Adam's Apples

Whether you like it or not, we are all believers. We believe that the sun will rise every morning; that we can leave our houses safely and return with just as little incident; that the person lying next to us really does love us more than all the other people she has ever lain next to; that most of our decisions throughout a privileged lifetime have been correct. Some of us, of course, believe in more than that, but that remains incontrovertibly a matter of spiritual disposition. What separates a person of faith from those who worship earthly pleasures and, ultimately, money and hedonism, is a taste for what has been called righteousness but which we will address in less comparative terms as redemption. Pain may make the most of us, but at some point in a future we cannot hope to understand much less imagine, our pain will be given a caption and a deed. We will see the wrongness of our ways and know why we erred; yet we will also catch a glimpse of what we did right, what we loved for the sake of loving alone, and what we lost. Our iceberg will calve from this frigid continent and melt in warmer waters to reveal something about ourselves that we seem to have known all along. If this sounds like a load of malarkey, you will feel welcome in Northern Europe, a place of unending beauty and equally relentless skepticism. I would not dare crown the region – encompassing Austria, the Baltics, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Western Russia – the most civilized on our planet because such declarations smack of chauvinism. Nevertheless, nowhere else can you find such enlightened secularism, commitment to modern ways of living and thinking, and a love for beauty bereft of its religious connotations. There is something very commendable about this lifestyle, yet our admiration is tempered by our curiosity: are such assumptions not the typical vanities of youth? Is it possible that the most advanced part of the world is at the same time the most childish? A rather original take on this conundrum is featured in this strange film.          

The setup will seem familiar: a halfway house run by Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a priest who does not believe that man is evil. His current boarders include Khalid (Ali Kazim), a Saudi Robin Hood of sorts and Gunnar (Nicolas Bro), an obese former tennis pro still mourning an out call that cost him his career. But the epicenter of the film and his newest rehabilitation project is Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a chain-smoking neo-Nazi who lugs around a picture of his Führer and hates everyone and everything. Ivan decides that Adam needs a goal for his eleven weeks there. "Pick anything," he says, thoroughly convinced that there lurks something productive inside of Adam that craves fulfillment. Adam espies an apple tree flooded with blackbirds and suggests a pie from the fruit whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe. Now we have all seen at least a dozen such vehicles: the goody two-shoes priest; the hardened criminal (making him a sympathizer of the most despicable regime in recent memory was a bit too easy); the Easterner who will be the target of this same racist; and the fat, harmless, insecure clown who loves his cat and plans on drinking and eating his way into Valhalla. Throw in Sarah (Paprika Steen), a damsel in distress, and a wise-cracking physician (Ole Thestrup) and the cast for a soppy, feel-good story is complete. Over time, and with knowing looks, Adam will discover man's true goodness in the form of this benevolent priest and his selfless commitment to reforming the wayward. He or Gunnar will fall in love with Sarah, and in the end it will be Khalid hugging him and wishing him a happy rest of his life, now that life has been expanded to include love, caring, and openmindedness. Despite the fact that you or I could write this script in our sleep, such stories do have a certain human humidity (to use the phrasing of this author) that many people still cherish. They will always be made and they will always yield a happy ending and smiles all around.

But here's where our expectations are pleasantly upended. The comic juxtaposition of Ivan and Adam, good versus evil in its most primitive form, is belied by a series of revelations about Ivan's life: his mother died at childbirth; he was sexually abused as a child and raised by his grandmother and sister, the latter of whom turned out to be wildly promiscuous and recently died; his wife committed suicide and his son Christoffer is a paraplegic in a persistent vegetative state. To make matters worse, Ivan has a brain tumor "the size of a volleyball," a fact that, according to his physician, makes him block out the truth. "When one gets too close to the truth," the doctor, a firm man of science, avers, Ivan begins to "bleed from his ear." If this weren't a fairy tale with a plethora of allegorical detail, one might question the medical authenticity of such a prognosis. But since we are dealing with the fantastic in the guise of the ordinary, this piece holds together with everything else we know. Adam has found the weakness of his enemy and exploits it more than once in brutal fashion. Yet he is not the only malevolent soul on church property: both Khalid and Gunnar display many of the traits that got them into trouble in the first place, except we have little empathy for their actions because although savable, they are inherently unhinged (most evident in Khalid's massacre of the blackbirds to protect Adam's fruit). What is even more deranged than the inmates' behavior is Ivan's voiced approval of their initiative and mores. When Adam threatens and swears at Khalid for not wanting to help him pick apples, Ivan tells him that "this is the type of attitude that will get us a pie." Khalid's bird shooting is hailed as a stroke of genius, as are Gunnar's revolting habits and his insistence on plying everyone with drink and food. The death of another inmate called Poul, however, an eighty-six-year-old former Nazi collaborator whom Adam immediately admires, is where Ivan shows his true colors, and those colors are the colors of the Lamb. Adam cannot understand why, despite Ivan's litany of suffering, the priest could forgive someone as admittedly evil as Poul. Adam would never do that, even if forgiveness were something he could begin to grasp. Then there is the matter of that Bible in Adam's room that keeps falling open to the same page regardless of how many times one drops it. And here, perhaps, we get the one predictable twist in a film full of high jinks and hooliganism, but it is the right thing to do and carried out with some creativeness. After all, Ivan, for better and worse, only wants to do the right thing and nothing more.

La espera

A short story ("The Wait") by this Argentine writer.  You can read the original here.

The car dropped him off at 404 of that street in the Northeast. It was not yet nine in the morning; the man surveyed approvingly the stained banana trees each surrounded by a square meter of land, the decent, cylindrical houses, the contiguous pharmacy, the faded diamonds of the paint and hardware stores. A large blind hospital wall sealed off the front sidewalk; in a few greenhouses farther away the sun shimmered. The man thought that these things (now arbitrary and casual in whatever order, like the things we see in dreams) in time would become, if God so desired, invariable, necessary, and familiar. In the pharmacy window one could read the letters of the cookware: Breslauer; the Jews were replacing the Italians who had replaced the creoles. It was better that way; the man preferred not to socialize with persons of his blood. 

The driver helped him unload his luggage. The door was finally opened by a woman with a distracted and tired air about her. Perched in his seat the driver returned one of the coins, a Uruguayan twenty-piece which had been in his pocket since that night in the Hotel de Melo. The man handed him forty centavos, and as he did so, came to think the following: I have the burden of behaving in such a way that everyone forgets about me. I have committed two errors: I gave him a foreign coin and let him notice that I cared about such a mistake.

Preceded by the woman he crossed the hallway and the first courtyard. The room that they had reserved for him gave onto, happily enough, the second courtyard. The bed was iron, deformed by artifice into fantastic curves depicting figures and vines; around it were an old wardrobe made of pine, a bedside table, a bookshelf that reached the floor, two unmatched chairs, a sink and washbowl, as well as its pitcher, its soap dish, and a bottle of clouded glass. A map of the province of Buenos Aires and a crucifix adorned the walls; the wallpaper was crimson with countless large royal peacocks in perfect, almost military lines. The only door gave onto the courtyard. The chairs had to be rearranged to make room for the luggage. All of this was approved by the tenant. When the woman asked him his name, he responded Villari, not as a secret challenge, nor so as to mitigate the humiliation which, in truth, he did not feel; but because the name worked, because it was impossible to think of another. The literary error of imagining or assuming the name of the enemy certainly did not appeal to him as a potential ruse.

At first Mr. Villari did not leave the house; finally, after several weeks, he went out for a spell at dusk. One night he went into the cinema three blocks away. He never took a seat in the back row; he always got up a little before the end of the performance. He saw tragic tales of the underworld; these, undoubtedly, had their fair share of inaccuracies; these, undoubtedly, included images which had also figured in his previous life. Villari did not notice them because to him the notion of any coincidence between art and reality was quite alien. Tamely he tried to make himself like things; he so wanted to move ahead with the intentions they showed him. But in contrast to readers of novels, he could never see himself as a fictional character. 

He never received a letter not even a circular, but would read with faded hope one of the sections of the daily paper. In the evening he would push one of the chairs against the door and drink maté ferociously, his eyes pinned to the creeper on the wall of the neighboring high-rise. Years of solitude had taught him that the days in his memory had to be equal; yet there was no day, not even in prison or a hospital, that would not bring unexpectedness, that against the light would not resolve into a web of small surprises. In other periods of confinement he had succumbed to the temptation of counting the days and hours, but this seclusion was different because it was endless – apart from one morning when the daily carried the story of the death of Alejandro Villari. It was also possible that Villari had died and that this life was but a dream. This possibility disquieted him because he had not made up his mind whether this fact was a relief or a misfortune; at length he dismissed it as absurd. In bygone days, less distant owing to the course of time than to two or three irrevocable acts, he had desired many things with unscrupulous lust; this powerful drive had provoked the hatred of men and the love of a certain woman. But now he no longer wanted anything in particular: he only wanted to persist and not to end. The smell of maté and black tobacco, the growing thread of shadow that had encroached upon the courtyard – these were stimulants enough.

In the house there was a wolf dog, already old. Villari befriended him. He spoke to him in Spanish, in Italian, in the few words he had retained of his childhood’s rustic dialect. Villari tried to live in the mere present without memories or predictions; the latter were of less import than the former. He obscurely believed himself to have intuited that the past was the substance of which time was made; for that reason did time immediately become the past. His fatigue on some days seemed to resemble happiness; at moments like these there was little more complex than the dog.

One night a flash of unshakeable pain in the back of his mouth left him scared and trembling. This horrible miracle recurred every few minutes until dawn. The following day Villari sent for a car to take him to a dentist in the Once district. Here they pulled his molars; in such a trance he was no calmer or more cowardly than anyone else. 

Another night, coming back from the cinema, he felt like he was being pushed. In anger and indignation, as well as secret relief, he turned to face his offender. At him Villari spat a vulgar epithet; astonished, the other stammered in apology. He was a tall young man, dark-skinned, accompanied by a German-looking woman; that night Villari repeated to himself that he did not know them. Nevertheless four or five days would pass before he went out again. 

Among the bookshelf's contents was a copy of The Divine Comedy with Andreoli's old commentary. Urged on less by curiosity than by a feeling of obligation, Villari threw himself into reading this masterpiece. Before eating he would read a canto and then, in rigorous order, the notes. He did not deem the infernal punishments implausible or excessive, nor did he think that Dante had condemned him to the last circle of hell where the teeth of Ugolino gnawed endlessly upon Ruggieri's neck.

The royal peacocks of the crimson wallpaper seemed destined to nourish pressing and tenacious nightmares, but Mr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous roundabout made of inextricable living birds. At daybreak he would languish in a dream of constant depth but varying circumstances. Two men and Villari entered with revolvers into the room or attacked him as he left the cinema; or all three at once were the stranger who had pushed him; or they waited sadly in the courtyard and seemed not to know him at all. At the end of the dream, he pulled the revolver out of a drawer of the bedside table (where, as it were, there indeed lay a revolver) and fired it at the men. The weapon's resonance would wake him up; but it was always a dream. And in another dream the attack would be repeated and in another dream he would have to kill them all.

One gloomy July morning he was woken up by the presence of unknown people (not the noise of their opening the door). Tall in the room's shadows, curiously simplified in the semidarkness (they had always been so much clearer in those fearful dreams), vigilant, unmoving, and patient, their eyes lowered as if curved by the weight of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had finally reached him. In a dream he begged them to wait and turned towards the wall as if he were going back to sleep. Did he do this so as to provoke mercy in his slayers? Or because it is easier to bear a horrific occurrence than to imagine and keep it until the end of time? Or – and this was perhaps the most plausible explanation – to make the assassins into a dream, as they had been so many times, at the same place and time?

He was afloat in such magic when the shot erased him.

Akhmatova, "Три раза пытать приходила"

A work ("Three times it came to torture me") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Three times it came to torture me,
And I with screams of woe awoke,
And then espied the slender hands 
Below the dark and mocking mouth.   

"Whom did you kiss as dayglow broke,
"And swore that separation ends,
"Your life, concealing ardent glee,
"While at black gates your sad sobs howled? 

"He whom you led to death, just he
"Will die, he soon will die," it growled.
The voice was like a falcon's shriek
But strangely like a voice she knew.

My body whole was twisted, choked,
The tremor of death's tread so grew;
Then fell the net, the cobweb bleak
Becoming now my daybed's flue.

In vain you neither laughed nor joked,
My unforgivable lie, you!

Bech presides

It is one of the petty conventions of petty critics that all authors have a nemesis. This shadow, this alter ego, this deranged double has met with the cackling approval of the psychobabble circuit, a hippodrome that is thankfully no longer very hip (it has been replaced with insecure, ignorant, and resentful termites, but these bugs can be safely crushed underfoot). What does a nemesis say about us? To the computerized mind, apparently everything; but to a first-rate writer, to the nimble-witted and light-pawed genius who playfully eludes the symbol hunters, the only nemesis is the critic who insists on reading a book with his cookie-cutter and scalpel, instead of attempting to understand artistic brilliance on its own terms. If you think a great artist is a tyrant, you should turn in your passport and voting card and proceed to the bleakest wilderness, where you can impose your dim drivel upon oblivious caterpillars and tree bark. And while the author of this quasi-novel is most certainly a genius, we may reserve judgment on the faculties of his much-ballyhooed protagonist.    

Some of us remember Henry Bech as the quiet, plain divorcé who just happens to be a major American novelist in the way that, for better or worse, there must be at all times some major American novelists. Will posterity smile upon Travel Light or When the Saints? Will Think Big, one of the silliest idioms in the English language, sustain its readership over the centuries? Those critics who deem Bech to be merely a Jewish variant of Updike impose untruths (as a banal example, Bech is notoriously unfecund, Updike amazingly prolific); those who admit that Bech is a rather unpleasant fellow of middling talent, even if his thoughts, which Updike generously disclosed, indicate a wide streak of genius, are not wrong so much as wrong-headed; and those who wish to localize a moral message amidst Bech's sleepy sins miss the point, set, and match. If all great literary works are moral, it is because amidst their layers of aesthetic bliss, stylistic triumphs, and sparkling insights into the human soul, they know right from wrong; this does not and cannot mean that their characters will always act morally. How do we, the readers, know that it, the work in question, knows right from wrong? One passage from the plight of Henry Bech may help illuminate our plan:

Not that Bech had ever liked Izzy's stuff. In fact, at bottom, he didn't like any of his contemporaries' work. It would have been unnatural to: they were all on the same sinking raft, competing for dwindling review space and demographic attention. Those that didn't appear, like John Irving and John Fowles, garrulously, Dickensianly reactionary in method seemed, like John Hawkes and John Barth, smugly, hermetically experimental. O'Hara, Hersey, Cheever, Updike – suburbanites all living safe while art's inner city disintegrated. And that was just the Johns. Bech would not have minded if all other writers vanished, leaving him alone on a desert planet with a billion English-language readers. Being thus unique was not a prospect that daunted him as he sat warming his cold inspirations, like a chicken brooding glass eggs, in the lonely loft, off lower Broadway, to which he had moved when his suburban marriage to his longtime mistress's sister had finally been dissolved. Solipsism was the writerly condition; why not make it statistical? Certainly the evaporation of Izzy Thornbush was a pleasing fancy .... Izzy, the former artificer, maker of hazy verbal Pyramids, need build no more; a magnificently kept man, he need oversee only the elaborate buttressing of his crumbling reputation.

Who is Izzy Thornbush, you may ask? The man himself might not be able to tell you; on the dotted line, as they say, he is another Jewish writer, but one "stocked with not just highbrow erudition but low mercantile cunning," which should tell you exactly what types of works he tends to produce. In stark contrast to the reclusive Bech, Izzy is loudly selfish and hormonal; he married a plastic heiress of plasticine temperament so that he can be fêted in the grandest manner (celebrations for writers, it seems, are inversely proportional to their talents); and as the world turns, so spins Izzy Thornbush, who has never met an idea or movement or theory that he didn't like. If all this suggests the very opposite of Henry Bech, Bech would agree. But like the discerning reader, he would not care a hoot.

Does the pentarchy of Bech at Bay really make a novel, quasi or otherwise? The five not-so-easy pieces will be treated on these pages as separate entities, because "Bech presides" has as much in common with the first part of the quasiness as it does with, say, a guidebook to Prague. Yes, the plot concerns an organization called the Forty, which gathers and compresses writers and other artists like a bunch of daisies, an organization which our Bech (the title cannot lie) will gavel into session. Will he bring doom to this dilapidated institution, a hangover from days when people thought books important and writers noble? Dear reader, why would such minutia concern you? Especially when you can just sample the snippets of ecstasy from Bech's humble agenda, most of which concern fellow scribes: "The famously tall one and the famously short one, who insisted on huddling tête-à-tête like the letter 'f' ligatured to the letter 'i'; "This, again, took them to a level of seriousness where neither was quite prepared to breathe"; "This browsing was selfish and superstitious: he was looking for clues that would help him turn his own peculiar world into words, and he resisted submitting for long to another's spell"; "The fascinating face, which, like a plate of nouvelle cuisine, was bigger than it needed to be to contain what was on it"; "Izzy came up to them, bringing the fresh air of familiar rudeness"; "That dazzling WASP blankness which comes of never having been persecuted and scorned." All we need, Bech seems to imply, is a few good books and our souls, miserable bogs, would be cleansed; indeed, very early on in his term, the president of the Forty lectures the other members (who are not the Thirty-Nine; they were more like the Eight) about "the artistic spirit, the appetite for truth and beauty." Who can deny such truths? Should we then be surprised when Bech scans a host's shelves for one of his books, whose "spines [he knew] better than his past mistresses' faces"? Too many questions for a single writer, I am afraid, which is why we have wonderful organizations like the Forty: to provide a cacophony of pretentious rhubarb before it all dies out, sound, fury, glory, and the rapture of youth unregained, Henry Bech's youth and everyone else's. Because Henry Bech has long since determined that the only thing which separates him from the rest of humanity is that instinctive search, the first time he sets foot in any house, for a bookshelf.       

Blood Disease

I suppose one would have to be intrigued by an inn called the Blue Bat, for reasons that should be obvious, even if the story is set in 1934 England. What was happening in 1934 England, you might ask? For one thing, the British Empire, whose zenith was the first half of the nineteenth century, was nearing its demise. The colonies, protectorates (a comically poor choice of words), and other dependencies which had lived only for the glory of a cold and distant isle, had begun their unshackling; a monarch unlikely to distinguish a Ghanaian from a Jamaican was relieved by a local leader who could sort whole cities by tribe; and the ways of the West, the onus of the paleface invader, were shed in order to embrace what had always been the way there, in those specific corners of the world whose peoples had survived, "utterly at peace with the forest that sustained and sheltered them." We note that "forest" could be replaced by "mountain," "river," "village," or simply "lifestyle" and yield the selfsame conclusion. Which is a fine way of explaining the perplexity of a man known widely and appropriately as Congo Bill.

Our tale begins and ends among bloodsuckers – perhaps that already gives away too much – as well as with British anthropologist William Clack-Herman. Professor Clack-Herman, henceforth Congo Clac–, I mean Congo Bill, has the misfortune of enduring a mosquito's lust and the attendant frailties. After a great ordeal of a 'cure,' Congo Bill returns to the Empire's home base "haggard and thin," and, although still young, now availing himself of a walking stick. He is met by his shocked wife Virginia, "a tall, spirited woman with a rich laugh and scarlet-painted fingernails," and his son Frank, nine years old and, regarding otherwise shocking phenomena, restrained and skeptical beyond his years. Almost immediately, fickle chance lures them to the Bat, which merits its own interlude:

It was a warm day, and in the sunshine of the late afternoon the cornfields of Berkshire rippled about them like a golden sea; and then, just as Virginia began to wonder where they would break the journey, from out of this sea heaved a big inn, Tudor in construction, with steeply gabled roofs and black beams crisscrossed on the white-plastered walls beneath the eaves. This was the Blue Bat; since destroyed by fire, in the early Thirties it boasted good beds, a fine kitchen, and an extensive cellar.

A very extensive cellar, I may add – but we are getting ahead of ourselves. The only other tenants at the Bat turn out to be Ronald Dexter, "a gentleman of independent means who had never had to work a day in his life," and Dexter's butler, a wizened, God-fearing man by the name of Clutch. Clutch will both live up and down to his name during the course of our tale, but that is to be expected of English elderly butlers who "have seen many strange things" in their "long lives":

Clutch was running a small silver crucifix with great care along the seams of his garments. A curious-looking man, Clutch, he had a remarkable head, disproportionately large for his body and completely hairless. The skull was a perfect dome, and the tight-stretched skin of it an almost translucent shade of yellowy-brown finely engraved with subcutaneous blue-black veins. The overall impression he gave was of a monstrous fetus, or else some type of prehistoric man, a Neanderthal perhaps, in whom the millennia had deposited deep strains of racial wisdom – though he wore, of course, the tailcoat and gray pin-striped trousers of his profession.    

Dexter sighs at Clutch's superstitions – but then again, the young spend an inordinate amount of time sighing at the old. So when we also learn that Ronald Dexter and Virginia Clack-Herman have long since been acquainted thanks to, of course, "consanguinity," or a "rather tenuous blood relationship," we understand malarial Congo Bill will now be set aside, at least for a wild night or two, while the kissing cousins consolidate their very mutual interests. What we do not understand is why the local patrons of the Bat, "farm laborers ... fat, sallow people, many with a yellowish tinge to their pallor" set the crucifix-toting Clutch at ill ease.

Once upon a time tales like these were termed, appropriately enough, "penny bloods," although their dry style was miles away from McGrath's lucid streams. His unusual literary debut possesses a ghoulish magnificence well superior to the subject matter, some of which is vowed to such perversity as to be better left forgotten. That is not to say, however, that there is no pathos in the plight of the Clack-Hermans, who are at one point associated, perhaps unfairly, with "members of the upper classes" (the double-barrelled surname might have had something to do with it) and then with "the fall of the Roman Empire." The narrative overcomes one of the worst opening lines you will ever read, as well as the thin pun on what courses through those same upper class members' veins, to provide the reader with a most harrowing experience, even when young Frank unravels his own macabre thread. Congo Bill could not, you see, completely forsake his beloved Africa and the utopia of the pygmies who saved his soon-to-be miserable life. As a token of that continent's unique fauna, Congo Bill imports (how this would be allowed now with quarantines is not ours to imagine) a colobus monkey in a cage that will become its coffin. The monkey is intended for Frank but will, in many ways, come to embody the anthropologist who thought that an endangered primate would thrive in England just as it had lived out its peaceful existence under its birth trees. Frank befriends the daughter of the inn's proprietor, a widower and another one of those sallow, wheezing beasts with beady stares, and the children get along nicely if in the way that children neglected in equal measure always seem to hit it off. Should it then strike us as coincidence that the taxonomic name for this monkey is colobus satanas? Let's just say that once you've seen the cellar, you may wonder about the beds and kitchen.