The Suffering of Being Kafka / Vaknin, Sam, 1961-

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Title: The Suffering of Being Kafka

Author: Sam Vaknin

Release Date: June 23, 2004  [eBook #12701]

Language: English

Character set encoding: Latin1


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUFFERING OF BEING KAFKA***


Copyright (C) 2004 by Lidija Rangelovska.



The Suffering of Being Kafka


1st EDITION


Sam Vaknin


Editing and Design:
Lidija Rangelovska


Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint
Skopje 2004


Not for Sale! Non-commercial edition.


(c) 2004 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska
All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be used
or reproduced in any manner without written permission from: Lidija
Rangelovska - write to:
palma@unet.com.mk or to
vaknin@link.com.mk

Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html

Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html

Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal11.html

Download free anthologies here:
http://samvak.tripod.com/freebooks.html

Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited
http://samvak.tripod.com/


Created by:
Lidija Rangelovska, Skopje
REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA



C O N T E N T S



Short Fiction
A Beheaded Cart
Language of Black and Red
On the Bus to Town
The Butterflies are Laughing
The Con Man Cometh
Janusz Courts Dinah
My Affair with Jesus
The Last Days
The Future of Madeleine
The Out Kid
Pierre's Friends
Death of the Poet
Redemption
Shalev is Silent
Pet Snail
Write Me a Letter

Poetry of Healing and Abuse
Our Love Alivid
Moi Aussi
Cutting to Existence
A Hundred Children
The Old Gods Wander
In the Concentration Camp Called Home
The Miracle of the Kisses
Fearful Love
My Putrid Lover
When You Wake the Morning
Narcissism
Prague at Dusk
In Moist Propinquity
Prowling
Getting Old
Sally Ann
Selfdream
Snowflake Haiku
Twinkle Star
Synthetic Joy
Tableaux (van Gogh)

The Author



The Suffering of Being Kafka

Short Fiction


A Beheaded Cart

by Sam Vaknin


(In Hebrew, the word "Agala" means both cart and the feminine form of 
calf. A beheaded calf is among the sacrificial offerings enumerated in 
the Bible).

My grandfather, cradling an infant's crib, departed. Navigating left 
and right, far along the pavement, he reached a concrete, round, post. 
There he rested, sheltered from the humid sun by peeling posters for 
lachrymose Turkish films. He pushed the crib outside the penumbral 
circle and waited.

Curious folks besieged the old man and his orphaned frame and then 
proceeded to buy from him the salted seeds and sweets that he lay, 
meticulously organised, inside the crib. My grandfather smiled at them 
through sea-blue eyes, as he wrapped the purchased sweetmeats in 
rustling brown paper bags.

My embarrassed uncles built for him a creaking wooden cart from 
remaindered construction materials. They painted it green and mounted 
it on large, thin-tyred, wheels borrowed from an ancient pram. They 
attached to it a partitioned table-top confiscated from the greengrocer 
down the lane. Every morning, forehead wrinkled, my grandfather would 
fill the wooden compartments with various snacks and trinkets, at pains 
to separate them neatly. Black sunflower seeds, white pumpkin seeds, 
the salted and the sweet, tiny plastic toys bursting with candies, 
whistles, and rattles.

Still, he never gave up his crib, installing it on top of his squeaking 
vehicle, and filling it to its tattered brim with a rainbow of 
offerings. At night, he stowed it under the cart, locking it behind its 
two crumbling doors, among the unsold merchandise.

With sunrise, my grandfather would exit the house and head towards the 
miniature plot of garden adjoining it. He would cross the patch, 
stepping carefully on a pebbled path in its midst. Then, sighing but 
never stooping, he would drive his green trolley - a tall and stout and 
handsome man, fair-skinned and sapphire-eyed. "A movie star" - they 
gasped behind his back. Day in and day out, he impelled his rickety 
pushcart to its concrete post, there dispensing to the children with a 
smile, a permanence till dusk. With sunset, he gathered his few goods, 
bolted the fledgling flaps, and pushed back home, a few steps away.

When he grew old, he added to his burden a stool with an attached 
umbrella, to shield him from the elements, and a greenish nylon sheet 
to protect his wares. He became a fixture in this town of my birth. His 
lime cart turned into a meeting spot - "by Pardo", they would say, 
secure in the knowledge that he would always be there, erect and 
gracious. Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post - 
older than the fading movie posters - watched the town transformed, 
roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy 
from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum.

Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn, 
himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his 
dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands.

My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud, 
raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing, on 
one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar 
in a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a 
mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in 
love and made her his only world.

This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and 
day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with 
vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous 
abodes in bustling cities.

At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling 
confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in 
her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shrivelled hand on his venous 
knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying 
warmth and withdrawing as unobtrusively. It was enough to restore him 
to his full stature. But then, the municipal workers came and pasted 
funereal announcements onto his concrete pole and the magic was all but 
gone.

My grandma withered, dilapidated by this onerous existence. 
Eveningtime, she would get up and carry her stool afore, clenched in 
two twiggy hands, tediously dragging her reluctant self on the long 
march home. My grandfather observed her, his eyes a moist, eroding 
guilt. His disintegrating pushcart, the rain-drenched figure of his 
loved one, the whizzing torment of the desert winds, the sound of the 
crackling paper bags in her arthritic palms - they all conspired to 
deny him his erstwhile memory of her.

Each morning, my grandfather woke up to study this ageless image as he 
glided over her translucent skin, high-arching cheeks, and 
sleep-fluttery eyelashes. He fended off the intrusions of the world as 
he smoothed the covers and tucked her figure in. Then, he would get up 
and make her breakfast, arranging ceremoniously her medicines in 
multicoloured plastic containers on the tray.

But my grandma rejected his sunup pleas. She wouldn't go on living. One 
silent morning, she clung to her sheets and wouldn't rise and accompany 
him. That day, grey and defeated, my grandpa ploughed the pavement with 
his barrow, unfolded a worn deck chair, and sank in, awaiting my 
grandmother's reappearance.

When she did not materialise, he left his post much earlier than usual. 
He emptied the compartments duteously, packed the unsold goods in large 
canvas sacks, tidying them away behind the two bottom doors of his 
cart. He then unfurled a polyester sheet above it and sailed home, 
shoving and cajoling his screeching and scraping workstation.

My grandma was in bed, as he had left her, ensconced in blankets, a 
suicidal tortoise, glaring at the ceiling as it bled in aqueous 
abstracts. My grandfather parked his rusting, faded, wagon and climbed 
home. His wife awoke with startled whimpers, tears streaming silently 
down her creviced face, tearing his heart with the iron grip of 
festering love. He hugged her and showered her with panicky little 
kisses.

She froze and fortified her berth with pillows piled high, staring at 
him through narrow cracks of oozing sanity.

One day, my grandpa, returning in the evening, left his cart outside, 
uncharacteristically. He entered and, for a few minutes, he and my 
grandmother just watched each other wearily. He extended a calloused 
hand and she dreamily stood up and escorted him to their porch, which 
overlooked the weed-grown garden.

My grandfather draped her shoulders with a knitted woollen shawl. He 
tightened it, and then, her shivering hand in his, he sat his love 
among some cushions he prepared. She glanced aimlessly at a guava tree 
that shot among the trail of gravelled stones. My grandfather 
contemplated her awhile and then, with sudden resoluteness, left.

Seconds later he reappeared among the shrubs, saluted her with a 
sledgehammer he held tenuously with both hands. She strained her face, 
attentive, consuming his image, like a flower would the sun, or the 
blind do the sounds.

Gasping and panting, my grandpa heaved the pushcart to the centre of 
the plot. With repeated, furious, blows, he dislocated its wheels and 
doors. Reduced to splintered wood and twisted metal, he cocooned it in 
the nylon throw and left it, devastated by the trees.

Sitting beside, they watched the setting sun diffracted from the 
green-hued sculpture in the garden. A smile budded in my grandma's 
honeyed eyes and spread into my grandfather's deep blue gaze.

The cart stood there for years, disintegrating inexorably beneath its 
blackening shield. Its wheels, now rooted in the soil, it sank into the 
mildewed ground, another, peculiarly shaped sapling. My grandpa never 
adjusted the synthetic sheet that swathed it, nor did he dig out the 
burgeoning wheels.

My grandpa was visiting a pharmacy, replenishing her medications, when 
my grandma died. With the dignity of the indigent, he never bargained, 
never raised his voice. Packed in small, white, paper bags, he rushed 
the doses to his wife, limping and winded.

This time the house was shuttered doors and windows. My grandma 
wouldn't respond to his increasingly desperate entreaties. He flung 
himself against the entrance and found her sprawled on the floor, her 
bloodied mouth ajar. As she fell, she must have hit her head against 
the corner of a table. She was baking my grandfather his favourite 
pastries.

Her eyes were shut. My grandpa knew she died. He placed her remedies on 
the floured and oiled table and changed into his best attire. Kneeling 
beside her, he gently wiped clean my grandma's hands and mouth and head 
and clothed her in her outdoors coat.

His business done, he lay besides her and, hugging her frail remains, 
he shut his eyes.

My uncles and aunts found them, lying like that, embraced.

My grandparents' tiny home was government property and was reclaimed. 
The sanitary engineers, revolted, removed from the garden the 
worm-infested, rotting relic and the putrid sheet concealing it.

The next day, it was hauled by sturdy garbage collectors into a truck 
and, with assorted other junk, incinerated.



Language of Black and Red

by Sam Vaknin


Eli and I sit on ladder-backs next to a luxurious roulette in a casino 
in Spain. I can almost pick glitters from the heavy, lowered 
chandeliers. I can practically touch the shiny wooden wheel. I can see 
the croupier's manicured nails. Lithe young bellhops, clad in 
ornamental uniforms, place trays on gypsum pillars next to our chairs. 
We fervently gulp the champagne from the tall, prismatic glasses and 
nibble at the tiny sandwiches.

We are that lucky that we dare not leave the table, not even to relieve 
ourselves.

Piles of shiny square chips represent our exceptional streak of 
winnings. The table supervisor looks very anxious. He shifts restlessly 
on his elevated seat, hawk-eyeing everyone malevolently. Sure enough, 
he doesn't like us. He clears all other players, letting us bet in 
splendid isolation, facing each other.

Eli's upper lip and temples glisten. My armpits ooze the acrid smell of 
manly perspiration. Easy to tell we are tense or apprehensive or both. 
We evade each other's gaze. Our hands are shaking and the boys keep 
pumping us with increasingly inebriating drinks. They want us under the 
influence. They want us to cough up everything we have and then some. 
We want to win. We want the casino broke. Our differences are 
profoundly irreconcilable.

Eli is a quarter of a tough century my senior. His life-swept face is 
haggard, straggly and raven eyebrows, lips cruel and eyes chillingly 
penetrating. He finds his sense of humour irresistible. It often is.

My baby face is framed by the plastic quadrangles of my glasses. I 
broadcast innocence and guile. The reactions I provoke are mixed. Some 
sense my vulnerability and hasten to protect me. Others find my haughty 
slyness loathsome. I guess I conjure my defencelessness to con my 
victims.

It may prove unhealthy to lose our sponsors' money. These people are 
charm itself and sheer delight - until you breach their pockets. They 
tend to lose their fabled equanimity. They regard business losses as 
hostile acts and the perpetrators as lethal enemies. So, they strike 
first, giving you no chance to err, to apologise, to scrutinise.

We are piling on not be piled in. The dough is multiplying. What if we 
lose? Eli says he has this thing going for him tonight, a wild card, 
from nature, and he does not dream to stop even though we reek of the 
casino's funds, even though two Spanish beauties resolutely scramble 
over him and heavies in bursting suits forage around obtrusively.

Eli's protruding eyes fixated on the wheel, mesmerically attempting to 
bring it to a favoured halt.

It smoothly winds down and Eli ignores my furious pestering: our 
underwriters invested to test and implement a betting method I 
developed. "I am offended" - I whisper, he ignores me. A febrile Eli 
has bonded with the table and every number wins, especially his choices.

"Twenty eight!" - he hisses, sidestepping the croupier to fetch his 
gains. He sprawls on the green felt surface and lovingly enfolds the 
clacking tokens. Reclining, eyes shut agloat, he savours his 
unaccustomed fortune. For he deserves a break. To Eli, this is not a 
game or, as I regard it, merely another path to self-enrichment.

To him, it is a sweet revenge for all the years he wasted, vending 
decaying fruits, along dusty and sizzling highways. This loot proves 
his detractors wrong. It loudly states, in black and red: I am here, 
not to be snubbed.

"Let's play some baccarat" - he sneers - "I am tired of this game."

We stretch our limbs and Eli surveys the killing fields we leave 
behind. He tremulously stacks the chips on one another, by size and 
then by colour. We carry them with trepidation all the way to the 
cashier and convert them to pesetas. Eli halves the tottering mound. He 
entreats me to deposit one of the two resulting heaps in the strongbox 
in our room.

He pleadingly commands me:

"No matter how much I beg and threaten, order or cajole - do not be 
tempted to obey me. Do not bring down this money."

I eagerly acquiesce.

"And now" - he rubs his hands - "Let's fry this fish in its own fat. 
Let's use some of the profits to dine in the casino's restaurant. Do 
you know that eateries in gambling dens are the best in the world?"

I don't. It is my first trip away from Israel. But he is right, the 
food is mouth-watering. A gypsy band of violins plays in the background.

Now, cleaned out gamblers alight by our burdened table and pat Eli's 
upright back. They greet him eagerly, as though, through him, they 
humble the much unloved establishment. They questioningly glance at me, 
a cold appraising look. They recount how they turned pros and swap the 
numbers of their rooms in the hotel above the gaming halls.

They sound content but look harassed and wiry. Involuntary ticks ravage 
their hands and faces. They all sport golden rings, red necks enchained 
with chokers. Their eyes dart restively. They sound as though they are 
listening and nod their heads in places, right and wrong - but they are 
distant. Minute or two of pleasantries and off they go to haunt another 
patron.

The dinner over, Eli fires up a black cigar and sighs. He casts an 
ominous stare at me for daring to suggest we call it a day.

"Don't be a jinx!" - he rasps - "You don't retire on a night like this 
with Lady Luck herself in partnership. These are the kind of early 
hours that casinos fear, I tell you" - and he goes on to rattle off the 
names of acquaintances turned millionaires. The next day they reverted, 
he ruefully admits. "Too greedy" - is his verdict - "Didn't know when 
to stand up."

Now that we've won, can we try out my method?

He snorts.

"It puts me to sleep, your martingale" - he grunts - "Its slowness 
drives me to distraction. I came here to enjoy myself, not just to 
profit. If you insist, here is some cash. Go, play your darned system. 
Just do me a favour, stray to another table."

Eli, returning to our first roulette, is greeted with regal pomp. I 
wander to a further board with lower minimum wagers. I squash my way 
into a raucous mob. They screech and squeal with every spin. I place 
some of my meager funds on red. Despite the tiny sum and nearly equal 
chances - I waver nauseous and scared. Until the ball reposes and the 
croupier announces black. Twenty eight.

I lost.

Another dose on red, just slightly larger. Another anxious wait while 
the croupier employs a silver rake to place the bets. I sneak a peek at 
Eli's table. It's hard to tell his state. His body tilts in zealous 
inclination, his shaded eyes impale the imperturbable dealer, his 
twitchy hands engulf the cards doled out from the "shoe". It's "21" or 
Blackjack, a pretty basic card game.

On certain rounds, Eli presents his palm, two of its fingers pointing 
at the "shoe". The dealer acknowledges him discreetly and draws the 
cards. He lays them gingerly in front of Eli who, exultant, gathers his 
winnings and tips the grateful worker. I can relax.

My tiny gains accumulate. The hours pass, the tables empty, it's only I 
and the croupier. My capital is nearly doubled. Eli, his countenance 
spent, keeps gambling. His bobbing head recoils as he awakes from 
interrupted slumber. It's just the two of us against the weary staff.

As autumn night is pierced by moonlight, the practiced smiles are 
lifted, wiped is the feigned civility of all involved. Players and 
house alike frantically observe each card, each turn of the wheel, the 
rested ball, the flickering digits of the stressed croupier. We shut 
our bloodshot eyes between one twirl and another, in intervals when 
cards aren't dealt and profits aren't paid.

Fatigue-glued to my chair I find it hard to stoop and place the wagers 
on the fluctuating squares of the roulette board. Eli wobbles towards 
me, his loosened tie dangling on his much-stained shirt. He undoes the 
upper buttons and slumps onto a lounger.

The presence of his silence compels me to skip the coming spin. I half 
turn towards him, rubbing my eyes with sticky hand. We stare at the 
tarnished carpet until he mutters:

"I am left with nothing."

And then:

"Go get the money from the safe."

But then he had instructed me to ignore such orders. Using my method, I 
have doubled our funds and more while Eli lost all our money overnight. 
I feel wrath-struck. I want to grab him by his tainted collar and shake 
him till it hurts. Instead, I rise, my legs a wobbly and oedematous 
mass. I stumble hesitantly until the pains subside and I can properly 
walk, toes hard on heels, to the elevator bank.

When I am back, Eli is slouched, position same, and snores. I could 
refrain from rousing him, say that I fell asleep in our room, that I 
lost the key to the safety deposit box, that I stirred him up but he 
wouldn't budge, I could come up with anything I damn well please, now 
that he is sound asleep - he will thank me for it, he will want to 
believe me. It is our last chance.

I regard the rustling plastic bag. I feel the greenish notes inside. 
Then I jiggle Eli's shoulder. He comes to in panic, surveying the alien 
landscape. Then, mechanically, he snatches our neatly packed reserve 
and falters towards his table.

I bide the time to his return, eyes glazed, lips forced into a tortuous 
smile.

"It's over" - he mumbles - "let's get out of here."

I collect my winnings from the board and proudly display them. He 
snickers:

"Less than my losses in every minute of this cursed evening."

But that is all we have. We pack our meager belongings and sneak 
through the back door to the taxi at the head of a nocturnal queue. Eli 
sprawls across the upholstered back seat for a quick shut-eye. I give 
the driver the name of our hotel at the heart of Madrid and he embarks 
on the twisting byways of the mountain slope.

Midway, Eli stops the cab and throws up through the semi lowered pane. 
The irate cabby refuses to proceed. He points to an antiquated manual 
meter and demands his fee. I pay him and with emphatic whoosh he 
vanishes behind a gloomy curve.

Eli and I, left crouching on a foreign hillside, far from any 
settlement, the night a velvet murk. Eli ascends the road, takes me in 
tow, two Chaplinesque figures in bargain-basement suits and fluttering 
cravats. The hours pass and we are no closer to our destination. A 
rising sun daubs us with pink and wine.

Eli turns to me and vows:

"From now on we play only with your system, Shmuel, I swear to you, 
only your martingale."

I don't respond. I distrust Eli's ability to keep his promises. This 
pledge came unsolicited and useless.

Eli drags his feet laboriously, wipes tears from reddened eyes and 
moans:

"Only your way, I guarantee, never again just gambling wildly. We wager 
on your brain and win, we win a lot, I'm talking millions. We won't 
know what to do with it, I'm telling you. After all, how many steaks 
can one consume? With mushrooming gains, we will occupy the best hotels 
and bang the greatest stunners, and wear the chicest clothes..."

There is such yearning in his voice. I embrace him warmly and I say:

"Sure thing, Eli, it's bound to happen. You and I, and screw the world. 
What you have just described is only the beginning. Just stick to my 
gambling system and it will turn out fine. Casinos everywhere will fear 
us like the plague..."

"The plague" - Eli reiterates and we stand, cuddled, two silhouettes 
carved against the inexorably rising day.



On the Bus to Town

by Sam Vaknin


I must catch the city-bound bus. I have to change at the Central 
Station and travel a short distance, just a few more minutes, to jail. 
The prison walls, to the left, will shimmer muddy yellow, barbwire 
fence enclosing empty watchtowers, the drizzle-induced swamp a collage 
of virile footsteps. I am afraid to cross its ambiguous solidity, the 
shallow-looking depths. After that I have to purge my tattered sneakers 
with branches and stones wrenched out of the mucky soil around our 
barracks.

But there is still way to go.

I mount the bus and sit near a dishevelled, unshaven man. His abraded 
pair of horn-rimmed glasses is adjoined to his prominent nose with a 
brown adhesive. He reeks of stale sweat and keeps pondering the clouded 
surface of his crumbling watch. His pinkie sports a rectangular, 
engraved ring of golden imitation.

The bus exudes the steamy vapours of a mobile rain forest. People cram 
into the passages, dragging nylon-roped shopping bags, shrieking 
children, and their own perspiring carcasses, their armpits and groins 
stark dark discolorations.

All spots are taken. Their occupants press claret noses onto the grimy 
windows and rhythmically wipe the condensation. They explicitly ignore 
the crowd and the censuring, expectant stares of older passengers. As 
the interminable road unwinds, they restlessly realign their bodies, 
attuned to seats and neighbours.

Our driver deftly skirts the terminal's piers and ramps. Between two 
rows of houses shrouded in grimy washing, he hastens towards the 
freeway. He turns the radio volume up and speakers inundate us with 
tunes from the Levant. Some travellers squirm but no one asks to turn 
it down. It is the hourly news edition soon. Thoughts wander, gaze 
introspectively inverted, necks stretch to glimpse the passing views.

The broadcast screeches to a sickening but familiar halt. Faint cries, 
the Doppler wail of sirens, air surgically hacked by chopper rotor 
blades, the voices of authorities grating with shock and panic. The 
disembodied speech of spluttering witnesses. On site reporters at a 
loss for words record mere moans and keens. An orgy of smoking flesh.

The breaking news has cast us all in moulds of frozen dread and grief. 
Here burly finger poking nose, there basket petrified in midair haul, 
my neighbour absentmindedly rotates his hefty ring.

The announcer warns of imminent terrorist attacks on public transport. 
It recommends to err on the side of caution and to exhaustively inspect 
fellow commuters. Trust no one - exhorts a representative of the law - 
be on alert, examine suspect objects, call on your driver if in doubt. 
Pay heed to dubious characters and odd behaviours.

Our bus is trapped in a honking row of cars, under a seething sun. The 
baking asphalt mirrors. I am anxious not to be delayed. The wardens 
warned us: "Never be late. Make no excuses. Even if God himself comes 
down - be back on time." Latecomers lose all privileges and are removed 
to maximum security in Beersheba.

I debate the fine points with myself: is mass slaughter ample reason 
for being tardy or merely an excuse? No force is more majeure that 
prison guards. I smile at that and the tension plexus slackens.

A febrile thought:

Jailers are ultra right-wing and rabid nationalists. Terrorism must 
never be allowed to interfere with the mundane, they say. And I 
rehearse in hopeful genuflection: "You mustn't send a Jewish prisoner 
to an Arab-infested prison. After all, I was held up by Arab assassins 
who slaughtered Jews!"

The legalistic side (they are big on it in penal institutions):

How can I prove my whereabouts (on this bus) throughout the carnage? 
Think alibi. The inmate always shows that he has complied, the warden 
equally assumes he is being conned, but even he must prove it. A 
stalking game with predators and prey, but ever shifting roles.

I rise, prying my neighbour loose from contemplation. He eyes me, 
wicked. I pass a soiled boot above his clustered knees and place it 
gingerly between two bursting bags. Moustachioed women wipe milky 
exudation from upper lips with blotted synthetic handkerchiefs. They 
address me in a foreign, gravelling, language. They use elephantine, 
venous, legs to push aside their luggage - a gesture of goodwill more 
than a decongesting measure.

I feel the clammy, throbbing breathing of another on my trousers. 
Thrusting my other leg, I straddle the passage, two Herculean pillars, 
a sea of Mediterranean groceries between my calves. Toe by heel, I get 
nearer to the stuporous driver, a human ripple in my wake.

"I am a prisoner" - I inform his beefy neck.

His muscles tense but he does not respond or turn to scrutinise me.

"I am an inmate" - I repeat - "Can you please confirm by writing in 
this diary (I point at a grey notepad I am holding) that I was on your 
bus at this hour? I have no pen" - I add.

He casts a sideways glance at me, monitoring the hopeless traffic jam 
from the corner of a bloodshot eye.

(Emphatically):

"So, you are a prisoner? What could you have you done?" (you chalky, 
myopic, intellectual).

Right behind him, a woman past her prime, face coated, breasts nestled 
in a pointed bra. The driver cannot keep his eyes off them. She, on her 
part, seems to be fixated on his tensile musculature. They both start 
at the sound of my voice:

"Banks."

"Banks!" - the driver mirthfully slaps his bulging thighs and the woman 
chuckles throatily, lips peeled to reveal pink-tainted teeth. "Come 
over here, I'll sign it."

In one untrammelled motion, he removes a hirsute hand from the 
oversized steering wheel, takes hold of my jotter, and opens it. Off 
goes his second hand. He scribbles laboriously, tongue perched on 
fleshy lips, ending with a flourishing signature.

People are murmuring throughout the bus. My answer is equivocal. It 
could imply armed robbery - or fraud - or counterfeit. I may be 
violent. The innocent looking are the really dangerous. I may even be 
an Arab, impossible to tell them apart nowadays.

A web of mutters spins from crimson lips to hairy ears, from 
crumb-strewn mouths to avid auricles. I return to my seat, retracing my 
erstwhile progress, facing the hydra. With the pad in my back pocket, I 
am calmer. Que serra, serra.

At the edge of my awareness a shrill, self-righteous female voice:

"Get out now, or I am calling the police."

I open my eyes, trying to pinpoint the mayhem. Somewhat behind me, the 
altercation draws closer, a portly woman pushing aside strap-holding 
passengers. She is preceded by a far younger female scrambling, 
expression hunted, to flee the bully.

She passes me by, her coarse contours defaced by agony, wheezing 
through luscious lips, one hand supporting heavy bust, the other 
clutching a sheaf of papers densely written in calligraphic Arabic.

"Driver" - the mob exclaims - "There is an Arab on board!"

"Go down! I am not sharing a bus with a terrorist!" - a woman screams 
and then another: "Maybe she is dangerous? Did you frisk her when she 
boarded?"

The driver negotiates the dense circulation, manoeuvring among a fleet 
of barely visible compacts. The noise distracts him. Without braking, 
he turns around and enquires: "What is it? What's the matter?"

"There's an Arab woman here" - one volunteers to edify him - "She is 
aboard the bus and may have explosives strapped around her waist." "Get 
her off this vehicle, she may be lethal!" - another advises.

"I am not forcing anybody down who has paid the ticket!" - snaps the 
driver and reverts to the hazy windshield.

A stunned silence. They thought the driver was one of them, he doesn't 
appear to be a peacenik. Someone latches on to the frontal paned 
partition and expostulates. "It's not reasonable, your decision. Today, 
you never know. Even their women are into killing, I saw it with my own 
eyes in Lebanon. They explode themselves like nothing, not a problem..."

The woman who spotted the ostensible terrorist now badgers the driver:

"Give me your details. I am going to have a chat with your supervisors. 
You can forget about this cosy job of yours!"

The Arab stands mute, vigilantly monitoring the commotion. A passenger 
tilts and hisses in her ear: "Child murderer." She recoils from the 
gathering nightmare and bellows, addressing the jam-packed bus:

"I am a nurse. I tend to the sick and frail all day long, both ours and 
yours. Every day there's a flood of casualties. Our injured. Our 
corpses. Your injured. Your corpses. Children, women, shreds, all full 
of blood..." - She pauses - "Why do you treat me this way?"

Her Hebrew is rocky but sufficient to provoke a heated debate with 
supporters and detractors.

"What do you want with this woman? She is just an innocent commuter! 
Look at yourselves! You should be ashamed!"

Others are genuinely scared. I can see it on their faces, the 
white-knuckled way they cling to the metal railings opposite their 
seats, the evasive looks, the stooping shoulders, eyes buried in the 
filthy flooring.

She may well be a terrorist, who knows?

It is too late to smother this burgeoning conflagration. My neighbour 
exchanges heavy-accented verbal blows with someone behind us. Women 
accuse each other of hypocrisy and barbarism.

The driver, pretending to ignore us, head slanted, listens in and 
steals appreciative glances at his voluptuous fawner. To garner his 
further admiration, she plunges into the dispute, a brimstone diva with 
words of fire.

Some passengers begin to push the Arab and shove her with innocuous 
gestures of their sweaty palms. They endeavour to avoid her startled 
gaze. She tries again:

"What kind of people are you? I am a medical nurse, I am telling you. 
So what if I am Arab, is it automatic proof that I am a terrorist?"

My neighbour suddenly addresses me:

"You've got nothing to say?"

"To my mind, if she were a terrorist, she would have blown us all to 
kingdom come by now."

I let the impact of this sane reminder settle.

"This bus is bursting. The driver skipped a few stations on the way" - 
I remind them - "She is smack amidst us. She has no bags. She could 
have detonated herself and demolished us by now."

My neighbour slaps his thighs with furry hands, a sign of pleasure. I 
am on his side. Some voices crow, encouraging me to proceed: "Let him 
continue, go on."

But I have got nothing more to add and I grow silent.

The Arab scrutinises me doubtfully, not sure if she understood 
correctly. Do I suspect her of being a terrorist or don't I?

"And who might you be to tell us off, if I may?" - scoffs the woman who 
started it all. Her voice is screaming hoarse, her face aflame with 
stripes of lipstick smeared and make up oozing. Three golden bracelets 
clang the rhythm of her scornful question.

"He is a prisoner" - announces the driver's would-be floozy. She eyes 
both me and her desired conquest triumphantly. The driver studies her 
in his overhead mirror, then gives a haunted look. Control is lost. He 
knows it.

"An inmate" - shrieks the agitator for all the bus to hear - "The 
perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"

"I am not an Arab" - I respond calmly - "They are too well mannered for 
the likes of me and you."

She blows up:

"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" - She leans towards me 
and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails - "A 
prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"

My neighbour half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm 
and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded 
audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a 
menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"

I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in 
the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end 
up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention centre, 
away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen 
in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing 
fields of haemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and 
whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.

I spent a month in these conditions and was about to return, I feel 
convinced.

The driver brakes the bus, rises, and gestures to the Arab helplessly. 
She tries to extricate herself by moving towards his cubicle. Some 
women mesh their hands, trapping her flapping arms, flailing about, her 
cheeks lattices of translucent rivulets. Her fear is audible in shallow 
exhalations.

But her captors persevere. They clench her scarf and the trimmings of 
her coat and twist them around the Arab's breathless neck.

The driver disembarks through the pneumatically susurrating doors. He 
walks the gravel path adjacent to the highway, desperately trying to 
wave down a passing car. Someone finally stops and they have a hushed 
exchange through a barricaded window. The hatchback cruises away.

The driver hesitates, his eyes glued to the receding vehicle. He 
contemplates the hostile bus with dread and climbs aboard. He sinks 
into his seat and sighs.

A patrol car arrives a few minutes later and disgorges two policemen. 
One elderly, stout and stilted, his face a venous spasm. He keeps 
feeling the worn butt of his undersized revolver. The other cop does 
the talking. He is lithe, a youth in camouflage, penumbral moustache, 
anorectic, sinewy hands, his eyes an adulterated cyan. He swells his 
chest and draws back his bony shoulders, attempting to conceal his 
meagreness.

"What's going on here?" - his voice a shocking bass. We are silenced by 
the contrast.

The instigator of the turmoil clears a path and fingers his oversized 
tunic as she volunteers:

"She is a terrorist and he is a convict and they were both planning to 
blow this bus up."

"Twaddle!" - roars my neighbour - "She is a hysterical, psychotic, 
panicky woman! Look what she did to his face!" - he points at me - "And 
that one, over there" - he singles the Arab out with a nail-bitten 
pinkie - "her only sin is that she is an Arab, a nurse or something, a 
fellow traveller, paid her ticket like all of us." The driver nods his 
assent.

"I am telling you..." - the stirrer yelps but the officer is terse:

"Continue behaving like this, lady, and it is you I will arrest for 
disturbing the peace..."

"Another mock cop" - she slurs, but her voice is hushed and hesitant.

"Perhaps even insulting a police officer on duty?" - the policeman 
hints and she is pacified, retreating, crablike, eyes downcast, towards 
her shopping.

"Who is the prisoner?" - the veteran cop enquires, his paw atop his 
gun, caressing it incessantly. I raise my hand.

"You are coming with us. The rest continue to your destinations. You 
too!" - he addresses the Arab, his civility offensively overstated.

"I want no problems here!" - he warns - "It's Friday, the Sabbath is 
upon us. Go home in peace. The police has more important things to do 
than to resolve your petty squabbles!"

Extracted from my window seat, their fingers vicelike under both 
armpits, they half drag me across my neighbour's knees, strewing all 
over him the contents of the plastic bag in which I keep my wallet and 
the weekend papers. It hurts.

We alight and the young one taps the folding exit doors. The bus drones 
its way into the snaring traffic jam. I watch its back as it recedes. 
The coppers place a pair of shiny handcuffs on my wrists and shackle my 
ankles too. I stumble towards the waiting squad car. They unlock the 
rear and gesture me to enter. They push me from behind and bolt the 
door. The gory rays of a setting sun dissect the murk inside.

I see the officers' backs and necks as they occupy the front seats 
beyond the meshed partition. One of them half turns and spits a snarl:

"My partner loves you, Arabs."

Only then, my eyes having adjusted, I notice the others in the stifling 
cabin I inhabit. They rattle their manacles and smile at me wolfishly, 
a toothy apparition.

"Where are you from, handsome?" - one asks and moves to flank me. His 
mitt is motionless on my knee.

He has an Arab accent.



The Butterflies are Laughing

by Sam Vaknin


My parents' home, it is dusk time, and I am climbing to the attic. I 
settle on my childhood's sofa, whose unravelled corners reveal its 
faded and lumpy stuffing. The wooden armrests are dark and bear the 
scratchy marks of little hands. I contemplate these blemishes, set 
bright against the deep, brown planks, and am reminded of my past. A 
light ray meanders diagonally across the carpet. The air is Flemish. 
The fitting light, the shades, the atmosphere.

There is a watercolour on an easel of a thickset forest with towering 
and murky trees. A carriage frozen in a clearing, a burly driver, 
looking towards nowhere, as though there's nothing left to see. No 
light, no shadows, just a black-singed mass of foliage and an 
incandescent, sallow horse.

My little brother lies bleeding on the rug. Two gory rivulets, two 
injured wrists, delineate a perfect circle. They cross his ashen palms 
and waxen, twitching fingers. It may be a call for help but I have been 
hard of hearing.

I crouch beside him and inspect the wounds. They are shallow but 
profuse. Red pain has broken past his skin, his face is wrinkled. I 
wipe him gently, trying not to hurt.

He stares at me, eyes of a gammy colt awaiting the delivering shot. He 
radiates the kind of gloom that spans the room and makes me giddy. I 
cower to my heels, then squat beside him, caressing his silent scream. 
My palms are warm.

We while the time. His frothy exhalations, my measured air inhaled, our 
lungs entwined in the proliferating density. The volumes of my 
childhood mob the shelves, their bindings blue and rigid.

I look at him and tell him it's alright, he shouldn't worry. A mere 
nineteen, he gives me a senescent smile and nods in frailty. He grasps 
it all, too much. Shortly, I may have to lift him in my arms and set 
him on the couch. We are not alone. Echoes of people downstairs. I 
can't tell who. Mother, our sister, Nomi perhaps. Someone arrives and 
sparks excited speech and lengthy silences.

I descend the steps, some hasty greetings, I stuff a roll of coarse, 
green toilet paper in my pants. Back to the horror, to frisk around the 
crimson wreckage. I wipe my brother wrathfully from floor and carpet 
and from couch, reducing him to a ubiquity of chestnut stains. I am not 
content. He is writhing on the inlay, attempting tears. It's futile, I 
know. We both forgot the art of crying, except from torn veins.

The light is waning. The brown blinds incarcerate my brother behind 
penumbral bars. His bony hands and scrawny body in stark relief. It is 
the first time that I observe him truly. He is lanky but his face 
unchanged. I was no child when he was born but he is still my little 
brother.

He is resting now, eyes shut, our lengthy lashes - both mine and his - 
attached to fluttering lids. Birds trapped in quivering arteries flap 
at his throat. He is sobbing still but I avert my gaze, afraid to hug 
him. We oscillate, like two charged particles, my little brother and 
myself. His arms by his side and my arms by his side, divergent. I 
thrust into my bulging pocket a ball of ruby paper.

There is a clock in here that ticks the seconds. They used to sound 
longer. It was another time. The haemorrhage stopped. A mournful lace 
of plasma on his sinewed wrists. It must have hurt, the old corroded 
blade, no flesh, just coated skeleton. To saw the bones till blood. To 
hack the skin, to spread it like a rusty butterfly, dismantling 
slithery vessels. I move to occupy the wooden ladder back, near the 
escritoire that I received as gift on the occasion of my first year in 
school.

He nods affirmative when asked if he can rise. I hold him under hairy, 
damp armpits. I confront him, seated on my grandma's rocking chair, a 
cushion clad in Moroccan equine embroidery on my knees. I gently hold 
his hand and he recoils. I didn't hurt him, though.

I wait for him to break, his hand in mine. Thus clenched, our palms 
devoid of strength, we face a question and a promise, the fear of pain 
and of commitment. We dwell on trust.

He unfists and bleeds anew. I use the paper ball to soak it up. It's 
dripping. I gallop down the spiral staircase and collect another roll, 
adhesive bandages, and dressing. Into my pocket and, speechlessly, I 
climb back. He is sitting there, a Pharaonic scribe, wrists resting on 
his knees, palms lotus flowers, but upturned. His gifted painter's 
fingers are quenched in blood.

I mop and dab, swab and discard, apply some pressure and erase. My 
brother is calling me in sanguineous tongue and I deface it, incapable 
of listening, unwilling to respond.

I bind him and I dress and he opens his eyes and gapes at the white 
butterflies that sprouted on his joints. He feels them tenderly, 
astonished by this sudden red-white beauty.

I count his pulse and he gives in to my pseudo-professional mannerisms. 
His pulse is regular. He hasn't lost a lot of blood, therefore.

He tells me he is OK now and asks for water. All of a sudden, I 
remember. One day, he was a toddler, could hardly walk, I led him back 
from the clinic. He gave blood and was weeping bitterly. A giant cotton 
swab was thrust into his elbow pit and he folded him arm, holding onto 
it tightly.

One jerky movement, it fell and he stood there, gawking at the soiled 
lump and whimpering. He was so tiny that I hugged him and wiped the 
tears from his plump cheeks.

I improvised a story about "Adhesa Cottonball", the cotton monster, who 
forever wishes to return to the soil, her abode. His eyes cleared and 
he giggled nervously. This sound - his chuckle - is in my ears, 
obscuring all real-life acoustics.

He gulps down the water silently, his eyes a distant blackness, where 
no one treads but he, his forest, among the trees, perhaps this 
carriage and its attending coachman. Where does he want to go, I wander?

My brain is working overtime. My skull-domiciled well-oiled machine, 
whose parts are in metallic shine, impeccable, unerring, impervious to 
pain. Machines don't ache this brother, sprawled on the couch, his 
shoulders stooping, in torn shirt and tattered trousers, my erstwhile 
clothes, his chest hirsute, his face adorned with budding beard and 
whiskers.

What story shall I tell him now to clear his eyes? How shall I make him 
laugh again? What monster should I bury in the sand?

I tell him to pack few things and come with me. He acquiesces but still 
won't budge. His twin wrist-butterflies are quite inert. He sighs as he 
buttons his shirt and rolls unfastened sleeves to cover his abrasions. 
When he gets up I see him as before: a gangling figure, an angular 
face, two cavernous sockets, big brown mole. He drags his feet.

We both descend. Don't tell our parents, he begs, I promise not to. 
Enters his room and exits fast, carrying a small plastic bag with 
severed handles. A pair of worn jeans spill from the top to cover some 
half-deleted lettering.

We bid farewell and walk placidly to the car. He freezes on the back 
seat, still cradling his plastic treasure, gazing forward but seeing 
little.

Nomi is driving while I watch him through the windshield mirror. His 
inanimate stare, directed at the window, is deflected by transparence. 
Slumped on the imitation leather seat, he and his trousers bump from 
one side to another on the winding road.

He falls asleep this way, sack closely clutched, chin burrowing into 
his hollow torso. At times, he shakes his head in stiff refusal. He is 
very adamant. Only his hands are calm, as though detached from his 
rebellious body.

Nomi is negotiating the parking and I touch his shoulder. He opens a 
pair of bleary eyes and looks at me like he used to when I was still 
his entire world. I touch once more and gently. When he was two years 
old, I left home for many years, never to be heard from. The hurt 
resides still in his eyes, that injury.

I touch a third time, thus pledging to remain, thus telling him my 
love. I study him at length and he does not divert his eyes.

Suddenly he smiles and dimples collect around his lips. He flings his 
hands high up and waves his red-white butterflies. He imitates their 
flight. He plucks their wings. He laughs and I respond by laughing and 
Nomi joins and the space of our car is filled with laughs and 
butterflies and butterflies and laughter.



The Con Man Cometh

by Sam Vaknin


Swathed in luminosity, we stir with measured competence our amber 
drinks in long-stemmed glasses. You are weighing my offer and I am 
waiting for your answer with hushed endurance. The armchairs are soft, 
the lobby is luxurious, as befits five-star hotels. I am not tense. I 
have anticipated your response even before I made my move.

Soon, temples sheathed in perspiration, you use the outfit's thick 
paper napkins to wipe it off. Loosen your tie. Pretend to be immersed 
in calculations. You express strident dissatisfaction and I feign 
recoil, as though intimidated by your loudness. Withdrawing to my 
second line of defence, I surrender to your simulated wrath.

The signs are here, the gestures, the infinitesimal movements that you 
cannot control. I lurk. I know that definite look, that imperceptible 
twitch, the inevitability of your surrender.

I am a con man and you are my victim. The swindle is unfolding here and 
now, in this very atrium, amid all the extravagance. I am selling your 
soul and collecting the change. I am sharpened, like a raw nerve firing 
impulses to you, receiving yours, an electrical-chemical dialog, 
consisting of your smelly sweat, my scented exudation. I permeate your 
cracks. I broker an alliance with your fears, your pains, defence 
compensatory mechanisms.

I know you.

I've got to meld us into one. As dusk gives way to night, you trust me 
as you do yourself, for now I am nothing less than you. Having adopted 
your particular gesticulation, I nod approvingly with every mention of 
your family. You do not like me. You sense the danger. Your nostrils 
flare. Your eyes amok. Your hands so restless. You know me for a 
bilker, you realise I'll break your heart. I know you comprehend we 
both are choiceless.

It's not about money. Emotions are at stake. I share your depths of 
loneliness and pain. Sitting opposed, I see the child in you, the 
adolescent. I discern the pleading sparkle in your eyes, your shoulders 
stooping in the very second you've decided to succumb. I am hurting for 
what I do to you. My only consolation is the inexorability of nature - 
mine and yours, this world's (in which we find ourselves and not of our 
choice). Still, we are here, you know.

I empathise with you without speech or motion. Your solitary sadness, 
the anguish, and your fears. I am your only friend, monopolist of your 
invisible cries, your inner haemorrhage of salty tears, the tissued 
scar that has become your being. Like me, the product of uncounted 
blows (which you sometimes crave).

Being abused is being understood, having some meaning, forming a 
narrative. Without it, your life is nothing but an anecdotal stream of 
randomness. I deal the final, overwhelming coup-de-grace that will 
transform the torn sheets of your biography into a plot. It isn't 
everyday one meets a cheat. Such confident encounters can render 
everything explained. Don't give it up. It is a gift of life, not to be 
frivolously dispensed with. It is a test of worthiness.

I think you qualify and I am the structure and the target you've been 
searching for and here I am.

Now we are bound by money and by blood. In our common veins flows the 
same alliance that dilates our pupils. We hail from one beginning. We 
separated only to unite, at once, in this hotel, this late, and you 
exclaim: "I need to trust you like I do not trust a soul". You beseech 
me not to betray your faith. Perhaps not so explicitly, but both your 
eyes are moist, reflecting your vulnerability.

I gravely radiate my utter guarantee of splendid outcomes. No hint of 
treason here. Concurrently I am plotting your emotional demise. At your 
request, not mine. It is an act of amity, to rid you of the very cause 
of your infirmity. I am the instrument of your delivery and liberation. 
I will deprive you of your ability to feel, to trust, and to believe. 
When we diverge, I will have moulded you anew - much less susceptible, 
much more immune, the essence of resilience.

It is my gift to you and you are surely grateful in advance. Thus, when 
you demand my fealty, you say: "Do not forget our verbal understanding."

And when I vow my loyalty, I answer: "I shall not forget to stab you in 
the back."

And now, to the transaction. I study you. I train you to ignore my 
presence and argue with yourself with the utmost sincerity. I teach you 
not to resent your weaknesses.

So, you admit to them and I record all your confessions to be used 
against you to your benefit. Denuded of defences, I leave you wounded 
by embezzlement, a cold, contemptible exposure. And, in the meantime, 
it's only warmth and safety, the intimacy of empathy, the propinquity 
of mutual understanding.

I only ask of you one thing: the fullest trust, a willingness to yield. 
I remember having seen the following in an art house movie, it was a 
test: to fall, spread-eagled from a high embankment and to believe that 
I am there to catch you and break your lethal plunge.

I am telling you I'll be there, yet you know I won't. Your caving in is 
none of my concern. I only undertook to bring you to the brink and I 
fulfilled this promise. It's up to you to climb it, it's up to you to 
tumble. I must not halt your crash, you have to recompose. It is my 
contribution to the transformation that metastasised in you long before 
we met.

But you are not yet at the stage of internalising these veracities. You 
still naively link feigned geniality to constancy, intimacy and 
confidence in me and in my deeds, proximity and full disclosure. You 
are so terrified and mutilated, you come devalued. You cost me merely a 
whiskey tumbler and a compendium of ordinary words. One tear enough to 
alter your allegiances. You are malleable to the point of having no 
identity.

You crave my touch and my affection. I crave your information and 
unbridled faith. "Here is my friendship and my caring, my tenderness 
and amity, here is a hug. I am your parent and your shrink, your buddy 
and your family" - so go the words of this inaudible dialog - "Give me 
your utter, blind, trust but limit it to one point only: your money or 
your life."

I need to know about your funds, the riddles of your boardroom, 
commercial secrets, your skeletons, some intimate detail, a fear, 
resurgent hatred, the envy that consumes. I don't presume to be your 
confidant. Our sharing is confined to the pecuniary. I lull you into 
the relief that comes with much reduced demands. But you are an 
experienced businessman! You surely recognise my tactics and employ 
them, too!

Still, you are both seduced and tempted, though on condition of 
maintaining "independent thinking". Well, almost independent. There is 
a tiny crack in your cerebral armour and I am there to thrust right 
through it. I am ready to habituate you. "I am in full control" - you'd 
say - "So, where's the threat?" And, truly, there is none.

There's only certainty. The certitude I offer you throughout our game. 
Sometimes I even venture: "I am a crook to be avoided". You listen with 
your occidental manners, head tilted obliquely, and when I am finished 
warning you, you say: "But where the danger lies? My trust in you is 
limited!" Indeed - but it is there!

I lurk, awaiting your capitulation, inhabiting the margins, the 
twilight zone twixt greed and paranoia. I am a viral premonition, 
invading avaricious membranes, preaching a gospel of death and 
resurrection. Your death, your rising from the dead. Assuming the 
contours of my host, I abandon you deformed in dissolution.

There's no respite, not even for a day. You are addicted to my nagging, 
to my penetrating gaze, instinctive sympathy, you're haunted. I don't 
let go. You are engulfed, cocooned, I am a soul mate of eerie insight, 
unselfish acumen. I vitiate myself for your minutest needs. I thrive on 
servitude. I leave no doubt that my self-love is exceeded only by my 
love for you.

I am useful and you are a user. I am available and you avail yourself. 
But haven't you heard that there are no free lunches? My restaurant is 
classy, the prices most exorbitant, the invoices accumulate with every 
smile, with every word of reassurance, with every anxious inquiry as to 
your health, with every sacrifice I make, however insubstantial.

I keep accounts in my unstated books and you rely on me for every 
double entry. The voices I instill in you: "He gives so of himself 
though largely unrewarded". You feel ashamed, compelled to compensate. 
A seed of Trojan guilt. I harp on it by mentioning others who deprived 
me. I count on you to do the rest. There's nothing more potent than 
egotistic love combined with raging culpability. You are mine to do 
with as I wish, it is your wish that I embody and possess.

The vise is tightened. Now it's time to ponder whether to feed on you 
at once or scavenge. You are already dying and in your mental carcass I 
am grown, an alien. Invoking your immunity, as I am wont to do, will 
further make you ill and conflict will erupt between your white cells 
and your black, the twin abodes of your awakened feelings.

You hope against all odds that I am a soul-mate. How does it feel, the 
solitude? Few days with me - and you cannot recall! But I cannot 
remember how it feels to be together. I cannot waive my loneliness, my 
staunch companion. When I am with you, it prospers. And you must pay 
for that.

I have no choice but to abscond with your possessions, lest I remain 
bereft. With utmost ethics, I keep you well-informed of these dynamics 
and you acknowledge my fragility which makes you desirous to salve my 
wounds.

But I maintain the benefit of your surprise, the flowing motion. Always 
at an advantage over you, the interchangeable. I, on the other hand, 
cannot be replaced, as far as you're concerned. You are a loyal subject 
of your psychic state while I am a denizen of the eternal hunting 
grounds. No limits there, nor boundaries, only the nostrils quivering 
at the game, the surging musculature, the body fluids, the scent of 
decadence.

Sometime, the prey becomes the predator, but only for a while. 
Admittedly, it's possible and you might turn the tables. But you don't 
want to. You crave so to be hunted. The orgiastic moment of my 
proverbial bullets penetrating willing flesh, the rape, the violation, 
the metaphoric blood and love, you are no longer satisfied with 
compromises.

You want to die having experienced this eruption once. For what is life 
without such infringement if not mere ripening concluding in decay. 
What sets us, Man, apart from beast is our ability to self-deceive and 
swindle others. The rogue's advantage over quarry is his capacity to 
have his lies transmuted till you believe them true.

I trek the unpaved pathways between my truth and your delusions. What 
am I, fiend or angel? A weak, disintegrating apparition - or a 
triumphant growth? I am devoid of conscience in my own reflection. It 
is a cause for mirth. My complex is binary: to fight or flight, I'm 
well or ill, it should have been this way or I was led astray.

I am the blinding murkiness that never sets, not even when I sleep. It 
overwhelms me, too, but also renders me farsighted. It taught me my 
survival: strike ere you are struck, abandon ere you're trashed, 
control ere you are subjugated.

So what do you say to it now? I told you everything and haven't said a 
word. You knew it all before. You grasp how dire my need is for your 
blood, your hurt, the traumatic coma that will follow. They say one's 
death bequeaths another's life. It is the most profound destination, to 
will existence to your pining duplicate.

I am plump and short, my face is uncontrived and smiling. When I am 
serious, I am told, I am like a battered and deserted child and this 
provokes in you an ancient cuddling instinct. When I am proximate, your 
body and your soul are unrestrained. I watch you kindly and the 
artificial lighting of this magnific vestibule bounces off my glasses.

My eyes are cradled in blackened pouches of withered skin. I draw your 
gaze by sighing sadly and rubbing them with weary hands. You incline 
our body, gulp the piquant libation, and sign the document. Then, 
leaning back, you shut exhausted eyes. There is no doubt: you realise 
your error.

It's not too late. The document lies there, it's ready for the tearing. 
But you refrain. You will not do it.

"Another drink?" - You ask.

I smile, my chubby cheeks and wire glasses sparkle.

"No, thanks" - I say.



Janusz Courts Dinah

by Sam Vaknin


Janusz thrusts his head through the illuminated window, deep into the 
house, his desperate shadow bedaubed across the wall. We shelter Dinah, 
a chimera of heads and bodies, protecting her from Janusz, from his 
love, from his contorted face, as he bawls, in his intellectual accent:

"But I want Dinah, let me speak with Dinah!"

Dinah's face alight, attainted red. It has been a long time since she 
was wooed so forcefully. Janusz, consumed by twilight, bellowing 
ignominiously in public. It flatters her, evoking stirrings she can 
recognise. She giggles uncomfortably, a beauty framed in silky skin and 
pearly teeth.

Janusz sits by day on colour-peeling, fading benches. His body arched 
with twanging dignity, his equine face buried in a thickset tome, 
exaggerated eyes peering through the magnifying lenses of his 
gold-rimmed glasses. From time to time, he chases a dogged, greasy curl 
away from his alpestrine forehead.

It was this expansive brow that most impressed me as a child. A swathe, 
pulsating in venous green, a milky desert, crisscrossed with brittle 
capillaries and strewn with bony rocks. Beneath this tract was Janusz: 
his wondering eyes, penumbral sockets, and slithering hair.

When he summoned Dinah, his face erupted into creases, as wastelands do 
before the rain. "Go away, crazy one" - my grandma, Dinah's mother, 
used to shout at him half-heartedly, as she shuttered the rickety 
windows. But even Janusz, who I, informed by hindsight, now know to 
have been really cracked - even he perceived my grandma's protests as 
eccentrically veiled summonses.

Grinning, he would press his face against the frozen casement, his 
Hellenic nose made into a bulbous offering, befogged, only his toothy 
smile remains, then gone.

The Seder was often celebrated at my grandparents. Tables colluded 
under shimmering white clothes, bleached by my grandma in plastic 
vessels. Matzos and wine bottles served porcelain and crystal bowls 
with scarlet sparkles. My mother and my father observed, dejected, from 
the corners of the room, two strangers in an intimate occasion.

My parents, unloved, rejected by both progenitors and progeny, clinging 
together, having survived their families. With eyes downcast, hands 
sculpting breadcrumbs or folding and unfolding wrinkled napkins, they 
silently cruised through the night, tight-lipped and stiff.

It was an awry evening. My grandpa, drowsed by medication, ensconced in 
sleepy, torn pyjamas, read the Haggadah perfunctorily. We devoured the 
food doled out by my grandma from steamy, leaden pots. We ate with 
bated silence, a choir of cutlery and chomp. Immersed in yellow 
lighting, we cast our shadows at each other. A tiny wooden bird sprang 
forth, recounting time from a cuckoo clock my father gifted to my 
grandparents.

Still silent, my grandma and my aunts began to clear the table, when 
Janusz implored Dinah, from the windowpane, to exit and meet him in the 
dusk. My grandmother didn't utter a single syllable as she fastened the 
blinders in his face. Janusz whimpered. The stillness was only 
interrupted by the clattering plates and the whishing sounds of lacey 
aprons.

Until the door, forced open, let in a tremulous Janusz, his shoulders 
stooping, his head askance, filling the frame with writhing 
apprehension and zealous hope. The door - two planks adjoined with 
sawdust - protested but Janusz didn't budge. His forehead sketched with 
rain-drenched hair, his eyes exuding watery anticipation, he stood 
there, sculpting with his twitchy hands an airy bust of Dinah. The 
odours of decaying food and festering sweat mingled with the crispness 
of the drizzle.

He tore her name from tortured chest: "DINAH!!!"

The women stifled a fearful shriek. The giant Janusz filled the room as 
he progressed in pilgrimage towards Dinah, his sinewy hands extended, 
the muscles rippling in his arms. There and then, we in the role of 
silent witnesses, he courted her, quoting from Kafka and Freud and 
Tolstoy. That night he called upon the spirits of his library, whose 
books he romanced on benches under all the lampposts in the township's 
parks. He sang her arias and, for a moment, he carried her away from 
us. His reputation was cemented by this nocturnal recital. We didn't 
understand a word he said, his music fell on arid ears.

My mother beseeched him softly, shocking us all:

"Go away, Janusz, Dinah is tired."

It was the first thing she said that evening. She then stood up, 
stretching her pygmy frame, pinning on Janusz her kaleidoscopic 
brown-green gaze. Her hair braked, cropped, atop her shoulders. Janusz, 
taken aback, studied her as one would an exotic species. His hands, two 
violent spirals, breached desperately the musty air. My mother stepped 
up to him and, looking into befuddled eyes, she reiterated her pleading 
command:

"Go away, Janusz" - and, then, soothingly - "Dinah will see you 
tomorrow."

Janusz's body crumbled. His shoulders bowed, he took his glasses off, 
withdrew a patterned flannel shirt from his trousers and polished them 
meticulously. His lake-blue eyesight fluttered. He placed his eyecups 
back, forgetting to restore his attire.

"I only want to talk to her" - he protested tamely - "I only want to 
tell her to marry me because I love her."

My mother nodded understandingly:

"This is not the time. You must go now. It is Passover, the Seder 
night, and you are intruding."

He reciprocated miserably and retreated crab-like, sideways, afraid to 
turn his back on the hostile room.

Dinah watched him from the kitchen, numbed. She absentmindedly arranged 
her hair and tightened the dull apron around her narrow waist. She 
pulled her blouse to carve her breasts, and, to adjust her stocking, 
she stretched a bronzed and streamlined leg.

Janusz gulped these inadvertent sights, quenching a burgeoning lust.

My mother repeated with irrevocable finality:

"Goodbye, Janusz!"

Awakened and subdued, he headed for the exit.

Then Dinah exclaimed:

"Janusz, wait, I will come with you!"

She hurled the balled apron at us and went and flanked Janusz, 
provocatively linking arms with him. Janusz stiffened, eyes tensely 
shut, afraid to shatter this dream of Dinah by his side. My mother 
fired a glaucous look at her sister, turned her back effusively, and 
sank into her chair, deflated. Janusz extended one leg towards the exit 
and Dinah somnambulated after him. Thus, torturously, they vanished 
into the murky, thunderstruck, outside, leaving the door ajar to the 
rain sprays and ozone smell of a gathering storm.

All the adults commenced and ceased to speak at once. My grandfather 
snored, his breath deflected by his sprawling chin, fluttering among 
the white curls on his denuded chest. My grandma concealed him in a 
tattered afghan and sat beside him, fingering a bracelet helplessly. 
One of my uncles cleared his throat in bass, regretted this promised 
speech, and slumped into his chair. They all eyed my father, the oldest 
and most experienced among them. But he kept mum.

They sat there for a while. My father tore apart the shutters and 
squinted in a futile effort to discern something in the gloom. The 
streetlamps were few and far between and the tepid lighting of the 
Seder barely brightened the room's far corners, let alone the alleyway.

The young ones dozed, bowing to soiled plates, their crumpled, stained, 
cloth bibs bobbing in a sea of matzo crumbs.

"Hard-headed" - muttered my grandma and my mother assented 
absentmindedly. Someone brought my grandma a glass of water. She dipped 
her lips and crusty tongue and smacked. "Maybe we should call the 
police" - ventured another uncle of mine, but we knew this was a 
non-starter.

Dinah got divorced in her early twenties, abandoned by her husband. She 
found refuge in her parents' home and cared for them and for those of 
her siblings who still resided there. She scuffed the floor and 
scrubbed the dishes. In the evenings, she settled down, legs crossed 
beneath her wearily, gazing at life unfolding from the porch, puffing 
at a medley of fidgety cigarettes. She had the dead countenance of the 
introspective. We tiptoed around her and soothingly vilified her former 
husband to her face.

At first, she clung to life. She raised a son and daughter in the 
squalid quarters of her parents. But when her daughter succumbed to 
leukemia, she was a broken vessel. She shipped her son to a foster 
family in a Kibbutz and sought employment in a hospice for the 
terminally ill. There, among the dead and dying, she spent most of her 
time, often napping, in between shifts, in a bed still sweating of its 
former, now deceased, occupant. Or she would sprawl on an operating 
table, among blood spattered bandages and slabs of sanguinary flesh in 
overflowing buckets.

She rarely returned to her parents now, to assume her tiny chamber, 
with its monastic bed, and ramshackle dresser. She has not dated, 
neither has she been with a man since her divorce.

And now, this, into the night with the deranged and violent Janusz, who 
wastes his time on books, on public benches in twilight parks. What 
could he do to her?

"A beautiful woman is only trouble" - someone said and everyone hummed 
in consent.

"Poor Dinah" - sighed another aunt, summing in these three syllables 
her entire shrivelling misery.

It was stuffy and men wiped foreheads with blemished handkerchiefs, 
doffing synthetic shirts imbrued with perspiration. Someone turned on 
the radio and off again. Others pressed frayed rags against the leaking 
window frames.

"She is not herself since Sima died" - my grandmother intoned in vacant 
words. No one mentioned Uzi, Dinah's only son, my cousin, my friend, 
irrevocably adopted now. I thought to myself: Dinah may be sad on his 
account as well. No one suggested that she misses him as badly as she 
does her daughter and her husband, who deserted her, amidst this 
budding emptiness, without saying why.

Mother served a round of roasting, grainy coffee, in tiny demitasses. A 
symphony of smacking lips and groans of pleasure followed.

"What are we to do now?" - my grandma said, her voice monotonous, her 
fingers curled around the trimmings of her dress - "She eloped with 
this madman. What's wrong with her? She has a handsome, clever child, a 
warm home, a steady job."

My mother stared at her and then away. My uncle, Gabi, said: "There's 
more to life than these."

"What more is there to life?" - erupted my grandma, approaching him 
with scorching eyes - "What do you have in yours? Do you have a wife, a 
home, or children? Almost thirty years old and still a toddler, 
unemployed, subsisting on the marrow of this old man here..."

My uncle, springing to his feet, circumnavigated the table to face my 
grandma and then, his mind changed, he exited the house, banging the 
door behind him wrathfully.

"I also must go" - mumbled his younger brother awkwardly - "My friends 
are waiting. We are going to have us a good time in the square, we..." 
- and he ran out tearfully.

Mother peered at the orphaned coffee cups and sipped from hers. She 
poured my father some more, avoiding his searching gaze.

"Never works, he is killing his old man, destroying his life" - my 
grandma repeated disparagingly. My mother nodded.

My father said:

"The aluminium here must be painted, it's all so rusty. I can do it for 
you on Saturday."

No one responded. Someone flattened a mosquito between two palms and 
studied the bloodied outcome.

"It's tough to be alone" - Aliza blurted - "She has no man and Sima 
dead and Uzi..."

"I am alone" - Nitzkhia countered.

"I hope she doesn't do anything stupid" - my father cautioned no one in 
particular - "This Janusz is a nutcase."

"He loves her" - Aliza said with wistful confidence - "He will not harm 
her."

"The worst is when you love" - my mother said - "The worst crimes are 
passionate."

She jumped to her feet and hurried to the kitchen to rid her dress of a 
budding coffee stain.

My father examined the shutters closely, unfurling them and back. "Stop 
that" - my mother sniped at him and he collapsed into his chair, 
embarrassed.

"It's late" - Nitzkhia said - "Maybe we should fan out and look for 
Dinah."

"She'll be back" - my mother reassured her nervously, fighting a losing 
battle with the spot - "She has nowhere else to go. He shares the same 
room with his mother. She watches over him relentlessly. If you ask me, 
there is something unhealthy going on between these two. No wonder he 
is like that."

"God" - exhaled my grandma - "I hate to imagine what the neighbours 
will invent: the two, alone, on the Seder night, in a public park..."

"He is a good person, this poor guy, he wouldn't harm a fly, how could 
anyone believe that they ... together ... I am not sure he could do it 
even if he knew what to do..." - Aliza laughed heartily, exposing 
equine teeth, and waving back a mane of waning blonde.

Everyone brayed and then earnestness reasserted itself. Dinah still 
hasn't returned and she was out there, with Janusz.

"I have cookies in sugar or in honey" - my grandma chuntered and 
motioned to the kitchen listlessly. My mother and Aliza rushed to fetch 
two outsized bowls containing triangular pastry floating in a golden 
syrupy lake.

"I still think that we should go out and look for her" - Nitzkhia 
insisted dreamily.

"Let's start to clear the table" - my mother instructed me and my 
sister. We helped her carry greasy plates and cutlery and shapeless 
napkins to the kitchen and pile them there indiscriminately. Mother 
rolled up her sleeves, donned a checkered pinafore, and started to 
scour away the evening with minimal, efficient moves.

"Mother" - I said meekly - "we haven't sung the Passover hymns."

She rinsed the dishes emphatically and used a drab cloth towel to dry 
them.

"Mother" - I persisted - "It is not the same without the signing." I 
liked to chime in and yodel the refrains.

"Well, I think we will be on our way now" - I heard Aliza from the 
other room. Nitzkhia had nowhere to go back to, she lived with my 
grandfather and grandmother.

"Mother" - I was panicky now, but I knew not why - "Gabi and Itsik have 
gone and now Aliza, too! No one is left!"

My mother froze and then, bending towards me, she tousled my hair, her 
hand all wet and soapy.

I shut my eyes and opened them repeatedly to repel her rivulets of 
stinging water. I was crying now and my sobbing swelled in me and I was 
swept in frazzled tremulousness, wiping my running nose on the back of 
a sullied hand. My younger sister retreated to the corner, kneeling, 
and snivelled inaudibly.

Mother just stood there, hands airborne, observing us in anxious 
helplessness. She tried to utter something but it came out a feeble 
"Don't you cry now, children" - my father glided from the adjacent room 
and leaned a naked, bronze, shoulder on the doorframe, his face a sad 
and distant mask.

"Why are they crying?" - he enquired no one in particular.

"Because we didn't sing the Passover hymns" - my mother countered in a 
stifled voice.

Father knelt and cradled me in his arms. He embarked on a monotonous 
Moroccan tune, until my tears subsided and, enraptured by the distant 
melody, I fell silent. I joined him in a seamless medley of Passover 
hymns, my voice lachrymose and screeching. My mother reverted to her 
chores by the basin and Sima, my sister, absorbed it all in her usual 
mousy taciturnity.

Father held my hand in his spacious, warm palm and led me back to the 
table, chanting all the way and rhythmically pressing my flesh, 
spurring me on to join him. We were the only two singing, now in hushed 
voices, not to wake my grandpa. My sister climbed onto my father's 
knee, her scalp safely ensconced in his moustache, head nodding to her 
chest, eyelids undulating dreams.

"We are going" - reiterated Aliza. She arose and straightened an 
erstwhile festive dress. As she was circling the table, Dinah barged in 
and hesitated by the threshold, prodded inside by the rain that 
drenched us all. An invisible hand shut the door behind her.

She was soaked, her hair in ropy waterfalls, her clothes an aqueous 
pulp, her wide feet bare. She gravitated towards a vacant chair and 
folded, planted in a swelling puddle.

My mother, exiting the kitchen, stared at her, alarmed.

"Where were you?" - demanded my grandmother bleakly.

Dinah shrugged. "We strolled in the public park. We walked a lot. He 
talked to me. His speech is beautiful, like a gentleman's. He is wise 
and erudite. He speaks six languages."

"Then he is definitely not for you" - my grandma interrupted rudely - 
"We have enough whackos in the family."

Dinah shivered. "He is not a whacko, don't call him that!"

My mother served her scalding coffee and my grandmother kept mumbling 
crabbily: "He is not for you, Donna. You forget about him this very 
instant!"

Dinah sipped the beverage, her eyes occluding pleasurably. She 
unwrapped them, green and crystalline, and said: "It all remains to be 
seen. It all remains to be seen."

My grandma grumbled despondently and gestured dismissively at Dinah's 
optimism: "As you have ill-chosen your first one, so shall you 
cherry-pick your second one, no doubt. Good for nothings. Only trouble 
and heartbreak await you."

And my mother said:

"Come children, let us go home. This is an adult conversation" - as she 
fired a cautionary glance at the interlocutors.

"Let them sleep in my room" - Dinah said - "Sometimes even adults have 
to talk."

"We all eat what we cook" - my mother sniggered - "Dating someone like 
that is like laying your bed with sheets of misfortune and blankets of 
unhappiness. Just don't come to us complaining that we haven't 
forewarned you."

"I never came to you for anything, let alone complaining" - retorted 
Dinah bitterly - "And not that I had nothing to complain about."

"What now?" - Aliza asked, still on her ostensible way out - "What have 
you decided?"

"What is there to decide after one evening together?" - riposted Dinah.

"Will you go on seeing him?" - Nitzkhia challenged her.

"I think I will" - responded Dinah ponderously - "I had a pleasant and 
interesting time tonight. He is a charming man and I don't care how he 
appears to you."

"He is insane" - my grandma groaned - "And you are even nuttier if you 
consider dating him again. In any case, you are through with us. Take 
your belongings and let us see the last of you if you intend to follow 
through with this disgrace."

Dinah trembled, chewing on her upper lip to refrain from crying. "You 
would have not spoken like that if daddy were awake" - she spluttered.

"You heard me?" - my grandma sniped at her, coughing and massaging her 
chest, fending off an imminent demise - "From tomorrow, find yourself 
another place!"

A distant mannish voice trilled opera arias. It approached, bathing the 
room and us, and Janusz knocked on the wooden shutters and called:

"Dinah, can I tell you something?"

And again:

"Dinah, can you come out for a moment?"

A tentative knock.

Dinah half-arose, supported by the armrests.

"Dinah?" - Janusz's voice, astounded, invaded by its onetime stutter - 
"Do you hear me? Are you there?"

My grandmother fixated Dinah with a tocsin look. Dinah stumbled towards 
the door, entranced, her hand extended, her mouth agape but speechless. 
She then sealed both her eyes and mouth and, thus, stood frozen, 
heaving imperceptibly.

"Dinah" - spurted Janusz - "I love you, I have always loved you, don't 
be cruel to me, I just want to tell you one little thing, one minute of 
your life, make it one second" - he paused and then - "I respect you 
greatly. We can talk through the window curtains. You do not have to 
come out to me."

Two tearful tributaries, two becks of salty rain, carved up Dinah's 
features. She returned to her seat, burying her oval countenance in 
futile hands.

Sighing deeply, my grandma neared the window. She propped herself 
against the soggy panes and through the fastened blinds she bellowed:

"Go away! Away from here, you crazy fool!"



My Affair with Jesus

by Sam Vaknin


Losing my mind in a bed-sitter. Pipes crackling in the kitchenette, 
spewing faecal water in the bathroom, only the urinal a tolerable 
translucence. The cramped space is consumed by a rough-hewn timber bed, 
prickly wool blankets strewn. The sheets a crumpled ball, spotted with 
ageing spittle stains. The window looks onto another window. Mine is a 
corporate apartment in Geneva, a menacing physical presence of solitude 
and silence crystallised.

On weekend mornings I promenade at length: along the lake shores, 
traverse the foothills, the sumptuous mansions of the rich, back 
through the marina and the slums, behind the "Noga-Hilton".

On my return, the flat contracts, the standard issue table, the single 
chair, my scattered clothing, the metered rotary dial phone, the French 
and German television channels I cannot understand.

Once weekly, on Monday morns, a woman comes to clean. Her legs are cast 
in limpid stockings, I smell her cleanser perspiration. A coarse 
elastic reins her stonewashed hair. She is not bejewelled. She wears a 
pair of twisted wire-rims. Her husband sometimes tags along, buried 
under her scrubbing implements.

She hardly ever acknowledges my cornered and abashed existence, like a 
besuited mummy with gleaming imitation leather shoes. She does my 
laundry and my ironing, too.

I did not want to die. I sought refuge in numbers, solace in 
propinquity. I thought I'd join the Jesuits.

I strolled to the United Nations building and met a senior bureaucrat, 
a member of the order. His angled modest office overlooked a busy 
"work-in-progress" intersection, but he renounced this distraction. He 
listened to my well-rehearsed oration and referred me to a monastery at 
the other end of town.

Ambling along the waterfront, I scrutinised the flower beds, the 
tourists, and the spout. Even at dusk, I found this city languid.

All shops were closed.

I had a dinner date with a Londoner, a naturalised Iranian oil trader. 
Throughout the meal he kept rebuking me:

"You sound like someone whose life is long behind him. It is not true! 
You are so young!"

I drove my shrimps amongst the Thousand Islands in my bowl.

"You are observant, Sir" - I said - "but wrong. I may be possessed of 
past, but not of future" - I gauged the impact of my harsh 
pronouncement - "Not necessarily a thing to mourn" - I added.

He rearranged the remnants of his dinner on his soiled plate. I 
gathered that he was far too experienced to be optimistic.

I visited the friary next morning. A young monk, clad in sportswear 
eyed me with surprise. I mentioned my referrer and was instantly 
admitted. We occupied a metal bench amidst a bustling corridor.

He told me about the order. They study several years, embark on 
charitable missions in far-flung countries, and then take vows.

I reassured him I was celibate and he pretended to believe me.

Gene called and invited me to his bookstore to inspect a new shipment. 
I used to spend all weekends there, reading, socialising, and devouring 
unwholesome food in the adjacent restaurant. Shoppers came and went. 
Gene would register the day's meager intake in his books and lock the 
entrance door. Sometimes we would proceed to patronise an Old City 
coffeehouse. But usually I would return to my alcove and wait for 
Monday.

That day, when I arrived, Gene offered me a cup of lukewarm coffee and 
said: "Stay with me, please, this evening."

The last client having departed, he bolted the iron shutters and we 
proceeded uptown, to get drunk. It was a farewell sacrament, Gene 
having lost his savings and a lot of other people's funds.

He climbed to my apartment and wept throughout the night of his 
intoxicated desperation. I woke to find him gone.

Thus, my world narrowed. The weather chilled. I couldn't pierce the 
stubborn rainfall that swathed my windowpanes. Arrayed in heavy 
overcoat, I sat, a patchwork quilt of light and shade. Or fully 
dressed, prostrated, the blankets heaped, on my Procrustean bed.

People from Israel stayed at my place. They ate my food and slept and 
showered. Then they moved off. I travelled back there on vacation. A 
journalist who did my profile years ago, refused to interview me. He 
said: "Dead horses do not make a story." My nightmares swelled with 
equine carcasses discharging jets of ink-black blood.

Come winter, I called on the priory again.

"You must first see the light, see Jesus" - my youthful guide insisted 
but, ready with a riposte, I rejoined:

"There are many paths to one's salvation and one's saviour."

Savouring my worn platitude, he promised to arrange for an interview in 
Zurich, the regional headquarters.

So many years have passed since then.

Perhaps a dream, perhaps a motion picture snippet, perhaps I am 
overwhelmed by one of my confabulations. I remember descending from a 
train, ankle-high in rustling snow, treading uncharted tracks towards 
an illuminated building, a boarding school. The manageress conducts a 
prideful tour of speckles premises. Toddlers in flowery pyjamas amuse 
themselves with ligneous cubes and plastic toys.

I can't remember if I have never been there.

That morning, in Zurich, I climbed up a hill, next to the colossal 
railway, and rang an ornate bell at the gate of an unassuming office 
building. I was let into an antechamber and led into the quarters of 
the abbot. He had a kind face, without a trace of gullibility. His desk 
was neatly organised, framed by heaving bookcases and shafts of greying 
light.

I was being examined, oblivious to the rules. "Why do you wish to join 
us?" - he enquired, then - "Follow me." We climbed down to the 
dormitories of the fresh initiates. He mutely pointed at the crooked 
berths, the metal chests, the hanging hair shirts. "We fast a lot. We 
pray from dawn till midnight."

He introduced me to the novices. "They look so happy and resilient" - I 
noted. He smiled. Echoes of clerical exertion from above rebounded in 
the cellar.

"We've got some guests" - he clarified, and suddenly awakening - "Have 
you already eaten?"

We crossed a lengthy passage veined with piping, thrusting agape the 
heavy oak doors at its end. I entered first, he followed, to face a 
purple multitude of churchmen. They rose in noiseless unison and waited.

My host declaimed:

"We have a Jewish guest, from Israel today" - he hesitated - "He will 
say grace for us. In Hebrew."

The hall reverberated. My host impelled me forward. A sea of crimson 
skullcaps as they rested foreheads on locked, diaphanous digits. I 
uttered the Jewish prayer slowly, improvising some. The alien phrases 
recoiled from the masonry, bounced among the massive trestle-tops, 
ricocheted from the clay utensils, the crude-carved cutlery, the cotton 
tablecloths. A towering Jesus bled into a candled recess.

The abbot led me to a chair and placed a bowl of nebulous soup in 
front. He stuck a wooden spoon right in the swirling liquid and went 
away. I ate, head bowed, maintaining silence, conforming to the crowd's 
ostentatious decorum. The repast over, I joined the abbot and his 
guests in the procession to his office. He recounted proudly the tale 
of my most imminent conversion.

They looked aghast. One of them enquired how I found Jesus. I said I 
hadn't yet. The abbot smiled contentedly. "He is not a liar" - he 
averred - "He doesn't lie even when lying leads to profit." "Perhaps 
the profitable thing to do is to be truthful in this case" - one 
bitterly commented.

The train back to Geneva crisscrossed a radiant medley, deserted 
streets spanned by forlorn bridges, and spectral streetlamps. I exited 
into the ceilinged station, to the ascending roads and winding paths 
and broader avenues, on to my flat. Immersed in shadows to emerge in 
light, I gazed at curtained windows tightly shut. I window-shopped and 
kicked some gravel.

At the entrance to my building I didn't turn on the light. I couldn't 
face the immaculate stairwell, the doormats, the planted pots of 
crucible steel. But darkness meant a lethal fall or stepping in the 
wrong apartment, intruding on the astonished life of someone else (the 
keys were all identical, I suspected). I couldn't cope even with mine.

I turned around, into the public park, across the inner yard, down to 
the looping street that bordered on the water. The lake was silver 
struck and boats bobbed up and down abstracted waves. Moon, cleaved by 
stooping branches, hills vaporising into mist. I circumvented them, 
resting on soggy benches, the stations of my pilgrimage.

The lake and road diverged and I arrested at the slopes. I dithered 
momentarily and then proceeded to ascend the footpath, liberally dotted 
with fallen leaves and broken twigs. Submerged in muddy soil, the rich 
substrate of foliar death, I kicked the ripeness of dispersing acorns.

I stopped in front of Dudley's home - a medieval French chateau - to 
study yet again its contumacious contours. Inside, behind the gate, 
Dudley constructed a tiny summer house atop a brook. We oft debated 
topics there we both knew little of. I never came there unannounced or 
uninvited.

Moonlight transforms brickwork chateaux into the stuff of magic. They 
take your breath away and hurl it back at you until it splinters. A 
canine wail, how apt, as though directed. Ripples of wholeness, happy 
containment, perfect abundance.

I went back the way I came, booting the same pebbles, hard on my heels, 
ethereal presence. The night inflamed. I arrived at my apartment, the 
stacks of documents and books, a glass of opaque water, the stale 
exhaling carpet, talk shows unfolding in a thick Bavarian accent. I 
half expect an angry neighbour to tap his wall - our wall - with naked 
palms. Or, worse, the cleaning lady.

At home, it's almost dawn, a blue horizon. I slit a tidy envelope and 
draw its innards.

The abbot advises me to prepare to visit Boston in the following week. 
I am expected there for an in-depth interview. I made a good 
impression.  "Your motives look sincere."  In Christ.



The Last Days

by Sam Vaknin


For years now I have been urinating into flower pots, spraying the 
shiny leaves, the fissured russet soil.

Typically, as time passes, the plant I pee on blackens. It is an odd 
and ominous hue, a mesh of bronze and mustard arteries, like poisoning.

Still, it keeps on growing in degenerate defiance against me and its 
nature.

I often contemplate this toxic quirk of mine.

Does it amount to a behaviour pattern, a set of familiar, oft-repeated 
acts that verge on psychological automatism?

And if it does - is it peculiar? Who is to judge, by whose authority? 
What are the moral, or other, standards used to determine my 
eccentricity or idiosyncrasy?

I am not even sure the quirk is mine.

Admittedly, the urine thus expelled, a cloudy saffron, or a flaxen 
shade, emerges from the pallid, limp appendage to which I'm 
indisputably attached. But this, as far as I am concerned, does not 
transform my waste disposal into a pattern of behaviour, nor does it 
make this habitual discharge mine.

My observations of the routines of my evacuation onto horticultural 
containers are detached (I am almost tempted to label them 
"objective"). I ferret out the common denominators of all these 
incidents.

I never abuse a potted plant when given access to a restroom less than 
three minutes walk away. I judiciously use "three minutes". There have 
been cases of houseplant mutilation when the nearest WC was three 
minutes and ten seconds far.

Also I never purge myself merely for pleasure or convenience. I can 
conscientiously say that the opposite is true: I resort to my 
vegetables only in times of acute distress, beyond endurance. 
Undeniably, the physical release I feel entails emotional relief and 
the faint traces of the exudative orgasm one experiences with a 
whorish, feral woman, who is not one's spouse.

The longer I persevere, the fiercer the cascade, sculpting the loam to 
form lakes of mud and rustling froth.

Another matter that greatly occupies me is the in-depth perusal of the 
circumstances in which my preferences of elimination shift.

A prime condition, of course, is the availability of a planter. I find 
these in offices and other public places. I cherish the risk of being 
found excreting in these urns - the potential social condemnation, the 
forced commitment to a madhouse.

But why? What causes this fluidal exhibitionism?

The exposure of my member is important. The wafting chill upon my 
foreskin. It is primordially erotic, a relic of my childhood. We pee 
like that when we are toddlers: the organ bare, observed by all and 
sundry, the source of foaming falls.

It's an important point, this nippy air of infancy.

Equally, there is the delicious hazard of being spotted by a beautiful 
woman or by the authorities (a policeman, a warden, when I was in jail).

Yet, the wished for outcomes of this recklessness are by no means 
ascertained.

Consider the authorities.

This act is so in breach of my much-cultivated image as European 
intellectual - that I anticipate being thoroughly ignored, in an 
attempt to avoid the realisation that they've been cheated (or were 
they simply too obtuse to notice my blatant preference for herbal 
floods?)

Even more inauspicious:

They may be coerced into conceding that not everyone can safely be 
defined or subjected to immutable classification. This forced admission 
would undermine the pillars of their social order. It's better to 
pretend that they do believe my story - as I hurriedly button my open 
fly - that I was merely sorting out my clothes. They hasten to avert 
their eyes from the dark stain that encompasses my squirting manhood.

A beautiful woman is another matter altogether.

If she happens to detect me, it has the makings of pornography. Being 
the right type, this can be the beginning of a great, blue passion.

I am not sure what is the legal status of my actions. Unobserved, in 
the absence of a gasping public - my exposure is not indecent. So what 
is it? An obscenity? Damage to public property? A corruption of the 
morals? Is there an offence in the codex thus described: "Exposing 
one's penis to the breeze while standing over a black and brown and 
yellow plant?"

I bet there isn't - though one can never be too sure. We are, 
therefore, left with the phenomenology of my exploits. Put less 
genteelly: we can describe the act but are very far from comprehending 
it.

I also notice that I resort to flowerpots before I browse a book, or 
while I do it, or after. I use my lower culvert to expunge my upper 
sewer of all manner of read cerebral effluence.

My learned piss, my highbrow vinegar.

While immersed in reading, sometimes I forget to drink for many hours. 
It does not affect the frequency of my eliminations. I, therefore, feel 
compelled to establish no connection between fluids consumed and urine 
produced when intellectually engaged. My higher functions offer 
splendid regulation of my aqueous economy.

My manner of urinating in plant containers is different to the way I 
pee in the gleaming bowls of regular loos. Confined among the tiles, I 
discharge meticulously, in a thin and measured trickle, free to 
ruminate on theoretical matters or to consider the last woman to have 
abandoned me and why she has.

I judge her reasons flimsy.

Out in nature - as reified by shrivelling potted shrubs - I experience 
a breakdown in communication with my wand. I find myself cajoling it 
both verbally and by straining the muscles of my bladder and my lower 
abdomen. I wag it with a mildness that masks suppressed hostility and 
pent aggression. I begrudge it the spontaneity and variegation of its 
inner and outer lives.

Following a period of obsequious supplication, it acquiesces and 
emancipates my floral urine: a stern and furious jet erupts in all 
directions, a sprinkler out of control, a hose without a nozzle.

There is the loneliness, of course.

Opposing a flourishing jardini�re, or an ivy covered fire hydrant - I 
am alone, the kind of privacy that comes with windswept nudity and 
public intimate acts. This is the solitude of a rebel about to be 
caught, an act of utter self-destruction as meaningful as farting or 
ejaculating in a whore who's bored to the point of distraction. In 
short: the angst.

I pee in existential window boxes.

Regarding the pots themselves - I am indifferent.

I am pretty certain that I expel not on the containers but on the life 
that they contain. I urinate on growth itself and not on the confines 
of its development. I am capable of peeing on houseplants wherever they 
may be. I did it in elevators and on standpipes, around hedges, and in 
our pristine rooms - my former wife's and mine.

Long ago, I passed urine in an empty classroom in my school where they 
wasted mornings grooming dim-witted girls to be ineffectual 
secretaries. That was my first exposure and aberrant liquefaction. I 
used a desiccated little pot. Truth be told, I was not to blame. The 
janitor locked me in without allowing for my incontinent bladder, the 
consequence of chronic prostatitis from early adolescence.

Thus incarcerated among the minacious rows of electric typewriters, I 
did what I had to do on the turf of the schoolroom's only flowerpot. I 
spent two blissful months of cooped up afternoons there, typing my 
finals thesis about the last days of Adolf Hitler.

As my book-length paper progressed, the classroom reeked of stale 
excretions. The plant first shrivelled, changing its colour from dusty 
khaki to limpid yellow and then to screaming orange. It was only a 
short way from there to the familiar brown-spotted murk that 
accompanied the grounded shrub's desperate contortions, attempting to 
evade the daily acidic chastisement I meted out.

At last, it twisted around itself, in a herbal agonising whirl, and 
froze. It became a stump, a remnant, the arid memory of an erstwhile 
plant. It formed a tiny cavity that whistled with the breeze. It 
assumed the air of parchment, increasingly translucent as I further 
drenched it.

It was the first time I witnessed the intricacies of death in action. 
Being at hand, I was its main or only agent, the first and sole 
determinant of its triumph over life. I meticulously documented each 
convolution of the inferior organism. I realised that few can reliably 
recount the withering of a plant in such conditions. Its wilting is 
bound to elude the finest of detectives if he refuses to acknowledge my 
sodden contribution.

This was, indeed, the point: an opportunity to murder, replete with the 
attendant pleasures of a protracted torturing to death - and still to 
be absolved.

Are you upset?

Then ask yourselves: what shocks you in the passing of a flower in a 
classroom thirty years ago?

You have no ready answer.

Lately, I adopted this novel habit of peeing in foreign toilets, around 
the bowls, creating fizzing ponds on shimmering floors. I half expect 
the tiles to yellow and to bronze and then to rarefy into limpidity. 
But porcelain is more resilient than certain forms of life. It keenly 
feeds on urine. It's not the way to go. Must find another venue to 
explore that wet frisson.

I exit lavatories engrossed in mourning, dejected, nostalgia-inundated.

I heave myself onto a leathery love seat and crumble, am embryo 
ensconced. I must completely reconsider I know not what, till when, 
what purpose to this contemplation. At least the rabid dousing of 
flower pots is meaningful - I pee, therefore I kill.

But this incomprehensible trot from john to armchair and back appears 
to be the wrong trajectory. On the other hand, I found no other path 
and an internal voice keeps warning me to delve no deeper.

I gather that my wife has left a while back. She used to wonder why the 
plants in our apartment expire soon and many. She changed the fading 
vegetation, never the dying earth. Not having heard her questions (and 
the plants being untouched), I conclude, with a fair amount of 
certainty, that she is gone.

No point in peeing into pots whose plants are dead. My wife would have 
enjoyed the metaphor. She says that what you see with me is never what 
you get. I find it difficult to imagine what she would have said had 
she known about my disposal habits. It would have fit her theory about 
me, for sure.

At any rate, I am not inclined to water urns whose flowers withered. 
Unholy urine, such as mine, is most unlikely to effect a resurrection.

I religiously wash my hands after the act. This might be considered out 
of character as I owned up to peeing whichever way, on plants and other 
objects. Sometimes the wind messes up the stream and sprays me 
teasingly. I cannot always shower and scouring my palms is kind of a 
ritual: "see you, after all, I am purged."

I miss my wife, the malleable folds of creamy skin I used to nibble.

Now there is no one I can peck and the flat is constantly in dusk. I am 
unable - really, unwilling - to get off the lounger I dragged to the 
entrance of the toilet. I wish I had someone I could gnaw at. Coming to 
think of it, my wife would have been interested in the details of my 
soggy deviance. But I am pretty certain that she would have been the 
only one. And, even so, her curiosity would have been mild at best. Or 
non-existent, now that she has vanished.

I cleanse my hands again. It's safer. One never knows the mischief of 
the winds. Why should I risk the inadvertent introduction of my waste 
into my mouth while eating?

When my wife informed me she is bailing out of our depressing life, she 
insisted that I was the first to abandon her. She accused me of 
emotional absenteeism. I was in the throes of a particularly gratifying 
leak on the undergrowth around a crimson fireplug. The oxblood soil, 
now frothy laced, aflame, the setting sun.

I placed the call to her naively. She bid farewell, her voice was 
steel, and she was gone.

I instantly grasped the stark futility of any war I'd wage to bring her 
back. I also knew it'll never be the same, peeing on plants. I am bound 
to remember her and what and how she said, the frightful burn, that 
swoon. I must have turned yellow-pale, then brown-orange, and 
putrefactive arteries have sprung throughout me. I couldn't do a thing 
but writhe under her sentence.

The muffled sounds of cars from outside. Some people tell the make by 
distant rumbles: deep bass, stentorian busses, the wheezing buzz of 
compacts. I play this guessing game no longer. I understand now that 
the phone won't ring, that the house if empty, that there is nothing to 
revive a shrivelled shrub, immersed in urine, implanted in ammoniac 
soil.

I think about the last days of Hitler: how he roamed his underground 
bunker with imagined ulcers, poisoning his beloved canines, his 
birthday party, and how he wed his mistress the day before the twain 
committed suicide.

How they were both consumed by fire.

This was the topic of my dissertation when I urinated for the first 
time in a flowerpot, in my childhood high school, in my forlorn birth 
town, so long ago. I had no choice. The school's caretaker locked me in.

And this is what I wrote:

How two get married knowing they will soon be dead and how it matters 
not to them. They exterminate the dogs and chew on cyanide, having 
instructed everyone beforehand regarding the disposal of their bodies. 
And then the shot.

Their last few days I studied in those early days of mine. Their last 
few days.



The Future of Madeleine

by Sam Vaknin


Madeleine lodged us in a tiny cubicle at the end of a corridor. Her 
establishment is all tidy and neat, but miniature. Madeleine's doll 
house, this hotel. At dawn, she rises and fixes a basic breakfast in 
the ground floor kitchenette. Scents of bacon and fried eggs waft 
through the building and shifts change at the reception desk, the weary 
loudly welcoming their alert replacements.

Madeleine takes note with gravity of the report submitted by the 
outgoing crew and updates the incomers with its details. Her make-up 
always fresh, her hair fluffy, her attire impeccable and stainless. Her 
sexuality harnessed by a prim-looking business suit, her lipstick an 
insinuated crimson.

Eli blinks at the sun and shields his eyes under a sinewy arm, flanked 
by two thick and raven eyebrows.

"They should pass a law" - he argues to no one in particular - "People 
ought to work by night and sleep throughout the day. Let the nocturnal 
be diurnal and vice versa."

The same sentence every tortured awakening. His ostentatious misery 
provokes contagious mirth in both of us. We go hysterical among the 
crumpled sheets, beating the shrunken pillows with our fists (his 
outsizing mine). At long last, Eli gets up and goes to shave and shower 
in the nude.

I am not embarrassed. Straddling the minuscule bath tub, I mutter:

"We are penniless."

"Yes, I am aware of it" - sighs Eli and whips the sink with lathered 
razor. He uses his fleshy backhand to wipe the frothy mirror. Pressing 
his nostrils upwards, ham-handed, he shaves the cobalt patches of his 
nascent beard and whiskers.

"I got myself a sucker for a backgammon match. He is from Iran. Was a 
Minister of labour or agriculture or something like that..." - he 
hisses a curse and cleanses a pearl of blood from prominent chin.

"What else?" - I enquire offhandedly. I know Eli well. He is too calm.

"Listen" - he enthuses as though the idea just budded in his mind - 
"there is this Jewish cardiologist, filthy rich, Marc. He lives all by 
himself in a six-room apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement. I 
introduced him to this chick and now they are getting hitched."

I keep my peace, awaiting the dŽnouement. Eli eyes me slyly:

"I told him you are a genius and that we are planning a convention of 
Sephardim in Israel, sponsored by Itzhak Navon, the former president. 
It set him on fire."

I cross my legs and inspect closely a bloodied mole embedded in my 
thigh.

"What have you got there?" - enquires Eli - "Anyhow, this guy is 
loaded, I am telling you. We can easily fleece him for five grand or 
more for the consultancy we are planning on opening here, in Paris. Add 
to this my cousin's money and the dough from the dentist and that 
computer guy - and we are in business."

"If it survives your gambling" - I interject tranquilly.

"You are such a doomsayer!" - Eli fumes, banging the bathroom door 
behind him.

A minute later, smirking - "Remember the wife of the Sorbonne professor 
at yesterday's dinner?" - I nod - "She called me this morning. She 
wants to interview me for a WIZO newsletter, or some such. I told her 
the only way to quiz me is on my bed, in my hotel room. She laughed and 
said that this is how she conducts all her assignments anyhow" - 
marvels Eli - "So, take a walk, knock back some coffee, munch on a 
croissant or something."

There is a cramped restaurant on the intersection, up the street, 
opposite the Military Academy. Every afternoon, for months now, I eat 
my duck in garlic there. Sometimes, Eli and I adopt this mock Swedish 
accent and demand the most improbable of dishes, barely able to contain 
our hilarity. The tortured waiters shun us.

Now, waiting for a table to clear, I bury my head in giant mug of 
greasy coffee replete with floating isles of pastry. Then back to the 
hotel in a deliberate slow motion.

Eli is sitting on a chair, bare feet on window ledge. The bed a muddle 
of ejaculated sheets. He casts a sluggish glance in my direction, 
upheaves, and dresses perfunctorily.

"I fixed with Marc. He is waiting for us. Don't start with petulant 
expressions and your usual brattiness. Be nice, we can no longer afford 
even our morning coffee."

A scarface Vietnamese with a tintinnabulary dialect minds the reception 
desk in the deserted lobby. Eli looks disappointed but mumbles 
"morning". We stroll towards the nearest metro station down the street.

Marc's spacious abode is in a newly renovated building. Bareness 
reverberates through six high-ceilinged rooms. The hulking cardiologist 
lives in the kitchen. He butchers meditatively a silver herring wrapped 
in a slab of putrid cheese laid on an ageing slice of bread. He licks 
lubricious swollen fingers, extending them for handshake, and smacks 
his fleshy lips.

"Sit down, please" - he utters cordially - "You're welcome!" His 
Hebrew, guttural and broken. Though somewhat stooping, Marc has the 
countenance of a Belmondo. Eli attacks the remnants of the kipper, 
stuffing his face with staling crumbs. "Where's Mazal?" - he enquires, 
between the mouthfuls, dodging digested scraps.

Masticating, Marc responds:

"She suddenly took off. She said she couldn't stand it here."

There follows a duet of smarmy nibbles, the unctuous morsels of a 
feigned alliance and selfish solidarity, the smutty autopsy of 
smoke-dried, gutted love.

Eli assures him: "I will get her back to you" - and Marc embarks on 
careful planning, strategy and tactics of the reconquista - when Mazal 
steps indoors. A vague air of long lost familiarity, a memorable face - 
the curving forehead, dark ponds for eyes, a boxer's nose.

"Marc" - she exclaims.

Sheathed in a hail of breadcrumbs and disintegrating cheese, the ursine 
pilgrim approaches her: "Mazal!"

They do not touch each other, not even the customary kiss on cheek. 
Mazal says: "I am going to put my things in the bedroom" - and smiles 
at me.

Eli coughs politely:

"Marc, we will leave you, guys, alone. Be a man, won't you? Show your 
love, woo her, be romantic. A woman is not a cow, to mount, to screw, 
and then to turn your back on and go to sleep. A woman needs attention, 
flowers, a restaurant and orchestra on her birthday, buy her a fresh 
dress here and there. Plunge your hand in your pocket. Be stingy and 
die lonely!"

Marc assents despondently, his eyes riveted to Mazal's swaying buttocks.

"Marc" - implores Eli - "let's finish this business with the money. To 
establish the firm, I must deposit it in the bank this afternoon."

Marc casts a haunted, ensnared glance at Eli's general direction.

But Eli strikes relentless:

"Marc, she'll be out of the room any minute now. If we keep arguing 
over these stinking five thousand dollars, you will lose her forever. 
Either you're in or you're out. The time to decide is here and now."

"I'm in, I'm in" - stammers Marc, defeated. He noisily dodders to the 
adjacent room. Eli winks at me expectantly. Marc returns with a bulky 
wad of cash and a stained, much folded, piece of rubricated paper.

"Sign this, both you" - he growls and, mournfully, to himself: "fifty 
thousand francs."

"A mere five thousand dollars" - Eli corrects him - "and the money 
doubles each half a year or so. Welcome, partner!"

Marc reciprocates with a feeble handshake and crumbles onto a kitchen 
stool. The flickering neon light weighs on his luxuriant eyelids, 
skirting the shady folds under his sockets. Eli bows and whispers 
hoarsely in our sponsor's hirsute ear: "Go to her, Marc. She is waiting 
for you. She is a woman."

Marc gestures half-heartedly but doesn't budge. Eli shrugs 
disparagingly and signals me to follow him.

Back in the street, he gleefully observes:

"She'll never stay with him."

We promenade in silence and then:

"It's five thousand US dollars we made today! We earned ourselves a 
normal lunch for a change. I haven't eaten properly since all those 
bets."

Eli used to wager meals in fine eateries on the outcomes of a quiz. The 
terms were thus: the dupe he lured could ask me ten questions which I 
correctly answered. I, in my turn, would then perplex the prey with a 
single, insoluble, challenge. I never lost. But when I won from Eli his 
platinum tie clip and pair of cufflinks, the betting stopped.

A tangled web of avenues and squares, the foliaged daubs of green and 
orange, the ash-clad buildings eerily aglow. Swirling bouquets of men 
in women, hormone-exuding teens, whores and their clients are 
negotiating seed. Paris perspires lust under the seething sun.

The corner drugstore is congested. Eli devours the headlines of a 
week-old Israeli paper. He doesn't even notice Mayer who occupies a 
seat beside him. His lips give shape to writhing syllables. Mayer 
regards his efforts with nauseated fascination.

"Eli" - I exclaim - "Look who is here! If it isn't Mayer!"

"Mayer!" - Eli wrinkles the daily - "What are you doing here? When did 
you arrive? Care for a little backgammon match?"

Mayer sneers, his bellows chest pulsating. With effeminate hand, he 
smears the effluence of the mall's tropic micro-climate on his balding 
head.

"You are still the same, you piece of shit" - he roars and they embrace 
affectionately.

Eli and Mayer are always in the throes of some conspiracy and I stay in 
the room, deterred by the metropolitan expanse, leafing through an 
illustrated French encyclopaedia. Madeleine intrudes infrequently, 
ostensibly to enquire of my needs, but really to find out if Eli had 
returned.

I pity her. I say:

"Eli met a friend of his from Israel. His name is Mayer."

She snorts bitterly and hangs up on my compassion.

Eli and Mayer stagger into the hotel at night, with fur-packed beauties 
hanging on their arms. Up, in the room, Eli points a stubby finger and 
enquires: "How much to do this guy?" - they gauge me unappreciatively 
and mumble something. Eli and Mayer burst into convulsive merriment.

Eli continues, exhaling heavily: "And that includes his dog?"

The girls recoil, torrentially blaspheming, and fling their imitation 
leather purses at the now much-bolted door.

Their voices fade along the corridor and up the creaking stairs.

I am left alone, in thought, pierced by their assaying gaze, when Eli 
breaks into the room, stark-naked, and drags me to the floor above.

"Come, come!" - he hastens me - "You mustn't miss this! Two stunners 
making it. This is something you have never seen before, I bet!"

"I don't want to!" - I whisper, prying my shoulder loose from his 
clammy vise - "Leave me alone!" - and I retreat, scuttling, to the 
safety of the landing.

"You are a nutcase, that's what you are!" - Eli now pelts me from his 
elevated perch - "Even a homosexual would be excited! Such knockouts, a 
ton of breasts, exquisite asses, that's what you are missing, you hear 
me?"

By morning his wrath subsides. Casting a waxy arm over his fluttering 
eyes, he blocks the fervid light and croaks:

"They should pass a law."

"Where's Mayer?" - I enquire.

"Up in the room" - he giggles - "Stuck with the whores. They claim to 
have been nurses in a hospital. When he revives, he will have to pay 
them" - he finds it side-splitting.

"Madeleine was looking for you" - I informed him and added - "Many 
times." I evaded his scolding stare, turning the pages in my book in 
the wrong direction.

"What did you tell her?" - he rasps.

"Nothing whatsoever."

"And she?"

"Said none."

 "We will visit her this evening" - Eli decrees and drops the subject 
altogether.

A few minutes later:

"Stay here" - he exits and locks the door behind him.

I contemplate the wooden planks that stand between me and the hallway 
and ruffle the pages of my book. When I rise to fill my cup with water 
from the corner sink, the walls reverberate with Mayer's blows.

"Where is the son of a bitch?" - he bawls - "Wait till I lay my hands 
on him!"

"He is not here. He descended earlier." Mayer digest the information 
and then attacks the doorknob viciously. "Is he inside? He locked you 
in?" - suspicion-impregnated pause - "Open the door! You won't?"

"He locked me in, he's gone, I have no key, I cannot open up" - and 
Mayer curses audibly. He is suddenly besieged by agitated female voices 
and tries to weave his tattered French into a sentence. The sounds 
recede as, having yielded, he climbs to the cubicle, apparently to 
recompense them.

By now the hotel is virtually deserted of its guests and of their 
echoes. Time is marked by the cheerful banter of the staff, some heated 
arguments, the weary vacuuming of carpets, the squeaky linen trolley. 
The equanimity of the eternal. Bathed in anaemic light, I watch my legs 
and arm, propped on a thickset book, with growing alienation. When Eli 
unlocks the door, he, too, does not belong. Not an invader but an 
error, the wrong protagonist of an unfinished novel.

Failing to pierce the dusk, he blinks his way towards the light switch 
and beats it into brightness. He eyes me intensely, his rare but most 
inspiring insect. "Get dressed. We need to be at Madeleine's in half an 
hour." A feline leap into the bathroom and Eli, urinates, legs wide 
apart, the door ajar, letting out the hissing voice and pungent smell 
of fizzing pee.

Still steeped in unreality, I kneel. From battered suitcase, tucked 
under the bed, I extract a rumpled blazer, age-patinated pants. "Put on 
cravat!" - he snaps - "She is not a floozy, has a lot of style" - he 
sounds proud. I don a necktie.

"Now listen up" - Eli expounds - "I told her about you, she thinks you 
are a demigod. She is convinced that you can tell the future. A few 
things about her: she is widowed, rich, and lonely. She has a Turkish 
paramour, a yachtsman. He works the Paris line and ends here once a 
month."

"What does he look like?" - I probe and Eli, violently revolted, 
unfurls my tie knot and motions me to start anew.

"Tall, swarthy, beefy, moustache. She is addicted to me. She wants me 
to move over to her place."

"I realise that" - I retort, irritably - "I am not blind, you know."

The taxi crawls into a murky parking lot and Eli and I sneak towards 
the glass paned entrance and press the intercom. Madeleine buzzes us in 
immediately, no questions asked. Silhouetted against the backlit 
doorframe, extended arm on jamb, she is carved into her wavy gown. Eli 
pecks her turned cheek and brushes against her nipples. I do not.

She doesn't even wait for us to settle down, thrusting her palm 
forward, digits outspread, under my flushing face. Her robe unravels 
some, hinting at ample, creamy breasts.

"Give me a reading" - she commands me hoarsely. I notice now her 
layered makeup, the sweat ravines and mascara pools, shaven abrasions 
where chin meets neck.

I contemplate her tiny hand, curvaceous, and say:

"I see a man."

"Who is he?" - she prods with bated breath - "How does he look and what 
is our future?"

"A towering man of dark complexion..." - a built-in hesitation, the 
vision blurring, Eli and I have practiced this on many women, a 
tiresome routine. I close my eyes, waggle my head, clasp knees in 
helplessness, writhe for a while, exhale:

"He wears a fine moustache. I see great waters..."

She yelps in fear and joy.

"You are two lovers... A boat, he is on it ... and the sea..."

Eli suppresses yawns, but Madeleine vaults into her bedroom, barefooted 
thumps on tiled floor. These fleshy thuds arouse. She reappears and 
kneels beside me, scattering purplish Polaroids on a nearby coffee 
table.

"That's him" - she pinkie-indicates a snapshot - "In Turkey, 
Istanbul..."

Her scent is primal, her neck too short but sculpted, she moistens lips 
with lithe, inviting tongue.

Eli boasts of me: "You see, what did I tell you? There's nothing he 
don't know, he see it all, a genius, he is the talk of every town in 
Israel..."

"You must have told him in advance" - Madeleine pouts and lays a 
shapely arm on Eli's thigh. Hair sprouts shaggy in her cavernous armpit.

"I swear to you I haven't!" - Eli withdraws, offended.

"Your father took you when you were a child" - I startle both, reading 
the headlines of an inner bulletin unfolding - "You conceived his child 
and then aborted. I hear the baby whimpering."

For one delirious moment, they both appraise me, shocked, albeit for 
different reasons.

"What did you say?" - Eli recovers first but Madeleine shrieks, reduced 
to a blubbering heap of mouth and shoulders. The muted violence of 
buried words tears at her body. She rends the carpet and vainly 
reconstructs it. Still sobbing mutely, Eli consoles her impotently, 
casting condemning glances my way as though exclaiming "Look what you 
have done!"

Madeleine is quieter now but welled-up ripples traverse her crouching 
figure.

She whispers something and Eli puts an ear to quavering lips. Another 
hiss and Eli lays an incidental hand on Madeleine's heaving chest and 
counter-whispers. A lengthy verbal intercourse ensues. She nods assent 
and Eli jumps, enthused.

"Join me today to see something you haven't seen in your entire life!"

With Eli this could only mean sex but something in his voice forbids me 
to refuse, an ominous promise, a kind of incest. Madeleine strolls 
dreamily into her bedroom and emerges moulded into a mustard toga and 
silver stiletto heels. Under the flowing robe, she is ensconced in 
nylon tights and a bikini top.

We drive through fluoresced, abandoned boulevards, awash with rustling 
leaves. A car or two speeds by, the metro stations gargle. Madeleine's 
numb face is ravaged by the intermittence of the lights. Her lifeless 
hands clutch at the steering wheel and hardly turn it left or right.

"It's here" - says Eli.

We descend few stairs to face a peeping hole embedded in a metal door 
which Eli raps. A mushroomed eye appears, withdraws, the gate is opened 
by a decaying woman, a brownish cigarette holder dangling from scarlet 
orifice. She motions us in with remnant grace.

We deposit overcoats and bags in a tucked-in wardrobe and negotiate a 
red-lit passageway into a bar. It's crowded. The patrons, slumped in 
upholstered armchairs and facing round glass-tops, are catered to by 
bow-tied waiters. These take their orders, serve them, replace the over 
spilling ashtrays, collect the checks, and smile profusely at the 
favoured clients.

Eli shoves me towards a giant curtain.

"Cent-six" - he sounds awed - "One hundred and six. This is the address 
and the name of this establishment. The bar is merely cover. You could 
call it a hundred and five" - he tsks and snickers gruffly, his hand 
engirdling Madeleine's waist. Her eyes are distant now, her hair 
atypically dishevelled. Skimpy clothes askew, her chalky body flares 
into the haze.

Eli rams his tailor's dummy toward the draped partition. He lets her 
pass and follows. I join them in a musky, clouded room. The light is 
dim, the cubicle immersed in droning chatter. Eli directs attention to 
the furthest corner: "She comes here every day. She must consume a 
bucketful of sperm."

A woman's head is bobbing in a virile loin, with one hand she is 
kneading his erupting masculinity, the other rubs another's member. 
Right next to them, a female self-impales on hoary groin. Eli drives 
Madeleine to the centre, disrobes and strips her of her vestments with 
rapid sleight of hand.

She stands there, nude voluptuousness, uneasy feet and fisted palms, 
her eyes occluded. She breathes tortuously. Eli fondles her breasts and 
passes a lustful hand between her legs. Others approach and taste her 
hesitatingly. Five minutes later, she vanishes under a pack of males, 
tree branch obscured by bee hives. Only her toes are visible, bouncing, 
contracting, flexed and still, fanned and convergent. Men rise, wiping 
off semen and others take their steamy place. Men on her breasts, men 
on her limbs, men in her orifices.

A tall, dark woman invites me to a party. I decline, she shrugs and 
proposes to another. I fall asleep.

Eli stirs me awake.

"Let's go home" - he croaks. He rubs a pair of bloodshot eyes between 
two fingers.

"Where is Madeleine?" - I cover my mouth to arrest the morning odours.

"She is gone" - says Eli, ireful - "She went home and so should we. 
Come on."

It is a lengthy, silent stride to our hotel. Eli stops by the reception 
desk, as though awaiting someone.

Back in the room, he asks:

"How did you know about her father? He really mounted her when she was 
young."

"I didn't know. It sometimes happens. I can't control it."

Eli regards me sceptically and plunges to the bed, fully-attired. He 
rests his head on interlocking hands and canvasses the slanted ceiling. 
Then he turns on his side and begs:

"Please read my palm."

"Stop it, Eli. I am exhausted. It's been a long day. Anyhow I am 
bluffing, it's a charade, a con, a trick. You of all people should know 
that."

"Please divine my future" - Eli pleads, alarmed - "I have a feeling 
something real bad is going to happen soon."

I hold his massive palm in mine and study the sooty definite creeks 
that cross and intersect.

"You are losing your wife these very days" - I pronounce, almost 
inaudibly - "You are in Paris and she is no longer yours back home."

"What did you say, speak up, I am telling you!" - Eli panics.

"You are losing Zehava, OK? Now will you let me be?" - I shrill and 
keep grumbling - "You have already lost her, she is no longer yours", 
until I drop off.

I wake into the cadaverous silence of an early afternoon. Madeleine is 
on the phone:

"Samuel" - her voice is as imperious and decisive as ever - "Eli 
departed in the morning. Went back to Israel. Some kind of family 
emergency, he said."

I wait.

"I ask you to leave this hotel" - she carries on - "You owe me nothing, 
you don't have to pay. I will settle the accounts with Eli when he is 
back. I simply want you out of here this instant."

Sleep-drunk, exuding tar and alcohol, I petition her:

"Where will I go?"

"There's a small inn on the Left Bank. I reserved a room for you, it's 
cheap."

She hangs up on me.

I am in the midst of hurried packing when Eli calls:

"Shmuel" - his voice is crackling static, dim, and foreign - "Zehava 
has someone. She wants a divorce and to take the kids. I feel like a 
boatman who has lost his oars, the bitch. I go to Paris to make a 
living, to create a business for our future, and she whores around..."

I gently place the sizzling receiver on the bed and drag my book-laden 
suitcase to the corridor and then, thunderously, down the spiral 
staircase.



The Out Kid

by Sam Vaknin


Sima was six years old when she died. Mother turned off the television 
and instructed me to go to my grandma's home at once. It was that time 
of day between retiring sunlight and emerging gloom. My grandmother was 
sobbing silently, seated gingerly on a shabby couch, her face buried in 
an oversized and crumpled handkerchief. My grandpa, muted, just hugged 
her close. It all reminded me of a Passover Eve, refreshments strewn on 
tables, hastily appended by my uncles and covered with flowery rags.

All lights were on, tarring the wiry tree in the garden with juddering 
shadows. I sat in the corner, thinking about Sima, wondering if her 
beauty survived her death. They said she had leukemia and vomited blood 
incessantly. She died, awash with it, her pallid face depressed against 
my grandpa's shoulder. I pondered if it was right to go on loving her. 
I thought about Uzi, her brother and my cousin.

After the funeral, Uzi was sent to a Kibbutz, never to return, leaving 
behind unfinished cowboy-and-Indian games on my grandmother's verandah. 
There were so many things I had to tell him but he was gone.

A few months later, my aunt invited me to join her to visit the 
Kibbutz. In her youth, she was a green-eyed, lithe beauty - cascading, 
raven hair and my mother's cheekbones, but gentler. She divorced still 
young and then Sima died on her and she found employment in Haifa, in a 
hospice for the terminally ill.

She was a recluse, living in a tiny, viewless flat which she 
compulsively scoured and polished. She spared her words and I was 
deterred by these and other eccentricities. But I wanted to see Uzi 
again and talk to him, as we used to. I imagined his full-cheeked 
laughter and the sparkle in his eyes, under his curls.

So, I said I'll come along and found myself, one summer morning, 
accompanying my aunt to the Kibbutz, a winding, dusty way. We switched 
countless buses and sipped orange juice through straws and my aunt 
tilted her wide-brimmed hat to expose a lock of greying hair. Her eyes 
were moist. She said: "I am going to see my Uzi now. It's been so 
long." The sun invaded her fedora, imprisoning her quavering lips 
behind a beaming grid.

I wanted to enquire why did she send Uzi to the Kibbutz to start with 
and tell her how I missed his smile, our games, the bucket loads of 
water he would pour on me after we bathed in the nearby sea. But I 
refrained because her eyes went metal when she mentioned him. She never 
even mentioned Sima.

So, there we were, standing at the gate, she and I and our gear, all 
packed in fading plastic bags at our feet, enshrouded by the black 
vapour of the shimmering asphalt and the roaring and receding bus. My 
aunt, contemplating the waning transport, grabbed my sweaty palm and 
lifted the rustling shopping bags. A whiskered driver of a tractor 
regarded us with curiosity, then guided us to our destination.

My aunt clenched a childish fist to tap the door, but left it hanging 
in mid-air awhile. Then, she let it drop, an alien appendage. She 
removed her hat, clinging to it awkwardly, straightened the wrinkles in 
her dress and gazed at her flat patent shoes uncomfortably. She knocked 
on the outer screen rigidly and the sounds reverberated in the house 
like distant thunder.

The door was opened so instantly that we recoiled. My aunt stared at 
the middle-aged woman and returned her barely audible "hello". It was 
as though her body shrunk. She undulated with her baggage eagerly. The 
older woman's lips were smiling at my aunt, but her eyes remained on 
guard.

She told me to look for Uzi in the animal corner, close to the 
mountain, among the cowsheds and cages. She needs to talk to my aunt in 
private, she ventured unnecessarily.

She softly shut the door behind me and I stood, dazed by the scorching 
sun. Barefoot and well-tanned kids, clad in shorts and T-shirts, 
surrounded and studied me and I reciprocated. I froze and they did not 
get closer. We formed two groups and measured one another.

A bird-like girl broke the spell: "Are you a new Out Kid?"

I didn't know what was an Out Kid. I told her that I was Uzi's cousin 
and that I am searching for him.

She gave a toothy smile, crossed the invisible barrier and held my 
trembling hand: "Let's go". She examined me, astounded, when I withdrew 
and violently extracted myself from her grasp.

We silently traversed some green-hedged paths. Brown signs with massive 
yellow lettering were everywhere. She navigated deftly among the gravel 
and the fences until we reached a bank of crates, laid on the 
sun-parched ground and hosting rabbits. Their wheezy, ribbed breathing 
nearly unstitched their fur.

Uzi was standing there, his back to us. He leaned his head on an 
extended arm, supported by the cage's frame, perusing a frightened 
rodent, whose nostrils twitched with desperation.

I called out: Uzi! He turned around listlessly and looked at me, as 
though unsure of my identity. My guide hopped from one dainty foot to 
another, her discomfiture increasing. Finally she departed and joined 
the growing bunch of children that monitored us from afar.

"It is a porcupine" - said Uzi, his eyes averted. "I tend to it and to 
the entire animal corner. We have sheep and horses, too" - he hugged 
the circumference with a bronzed gesticulation. "I climb the mountain 
daily with my father" - he added. I kept silent. His real father 
deserted him when he was toddler.

Uzi grew quiet, too. He kicked a pile of dry manure and asked me if I 
want to see the cows and I said I did and off we went. It was like in 
the olden days, when he and Sima and myself strolled down the white-hot 
pavements. She had an auburn mane she locked into a ponytail, her 
mother's eyes, green tarns, a swan's own neck. She made us laugh at the 
unexpected femininity of her most childish enquiries.

Then and there, with Uzi by my side, it was as nothing happened, a 
midsummer's nightmare, when you wake, perspiring, but in a familiar bed.

We talked profusely and laughed and I inevitably dived into some 
straw-infested fertilizer and didn't mind at all because Uzi was with 
me to pour large bucketfuls of glacial water he carried from a nearby 
stream. I closed my eyes and pretended to be at sea, to have brought 
along the spraying waves and the caressing breeze, a gift to Uzi, and a 
reminder.

The native kids just followed us, their eyes azure, their skins a 
seamless copper. They tracked our movements with naked, strapping 
bodies and clean-smelling hair. They clung to us and giggled secretly 
and pointed at Uzi and whispered in each other's elfin ears, and then 
they chuckled.

Uzi said not a word. He passed a soothing hand on a horse's muzzle and 
a cow's leg and the pulsating furs of bunnies. He gently pulled their 
elongated ears and they scurried to and fro and made him laugh. He had 
a gurgling, erupting laughter, Uzi had.

We climbed a thorny, stone-filled road atop a hill, pausing to look at 
the vanishing Kibbutz at our feet. "There's my home" - Uzi singled out 
a cubicle. I wasn't sure which one he meant, but I did not insist. I 
only looked at the hazy greenery and at the gleaming swimming pool and 
said: "Let's go down, I am worn out."

The children awaited our descent and cried at Uzi, who ignored them. He 
only hastened his steps and so did I. They followed us. Surrounded, 
stranded on a tiny path, we stopped. They shoved Uzi and pulled.

"Who is he?" - they demanded - "Why did he come here? Where is he from?"

He frowned and said: "It's no one special. He just came with my mother 
from over there" - with a vague gesture to indicate the nowhere.

The girl fixed me with her gaze.

"It's nothing, it's no one! He is only here for a visit, I am telling 
you!" - Uzi pleaded.

"He must return where he came from" - said one of them, his eye a cold 
blue sparkle. His jaws rippled as he spoke, skin smooth and dry. My 
shirt was dabbed in sweat and hung, keeled over, from my thick, long 
trousers. "Let him go back" - echoed the girl - "We cannot have another 
one of you. Isn't it enough that you gorge on our food and have new 
parents?"

Uzi was soundless, his head lowered. I couldn't look into his eyes like 
we used to do when we were sad. Sima and I had this game of who would 
be the first to stare down the other with an invincible, metallic look. 
Deep inside, I thought, this must be how Uzi sees them - as enemies to 
be stared down and out and away.

One kid approached and tugged him at the shoulder and Uzi stooped. It 
was as if a valve was drawn, the air let out, to render a misshapen 
Uzi. Another child stepped forcefully on Uzi's earth-baked, 
sweat-furrowed toes. His breath mingled with his quarry's as he 
increased the pressure. Uzi's face contorted but he didn't budge.

Jaded and starved they left and we proceeded to Uzi's new abode, amidst 
the well-trimmed lawns and neck-high hedges. He knocked hesitantly and 
someone let us in. Uzi erupted in bitter sobbing, beating his sides 
with pale-clenched fists. He stood there, squealing and grunting, like 
the animals in his corner and the muffled sounds filled the house and 
washed over the bowl of fruits and the heavy, murky curtains, and the 
antique wooden furniture, rebounding, a thousand echoes.

My aunt called his name. His new parents entered the kitchenette and 
sealed the sliding door. I had nowhere else to be. "I brought you some 
food" - said the mother and he nodded bravely and brushed aside the 
tears that threatened to emerge. She opened the overflowing plastic 
bags with learned helplessness, displaying pastries she prepared at 
home.

But Uzi selected a mid-size orange and peeled it expertly, stuffing his 
mouth as he progressed. The orphaned pies adorned the table that stood 
between them. They both avoided looking at each other. Still with 
diverted eyes she extended an uncertain hand and touched his shoulder. 
He shrank under her stroke, so she withdrew and sat up, tense, 
straddling the edge of a recliner.

Thus, they circled one another wearyingly. A longcase clock ticked 
minutes and then hours before my aunt got up, mauling her wide-brimmed 
hat, and said: "I must be going now", and Uzi nodded, devouring yet 
another orange. He didn't even rise to bid farewell.

"I'll come to visit you" - she promised but her pledge sounded tinny 
and rehearsed. Uzi consumed the fruit and stared intently at the floor. 
His mother took my soiled palm in hers and exited the house. No one 
escorted us to the gate or to the grimy station. We stood there, in the 
sweltering sun, until we heard the bus, uproarious, like echoes of a 
far-off battle.



Pierre's Friends

by Sam Vaknin


Pierre is terrified. Not hard to tell. The bald patches on his 
egg-shaped skull exude pearly sweat from sooty pores, a salty path down 
to his darkening collar. He thrusts two alcohol-swollen fingers and 
loosens his shabby necktie. His bloodshot eyes dart from one grimy 
corner of the restaurant to another, avoiding Eli's.

The three of us are seated awkwardly on the porch of an unfashionable 
eatery, crinkling the paper menus. Pierre orders an espresso. Eli and I 
dismiss the hovering waiter impatiently. So now, Pierre sips his 
lukewarm swill as we observe him closely. He coughs, expelling coffee 
grounds all over. We don't recoil. He chokes.

Only the day before it was my turn to writhe. I landed in the minuscule 
and gleaming airport, picked up my battered suitcase, and tailed the 
passport control procession. Throughout it all, I couldn't stop 
shivering.

A uniformed officer of the Border Police leafed gravely through my 
documents, comparing them to a neatly printed list. He picked up the 
receiver of an antiquated phone and tugged at its snaky cord. I 
strained to overhear the words that may condemn me.

But the inevitable cannot be hastened. I stood there, a rabbit caught 
in legal headlights on time's highway, awaiting the terminal collision 
with my life. I watched mayhem unfold, as each official summoned others 
to consult.

At last I was approached and asked with firm civility to accompany a 
prim official to a cubicle. He placed himself behind a rickety table 
but offered me no seat. I remained standing. He then proceeded to 
inaudibly recite the questions printed on a faded form and I responded.

He leaned back and demanded to know in which hotel I had reserved a 
room. I told him. It was a small establishment proffering basic 
services. He nodded approvingly: I must be a solid, thrifty person to 
have chosen such accommodation. It sort of placed us both, despite his 
social inferiority, on equal footing.

He solemnly informed me, in ominously florid phraseology, that I am the 
subject of a full investigation whose gravity cannot be overestimated. 
He asked me not to leave town - or even my hotel - till it is over. Do 
I fully understand, he queried. I nodded brusquely and noted the 
gleeful smirk with which he handed back my passport, duly stamped.

I hailed a yellow cab and helped its driver stow my baggage in the 
trunk. Around a flowery mound, we headed straight to town and to my 
lodgings.

The first thing I did was place a call to Eli. Surprisingly, it was he 
who picked up the phone.

He heard my convoluted tale - I felt his gathering gloom - asked 
several questions and concluded:

"Your place, tonight."

Still listening to the dial tone, I lay across the bed and contemplated 
the blotchy ceiling, projecting overflowing fears into the aqueous 
blots.

Eli will be here, I could count on him, he loved me as a son, a twin, a 
soul mate. We were complementary: I only knew about things that he 
experienced. I couldn't capture him in words like "streetwise". Eli was 
life itself: innocuously cruel, indifferently relentless, 
single-mindedly propagative, amoral, steeped in gallows humour.

My employer insisted that Pierre admitted to a conspiracy to pass on 
weighty secrets - commercial and political - to the press. He swept 
aside my vehement protestations and railed at me for wanting to destroy 
his business empire, his life's achievement. Pierre confessed in the 
police interrogation, he seethed.

It was now up to an investigating magistrate to decide whether to 
indict us both.

I knotted my tie the way Eli taught me and donned a jacket. Bathed in a 
springtime sun, I headed towards the flower clock near the marina by 
the lake. It ticked away its scented, multicoloured time in pensive 
melancholy. I felt forlornly relieved. Whatever the outcome of the 
proceedings, I knew this chapter ends.

I recalled myself facing this timepiece on my first day in town - 
diminutive and lost, clad in a cut-price suit of itchy blue with golden 
stripes. I had it custom-made in the West Bank. I enviously sneaked 
furtive glances at the ubiquitous tall, well-tailored, Aryan men who 
roamed the streets.

In time, I, too, improved attire. My climb was meteoric: department 
head, division chief, then two divisions, vice president. I became a 
welcome guest in the hoary mountaintops and charmed castles of the 
world's affluent and mighty.

I mulled four years of images while genteelly strolling down the 
promenade, unfastening my necktie and nibbling at a colossal ice cream 
cone. At last, I flung my reefer on one shoulder, stuffing the stifling 
tie in an inside pocket. Unshackled, though officially confined, I 
hummed a tune and drifted aimlessly.

Back at the hotel, Eli, submerged in a strategically-situated lounger, 
leafed through the oversized pages of a local rag. He rose with 
difficulty from his seat and embraced me warmly. Disengaging, he 
scrutinised me, his two hands on my shoulders. And then another hug.

Sipping Campari orange, Eli attentively listened to my story. His 
fleshy palms wriggled involuntarily in the more stirring passages, as 
if to illustrate his mental notes. When I was through, he sighed: "We 
will extricate you from this mess."

I handed over Pierre's phone number and we went up to my room. Eli 
surveyed it critically: "Could be worse, I guess." He proceeded to 
sprawl on the only bed, fully clothed. Waving his legs and matching 
toes to heels he shed his shoes, displaying threadbare socks.

He shoved a sausagey finger at the phone's rotary dial and pressed it 
down. It clanged into position. Eli's French was guttural and 
splintered. His conversation over, he gathered his discarded shoes and 
muttered: "Let us go."

That is how we came to face Pierre in this cafe. He compulsively passes 
a venous hand over his blushing baldness, to fend off the breeze.

"You and Shmuel were friends" - Eli implores. Pierre nods eagerly, 
stealthily peeking at me beneath his furled eyebrows. "This is no way 
to treat a friend" - Eli hectors him, bending forward, his face 
skirting his interlocutor's, a burly arm cast casually on creaking 
armrests.

"What is it that you want?" - Pierre stammers and strokes a lumpy 
throat. His body petrified, only his hands are squirming on the table, 
like rodents in a maze.

Eli eyes his discomfiture, amused.

"I want you to tell the truth and only the truth" - he reassures Pierre 
nonchalantly even as he mutilates a plastic straw and chucks it at 
Pierre's face. The latter's spectral pallor alternates with crimson.

"We don't want you testify to anything that is not the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth. Follow the wording of the courtroom 
oath tomorrow morning" - Eli lunges at Pierre, a breathing distance 
from his startled face. I couldn't help admiring the bestial move, 
Eli's proficiency in this survival game, the managed tension between 
his bulk and supple muscles.

He recoils abruptly, the quintessence of indifferent equanimity.

"But Shmuel gave me the documents" - Pierre says, attempting to resist 
- "I got the documents from him! How else could I have obtained this 
highly classified material that's locked in safes?"

Eli nods understandingly. He moistens a corpulent finger and uses it to 
haul some cigarette residues to Pierre's overflowing ashtray.

"I wonder" - Eli, dreamily - "did he also tell you to sell these 
crucial data to the local paper with the biggest circulation - and for 
pennies?"

Pierre swallows hard. Then, ejecting all the air he hoarded since the 
beginning of our chat, he shakes his head: "No, this was my invention."

Eli glowers at him with feigned astonishment.

"Invention?" - he echoes - "Invention..."

Pierre pounds the soggy butt of his mutilated cigarette under heel.

"I will stick to the truth in court" - he obstinately reiterates. Eli's 
angelic smile.

"But I will tell them that Shmuel was the source of these cursed 
documents."

"Only the truth, I told you" - Eli eggs him on solemnly. "Don't stray 
either left or right. If Shmuel was enough of a fool to give the files 
to unauthorised personnel, that is his problem, not yours" - a pause. 
"In any case, I understand that he didn't touch a centime from the fee 
the magazine paid you."

Pierre looks intently at the river.

"No" - he admits - "Shmuel didn't even know I'm going to do it, my 
liaison with the paper" - reanimated - "I didn't share with him because 
he never was my partner!"

"Superb, superb!" - Eli enthuses - "It is such a pleasure to hold a 
fruitful conversation with someone as intelligent as you. By the way, 
what are you doing now that you've been fired? You got a job? Perhaps a 
hobby?"

Pierre's lips uncurl bitterly. He straightens his battered spectacles 
on shiny nose and passes an amnesiac hand on long-gone hair.

"Nothing" - he exclaims, examining Eli with hurtful slyness - "The boss 
dumped me like that, no severance fee, no nothing, simply because he 
caught me drinking on the job."

Eli snaps calloused fingers. He orders a glass of the finest whiskey 
for his guest. Pierre smiles gratefully.

"We do a lot of business in Europe, Shmuel and I" - Eli expounds - "We 
need faithful, quick-witted collaborators. I promise you, we don't 
throw people to the street after years of dedicated service without 
enough to buy a drink on such a lovely day."

Pierre moans as he consumes the amber potion. His eyes flit between Eli 
and myself. His cheekbones drip perspiring beads into his beverage. He 
doesn't wipe them. His nostrils flare. He gulps again.

"Settled then" - Eli concludes - "I am delighted to have met you. We 
now have friends in common. We will keep in touch. We shan't forget 
you" - but he stays put.

Shocked into action by this brusque farewell, Pierre dries his lips 
with greasy sleeve and begs:

"Just let me give you my details..."

Eli's entire face implodes into a thin-lipped leer. He taps Pierre's 
stooping shoulder and pronounces:

"We will find you, worry not. We always find our friends. Your address 
is (it was). Your phone, though currently unlisted, is (the number). 
You share apartment with (her name). Your only child lives with his 
mother in this address (true)."

We turn our backs on a confounded Pierre and down the steps that lead 
into the street. I watch him slumped, staring ahead, the glass half 
raised and tilted.

Eli commands: "Let's take a cab, I am bushed. But first, go back there 
and pay for all the drinks. Surely you don't expect me to pick up the 
tab as well?"

I leave him standing in the middle of the thoroughfare and return to 
Pierre, the catatonic. I place a note of a hundred francs in front of 
him but do not say a word. He waves his hand in feeble, interrupted, 
protest.

Eli catnaps on the back seat of a waiting cab.

"To the hotel" - I tell the driver. Eli wakes.

He growls:

"It is the last time I am here to save your ass, you hear me?"

Standing at the entrance of our plain hotel, he grabs my shoulders and 
turns me around ferociously to face him.

He stares at me the way he did at Pierre:

"This is the last time, you hear me? There will be no more"

I nod, he smiles, and we embrace.



Death of the Poet

by Sam Vaknin


The poet succumbed at eight o'clock AM.

Five minutes prior to his death, he made use of a stained rotary dial 
phone, its duct-taped parts precariously clinging to each other. His 
speech was slurred but his interlocutor - a fan - thought it nothing 
extraordinary.

Sighing ostentatiously, she reluctantly agreed to come to him, volubly 
replacing her receiver in its cradle.

She was not surprised to be met by others he had called, nor was she 
astounded to learn that he had died all by himself, wrapped in two 
dusty khaki blankets, sprawled on a tattered mattress, flung on an iron 
frame that served as both bed and escritoire. It was so like him, to 
die like that.

Removing the rigored cadaver through the narrow doorway was tricky. The 
medics rolled it down the claustrophobic and penumbral staircase (there 
was no lift). His ink-tainted right hand kept striking the peeling 
yarns of greenery that hung, flayed, from crumbling concrete walls.

Panting, they laid him on the bottom stair, an outsized embryo with jet 
black hair and eagled nose. His nostrils quivered.

The radio reported his passing and lengthy obituaries adorned 
tomorrow's press. The critics cloaked with affected objectivity the 
overpowering disdain they held the man, his lifestyle, and his work in. 
They claimed to have been his closest friends and recounted some futile 
anecdotes.

The ceremony held by the municipality in the Writers Hall was open to 
the public.

I said to Nomi:

"Why don't you approach the organisers? Tell them that you have 
composed music to some of his poems and that you are willing to perform 
them."

They were thrilled and Nomi settled on two songs - one that I liked and 
one that was her preference. She had a fortnight to rehearse them 
ceaselessly.

Then Dani phoned me. Years ago, still adolescent, he co-starred with 
the poet in a television show. They spent the night discoursing, which 
rendered them inseparable thereafter, the apprentice and his mentor. 
Because Dani is what he is - he turned into the poet's fan. And because 
he is what he is - he abruptly brought it to a halt. They never met 
again. Dani never thinks of himself in terms of extremism but his 
relationship with the dead poet was such.

And now he enquired:

"You heard? He is dead."

But he did not pause for a response. He went on to recount the by now 
familiar story of how they met, and how he admired the poet's 
ingenuity, inventiveness, aplomb, the love he made to the Hebrew 
language. And how it was all over.

"I am not attending this fallacious wake" - Dani is soft-spoken even 
when his words are not.

That evening, Nomi and I went to the Writers' Hall. A woman with 
anorectic eyes compared our invitation to a clammy list. We slumped 
into some wooden deck chairs, attired steamily in our discomfiture. 
People climbed onto a squeaky stage and then retreated, having recited 
the poet's work in a post-mortem elocution. They argued with venomous 
scholarship some fine points.

The poet's raisiny and birdlike mother was all aflutter in the front 
raw, flanked by the agitated organisers. She flung herself at the 
poet's ex spouse and at her son, protesting creakily and waving a hefty 
purse:

"Away with you!" - she screamed - "You killed my boy!"

The divorcee approached, her black dress rustling, hand soothingly 
extended, but midway changed her mind and climbed the podium.

She promised anodynely to preserve the poet's heritage by issuing a 
definitive edition of his writings, both published and in manuscript. 
Her voice was steady, her gestures assured, her son clung to her dress 
eyeing us and the scenery indifferently. He dismounted as he climbed, 
obediently and unaffectedly.

On cue, Nomi sang two bits, her voice a luscious blond. She looked so 
lonesome onstage, a battered playback cassette-recorder, a wireless 
microphone, her quaking palms. When the last note died I discovered 
that I am not breathing and that I turned her notepad into pulp.

On her odyssey from stage to seat, Nomi glanced coyly at the poet's 
still roiled mother, who hastened to hug and compliment her warmly.

The night was over and the mob dispersed.

The poet's mother stood forlorn, tugging at the impatient sleeves of 
the departing as she demanded: "How shall I get back?" - but she 
wouldn't say whereto. Roundly ignored by the pulsating throngs of 
well-wishers, she watched them comparing impressions, exchanging phone 
numbers, mourning the poet and, through his agency, themselves.

"I knew your son" - I said.

I really did - perhaps not as intimately as a friend, but probably more 
than did most of those present. Once I visited that warehouse of 
weathered books he called his home, sat on his monkish bed, played the 
effaced keys of his battered typewriter.

I offered her a ride and she accepted, sighing with childish relief.

Nomi drove and I listened to the poet's mother. Like him she wept in 
words.

"He used to visit me every week" - with pride. Invited us for a drink 
in her room at the seniors' home. The evening chilled, she observed. 
How about a warm libation ("I have even hot chocolate"). When we 
declined politely, she tempted us with exclusive access to letters the 
poet wrote to her.

We took a rain check and made a heartening spectacle out of noting down 
her address and her phone number.

The night guard at the entrance, besieged by a polished wooden counter 
and facing banks of noiseless television screens, winked at us.

"Thank you for bringing her back. A wonderful woman but lousy kids. No 
one ever visits."

He turned to face the poet's mother, raising his voice unnecessarily:

"And how are you tonight?"

Ignoring him, she eyed us inquisitively:

"You have children? No? What are you waiting for?" - her shrivelled 
finger spiralling - "Make a few children and hurry about it. Believe 
me, nothing in life is more important. Nothing if not..."

The swooshing elevator doors, an amputated sentence, and she was gone.

At home, we lay on our backs, each in its corner of our bed, trying to 
pierce the darkness blindly.

We never mentioned that evening, neither have we returned to visit the 
poet's mother. We came close to doing so, though. One Saturday we 
mutely decided to climb the hill and drop by the seniors' home. 
Instead, we ventured further, to Jaffa, and bought Sambusak pastry, 
filled with boiled eggs and acrid cheese.

Side by side we lived, my Nomi and I.

And then she divorced me and so many things transpired that the poet 
and his mother and this story were all but forgotten.



Redemption

by Sam Vaknin


My grandfather sat on a divan, back stiff and eyes tight-shut, when the 
news arrived. At the age of seventy, his body still preserved the 
womaniser's tensile, proud, virility. He dyed his hair jet black. 
Original Moroccan music, wistful and lusty, the desert's guttural 
refrain, poured forth from a patinated gramophone. The yearning tarred 
his cheeks with bloodied brush, a capillary network that poured into 
his sockets.

Now, facing him distraught, my father was reciting gingerly the 
information about his little sister, confessing abject failure as the 
clan's firstborn. His elder sister died in youth but even had she lived 
she wouldn't have qualified to supervise the brood due to her gender. 
It was my father's role to oversee his younger siblings, especially the 
females, the thus preserve the honour of his kinfolk.

Being a melancholy and guarded man, he blamed them for conspiring 
against him. He envied them instead of loving. He kept strict ledgers 
of help received and given. He felt deprived, begrudging their 
successes. They drifted apart and my father turned into unwelcome 
recluse, visited only by my tyrannical grandfather. On such occasions, 
my father was again a battered, chided, frightened child.

That day, with manifest obsequiousness, he served the patriarch with 
tea and home-made pastry arranged on brightly illustrated tin trays. My 
grandpa muttered balefully, as was his wont, and sank his dentures into 
the steamy dough, not bothering to thank him.

As dusk gave way to night, my father fetched the grouser's embroidered 
slippers and gently placed his venous, chalky feet on a dilapidated 
stool. He wrapped them in a blanket. Thus shoed and well-ensconced, the 
old man fell asleep.

These loving gestures - my father's whole repertoire - were taken by my 
grandpa as his due, a pillar of the hierarchy that let him beat his 
toddler son and send him, in eerie pre-dawn hours, to shoulder bursting 
wineskins. This is the order of the world: one generation serves 
another and elder brothers rule their womenfolk.

"Whore" - my grandpa sneered. His voice subdued, only his face conveyed 
his crimson wrath. My father nodded his assent and sat opposed, sighing 
in weariness and resignation.

"Whose is it, do we know?" - my grandpa probed at last. My father 
snuffed the ornamental music and shrugged uncertainly. My grandpa 
rubbed his reddened eyelids and then slumped.

"We need to find him and arrange a wedding" - he ruled. My father 
winced, propelled by the incisive diction into the grimy alleys of his 
childhood, the wine tide and ebbing in the pelt containers, the origin 
of his recurrent nightmares, nocturnal shrieks, sweaty relief when 
nestled in my mother's arms, his brow soaked, his heart in wild 
percussion.

"Today it's different, Abuya" - my father mumbled, using the Moroccan 
epithet. My grandpa whipped him with a withering glower.

"I will depart tomorrow" - my father whispered - "But I don't wish to 
talk to her."

"Don't do it" - consented grandpa, his eyes still shut, waving a steady 
hand in the general direction of the decimated music - "Just salvage 
our dignity and hers."

The next day, father packed his crumbling cardboard suitcase, the one 
he used when he fled Morocco, a disillusioned adolescent. He neatly 
folded in some underwear and faded-blue construction worker's 
sleeveless garments. On top he placed a rusting razor and other 
necessaries.

I watched him from the porch, he waning, a child size figure, going to 
the Negev, the heartless desert, to restore through a defiled sister 
the family's blemished honour. He stood there, leaning on the shed, 
patiently awaiting the tardy transport. The bus digested him with eager 
exhalation.

He has been away for four days and three nights. The fine dust of 
distant places has settled in his stubble. He wiped his soles on the 
entrance rug, removed soiled clothes and gave them to my mother. He 
slipped into his tunic and his thongs, uttering in barely audible 
relief, then sank into an armchair.

My mother served up scolding tea in dainty cups. He sipped it 
absent-minded, dipping a sesame cracker in the minty liquid. Having 
reposed, he sighed and stretched his limbs. He never said a word about 
the trip.

A few months passed before his sister called. She phoned during the 
day, attempting to avoid my father, who was at work. My mother spoke to 
her, receiver in abraded hand like hot potato.

We were all invited to her forthcoming wedding. She was to marry a 
Northern, elder man of means. He will adopt the child, she added. Still 
enamoured with her elusive lover, she admitted, it wasn't the hideous 
affair we made it out to be. These days and nights (too short) of lust 
and passion in the wasteland have yielded her a daughter, a flesh 
memento of her paramour.

My mother listened stone-faced. "We cannot come" - she said, her voice 
aloof - "my husband won't allow it." But we all wish her happiness in 
newfound matrimony. In the very last second, as she was replacing the 
handset in its cradle, she whispered, maybe to herself: "Take care of 
you and of the little one."

She subsided on the stool, next to the phone, and scrutinised the blank 
wall opposite her. I busily pretended not to notice her tearful 
countenance.

When my father came back from his excruciating work on the scaffolds, 
my mother laid the table. They dined silently, as usual. When he 
finished, she cleared the dishes, placing them in lukewarm water. "Your 
little sister called" - she told him - "She is inviting us to her 
wedding up north. She is marrying a wealthy man rather older than 
herself, so all's well that ends well. At least she won't be destitute."

"None of my concern" - interjected my father gruffly, heavily rising 
from the chair.

The following day he travelled south, to meet my grandpa. He then 
proceeded to see his other brothers and his sisters. That over, he 
returned, called in sick and remained at home for weeks.

When his youngest sibling, my uncle, came to visit, my father embraced 
him warmly. He loved them all but only this Benjamin reciprocated. My 
father pampered him and listened attentively to his seafaring tales, 
echoes of distant places, among the glasses of scented Araq, a powerful 
absinthe. They munched on sour carrots dipped in oil.

At last, my father raised the subject. Retreating to our chambers, we 
left them there to thrash the matter out through the night. Their 
voices drifted, raised and then restrained. My father shrilly argued 
but his brother countered self-convinced. He packed and left in the 
early hours of the morning.

My father entered our room, defeated, and tucked us in unnecessarily. 
He turned off all the lights, a distended, dismal shadow, and surveyed 
us, his beefy shoulder propped against the doorframe.

My mother instructed us severely:

"If daddy's youngest brother calls, don't answer. Nor he neither his 
wayward sister are part of our family. Your father excommunicated them 
forever and cursed their lineage. They have disgraced us. Now they are 
perfect strangers."

I liked my uncle - boyish and outgoing, hair long, and smooth, and 
often brushed and dried, his clothes the latest fashion from abroad. He 
was a seaman. His visits smelled of outlying cities and sinful women 
thin-clad in bustling ports. He carried stacks of foreign bills stashed 
in his socks and bought my mother foreign, costly fragrances (she 
buried them among her lingerie until they all evaporated).

At the bottom of his magic chest lay booklets with titillating tales of 
sizzling sex and awesome drug lords. I waited for his visits with the 
impatience of an inmate. He was the idol of my budding willfulness and 
nascent freedom. I resented our forced estrangement.

And so began my mutiny. Lured by the siren songs of far-flung lands, of 
sexual liberation, and of equality, I travelled to my grandma's home, 
an uninvited guest. My uncle, whose name now we could not pronounce, 
was there. We strolled the windswept promenade of Beer-Sheba, kicking 
some skeletal branches as we talked. He treated me as an adult.

Then it was time to return. My father, aware of my encounter, regarded 
it as treason, another broken link in the crumbling chain of his 
existence. To him, I was a co-conspirator. I shamed him publicly. He 
felt humiliated in his own abode. He didn't say a thing, but not long 
after, he signed me over to the army as a minor. My mother tremblingly 
co-signed and mutely pleaded with my father to recant.

But he would not. Immersed in hurt, he just imploded, blankly staring 
at the television screen. He took to leaping anxiously with every phone 
ring, instructing us in panic to respond. He didn't want to talk to 
anyone, he promised.

When I enlisted, he accompanied me to the draft board. Evading any 
contact, he occupied a tiny, torturous wooden stool. He didn't budge 
for hours and didn't say a word and didn't kiss farewell, departing 
with a mere "goodbye". I watched him from the bus' window as he 
receded, stooped, into a public park. He collapsed onto a bench and 
waved away the pigeons that badgered him for breadcrumbs. Finally, he 
let one near and kicked her with his shoe. They scattered.

I didn't visit, not even on vacations. I found father-substitutes, 
adopted other families as home. At times, I would remember him, a tiny, 
lonely figure, on a garden bench, surrounded by the birds.

One day, my service in the army nearly over, my mother called and said: 
"Your father wants you here."

At once I felt like burdened with premonitory sadness, with the belated 
anguish of this certain moment. She told me that my uncle died in 
shipwreck.

"His cousin was with him to the end. He clung on to a plank all night, 
till dawn. He fought the waves and floated. And then they heard him 
mutter: what's the point and saw him letting go and sinking under. They 
say he drowned tranquil and composed."

I alighted from the belching bus before it reached my parents', 
traversing accustomed pathways, touching childhood trees, pausing in 
front of the boarded cinema house, a fading poster knocking about its 
peeling side. A titian cloud of falling leaves engulfed it all. The sea 
roared at a distance as if from memory.

I knocked, my father opened. We contemplated one another, vaguely 
familiar. Alarming corpulence and evil hoary streaks. Time etched its 
brown ravines in sagging flesh, the skin a flayed protection. He spread 
his arms and hugged me. I cautiously accepted and dryly kissed his 
stubble.

He ushered me inside and sat me by my brothers. I greeted them in 
silence. My father helped my mother serve refreshments, peeled almonds 
and solid confitures. We sulked in mounting discomfort.

Sighing, my father rose and climbed the spiral staircase to his room. 
He soon returned, clad in his best attire, his synagogue and festive 
uniform, the suit he wore in my Bar-Mitzvah.

Like birds after the storm the house was filled with curled rabbis. 
Flaunting their garb, grimly conferring with my father, they eyed the 
table critically.

"There's more!" - my mother hastened - "There's food, after you finish."

"Are these all your children?" - they demanded and my father, blushing, 
soon admitted that my sister wants no part in the impending ceremony. 
They nodded sympathetically. They linked their talliths (prayer shawls) 
into a huppah (wedding canopy) and ordered us to squat beneath it.

They blessed the house, its inhabitants and future monotonously. My 
father's face illuminated, his eyes aglow. He handed each rabbi and 
each cantor a folded envelope from an overflowing pocket in his vest 
and poured them Araq to warm their hoarsely throats. They gulped the 
fiery libations, chanting their invocations as they swallowed.

With marked anticipation they assumed the better seats around the table 
and plunged into my mother's dishes. She waited on them deferentially. 
Burping aloud, the food devoured, they broke into a vigorous recital of 
pious hymns.

Night fell and my father entered the guest room and settled by my bed. 
He drew the covers to my chin and straightened wrinkled corners.

"We blessed the house" - he said - "to fend off a disaster."

I asked him what he was afraid of. He told me that he cursed his 
brother to die young and now that he did, my father was anxious.

"You loved him very much" - I said and he averted his face.

Waves clashed with undulating ripples to deafening effect.

"There will be a storm tonight" - my dad said finally.

"I guess so" - I agreed - "Good night. I am bushed, I need to rise and 
shine early, back to the army."

I turned around to face to the naked wall.



Shalev is Silent

by Sam Vaknin


Shalev's ample back is propped against the laundry dryer and he is 
keeping silent. It jerks, he jolts, eyes downcast, his short-sleeved 
T-shirt defenceless against the arctic ambiance.

"Shalev, say something" - I mutter. He only smiles. It is my daybreak 
plea, repeated each morning since he quietened.

By way of responding, he turns to face the glass eye of the coinless 
Laundromat, his stooping shoulders focused upon the swirling garments. 
He motions to me to lay my wash on a truncated soggy wooden slab.

The laundry room is high ceilinged. Rags decomposing hang flayed on 
oxblood iron juts, stabbing four walls coarsely mortared by the 
inmates. Pipes conjoined with mouldy tape drip onto the twin 
contraptions - the malignantly oversized washer and dryer.

Shalev is average height but way obese. His wild stubble and wire 
glasses accentuate his burliness, the towering machinery, the vaulted 
chamber. "The Cyclops's Cave", I call it and well-read Shalev just 
chuckles. He casts a longing glance at a pile of books and snacks 
awaiting in his "Promised Corner". But he wouldn't say a word.

I occupied one of the twin armchairs in the ironing parlour and set the 
backgammon board to play. Shalev was preceded in this job by a 
transvestite whose nocturnal off-key strains of yearning were still 
evoked. Forced to sequester him away from virile lust - both others' 
and his own - the prison authorities allowed him to import his shoddy 
furniture into the concrete monastery that later became the washroom.

Shalev slept in his predecessor's bed and kept his munchies in his 
metal bureau, coated with peeling sepia paper cuttings. Now, he sank 
into the matching armchair, arranging his limbs gingerly, as though 
preparing to inventory them. He smoothed his feral moustache with two 
stubby stained fingers and studied the board alertly.

He then rose from his seat, swung shut the door but didn't bolt it 
(regulations). To fend off the gloom, I stretched over and turned on 
the milky lights above his bookshelf. His wife got him some of the 
volumes and others he borrowed from the prison's library, my workplace.

Shalev inclined and smothered a round piece with a bulky fingertip. He 
drove it to a screeching halt next to a corner of the patterned board. 
Then, content, he fisted the yellowed dice and hurled them at the 
table. Six-six. His eyes aflame, he basked in this auspicious opening.

I waited with bated breath for an exclamation of his evident exuberance 
- but Shalev just proceeded to conjure his pieces into and out of 
existence in a whirlwind of clattering dice and scraping moves and 
sweaty palms. He suppressed even his customary snickers at my 
clumsiness. Perhaps chortling was too akin to speech.

"Shalev" - I said - "why have you stopped talking? Why don't you laugh 
anymore? Why the silence?"

He flings a pair of agitated dice at me. I groan as I pick them off the 
gooey floor.

"Listen" - I persisted - "I have an idea." An involuntary twitch 
betrayed his interest.

"Why don't you write what you have to say? We will prepare a stack of 
small cards here and you could jot on them to your heart's content."

"What cannot be said in words, can sometimes be expressed in letters."

Shalev froze and for a minute there I thought I lost him. Then he 
nodded his head excitedly. I abandoned him and his victory over me and 
bolted outside, into the greying drizzle. I crossed two lanes muddied 
by steamy kitchen waste and absconded with a pack of printing paper 
from the library. Hiding them under my tattered blemished coat, I 
hasted to the laundry room.

Shalev arranged the pieces in two equidimensional towers of alternating 
black and white. I proudly presented my paper loot. We used a ruler and 
scissors to divide them into squares. And all that protracted time I 
prayed that Shalev will not devolve from verbal to written taciturnity.

Shalev held the ordinary pen I gave him as though he never handled a 
writing implement before. He scrawled his tortured letters 
excruciatingly:

"I want to ask you for a big favour."

The dryer banged spasmodically and ceased.

"I want you to explain to my wife why I am keeping silent."

The hush was broken only by the sounds of his laboured scribbling.

"I have a feeling that no one loves me anymore. She is distancing 
herself and I am losing my daughters. When on vacation, I am a stranger 
in my own home, with no authority or recognition. It feels so helpless. 
I cannot hold on to them. Tonight I dreamt that I am screaming as they 
retreated, eerily oblivious to my pleading, to my words. So I decided 
to keep quiet. Tell her all that for me, will you?"

I nodded and he lifted himself from the crumbling armchair, hugging my 
soiled clothes, and trotting towards the rumbling, cornered appliance.

The following morning, at six o'clock, the warden bawled our names, 
marking those present. Ensconced in dreary blazers, we fended off the 
chill. Shalev, wearing his semipternal T-shirt, leaned on the barrack 
wall. "Stand straight" - the warden barked and cast an evil glance. 
Shalev recoiled dreamily. "Who's missing?" - our sentinel demanded and, 
not waiting for an answer, invaded our windswept accommodation.

"You, come with me" - he motioned to Shalev - "The staff complained 
yesterday. Clothes were amiss. What happened?"

Shalev kept mum.

"He doesn't talk" - somebody volunteered - "He is on a strike." And 
wicked sniggering.

"What is it that I am told?" - the warden shrilled - "You are not 
talking? With this scum" - his outstretched hand enclosed us all, a 
brown effluence - "you can do whatever you want. But with the 
authorities of this facility, you hear, you will respond! Clear?"

Shalev just nodded absentmindedly. This far from innocuous acquiescence 
infuriated our guardian.

"It is not the last you hear of me" - he spat and trotted towards the 
management's stone parapet, splashing jets of mud on our rubber boots. 
Shalev grabbed my arm and navigated me towards the prisoners' public 
phone. Today was his turn to make use of it, his ten minutes with the 
outside world.

A big, uniformed, crowd surrounded the booth. Everyone knew by now 
about Shalev's weird protest. They came here to loot his minutes, to 
scavenge the carrion of his allotted phone call. When they saw me, they 
hummed in disappointment and dispersed, only to perch on the nearby 
benches, just in case.

Torrential rain volleyed the butt-scorched and graffiti-tattooed 
plastic shell with itinerant orange leaves. I held on to the scarred 
receiver and dialled Shalev's home, his family.

His wife picked up. I recalled her deceptive fragility and her two 
well-attired, well-mannered offspring. She always carried baskets with 
her - one with food and one full of reading material. They did not 
bother to inspect their contents at the gate anymore, that's how 
predictable she was.

"Hello, this is Shmuel" - I said and read the note to her.

Silence ensued, chased by defiant sobbing:

"This is not true. We do love him" - whimpers.

"Shalev" - I hesitated, distressed, under the shadows cast by his 
hirsute skull - "Shalev, please, she is crying..."

To the receiver:

"I am giving you Shalev."

Shalev held the handset in his plump hand and listened attentively.

"Are you there?"

He kept mute for many minutes, digging a moat of silence against the 
verbal onslaught of his wife. He listened to his daughters, head 
tilted, eyes moist, lips clenched.

Then, gently, he replaced the mouthpiece in its cradle, stifling his 
children's whining.

There he stood, bent, broken, brow kissing the frosty metal, 
reluctantly driven away by the minacious grumblings of his fellow 
inmates. He mournfully dragged his feet along the silt-spattered road 
to our barracks. Sometimes he stopped and kicked a gravel listlessly, 
watching its trajectory transfixed, until it hit the rustling bush and 
vanished.

"Hey, you!" - it was the warden, materialising with the greyness of an 
impeccable camouflage.

"The chief wants to talk to you about your silence."

Shalev's eyes shifted in the manner of a hunted game. A muscle pulsed 
wildly in his cheek.

"He doesn't speak" - I ventured, head bowed, eyes locked on the grimy 
shoes of our custodian - "I can accompany him. He corresponds with me 
and..."

"You do what you are told to do" - the words awhipping, eyes socketed 
in bloodshot red - "or you will end up just like him, in the solitary!"

Bad winds thrashed Shalev's flimsy summer shirt as he descended towards 
the patched glass door at the entrance to the headquarters.

Back in the barracks, I sat cross-legged on Shalev's bed, eyeing his 
neatly folded blankets, clean smelling, flower-patterned sheets, the 
mound of books under his night lamp.

I got up, tucked my shirttails into my cord-held trousers and crossed 
the square between the barracks and the management. Shalev was seated, 
overflowing, on a tiny stone bench, studying his fingers as he crossed 
and then uncrossed them. He rubbed the sole of one of his boots against 
the other. His lips, tightened pale, contrasted morbidly with the 
inkiness of his beard and whiskers.

"Go away" - ordered the warden offhandedly.

"Shalev" - I said but he did not react - "I have an offer to make. Give 
me your silence. I want to buy it from you. Let me be the one to go to 
the chief and then refuse to talk to him. You tell him that everything 
is fine, that it was all one big misunderstanding, that you had a fight 
with your wife, with your family. Apologise profusely. After we exit, I 
will give you back your silence, I swear to you."

Shalev exerted himself and raised his head, watching me intently. But 
then his chin drooped and I chastised myself: "you lost him, you lost 
him" and I wanted to beat myself unconscious.

The warden shook his head in mute disdain.

The silence was broken by the smoke-drenched curses of prisoners and 
staff, as they crossed the link chained paths. A woman staffer exited, 
banging a wooden frame behind her portly figure. She scrutinised the 
warden questioningly, a sooty cigarette hanging from the corner of a 
lipstick smear:

"This is Shalev?"

"That's me" - said Shalev - "I am ready now. I will talk to you."



Pet Snail

by Sam Vaknin


Nomi and I had a snail. We placed it in any empty ice-cream packing, on 
a bed of lettuce. We took turns spraying it with water drops. Morning 
come, Nomi would emerge from our bed, her face dishevelled, and 
sleepwalk to enquire how the snail was doing. She rejoiced with every 
black-rimmed bite, clapping her hands and drawing me to witness the 
tiny miracle. She replaced the perforated leaf with a green and dewy 
one about once a week.

At first, her minuscule charge concealed itself among the decaying 
greenery. Nomi spent hours, patiently awaiting a revelation. Crowned 
with a set of dark, huge earphones that I bought her, she pounded her 
keyboard, keeping a lovat eye on the snail's abode.

When it finally emerged one day, the music stopped and she exclaimed 
elatedly.

Later that year, I was sentenced to a prison term. On the way home, 
courtroom echoes reverberated in the hushed interior of the car. Nomi 
said: "Let's go somewhere before..." And I responded: "Let us go to 
Eilat, to our hotel."

"A pity the jazz festival is over" - she frowned. "A pity" - I agreed.

At home, an air of doom, we packed a hasty suitcase and booked the 
flight.

A thing I said reminded Nomi of the snail. She held its lair in both 
her hands and placed it accusingly on the glass top table in the living 
room.

"What shall we do with it?"

"Let's leave it enough water and food for a whole week" - I suggested - 
"His needs are few, he is so teeny, so I don't think there'll be a 
problem."

Nomi secured an errant golden curl behind her ear: "You sure?" I was 
and so we entombed him beneath some salad leaves and showered him with 
water and Nomi giggled: "To him it's rain." Then she grew serious.

It was an early morning. Nomi felt my swollen eyelids, pausing her 
finger on the protruding veins. On the way to the elevator, she 
stopped, unloaded a laden rucksack and hurried to the entrance door, 
wildly rummaging for the keys in her multicoloured purse. She returned 
to me, flushing and panting and uttered: "It is fine!" "It climbed 
through some lettuce sprouts" - she reported. Her morning voice was 
moist and hoarse, Edith Piaf-like. I cast a virile hand over her 
shoulder and guided her outside.

We spent four days in Eilat. We slept a lot and swam the pools, among 
the waterfalls and artificial rocks. My sister happened to be staying 
there with her newly-minted family. But it was already chilly and 
autumnal and, four nights later, we decided to return. My imminent 
incarceration loomed and Nomi was atypically broody. I tried to comfort 
her, thinking what a consummate liar I have become.

When we reached home, Nomi dumped her suitcase, precariously balanced 
on its two hind wheels. I heard the metallic clinking of unfurled bolts 
and she was gone. A minute or two later: "I can't find it!" and then 
"It is not here, Sam!"

We cautiously separated one gnawed leaf from another. We studied the 
inside of the box and its immediate neighbourhood, the marble counter. 
The snail was nowhere to be found.

Nomi was restless for the remainder of that day. Down hill, at a 
crossroad, concealed behind a gas station, stood an intimate French 
restaurant. It was our crisis eatery, a refuge of self-administered 
great wines and nouvelle cuisine. But today its charms failed. Nomi was 
crestfallen throughout dinner. She sat and gestured and chewed the food 
mechanically.

Still, ever so practical, faced with numerous arrangements before my 
disappearance, she recovered. But she refused to discard the now 
orphaned container and she made sure the leaves were always fresh and 
glistening. She thought that I didn't notice how she inspected the box, 
hoping to find her snail in it, revenant.

"It must be bigger now" - she sighed and then - "Today I plan to clean 
the entire house. It is your last weekend here."

On cue, I went to the public library and spent a good few hours reading 
Kafka's "Metamorphosis", a story about a respectable clerk turned 
loathsome insect in his sleep.

We used to clean the house together, Nomi and I. She would sluice the 
floor and I would dust, scrub the bathrooms and the kitchen. It was one 
of the last things we did together before we stopped.

The afternoon was muggy and I walked home, immersed in thought. I found 
Nomi slouched on an armchair, surrounded by heaps of furniture and 
bundled carpets. Her face wore tearful makeup, her eyes were distant, 
and her hair bedraggled. I upturned a chair and faced her, silently.

She pointed speechlessly at the general direction of the kitchen and 
then subsided.

"I stepped on it, I squashed it" - and added frantically - "I didn't 
mean to! It is still so small and I don't know how it made it to that 
corner!"

"It must have climbed the refrigerator and descended to the floor" - I 
ventured. She signalled me to keep away.

"I had to clean the house because of you, because you are going" - in 
an accusatory tone.

I didn't know how to respond, so I tiptoed to the kitchen and 
contemplated the mess of snail and concha on the floor.

"Shall I wipe it off?" - I enquired meekly.

"Now, I don't even have a snail" - tears blended with startling 
exhalations - "You will be gone, too! I thought we could fight the 
world, you and I, that we are invincible. But it is not like that at 
all! We can't even look after one snail together!"

"Are you mad at me?" - I asked and she snorted, part pain and part 
contempt. She scooped the shattered snail with a paper towel and dumped 
both in the overflowing trash bin. She froze like that awhile and then, 
as if reaching a decision, she deposited the box, replete with lettuce 
leaves, in the garbage can.

"I don't think I am going to need it. I am never going to have another 
snail" - she paused - "At least not with you."



Write Me a Letter

by Sam Vaknin


He looks at me with his single surviving eye and pleads: "Write me a 
letter."

I smile and remove the women's magazine from his hands. Under "Singles 
Ads" it says:

"165/33, feminine, rebellious, striking, looking for a man for serious 
relationship, Postal Box Office."

"Write me a letter" - he repeats and his lonely eye gleams.

"Soon, I am going to get my second, more beautiful one" - he adds 
apologetically.

We are in a residential caravan in a prison camp, whiling the time 
away. I am waiting for my inevitable, unnerving, early release and he 
is looking forward to that feminine, rebellious who will discern in his 
solitary eye that which he craves to witness in both hers.

I acquiesce and write to her, the mysterious stranger. My writing is 
calligraphic and Maurice convinces me that it, alone, should make the 
prospect meet him.

And when she does, it will all be different. He will demonstrate to her 
that there's a soul concealed in his awkward flesh and how his lonesome 
eye grasps colours and sun and light and shadows. Lots of shadows.

At night, he wakes, perspiring, stifling whimpering, panicky sounds, 
like beavers struggling to emerge, consuming his insides, driving the 
torture wheel called Maurice. He rises from his nightmare and shuffles 
to the slimy toilettes on the remainder of his leg. When he is back, 
face rinsed, he looks around, alarmed, climbs laboriously into the 
upper bunk, and tries to sleep.

But the sirens of that particular patrol car haunt him with red-blue 
flashes in the desiccated socket of his long-gone eye. He can't erase 
the gunfire sounds, the streaking bullets that carved his flesh with 
long, brown scars. The raining glass that gouged his eye erupts anew.

"I lost my eye in the showers" - he nags the dwindling numbers of his 
unwilling interlocutors. They heard it all before - the tale of Maurice 
and his magnificent porcelain ball that cost him 5000 New Israeli 
shekels.

"I was scared, so I pretended to be violent, so they became afraid of 
me. Everyone knew that I am not to be messed with!"

Maurice recounts to me his prime: replete with eye, a serviceable leg, 
and human form.

Now he frequents only hookers. He calls them "escort girls". They have 
been escorting him a long time now and he is a heaving cyclopaedia of 
their addresses, official prices, negotiating tactics, and final 
offers. "Half an hour" - he lectures me - "and you can come but once. 
So you better masturbate before. But you can still strike a bargain 
with them even if it happens."

He finds them pretty. As far as he is concerned, they are all 
attractive and stunning and he keeps wondering aloud why they ended up 
in bed with him. He relishes his good fortune and frequents their 
cubicles and sweaty cots. "In Haifa, some of them do it for 50 
shekels!" - he gasps incredulously.

Maurice does not neglect his physical exercises.

"Am I triangular?" - he demands to know, swerving on his healthy limb, 
a dented nakedness, we are in the showers, avoiding effluence.

I study him closely. He has a well-developed torso, like a miniature 
Schwarzenegger. He is trilateral both front and back. His shoulders a 
triangle, imposed on squarish chest and powerful hands. I tell him so. 
But Maurice seeks second and third opinions. He circles the muddy 
pathways of the camp for hours, only a towel to his loins, and pesters 
every passerby. They all confirm my observations.

"Your stomach is repulsive" - he tells me earnestly - "Stop eating so 
much. Work out!"

I give him the letter I composed and he ponders it gravely. Then he 
folds it carefully and withdraws an envelope from his peeling iron 
dresser.

"Write me the address, too" - he says - "It must be the same hand."

I do so obediently. He inserts the letter in the envelope and licks it. 
Thus opaque and sealed, he places it gingerly in a drawer.

It joins four identical epistles.

"Maurice, when will you send these letters?" - I demand.

"Soon" - he laughs - "I don't have stamps. Every time I go on detail I 
forget to buy them. Tomorrow I will remember. Tomorrow I will dispatch 
them and you will write me more. One of them will surely answer. 
Something will come out of it."

I suggest to him to address some his missives to the beauties on the TV 
soaps. He sign up to my charade enthusiastically and insists: "Write, 
write me a letter to them" - he doubles up in laughter.

Maurice carries in a mouldy plastic bag a few fading and creased 
photographs of himself before. He is surrounded with minimally-attired 
knockout adolescent girls. These may be the "escorts". He confesses to 
wedding three of them and to fathering a brood.

I notice a sad-eyed kid, sprawled on a sofa, gaping at the camera. It's 
unmistakable: a tiny Maurice. You also can't misjudge the expression in 
Maurice's single, dewy, eyeball.

But Maurice the Cyclops never cries. His vising headaches merely reduce 
him to reclining on his rusty metal bed, turning his back to us, 
pretending to be slumbering. His shoulders quaver, yet we never dare 
approach him.

"All my women betrayed me" - he tells me every morning, awakened by the 
screaming wardens. I wonder what he dreams of that makes him reiterate 
so often.

"The minute I entered the pen, they strayed with another. That's why I 
divorced them, all three" - he elaborates.

Maurice places little trust in women. They hurt him so. "But they are 
so beautiful!" - he utters wistfully, as he measures a new pair of 
jeans he bought in his last vacation. They are too loose. I tell him. 
He spends the remainder of the evening refitting them and adding holes 
and buckles to his belts.

"How is it now?" - he anxiously enquires of no one in particular.

"Much better, Maurice" - I reassure him.

At night, when no one sees, he changes the soggy patch covering his 
missing eye. It's nothing but a gauze and two adhesive bandages, 
plastered directly over the shrivelled, murky hole that's left of the 
glistening, jocular eye in Maurice's photos.

He is ashamed and doesn't want to nauseate us. Maurice has a developed 
aesthetic sense. He still remembers beauty and wants it in his life. 
But all he has right now is a dehydrated wrinkle above a hollow abyss 
in his skull. It's where he used to gaze at beauty from. But now it's 
dark. Only the muscles that surround it still react to absence. He 
mocks himself self-deprecatingly. There's nothing else to do without an 
eye, a leg, one's looks.

Maurice is suing the police. In his mind he has won and is already 
divvying up the reparations. He is going to buy a flat, a car, and then 
a girl. She is bound to adore him and they will live in happiness and 
wealth and many children and Maurice will grow with them. "This is my 
second childhood" - he hums along with a hit song on the radio. In such 
times, Maurice is no longer in jail but in the hereafter, in a world of 
warm and loving families.

"I spent fourteen years inside" - he confides - "My father says I am 
lucky to have been shot. Maybe this way I will settle down. Maybe I 
will have enough money not to work and only raise my children."

The offspring he has already had are held back by his women. The same 
females who do not visit him and force him to stagger on the steep 
hills of Haifa just to see his kids for an instant and give them gifts. 
Maurice saves all his meager pay and uses it to buy his children 
presents and himself more clothes.

"Some girls make advances in the cab on the way back to jail" - he 
brags. "I tell them that I am doing time for burglaries and this turns 
them on. When I returned from my last vacation I met one girl, she fell 
for me, she asked me to sit next to her, she twisted her face like 
this" - Maurice demonstrates a yielding, kiss-ready, feminine mouth.

He can't believe his luck: "She is so beautiful" - he moans longingly. 
He thinks this can't be true, something must be wrong with the girl, 
that this may be a trap. She must be married - he freaks. "We are so 
miserable" - he sighs - "The minute we cross the gate, they go looking 
for someone else."

Maurice yearns for the olden days, ten years ago, when a woman was a 
woman and he was a proper man with eyes to look dames over and legs to 
chase them. Maurice isn't good at expressing pain. He prefers to 
measure shirts or to ask me to write him letters.

That evening, when I come back from the detail, I find Maurice parked 
on his bunk, his ailing leg impossibly extended, weighed down by a 
bulky orthopaedic shoe. He avoids me, dejected. And then:

"Vaknin" - he calls - "Come here, Vaknin."

I go and sit by him. At his request, I tie his laces: one cross, one 
over, and a butterfly. He shuts his eyes while people fuss around him. 
And now, the humiliation and the embarrassment - both mine and his. The 
intimate togetherness, a man, shoelaces, man, at dusk, a drafty room, 
in prison. The closest two can get - sometimes more than carnal. A kind 
of love.

"Vaknin, thank you" - he says, inspecting my endeavours critically - 
"Vaknin, what shall I do if someone answers my letters? What will 
happen then? I am afraid to post them, not to get a response. I only 
have a socket. My beautiful eye hasn't arrived yet. I am crippled, 
crippled..."

Maurice breaks into a sob and I move closer and hug him and nestle him 
and wait for him to calm down.

But he does not. He is devoured by weeping. He crumbles in my arms, the 
tears engulfing both his eyes, ungluing the adhesive bandages and 
loosening the gauze. It falls. His triangular rib cage trembles, his 
inert leg twitches, and his absent eye, and all his offspring that are 
strewn across the city weep through him and the long years and his 
father, who is happy he was shot and the wall, the only witness to the 
anguished nights of Maurice.

And I weep with him. I, too, weep with him. Together.



The Suffering of Being Kafka



Poetry

Of Healing and Abuse



Our Love Alivid

by Sam Vaknin

Our bloated love alivid
at the insolence of time
protests by falling in,
involuntarily committed.
You are the sadness
in my sepia nights.
I am in yours.
We correspond across
our dead togetherness.


Moi Aussi

by Sam Vaknin

I need to know you
even as I never know my self
that phantom ache
of amputated innocence.
You,
the stirrings of a curtain, dust
settling on sepia cukoo clocks
covers obscuring.
Perhaps one day you will become
a benign sentence
an agency
through which to be.


Cutting to Existence

by Sam Vaknin


My little brother cuts himself into existence.
With razor tongue I try to shave his pain,
he wouldn't listen.
His ears are woolen screams, the wrath
of heartbeats breaking to the surface.
His own Red Art.
When he cups his bleeding hands
the sea of our childhood
wells in my eyes
wells in his veins
like common salt.


A Hundred Children

by Sam Vaknin


Tell me about your sunshine
and the sounds of coffee
and of barefeet pounding the earthen floor
the creaking trees
and the skinned memory of hugs
you gave
and you received.
Sit down, yes, here,
the intermittent sobbing
of the shades
slit by your golden face.
Now listen to the hundred children
that are your womb.
I am among them.


The Old Gods Wander

by Sam Vaknin


Your promised lands
with reticence.
Grey, forced benevolence.
They shrug their crumpled robes,
extend in veinous hand
black cornucopia.
You're fighting back, it's evident,
bony protrusions, a thumping chest,
the clamming up of sweaty pearls.
They aim at your Olympian head.
There, in the meadows of your mind,
grazing on dewy hurt,
they defecate a premonition
of impending doom.


In the Concentration Camp Called Home

by Sam Vaknin


In the concentration camp called Home,
we report in striped pyjamas
to the barefeet commandant,
Our Mother orchestrating
our daily holocaust.
Burrowing her finger-
-nails through my palms,
a scream frozen between us,
a stalactite of terror
in the green caves of her eyes
there, sentenced to forced labour:
to mine her veins of hatred
to shovel her contempt
to pile scorn upon scorn
beating(s) a path.
At noon, Our Mother
leads us to the chambers
naked, ripples of flesh
she turns on the gas
and watches our hunger
as her food devours us.


The Miracle of the Kisses

by Sam Vaknin


That night, the cock denied him thrice.
His mother and the whore downloaded him,
nails etched into his palms,
his thorny forehead glistening,
his body speared.
He wanted to revive unto their moisture.
But the nauseating scents of vinegar
and Roman legionnaires,
the dampness of the cave,
and then that final stone...
His brain wide open,
supper digested
that was to have been his last.
He missed so his disciples,
the miracle of their kisses.
He was determined not to decompose.


Fearful Love

by Sam Vaknin


Cherubim turn swords,
cast flaming fig leaves
on a cursed ground.
With bruised heels
we labour
among the bitten,
festering fruits of our ignorance,
making thorns and thistles
of our crowns.
In the sweat of our faces,
a pheromonic resonance.
In our dusty hearts,
skinclad, in cleavage,
we hope to live forever,
flesh closed upon itself,
conceiving sorrow.
Our trees are pleasant to the sight
of gold and onyxstone
and every beast and fowl has its name
except for our nakedness.
In a garden of talking serpents,
cool days and lying Gods,
I betray you to the voice
and hide.
Return


My Putrid Lover

by Sam Vaknin


My lover dreams
of acrid smells
and putrid tangs
I lick
(dishevelled hair adorns)
her feet
I scale
the shrink-warped body.
I vomit semen
that her lips ingest.
And youth defies her.


When You Wake the Morning

by Sam Vaknin


When you wake the morning
red headed children shimmer in your eyes.
The veinous map
of sun drenched eyelids
flutters
throbbing topography.
Your muscles ripple.
Scared animals burrow
under your dewey skin.
Frozen light sculptures
where wrinkles dwell.
Embroidered shades,
in thick-maned tapestry.
Your lips depart in scarlet,
flesh to withering flesh,
and breath in curved tranquility
escapes the flaring nostrils.
Your warmth invades my sweat,
your lips leave skin regards
on my humidity.
Eyelashes clash.


Narcissism

by Sam Vaknin


The Toxic
waste of bottled anger
venomised.
Life belly up.
The reeds.
The wind is hissing
death
downstream,
a river holds
its vapour breath
and leaves black lips
of tar and fish
a bloated shore.


Prague at Dusk

by Sam Vaknin


Prague lays over its inhabitants in shades of grey.
Oppressively close to the surface, some of us duck, others
simply walk carefully, our shoulders stooped, trying to
avoid the monochrome rainbow at the end of the hesitant
rain. Prague rains itself on us, impaled on one hundreds
towers, on a thousand immolated golden domes. We
pretend not to see it bleeding to the river. We just cross
each other in ornate street corners, from behind
exquisite palaces. We don't shake heads politely anymore.
We are not sure whether they will stay connected if we do.

It is in such times that I remember an especially sad song,
Arabic sounds interlaced with Jewish wailing. Wall after
wall, turret after turret, I re-visit my homeland. It is
there, in that city, which is not Arab, nor Jewish, not
entirely modern, nor decidedly antique that I met her.

And the pain was strong.


In Moist Propinquity

by Sam Vaknin


Hemmed in our bed,
in moist propinquity,
'tis night and starry
and the neighbourhood inebriated,
in the vomitary of our street.
A woman,
my stone-faced lover,
a woman and her smells.
The yellow haze of melancholy lampposts.
Your hair consumes you.


Prowling

by Sam Vaknin


The little things we do together
to give up life.
The percolating coffee,
your aromatic breath,
the dream that glues
your eyelids to my cheek.
We both relent relentlessly.
Your hair flows to its end,
a natural cascade,
a velvet avalanche
buries my hands.
In motion paralysed,
we prowl each other's
hunting grounds.
Day breaks, our backs
turned to the light
in dark refusal.


Getting Old

by Sam Vaknin


The sageing flesh,
a wrinkled vicedom.
The veined reverberation
of a life consumed.
On corneas imprinted
with a thousand dreams,
now stage penumbral plays
directed by a sight receding
and a brain enraged.
To fall, as curtains call,
to bow the last,
rendered a sepia image
in a camera obscured,
a line of credits,
fully exhausted,
fully endured.


Sally Ann

by Sam Vaknin


I wrote, Sally Ann, I wrote:

Shot from the cannon of abuse
as unwise missiles do.

Course set.

Explosive clouds that mark
your video destination.

Experts interpret,
pricking with laser markers,
inflated dialects
of doom.

Hitting the target, you
splinter, a spectacle
of fire and of smoke.

The molten ashes,
the cold metallic remnants,
the core...

A peace accord
between you and your self.


Selfdream

by Sam Vaknin


At times, I dream myself besieged.
I rebel with the cunning of the weak.
I walk the shortcuts.
Tormentors clad
in blood-soaked black,
salute as I manipulate them
into realising their abyss.
Some weep their sockets hollow,
or waive their thorns.
Much pain negotiated.
A trading of the wounds.
My chains carve metal
and I am branded.


Snowflake Haiku

by Sam Vaknin


Where I begin
your end
snowflake haikus
melt into
crystalline awareness.

I guard
your quivered sleep.
Your skin beats moisture.
The beckoning jugular
that is your mind.

My pointing teeth.

A universe
of frozen sharp relief,
the icy darts your voice
in my inebriated veins
in yours.


Twinkle Star

by Sam Vaknin


Twinkle star
of barren scape
and ashen craters.
Seething Ammonia winds.
The fine dust
of life forgone
on surface tensioned.
Beneath its crust
trapped oceans surge
in icy recollection.
It hurls its core
again the dimming sun's
depleted inattention.


Synthetic Joy

by Sam Vaknin


Synthetic joy of wedding halls,
caked bride and groom,
a spewing orchestra,
metallic rings.
Exchanging aqueous looks,
thickset in exudate,
the relatives.
Mother exuding age,
a father pillaged by defeat,
a clutch of wombless matrons.
The light is ashen,
the food partitioned.
Soon, scene of soiled tables.
Soon, the relieved goodbyes.
Soon, the breathless breeding and the crumpled sheets.
The neon lights extinguished by the dawn.


Tableaux (van Gogh)

by Sam Vaknin


Listening to a scarlet sink, detached
an ear, still glistening wax,
in bloody conch.
The gaping flesh.
Wild scattered eyes
fiercing the mirror.
Light ricochets from trembling blade
(it's gaslight evening and the breeze...)
Behind his stooping shoulders,
a painted room ablaze
the dripping composition of his blood.
The winding crowd
inflates the curtains inwards,
sails of a flying Dutchman.



THE AUTHOR

Shmuel (Sam) Vaknin

Curriculum Vitae


Born in 1961 in Qiryat-Yam, Israel.
Served in the Israeli Defence Force (1979-1982) in training and 
education units.

Education
Graduated a few semesters in the Technion - Israel Institute of
Technology, Haifa.  Ph.D. in Philosophy (major: Philosophy of Physics)
- Pacific Western University, California, USA.  My doctoral thesis and
other books are available through the Library of Congress.  Graduate
of numerous courses in Finance Theory and International Trading.

Certified E-Commerce Concepts Analyst.
Certified in Psychological Counselling Techniques by Brainbench.
Full proficiency in Hebrew and in English.

Business Experience
1980 to 1983
Founder and co-owner of a chain of computerised information kiosks in 
Tel Aviv, Israel.

1982 to 1985
Senior positions with the Nessim D. Gaon Group of Companies in Geneva, 
Paris and New York (NOGA and APROFIM SA):
- Chief Analyst of Edible Commodities in the Group's Headquarters in 
Switzerland
- Manager of the Research and Analysis Division
- Manager of the Data Processing Division
- Project Manager of the Nigerian Computerised Census
- Vice President in charge of RND and Advanced Technologies
- Vice President in charge of Sovereign Debt Financing

1985 to 1986
Represented Canadian Venture Capital Funds in Israel.

1986 to 1987
General Manager of IPE Ltd. in London. The firm financed international 
multi-lateral countertrade and leasing transactions.

1988 to 1990
Co-founder and Director of "Mikbats-Tesuah", a portfolio management
firm based in Tel Aviv.  Activities included large-scale portfolio
management, underwriting, forex trading and general financial advisory
services.

1990 to Present
Freelance consultant to many of Israel's Blue-Chip firms, mainly on
issues related to the capital markets in Israel, Canada, the UK and
the USA.  Consultant to foreign RND ventures and to Governments on
macro-economic matters.  President of the Israel chapter of the
Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA) and (briefly) Israel
representative of the "Washington Times".

1993 to 1994
Co-owner and Director of many business enterprises:
- The Omega and Energy Air-Conditioning Concern
- AVP Financial Consultants
- Handiman Legal Services - Total annual turnover of the group: 10 
million USD.
Co-owner, Director and Finance Manager of COSTI Ltd. - Israel's largest 
computerised information vendor and developer. Raised funds through a 
series of private placements locally, in the USA, Canada and London.

1993 to 1996
Publisher and Editor of a Capital Markets Newsletter distributed by
subscription only to dozens of subscribers countrywide.  In a legal
precedent in 1995 - studied in business schools and law faculties
across Israel - was tried for his role in an attempted take-over of
Israel's Agriculture Bank.  Was interned in the State School of Prison
Wardens.  Managed the Central School Library, wrote, published and
lectured on various occasions.  Managed the Internet and International
News Department of an Israeli mass media group, "Ha-Tikshoret and
Namer".  Assistant in the Law Faculty in Tel Aviv University (to
Prof. S.G.  Shoham).

1996 to 1999
Financial consultant to leading businesses in Macedonia, Russia and
the Czech Republic. Collaborated with the Agency of Transformation of
Business with Social Capital.  Economic commentator in "Nova
Makedonija", "Dnevnik", "Makedonija Denes", "Izvestia", "Argumenti i
Fakti", "The Middle East Times", "The New Presence", "Central Europe
Review", and other periodicals, and in the economic programs on
various channels of Macedonian Television.  Chief Lecturer in courses
organised by the Agency of Transformation, by the Macedonian Stock
Exchange, and by the Ministry of Trade.

1999 to 2002
Economic Advisor to the Government of the Republic of Macedonia and to 
the Ministry of Finance.

2001 to 2003
Senior Business Correspondent for United Press International (UPI).
Web and Journalistic Activities:
Author of extensive Web sites in:
- Psychology ("Malignant Self Love") - An Open Directory Cool Site,
- Philosophy ("Philosophical Musings"),
- Economics and Geopolitics ("World in Conflict and Transition").
Owner of the Narcissistic Abuse Announcement and Study List and the 
Narcissism Revisited mailing list (more than 4900 members).
Owner of the Economies in Conflict and Transition Study List and the 
Link and Factoid Study List.
Editor of mental health disorders and Central and Eastern Europe 
categories in various Web directories (Open Directory, Search Europe, 
Mentalhelp.net).
Editor of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the Verbal and 
Emotional Abuse, and the Spousal (Domestic) Abuse and Violence topics 
on Suite 101 and Bellaonline.
Columnist and commentator in "The New Presence", United Press 
International (UPI), InternetContent, eBookWeb, PopMatters, and 
"Central Europe Review".
Publications and Awards
"Managing Investment Portfolios in States of Uncertainty", Limon 
Publishers, Tel Aviv, 1988
"The Gambling Industry", Limon Publishers, Tel Aviv, 1990
"Requesting My Loved One - Short Stories", Yedioth Aharonot, Tel Aviv, 

1997
"The Suffering of Being Kafka", electronic book of Hebrew and English 
Short Fiction, Prague, 1998-2004
"The Macedonian Economy at a Crossroads - On the Way to a Healthier 
Economy", (with Nikola Gruevski), Skopje, 1998
"The Exporters' Pocketbook", Ministry of Trade, Republic of Macedonia, 
Skopje, 1999
"Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited", Narcissus Publications, 
Prague and Skopje, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004
The Narcissism Series, e-books regarding relationships with abusive 
narcissists, Skopje, 1999-2004
"After the Rain - How the West Lost the East", Narcissus Publications 
in association with Central Europe Review / CEENMI, Prague and Skopje, 

2000
Winner of numerous awards, among them the Israeli Education Ministry 
Prize (Literature) - 1997, The Rotary Club Award for Social Studies - 
1976, and the Bilateral Relations Studies Award of the American Embassy 
in Israel - 1978.
Hundreds of professional articles in all fields of finances and the 
economy, and numerous articles dealing with geopolitical and political 
economic issues published in both print and Web periodicals in many 
countries.
Many appearances in the electronic media on subjects in philosophy and 
the sciences and concerning economic matters.


Contact Details:
palma@unet.com.mk
vaknin@link.com.mk

My Web Sites:
Economy / Politics:
http://ceeandbalkan.tripod.com/
Psychology:
http://samvak.tripod.com/index.html
Philosophy:
http://philosophos.tripod.com/
Poetry:
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html



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