’d just been to Fuaye, a posh new restaurant in Nisantasi; over dinner with my parents, we’d discussed at length the preparations for the engagement party, which was scheduled for the middle of June, so that Nurcihan, Sibel’s friend since her days at the Lycée Notre Dame de Sion, in Paris, could come from France to attend. Sibel had long ago arranged for her engagement dress to be made by Silky Ismet, who was then the most expensive and sought-after dressmaker in Istanbul, and that evening Sibel and my mother discussed how they might sew on the pearls that my mother had given her for the dress. It was my future father-in-law’s express wish that his only daughter’s engagement party be as extravagant as a wedding, and my mother was delighted to help fulfill that wish as best she could. As for my father, he was charmed enough by the prospect of a daughter-in-law who had “studied at the Sorbonne,” as was said in those days among the Istanbul bourgeoisie of any girl who had gone to Paris for any kind of education.

It was as I was walking Sibel home that evening, my arm wrapped lovingly around her sturdy shoulders, and thinking with pride how happy and lucky I was, that she said, “Oh, what a beautiful bag!” Though my mind was clouded by the wine I’d drunk at dinner, I took note of the purse and the name of the shop, and the next day I went back. In fact, I had never been one of those suave, chivalrous playboys who are always looking for the slightest excuse to buy women presents or send them flowers, though perhaps I longed to be. In those days, bored Westernized housewives in the affluent neighborhoods of Sisli, Nisantasi, and Bebek did not open “art galleries,” as they did later, but ran boutiques, stocking them with trinkets and entire ensembles smuggled in their luggage from Paris and Milan or with copies of “the latest” dresses featured in imported magazines like Elle and Vogue, and selling these goods at ridiculously inflated prices to other rich housewives who were as bored as they were.

The proprietress of the Sanzelize (its name a transliteration of the legendary Parisian avenue), Senay Hanim, was a very distant relation on my mother’s side, but she wasn’t there when I walked into the boutique at around twelve and the small bronze double-knobbed camel bell jingled two notes that can still make my heart pound. It was a warm day, but inside the shop it was cool and dark. At first I thought that there was no one there, my eyes still adjusting to the gloom after the noonday sunlight. Then I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about to crash against the shore.

Birthday Girl

by Haruki Murakami 村上春樹

She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked on Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. The other part-time girl had agreed to switch shifts with her as a matter of course: being screamed at by an angry chef while lugging pumpkin gnocchi and seafood fritto to customers’ tables was not a normal way to spend one’s twentieth birthday. But the other girl had aggravated a cold and gone to bed with unstoppable diarrhea and a fever of 104, so she ended up working after all on short notice.

She found herself trying to comfort the sick girl, who had called to apologize. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to do anything special anyway, even if it is my twentieth birthday.”

And in fact she was not all that disappointed. One reason was the terrible argument she had had a few days earlier with the boyfriend who was supposed to be with her that night. They had been going together since high school, and the argument had started from nothing much. But it had taken an unexpected turn for the worse until it became a long and bitter shouting match–one bad enough, she was pretty sure, to have snapped their long-standing ties once and for all. Something inside her had turned rock-hard and died. He had not called her since the blowup, and she was not about to call him.

Her workplace was one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the tony Roppongi district of Tokyo. It had been in business since the late sixties, and, although its cuisine was hardly leading edge, its high reputation was fully justified. It had many repeat customers, and they were never disappointed. The dining room had a calm, relaxed atmosphere without a hint of pushiness. Rather than a young crowd, the restaurant drew an older clientele that included some famous stage people and writers.

The two full-time waiters worked six days a week. She and the other part time waitress were students who took turns working three clays each. In addition there was one floormanager and, at the register, a skinny middle-aged woman who supposedly had been there since the restaurant opened–literally sitting in the one place, it seemed, like some gloomy old character from Little Dorrit. She had exactly two functions: to accept payment from the guests and to answer the phone. She spoke only when necessary and always wore the same black dress. There was something cold and hard about her: if you set her afloat on the nighttime sea, she could probably sink any boat that happened to ram her.

Ask Me If I Care

by Jennifer Egan March 8, 2010

Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty crests the hills. Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

＊bootleg【美】非法製造、銷售、轉運的(酒、煙等)。

The first time we go to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she points up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and says that her old school is up there: an all-girls school that her little sisters go to now. K through six, you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, “Can we see them?” and Alice goes, “My uniforms?” but Scotty says, “Your alleged sisters.”

Sonny's Blues

James Baldwin

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

When he was about as old as the boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he'd had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now. He had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment down-town, for peddling and using heroin.

Just Tell Me Who It Was

by John Cheever

WILL PYM WAS a self-made man; that is, he had started his adult life without a nickel or a connection, other than the general friendliness of man to man, and had risen to a vice-presidency in a rayon-blanket firm. He made a large annual contribution to the Baltimore settlement house that had set his feet upon the right path, and he had a few anecdotes to tell about working as a farmhand long, long ago, but his appearance and demeanor were those of a well-established member of the upper middle class, with hardly a trace—hardly a trace of the anxieties of a man who had been through a grueling struggle to put some money into the bank. It is true that beggars, old men in rags, thinly dressed men and women eating bad food in the penitential lights of a cafeteria, slums and squalid mill towns, the faces in rooming-house windows—even a hole in his daughter’s socks—could remind him of his youth and make him uneasy. He did not ever like to see the signs of poverty. He took a deep pleasure in the Dutch Colonial house where he lived—in its many lighted windows, in the soundness of his roof and his heating plant—in the warmth of his children’s clothing, and in the fact that he had been able to make something plausible and coherent in spite of his mean beginnings. He was always conscious and sometimes mildly resentful of the fact that most of his business associates and all of his friends and neighbors had been skylarking on the turf at Groton or Deerfield or some such school while he was taking books on how to improve your grammar and vocabulary out of the public library. But he recognized this dim resentment of people whose development had been along easier lines than his own as some meanness in his character. Considering merely his physical bulk, it was astonishing that he should have preserved an image of himself as a hungry youth standing outside a lighted window in the rain. He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream.

Will had not married until he was past forty and had moved to New York. He had not had the money or the time, and the destitution of his youth had not been sweetened by much natural love. His stepmother—wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks—had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup. She was not a jolly old toper, and what she had to say was usually bitter. The picture she presented may have left with Will some skepticism about the emotional richness of human involvements. It may have delayed his marriage. When he finally did marry, he picked a woman much younger than he—a sweet-tempered girl with red hair and green eyes. She sometimes called him Daddy. Will was so proud of her and spoke so extravagantly of her beauty and her wit that when people first met her they were always disappointed. But Will had been poor and cold and alone, and when he came home at the end of the day to a lovely and loving woman, when he took off his hat and coat in the front hall, he would literally groan with joy. Every stick of furniture that Maria bought seemed to him to be hallowed by her taste and charm. A footstool or a set of pots would so delight him that he would cover her face and throat with kisses. She was extravagant, but he seemed to want a childish and capricious wife, and the implausible excuses that she made for having bought something needless and expensive aroused in him the deepest tenderness. Maria was not much of a cook, but when she put a plate of canned soup in front of him on the maid’s night out, he would get up from his end of the table and embrace her with gratitude.

At first, they had a big apartment in the East Seventies. They went out a good deal. Will disliked parties, but he concealed this distaste for the sake of his young wife. At dinners, he would look across the table at her in the candlelight—laughing, talking, and flashing the rings he had bought her—and sigh deeply. He was always impatient for the party to end, so that they would be alone again, in a taxi or in an empty street where he could kiss her. When Maria first got pregnant, he couldn’t describe his happiness. Every development in her condition astonished him. He was captivated by the preparations she made for the baby. When their first child was born, when milk flowed from her breasts, when their daughter excited in her a most natural tenderness, he was amazed.