FOR A GIRL LIVING IN A MONASTERY Beautiful girl of the monastery, here I am. I look for you, I wait for you. Come out to the gate and hear me sing the sweetest verse my heart has ever sung. May the wall allow me to be heard, may it not feel jealous of me, and before you leave, may you come close, so that in kissing you I quench this fire. Beautiful girl of the monastery, come here and know I cannot let your virgin state, oh innocent girl, go to waste. https://draft2digital.com/book/3562959
blame myself. When you’re in close proximity with someone who’s innately unbalanced, you tend to see things from their warped perspective. I’d got used to him talking to himself all the time, smoking dope with his mates until all hours, or suddenly disappearing in the middle of a meal, to see a man about some futuristic scheme, usually to buy a lot of old tat and tart it up. Or he’d go off and spend a whole night away at the shop. He often slept there. Perhaps he was already having casual affairs. I didn’t want to know. I was just trying to keep myself together.” The invisible presenter makes sympathetic murmurs. Lucas can’t bear to watch. Yet he’s compelled to. However, the next shot is some goggle-eyed balding expert who starts a lecture about the nature and nurture of mania. Lucas speeds him on his way, but the programme keeps jumping between other interviewees, more experts, the smug presenter, clever graphics, graphs, brain-maps. Frustrated, he fast-forwards it yet again, and again, searching for more glimpses of his mother—and his father, that vanishing beast. His skull has its own home movies.. A gawky stuttering man who made him laugh by setting fire to the garden and then got taken away. That must have been here, at the Pink Cottage. And there was one more calamitous experiment in community care, one icy Christmas, at the flat in Chesterton Crescent, when Father Nicholas started digging up the wiring looking for a secret junction box behind the telly, and blew out the festive tree. Or maybe that was one of the stock infant nightmares, he can’t be sure. For there were worse dream scenarios, that kept on coming . . . a dream of beetling brains, the lobes on tiny legs, hiding in a scrapheap in the cupboard, waiting to leap on his back. And more. And more. Not to be contemplated. What kind of childhood writes these sequences, who makes these bedtime stories up, is it really you, Daddy Bogus? STOP. There she is, La Mama, in dark profile, her lips moving, making up her secret part. “I suppose sex was another kind of early-warning system, to prepare me for the worst. We’d had what you’d call quite a normal healthy sex life. Although I was worn out half the time from housework, homework and the rest. But he became very obsessive. A bit, ah, fetishistic . . .” She’s giving too much away. She’s rushing on. Lucas can read the signs. And it was all meant to have some vast cosmic significance. For him, of course . . . and I got bored with his ridiculous business of ‘let’s pretend this, let’s pretend that . . .’ About this time I joined a women’s group and started to question these assumptions of patriarchal male sexuality, these fantasies of omnipotence . . .” Lucas recognises that harsh overtone in her voice. It always seems directly beamed at the plexus of his male being. But what has he actually done to …
Talal and Hakim are enjoying a morning walk in the park across from Hakim’s place. It’s the cool end of September, and one can feel the need for a sweater or a light jacket. One can also see the coolness by watching the park inhabitants such as the flock of ducks by the pond, who argue as lawyers about the pieces of bread thrown to them, while the smaller birds flutter around preparing for their annual migration south. Even the crows, who gather in bunches here and there and claim their domain, confirm the fact that fall is here and winter approaching. There are a lot of visitors in the park this morning, and one can see the frustration on the faces of the people who live under the pressure of a bad economy, high unemployment, and the high cost of fuel and food. Hakim is wearing a light windbreaker and running shoes and is ready for conversation although notices that Talal looks tired and withdrawn. “What’s up, man? You look terrible, what’s eating you?” Talal doesn’t say anything, but Hakim persists. “What is it, my friend? You look frustrated. Come on, talk to me.” “The same old nightmares. They never change. I see the same scene, the same corpses, feel the same pain and the same hate; I was up at three this morning.” “Sorry to hear that, pal; I hope things will get better from now on. I have news for you. I talked to Ibrahim this morning. He wants you to visit him. He says preferably with a woman?” Talal stops walking and looks at him. “He wants me to go and see him? Have someone along?” “Yeah, cover I suppose. Take Emily and go for a couple of weeks, like a holiday. She needs to get away for a while after what she has been through the last few days.” Talal likes the sound of that. It’ll give him the chance to see his brother and sister in Falluza and to show Emily his country, about which he has told her so much lately. Perhaps he’ll take her for a boating trip on the gulf, or even for a swim. “That sounds pretty good. It’ll get Emily away from the funeral and all that, and at the same time I’ll go see my sister and brother and Ibrahim.” “Now you are talking; how is your money situation? Do you need help?” “Not really. I just have to sell a few shares of Advanced, like I have been doing lately. There is no other money, you know.” “There is no problem with that. Put ten thousand shares out there Monday morning and you’ll be alright. The price is good these days, although I expect them to do even better in the near future.” “I only need to put out eight thousand, maybe only seven. That would probably be enough.” “Put out ten and don’t worry. That will leave you with some left over. Perhaps you can give some to your family.”
It must have been the old man’s genes, he thought; I wish he’d been alive to see it. George Pearson’s cry of golf agony brought Jeremy back to 1948. “Look at that,” George said. “I can’t hit out of that tangle, especially with a tree in the way.” “Just use your 12 iron,” Jeremy told him, and chortled when Pearson kicked the ball onto the fairway. “That’s a stroke,” he said. “Don’t lose track of it.” At lunch in the clubhouse, Jeremy gazed across the green expanse of the course, taking in the order of the town across the river, its bustle, the leafiness of its neighborhoods, the orchards marching up into the brown foothills. Edging along just beyond the river, a locomotive hauled cars of apples headed east. “The steamers used to put in there right below the foot of Orondo Street with wheat from upriver to be loaded on the trains” he told Pearson. “What a jumble of a place it was. The buildings were shacks and lean-tos, for the most part. The electric plant up in the canyon had been running for a year or so, but most of the shanties had oil lamps, and in winter lots of them burned down. The streets were paved with dust that choked you when the weather was dry and mud that tried to suck you under when the snow melted. There were boulders in the middle of the avenue. When she saw the place, Winifred wanted to get back on the train. It was hard living, but folks kept coming. The population went from fewer than 500 at the turn of the century to almost 2000 when we came. They weren’t all farmers and families and legitimate businessmen. There were half a dozen taverns with heavy gambling, and until 1908 there was a booming red light district. The Dispatch had something to do with ending that, and with voting out booze, too.” “The Dispatch, meaning Jeremy Stone,” Pearson said. “And Winifred. This town had to be cleaned up if it was going to develop properly.” “I won’t mention Ted and Angie’s.”
Hellenic Canadian Literature 