‘HEREIN LIVES THE MAJORITY’S MINORITY’
Boris K. was mildly astonished and asked of the meaning behind the street art, when he suddenly spotted another oddity. People were so short that their garb was dragging along the moldy tiles.
‘Oh, why you are… Downthesewerians!’ Boris concluded.
an excerpt from a story “Boris K and the Majority’s Minority”
https://belegbg.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/leila-samarrai-votka/
In his tiny two-by-two hole in the wall, Boris K. sat with a dignified expression on his face and his legs out in a straddle. He wore two left slippers of diverse colour. As he casually turned to peer in the cracked mirror, he was greatly displeased by the sight of his slicked-back gray hair. He attempted to part it à la Sieg Heil, but could not really pull it off because – he wore a flower in his hair, you see.
At springtime, as the locks of his raven hair started blooming, he left all the women breathless (left-wing ones in particular, as they were especially partial to flowers).
“There is a certain symbolism to them,” they claimed.
Boris K. was a seasoned communist, a ruin left behind by the transition, a redundant loser. Like many others, he looked back on the times when he subscribed to the Labourer newspaper with nostalgia. It used to be a matter of prestige.
Due to his former high-ranking positions as the coffee brewer and sentry for the Trade Union sessions, he retained the habit of sitting, sleeping and eating dressed in a gray business suit. On that cold evening he was waiting for the arrival of his landlady while reading “The Trial”. Remembering the times past and the chanting of the famous “Comrade Fidel, if you so said/we’d go live in a car shed,” Boris K. mused how, everything said and done, he was actually still living according to his beliefs. The very thought was heartwarming. Boris’ “car shed” belonged to none other than the very harpy, the very shrew who announced her intent to arrive at 6 AM on the dot. At that time, with the first rays of sun, she was to materialize in the flat. Boris felt hungry and mildly nauseous. Maybe it was the fear of the landlady, or perhaps an omen of the apocalypse. He felt confused. By the powers of the left wing, Boris K. was no coward!
He approached the old refrigerator, opened the handless door, and saw a drunken lady squeezed into a small glass cage. It was a bottle of vodka, the Russian standard with 40 percent of alcohol. The poster on the wall offered him support and encouragement, or at least so it appeared to Boris K. It seemed to be saying “Bottoms up, Boris! Long live the counterrevolution!”
“Alas… if only I could squeeze myself inside just like you,” Boris thought wistfully. He envisioned his landlady, the morning sun illuminating her like a halo, menacingly brandishing the electricity bill. He huddled against the wall, crying like a baby, his cheek resting against a poster. A thought pierced his aching head, which throbbed as if clenched within a hoop. “But I don’t drink.”
“Now or never,” he spoke out loud. After the first sip, it occurred to him that he should attempt to seduce his aging landlady. He was determined to fight to the bitter end.
“This is how Alexander the Great charged against the Persians with his sword!” he thought, detaching his tear-stained cheek from the poster. “Is the casino Alexander still open?” he asked the wall hopefully, his face beaming.
Feverishly, he contemplated the way to get out of debts. Even without a penny to his name, Boris K. decided to try his luck at the adjacent casino. He took a big gulp of vodka and stumbled. Toppling the chair, he knocked down the suit and the grey socks and grabbed for the closet. He let the bottle drop out of his hand after the second swig. Somewhere in the pile of jumbled clothing Boris spotted a formal suit à la Vienna. He looked at it from all sides. He looked both ways furtively, as if he were not alone in the room, so surprised he was at the appearance of a beautiful, shining suit in such a gloomy environment. He stroked the buttons gently with his fingertips. It was exactly what he needed. Boris K. looked up at the ceiling and muttered “Thanks!”
Delighted, he cast another glance toward the closet and noticed the secret barrier dividing it into two parts. He grabbed the handle and shook it tentatively, but it appeared to be locked. Boris K. stepped back and stood in the middle of the room. The bottle of vodka back in his hand, he raged at the locked compartment.
“You’re hiding some great treasure, I know it!” “
He heard something rattle in one of the suit pockets. His hands shook as he rifled through the pockets, but all he found there was some brass buttons.
“Pure gold,” he soothed himself.
Donning the suit, he decided to use the buttons as gambling tokens. Thrilled with his incredible discovery, Boris K. danced a few bars of the Viennese waltz in front of the cracked mirror, arranging his hair. Out of breath, he fell onto the sofa. He was transported back to the harsh reality by the picture of Fidel Castro winking – or so it seemed to Boris K – straight at him.
“Too much to drink,” Boris concluded. Pulling himself together he threw the cheap buttons into the corner of the room, took one glance at the electricity bill and burst into tears.
The old lady entered just as she promised – illuminated by the first rays of sun. On her dress, tailored back in the forties, she wore an embroidered swastika.
“The Brazilian tarantula. Such an elegant little animal,” she explained to the curious butcher’s wife in passing. She wore lace gloves, dirty fingernails showing through. Smoothing down her oily hair, she swiped a dainty finger over one of her eyebrows, tattooed according to the latest fashion. Following the unfortunately drawn arch, she cast an Ilse-Koch-like look to Boris K. A cynical smile spilled across her elderly, clenched lips.
“Cash on the table,” she pulled out a stopwatch from her undershirt, “in 60… 59… 58…” As she counted down, it appeared, the last seconds of Boris K’s short life, the age spots on her cheeks broke through the layers of golden foundation and bright lipstick on her cheekbones.
“Do sit down, old Fräulein,” stammered Boris K, pointing to the sofa as full of holes as a Swiss cheese and stinking of cigarettes. The old woman threw him a contemptuous look. Boris K. realized his mistake. “Meine Frau,.. I… I… Frau, bitte,” he stammered, hypnotized by the embroidered swastika flanked by a flashy heart-shaped medallion. Finally, he murmured “Just let me run to the casino. I forgot my wallet next to the roulette here.”
“The casino, you say?” The old woman swiped the corners of her widely open mouth using a forefinger and a thumb.
“I swear by… this poster on the wall, Fräulein Suzy!”
She studied him like one would an insect and, with a sudden twist, cast a look filled with loathing at the poster of Fidel Castro. Stalin was her true love, but it was a fact she carefully concealed.
“Too bad he is an infidel,” she said as the light pushed its way through the dirty windows, illuminating her head like a halo. Her voice rang with the austerity typical of elderly women of reckless youth, who remembered their days of decadence just a touch too wistfully. Once easy, now a puritan, she had changed the dirty skin of her body and threw it on the altar of martyrdom, akin to a snake.
Boris K. repented his actions. He felt like taking off his nonexistent à la Vienna hat.
The old woman turned, eyes bulging, and approached him at a menacing pace. With the stance of an SS officer, her long nose touching the chest Boris K, Frau sniffed him, noticed the empty a bottle of vodka and contemptuously waved her hand. Settling into the sofa, she closed her eyes in the manner of a yogi. It lasted a whole of fifteen minutes, with Boris K. perspiring, dabbing the sweat from his brow and occasionally massaging her feet, until she cried
“Genug! Stop!” Her wide open eyes startled Boris K and he immediately stood to attention. “At ease!” Boris K. threw the left shoe off his right foot, hips swaying. “I forgive you, just as my Fritz would have done,” she murmured wistfully, remembering her old love – a high ranking SS officer, carried off by the maelstrom of war. Boris K. burst into tears of happiness. “But, under ein condition! ,” she roared in a thunderous voice. Boris K. was all ears. “I will write off your debt if you can squeeze yourself into this bottle.” The Frau pointed at the vodka bottle. “Verständlich? Understand?” the implacable Frau screeched.
Boris K. glanced at the bottle, then at his soft, pink hand (he was an artist, and it is well known that they do absolutely nothing under the sun). He wanted to protest, to say that one could not treat the oppressed classes so. Squeezing people into bottles like that? Not even Mengele would have thought of that, he thought – but said nothing. Somehow he managed to bend his back; he crumpled, growing smaller, lowering his proud fists, his skillful fingers curled and his head hung low. Thus his entire body distorted.
Boris K. kept diminishing before the terrible powers of the frau, finally growing small enough to squeeze his tiny hand into the vodka bottle, followed by his shoulder, chest and spine – the latter proved easy enough to squeeze into the bottle – and finally his feet, which by that point had completely refused to obey him. Thus Boris K. successfully completed his task under the Frau’s contended smile. Only Boris’ two large, terrified eyes remained visible.
The giant frau stood up, took the vodka bottle and headed for the locked compartment – the strictly guarded secret of all secrets. For years she was suspected of hiding, if not jewelry, then at least Fritz’s letters there. She reached into her pocket for the gilded key and opened the plywood compartment. Frau looked with pride upon the arranged bottles of numerous manufacturers – English and French, but mostly German. One bottle contained Sir Gawain, her former tenant, the second Herr Hans, and the third, Jean-Paul. From the fourth, the Obergruppenführer Fritz (the former supreme commander of the Waffen-SS) smiled at his lover, the Frau, who blew him a tender kiss. Each of the bottles contained a tenant hopefully peering through the stained glass of his prison, every one of them grateful to his landlady for being so very generous as to write off his debt.
Imaginarium, Igor Morski 1960
Vanity on the fox’s trail
Behold, a miracle!
Supposedly one-sided at instants
Suitable for a scrambled moment
The martyr and her daughter who wash their feet
Tasseled with nails instead of sandals
Conversing silently.
Anything but sough
Shores and scrapings fantasizing
Daughter do you wish the powder to slip you
To disturb the onus, non-being and tendrils
Wistful across the stones you overcome
Blacker than night
You fear there will no longer be vertebrates
It is the third hour in the night After
from “The Darkness will understand”
https://leilasamarrai.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/leila-samarrai-the-adventures-of-boris-k-intro/
Boris K. and the Smooth Criminal
Boris K., exhausted and worn-out due to mental exertions, bent the knee in the decisive battle with his landlady about the unpaid rent. Evicted from the comfort that was the neo-Nazi apartment of Frau Suzie, he found solace in all that existed in the endlessness of cosmos.
He shot a glance at the North star which was shining in the sky, round as a saucer, and he was listening to the cries belonging to victims of brigand gangs in the night who were pillaging the moment the clock struck midnight. But Boris K. was used to violence and took it with a spiritual calmness and peace which would have been the stuff of envy for the Tibetan monks and a llama or two.
Boris K. was squatting for a while, staring at the asphalt where, out of the dim cracks, many a strange underground creature emerged, who then mercilessly tore down everything in their path, burning shops and wrecking the property of the Phenomenonpublic.
Hidden amid the thick treetops, Boris K. had just embraced his own knees when he felt a presence of someone. He felt unease; cold sweat flooded him. Boris K. stepped out onto the barely lit asphalt and walked in uneven step towards the source of the light about a hundred or so meters away.
He stopped, noting a distorted shadow of his follower. He had a huge head and a disproportionally small body. Boris K. hot-footed onward. The shadow was catching up to him, one moment on his right and another on his left, occasionally disappearing ‘mong the surrounding buildings. The moon sailed across the sky somewhat faster than usual.
“Who is this person following me? And what does he want from me?”, Boris wondered, and realized that a leap into the sewer was his only means of salvation.
As heavy fear lay weighty on his soul, and cold sweat bathed his chest, Boris K. jumped in the manhole happier than an Olympic gymnast.
Famished hands welcomed him in full eagerness.
An obscure curiosity. There was a power outage in my apartment after I wrote the last verse.
LUCIFER Costly is the music I write… CROSSES OUT WITH PEN
The bird I hath saved, then killed.. UH, NO.
To fly and to create is one NO GOOD, I HAVE NO TALENT.
Let me make a wish for my 40th birthday.
for my 40th birthday, I wish…[his eyes turn golden]
…to await the darkness with open eyes.
I no longer want to drink up my screams
like a heavy undefined heart shape
a sweetened saltiness of thirst akin to soot
resists in my baked mouth
While the hoof howled
I bit the day.
Palms sunk into the darkness of the armpits,
claws are exposed to injuries,
hooves touching the naked floor and pushing away. I am being born.
DOCTOR FAUST-Scalpel and kill the light during the babe’s Exodus onto the world…
SISTER ROSEMARY-Doctor, do not frighten the child…
-This is not a child.
DOCTOR FAUST-Madness aflame cannot feel shame…
SISTER ROSEMARY- But keep quiet
Shhhhhh
The child can suddenly awaken in the dark
DOCTOR FAUST—A torchbearer? [manic laughter]
I went out into the dampness, in the rain, amid the stench.
in blood, out of blood, hatred, fertility, nerves…
LUCIFER’S SHADE come come into the darkness…
LUCIFER’S PERSONA Do not even jest with the curse for I fear the dark.
There, merciful lady have mercy on my dishonoured self, far away your Heaven be
A trampled flower upon the midden I
A devil with a pitiful weakness…
a flaming storming tempest
light abandoned by fog
a moment’s thought
charm of a dewy garden
a smiling morning star with a foil
between the fingers
celebrating the fortieth victory
in unending silence
in the merry dawn of October
For I grew as strong as Samson when I heard
that my will shall be granted
for I made a flawless pact
but will not disclose what I gave up in return
A FIELD FLOWER PICKER EARLY IN THE MORNING tell me monster what glimmers in your eyes
LUCIFER it is a threat of living
me, disguised in man’s clothing, looking like this…
I shall outlive the darkness
but will no longer drink up my screams in darkness…
In the mirror
I see Suns long passed
the breath which wipes away the glass contours
is frightened and uneasy
The Moon – what a sensitive parasite that is
If I lunge at the mirror
I will crack my tooth structure
I’ll consume the Suns, devour the Moon
Rend asunder hesitant bodies
I hate you, you, you, and you,
though I love all of you
you and you and you.
The scream of butterflies
It is like a desert where time isn’t told by clocks
it is like the crevice for the jailer to peer into a cell
it is why the birds, to me, have no name
it is the cause of my timid disruptions
it is the cause of my fallen kingdoms
It is not a creature known to human heart
that remains unmentioned amid my words.
SERBIA.
in this land that is not even my own
in this land where proud Palm Readers tell fortunes
(I might say that Serbia is a witchly soil
but there is no magic inside it)
Can I even be alive?
within the poem that screams while singing
(a witchly silence)
me, a flower studded in silence
If I have to die here
leave me to open up in silence
I, a strained water
I, a chained tree
I, a shepherdess in the witch forest
I, the mutes well of
a dying swath or mad, screaming butterflies
yes…
Bitterness? Or purity?
deceptive ventures
and useless experience
you have set in stone my human loneliness
Let us out of here, miss S! ..!!!! (scream of butterflies)
let us fly through
your sullen azure arch
In return,
we’ll celebrate you as a jailer
on the 25thanniversary of your hammer – existence, scavenger
we will glorify you, we… we, the winged corpses in the pit.
This night of torture
this dawn of tamed passion
this heartbreak soil.
NAHUA
It is a place of seven caves
Somebody calls me by my name.
It was the Hueyapan vicar:
“Diego”, – he told me – down there in aztatltlan(tli), the Nahua tribesmen
Cut people up
In pieces.
A sacrifice, Diego, it is a sacrifice.
Chicomostoc… (rhythmic drumming)
Rabbi Isa, Rabbi Isa… (rhythmic drumming intensifies)
RICHARD THE CANNIBAL KING
He took rothers and left the stede, that is the King!
The Cannibal King, For the King is the great power
that overpowers the great power that overpowers
the powers the great power
that overpowers the great power that overpowers the powers
Unis,Unis, Unis
Mother, mother, Mother who is Father, awaken me!
Fear not the nightmare, my child, but sing praises to her(demonic laughter)
SUDD MA’RIB
Selena is reading the spells from the Book of the Moon
Blood, my heart, my bill, me in a pool of blood
Ruinous, violently, I bounced my moist body
Towards the tambourine stars
u sudd Ma’rib, la ciudad perdida, *The lost city (esp)
my bane, in the pit, an engine-maker, a prophet, my salvation
mydeca, are – pr – pour.. pour, pour..
my blood
my bane
my heart
my salvation
Abwûnd’bwaschmâja *Our Father, Aramaic
Abwûnd’bwaschmâja
And to this the Rabbi told me:
Talita kumi. *Stand up, lass, Aramaic
l’ahlâmalmîn. *Amen.
L’ahlâmalmîn.
EGYPT
Yet another dream…
I was born
The Goddess of Air and Invisibility
I was born and died a virgin of the Ogdoad
me, Amunet, the female hidden one
the androgynous goddess, the serpent, the lesbian
goddess of graves and coffins
and the moonlight cast by Iah made my dream illumined
I am the nightly vision written of in Anacreontea
Take me to your bedding, if you want your woman to love you
Your hands quiver, but they know how to caress
Kiss that bit of the body where my eyes divert
Of the tombstone
In the dark land, in a bloodied area, in the riverbed
You will be reborn
In the Ogdoad, you will be reborn
In the sudd Ma’rib, you will sing thy love and thy life.
TALITA KUMI!
Fear mourned me
Horror clawed at the cheeks
The spasm of fear is as hard as a quince
(love is a bone breaker, the Dream is interrupted)
SERBIA
“I know what I’ll do. I’ll give you a drachma!”
While the landlady waves with the electricity bills in hand
She’s looking at me as if I were her lamb meant for the slaughter
but, I am a she-dreamer of beautiful lips
Jesus understands me, we speak the same tongue
Amunet understands, she would hold me in her generous embrace
The cities understand, the blindness understands, the blood of the innocents understands
While I cast the curse of the fiery tongue on the Daemonion
After I’ve sacrificed my own world to the world outside
She burned at the spot, bills in hand and all…
O, how we do not forgive our debtors.
And glory be to the hellish tower of slaves!
glory! Amen oh Babylon
I walk thy streets, bare and free
Rabbi Isa, deliver me not from Evil.
One fine day, Boris K. was commissioned to hand over a tax return to Grandma Katrina, also known as Grandma Hurricana, Josefina, Super Sandy, and Camille. Regardless, everyone knew her as the ‘Freak of the Mountains’, who was infamous for releasing terribly vaporous winds. Some tell a story of how she was once a great Marxist and extreme leftist who, volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War. She drowned the Americans, who could not kill her with their rifles, by causing major flooding of the Mekong River. Others described her as a runaway Marxist who in her youth called herself, Josefina Brant and cut her hair in a Mohawk to resemble a great American Indian warrior. Regardless, she was a feminist with no desire for marriage who literally blew away all her suitors. Whenever an eligible man came near her, she would destroy them, creating storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, even blizzards to deter their efforts to court her. No one was really sure if she was really as bad as the legends indicated because her name changed as often as her methods of destruction. Regardless, everyone lived in fear of her.
For a long time, no one ever heard or felt anything from Grandma Katrina.When she got old, she decided to move to the top of a very high mountain and live on welfare. No one ever really heard about her except during tax time. For, whenever a postman would attempt to deliver her tax forms, terrible storms and flashes in the sky would appear. These annual deliveries incensed Katrina and she couldn’t help but break wind and annihilate every last man delivering her mail. As a result, she hadn’t paid her taxes in over 1500 years.
Boris K., who decided to try out being a postman for the Phenomenrepublic, thought the stories were just legends. Why did they look at him in such a pitying way when the boss gave him the assignment? They told him all he had to do was hand over the tax evasion form to the old lady. Boris K.’s colleagues explained to him that once he was three quarters of the way up the mountain, he will have reached the point of no return, the spot where every postman before him made it, but never came back from. Despite the legends and warnings, Boris K headed up the mountain ready to fulfill his duty.
He started his ascent at exactly eight o’clock that morning. He calculated that he would be able to hike approximately 4 hours per day if he needed to take a break to catch his breath every 25 feet or so. The journey ended up taking four full days. The slopes were sharp as glass, the curved crystalline walls made it impossible for Boris K. to progress without a great deal of pain and a number of skin lacerations. At times, he would slip, grasping for the moss and throwing himself over ramparts to avoid bruises during his freefalls. Blistered by the relentless sun and rushed by wild goats, Boris K. kept on going. Through dry parched lips and a raspy throat, he raved:
“Oh my darling….Oh my darling… ohhhhhhhmyyyydarrrrrrrrrling Clementine. Thou art lost and gone for tax…es, Ohhhhhmyyyydarrrrrrrrrrling Clementine!
When he got too hot, he fanned himself with the tax papers until finally he reached the end of the road, or at least he thought it was the end. Mysteriously, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle presented itself directly in front of his path. It was a giant obelisk, taller even than the pyramid of Giza. Boris K. stood staring at the unexpected barrier, desperate and exhausted, when he heard a menacing growl erupt in front of him. Startled, He leapt up, grabbed the bag with the tax papers, and assumed a fighting stance in front of the mysterious creature, who appeared to be from the early Mesozoic era.
“I am a flesh eating Epanterias. Call me Caliban” spoke the monstrous creature as saliva dripped from his canines.
Boris K. was blinded by fear, and momentarily lost his head. Fortunately, when he came to, he remembered he had a rope. He thought he might try using it to escape somehow. Desperately, he threw the rope over the Obelisk, where, by chance it landed over a small tree that was strangely growing out of the side of it. Like a bird flying into his mouth ready roasted, Boris K. had received a means to climb out of his trouble, thus sealing his questionable fate with the wind. Or so he thought. For as he descended the obelisk, he became entangled in the rope and rolled down the monolith like a log, breaking one rib and bruising one-half of his body.
After crashing into the hard ground, Boris K. sat up on the other side of the narrow but tall structure, moaning and whining. And that was then the beast approached him, calmly walking around the side of the obelisk, his fangs bared and his eyes bloody. The saliva was now literally streaming from his mouth like a waterfall. Suddenly, they both paused upon hearing an elderly lady speak with sandpaper in her voice.
“Son, did you bring your Grandma Katrina’s pension?”
She smiles at him with anticipatory evil in her eyes. She spreads her arms wide to embrace Boris K. His eyes blur with anguish while shivers stream through his body. He cries out though his dry mouth. It is at this moment he realizes that Grandma Katrina has been tracking him since the beginning, changing name and form, but always the same evil old lady.
“HELP!”he cries, but he knows no one will come.
“Do not be afraid, ”Grandma Katrina consoles him. “I’m a vegetarian, and Caliban does not bite, either. And even if I ate meat, I would have no interest in a postman. Their wages are too small, and they take no bribes to fatten their wallets or their stomachs. You’re just too skinny for any monster’s or witch’s taste. Boris K. takes it in, looking sideways at the Mesozoic animal, still salivating.
Katrina pats and parts Boris K.’s hair with her bony finger and proudly says:
“I am the queen of typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, bombogenesis and spring fevers that blow in from my March winds. Just give me my pension and give up on any tax forms. I’m responsible for blowing in Spring Fever with the Western winds, and I’m busy with more important matters. You postmen are annoying me. I’m losing my motivation to develop the mountainous highlands.
She pauses and looks at him inquisitively, as if she’s looking at him for the first time:
“You are the first one to make it this far up my mountain. Because of your tenacity and immunity to my vaporous charms, I will spare your life, but only if you can manage to deliver me your letter.”
At that moment, Katrina puffs her cheeks with the force and power of a trombone virtuoso and in a coloratura glissando, she lets out an unholy wind, strong enough to blow Boris K. back down the mountain. Boris K. turns his head and shields his face, but stands his ground.
“The way you conquered the obstacles I laid in front of you, like my magical Obelisk, which even naturally blonde girls confidently managed to bypass, amuses me. I admit Boris K., as long as I’ve been alive; I’ve never seen a fool like you!”
And with that comment, she flies away, back to her front porch. After five days and five nights of hiking and ascending that mountain, then climbing up and down an obelisk without any food or drink, Boris K. finally finds himself at the summit where Grandma Katrina was waiting for him, cleaning her tooth with dental floss. Now all he has to do is figure out how to get the tax papers in her hands so he can go home. Grandma Katrina sees the tax papers in Boris K.’s hand, chuckles, lifts her dress, and then runs into the cottage for a game of cat and mouse. Boris K. notices that the cottage has neither doors nor a mailbox. Grandma Katrina suddenly appears with her pet dinosaur, Caliban, on the bench next to the house. She sings a song with the eerie, husky voice of a woman at least, two centuries old:
‘Oh, Beelzebub, please open up your sheath
I conjure you to fill my mouth with teeth!’
Woot! Woot!
After jumping up and down for joy, she instantly vanishes again. Boris K. stands up and limps up the one step to the chalet.
“What am I to do now?” He thinks, “Without a mailbox there is no way to hand over the tax papers!”
He suddenly hears roaring laughter coming from the forest. It sounds like Caliban and Grandma Katrina were laughing together. Her teasing was really getting on Boris’s nerves. She would appear on the bench beside her house and then disappear into the forest again. At one point, she appears near her house again, holding a cache of teeth in her wrinkled hand. That was when Boris looked up to her face and noticed that her mouth was collapsed in over her virtually toothless gums.
“One, Boo … thixty-thibe …” With each tooth counted, The Witch throws them far away from her, saying to Caliban.
‘Betch!’
Josefina had trained that dinosaur to return all 65 teeth back into her emaciated hand. Boris K. picks up a rock that looked like it also came from the Mesozoic era– it was gilded – he wrapped the tax return carefully around the rock, attaching it with rope. Upon considerable reflection and invoking the laws of physics, Boris K. turns his arms at a 180 degree angle; hand bent at the elbow, and releases the stone with full force toward the dark little room in her house. He misses.Stunned, Boris looks around the ground for another stone, finding one that might work. Afraid he might encounter Caliban again, he waits. He thinks to himself,
‘If I wait for Grandma Katrina and her beast to doze off, I can deliver those tax papers and then escape from this infernal den as fast as possible.’
Holding all 65 of her porcelain teeth in her wrinkled palm, Grandma Katrina speaks in a voice mimicking that of Demosthenes in the first stage of practicing Filipik:
“Abambon ah hope…! Babaa bime I bell ah beep was buring babecbacular bariot b races in Angen Brome. I waz bear an Grabe Ceezer asbed me to reblace em”
Katrina then turns her attention to cleaning her dental crowns and bridges with Efferdent and then affixing them to her gums with Fixodent. She was feeling fresh and fragrant again. Grandma Katrina turns to Boris K. and makes a creepy face. From her toothless mouth he could hear a strange squealing sound. This was Grandma Katrina laughing uproariously; and, to the horror of Boris K., she enchanted his tax papers and they were floating around in the wind. He got hold of his papers again, and aware that it was his last chance to be saved, he took small careful steps toward the entrance of her house. Unfortunately, it was enchanted too due to phenomenozations, and each time he tried to grab the door, the house would fly away from him, just out of reach.
“I will not give up!” Boris K. mutters emphatically, out of spite.
Beside him appears the Mesozoic man-eater, with saliva pooled all around him. He licks Boris’ muscles that are bulging with so much intensity, his postal uniform is bursting at its seams. Looking into the dark crater mouth of the prehistoric creature that threatens to swallow him whole, Boris K. orders loudly:
“Ricky, fetch!” and he throws his stone.
So this Mesozoic beast, possibly a distant relative of Pavlov’s dog, instinctually takes off, retrieves the stone, and brings it back to Boris K, with a vigor and happiness beyond all comprehension. Then, Boris takes out a copy of the tax return from the pocket he uses to cool himself when travelling in hot zones, he stares at it, and then crumbles it up in sadness, his hands trembling the whole time.
“Now even you are no longer of help.” Boris K. bitterly realizes that the law has failed him. That is when he hears the witch begin to speak again, in a distant, yet, academic tone:
“Fear is desirable, Boris K. Running away intensifies it. It disappears just before you confront it.”
The old woman was cooled herself with the disintegrated cover of Sigmund Freud’s book, The Ego and the Id.
“This is to be expected, is it not Boris K? I am a well-read Granny. Tell me, how did it all start, Boris K?
With that question, she begins a recitation as she magically lies Boris down on the bench, his arms resting thoughtfully behind his head.
‘For always you will stay and be a kid
Reacting and then following your Id
Postmen rarely make it past their ego
Forgetting there is so much they don’t know.’
Woot! Woot! Ha hahahaha!
Upon finishing, Katrina laughs blissfully and sadistically, revealing a full mouth containing sixty-five shining gold teeth. Then subtly, the air shifts, then ripples, revealing a focal cyclonic wind that surrounds only them. In the eye of the storm, Boris’ hair stands on end. He is already half dead from fear, and dripping with sweat. Boris K., confused and fearful, waits for the next play in Katrina’s sinister game. In his moment of fear Boris K. remembers something he heard someone say once:
‘On every mountain there exists a miracle.’ Or was it ‘if you have faith you can move mountains?’ Hmmm. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he knew that it was something about miracles being possible if you were on a mountain. Well, he was on a mountain to end all mountains, and so he was ready for his miracle!
With these confusing thoughts, Boris K. feels somehow comforted. Although it was dark, the sky was still shining and the sun was searing Boris’s body with an unbearable heat.
“What shall I do?” he thinks desperately.
He throws his hands up in the air and implores the blinding sun for assistance. Overwhelmed by fatigue and despair, his hope almost completely abandoned, the witch, who found Boris K. endlessly entertaining, laughs heartily, raises her skirt and then flees into the woods. For a long time, the woods echo with the witch’s laughter. Being infused with the energy of the sun, Boris K. finds renewed hope and climbs up to the top of Katrina’s house, invoking the strength of Hercules. Once on the roof, he leans against the chimney and holds onto it tightly. Once again he thinks about miracles on the mountain and he mysteriously feels his hands slipping into the chimney. His hands are now covered with soot, so much so, that they turn a surreal shade of red and black. With this success, he pokes his head and torso through the structure, momentarily staggering in the slowly increasing wind as he is half in and half out of the chimney. Confused, he peeks his head back out of the chimney to see if he can see Katrina. And that is when he is seized by a fully-erupted bombastic Tempest. Upon a great whipping wind, both Boris K. and the house are elevated to the heavens. Boris K. tightly shuts his eyes in fear, but manages to drop the tax papers into the chimney before he lets go, falls for an eternity, and then finds himself swimming in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Epilogue: Many years later, about 166 kilometers from the Earth, a low-orbiting NASA satellite known as Titan H, locates a tax return within a piece of space trash that resembles a house. Once again, despite all his best efforts, Boris K. prevails.
image found here
BERNARD”S HOURS
The story of a schismatic misanthrope
“The basis of hatred is fear” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Part I
00.00
I have always hated people. Always or after one woman stabbed my heart with a knife? I have no excuse, because hatred is a gift we receive upon birth and not some acquired imagination.
They hated me too. But, I was exceeded by the persistence of my disbelief and my hatred which was, contradicting even their own, pulsed stronger. Petty illusions were bringing short term relief, so I would, at times, mercifully get carried away to awaken love in some woman. When you are a dark hero, you are not pure in your soul and the demons pursue you. You see evil in everything, or something special in which evil lays (perhaps the handsomeness of evil) When there is no longer any tenderness within you, it is a feeling of a constant thwack. You are cold, and some mute perpetrators are ripping the clothes off your body, again and again. While they are doing that, hatred and disgust is clearly visible on their faces. In the imagined laboratory of my mind, heavily lit and full of rats, there is plenty of poison and weapons, and you, the common humans which I hate, are the main experiment of the Great Scientist. Like a dead drummer, I yawningly hit the little drums while walking the streets of some dark city. You are present in it, and I am like a hollow tree trunk among blossoming trees bearing exotic fruits. I am not saying that an occasional exchanging of warm words or touch does not feel good. A cold coffee is just as drinkable as the hot one. Sometimes, a woman with an hourglass body makes me feel like a man, like everybody else does, directing herself in waves towards my genitalia. But, you cannot believe the same lie twice. It is a black sun that only glows partially. At times it manages to replace the suns of other people and the ways in which that luminous trickster shines to them. Those moments last short, therefore I am my own sun, at the same time a shadow, I – the used puppet who observes the remains of the humorous theater play from which he was removed, by having his legs and arms torn away from his limbs. He is angry at the actors of the play. By the course of time, a lot of water gathered between me and other people.
00:23
Maybe my hatred was born 23 years earlier when I have met a boy with curly hair, near a murky body of water, during a very dark time of my childhood. It was warm and dry. The sun fried with its whips. Like the golden mask of Medusa, it grinned above the forest of my childhood.
– You are the one whose father hung himself? – said the little leader of the gang, whom they called Dirty Josh, and touched me with a stick.
– You are already five minutes late. I hope you brought them.
I did not answer. I offered him the lead soldiers.
– Here is the replacement for life.
He took them and lined them up on the wooden bench, surrounded by trees the color of ebony. His hands were sweating while he was arranging them into the little battalion.
– This is my battalion and that one is yours. Since you were late, the punishment for defeat will be death. Don’t ever forget it. Let us see who is stronger.
With the best of my strength, I would charge his figurines with mine. Perhaps you think I shouldn’t have shown so much zeal? I would act differently now. I would spit on him or cut him with a knife. From this other thing, I always feel a tingling in my stomach and realize it is disgust, mixed with fear. From MY soldiers he picked all the strongest and prettiest ones (my father carved them before his death, but not all of them were equally pretty). Some of them were really badly made, but it would depend from how much did he drink that day. When a soldier was done, my father would stick him into the ground and say:
– Son, this is your army. And your strength for life..
When he was making Achilles and Spartacus, he was drinking moderately. So they were, even thought Josh’s soldiers were prettier and greater, my Achilles and Spartacus, successfully protecting the flank, so I won the fight for an equal battle with my effort (or perhaps hatred). I could only imagine how much agitated was the evil boy because of it. Seeing he wanted to show himself in front of his gang, and that he chose the strongest soldiers, he could not lose. His were, in tense expectation, drenched in sweat. That is when I realized that human greed, hatred (and sometimes lust as well) smell like salt, a salty bath in which a woman lays with her open legs and the smell of her sex, like with animals, merges with the stench of fear and salt. All hatred begins in childhood. You have not been lied to. Innocence can only produce crime, because within what lies the vanity of the crime if there is not some nostalgia in it due to innocence lost. I am convinced that the man does get born clean. People become evil in time. And all are, with no exception, evil. Crooked and evil.
I showed Achilles to the small man:
– Yesterday his tooth got chipped, so he is not well, otherwise he would slaughter your entire battalion . Just HIM ALONE. If he was well, he would’ve done it already. If only his tooth was not hurting so much. It still hurts him. You see. He is great, strong, powerful.
– Ah, like that! Ah, like that!
Dirty Josh wrenched it out of my hand, and while giggling, threw him onto the loam next to the bench, because he thinks he is powerful. And he stepped on him accompanied by the laughter of the play actors, until, with his torn limbs, sweaty and satisfied, he pardoned him. That is when the evil boy threw Achilles in the dirt, into the murky water, far away from himself. Dirty Josh laughed. That is when I saw he was also missing a tooth. His corpse was found three days later, in the murky water, wormy from piss, dirty from blood and mud, with the lead stick figure stabbed into the center of his forehead. The wound hole was too big, almost grotesque. The spike, once corded inside, had layers of the brain mass stuck to it upon being pulled out.
I still keep Spartacus, and I never made a new Achilles. All hatred starts in the childhood. You have not been lied to.
Sometimes I hear tapping on the door. I first thought it was the rain. But no, it is Achilles. In the robes of a strong, Greek hero with bare, hairy feet, slowly stepping into my home. He looks at me and I look at him. We are cold, we do not speak and we eat fish.
00:46
I am never late. I posses an enormous collection of antique clocks. A pile of beige boxes full of the second hands, some pocket watches with monocles, huddled into order, peeks from a Victorian jacket. My hours is what defines me. No moment is worth more than that bare notion. The tick of the clock industriously warns that I am already five minutes late to the opening of my own store. Then, with the speed of a rabbit who heard a hum and trembled and leaped, I exit for the street with a smile. My antique shop is located in the trade area of the K. city, in one solidly built house with walls out of brick.
On the board, hanged upon a fir door, a headline reads “RARE BOOKS” (photographs, postcards, old charts, maps and musical instruments). Modern electrical heating under the porcelain panels and economical stoves are in the kitchen compartment. Vis-à-vis to the kitchen and the small bathroom (actually, it is composed of a single lavatory and a soap selvage) is my work desk with a computer. The work room has a low ceiling, and the sockets are on the Spanish wall, for phone and the satellite dish. The work room exit leads straight into the room for welcoming customers in which there is a big stall behind which I show antiques to customers and receive money.
7:23 AM.
Today somebody wished me death. Like a dog’s grimace in the corner of a yard that’s not his own. A short shriek over the phone and wheezing:
– Die!
It was an open invitation, a desire for neck breaking. What should I answer? How should I defend myself, so it never crosses their minds to call again? I stop before the gate, then open it indecisively and enter a narrow field that surrounds the hovel. I kicked the dog, but gently. The dog moved away, and then fixated on me with his eyes. Right next to the window frame, I sneak a peek inside. A darling character used to be huddled in the bed, covered over his head, and the sheets above him swollen from breathing. A naked void is under the covers now. The sheet does not give away someone still breathing and thinking under it. Like a corpse. I imagine how the sheet stands upright, the corpse fills with semen, pullulates and sprouts, grows up to the muscles, tissue, blush, luxury of cheeks, an eyeful glow. A young girl, with her face dirty and yellow from some hidden melancholy, gets up from the bed, takes the full laundry basket, and then beats him with a stick. That there is a mother! I extended my hands to her. My hands miss and touch the icy cold air. She passes through me and claps her hands, spins and dances while observing the miniature paintings lined next to the barrels in the yard. I sit on a stool and with smooth moves of my fingertips I touch the masonite. Then only a whisper is heard and that wheezing, the crying, wailing. The dog begins to howl.
– Who are you? What are you doing there? – the old man from the house next door points his slim finger at me. Then he recognizes me, spits on the side, opens the bottle which he uses to refresh his face. He refreshes himself on top of the empty snow. Then looks around, at least it seems so to me, the endless sky, stretched into nothingness. That infinity can never be remembered and neither could SHE ever paint it fully. The snow sticks to the inner part of my suit. Sticks to the skin. I entered the cold shanty of my once home, and observing the paintings mother painted, I knowledgably distinguish patterns and colors. I notice some of them were done rather badly, or perhaps are not so close to me anymore. The old man and I light our cigarettes and look at each other. He watches me through the window. While he watches me, he murmurs into his own beard and raises his head to the sky again. Then, like a defeated peacock, he bends his head into the wet snow, where the peace of death reigns. I hear some kind of a people buzz, but it is too far away from me. I am amid the cold, vacant garden, surrounded by paintings, wet laundry, dirty glasses and broken mirrors. I flip everything that is dirty, touch it gently with my hand, move the dust and put a few miniatures into my bag.
– How will you clean this?
– What?
– How will you clean all of this, now that all of your kin has died? – the old man asks.
I am completely close to the wall, and then, leaning through the low window, I throw the dirty glass over the fence, directly to the old man’s wall. It shattered, and dark, greasy liquid sprayed out onto the wall. The old man ran away frightened. After the old man leaves me alone, I become concentrated enough to spot the gramophone which I came to pick up. It was, certainly, very old, with a handle. The mechanism is completely upstanding, and it has a special record compartment as well, I will tell to a customer on the same day. I wash my face with cold water over the dirty lavatory and I play Beethoven’s violin concert in d minor, which spills through the room through the whirl of Poe-like terror. I pick books. I flip pages of each of them and rip them one by one. Not for sale. Can a man be more alone?
7:46
I see myself among skyscrapers; they grow me like I am a plant. I was ripped from the surrounding smoke, but I am sprayed by it. I stagger around like the poisoned sewer water. The asphalt is hit in the middle. Cloven. Like on the clavier, my feet mingle the sidewalk. Eyes are gripped into the darkness of the glasses. Here and there, I hear a bat of footsteps behind me. The head of the people orchestra is the Kapellmeister whose massive truncheon, like thunder, hits the naked, pissed on concrete. The world can be horrible, but not dirty. In all that disgust, I kept my good taste. During all this time, the sun was, wanting to fulfill its primate at any cost, trying to pierce through the curtain of smoke. Devouring, intoxicating sun pierces into the softness of the morning, whitened sun, a powdered ball. I noticed the way it twirls, how it rises and powers the sky like a giant, yellow bug on batteries. Like some clock, the sun measures the hours with ancient precision and swallows the passerby with immeasurable fever of eternal existence. You are nobody and nothing, and the yellow bug crawls over you, and each of her prong points a finger to you, accusing you of transience, of tardiness. It often exists like counterweight, but also a help to the grayness of the clouds who are like bulletproof vests. One selvage of metal pulses with a glow and illuminates the parts of the overcast architectonics of the city. Sometime later, the city is filled with moonlight and the light lasts deep into the night. Arctic star, as enormous as a plate with two curious eyes, will soon crack in the sky. Eternal light, the eternal peace that bothers me, for I demand the darkness that brings me joy.
This story will envelop further….
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