…Now I don’t know how to read further because they tied you in chains, cause they pierced you with the spear, cause one night in the forest they separated you from the woman who looked with her eyes fixated and didn’t know how to speak, cause they deprived you of light, the pelagos, the bread. How did we fall, comrade, in the trap of fear? It wasn’t in your fate, nor in mine these writings we never bought or sold such things who is he who orders and kills behind our backs? Let it be, don’t ask; three red horses on the threshing floor circle around human bones and have their eyes covered, let it be, don’t ask, wait; the blood, the blood will rise one morning like St George the horse rider to nail the dragon to the soil with his spear.
…I said, together they fight the common enemy called hunger, the endless source of need for equilibrium the unhealed wound or the bleeding scar of the twentieth century as always and I said, together they define the meaningful schemata of the swallow’s flight path that slices the wind caressing it with a winged shadow together they formulate the essence of the unexpected soft pain and sweetness together they constitute the final, greatest monad.
“Just close your eyes and think of something else,” he told her. Paul’s a good buddy, she thought, and he stuck with me through all of the Michael years. She realized she was already thinking of Michael in the past tense and wondered if that was a sign of healing. The last time she had been on a plane she and Michael had flown to California for their first wedding anniversary. That had been just one year ago. As instructed, she shut out the sight of the storm clouds and retreated into her thoughts. She wondered for about the fifth time why Paul had not been selected to assist Chopyk in leading this Soviet Union trip. It meant prestige and academic advancement. Paul was at least as well educated as she was with all the same qualifications: experience as a teaching assistant and going for his Ph.D. Besides, he was a man and the department favoured men in positions of authority. The graduate women often got no farther up the tenure track than lecturer. Jennifer was a loose cannon; she knew that was her reputation around the department. She was not one to toe the party line—or to sleep with the chairman to improve her grades. Could it be, as her women’s lib friend had told her, it was because she would accept less money for the job? Just the cost of the trip and a small daily stipend—that was all she was receiving. Paul would have held out for a real salary, she thought uncomfortably. But she had to take this trip. It was ridiculous to think she could continue as a University of Vancouver graduate student in Russian Literature without actual exposure to the Russia of today—the Soviet Union. The department had been trying to organize this language immersion tour, a first for any Canadian university, for years. It was time to damn the expense and go. This plan had seemed pretty clear until a warm day in May when the departmental chairman, Dr. Hoefert, summoned her to a meeting at Professor Chopyk’s office, and he had hinted to her on the phone that he might have some good news regarding the language tour. It turned out that she had been summoned not so much to Chopyk’s office as to his adjacent waiting room. She spent three quarters of an hour glued to a sticky orange vinyl chair, feeling her hair frizzing wildly in the humidity of the overheated building, one foot bobbing in time to the tapping of the secretary’s typewriter. Occasionally, Chopyk and Hoefert had glanced through the glass panel as if to determine that she was still there. At first she mentally railed at professors who expected papers to be turned in on time but couldn’t be bothered being punctual for appointments…
ΙΙ From having many things to do he’s a goffer now from his endlessly creating mind he now counts how to make enough to last to the month end. The man, who once walked in the village cobblestone road and the space bloomed, now feels lucky that he was hired on a trial basis and without pay.
…the seething angst of lust demands her body’s contours and dark caves on the altar of Aphrodite deserving unemotional dedication, like any archon sitting up high, like any God jealous or self-absorbed and relaxed and truly the hierodule too will one day sit at the big table of the selected few, one day she too will be named the heroine of the goddess wasn’t she after all another true believer? Wasn’t she too a true little unrepentant Christian?
Certain Pain Beyond the lust of lust beyond the whirl of secret yearning and beyond drunkenness, certain pain strikes the windowpane of the empty heart incapable of having any joy.
A Day in School A DAY IN SCHOOL In the preceding chapter I blended the school environment into the farming community. The blending reflects the reality of the times, since formal education was not as significant in the overall process of raising children born to farming parents as it is now. In the farming community of that era, many a young man reached his 16th birthday without achieving much formal education, as he was frequently needed at home to assist in the survival of the family farm. School was part of the community but secondary to the immediate needs of the farmers. The first priority was the welfare of the family, and the teachers and school board members were well aware of these realities. I expect that there were certain rules regarding attendance, and teachers were likely obliged to report to the school board if any student had a particularly poor attendance record. On the other hand, attendance did not guarantee educational progress and if there was obvious negligence on the part of the student, whether the fault was his or his parents, there was not much a teacher could do except try and demonstrate to the individual the value of an education later on in life. Notwithstanding, school was of secondary importance to many families, as the boys would remain on the farm when they finished whatever formal education they were interested in getting. I have already mentioned that our parents, father in particular, had a different perspective on education. He enjoyed cerebral activity and insisted that we attend school regularly and study hard. Because I did well in school, attendance was a relatively pleasant part of my life. Sure it interfered with perfect spring or fall days when the outdoors stared at me through the school window and…
Christening The parents remember the long faces of grandfather and grandmother and they feel guilty how can you call Adeadatos instead of Theodoros and Precious instead of Diotima as if the godparents were demons and pagans?
The old woman knew that Caitlin and Michael had started sleeping together again sometime after the night that Caitlin had not come home, and Padraig had been beaten up in the church. Even if Caitlin had not told Mother Ross the full story of that night, the old woman would have known without any doubt everything that had happened. Poor Caitlin. There’ll be fingers counting soon and they won’t make it to nine. Respectability holds us all to ransom. And we have to pay something in the end. The dearer we regard respectability, the higher we have to pay. I got off lightly, I suppose. But I can recognise respectability for the blackguard it is. And yet I too paid a price in the end. Mother Ross sat down on the iron bed. One of the brass knobs shook, fell off with a thud on the floor and rolled under the bed. “You can stay there,” she said. She rubbed the finger of her left hand where her ring used to be. It had been her mother’s wedding ring, then her own, and yesterday she had taken it off and given it to Michael. Today Michael would use it to bond the two lives, the two bodies, the two souls, of Caitlin and himself. And Caitlin. Sick and straining with the baby already unfurling inside her like a sticky little bud in spring. Wearing her white gown like the thorn tree on the hillside. The white gown she had stitched herself in the evenings by the fireside. Mother Ross heard Caitlin climb slowly up the stairs and go into her room to prepare herself for the wedding. The motor-car would call in a couple of hours: Liam Devlin’s newest Ford. Michael had been proud to hire it for the afternoon to drive his bride to church. Liam was proud to drive it. Half the village would line the road, not just to admire Caitlin, but to marvel at the new miracle of the machine age: Liam Devlin’s Model T Ford. Soon every man in the village would want one, and Liam’s ambition was to open a garage on the Lisnaglass road to sell new motor cars, the petrol that made them go, and all the spare parts that likely would be needed after miles of bumpy travel on the rough and muddy roads of the country hereabouts. Caitlin left the door of her room open, and Mother Ross could hear her sobbing. So rarely did Caitlin weep that it moved Mother Ross all the more when she did. Like hearing a man cry. Mother Ross sighed a sigh that pulled her heart up with it into her throat. She swallowed it painfully and wanted to cry herself from the agony she felt.
Synthesis Cyclical movement of stars emotional undulation of our laughter scar of the saddened skin and the lone cricket witness of my hand searching for moist deep in your recesses labyrinthine adventure moonlight jealousy over our synthesis two bodies defining the shape of a monad
Manolis Aligizakis 