Photo courtesy of Maaza Mengiste.

There is a Madonna at the bottom of the crystalline waters off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, standing guard near a gap where two rocks curve in an unfinished embrace. Dead leaves and fish float above her like drifting feathers, shimmering in the swatch of sunlight that drapes across the mossy cement foundation where she rests. She is alone except for the child she holds, a hand protectively across his chest. She is called Madonna di Porto Salvo and she is the protector of the island, the saint that watches over all those who cross her turquoise waters and comforts those who do not make it to land.

The island of Lampedusa was once known as a quiet holiday getaway, the place to go for tranquil rest on a lovely beach. Geographically, Lampedusa is closer to Tunisia (113 kilometres) than it is to Sicily (205 kilometres) and it is 295 kilometres from Tripoli. Since the early 1980s, migrants from Africa and the Middle East have used the island as an entry point to Europe, paying hundreds ofShe is called Madonna di Porto Salvo [. . . ] the saint that watches over all those who cross her turquoise waters and comforts those who do not make it to land. dollars to make the dangerous journey on fragile, overcrowded boats. The numbers have steadily increased over the last decades, and the onset of the Arab Spring has brought an overwhelming spike in those figures. The day I arrived on Lampedusa to learn more about its history with migration, there was a ceremony to commemorate migrants who had drowned trying to reach the island. Italian Coast Guard divers secured a wooden cross and a bouquet of flowers at the feet of the Madonna di Porto Salvo, their breaths bubbling through the Mediterranean Sea like shards of glass. Soon after the ceremony was finished, I learned that by chance, there was a boat arriving that day from Libya; their slow, perilous approach detected by the Coast Guard.

A few hours later, I stood at the edge of the coastline, watching as the boat full of men, women and children arrived. Around me were journalists and photographers, members of the Italian Red Cross and other humanitarian aid organizations. There were also residents of the island grimly observing this latest spectacle. They stared, resentment tinged with disinterest, at these dark-skinned foreigners stepping gingerly, shakily, on to Italian soil. It was hard for me to watch with the same detachment. I looked for Ethiopian and Eritrean faces instead, waving at all those who waved at me, trying to smile as some form of encouragement before they were whisked away to begin the tortuous task of establishing their right to be in the place they risked everything – including their lives – to reach. It was difficult to imagine what they would face, but nearly impossible to comprehend the many roads they had taken to arrive at this point. I thought of my friend in Rome, Dagmawi Yimer, who tells his story freely, but cannot seem to speak it without a subdued voice, as if the terror has left a permanent scar.

Dagmawi was a law student in Addis Ababa in 2005. A soft-spoken man with penetrating eyes and fine features, he planned to spend his life in Ethiopia, working to make a difference. But then political unrest engulfed the country as a result of contested election results. Then came the government’s crackdown on demonstrators, then a paralyzing list of repressive measures, then the killings of unarmed protestors, and his life in his homeland felt like a dead end. A close childhood friend, Yonas, had already left the country. So Dagmawi, along with Yonas’s brother, Daniel, and a few others from his neighbourhood, made the decision to leave. He packed carefully, slipping a few of his favourite books into a bag, and prepared himself for a long trip filled with hours of boredom. He would take a bus to the border of Sudan. From there, guides would lead him further into the country then to Tripoli, Libya. Once there, he would board a boat to Lampedusa.

On a map, it is a straight line from Addis Ababa to Tripoli. Just over 3000 kilometres along a path that crosses Khartoum, chews through the Sahara desert, then spills out onto the Libyan coastline along the Mediterranean Sea. But a map is deceptive and the straight line hovers above another route that branches out in all directions, traversed by people as invisible as ghosts. Even under normal circumstances, it would not be an easy trip: three countries, at least five languages, numerous checkpoints, and a terrain that includes the treacherous, seemingly endless Sahara. It is nearly impossible to make a journey like this without knowledgeable guides who also understand the veiled transactions that must take place at every stop. Migrants trying to reach Europe from sub-Saharan Africa become as undetectable as the hidden roads, rendered even more invisible by numerous bribes paid to police and border officials to look the other way. Traffickers bandy frightened people back and forth between designated cities, human flesh becoming its own form of contraband. Dagmawi had no idea what awaited him and his friends once they got passed Ethiopia. He could not have known that he would be bought and sold like a slave, shuttled from one place to another, and beaten and arrested by men who continually raised their asking prices.

The day Dagmawi left, he and Daniel simply boarded a bus heading to the Sudanese border. It all seemed so easy at first. At the border, he was met by traffickers with Land Rovers, men from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya who offered to take him to Gedarif, just south of Khartoum, for a price. Traffickers bandy frightened people back and forth between designated cities, human flesh becoming its own form of contraband.From there, he progressed to Khartoum then Umdurman. Intermediaries appeared at every stop, more money exchanged hands and he was led deeper into Sudan, closer to Libya. He was not alone; along with Daniel and friends from his neighbourhood, each leg of the journey included others just as desperate to get to Europe. They drove for days across an overwhelming landscape of sand, rolling dunes dissected by the tracks of other vehicles that had gone on before them, all of it blanketed by a scorching, deadly heat.

The Sahara reaches temperatures as high as 57.7 Celsius, making it the hottest place in the world. It is vast and unforgiving; a swath of land more suitable for scorpions, camels and lizards than human beings. As Dagmawi travelled towards Libya, the guides who took over became progressively less sympathetic, gruffer and cruel. During the interminable waits and delays in the Sahara, during the constant changeovers from one contrabbandiere to another, there were the skyrocketing demands for more money, the random beatings, the humiliation of being packed into crowded spaces like animals, the insults and racial slurs. Dagmawi began to realize he had entered a twisted, dark labyrinth manned by those who saw him as nothing more than a source of cash, a commodity made more valuable as the threats and dangers increased. Along the truck routes in the Sahara were the discarded bodies of those who had run out of money, those physically unable to withstand the hunger and thirst, and those who had simply surrendered to the fear. But there was nothing to do except keep moving forward, hiding what money he could in his clothes, praying along the way. Twenty days, hundreds of dollars, and more than 1300 kilometres later, he was in Benghazi, Libya. It didn’t matter that he’d thought he was heading to Tripoli. He went where he was taken.

Dagmawi and his friends found shelter in a Benghazi house with other migrants, hiding until relatives sent more money to pay for their boat ride to Italy, an average of 800 to 1200 dollars per person. Every day was spent waiting. Dagmawi struggled to remember all the reasons he had started the journey, while trying his best to forget everything he’d experienced along the way. He tried not to despair, to keep hoping, but regularly, he asked himself how he’d ended up in that cramped house with eighteen other men, frightened to step outside and risk arrest. The house was its own kind of prison and the waiting a form of punishment. One morning, he woke up and wrote the following on the wall, a reminder that nothing, not even a nightmare, lasts forever: If you can survive, all of this will pass. He had barely finished when there was a knock at the door. It was the Libyan police.

Dagmawi and his friends were forced to leave the house immediately, marched out at gunpoint without being given the time to put on their shoes or gather much of their belongings. If they had been afraid before, they were terrified now. In the hands of police, they were illegal migrants who could disappear without any trace. They were shoved into a truck then taken to jail. At the prison in Benghazi, they found a hundred others, including women and children. Almost right away, they were crammed into a stifling metal container. And it was here, in this claustrophobic box without water or food, without a toilet, that Dagmawi met the equally traumatized gaze of a four-year-old boy named Adam. It was a moment he would never forget: the sight of this young boy enduring what was breaking so many grown men and women. In the container, travelling once more across the desert, Dagmawi’s odyssey was just beginning. He was going back over the hundreds of kilometres he’d already crossed, back towards more smugglers but this time without any more money, not even his shoes.

In Arabic, kufra means ‘to hide the truth’; it represents a sin, a heresy against the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. A kafir is one who hides this truth, an unbeliever. This was the name given to the town of Kufra, or al-Kufrah, because of the non-Muslim people who inhabited the area long ago, as if those who came from there, or entered there, were complicit in an act of betrayal by their very existence. Surrounded on three sides by depressions, it has been an important part of trade routes crossing the desert and has become an almost mandatory stop for migrants travelling between East Africa and the Libyan coast. It is the pulsing centre of an underground world comprised of human traffickers, police and organized crime groups.

The prison at Kufra, where Dagmawi was taken, is a hulking slab of concrete in the middle of the Sahara desert. It loomed above the prisoners as they were unloaded at gunpoint and pushed through its gates. Immediately, the women were separated from the men; Eritreans and Ethiopians were separated from those from other countries, then they were herded into filthy, small cells with one toilet and a few bug-infested mattresses. It was difficult for Dagmawi not to curse himself, not to rail against the situation in his country that had forced him and so many others to abandon all they loved. And he loved many things: his hardworking father whom he hadn’t told goodbye when he left; his mother, who expected his help in her kiosk; his books by Dostoyevsky; Bob Marley; and country music. He liked films and was interested in law. He was a normal young man. How did he get here, stuck amongst the screams and the stench, eating off the ground the meager rice guards threw his way, drinking water that smelled of benzene?

The days bled into each other, the sun a slow drag across the sky. There was the constant presence of heat, the beatings, the abuse of children, the solitary confinement, the agonizing knowledge that women were suffering their own kind of hell. Dagmawi was caught in the helpless cycle of witnessing violence and falling victim to it. Even if he could have escaped, he would have been three hundred kilometres from the nearest water well. He would have been further trapped by his dark skin, easily identifiable as a non-Libyan. By now, all the migrants were black; all traffickers, Libyan. It was easy to tell who was who, who was at the mercy of whom.

Among the many belongings that Dagmawi had to leave behind when he was arrested was Henri Charrieré’s autobiography, Papillon. It is the suspenseful story of Charrieré’s wrongful murder conviction in a French court system in 1931, and his It was here, in this claustrophobic box without water or food, without a toilet, that Dagmawi met the equally traumatized gaze of a four-year-old boy named Adam. eventual escape – thirteen years and nine attempts later – from what had been considered an inescapable prison, Devil’s Island. Papillon became an instant hit when it was released in France in 1971, and it is easy to see why. It is a classic tale of perseverance and survival. Stories like this confirm what we want to believe about the world: that eventually, justice prevails, evil slinks away and good triumphs. But for people like Dagmawi, the underworld follows its own storyline. Cruelty has a place, fear belongs and the foundation of everything is humiliation.

One day, Dagmawi and the other prisoners, both men and women, were paraded out of their cells and told to form a single line in front of a man they had never seen before. Soon, this man separated them into two groups, and simply pointed to the one that included Dagmawi and said, ‘I’ll take these.’ They were loaded into a truck and driven to a house owned by this contrabbandiere and there, the man informed them that he’d paid thirty dinars for each of them: less than twenty-five US dollars, just over fifteen pounds, and a bit more than eighteen euros. They were ordered to call their relatives to reimburse their buyer and pay for their way to Tripoli. Dagmawi had no choice but to make the call; he had seen what happened to those who couldn’t pay. The desert was littered with their remains, bodies fading back to ghosts.

It was a three-day ride to Tripoli, packed in a truck covered with a tarp. There were too many people for the small truck and there was not enough room for everyone to sit down. Dagmawi stood, barefoot in the space that forced everyone to relieve themselves where they were. They were hungry and thirsty, collapsing under a tremendous fatigue, and it was only by puncturing the tarp overhead that they could get enough air to breathe. There were women amongst them and every day, the men had to fight against the smugglers’ attempts to rape them. Dagmawi thought again of the degradation of the prisons, the screams of other prisoners, the futility of escape, and wasn’t sure how he would make it. But somehow, he and his friend Daniel stepped out of the truck, in Tripoli. Somehow, they found a neighbourhood of Ethiopians and Eritreans. Somehow, they managed to find a place to stay until they could buy their way to Lampedusa.

It was in a Tripoli café that Dagmawi saw a photo of his friend and Daniel’s brother, Yonas, the one who had left Ethiopia before them. Below the photograph was the address of the Eritrean Consulate. He and Daniel went to the consulate to find out what happened. There, the official gave them Yonas’s wallet and informed the grieving men that he was the only ‘lucky’ one on board a sinking ship heading to Italy. He was the only one who could be identified from the more than thirty migrants dead. As if this weren’t enough to bear, a few days later, Daniel was caught by police and sent back to Kufra to begin his own odyssey all over again, shouldering the knowledge of his brother’s death. It would be a year before he would be able to leave Libya, aided by money sent by Dagmawi from Italy. Yonas and Daniel’s parents still do not know what happened to their son, the telephone an impersonal, inadequate method for communicating news that can shatter a parent’s heart.

Thirty-two migrants, including Dagmawi, boarded a boat bound for Italy on a hot July day in 2006, more than a year after he left Addis Ababa. The passengers included a ten-year-old Eritrean boy travelling alone. All they had with them was what they wore, their clothes caked in the filth of the prisons and containers, smelling of fear and human waste. At some point on the trip, the Italian Coast Guard put them By now, all the migrants were black; all traffickers, Libyan. It was easy to tell who was who, who was at the mercy of whom. onboard their ship and gave them safe passage to Lampedusa. The crowds that greeted Dagmawi were much the same as those I found myself standing amongst, five years later. By chance, a news crew recorded this moment without understanding who it was they’d captured on camera. There is Dagmawi, next to two friends. He looks thin, stunned and exhausted. He is dressed in a clean green shirt, sitting with his knees up, his hands crossed, staring quietly at the country unfolding before him.

I asked him recently about this shirt, its newness jarring, the colour almost too vivid for all I know he’d been through. It was a gift from a friend who had managed to save one item of clothing for Italy. Dagmawi had put it on as land appeared on the horizon. It was a gesture, however small, of his fight to regain his humanity, to step on to Italian soil as if he belonged. Once in Italy, Dagmawi Yimer made a vow to himself to tell the story of all those still left behind, and of those, like Yonas, who would never arrive. He learned Italian and began work in a film collective call ZaLab, making documentaries such as ‘Come un uomo sulla terra’ (Like a Man on Earth), that describe his journey as well as that of others. He has championed the cause of immigrants and co-founded the Archive of Migrant Memories in Rome. Using his camera as a voice, Dagmawi Yimer is now helping others share what had once been unspeakable.

I could not help thinking of him that day in Lampedusa as I watched buses drive away with new immigrants. Less than three hundred kilometres from where I stood was Libya, and in her cities were others like Dagmawi, caught in the deadly consequences of a civil war, easy targets identified by their skin colour. The Arab Spring has intensified their horrors. In desperation, they will continue to embark for Europe; they will continue to drown; they will continue to step off sinking boats and find a way to live. And far below the sea, will be the Madonna di Porto Salvo, gazing up. ■

I saw Jay watching me in the mirror, smiling.

From ‘Summer’ by Jacob Newberry in Granta 118: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Photo by Brigitte Brignet / Agence Vu.

The Tel Aviv Launch
9 February, 7 p.m., Sipur Pashut, 36 Shabazi Street, Neve Tezedek, Tel Aviv 65150

Join contributor Jacob Newberry for an evening of dramatic readings and conversation that explore personal and political exit strategies.

Photo by Kriska.

This is how it starts, my yearning to escape: with a snot-green triangular stamp from Qatar.

Goobie says, ‘Lynda, please can I have the green stamp? Please please please.’ It’s so weird-looking and wonderful that she’ll trade a favourite from her collection: the Polish one with galloping horses and POLSKA spelled out in bold letters, or the one from Romania with the sad-eyed spaniel. She’s even willing to give up the San Marino stamp with the dinosaur floating freestyle through the water.

If she asked for anything else, I would probably give it to her. Her real name is Beverly, but I’ve always called her Goobie. She doesn’t give me Indian burns on my arm, twisting the skin in opposite directions across the bone, the way Sandy, my older sister, does. Goobie’s a year younger than I and will do anything I say. She even spat on the head of a teenage boy walking beneath us when we were up in my favourite tree in front of our house.

But I won’t trade the green stamp with her. Here’s how I got it: coupons from the back of our Archie and Veronica comic books. One hundred stamps for twenty-five cents. We asked Mom for two quarters and taped them to the coupons and sent them off through the mail; a few weeks later, two fat yellow envelopes stuffed with stamps fell through the mail slot. Most of the stamps are boring: drab little squares from places like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the German Democratic Republic. But in one of my packets, that stamp from Qatar appeared like a sparkling jewel.

I pasted it onto the ‘Q’ page of my album, which is otherwise completely empty. I paste all my stamps into my album, licking the little hinges that taste worse than the fluoride In one of my packets, that stamp from Qatar appeared like a sparkling jewel. treatments the dentist gives us. The extras I keep in an old Antonio y Cleopatra cigar box. Goobie and I like the inside lid of the box because of its sexy picture: Antonio, clad in a Roman-warrior dress, is paying his respects to a reclining and bare-breasted Cleopatra. I pull out my album when Goobie isn’t in our bedroom and examine the Qatari stamp. It has a spouting oil well, palm trees, sand dune; the head of a man with a goatee wearing an Arab headdress bobs atop the gushing oil. Arabic calligraphy squiggles along one side of the triangle.

I go downstairs to where we keep the Encyclopedia Britannica and look up Qatar. There is the Arabian Peninsula, shaped like an elongated, sideways heart; Qatar sticks up in the middle, where the two lobes should meet. I say the capital aloud: Doha. And other places along the coast: Bahrain, Ras al- Khaimah, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain. I roll the names around on my tongue like exotic tastes. Such different, distant worlds; they beckon almost irresistibly. I say aloud: I will go there someday.

Upstairs in my room, I look at the Qatari stamp one last time before carefully putting the album in my closet. Sandy, whose bedroom is next door, collects coins instead of stamps. I think coins are stupid. They’re ugly and heavy and you can’t even spend them in this country. They don’t make me dream of leaving Detroit the way the stamps do. Sandy says they’re better, just because she likes to lord things over me.

Sandy’s two-and-a-half years older, which makes her a pre-teen. A pre-teen Queen. She subscribes to magazines that have articles about how to stop zits and attract boys. She carefully cuts out the pictures of her favourite bands, Herman’s Hermits and the Beatles, and plasters her door and walls with them. She plays their records on her little black-and-white phonograph when Goobie and I are trying to sleep at night. She listens to WKNR (‘Keener 13, Detroit’s Top 40 Radio Station!’), or CKLW, from across the Detroit River in Canada, on her transistor radio.

Sandy says, ‘Bev, who do you love?’

We are all three in the back seat of our black Plymouth. Our father is driving us down the Lodge Freeway to Olympia Stadium. We are going to a matinee concert with the Beatles.

Goobie says, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, which Beatle do you love?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Love Paul, because I love Paul.’

‘Okay.’

‘At the concert, you have to shout, “I love you, Paul!”’

‘Okay.’

Sandy says the same thing to me, but I don’t answer. First of all, I don’t like her to boss me around. Second, I’m not all that happy about going to this concert. I don’t even like the Beatles that much. It’s a muggy August day. We don’t have air conditioning, so the windows are rolled down and my hair is whipping around my head. The backs of my thighs stick to the black-and-gray plastic seat covers. They make a little ripping sound when I lift them up: first the left, rrrrip; then the right, rrrrip; then the left. Sandy is bouncing in place, her head almost touching the overhead light. This is the biggest day of her life.

The traffic backs up on Grand River Avenue and stops. It takes forever for Dad to get to the front of Olympia, a big reddish brick building where the Detroit Red Wings hockey team plays. He says: ‘Be sure to hold hands and stick together.’ Such different, distant worlds; they beckon almost irresistibly. I say aloud: I will go there someday. There are about a million kids pressing through the doors. Goobie hangs on to my arm so tightly her nails dig into my skin; Sandy’s got my other arm. She’s looking at our tickets and pulling us along. I can barely breathe, there are so many people. She somehow finds the entrance ramp; an usher escorts us to our chairs on the floor of the stadium, where the ice rink usually is. Around us, rows of seats rise almost to the ceiling.

A bunch of groups I don’t know perform first: The Ronettes, The Cyrkle, The Remains, Bobby Herb. I am bored, bored, bored. It feels like they’re playing for hours. I’m thirsty and have to pee. Sandy says: ‘You have to hold it. And don’t go in your seat. ‘

The Olympia emcee appears on stage. He says the Beatles are having technical difficulties and will be on in a few minutes. People groan. And then suddenly, everyone begins to scream. The Beatles, in striped suits and big paisley ties, walk on to the raised podium and begin to play ‘Rock and Roll Music’. The audience goes crazy. You can hardly hear the band for all the screaming: girls are pulling at their hair, some crying. It’s like the Fourth of July with all the flashbulbs popping everywhere in the dark stadium.

I know most of the songs from Sandy playing them on her phonograph: ‘Day Tripper;’ ‘Baby’s in Black;’ ‘Yesterday’. But the music is drowned out by the screaming. Which continues even when Paul and John are talking, so I can’t hear what they say. It’s the one part of the concert that might have interested me. This summer I’ve been speaking – or trying to – with a British accent. I think it makes me intriguing. At least I don’t sound like I’m from Detroit. It drives Sandy nuts. She says there is no way I could have acquired a British accent; I’ve never even been out of the country except to Canada. And that was just across the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Ontario. I tell her I don’t know how it happened; I simply woke up one morning speaking like this.

Last summer, it was a Brooklyn accent.

Sandy is standing on her chair when the Beatles sing, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. Goobie too is on her chair, screaming. ‘I love you, Paul. I love you.’ She tugs at Sandy’s sleeve. ‘How’s that?’

‘Great. Keep going.’

Sandy looks down at me expectantly. I stick my fingers in my ears. ‘I have a headache,’ I shout. ‘I’d rather be reading a book!’

Afterwards, in the car on the way home, Sandy says, ‘Do you always have to be such a spaz?’

In our family, the children all have definitions, like a vocabulary quiz in school.

Sandy: Pretty and Artistic.

Beverly: Beautiful and Athletic.

Lynda: Smart.

I’m the only one who doesn’t have an ‘and’. Ida, who was born last year, is just The Baby. But that doesn’t count; she hasn’t had time to establish herself yet.

Sandy calls me ‘ibid’ because I use big words and am argumentative like Dad, who’s a lawyer. She hires me with her allowance money to try to talk Mom or Dad out of punishments. When I get mad and turn my words against her, Sandy says: You’re just like Dad.

Everyone in our family says that sort of thing. But it means different things. My grandmother Bubbe says it in an accusing tone. She usually follows with: You make your mother work too hard; she’s going to get sick. Bubbe is from the Old Country. She wears dentures that don’t fit very well and clicks them like castanets. So what she says sounds like this: ‘You just like your fadder,’ click, click, click. ‘You make your mudder sick,’ click, click, click.

Bubbe is Mom’s mom. Mom had rheumatic fever twice when she was a kid and almost died. The doctor says that she is just fine, but Bubbe worries that Mom is always on the verge of dying. Suddenly, everyone begins to scream. The Beatles, in striped suits and big paisley ties, walk onto the raised podium and begin to play ‘Rock and Roll Music.’ She worries that Mom will drop dead from carrying bags of groceries or doing laundry. Zaide, my grandfather, stays quiet. He smells of Listerine and boiled cabbage. Little tufts of grey fur sprout from his ears. At our Passover Seder, after Zaide has a few shots of whisky, he whips off his glasses to show me the scar above his left eyebrow he got from a saber wound when he was a soldier in the Tsar’s army. When Bubbe has been clicking away too long with her worries about Mom, he leans over and says in his thick Russian/Yiddish accent: You talk too much, they lock you up.

Dad is the oldest child of Nanny, my other grandmother, so you’d think it would be a compliment when she says I’m just like him. Nanny and Papa are American. Their house smells better than Bubbe’s and Zaide’s, and Nanny’s food is better. She makes scrambled eggs with ketchup on top that she calls ‘rock ‘n roll eggs’, in honour of the Beatles. Papa lets me sit on his lap and take little sips from his beer mug. He gives me a piggyback ride to inspect the branches of the Queen Anne cherry tree in the backyard.

Nanny is digging in her garden, her big breasts squeezed together in a tube top, little droplets of sweat popped out above her upper lip. She says, ‘Aren’t you getting too big to be riding on Papa’s back?’

I say, ‘Sssh! I’m admiring the lushness of the Rwanda Highlands!’

‘Smart aleck. You’ll grow up to be a lawyer just like your father.’

Actually, Nanny’s very proud of the fact that Dad’s a lawyer. She’s proud of her other two sons, too: Uncle Todd, a professor of molecular biology; and Uncle Eugene, who’s studying for his doctorate in art history in London. She says mean things about Mom, who didn’t go to college. She thinks Mom isn’t very capable or smart. It makes me mad; I don’t like her criticizing my mother.

But sometimes I agree with her.

Here’s Mom’s life: She goes to the hairdresser’s once a week to have her hair washed and curled and sometimes tinted. She shops for groceries. She talks on the phone in Yiddish with Bubbe. She cooks dinner. She does laundry. She orders around the housekeeper – whom Nanny calls ‘the coloured girl’ and Bubbe, ‘die shvartze’ – when she comes to wash the floors and iron the clean clothes.

I want her to be something, someone. So when people say that I’m just like Dad, I take it as a kind of compliment. It means I’m not like Mom.

Here’s Dad’s life: He goes downtown to the Penobscot Building, with the big red flashing ball on the top, to his law office. He travels around the country, selling the prints that Uncle Eugene sends from London. He listens to classical music on the stereo with his headset on, wildly conducting while my sisters and I leap around the living room like demented ballerinas. He talks to me about articles I read in the Detroit News.

Mom says, ‘You’re becoming an intellectual snob, just like your father.’

Dad reads books. Mom doesn’t. Sandy reads “Nancy Drew” mysteries. They’re stupid and boring. Who wants to be a sleuth riding around in a roadster? That isn’t a real profession. For a while, I wanted to be a nurse like Cherry Ames. I read all twenty-five or so of the Cherry Ames books: Cherry Ames Student Nurse, Cherry Ames Senior Nurse, Cherry Ames Army Nurse, and so on.

The Summer of My Brooklyn Accent, when Mom was pregnant with Ida, I decided to do night duty. I took an old white shirt of Dad’s and embroidered ‘RN’ in red thread on the breast pocket. I cut a piece of white cardboard to look like a nurse’s cap, drew a dark blue stripe across the front and glued a piece of elastic across the back. I attached a piece of paper to a clipboard with the hours of the night written in the left-hand margin. Mom was exhausted from the pregnancy and went to bed early. I put on my uniform and set up a plastic TV table in her room with a pitcher of orange juice, a flashlight, a thermometer and my watch. Every hour, I woke her to take her temperature and give her orange juice. She was pretty good-natured about it, especially as she had to read the thermometer for me.

I scribbled down the temperature reading by the dim glow of the flashlight. There was nothing else to do until the next one. Dad came upstairs after I wrote down the 11:00 reading. He said: ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in bed?’

‘I’m the night nurse, and your wife is my patient.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Go to bed.’

‘But I still have all these hours to fill in my chart.’

‘Lynda, I said go to bed.’

Dad has a ferocious temper and sometimes hits us. We’re all scared of him. Nobody tries to stand up to Dad, let alone talk back.

I get tired of Cherry Ames after that. Department Store Nurse and Dude Ranch Nurse don’t hold much promise of a glamorous life. I switch to biographies. I read about Albert Schweitzer; for a while, I’m going to be a medical missionary in Gabon, with a sideline in lowland gorillas. That lasts until I read about Marie Curie. Now I am certain that I have found my calling: scientist. I visit Uncle Todd’s laboratory and am smitten with the vile chemical smell, test tubes, white laboratory coats, Bunsen burners, flasks bubbling with brilliantly coloured liquids.

Inventing seems an equally promising profession. I build a specially modified dumbwaiter for our house: a piece of plywood with holes punched at all four ends, twine threaded through the openings, then gathered together. Dad won’t let me pound nails into the woodwork, so I attach the ends of the twine with Scotch tape to the rail upstairs and gently lower the plywood. It hangs, suspended and twirling, waiting for someone to put something on it to be hoisted up to the second floor.

Scotch tape isn’t very strong. Anything heavier than a piece of tissue makes the thing go crashing down. I get tired of re-taping it and move the dumbwaiter to my favourite tree In my tree, I hoist up a pile of books on the dumbwaiter and fly away. I’m Amelia Earhart, Florence Nightingale, Sonja Henie. in the backyard, a Russian olive. I tie it to one of the branches that extends out from the cleft where I sit, load it up with books and haul them up. Goobie’s feelings are hurt that I don’t invite her up. But I like being by myself. It’s tense in our house, with Mom and Dad yelling at each another and at us and Mom sometimes crying. We have to be careful around Dad. One minute he’s great: playing badminton with us or letting us ride on his back when we go swimming through the murk at Kensington Lake. The next minute: he’s snarling like a beast and hitting us with a newspaper like we’re dogs.

In my tree, I hoist up a pile of books on the dumbwaiter and fly away. I’m Amelia Earhart, Florence Nightingale, Sonja Henie. I no longer feel the hard, black tree bark cutting into my thighs where my shorts end. I’m Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Ludwig von Beethoven. I open my stamp book and am in the Central African Republic, fending off nightmarish beetles. In Colombia, where an erupting volcano is spewing life-threatening lava. In Rwanda, amid an elephant-and-water-buffalo stampede. And best of all, in Qatar.

My beacon in the night. ■

Photos by Ming1967.

It’s a true story. As a writer (a novelist, to be more precise), when I say it’s a true story, it’s almost always not. But this time is different. It’s a really super true story. Why? Because it’s almost not a story.

It happened a few days ago. That morning there was a grand opening ceremony of a National Writers’ Congress. Of course, I wasn’t one of the delegates, I was just allowed to sit in on the ceremony. It would be just like a big Kafka show, I thought (and that’s why I wanted to go). I arrived too early (at 8 a.m., and the ceremony began at 10 a.m.), and I was starving to death (I hadn’t had breakfast). So I decided to look for some place to eat something – anything – and that wasn’t easy. To the north was Tiananmen Square, to the east was the Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall, and to the west was the Great Hall of the People, where the ceremony would be held. So my only choice was south. I went south. I passed several soldiers, with their eyes steadily fixed on the same spots just like some wax statues. Then I passed an old, high, western-style building, whose windows were broken, like a gothic haunted house. I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature. Then a beautiful public convenience, like a temple. Nothing to eat. I decided to go on. I crossed by the subway. In the subway I was quite taken aback by what I saw. Three monstrous beggars – maybe demented, maybe deformed, maybe just dirty, I couldn’t be sure – lying on the ground, covered with rubbishy quilts (obviously, they slept there in the night). I had no choice but to pass them, quickly, I must say. And at last, when I returned to the surface of the earth, I saw the KFC across the street. I had a great breakfast at KFC. These were just like a series of symbols, I told myself. Anyway, I felt a little happy (for the breakfast), a little sad (for the beggars) and a little absurd (for the symbols). Then the ceremony, the long and boring and empty speeches. When it was over, I felt partly happy (for was finally over), partly sad (it’s hard to say why) and partly absurd (for all these). After that I didn’t go back home at once, I just wanted to take a walk and breathe some cold (though dirty) winter air. I went to a bookshop and a flea market, where I bought a book about landscape painting in ancient China and some small lovely silvery goblets, of course, all very cheap (and beautiful). On my way home, sitting in the jam-packed metro, I felt satisfied, anyway. I felt satisfied because I felt solitary. I treasure this solitude. It’s my holy solitude. Maybe now there is nothing holy in modern China – except Money. But at least to me, Solitude is holy. It means that in spite of everything else, I still can do something I want to do, such as reading. I’m always a keen reader of western literature. I love Raymond Carver, Paul Auster, Geoff Dyer, Alice Munro and many others. My favourite magazines on this planet are The New Yorker, Harper’s (an American friend ordered these two magazines’ digital subscriptions for me as a gift), and, Granta (I met with the editor John Freeman, in Beijing, just two days before the Congress, and we talked about books so happily – like two killers talking about guns – that he also gave me a digital subscription, also as a gift). I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature. It’s not naivety. It’s not escape either. It’s great. It’s great because it’s so simple, so beautiful, and – almost – no one can prevent you, even in China.

It was a long way to home, so I took out a Pocket Penguin, Anton Chekhov’s The Kiss, from my bag and began to read. ■

Photo by Paul Robertson.

So far as I am aware, mine was the first magazine-length article about the Lawrence case. For four years after the murder the newspaper industry – of which I had been a part (I worked then at the Independent on Sunday) – had shown at best a patchy interest.

The idea came from Ian Jack, then Granta’s editor. He had discussed the Daily Mail’s famous ‘Murderers’ front page over lunch with his friend and mine, Peter Wilby, and came away feeling he just didn’t know enough. When he then tried to find out more he discovered the absence of extended journalism on the affair and so he decided to commission a piece, and turned to me.

At that stage I knew very little about the murder and even less about racism, but I like research, I write narratives (which is what Ian wanted) and, newly freelance, I was available.

I was asked for 10,000 words, submitted 18,000 and saw about 15,000 published. It was as straightforward and plain a chronological account as I could manage. Most of those I approached for help, interviews and documents were helpful and eager to deliver their various versions of events – though I never, then or after, made much headway with people in the Progress estate. I did my best to be fair and accurate but a number of mistakes are now obvious and I would ask readers to remember that it was written in 1997.

By the time I submitted the piece I was sure there was a lot more to come out about the murder and its aftermath, and with a public inquiry on the cards it was likely that at least some of it would. None the less, I don't think I had any idea of how important it would all become.

Brian Cathcart
January 2012

Stephen Lawrence was murdered on the night of 22 April 1993, in Eltham, a south-eastern suburb of London. He was on his way home with a friend, Duwayne Brooks. Both Lawrence and Brooks were eighteen years old and both were black. Lawrence was at school studying for his A levels; Brooks was at college learning electronics. It was a Thursday. Lawrence had been at school; Brooks had a day off college. They met at the gates of Lawrence’s school, hung around in Lewisham for a while and then went to Mottingham, where they spent the evening at the home of Lawrence’s uncle, eating dinner and playing Super Nintendo. At 9.55 p.m. they left the Mottingham house and began their complicated bus journey home. Stephen’s parents did not like him to be out late.

Lawrence lived in Plumstead. Mottingham and Plumstead are only three miles apart, but the journey involved three buses on different routes; this part of London has never been penetrated by the Underground, and most main roads run east to west. Lawrence and Brooks were travelling south to north, parallel to the line of the primary meridian which cuts through Greenwich, a couple of miles to the west. The first bus took them to Eltham High Street and a second to a well-known local interchange, Well Hall Roundabout. There they walked fifty yards to a bus stop in Well Hall Road from which they could take a third bus the mile or so over the hill to Plumstead. They reached the stop at 10.25 p.m.

Three other people waited there with them: a young French au pair girl and two white men, one in his thirties and the other in his late teens. According to the later statements of these three people, Lawrence and Brooks passed the time chatting about football, and one of them practised a few dance steps.

Fifteen minutes passed. No bus came. The boys got restless. If at the beginning of these fifteen minutes they had decided to walk the rest of the way, they would have been almost home by now. Plumstead was only a mile and a quarter away. Brooks suggested a different route home, on a bus which used another exit from the roundabout, but Lawrence was reluctant to move; the other route was less direct. Brooks then walked a few yards back towards the roundabout to see if a bus was coming. He spotted one in the distance, and also a group of young white men on the far side of the roundabout moving their way. There were half a dozen of them. Brooks turned and moved towards Lawrence, calling: ‘Can you see the bus?’

Lawrence didn’t reply; perhaps he hadn’t heard the question. Brooks called again: ‘Can you see it?’

The time was 10.40 p.m.

The white boys were by now just across the road and within earshot. One called out: ‘What, what, nigger?’

Then the white group started to run across the road towards Lawrence and Brooks. Brooks ran from them, yelling to Lawrence to run too. But Lawrence didn’t, perhaps because he hadn’t quite understood what Brooks was warning him of. The white group surrounded him, punching and kicking him and pulling him to the ground. One of the white boys chased Brooks briefly and then turned back to join in the beating of Lawrence.

It was over in a few seconds. The white boys ran off down a residential side street, Dickson Road. Lawrence got to his feet and ran in the other direction, across Well Hall Road. His friend rejoined him. ‘Duwayne,’ said Lawrence. ‘Just run,’ said Brooks.

They covered about a hundred yards. Brooks was ahead when he heard Lawrence call again.

‘Look at me, tell me what’s wrong.’

Brooks turned and saw blood pumping through Lawrence’s jacket.

‘Just keep running,’ he said.

‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Lawrence said. Then he collapsed.

Brooks saw a phone box, ran to it, and dialled 999, asking for an ambulance. The operator seemed uncertain of the phone box’s location. Brooks wasn’t sure that he had been understood. He left the phone off the hook and ran out into the traffic on Well Hall Road, trying to flag down passing cars; none stopped. He asked a couple of pedestrians for help; they walked on. He tried the telephone again, and again there was confusion–panicky incoherence at one end, perhaps, and incomprehension at the other.

A car stopped; the driver was an off-duty policeman. Lawrence had lost consciousness by now and Brooks was agitated and distressed. He told the policeman that he’d called for an ambulance but that the woman at the other end hadn’t listened to him. The policeman went to the phone and came back to say that an ambulance was on its way. A couple came out of a church nearby. The woman knelt beside Lawrence and realized she could do nothing but comfort him and pray. She thought he seemed peaceful. Two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, arrived next. Brooks asked: ‘Where’s the fucking ambulance? I didn't call the police.’ He urged the policeman to take Stephen to hospital by car. According to Brooks: ‘He said he couldn’t. He said he was going to handcuff me because I was getting hysterical.’

An ambulance arrived at 10.54 p.m., but Lawrence was no longer breathing and his heart had stopped beating. He was taken to Brook Hospital, a mile away. At 11.17 p.m. he was certified dead.

The autopsy showed that he had been stabbed twice with a large knife, once in the shoulder and once close to the collarbone. The blows were probably struck while he was still standing and entered the body in a downward direction, severing vital arteries and veins. Lawrence bled to death from these blows, but the attack had been so quick and so confusing that the three people at the bus stop, watching from only twenty-five yards away, thought they had witnessed a scuffle rather than a stabbing. None of them had seen a weapon; they saw only that Stephen had been pulled to the ground and kicked. When he got to his feet and ran, it looked as though he was not badly hurt. All three boarded the bus when it came along, but one of them, the white teenager, Joe Shepherd, recognized Lawrence as a boy from his neighbourhood. When he got home, he told his father. Father and son then went to tell Stephen's parents, Neville and Doreen Lawrence, that they thought Stephen might have been badly beaten. In search of their son, the Lawrences drove first to the bus stop and then to the hospital, where, after a short wait, they were told that he had died.

These are the principal events in the murder of Stephen Lawrence, so far as they are known. There is little about them to suggest that he would become the most famous black victim of murder in British history.

Continue reading here.

Photo by Michael Swan.

He is twenty-five years old. It has been years since he has lived here. At the Cap Haitien airport, there is no one to greet him. Whoever was entrusted with picking him up at the arrival gate has forgotten. He lingers outside customs and watches the taxi drivers and the porters squall over the new arrivals until he is left alone with the dusty whirring of the fan. A uniformed attendant in a crooked tailored shirt pushes a broom across the tile floor.

He wanders outside, past the one-eyed beggars with disfigured limbs who thrust upturned palms at his chest. He pushes past them, m’pa geyen ayin, he announces, nervous, but also elated that he has not forgotten his Kreyòl. The smell of rotting fish and garbage blows in from the sea and he feels a sudden tightening in his chest, a sense of exhilaration that he had not expected to find, here.

He continues down the dirt road with no particular destination in mind, though eventually, he knows, he will end up at the missionary hospital. He passes a wooden stand hung with elaborate ropings of inner tubes: tubes for bicycles, for motorcycles, for cars, for the wheels of the wooden carts that the men still pull through the uneven streets, a technology as old as the colonial era.

He feels strangely at home in the wet heat, surrounded by strangers. He smiles at the ribcage-thin dogs that skitter along the ditches in search of He feels strangely at home in the wet heat, surrounded by strangers. rotten food. A tap-tap bumps past him but he makes no attempt to flag it down. He has no Haitian money, though he has a wad of American dollars in his wallet in his backpack. He tightens his grip on the shoulder strap, which is slung over his shoulder like an experienced traveler (though in truth, he hasn’t left Florida in years). He eyes a pile of gold-green mangoes stacked on a scrap of burlap like Fabergé eggs in a department store display window. He feels as rich as a king.

He makes it all the way to the Iron Market in Cap Haitien before he breaks down and changes twenty American dollars for a fistful of gourdes. He is hungry, and wants a bowl of black beans and rice, with a thick ladle of scrawny Haitian chicken slow-cooked in tomato sauce and shallots until the meat shudders loose from the bone, but his mother’s dire warnings about tropical diseases keep looping through his head like a scratch on a record, so he buys a Coke instead.

The drink is cool from the melting ice and the vendor, a thick woman who squats in the late afternoon heat with her skirt hitched up around her knees, will not let him walk away with the bottle.

He drinks it standing in the street, his neck thrown back like a bird’s, his pale throat exposed. The taste is saltier, more tart, somehow, than the sickly-sweet colas he buys when he goes fishing in Lake Okeechobee. A crowd of barefoot boys in ragged T-shirts has gathered around to watch and he closes his eyes against the sun as he leans back to drain the bottle.

Eh blan, bum yon ti bagay, give me something, the boys pester, amused by their own temerity. He answers them in stumbling Kreyòl, but the words come out faster, more fluid, every time he speaks, as if his mouth remembers what his mind has forgotten: the texture and shape of words, the taste of language in his mouth. He’d been less than a year old when his parents had moved to the missionary compound where his mother, too, had spent her childhood. They lived in Haiti until he was seventeen, until the evacuation.

How do you speak such good Kreyòl, the soda vendor demands, eyeing him.

He smiles at her, embarrassed. He is unused to flattery. In his own country he has grown used to being invisible: a nondescript factory worker who fishes on weekends, reads sci-fi novels, tinkers with short-wave radios.

I grew up in Haiti, he tells her, warming to the attention.

Where? she asks.

In Milot, at the hospital, he says.

Dr MacKinnon’s hospital? she asks, her voice rising.

He nods, his pock-marked face flushing to pink.

He’s my . . . He stutters, forgetting the word: he’s my grandfather. He was my grandfather.

Then you are the grandson of Jesus Christ! the woman tells him, leaning her hands on her thighs as she heaves herself to her feet and claps her palms together.

Doctor MacKinnon was Jesus Christ! she says, reaching for his hand, which she clasps between her own warm fingers and bows her head, as if in fealty. The little boys take a step back, gauging the significance of this new information.

Dr MacKinnon saved my husband, he saved my son’s life, she announces, arms flung wide to draw in the gathering crowd. Dr MacKinnon gave me life – he gave me life!

She refuses to let him walk away after this confession, makes him sit, instead, on the dented cooler while she sashays down one aisle of the open-air market, hollering to a friend, and returns a few minutes later with a heaped serving of rice and beans with fried yellow plantain draped across the top like a coat of arms. She will not let him pay.

He eats furtively, his mother’s unheeded warnings growing smaller and tinnier with each bite. The vendor watches as he ladles the spoon hungrily into his mouth. The little boys watch too, but they have stopped calling him blan. Earlier, one of them had begged the blan for a ti morso but the vendor had reached over and swatted him with a rolled-up piece of cardboard. The boy darted out of the way, but now shows the foreigner a grudging respect. The startled looking white man with the sad smile and the nervous tic in his shoulders is, if this story is to be believed, the grandson of a man who performed miracles. The boy eyes him cautiously, trying to assess if he is capable of magic.

In Milot, the returning grandson settles quickly into his new role at the hospital laboratory. His white-haired grandmother, Dr MacKinnon’s widow, still presides over the noon meal at the old dining room table, her strident, dogmatically cheerful voice narrating stories of bygone glories to anyone who will listen, but it’s hard not to notice all that has changed. The missionary school, too small even to justify a full-time teacher, has shrunk from four classrooms to one. Half of the houses are empty, and the missionaries that remain have a haunted, exhausted aspect, as if they are sleepwalking.

Both of his uncles still live in Milot, both vying for control over the missionary hospital, although neither one lives on the compound. The MacKinnons have all moved, all but the adopted children, out to the retirement villas at Rivière du Nord. He could have moved out there himself, into his mother’s old house (which she never lived in, horrified by its unnecessary grandeur) but instead he has chosen to stay in a volunteer cottage on the compound. There are a few other single volunteers who live on the compound and he prefers their reckless company to the paranoid monologues of his uncles.

In the lab, he works alongside the other Haitian technicians, although he has no medical training. He studied electrical engineering at a technical school in Florida, and has the innate MacKinnon confidence that he will pick up what he needs to know on the job: the human body is, after all, the ultimate machine.

There are things that surprise him about the missionary hospital, after all of these years. The lab technicians do not have access to a toilet The boy eyes him cautiously, trying to assess if he is capable of magic. and must instead use a bucket when they need to relieve themselves. This is an even greater insult because the Haitian doctors have been given a flush commode, and the technicians implore him to argue with his grandmother and his uncles on their behalf. It is startling to him that in forty years, no one has thought to build public latrines at the hospital, but when he mentions it to his grandmother, she assures him in ringing tones that there are far greater priorities at the missionary hospital.

His soft heart has a tendency to get him in trouble.

Soon after he arrives, he makes copies of the keys on his grandmother’s keyring, just as he did when he was a punk 16-year-old, so that he has unrestricted access to the storage depots and the volunteer lounge, where he wanders upstairs to watch American movies after everyone else has gone to bed.

After weeks of pestering, he agrees to let one of the diabetic boys who does odd jobs around the hospital in exchange for free insulin take a shower in the lounge. Jonas has never in his life taken a shower, only bucket baths drawn from the public fountain, but he has fantasized his entire life about tilting his head back under the stinging droplets, invisible and alone under a clean, effortless deluge of falling water. Dr MacKinnon’s grandson shrugs. Why not, he says, and lets Jonas borrow a towel.

The next day, he receives a lecture from his grandmother. If Jonas brags about this breach of propriety then all the other Haitians will be jealous and want a shower too. We cannot afford to provide showers for everyone in Milot. We have already provided the water fountain, which is more than enough. She also confiscates his keys.

He is, at times, disgruntled by the missionary experience. When he asks for monetary compensation for his months of service – a token gesture: $400/month (he still has bills to pay in Florida) – he is ignored.

On the weekends, he has to duck under the wires and cables in the living room of his mad genius uncle, the engineer, to ask if he can borrow one of the hospital vehicles to drive to the beach, but during the entire conversation his grizzled uncle never once lifts his wild beard from where it is bent over the computer tower.

Um, Uncle Joash?

What do you want?

I was wondering if I could go into town today?

No, not today.

Why?

Because I said so.

Uncle Joash’s sons are the ages that his brothers were when they left Haiti and he now recognizes, for the first time, the almost frantic neediness of missionary children. He senses in them a deficit, a hole. Their parents are too busy running the hospital, fixing the unreliable generator, typing up newsletters to raise money, saving lives.

He himself remembers his childhood with deep fondness. He remembers picking raspberries in the mountains above Kenscoff, where he once spent an entire summer poised on the ledge of a cliff learning to crack a whip into the void. When he was twelve, he trained a parakeet to wing down out of the sky and land on his outstretched arm, a trick that had required hours of solitary devotion to a half-wild creature.

But even so, one night he finds himself telling an American volunteer, half in jest, that he was actually raised by the Disney Channel. The volunteer laughs, and he feels both guilty, as if he had just disowned his family, and strangely accepted. The Americans have an innate confidence and chumminess that he alternately envies and despises. He has to work so hard to keep up.

He remembers that things felt different at the hospital when his grandfather was still alive. Whenever they would run into each other on the compound, Dr MacKinnon would lift his hat and say, as if flabbergasted: Man, you’re getting bigger every day. Is that my grandson?

His grandfather taught him to build kites, to stretch tissue paper taut over feather-light ribs and yank it gently into the sky, the tail flicking in the wind like a horse’s mane. They developed photographs together in an improvised darkroom.

Once, when the Doctor had caught him and another grandson, in a fit of boredom, attempting to chop down a mahogany tree with a dull machete, he came out and stood with them under the cacophony of cicadas and rocked on his heels with his hands in his pockets. He observed, gently, that the tree hadn’t done anything to warrant this ill treatment. His grandfather returned soon thereafter with a delicately penciled diagram and instructions for making a wooden bow and arrow, confident that boys were at their best when faced with a challenge. He never overtly reprimanded them.

It is Mrs MacKinnon’s widow who now plays the role of disciplinarian on the compound. As a teenager, he had managed to skirt her wrath by staying out of sight, but now that he works in the lab, he smarts under her scrutiny.

An eleven-year-old Haitian girl, skinny as a rail, has been tested three times for malaria, but every time the white-coated lab technician examines There is a picture of his grandfather in the photo album, red suspenders looped over tired shoulders, his wrinkled face stretched into a thin-lipped grin. the slides she moves them so quickly across the microscope that she fails to observe the tell-tale signs. One of the doctors orders a blood transfusion anyway, concerned by the child’s hematocrit levels, but on Saturdays the lab techs only work a half day, so the transfusion is overlooked. When his grandmother learns of the oversight, she delivers yet another searing lecture about irresponsibility, which he takes personally, cutting short a trip to the beach to rush back and mix the acid to stain the slide. He has no medical training, so he has to hop on his bicycle to find someone to verify the lab results, then cross-check the tubes for a blood transfusion. When the little girl revives, he stumbles back to his volunteer cottage in a stupor of awe.

His grandfather, he knows, saved countless lives during his career as a medical missionary, but saving this one girl’s life is perhaps the most powerful thing he has ever done. He wishes that he could, but knows that he will never be able to do what Dr MacKinnon did: touch the human body with authority and restore it to health. He is far more confident when it comes to fixing machines: he understands voltage and induction and can troubleshoot, with a clear conscience, an ailing transformer. The human body is a thousand times more complicated, and therefore terrifying. He has no magic in his fingers. He trembles just to imagine that weight of responsibility.

Still, he savors the compliment when one of the nurses tells him that he has l’esprit Dr MacKinnon, the spirit of his grandfather, and the heart of his mother. He doesn’t trust that he can live up to the compliment, but he wants to believe that he is capable of it.

He falls in love, while on the compound, with one of the Haitian women he works alongside in the lab. Her name is Lovely and he suspects, presciently, that his uncles and his grandmother will not be pleased. He tells no one when he decides to spend the weekend with her in Cap Haitien. He leaves on Friday, after work, and takes the tap-tap to her family’s house, where he sleeps beside her on a narrow mattress on a creaking, iron frame and wakes to roosters and the rattle of charcoal in a brazier, the sound of popping oil. He feels her burrow against his chest then sigh in her sleep. For the first time in his life, he feels as if he belongs in Haiti.

He is most astonished by the bucket bath in the courtyard, where he strips to his underwear before a crowd of amused boys as water from the fountain splashes onto the wet concrete and flows out into the clogged gutter.

When he returns to the compound on Monday morning to report for work, the MacKinnon family is livid. One of his uncles has called the morgue, fearing the worst. He receives yet another lecture, this time on the mortal dangers of entrapment by Haitian women who only want one thing: a passport.

After the weekend in Cap Haitien, he finds himself pulling back from Lovely. He wishes, later, that he had ignored his uncle’s warnings. Uncle Absolom made it sound as if he had learned the hard way about Haitian women, and just wanted to protect his nephew, but in retrospect he doubts there was any kindness in the gesture.

When Lovely tells him that she wants to get married, he isn’t ready. He thinks he can do better.

One morning, over breakfast at the MacKinnon mess hall, his mad genius uncle, who has spent a lifetime on the hospital compound, announces that at the end of the month he and his family will be leaving Milot. Within weeks, the rest of the missionaries have followed suit, which surprises him. The school closes, the last of the missionary kids gone. He doesn’t understand what has happened.

He later pieces together that Uncle Joash had undergone an epiphany of sorts, and had tried, unsuccessfully, to restructure the hospital charter to remove the family veto power, which gave any member of the MacKinnon family the right to veto decisions by the remaining board members. As soon as Uncle Joash is gone, his grandmother and the one remaining uncle, Absolom, swiftly firm up control over the crumbling missionary enterprise.

Absolom is not a man to whom one voices criticism. Absolom does not deign to nod hello to those who are beneath him, such as a nondescript nephew. When Absolom fires Lovely, along with countless other employees who have been deemed unsuitable, Dr MacKinnon’s grandson finally works up the courage to protest.

He stands up to Absolom only once, indirectly. He tells his grandmother, Whatever it is you’re doing, I don’t agree with it.

The next day, Absolom informs him that his services are no longer needed. He flies home to Florida on the next plane.

In his late thirties, at a Florida diner, he confides to an old friend – a missionary’s daughter that he fell in love with, briefly, when he was sixteen – that he probably should have married Lovely.

Over bacon and eggs, they talk about Haiti, and Dr MacKinnon, and the ghost-town missionary hospital in Milot. He had wanted to shower before he saw her again, but the night shift at the electronic integrated circuits factory ran late so he is still dressed in his stained canvas pants and standard-issue cotton work shirt. His back is stiff and sweaty and he feels exhausted. Across the table sits the red-haired girl. He hasn’t seen her in years. He doesn’t know why he tells her about Lovely. Perhaps because he felt, a decade earlier, that he was too good for a Haitian lab technician, and he has always suspected that the red-haired girl believes herself to be too good for him (he judges himself, now, with the tired eyes of middle age: he is not the man he once imagined himself to be).

Later, back at his apartment, he cracks open a beer and pulls out his photo albums from Haiti. He has no photos of Lovely, but he can still close his eyes and remember waking up next to her in the house without electricity. He had not wanted to wake her, had leaned on his elbow to watch her thin chest rise and fall in the dim half-light where the sun came in through the holes in the tin roof. He could smell plantain frying in the courtyard.

He has no photos, either, of that first day back in Haiti, when a stranger fed him rice and beans for no other reason than that he was His heart is a tired engine with too many loose screws and faulty wires Dr MacKinnon’s grandson. There is a picture of his grandfather in the photo album, red suspenders looped over tired shoulders, his wrinkled face stretched into a thin-lipped grin. His mother and uncles, in a revolutionary mood, liked to refer to him as The Old Man, behind his back, but they would have done anything to please him. He had an aura that inspired loyalty. He liked to tell people that if he expected the worst, he got nicely surprised – sometimes.

He folds the photo album closed on his lap and takes another sip of his beer. He doubts that he will ever return to Haiti, although he still remembers it as the backdrop of all that is most important to him: the shrill, humid whine of the cicadas, the smell of burning plastic and mildew that he still associates with love. He has never learned his grandfather’s useful habit of expecting the worst, has never learned to steel himself against life’s inevitable disappointments, which is why he has to watch himself with the beer, and not start drinking too early.

His heart is a tired engine with too many loose screws and faulty wires, not weightless like the tissue-thin kites he used to fly with his grandfather as the string danced between his fingers, nor half-wild like the bird that once landed on his outstretched arm.

He no longer believes himself capable of miracles, but he wishes that he could. He would have liked to have been the grandson of Jesus Christ. ■

Photo by superdeluxe.

Rob, whom my co-workers at Babe’s Billiards called ‘Crackhead Rob’ – mainly to distinguish him from Handsome Rob, the bartender – was a bona fide pool hustler. This was how he paid rent. When he was practising and I asked him if he could teach me how to play, he’d say, in his clipped, upstate-New York State twang, ‘Hell no! I don’t give suckers pool lessons for free!’ And then he’d be seized by a brief, mirthless fit of laughter.

‘Not even if I give you a break on your tab?’

‘You’ll give me a break anyway,’ he’d say. Then, lining up for a shot, he’d add, ‘Just pay attention.’

‘I am paying attention.’

He’d make his shot, straighten up and look at me. ‘You know what I don’t care about? I don’t care about you learning how to play pool. Fact is, you ain’t never gonna have no game, so just stick to pouring beer, it’s your speciality in this life.’

Possibly in his thirties, Rob looked easily fifty in his ill-fitting jeans, grease-stained sweatshirts, and large anonymous white sneakers. He wore those puffy shoes favoured by geriatrics and junkies. Like many of my bar-flies at Babe’s, a pool hall in Northwest Washington, DC, Rob didn’t shave often. Like many of my bar-flies at Babe’s, a pool hall in Northwest Washington, DC, Rob didn’t shave often. By day he was, supposedly, a courier. Whether or not that was true, I’d seen him on occasion buzzing down Wisconsin Avenue in the middle of the night on his feeble moped with his dinky astro-blue helmet on – certainly one of the saddest, funniest, sights I’ve ever seen. My surliest customer, by far, Rob was also one of my favourites. He liked me, too, I’m sure, probably because I was one of the only people who didn’t view him as a worthless rodent.

For a couple months, Rob hung around with this emaciated stripper named Bird Brain. I presume that wasn’t her given name, but that was what she went by, unfortunately. That he was quietly, secretly, in love with Bird Brain was obvious.

When she wasn’t around, I’d ask about Bird Brain and Rob would just wave me off. ‘She’s a fucking idiot,’ he’d declare, which was code for: ‘I can’t stand that she will have sex with anyone but me – she’s killing me!’

Their relationship was never consummated. I know because they both told me so. Like so much that happened at Babe’s, the entire situation was amazingly futile, freighted with crushing sadness. And like everything at Babe’s, it was hilarious. Everyone meant well and everyone was completely fucked: they were all too busy stealing from their neighbour to notice that their own houses were being ransacked.

I’d graduated from college in California earlier that year and had moved back to DC, where I was from. I’d walked into Babe’s Billiards one afternoon because it was near my friend’s house. Ordering a beer from the perky Russian bartender, Veronica, I said I was looking for a job. She asked me if I’d ever tended bar before.

‘Oh, yes, definitely,’ I said although I had not.

Five minutes later, she told me I was hired. (Simpler times, to be sure.)

The following night, I was behind the bar, solo, pretending I knew what I was doing.

The owner, Ted, moved slowly and steadily, like a tarantula. Rob called him ‘Montgomery Burns,’ because he looked exactly like Montgomery Burns. I don’t think I ever saw him smile as he crept around, eyeing us all warily. Ted’s other nickname, popular with the rest of the bar-flies, was ‘The Crypt Keeper.’

Not fond of spending money on anything whatsoever, Ted barely turned the heat on in the winter, so I had to wear a scarf and gloves while working. Conversely, in the summer, it was shorts and T-shirts. His son, Thad, a cheesy blonde cokehead with a goatee who drank staggering quantities of Grand Marnier while on duty, oversaw the place at night. Thad was sleeping with Veronica, who was also a manager.

She left abruptly, in a cloud of scandal, a few months after hiring me. Whatever had happened, it was unsavoury. Everything at Babe’s was unsavoury.

After Veronica left, the other Rob – Rob the handsome bartender – took over managing the bar. Handsome Rob was a pro, he’d tended bar at countless places around town and could do it in his sleep. Handsome Rob understood that, like defence attorneys, bartenders were there to help advance whatever narrative best suited their clients. He had no ambitions beyond serving drinks swiftly and accurately, nothing beyond getting his customers to give him more money than made sense, but he did that very well. Still, he’d gone to the same fancy private school that I went to, graduated eight years before me, and more than once he made me promise that I would not still be tending bar when I was his age. Handsome Rob was a great guy, and everyone adored him. He was charming, wore crisp shirts, nice cologne, and moved with the swift kinesthetic assurance of a professional athlete.

Still, despite his sweetness, to Handsome Rob our regulars were just cattle from whom it was our job to pull as much milk as possible. Whether it was Mo and Patrick who painted houses and drank oceans of Budweiser, or Crackhead Rob or one of Crackhead Rob’s victims, or Mika, the sensible software engineer.

While everyone was a degenerate, some of us hid it better than others. The Good Deacon, for example, was an upstanding African American Catholic, a man of a certain stature in the community, father of several well-adjusted children, loving husband, successful businessman. The Good Deacon showed up every day for two or three beers before sauntering homeward.

On my final day at Babe’s that winter, he suggested that we go get a motel room and watch dirty movies together. He muttered this proposition in a very congenial way, but also very offhand, and then I finally saw that this person who I’d been talking to every day for the last six months had been trying to flirt with me all along.

At the time, I’d pitied the Good Deacon – thought him too enamoured with the façade he’d invented for himself to be himself – but, in retrospect, I understand why he wouldn’t want to give all that up. A glance around the bar on any given night and you’d see a dozen living examples for why being yourself wasn’t necessarily the best policy.

Handsome Rob laughed when I, scandalised, whispered my story about the Good Deacon to him later that night. Of course, he’d long ago figured out that the Good Deacon was trying to have sex with me.

No matter who he was serving drinks to, Rob was unsentimental about the work: despite his swift and chipper manner, he was – precisely like Crackhead Rob – just there to take your money and get you out the door before you made a scene.

When practising his pool game, Crackhead Rob would line up all the balls down the centre of the table and mechanically shoot each one into the same pocket, as if it was just that simple. He missed none of them. He selected a pocket, and then the balls all went there, one at a time. Watching him, I began to notice how he introduced various types of spin to the cue ball, how his attention was as much about controlling the destination of the cue ball as it was aiming for a pocket. Between practice sessions, he’d drink beer and work on the NYT crossword on the bar. This is how I first noticed that he was secretly, sort of, a genius. He finished the crossword every time, nailed it with the same unnerving accuracy as his bank shot.

‘Kennedy’s secretary of defence?’ he’d say.

‘Um,’ I’d say.

A minute later, he’d grunt and write the answer down. ‘Fuck it, Pete, don’t hurt your brain.’

‘Was it one of the Dulles brothers?’ I’d ask, because I’d taken a class on the Cold War in college and I knew a couple things.

He’d just shake his head, squinting at me, then mutter, ‘Fucking private school!’ and guffaw to himself, shaking his head in disbelief.

Rob liked Babe’s because we let him practise on our tables for free and we had twenty-five cent Buffalo wings and five dollar pitchers of Bud Light. The wings and cheap pitchers courted a lot of degenerates, actually, but Rob was by far the most interesting. At two in the afternoon, he’d enter and order He finished the crossword every time, nailed it with the same unnerving accuracy of his bank shot. twenty wings, a pitcher of beer. By the time the happy hour customers started rolling-in, Rob would be on his second pitcher. The regulars hated him, and the rest of the staff hated him, everyone hated him except for Handsome Rob, who didn’t take it upon himself to judge people. Handsome Rob understood that, like defence attorneys, bartenders were there to help advance whatever narrative best suited their clients. The rest of the people at Babe’s talked shit about Crackhead Rob, said he’d gone to prison for selling crack and then he’d ratted on people to get out. That all might have been true – I didn’t ask him, although I saw quite a lot of him that year. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past him to sell crack or rat out people to reduce his sentence. He was an unapologetic opportunist. But I trusted him.

Among his spotty list of virtues, Rob was also extremely honest. Unlike Paul Newman’s character in ‘The Hustler,’ Rob didn’t dupe his mark by playing poorly at first, and then getting better. Rob just preyed on people’s sense of superiority over him. People would just look at him and know that they were better than a dirt bag like that. In this way, he separated them from their money.

Working on his third pitcher by the time his prey began to arrive, Rob would pick the most bent cue from the stack by the door. His opponent, often a twenty-something, would usually have one of those special pool-playing gloves that covers only a few fingers. He’d have his own special cue in a little box. The kid would pat a sack of talcum powder against his left hand, rub his cue with the powder, just in case there was any possibility of friction. He’d meticulously chalk the tip. Rob chalked without thinking, without looking at the chalk or the cue, it just happened, like breathing.

Gambling pool players almost always play nine-ball, because it involves some strategy, and because it’s faster than one-pocket, which our non-gambling old-timers who were always on Table One favoured. There were twenty tables at Babe’s. The old timers played one pocket on Table One by the door, and Rob went anywhere, but did his practice on Table Five, beside the bar.

In the evening, swaying drunkenly beside the table with fresh buffalo sauce stains on his sweatshirt, Rob would hiccup, then say: ‘Sink three balls before I clear the table and you win.’

The kid would smile at me and I would smile back, and then quickly break eye-contact.

‘We’ll start at twenty a game.’ Rob would pause for the next hiccup and then continue: ‘We can go up to forty when you get frustrated. Above that is up to you, but people get ugly up there, from my experience, so I prefer to keep it at forty.’

Then he would crouch down and line up for his break, an eerie stillness coming over his body. Within a couple minutes, the cue ball would be alone on the table and he’d be stuffing a twenty into his pocket. Unlike Paul Newman’s character in ‘The Hustler,’ Rob didn’t dupe his mark by playing poorly at first, and then getting better. He’d light a cigarette and sit down while the kid racked up the balls for the next match. The loser had to rack. You stopped playing when you stopped racking the balls. Rob didn’t talk at all when he played pool for money; he just stared at the table, deep in concentration, and chain-smoked. Later in the night, once he was quite drunk, he’d sometimes yell, like a battle cry: ‘Rack ‘em!’ and then he’d sit down at the bar and drain some of his beer, still watching the table.

At two in the morning, I’d close up.

Sometimes, when he’d taken enough from that night’s kid, Rob would treat me to breakfast at the all-night diner a couple doors down.

The only person who Crackhead Rob had liked in the bar, apart from me and Bird Brain, was Evellyn. A sixty-something grandmotherly-type, she was a waitress in Babe’s small restaurant. She was a waitress her whole life until she died, suddenly, of a stroke one night at her small apartment in the suburbs. One day she was there, and the next she wasn’t. Laura – who was much younger – and who’d been there for more than ten years, had a nervous breakdown as a result of Evellyn’s death and had to be hospitalized.

When Handsome Rob told me about it, I was on the other side of the bar. It was my day off, but I couldn’t resist coming by for a free drink.

‘And Laura? In the hospital?’ I said.

He nodded. When tending bar, he kept his sleeves rolled halfway up his muscular forearms, and when listening to someone intently, he planted his hands on the bar, very wide apart. After a moment, he shook his head. ‘I think, you know, Laura realized that – that she doesn’t want to still be stuck here when she’s Evellyn’s age. I think she realized she didn’t want to die here, right where she’s been standing for her whole adult life.’

‘You think?’ I said uncertainly.

‘Definitely,’ he said.

Rob was projecting, I figured. To him, we were characters in ‘The Iceman Cometh,’ but I didn’t think so. At least the people in that play had pipe-dreams; no one in Babe’s was contemplating the future at all.

I had spent a lot of time hanging out with Laura and Evellyn during the slow day shifts, and Laura was brittle, a fragile bird. The two of them were close, too, they played the coin-operated touch-screen video game system when business was slow. Specifically, they played this game called Monster Madness. I played with them, too. We bummed each other cigarettes. Eventually, I got the high score at Monster Madness and they pretended to be furious with me for pushing their names down in the ranking. I still had the high score when Evellyn died, but her name was right there, three steps below mine. I never played that game again.

Like Handsome Rob, Laura didn’t have hobbies or aspirations. She smoked a lot of cigarettes and wore thick black eyeliner, like a goth, but she had blonde hair and was too sweet to be a goth. I think she wanted our little space to be frozen in time: I don’t think she wanted to escape. I think she wanted it to never end.

Around then, as things were winding down for me at Babe’s, for some reason Crackhead Rob faced off against Buck one night, playing nine-ball. Buck was one of the old timers who played on Table One. I remember it was clear and cold that night, and they played on Table Five, beside the bar. I’d never seen Buck play Table Five. I don’t know why they played; Rob never explained it to me. I assume he had no one else to play, no suckers on hand, and he’d had enough to drink that he thought he’d see if he could take some money from Buck.

Like most of the old timers, Buck was black, and didn’t say much. A retired bus driver, he had a huge pot belly, but was fairly thin otherwise. Word among the other players was that he was unbelievably good, one of the best in the city. I don’t think I ever spoke to Buck, because he drank non-alcoholic beverages and ordered from Laura, but I remember him well, his Redskins baseball cap, his potbelly, his blue jeans.

Rob must have known he was out of his league, but he liked to put money on pool games, so he took the bait. I don’t know what the spot was, if there was one – that is, I don’t know if they’d handicapped the game to try to even it out. Probably not. Buck moved slowly and played defensively. He didn’t bend down much when he shot, and his belly hung there, prominently. With Buck, pool was clearly an intellectual exercise and he was scarily cool at the table.

One pocket, the old timers’ game of choice, is won by defence. The most important thing is to leave the cue ball in an untenable place With Buck, pool was clearly an intellectual exercise and he was scarily cool at the table. for your opponent, far more important than sinking a ball. If you place the cue ball on the wrong side of the cluster of balls in the center of the table just once, the game is over, you’ve lost. Playing nine ball, Buck employed much the same tactics, but to offensive purposes; after every shot, the cue ball drifted gorgeously into perfect placement for his next shot. More often than not, he ended up banking the nine in and winning before the game was really underway.

By the third game, Rob was visibly rattled. Losing money fast, he even stopped drinking beer. The pros, guys like Rob and Buck, would just assign a pocket to each player, and when a game was done, the loser would drop the cash into that pocket. That night, Rob spent a lot of time hanging around Buck’s pocket, dropping bills.

At the end of the night, Rob was busted. He’d gone to the ATM already and maxed it out, could withdraw no more. The match was over. Buck fished the bills out of his pocket, folded them up, slid them into his wallet. Rob sat down, dead sober, at last. He looked traumatized.

They said nothing to each other at the end. Buck just took his money and walked away.

After what seemed like an appropriate pause, I said, ‘Drinks are on me, man.’

Rob just lit a cigarette. Then, a few minutes later, he stood up and left.

Not long after their game, I bought a one way ticket to Ecuador.

My days of living like I was a character in a Tom Waits song were over. I never entered Babe’s Billiards again. What happened was that I quit and, as if it’d been arranged just for me, the whole place imploded right behind me. Evellyn was dead, Laura in the hospital, and everyone else was eyeing the exits. A year later, I came back to the States for a wedding, and Babe’s had already been shuttered.

Over the two years I spent in Ecuador, I wrote about economics for a think tank and After every shot, the cue ball drifted gorgeously into perfect placement for his next shot. lived alone on a hillside in a charming house with two dogs, a tall wall around my yard. I had bars on my windows to stop the thieves. A maid cooked beef bones in oatmeal for the dogs, and a gardener tended to the flowers once a week. There were broken bottles cemented to the tops of my walls, but the thieves were eager. One morning I awoke and tried to water my petunias, but found the garden hose was gone. Someone had climbed over the broken glass and fought off the dogs to steal a mouldy hose.

The cab drivers, every day, tried to filch me – I am, after all, tall and white. When they realized that I lived in Quito and spoke Spanish, they’d lay off, but it was very exhausting getting hustled all the time like that. All of it was exhausting, all the batting off of thieves. I was mugged six times in one year, often by the same people. It got so that I’d see them approaching and would step against the wall, hold my arms out.

Once, when I was playing a game of pool, I actually told a guy not to steal my jacket while I took a shot, and then, when I took the shot, he stole my jacket. After that, I promised fifty dollars to whichever unscrupulous thug could retrieve my jacket first. Within twelve hours, I had it back. The guy who had stolen it had been beaten bloody by several Columbian gangsters on the floor of his mother’s living room. For the next six months, I saw him often in the neighbourhood, but he never looked me in the eye again.

Thieves honour. I’d learned that already. That and more. The fact is, you might be a better pool player than me, you probably are, but I’ve got twenty dollars says I’ll beat you anyway.

It’s been twelve years but I think of those people all the time. I think about Patrick the Irish house-painter who was an inexpert alcoholic (he’d already be making a scene, aggressively hitting on the demure Washington ladies who’d just stopped in from the cold by his third beer, so much so that I sometimes had to ask him to leave, even though he could easily drink another ten pints of beer without getting much drunker). Another house-painter from that same crew, Mo, sucked down Budweiser and was smart and self-assured, and I considered him a friend for a while. Mo was a working class black man who’d grown up in DC, one of the most segregated cities in the United States; he was always rolling his eyes at my upper middle class white man angst. I’ve tried to look him and a few of the others up on Facebook, but I don’t even know their last names. I think of the Good Deacon with his golden cufflinks, crisp pocket squares, Cheshire cat grin. I think of the two Robs most often, but I also think of Buck and Ted and Thad and Laura and poor sweet Evellyn, with her Marlboro Light 100s and her melancholy grin. We had a blast. Then again, maybe I was the only one having fun. ■

1949-2011

The essays of Christopher Hitchens, who died today, span four decades and themes as diverse as Leonard Cohen and al-Qaeda. In all of their poetic rigour and flinty contrarianism they are united by a shared quality: the vibrancy of his voice. Even in the final year of his life – which he said he lived ‘dyingly’ – there is a tenacity, verve and wit entirely his own.

In one of his essays for Granta Hitchens is in full fiery flow when taking in the first day after Ceauşescu’s fall in then Austro-Hungary (first published in Spring 1990), which begins:

On Christmas night, stuck in freezing fog at the Austro-Hungarian border, I had telephoned my best Budapest friend and spoken across an insufferable line, fed with near-worthless forint coins cadged from a friendly guard. ‘Have you heard?’ said Ferenc, ‘Ceauşescu has been assassinated.’ The choice of word seemed odd. ‘Murdered’ wouldn't do, of course, in the circumstances. ‘Killed’ would have been banal. ‘Executed’ – too correct. And Ferenc always chooses his terms with meticulous care. No, a baroque dictator who was already a prisoner, and an ex-tyrant, had somehow been ‘assassinated’. I took the first of many resolutions not to resort to Transylvanian imagery. Yes, there had been King Vlad, known as the Impaler, reputed to drink blood as well as spill it. Every writer and subeditor in the trade was going to be dusting him off. Still, I found myself wondering just how Ceauşescu had been ‘assassinated’ after his capture. A stake through the heart? I had read that the chief of Ceauşescu’s ghastly Securitate was named General Julian Vlad, but I was determined to make absolutely nothing of it.

His sensitivity to the way that language shapes the outcome of a conflict or revolution is in evidence in this piece on ‘Nicaragua’ (first published Spring 1985):

Towards the close of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge – faced with a miserable Mexican exile, and oppressed by the spread of totalitarian ideas – offers a number of reflections on the fate of the betrayed Russian revolution and the ‘socialist experiment’:

It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is this very sensible?

I went to Nicaragua, as I had gone to Cuba, Angola, Zimbabwe, Grenada and other such loci, not as a tourist of revolution but as an amateur biochemist. How were the bacilli doing? What germs were emerging as the dominant strain? In other words, would Nicaragua turn into another example of frowsty barracks socialism, replete with compulsory enthusiasm, affirming only the right to agree?

I went to Nicaragua determined not to come away saying things like, ‘You have to remember the specific conditions – the blockade, the sabotage, the CIA . . .’ The Sandinistas make large claims for a revolution in liberty – socialism with a human face – and for a new kind of American state that fuses the best of two opposing world systems. This time, they seemed to say, would be different. It didn't seem patronizing to take them up on it.

Both ‘Nicaragua’ and ‘On the Road to Timişoara’ are available in full to our subscribers in our online archive. ■

Photo by Dianne.

When the fish in Karachay Lake, south of the Ural Mountains, Russia, went blind, not everyone stopped eating them. It was only a game. The boys, bored on a hot summer day, would wander down to the lake through the forest and pull off shirts and pants and splash into the murkiness, jump on one other’s backs and spit lake water into the air from their sunburnt lips. It was always warmer in Karachay than any other lake. When they had cooled off, they stood with their toes shoved into the silty bottom, knees bent, eyes flicking over the surface, hands hovering. The fish came to nibble at their calves and ankles, and even blind they could turn and flick away from the boys’ diving hands as fast as light winking off glass, as if turned by some secret code.

The fish had milky-blue eyes that bulged and reminded the boys of the old Red Army soldiers The fish had milky-blue eyes that bulged and reminded the boys of the old Red Army soldiers that sometimes wandered into the village and sat with tin cups and crusts of salt dried around their lids and lashes, stunned and hungry. The fishes’ gills opened and closed in panicky gasps and seized in the boys’ hands until the boys knocked them on the head. They filleted them and roasted them over a small fire, plucking the hot white meat from the sticks.

Once, one of the boys caught a fish and yelled at the others to come see. They splashed towards him where he stood with his catch held far from his skinny white chest. It was a small carp, slick and silver-brown with fat grey lips and both of its eyes on one side of its head. The boys laughed and poked at it, brought it back to the shore and sliced it open on a hot rock in the sun. They dug around in its guts looking for other oddities, and then dared each other to eat chunks of it raw. One boy picked up the head and flung it at the back of another with a bloody thunk.

Sometimes after they had eaten, the boys climbed the limbs of the old fir trees. At first, they called out to one other, threw twigs and cones and laughed as they rocked, hands sticky with sap, but as the sun dropped their voices did too, and they went silent as the last birds called from their nests, a forest of boys swaying in the twilight. Their fathers had done this before them. And their fathers, too. Later, they dropped to the ground and went home stinking of fish and lake grass, to mothers who scolded them and scrubbed their backs and arms and faces in water so hot it turned their soft skin pink.

When the restriction notices went up in town about drinking water from the Techa River or eating the fish in it or in the lakes nearby, everyone obeyed at first. Forty miles of dark foam floated on the surface like a frothy plague of water turned to blood. Trucks left the nearby Mayak chemical plant and travelled the road like a conveyor belt to the shores of the river. They dumped load after load into it and then even more into Karachay Lake. There were rumours of a poison reaching the Atlantic.

One day, men came and dammed the Techa River, and then, after years of thin living and war and empty chairs at the dinner table were like gravestones, there was a rich riverbed that had once been under water. Everyone who could grabbed a piece and planted it. People started drinking the water again. A feast of fish, but the fish were blind.

Gardens were sown and harvested and sown and harvested, and the boys, nearly men, began to see Rusalka in their dreams. She swam through the waters of Karachay Lake, her tail silver-green as she rode the small waves like sea foam, and was carried to the shore where the boys watched, tied in silence. When her tail touched sand, it split, formed feet and legs and she walked from the water toward them, smooth, naked as a pearl. The boys followed her to the edge of the beach where the fir trees met the shore. She climbed and perched in the arms of the branches, singing songs that made their breathing turn to clacking as they climbed the tree after her and their mothers in the shape of flopping fish on the rocks called out to go no nearer. And then at once they were in the water drowning. Rusalka’s silver hair in their mouths, her tail around their legs, pulling them deeper. The boys woke drenched and panting, gums swollen, blood smeared over their white teeth.

The Mayak plant was burning. A two-and-a-half metre thick concrete lid shot into the air and landed thirty metres away. Dissolved nuclear waste rose in smoke, collected like a cloud and shadowed the land five miles The boys woke drenched and panting, gums swollen, blood smeared over their white teeth. wide, raining over the province of Chelyabinsk. It rained on the houses, the thatched roofs, the gardens of carrots and potatoes and leeks; it rained on the cattle, the sheep, the pigs lolling in the cool mud; it rained on the forest of fir and pine along the rivers, on the meadow grasses of the steppes, the clover and caragana shrubs, on the badgers and the polecats and the bears digging for bugs in the damp under rocks. And it blew in the open windows, settled on the baked bread, on the jugs of milk, and on the boys eating at the table, drinking from tin cups.

Then the fish weren’t blind, they were dead. And the boys weren’t boys anymore, they looked like old men, aching and brittle, faces red and splotchy, vomiting and weak. Skin sloughed off their cheeks and foreheads and hands in large sheets, while their mothers eyed them at dinner with growing terror and the food that none of them could now eat.

The towns along Techa River were gathered up like fruit, first one, and then months later another, and then another. The army came and notices were posted again, and the people were collected and carried away from their homes. Their houses were burned and the top layer of their land scraped from the earth, grey scabs of rock where nothing grew again, the wild animals as homeless as the people, the trees and flowers and grasses, homeless. Dead fir trees in the dead ground. And none of the villagers were told why.

They went to the hospitals – the boys and mothers and sisters and fathers all nauseated and weak and sweating in the night. Rusalka called to them all from Karachay. There was a bead of sweat on the doctor’s upper lip when he called it blood disease and vegetative syndrome, but no one knew what vegetative syndrome was, so the people called it river sickness. The doctor could do little to help, so the people went home again. The mothers boiled broth and said prayers in the four corners of each room, the fathers flipped through old seed catalogues, and the sisters chose names for babies that would never be born.

The boys died panicked and confused in homes not their own, and Karachay Lake shrunk while trucks from the Mayak plant, patched and producing again, slipped their loads into the dark water. The dusty banks of the old lake absorbed the secrets they planted in it, and it contracted deeper and deeper into itself, until it was a wet shadow on the dry land.

One night, maybe the townsfolk say, the ghosts of the boys climbed the dead fir trees along the shore and called to Rusalka until she came up from the lake, wailing. Her smooth skin was covered One night, maybe the townsfolk say, the ghosts of the boys climbed the dead fir trees along the shore and called to Rusalka until she came up from the lake, wailing. in coarse black hair, eyes growing on her hands and neck, her feet webbed and her breasts gaping wounds. As she rose, her wailing grew louder and the dead boys moaned with her, cracking the dome of imposed silence that sealed Chelyabinsk. She started to spin, slowly at first and then gathering speed, flying like a cyclone over the dried lake bed, gathering up the poisoned dust like a spinning spool with thread, she moved to the centre of Karachay, rose high above the trees, a screeching storm, until she finally burst, and all the throbbing dust released into the winds that carried it out to the villages for miles around. The fir trees shook in its wake, leaves and needles and seeds sucked into the rush, and the ghost boys felt their ghostly skin prick at the evil passing of it.

The Karachay dust blew its way over four hundred thousand people, while men in white coveralls came to the lake and filled the bed with concrete blocks to pin the poison down. But the land had already revolted and would not be contained. A lake turned weapon – the concentrations so lethal that a single hour standing on its shores changed any living thing into a ghost.

And people turned afraid, as the land turned against them.

In 2009, Artyom Sidorkin had trouble breathing. He was a boy-faced man with red hair and a soft voice; when he spoke, he lowered his eyes. He lived in the Ural Mountains, four hundred kilometres away from the Mayak chemical plant, and he did not want to go down to the city of Izhevsk and the hospital there. He hated the city, but he was coughing up blood. It was like needles in his chest when he inhaled, and no one wondered what this meant.

In the Udmurtian Cancer Center, Dr Kamashev showed Artyom the scan of his lungs. Even cancer cells only want to live; life will take hold of life wherever it can. The doctor traced the outline of the tumour with the tip of his ballpoint pen. It was so large that even he, this man from the mountains, could tell where it was. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of these before’, Kamashev said, ‘and it must be removed at once.’ Artyom nodded; he was twenty-eight years old, and he was going to die.

Even cancer cells only want to live; life will take hold of life wherever it can. What the surgeon would say later is that when he made the incision and prepared to remove the tumor, he stopped and blinked three times before calling someone else to come see. What Artyom Sidorkin would say is that nobody knows anything; no one understands how this could have happened. When the surgeon opened Artyom’s ribs and cut into his lungs, he found nestled in the red folds and poking into the capillaries a small, green fir tree. ■

The second and last installment of Wiam El-Tamami’s diary of the ongoing turmoil in Egypt.

Monday 21 November

On the metro home, a man (one of State Security’s many informants?) was swearing that he’d just been at the midan and that there was nothing going on, that it was all lies. The people sitting around shouted him down, saying they’d seen the videos with their own eyes, police beating and shooting, setting the square on fire, dragging a dead man into a rubbish heap. Suddenly the whole carriage was ablaze with conversation, everyone talking about Tahrir, and the consensus was that the police are the same as they have always been – brutal and merciless – and that it had to stop (though there was no mention of the hallowed army’s role in the bloodshed). The man got off the metro, silent and sheepish. The revolution was once again at a rolling boil, and we were reaching that point when people were once again behind us. I felt somehow in alignment with things, at rest in a way I hadn’t felt in a long while. Today I had been exactly where I was meant to be.

Abdalla got shot in the night. A live bullet hammered through his right leg, shattering his shin bone. While he was down, they shot him twice more with birdshot pellets, one in his shoulder, one in his thigh.

Tuesday 22 November

I’ve never seen the square so charged as I did on Tuesday. It was a little after midday and there was none of the milling around that characterized even the headiest days of the ‘first’ revolution. In January and February there was the humour, the signs, the rings of song and dance, the explosion of creativity, the smiles and sense of camaraderie. Today people were marching, chanting, stony-faced and resolute. By late afternoon it was packed, one of the most crowded days the square had ever seen.

We’d marched to the midan from Mustafa Mahmoud mosque, along the same route marches had taken on the 25th and 28th of January. We chanted Yasqut Yasqut Hokm Al-‘Askar – Down Down With Military Rule. We chanted Fil Tahrir Fi Nas Betmoot – People are Dying in Tahrir. We chanted Horreyya! – Freedom! – four rhythmic claps and arms stretched wide into the air.

We called on onlookers to join us, asking why they were silent: had they got their rights, did their brothers not die? The reaction was reassuring. A lot of people had come out to watch, some cheering us on from their balconies. When we chanted The revolution was once again at a rolling boil, and we were reaching that point when people were once again behind us. Inzil! Inzil! (Come out! Come out!) a young man at a window pointed to the baby he was cradling with a smile and a shrug, but pumped his fist to let us know he was with us in spirit. Many stood on the pavement, filming the march with their cameras and mobile phones. Some faces were inscrutable, but I sensed none of the hostility or disdain that constituted the usual reaction to demonstrations in previous months. By the end of the march, our numbers had swelled.

We went to the hospital to see Abdalla. He had been brought in the night before, but had to wait eight hours to go into surgery. Ambulances screeched in front of the Accident & Emergency entrance nonstop, hauling in scores of critically injured protestors from the square, but the ones who would die if they were not operated on immediately – the ones who had been shot with live bullets in the head or chest – had to be seen to first. He waited in a line in front of the operating theatre – one out, the next one in.

It was a relief to see that he was still able to smile and joke, despite being dizzy and nauseous from the anaesthetic, despite the two metal plates that were now in his leg and the long weeks of recovery to come. I was amused at how, even under these humbling circumstances, this gawky man-boy maintained his strangely princely manner. ‘Excuse me, I’m about to vomit,’ he would announce before leaning over the side of his bed and doing so carefully into the bin; and, ‘I bid you goodnight’ in an ironic classical Arabic, before his eyelids drooped down.

As we left the hospital a small crowd had gathered around the television in the lobby. Tantawi was giving a speech. No admission of responsibility for the bloodshed; he’d ‘accepted’ the puppet government’s resignation; the elections would go on as planned, despite calls for a postponement, despite the fact that many parties and candidates (but not, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, who were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations) had suspended their campaigns in protest. His eyes were sunken, his voice higher-pitched than I had imagined. I realized I’d never heard him speak before. There were lines lifted word-for-word from Mubarak’s first speech ten months earlier, the familiar weak protestations that he had never sought power. We’d played this tired game before – best of three? I was happy to see that everyone watching was waving him away in disgust. A middle-aged woman called out at the screen, ‘You’ll go too, just like the one before you, you’ll go.’

Two young men outside the hospital’s front door were giving out cloth masks. Even a couple of miles from the midan, the effects of the tear gas were felt, and as we got closer our skin began to sting, our eyes to stream. We walked in, trying to get away from Mohammad Mahmoud, to a place where we could catch a breath, but the gas seemed all-pervasive, even deep into the square. The cloth surgeon’s masks were no good now: we fumbled with our black plastic masks, strapping them on and trying to inhale as we picked our way through the landscape strewn with people stumbling around, faces red, eyes streaming, some coughing and gasping for breath. I felt nauseous. The strange thing was no bombs had been fired directly into the square, and there was none of the white smoke that accompanies them. Some said it was just the wind blowing the gas our way, but it felt too persistent to be a gust of wind. A girl, tears coursing down her face, was saying, ‘This gas is different, I swear, it’s different even from yesterday’s.’ A woman told a man that she was five months pregnant, that she had been helping out in Mohammad Mahmoud, and her doctor had just told her that the gas she’d inhaled could cause serious harm to her baby. Hala suddenly felt weak: she seemed barely able to stand and complained of stomach pains. We walked her out of the midan, along Kasr el-Nil bridge, to put her into a taxi home. Along the way we saw a teenage boy passed out, his friends crowding around him. At first they were trying to revive him with water and pats to his cheeks, but as his face began to turn blue, they scooped him up, clumsily, all limbs, and rushed off in the direction of the field hospital.

When I got home I stripped off everything I was wearing, including socks and underwear, and rolled it all into a ball. I pushed it into the washing machine and took a shower. Then I went online. On Facebook and Twitter people were talking about the gas. I read an article that claimed that the metro ventilation openings scattered throughout the square had been used to disseminate it. A friend of mine had set Even a couple of miles from the midan, the effects of the tear gas were felt, and as we got closer our skin began to sting, our eyes to stream. up a task force to investigate this new gas. He suspected it might be CR – a carcinogen, banned in the US for riot control, lethal in large doses. ‘The U.S. military classification for this chemical agent,’ I read on Wikipedia, ‘is combat class chemical weapon causing serious side effects for humans.’ My smiling profile picture seemed incongruous with the increasingly grim news. The following day two friends would report coughing up blood, and a doctor at the field hospital in Tahrir – a young woman named Rania – would go into a coma and die when the hospital was directly hit with round after round of the gas.

All night long I thrash around. Into my dreams seep thoughts of toxic gas, and I wonder, in a paranoia that half-sleep magnifies, about my hair, long and tangled and snaking around me, my hair that I have not washed because it was late and cold and I was tired, about my hair contaminating the pillow and sheets and the covers I pull over my head.

Wednesday 23 November

It has become normal for a friend like Hala to turn ferocious, suddenly, on the phone, saying God curse them all, God take revenge, before I used to have a bit of sympathy for the lower-down officers but just look at the facts – one side is fighting for a cause, the other beating and shooting and brutalizing and for what? Just to follow orders? They’re monsters just like their bosses, their hearts are just as blind.

For some reason I don’t feel anger.

The hospital again, then back to the midan. Word on Twitter is that they’re arresting people around the entrance closest to us. We buy medical supplies but distribute them among our backpacks instead of carrying them in boxes and plastic bags. I remember now the image of medical supplies confiscated and thrown into the river in early February, I remember how people were detained for carrying even large quantities of food in the vicinity of the square. We have to plan our entrance carefully. We take a taxi, then veer off left just before the entrance, and get out to walk through the back alleyways. We jam on our gas masks, mine is too tight and choking me, but there was no time to mess around with it. We walk to the first field hospital on the way. We’re about to offload all our bags when a doctor appears. That’s enough, he says, taking just a few bottles. He says it’s better to give a few bottles to each of the field hospitals if they need it, and asks us pointedly keep the rest with us until tomorrow. ‘Otherwise they will be abused,’ he says in English. I’m not sure what he means. The square feels strange, threatening. It’s only 10 p.m. but it feels far too late to be outside. We stumble through it, breath short, eyes blind with gas-tears, and it feels like a warzone, huge piles of rubbish, the haze of gas and bonfire smoke, young men with bandaged heads and arms in casts lying on the edges under thick rough blankets, sirens, sirens, the incessant scream of ambulance sirens, and as we go down into the underground, hordes of young men are coming towards us, heading the opposite way up to the square, young guys in goggles and cloth masks and gas masks, some with scarves covering their faces, looking like an advancing army.

Thursday 24 November

The fighting stopped on Thursday. Five days too late, the army decided to build a concrete wall on Mohammad Mahmoud to separate the two sides, as though they, too, were not a party to this. The Minister of the Interior denied that a single bullet had been shot, rubber or live. A press conference with two members of the military junta took place during which they made similarly ludicrous statements. The Confederacy of Dunces. Tantawi appointed as new puppet prime minister a man called Ganzoury who had been prime minister in the nineties, during the Mubarak era, presiding over an honourable roster of corrupt ministers, many of whom were now in jail. Twitter was awash with jokes at the seventy-eight-year-old’s expense: the hashtag immediately assigned to him was #GanzouryTimes. A group of activists relocated their sit-in to the cabinet building to protest the appointment of a puppet minister to a puppet government. On Thursday morning one of them was run over by a Central Security armoured vehicle.

Friday 25 November

Over the weekend the square became carnivalesque again. Fireworks were set off, their sharp cracks making me jump, my heart hammering in my chest, until I realized what they were. Too raw, still, too close. The march that morning was led by Ahmad Harrara, a young dentist who’d lost his right eye on 28 January, and his left eye on Saturday, 19 November. I saw several young men in the march with a bandage secured to one side of their face, covering one of their eyes. Again, the eyes, again and again, they shoot for the eyes. I had an image of a whole generation of young men wearing eye patches; our children will see them in the street and know why. The Kasr el-Nil Bridge that leads to the square is flanked by a pair of large stone lions on either end. On Friday someone had covered the right eye of one of the lions with a big white bandage.

Talks about a civilian council or national salvation government to replace the military junta were underway and had been for days, but the politicians dithered and dallied in their back rooms. Tahrir was once again howling, and Tahrir was once again leaderless, but this time it did not work to its advantage.

Monday 28 November

On Monday I woke up in a rage about the elections. This past week, new life had been breathed into our revolution, but for that to happen, for public anger to have reached that second tipping point, there was a great pool of blood – ninety dead, at the last count, and eight thousand injured. And now it has passed, and nothing has happened. Now it’s all last week, and people have forgotten. The regime still stands, monstrous and unapologetic. They have fed us this sham of an election, knowing that the span of our collective memory is – for those who are trying to roll the tape backwards, to trap us in an eternal loop of déjà vu – mercifully short.

On Monday I read about the big turnout for the first day of the elections, thousands of people standing patiently in hours-long lines. I read the words ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’, I read about a sixty-year-old woman holding her pinkie aloft, proudly purple-inked, saying this is the first time she has ever voted in her life. I don’t know where the tears came from, but out they poured. I felt like a top that had been twisted tight for one long week, and had suddenly been sent spinning.

Tuesday 29 November

On Monday I raged, and on Tuesday I went to vote. My instinct had been to boycott, and I still feel that was the strictly moral choice. My decision was a response to the call from some activists for the need to fight this battle from within the political arena as well as on the streets. There was also the argument that the only people who were considering a boycott were the liberal revolutionaries, whose chances at a political stake were slim and would not bear further erosion. In any case, I went to vote. It was uneventful. My electoral committee was virtually empty. I looked at the huge ballot paper with its incongruously childish candidate symbols (mango or dustbin or pistol?) and chose The Revolution Continues. I made my mark, going over it several times with my pen, the ink pooling thicker and darker.

I know it’s far from over. I know it will take years. I know, I hope, that things will not go back to the way they were, that we will not succumb to the magic sleep-dust. But I just wonder. I did not know any of the people who died in January and February. It’s getting closer, you see. Every wave will be more violent, will radicalize people who were once far from the front linesDuring the Maspero massacre in October, a young man died whom I later found out to be a friend of a friend. Last week two of my friends were wounded, as well as many more people I know. It’s getting closer, you see. Every wave will be more violent, will radicalize people who were once far from the front lines, as the bullets become no longer an abstraction but real steel in the limbs, the eyes, the heartflesh of their loved ones. I remember on Sunday wanting to ask Hani if he was not afraid to die. At some point in the week I began to understand, and the question became moot.

Two days ago a shipment arrived at Suez port from the United States, consisting of 7 tonnes of tear gas, with 14 more on the way. Today it made its way safely to the storage facilities of the Interior Ministry in Cairo. ■

In the first of a two-part diary, Wiam El-Tamami writes from Cairo about the violence that continues to engulf Egypt.

Photo by Gigi Ibrahim.

Monday 28 November

I woke up in a rage about the elections. A violent, sputtering rage, bordering on revulsion. I felt like a dog that had been fed a teething toy to stop his howling about a wide-open wound.

I couldn’t get the sign out of my mind, raised by an old man in Tahrir: ‘If Tantawi can’t accept my sowt in a vast square, will he accept it in a ballot box?’ The word for ‘voice’ and ‘vote’ is the same. And here we were, on the first morning of an election that may well be rigged, for a parliament that is likely to be powerless, under a regime that is ushering us forward into this farce to distract from the fact that it had spent the past week killing, maiming and brutalizing those who had spoken out against it. All while the blood spilled was still warm.

I raged, and raged, and remembered last Monday.

Monday 21 November

We walked into an alleyway of shops selling industrial safety equipment. We chose one at random; the man knew why we were there. He showed us the gas masks, black plastic with side filters and an orange snout. We asked to see the safety goggles too. My friend Chitra wondered idly whether helmets might not also be a good idea. Mahmoud, a writer, haggled over a big box full of gas masks and goggles, telling the man with a grin that it was his patriotic duty to give us a good price.

We headed towards Tahrir. We’d been this way hundreds of times before, but this time was different. Nervousness crackled between us. A big pack of emergency medical supplies rounded my back like a hump. The sky was overcast, the streets leading up to the square virtually empty. It felt like those eighteen days back in January and February. I didn’t know what to call them now: ‘revolution’ faltered and fell off my lips.

I was last here three days earlier, on Friday. We’d come out in force to protest military rule. In the nine months since Mubarak was overthrown, thousands of people – including artist and activist friends – have been thrown in jail, subjected to torture and sexual assault, sentenced en We headed towards Tahrir. We’d been this way hundreds of times before, but this time was different. Nervousness crackled between us. masse before military tribunals. Maspero, the name of the monolithic television building on the Nile, now collocates with massacre, and the indelible image of tanks mowing down unarmed protesters. State media has been used to whip the general public up into a frenzy against the ongoing strikes and protests – against the very revolution – which was blamed for the rise in crime and a crumbling economy. Just like Mubarak, the military junta was blowing magic sleep-dust into people’s ears, that soporific promise of stability: iss-tiq-raar, iss-tiq-raar, iss-tiq-raar.

We went out on Friday, and then we went home. A small group of people – most of whom had been injured in the revolution’s early days, and had yet to see any change – decided to stay in Tahrir. On Saturday morning Central Security forces, Egypt’s riot police, violently stormed the sit-in.

Saturday 19 November

I watched the events on Saturday from afar. The square was under attack, and hundreds more people streamed in to defend it. I’d been in most of the protests since 25January. I’d marched and chanted, translated testimonials and delivered supplies, posted news and tried to get the word out as best I could. But I had always managed, through a mixture of fear and luck, to veer out of the way of violence. I was not in that core group of activists who had spoken out long before speaking out became widespread, who for years had led small, seemingly futile demonstrations, and who were often the first to head out whenever there was trouble, who put themselves in harm’s way and called on others to do the same. And I was certainly not the young man who had stood in front of an armoured vehicle to stop it or the hundreds of others who stood on the front lines, facing the bullets with bare chests. I admired the courage of the former camp, envied their unwavering belief. As for the latter, I could not relate to them at all. What did it take to step out onto that brink of self-sacrifice? The word heroism doesn’t mean much to me. What does is human life: our small, rugged, dirt-beneath-nails existence. I don’t believe in dying for a cause, I said to myself, I believe in living for one.

Malek was in that band of activists. I’d met him briefly two summers earlier, over a dinner table packed with friends and glasses. On Friday I saw him with some of my friends at the downtown restaurant everyone heads to for a break during protests. He was wearing yellow, leaning against the table, looking lion-like as always. I talked books with a mutual friend. On Saturday Malek lost his right eye to a birdshot pellet.

Sunday 20 November

By Sunday, I felt depleted. I wanted to hear nothing more of Tahrir, to blank it out for today, this all-consuming thing that had taken over our lives for the past ten months. Petulantly, I wished I was elsewhere, that the choices I had to make today were limited to what I would eat, where I would go with friends, what word to put before which. But Tahrir is unavoidable. My sister called me from Dubai, paused for a beat after my ‘hello’ to listen to my quiet surroundings and said, ‘Obviously you’re not there.’

I called Hala, who was. She said she was sitting in front of the Mugamma building, where people came to rest from the fighting. Her voice sounded deflated. I was glad to hear there were still safe spots in the square. This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist – and I, having been a watcher for over a day now, had forgotten.

At 3 p.m., I grudgingly decided to go. Fear and inertia would keep their grip on me for two more hours, inhaling a constant stream of news on Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly I was up, and I could not remember how I got there. In the words of Derrida: the moment of decision is madness. I began to pull on clothes: thick jeans, running shoes, warm hoodie, scarf. I wrote down a list of the medical supplies needed and was debating whether to take vinegar or coke, our trusty anti-tear-gas aides, when I got a call from a friend I had been to many a demonstration with.

‘Where are you?’ she demanded.

‘Home, heading over now . . . ’

‘Stay where you are!’ she said, her voice rising. ‘The army has stormed the square and is shooting live fire!’

‘Are you . . . sure?’ I heard myself mumbling, my heart gone cold.

‘Stay where you are!’ she repeated, as though I hadn’t heard. She was shouting now. ‘THE ARMY HAS STORMED THE SQUARE AND IS SHOOTING LIVE FIRE!’

I called Hala. It rang twice. She answered, her voice mangled.

‘I’m choking on my own tears . . . we’re safe . . . we ran, found a place . . . choking . . . can’t speak . . .’

Tahrir is empty. They streak across it, setting it ablaze: the tents, a lone motorcycle, the new banner proclaiming The People Want a Civilian This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist – and I, having been a watcher for over a day now, had forgotten.Ruling Council. The square is on fire, many small fires. Slowly, people regroup in the downtown alleyways, amidst vicious street fighting, and make their way back to their midan. More and more join them as the night wears on. If they had let a few dozen people stay in the central garden of the square, none of this would have happened. Now Tahrir was filled with thousands, who used the iron railings to bang out a ragged beat to their chants against the military and police, amidst the incessant wail of ambulance sirens.

Reports on Twitter were of more than thirty corpses in Zeinhom morgue, many of them dead from live bullets to the head and heart. The families were being pressured to sign releases claiming other causes of death, in exchange for their children’s bodies.

I called Hani at night. I knew he had been with Hala earlier, and I assumed she meant him too when she said ‘we’re safe’. His phone was switched off. My roommate came home and told me that two of our friends were now in Mohammad Mahmoud, where most of the fighting was taking place, throwing rocks. I had spent the eighteen days with them both, and could not imagine two people less likely to be engaged in what now amounted to trench warfare. One was all bark and no bite, who ran at the sight of his own shadow; the other was like a small Buddha: calm, implacable. I texted Hani, trying to imagine where in the square he would’ve been. A man with love and integrity, a patriot, an engineer, an eternal optimist. I could not imagine him milling about the inside of the square while others were being injured and killed, but I had never seen him display the sort of single-minded ferocity it must take to be on Mohammad Mahmoud.

I tried him again. It rang, finally. He picked up. His voice was soft, calm, happy. Relief. ‘They broke me,’ he said in Egyptian. ‘Emotionally, psychologically . . . ?’ I half-joked, dreading the answer. ‘The military police . . . they split my head open . . . and my arm went up to protect it . . .’ I heard ‘a lot of blood’, I heard ‘ambulance’ and ‘stitches’ and ‘bruises’ and even as he reassured me that he was going to be fine, that miraculously there was nothing broken and no internal bleeding, I felt unutterably bewildered. I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I got it then. This good man. This good man who had stood up for what he believed was right, in the streets of his own city. Viciously beaten, narrowly escaping a worse fate. A small child in me, sad and disbelieving, widened its eyes, asking a question that had never been quite so specific before. Why would anyone want to hurt Hani?

Monday 21 November

We walked into Tahrir carrying gas masks and medical supplies. The atmosphere was tense, people’s faces grim. The field hospital had to be evacuated last night from its spot just off Mohammad Mahmoud, after it was directly hit with volley after volley of tear gas. Two passages had now been cleared through the crowds, demarcated by waist-high lengths of rope and guarded by young men, along which motorbikes zipped, ferrying the injured from the front lines to two tents inside the square that now acted as makeshift hospitals.

We met Hani. His head and right arm were bandaged, and his back clearly smarted whenever anyone would touch it, but he was in good spirits. ‘It’s a lot more crowded than yesterday. They’re just provoking more and more people to come out.’

I eyed the direction of the fighting nervously. Every so often people would break into a run, charging towards us. Hani stayed put, calling with wide arms for people not to run, not to panic. He said it was just the kids at the end of Mohammad Mahmoud running from a new tear gas bomb. He was already an old hand at this new square.

Sunset was approaching: dawn and dusk were their favourite times to strike.

‘If they do come in again, which way do we run?’

‘That way.’ He nodded towards Kasr el-Nil Bridge, not missing a beat.

He added that there was no way they would storm the square again today, not with this many people, not with yesterday’s big media scandal, from which they were still trying to recover. I wasn’t so sure. I wouldn’t put anything past them. They did everything with a crude impunity that was either lunacy or utter stupidity. Or perhaps it was a twisted, Machiavellian genius: their actions were so bumblingly blatant that the general public did not believe the worst could possibly be true of their beloved armed forces.

We went to eat at the usual place, and Hani ordered his usual, and as usual I teased him about his predictability, all of which was reassuring. A waiter we knew, with a straight solemn back and a skinny wolfishness, had small dark holes in his face. Pellets; we’d learned to recognize them by now. I couldn’t imagine him out of his straightlaced black-and-white uniform. I tried to imagine him throwing rocks.

Hani told us how it had happened. He was in Mohammad Mahmoud, close to the square. The vehicle shooting tear gas suddenly surged forward towards them, firing bombs in quick succession. They turned to run, and found a rush of people running towards them from the opposite direction. In a perfectly coordinated move, military police had charged the square from I eyed the direction of the fighting nervously. Every so often people would break into a run, charging towards us. the opposite side. They were caught in this two-armed pincer, a heap of bodies, sticks raining blows, a thousand scenarios rushing through his head as the blood gushed: is this it? The moment I get arrested, get killed? He heard one of the officers say, ‘This is so you won’t come back to Tahrir, you –’ and suddenly something broke and they ran for their lives. After being rushed to the hospital and his wounds taken care of, he was determined to come straight back to the square – if only in defiance of that officer’s words, his blows – but a friend held him back. He returned in the morning.

We went back to the square, meeting Hala along the way. She told us of the stampede when the army attacked, how she and a couple of other girls managed to burrow into the side streets, begging several people in the neighbourhood to let them in as soldiers crawled through the streets searching for protestors. Finally a couple of gas station attendants called them over and unlocked a tiny storeroom for them to hide in. After forty-five minutes in there they started to gasp from a fresh round of tear gas and had to come out, finally finding their way through the back alleys to a friend’s house and temporary safety.

Abdalla joined us, this ambling beanstalk of a boy-man, from his station deep into Mohammad Mahmoud, on the very forefront of the fighting. He still had his toothy grin. He also had pellet holes in his face from Saturday and a bandage on the back of his head where he caught a rock on Sunday.

‘Friendly fire,’ he joked. ‘Those kids don’t know how to throw. But actually, they’re getting seriously good at all this. They know how to pick up a tear gas canister the moment it lands and hurl it right back, how to stand upwind of the smoke and give your back to birdshot.’

We were hanging out by one of the entrances to the square, the mouth of Kasr el-Nil bridge. The mood was far lighter now. Night had fallen, the square was crowded with people and the usual motley crew of sellers with their carts – grilled corn, roasted sweet potato, pumpkin seeds with their white salt-coats – and, though fighting still continued on Mohammad Mahmoud, a direct attack on the square felt less and less likely.

Abdalla got a call, and stood up. ‘The slingshots have arrived,’ he announced with a grin. ‘Time to go try them out.’

Two horse-drawn carriages, of the elaborate gilded types that ferry canoodling lovers along the Nile, drew up in front of us. A group of young men materialized to offload its cargo – dozens of sandbags – and carried them into the square. A little while later, four men passed by carrying a huge tangle of barbed wire. More and more people were pouring in, many carrying supplies for the hospital and sit-in. I saw a group of young women I knew, their expressions grim, carrying thick woollen blankets and boxes full of juice and milk cartons. They looked like they had just got up from in front of their television or computer screens. They looked just the way I must have looked in the morning, when I arrived, before the square had worked its magic on me. Tahrir felt the way it had back in those eighteen wintery days of January–February. Though we’d come here many times in the interim, something was distinctly different this time. Our revolution had been revived.

Read the second and final part of Egyptian Diary here.

Photo by Marek Szczepanek.

At the age of eleven, Adrian, Phil and I discovered that there were lizards on Hayes Common, the South London heath a few miles out from where we lived. We already kept newts in fish tanks, and frogs and toads in old metal baths in our gardens. Now these lizards entered our imaginations. They were difficult to catch. You had to spot them at a distance. They basked in little clearings beside the paths, their brown bodies flattened to warm in the sun. When you saw one, you crept towards it until your hand was near enough to grab. Usually your hand closed on nothing, but sometimes you felt a scrabbling warm body. We got better at it, and by the end of the summer had thirty-three, in a large zinc bath planted with tussocks.

In the next two years, our zoo got larger. We had grass snakes, slow worms, two kinds of frog, two kinds of newt, a huge female toad, a nest of voles and an eel in a water butt. As well as the little brown common lizards, we had big gold-flecked green lizards from the pet shop. Our evenings were spent catching spiders and grasshoppers. At school we were known for this hobby; we took pride in it, felt admired. Other kids asked us for tours of the zoo, and we showed them around condescendingly, feeding a toad or lizard from our fingers, dropping worms into the depths for the eel. We did this with an air of remoteness, as if gazing into the wild distance with an understanding that the others couldn’t share. Our zoo needed something more thrilling, more dangerous, we had decided. We wanted an adder.

But how would we catch one? We had considered this question. An adder picked up by the tip of the tail wouldn’t be able to bring its head up to bite, Phil Our zoo needed something more thrilling, more dangerous, we had decided. We wanted an adder. announced. You could safely dangle it into a collecting bag. This he had discovered in an old book, written, it said, for boys who loved adventure. But don’t pick up baby adders, the book warned, for these were capable of curling up to bite you, and were full of poison. For adult vipers, the method was safe, and better than grabbing behind the head, because a snake held at the neck might edge its head sideways and put a fang into your finger. We nodded wisely.

When we next met, Adrian produced an old biker’s glove, a thick leather gauntlet that surely the fangs wouldn’t pierce. But we only had the one.

In our largest zinc bath, we planted tussocks and arranged logs, working at creating the look of a wild place where adders would bask in the hot stillness; a place where we would creep up through bracken and see them, and catch our breath. For the lid, we stretched net-curtain and wire netting in a wooden frame, with foam rubber glued to the underside. This would be our zoo’s tiger. It mustn’t escape.

Then, on a hot May morning we set out, cycling through the suburbs and freewheeling headlong down the great chalk drop into the weald valley, aiming for the heaths of Ashdown Forest. It was 1968. We were thirteen.

And then, just yards from the road, everything went still. I was poised above an adder, which looked up at me, its tail-tip wriggling like a worm. The furious little face was oily black. White scales like tiny pearls lined the top of the mouth. Adders have faces intense with hatred; hot with it. The eyes were like blood-blisters.

What had caught my eye in the heather was the zigzag, a pattern too clear to look natural. The shadows cast by bracken leaves have similar shapes. In these shadows, the zigzag evolved, presumably, but somehow the scatter of light and shade on the forest floor became on the snake a regular wavy line. It breaks up the animal’s outline. Hawks and crows see the snake from above. People do too. When the snake moves, winding through stalks and shadows, the zigzag goes in different directions, confusing the eye. On a motionless snake, it is insolently clear. In the heath’s debris, the zigzag looks stylized, like a printed or ceramic pattern, a logo or uniform, a badge of power and purpose. When we thought of adders, the other creatures in our zoo seemed weak and flustered – little biscuit-coloured lizards and soft, gaping frogs. They were low status. An adder was deadly cool.

The zigzag is common to all Europe’s vipers. It is one of nature’s design classics. On some, such as the Nose-Horned Viper of southeast Europe, the colours seem freshly painted. Chocolate on pale grey, scarlet on pink – a touch might make them smear. The Nose-Horn comes from a land of white light and black shadows. In comparison, our adder, the Adder or Northern Viper, has muted colours. Females are the assorted browns of dry grass, old bracken, leafmould and sand. Males are light grey marked in black. Rarely, the males are white with black markings; the females ghostly pink. This viper of northern Europe lives under changing skies. Shadows cross the heath like changes of mood. Browns and purples intensify, then lighten. The adder’s colours sink into the background. Then, at the sun’s touch, they gleam.

‘Here’s one.’ I kept my voice low. Adrian threw the glove, which fell short in deep heather. I didn’t dare move.

‘Grab the tail.’

‘I’ll try.’

I dropped onto a knee, and forward on to my hands. The moss was spongy. A sour smell came up. My thumb felt a thorn. Inching until my head was almost over the adder, I raised my right hand.

Something touched my left.

I looked down and gasped at the huge ginger adder uncoiling beside my hand. Her pale yellow face was an imp’s face with copper eyes. The touch I had felt was her nose on my hand. She approached again, black tongue flickering.

Her eyes burned. The pupils were black and vertical. In a male adder’s dark red eye, the flame is a flare in deep space, far off. His fury has distant origins. The female’s lighter eye burns closer, with intimate malice.

She paused. The tongue was now fully extended, trembling, its tips thin as hairs. At the root it was pink.

A slow hiss started, as her body filled and emptied.

Her bite would be like a dentist’s needle.

But her head turned away. She was gliding into the heather. My fingers grasped the disappearing tail. It felt warm. I pulled her into the open, and stood up shakily, as she twisted and bucked, hissing loudly. She was heavy. Her tail tip coiled round my finger. She threw her head at me, mouth open; I staggered and swung her away. Her underside was reddish grey. She whipcracked, wrenching her body, then the head came towards me again. I stepped back, nearly falling over. ‘God!’ gasped Adrian, coming up behind.

I didn’t know what to do.

The face of a snake is unmoving. No affection, doubt, surprise, curiosity or fear comes into that countenance. It knows everything it will ever know. The eye, behind a hard, transparent scale, does not move or blink.

Adders look wickedly intent. Big flat eyebrow-scales frown towards the nose. The mouth has a long sad line, or an evil grin, or a glum smile as if adders hate being adders and want revenge on everything. They would cry if they could, but their eyes are too hard, in their medieval demon faces. Devils are unhappy, shut out of paradise, but do not know how to be other than devils. This yellow face knew something everyone knows.

Most snakes are ambush predators. They lurk, motionless, choosing the moment to strike. Or, rather, the strike is triggered, by eyes, ground vibrations felt in the jaw, heat-sensors and receptors of chemical traces. But it looks like choice, and the human behaviour it seems to resemble is calculating, spying, manipulative. Snakes give a glimpse of a world with no pity. Stone faces will ignore our pleas. Our vulnerabilities will be exploited, not forgiven. Snakes arouse our fear that the world is like that.

Yet these features are no more than survival adaptations or quirks. We have scales too: our nails. Close up, an adder’s scales look like beautifully filed pointed fingernails, emerging from cuticles of skin.

There are two main ideas about the ancestry of snakes. Aquatic reptiles that later became terrestrial may have had the hard scale to seal their eyes underwater. Or maybe the ancestors were lizards that took to living underground, lost their legs and later returned to the surface. The scale may have shielded their eyes from grit. Vertical pupils cast a sharper image on to the retina, aiding hunting at night. The wide mouth evolved for the swallowing of prey, since the teeth are too weak to tear flesh.

We should see the adder as a sensitive creature, exquisitely alive to its environment; a vulnerable creature, frequently broken; a creature no more callous than other predators. We should. But this is like objecting to vampire films because the vampire is an unfair representation of a human being. It is a serious moral objection – and it fails to consider the appeal of such demons; the needs that they meet.

The evolutionary psychologist Roger Ulrich describes experiments in which people were repeatedly shown images of snakes, and also modern dangers such as handguns and frayed wires. Fears prompted by the modern items faded quickly. Adders have faces intense with hatred; hot with it. The eyes were like blood-blisters. Soon they produced no reaction. But the snakes caused panic every time. There is little danger from snakes in modern Europe. Bees kill many more people; cars huge numbers. But the sight of a snake inspires terror. Another evolutionary scientist, Lynne Isbell, argues that in deep prehistory our relationship with snakes played a major part in the formation of our eyesight, posture, brain-structure and behaviour, since for millions of years snakes were the main predators upon our early primate ancestors. Snakes are deep in our nerves.

They appear in human dreams more often than any other animal, says the biologist and evolutionary theorist Edward O. Wilson. In many cultures they are worshipped. Snakes are symbols for primal forces: death, life, creation, rejuvenation, fertility, eternity, infinity, temptation, treachery, sexual arousal, the phallus, the female libertine, wisdom, knowledge, order and healing. In the Christian story, a snake precipitates the defining crisis between God and the first human beings. The serpent is the ender of our simple bliss, the evil genius, the worm in the bud, the single flaw and the fatal temptation.

We are full of the memory of snakes; primed to watch for them.

And here I was with a big one in my fingers, thrashing wildly.

Adrian held out the coffee jar. I swung the snake towards him. He leaped back, dropping the jar.

‘Go on. It can’t bite while it’s dangling.’

‘You reckon?’ He put on the glove, and again raised the jar. I tried to manoeuvre the snake. Her snout touched the rim. Feeling support, she began to wind her body round the jar. Adey dropped it again. She corkscrewed. I felt her body stretch. Would the muscles tear?

Her head leaped at me again. I swung her away.

And her tail went through my fingertips. She flew, in an arc, towards Adrian, who jumped back. I saw her draped on the heather. Her head moved to point down, and she was gone.

But we did get an adder that day. Phil caught it; freckly Phil, with steady eyes, bushy brown hair and large hands. I can see his face. Girls were always asking about him. But he stayed shy. In his eighteenth year he died, his motorbike ploughing into a pile of roadworks left unlit one night. A sports-car driver, the only witness, denied that he and Phil had been racing. ‘Of course they were,’ said Adrian.

Wild creatures are out in the open. Few live more than a few seasons. Predators swoop, ending life in an instant. An accidental wound can be a death sentence. Will we see that one again? The serpent is the ender of our simple bliss, the evil genius, the worm in the bud, the single flaw and the fatal temptation. Safe at home, we think of the animal, still out there. A snake is gripped by a hawk, or gets away. An animal goes under the wheels or escapes them. Moments ago a consciousness was there. It isn’t now. The fish in another fish’s mouth looks out as if from a hiding place, the fins on the cheeks gently beating. Then the big fish gulps. The toad half-swallowed in the snake’s jaws has a calmly attentive expression. Its golden eye shuts and opens, re-engaging with the world.

Phil caught the adder easily. We were walking beside a high bank. He turned his head, made a quick movement, and a snake was hanging from his fingers, as if taken from a shelf. ‘Got one,’ he said, matter-of-fact. Then his smile got bigger and bigger.

We gathered to look at a small female, russet-brown, squashed against the side of the jar. On her sides the scales were diamond-shaped, emerging from brown skin.

The bath was in Adrian’s garden. Phil had already said he couldn’t keep an adder. His little brother might fiddle with the enclosure, and there were dogs that ran tumbling down the garden. Adrian’s sisters were older than Phil’s brother, and always kept away from his reptiles. He had no dogs. But we began to worry. Next door there was a little girl, a toddler. We imagined the adder getting through the fence.

Our unease grew. After a week, Adrian told us he had begun checking on the snake all the time. One day he phoned, panicking; he couldn’t find it. We took the terrarium to pieces. Out came every log, every tussock. The adder wasn’t there. Three lizards we had put in for food ran frantically about as we searched. They had seemed unworried by their room-mate, and the adder had not eaten since its capture. Feeling scared, we searched Adrian’s garden, finding nothing. ‘What are you looking for?’ called his Mum.

‘Oh, nothing.’

I went back to the bath. It had to be there. Lifting the lid, I noticed a narrow space between the planks. Wedged there was the adder, tight and drab.

‘We’ll have to take it back,’ said Adrian. ‘Unless one of you can keep it. I can’t stop thinking of it getting out and biting someone.’

The snake had grown in power. It had forced us to release it. We were quiet as we cycled to the heath. Shaken from the jar, the adder rolled out in a ball. For perhaps a minute, there was no movement. The ball rolled forward. Our adder’s snout appeared, and her head. Her tongue flickered. We stared silently. Unknotting herself in one long fluid movement, she veered to the left, turned back to the right and continued on into the heather. ■

The film below offers a glimpse of a recent conversation between Granta’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey; two artists from the issue – Kanitta Meechubot and Dinos Chapman (whose drawing adorns the cover of Horror) – artistic director Michael Salu and the audience at The Hospital Club. This is followed by a piece by Michael on commissioning artwork for the issue.

Often, the most frightening thing is facing the other. In our Horror issue, this confrontation with the alien, the unknown, is presented in many forms, from the wraithlike moviegoer in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Starveling’, slinking in and out of a darkened matinee theatre, or a lovelorn tiger stalking through the suburbs in Rajesh Parameswaran’s ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’. The stories in the issue left me wondering if the imagination is capable of conjuring absolute horror without personifying or falling prey to culturally imposed symbols.

From the Victoriana of Stoker and Poe to the pulpy aesthetics of H.R Giger and David Cronenberg we are all accustomed to the rich visual history of horror across the whole gamut of artistic expression. Giger is famed for representations of the body, peeling away the skin and recontextualising our biomechanical structure. Equally Cronenberg (a I wanted to find out what Horror can be today, in a time in which our moral boundaries shift continuously to accommodate political and economic change. director whose work I adore) certainly in the earlier part of his career, unflinchingly set out to examine human physicality, through violence, infection and transformation; a conversation about the ever-shifting shape of the human body. Whilst these works are always compelling, challenging and inspiring, they were also beautiful. In his Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke makes a firm distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, arguing that the sublime induces a sense of being dwarfed or even horrified and beauty a sense of desire to preserve. I dreamed of an image for the cover that set out to achieve the impossible, conjoining both the beautiful and the sublime.

And so I asked the Chapman Brothers.

The Chapman Brothers’ vast body of work has long been an inspiration. Back since they created ‘Disasters of War’ I’ve been transfixed by their social and moral commentary, specifically their relentless engagement with challenging our system of context and identification over the last twenty years or so. I wanted to find out what horror can be today, in a time in which our moral boundaries shift continuously to accommodate political and economic change. With globally accessed news sites able to put you nose to nose with the scourged body of a fallen dictator, does ‘otherness’ become that more important to us?

The Chapmans’ answer to this question is beautifully succinct: an image that manages to be both everything and nothing at the same time. The delicate pencil work spawned a sprawling organic mass which is alien, yet familiar. The Horror I dreamed of: distilled.

Putting an issue of Granta Magazine together is akin to curating an exhibition space. The theme is reflected in both intricate textual Kanitta’s song is candid yet sensitive, a poetic comprehension of the incredible sophistication of the universe and where our mortality fits in to place. detail and visually embroidered, always considering the project as a whole. The iIllustrations and imagery we create and commission to introduce the stories have a broad remit. A visual response to the piece, yet an aesthetic responsibility to the wider concept. Oat Montien’s illustration of the animal desire which permeates Rajesh Parameswaran’s Bengal Ming, somehow sits well with the altogether more hauntingly symbolic representation by Golbanou Moghaddas of Will Self’s musing on his own mortality.

The inevitable by-product of this experiment, was the overwhelming presence of the body in this issue. Or at least organic or fleshy matter of some shape or form. Physicality, distinct from mind and spirit, seems to pervade every thought about ‘otherness’. That which is familiar to us, and which we indeed are, is also the most profound, frustrating and compelling of enigmas. Fear and desire – so intrinsically linked – and witnessed through the creation, compulsion and destruction of the body. Eros and Thanatos, unable to exist one without the other.

‘Our Lady of Pain’ from ‘A Garden of Illuminating Existence’ by Kanitta Meechubot in Granta 117: Horror.

A Garden of Illuminating Existence’, Thai-born Kanitta Meechubot’s multimedia meditation on grief, illness and death leads us further to the core of nature’s perpetual duality. As in much eastern philosophy, she embraces the cyclical journey of life, love, illness and death in a beautiful, spellbinding visual poem, amidst which she muses on the effect her grandmother’s battle with womb cancer had on her grandparents’ relationship and her own understandings of grief and love. Again, beauty abounds throughout this work. Kanitta’s song is candid yet sensitive, a poetic comprehension of the incredible sophistication of the universe and where our mortality fits in to place.

Illustration by Owen Freeman for ‘The Colonel’s Son’ by Roberto Bolaño in Granta 117: Horror.

Owen Freeman also enunciates love and desire, with his own distillation of Eros and Thanatos for the late Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Colonel’s Son’. I was introduced to Freeman’s work years ago and have been captivated ever since by the visual narrative and his cinematic depictions of human behaviour. So much so that I’ve asked him to illustrate every Bolaño story that has appeared in Granta Magazine. You could say he’s the illustrator equivalent of the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle. There was a natural fit between Freeman’s versatile, visceral focus on the body and Bolaño’s muscular and rather visual prose.

The Bolaño/Freeman collaboration led us to further explore the possibilities of narrating with imagery. ‘Ain’t Nothing but a Movie’ was the spawn of this happy union.

The project was pieced together by Jocabola and David Bonas in HTML5, the web language of today. The original score that The Bolaño/Freeman collaboration led us to further explore the possibilities of narrating with imagery. strains over Freeman’s images is by Sorgerune, a long term collaborator with Jocabola. Sorgerune asked me for music references I felt appropriate for the story. It needed to be unobtrusive, yet atmospheric and unnverving. I fired some names over: Murcof, Fever Ray, Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, How to Dress Well. I wondered where he might take it. The end result is perfectly pitched.

The allegorical nature of Bolaño’s story, which follows a ‘zombie’ B-movie as seen late at night by the narrator, led us to think about societal metaphors of infection and revolution. Which in turn made audible whispers from a voice with much to say on these matters, the late Gil Scott-Heron:

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here’s a look at the closing numbers – racism’s up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot – the House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is scarce – and common sense is at an all-time low with heavy trading. Movies were looking better than ever and now no one is looking because, we’re starring in a ‘B’ movie. ■

Visit the Roberto Bolaño-inspired HTML5 experience Nothingbutamovie.com

Lyric excerpted from ‘B Movie’ from the album Reflections by Gil Scott Heron.

Shahrnush Parsipur, born in 1946, is one of Iran’s most celebrated contemporary woman writers. An outspoken proponent of women’s rights, Parsipur has seen all of her books – eight works of fiction and a memoir – banned in her native land. No stranger to opposition, she was imprisoned for her writings four times, once by the Shah’s security police and three times by the government of the Islamic Republic.

The following is an extract from her Prison Memoir, which takes place in the years after the Islamic Revolution. Parsipur is tracked down, arrested and swiftly finds herself incarcerated without a hearing.

Photo by Maxwell G.S.

It was nighttime, the prisoners were lying down on the floor, pressed against each other. But, to my surprise, they were all awake. Total silence reigned over the unit. It was a strange scene. Contrary to all other times, there was no line at the bathroom door. Instead, a few prisoners had gathered round the radiator and they were taking turns climbing on top of it so that they could look out from the window set high in the wall. One of them was Iran, and another, Farzaneh. Both were monarchists. The rest belonged to various other groups.

When I walked out of the bathroom, I saw Iran climb down from the radiator. She was shaking. Although we were not friends, she took me by the arm and whispered that the bodies of the executed prisoners had been laid out on one side of the courtyard. That night, starting at eleven o’clock, we had heard an earsplitting noise every few minutes. One of the prisoners had explained that they were building visitors’ rooms and that the noise was from the steel beams being dropped to the ground. Just then, we heard the noise again, and Iran, who was in shock, started to shake even more. I asked her, ‘What is this noise?’ she said. ‘Heavy machine gun fire.’ I didn’t know what a heavy machine gun was. I left the people who were again climbing up on the radiator and walked back to my room. I felt uneasy.

That day, at about two in the afternoon, I had seen two girls leave the unit. They were very beautiful. They were wearing shoes and to avoid dirtying the pieces of carpeting on the floor, they moved toward the door on their knees. I had asked their names and ages. They looked like twins, seventeen at most, but they explained that they were actually aunt and niece. The image of their amiable faces had stayed in my mind. I had not seen them return. Now I was looking more carefully at the prisoners. They were silent and staring directly ahead.

When I reached my room, Farideh, who managed the room across the hall, was standing in the doorway. I asked her, ‘What is going on?’ That night, starting at eleven o’clock, we had heard an earsplitting noise every few minutes. She said, ‘It’s heavy machine gun fire. Can’t you hear it?’ I asked, ‘What is heavy machine gun fire?’ She explained that when they carried out mass executions, they used heavy machine guns and this was the sound of the shower of bullets being fired. Then she said everyone was quiet so that they could hear the single shots; after each shower of bullets, a single shot was delivered to the head of each prisoner. The prisoners were counting the single shots. So far, they had counted more than ninety.

Now I, too, was quiet. Farideh said, ‘Listen.’ I could hear the muffled sound of the single shots. Again, the image of the two girls flashed in my mind.

I returned to my room and quickly retold all this to Golshan and the others. The silence of death washed over our room, too. The noise that until then was supposed to be steel beams crashing to the ground, took on a different meaning. We, too, started to count the single shots.

Golshan left the room, and when she returned she said two sisters from the leftists’ room who had been summoned to the Public Prosecutor’s office had been executed. I hadn’t seen them leave, but I remembered the aunt and niece. At around two in the morning the two leftist sisters returned to the unit. Everyone followed them to their room. The prisoners kept touching them. They all thought they were seeing ghosts.

The night of the heavy machine gun fire passed bitterly. The prisoners counted more than 250 single shots. I didn’t know the exact number because I had joined in the counting midway. The next day I saw a list of some three hundred people in the newspaper. One of them was one of the two pretty girls I had seen leave the unit. They claimed she was executed because she had committed adultery. I never tried to find out whether it was the aunt or the niece who was killed. I knew that under the laws of the Islamic Republic, they stoned adulteresses. But the legislator had said that four unbiased witnesses had to have seen the adulterer and the adulteress in circumstances when even a thread could not pass between their bodies. I wondered in what situation they had found the young girl to have put her in front of the firing squad. What’s more, the girl was not married and therefore could not be accused of adultery. It was obvious that they were trying to tarnish her and her family’s reputation. I cannot find the words to describe the hatred I felt. The image of the girls would not fade from my memory. I remember clearly that when I met them I thought to myself, I wish I had a daughter this beautiful.

One night, a short while later, the heavy machine guns were again fired until dawn and another group of prisoners lost loved ones. This time, Mrs Zomorrodian’s fifteen-year-old son was among those killed. The lady had four children and she lost three of them to the firing squads.

Between the time when my mother and brothers were arrested and the day of my arrest, the impeached President Banisadr and the Mujahedin leader Massoud Rajavi fled the country and sought asylum in France. And while we were in prison, in August 1981, the new President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar were killed by a bomb in the Prime Minister’s headquarters. Shortly before these incidents, the warden of Evin Prison was murdered.

Every Friday night the Komeil Prayer ceremony was broadcast on the prison loudspeakers for several hours. I was raised in a Muslim family and my father always prayed. My mother, too, had been praying for years. My grandmother was more inclined towards mysticism, yet she had religious beliefs. As a result, I never had the slightest bit of conflict with religion. I didn’t abide by the tenets of Islam, but I never lost my respect for religion. Now in prison, I found myself gradually being exposed to religious rituals that bore no resemblance to what I was familiar with. We knew all about praying and fasting. My mother also believed in giving alms and paying tithes, although my father was of the opinion that there was no need for this because he paid taxes. In prison, the Mujahedin and devout monarchists prayed, but the leftists, according to their beliefs, refrained from this practice. I was among those who didn’t pray.

Now the Komeil Prayer had appeared on the scene. The high volume of the loudspeakers in a unit where more than three hundred people were in commotion was nerve-wracking. Around the same time, a mullah dressed in a jacket commonly worn by the Revolutionary Guards came to the unit. They took him The prisoners were counting the single shots. So far, they had counted more than ninety. to the largest room which belonged to the leftists and a great number of the prisoners gathered there. I, too, went. He had come to ask about the difficulties the prisoners were facing. Normally, the prisoners didn’t dare complain, but by then they were so wornout and stressed that they stridently complained about the heavy machine gun fire. The mullah denied it altogether and said, ‘It’s the sound of a soccer ball hitting the rain gutters.’ And then, as is customary, he preached for a while and then chanted a sermon. Before starting the sermon, he suggested that the prisoners cry.

I was stunned. In fact, one of the reasons why I never went to the mosque was this ritual of crying and weeping. As a child, I never understood its meaning and in later years when I came to believe in socialist ideas and saw the world differently, I still didn’t comprehend it. But that day, a vague understanding began to take shape in my mind. In reality, the prisoners were all in such an emotional state that they needed to cry, and this man who was himself one of the causes of their circumstances had come there and was encouraging them to cry.

It was in September when they asked all the prisoners to start attending prayer services in the prison’s house of worship. I didn’t go, and until my last day in prison I steered clear of participating in these sorts of ceremonies. The prisoners would go to the house of worship where various programmes were arranged under the supervision of the prison warden and the judge of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. Sometimes repentant prisoners would speak, other times prisoners who were still committed to their cause and belief would discuss events, and occasionally prisoners sentenced to death would caution their friends against participating in politics. I can’t remember how many times a week these events were held, but I do recall that except for the elderly, the ailing and mothers caring for small children, all prisoners were strongly encouraged to attend. Many, in fact, looked forward to it. Their incentive was to see family members and relatives who were being held in other units, or at least to get news of them.

Towards the middle of November, the prison population swelled far beyond capacity. More than three hundred and fifty prisoners swarmed around the unit. At night some were forced to stand alongside the walls because there wasn’t enough room even to sit. The trials and executions continued and even these were becoming a routine. One day they announced the names of numerous prisoners and said that they should prepare to be transferred to Ghezel-Hessar Prison. When you are free, you inevitably feel compelled to act, but when incarcerated, you are powerless to do so. My name was among them. Golshan, Iran, Farzaneh, and Banafsheh – all residents of the first two rooms in the unit and the remaining members of a case involving monarchists – were also among the group. My mother, who didn’t want to be separated from me, went to the unit’s administration office and managed to get her name added to the list. I returned to my room and approached Minu. She apologized and said that she had given my name to the administration and told them that I was a communist. As manager of our room, she was obliged to report on the prisoners, and I did in fact socialize with the leftists in the unit. I said, ‘I take no issue with this, except that I have never been a communist. A socialist, yes. To the same extent as the Swedes are socialists.’ Still, I made no effort to change the content of the report she had filed.

I was tired, dispirited and fed up. I felt the weight of all the corpses on my shoulders. In truth, deep in my heart I was also somehow happy that I was in prison during that terrifying time. When you are free, you inevitably feel compelled to act, but when incarcerated, you are powerless to do so. Given my beliefs about freedom and democracy, if I had been free at that moment and took no action, I would have been deeply disappointed in myself, and it was obvious that I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. The breadth of the disaster unfolding was far greater than my capabilities, far greater than even the capabilities of the largest political groups.

Albert Camus, in writing about Sisyphus, who defied the gods and put Death in chains and was punished by having to push a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down again, wrote, ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’ because he has to be. And in prison, at a time of blood, filth and stupidity, I was somewhat happy because I had to be. I had not wished for the circumstances I found myself in, yet I did not try to escape from them, and now the decision-making was left up to the limited aptitude of the Hezbollah. ■

Excerpted from the Prison Memoir of Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Sara Khalili. The complete memoir will be published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 2012.

Photo by Pink Sherbet.

They sway as they walk. Their feet turn inwards – perhaps they’re walking on their ankles. They’re wounded, each of them in a different way – a bandaged head, a torn shirt revealing a bloody stomach, perhaps a chunk bitten out of the neck. Their clothing is tattered. Each has a bloody mouth. They have ripped these globs of flesh out of each other. Their fingernails are split and bloody. Their mouths hang open. They moan – or perhaps it is more of a sigh, like the long vocalized exhalation that might come from a corpse when you move it, when air trapped in its lungs escapes. They are coming for you. Not quickly – probably not faster than you can move – but inexorably, an untiring horde.

Though we describe vampires as undead, they’re livelier and stronger than most of us. Ghosts are ethereal, often beautiful. But not these shuffling creatures, their arms outstretched, longing for something they can neither describe nor derive satisfaction from. These zombies are the real walking dead. They are corpses who will not lie down.

Where do they come from? Modern vampires date from the eighteenth century, werewolves from the Roman Empire, ghosts from at least 1,000 years before that. Zombies have been around in their current form only since the 1960s and yet they’re everywhere now.

On one level, zombies are simply the newest version of the oldest thing: a thought about what it might be like to live forever, or to They moan – or perhaps it is more of a sigh, like the long vocalised exhalation that might come from a corpse when you move it, when air trapped in its lungs escapes. return from the grave. We will all die. When we’re young, a voice inside says ‘but not me, surely not me’. But that voice fades in time, leaving us only with the longing for eternal life. And so these myths comfort us: vampires are lonely, ghosts are intangible, werewolves are bestial, this is the price of immortality. To become a zombie exacts an even sharper price: brainless, repulsive, no one would choose that fractional life over the peace of death. Perhaps the zombie represents our society’s increasing yearning for immortality, and the increasing necessity therefore to imagine it as horrifying.

While vampires tend to be more popular in times of economic prosperity – think of Interview with the Vampire’s lush heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s – zombies, the shuffling mass dressed in rags, tend to come to the fore in more austere times. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead comes to us from the depression of the 1970s and of course zombies are having a massive renaissance – as it were – now.

The zombie apocalypse is the death of civilization, the moment when all that becomes important is: do you have food? Do you have guns? We want to practise this in fantasy, to imagine it all the way through, especially in times of economic crisis. We live in cities now; far from sources of food, not knowing our neighbours. Zombies are the horrifying crowd of the urban poor, the grasping hands reaching out for something which, if you gave it to them, would destroy you. They’re the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledge.

Or one could examine the undead through the lens of race or the ‘other’ and ‘passing’. On that level vampires are Jews in the medieval imagination – think of the fear of crosses, the old lie about drinking blood. Or maybe vampires are gay, or bisexual. They’ll bite anyone. Since John Donne wrote ‘The Flea’ – a poem to convince a lover that since a flea had bitten both of them their bloods were already mingled so they might as well go to bed together – we’ve known that sharing blood means sex.

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.

All that sucking. All that tasting. All that desire. It’s the terrifying thing about gay people or Jews or vampires – you can’t always tell them from anyone else.

By contrast, zombies can’t ‘pass’. It’s probably significant that they originate in West African Vodou and thus carry a hint of racial fear with them. Their brains have been stolen away, in the way that good Englishmen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries feared that the influx of immigrants would drug or brainwash or seduce their women and contaminate their gene pool.

And they won’t just kill us, they’ll turn us into one of them. They confront us with how close we all are to the edge of acceptability. A moment’s loss of concentration could mean that we become the outsiders. Kill them again and again and perhaps we’ll never have to acknowledge that they were inside us all along.

Our compulsion for mythological creatures, though, the reason they capture our imagination, is that it’s impossible to pin down their meaning completely. I’ve read the theory, but I find that zombies mean something quite different to me.

I have been boiling my head in zombies lately as research for a games project I’m George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead comes to us from the depression of the 1970s and of course zombies are having a massive renaissance working on. I’m writing the story for ‘Zombies, Run!’, a game to play while actually running in the real world, improving fitness by running away from the zombie horde, because zombies are a joke too of course, a comic parody of humanity, and so they take to a light-hearted setting as well as they do a dark one. I’ve been watching zombie movies and TV shows, reading zombie books, listening to zombie podcasts. My days have been full of glistening intestines sliding out of the belly, devoured by shambling corpses, full of the stinking bite wound that means you too will become a walker. And then, inevitably, I had a zombie dream.

In my dream, I was at my parents’ house – a potent symbol to start off with – and as I watched from their living room I saw the zombie horde begin to descend on the house. I knew what would happen. I’d seen it before, this exact moment before. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no I can’t bear it when they do it to me, no I can’t let it happen again, never again.’

Those were the words I woke up with: never again. Which made it all very clear. For me, at least, only for me.

In the 1950s the Holocaust was not something people spoke of, not really. It was repressed. Jewish people went off to settle the land of Israel and that was how the thing was: settled. All those corpses buried, all those piles of skeletal bodies, the walking skeletons taking slow painful steps out of the camps. No one spoke about it. The war was won. Germany was partitioned. We built a home fit for heroes. It was done.

But, of course, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be done, not something like that. Not only for the Jews but for the whole of Europe. Something terrible had happened and the world had changed. Aharon Appelfeld, one of the most celebrated Israeli novelists of his generation, who also makes an appearance, as himself, in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, says of the Holocaust in Roth’s book of interviews Shop Talk: ‘We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious, the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day.’ That is what is horrifying: not the death, not necessarily just that, but the absolute inexplicability of the whole thing. The horror is in the things we do that we do not understand.

Zombie movies always go roughly the same way. First there are isolated reports of strange occurrences. The protagonists laugh them off, cannot believe. Then there is proof, but by thenAll those corpses buried, all those piles of skeletal bodies, the walking skeletons taking slow painful steps out of the camps. it is too late to run. Hide, maybe. Fight them off if you can, but they can tell you are different, they will sniff you out in your hiding place, there are too many of them to keep fighting. At last there is a small family-like group sheltering, shivering together as the monsters outside – people who used to be their friends, neighbours, lovers. There is only one ending. Holocaust movies go exactly the same way: line by line by line.

The trial of Eichmann, when the silence was finally broken, was in 1961. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968. Is it too much to say that those walking corpses were a dawning realization of the whole monstrosity? Probably. I can only say that this is what they are for me.

Zombies are all the things that will not lie down and die, the truth we cannot repress, the thing that will rise up until it overwhelms us all. Whatever you want to forget is stumbling, dead-eyed and open-mouthed towards you. ■

Photo by Patrick Denker.

It is mid-afternoon, the breaking point of daylight, when I finally reach the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo and walk down a curving ramp in a long white tunnel. I am there to find a two-year-old girl named Rosalia Lombardo who died in 1920. It was hard to find this place where the unburied dead are on display for the living. I’d had to pick my way through a tangle of Palermo’s winding streets and soon, I found myself lost in a neighbourhood friends had warned me about. Suspicious residents eyed me, some shouting directions that took me through small alleys, into cramped underpasses and past shanties that reminded me of Addis Ababa’s slums. Along the way, I stumbled upon a beautiful horse whinnying in a single-room house. Newspapers would later announce a horse found dead in the area, one of the oldest strongholds of the Mafia, the result of a freak accident that would uncover an illegal horse-betting ring. I wasn’t aware of any of this that day, however. All I knew as I tried to find my way to the catacombs is that I did not belong there. And perhaps this was the most fitting emotion to have as I finally approached the catacombs, a macabre remnant of another age, a place where the living could – and still can – gaze at the mummified bodies of those who refused to go gently into the night, all 8,000 of them.

I go through the chilly corridors, listening carefully for any other footsteps. I am alone beneath the earth in a crypt. Napoleonic-era soldiers lay lonely and forlorn inside their dusty coffins, dry and nearly fleshless in their faded military uniforms. There are doctors and lawyers in their best suits, women in flouncing dresses, children in their frilly gowns and staid jackets. I walk past a cell reserved for virgins and another specifically for infants and young toddlers. I can’t help staring at the curling, full moustache of American Vice-Consul Giovanni Paterniti (who died in 1911); it seems far too decadent for its grim surroundings. I try to shake free of my inclination to make comparisons to Dante’s Purgatory and his encounter with the anguished spirits damned to a frustrating limbo. All I knew as I tried to find my way to the catacombs is that I did not belong there. These are not spirits, I tell myself. These are simply members of an elite cadre of the dead, spiritless. Nothing but drained flesh kept well past the point of decay. I want to wipe away the smell, a pungent odour that threads up my nose and settles in the back of my throat. I know what it is: old skin floating on dust. Most of the bodies that surround me, if not in coffins, hang on walls from wire and nail in slumping poses. Many are skeletal with matted tufts of hair poking up from nearly fleshless skulls, their facial features misshapen by hundreds of years of gravity. Mummification used to be a privilege. It was a way for the dead to trudge back from the deepest nether land each time their body was viewed. A kind of circular, unending resurrection that thrust them out of oblivion and into memory. But time has been merciless with its own forward march. Except for their star resident, Rosalia Lombardo, these mummies not only look undeniably dead, but grotesquely so.

It was divine intervention that led the way to the creation of the catacombs in the late sixteenth century. The Capuchin friars who settled there in the early half of the century buried their dead in a large pit close to their church. Decades later, an exhumation of one of these burial pits showed that forty-five cadavers were startlingly well preserved. It was, they said, a miracle. Forty of those bodies were transferred to a new room built behind the main altar of the Santa Maria della Pace church to give them a place fitting of this extraordinary discovery. From 1599 on, the number of mummies increased, necessitating the construction of one room, then another and another, until the corridors wound around corners and included wall niches, coffins and small cell-like rooms. At first, the catacombs included only the early mummified friars, then members of the nobility requested internment there. It was initially a prime location to be buried, mummification a status symbol reserved for those who could afford it. It left the rest of the population to common graves or pits; unremarkable deaths for seemingly unremarkable lives. By 1787, however, the catacombs had expanded to include priests, professionals, soldiers and men, women and children from all social strata. By 1832 this holy cemetery could grow no more and shortly after Italian unification in 1861, nearly all burials were relegated to graveyards and the catacombs were used only as temporary holding stations before bodies were interned in cemeteries.

Compared to the complex procedures involved with mummification in ancient Egypt, the dead in Palermo were not difficult to preserve. Corpses were laid on ceramic grids so their bodily fluids could drain away. The cells where they were kept were then shut off for close to a year, virtually sealing them from all that could ravage the body. After they were brought out, bodies were washed with vinegar and dressed. Preservation was made easier by the church’s natural surroundings and the conditions in the crypt: low humidity, good airflow and cool temperatures. Some, in fact, still retain soft tissue. They were clothed according to their profession or the fashion of the day.

Rosalia Lombardo’s father was a military general who had witnessed the bloody battles of the Great War then survived the 1918 influenza epidemic that ripped its way cross the world. It would eventually kill close to one-fifth of its population, more than twice the number that died in World War One. He was familiar withExcept for their star resident, Rosalia Lombardo, these mummies not only look undeniably dead, but grotesquely so. the sight of the sick and the wounded, the dying and the dead. So when his young daughter succumbed to pneumonia in 1920, he should have been bowed with grief but not bent insensibly by it. Yet when she died, he was Father, not General, and perhaps more than anything, he couldn’t fathom life without another glance at his daughter’s face. He begged the assistance of a local taxidermist by the name of Alfredo Salafia to preserve her body.

Salafia was no stranger to embalming. He had tested his experimental formulas on animals, then was given permission to apply them to unclaimed cadavers, then eventually, he had gone on to perfect his work on his own father’s body. He had demonstrated his expertise to a NYC public at the Eclectic Medical College, and had already done wonders with another corpse, that of American Vice Consul Paterniti. General Lombardo knew whom to seek when his daughter died. More than ninety years after her death, Rosalia still looks disconcertingly the same. Almost alive.

Soon I find Rosalia’s small room. She rests in a crib-sized coffin. Her head is the only exposed part of her, the rest nestled in a blanket tucked just beneath her chin. I have read extensively about the girl and looked at endless photos. Despite the prior research, however, I can’t help being surprised. Her blond hair still holds its vibrancy, held by a ribbon that has somehow managed to keep its colour. Curls fall across her forehead in wisps, combed carefully into place. Her lashes are thick and so long they seem to brush her plump cheeks. Her lips do not draw back with the shrunken, distorted smile common in the other mummies. She is called ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and rightly so. She looks as if she’s just a breath away from opening her eyes and smiling into your curious gaze. Rosalia was perhaps Salafia’s most glorious achievement, a testament to his skills and the effectiveness of the embalming fluids whose formula he would take with him to his grave. She has defied almost all of the destructive, morbid forces that prey on each of us when we die. Looking at her, it would be easy to ignore the rest of the 7,000 plus crumbling bodies of evidence that point to a different, more horrifying demise.

We want to believe that we will die with dignity; that death is a confrontation and the battle is somewhat fair. We write about death but few of us have been witness to it. We imagine our last moments. We want to ‘go in our sleep’ without suffering, but don’t see the contradiction in wanting time to make our final goodbyes. We shroud our terror in myths and wishes. We embrace religion and expose ourselves to horror films. We swing on the pendulum between fascination and repulsion, trying to find the balance that will lead us to our own graceful end. We don’t want to admit what most doctors know: that death holds no dignity, that our passing could very likely be painful and ugly, that even with the advances in medicine, we have not been able to negotiate a kind way to go.

When you die, the eyes that are moving across this page will be the first to still. Death will start with your eyelids then work its way down. Your eyes will lose their focus. They will remain open, staring at nothing, as a gray film covers them. Your pupils will dilate to a wide blackness and that familiar curve of your cornea will flatten. Your brain will have stopped. If you are receiving oxygen, a pallor will fall across your face and what they’ve written is true: your features will have a marble smoothness that can only be described as corpse-like. If you die short of breath, the choking will colour you a bluish tint bordering on a disturbing shade of purple. In either case, no one will be able to She is called ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and rightly so. She looks as if she’s just a breath away from opening her eyes and smiling into your curious gaze. mistake you for your living self. Then it will continue down, towards your neck. Your jaw will go slack and tug your mouth open. Death will travel to your arms and chest, your stomach and legs. In twelve hours, full rigor mortis will set in; this is if you are lucky in the way you die. If you have suffered through a sudden, violent death, rigidity could hit harder, quicker, as if mocking your best attempts to stay alive. If you are like most, though, you will die in a hospital. The heart you have might try to beat for just a little longer. If you could see through your own skin and flesh, past the ribs that might have cracked from desperate attempts at CPR, it would look like it is wriggling: a wet, jellylike bag of bloody muscle. Its best efforts will be futile. It will not have the blood it needs to spring you back to the land of the living. You will still be dead.

Your corpse will be at the mercy of the living. Relatives will contend with the grief that death brings and they will shoulder its responsibility. One way or another, they will let you go, not only because they have to, but also because they won’t know what else to do with you. Life is for the living. One day, we will be one of those who don’t belong. So, we build our rituals to prop up a door between where we are today and where we know we all must go. It is a flimsy partition with gaping holes if we cared to peer closer. But we keep ourselves busy, doing everything to avoid the fact that we are tender creatures, made fragile by our very existence.

Once dead, your body will want to give in to the natural process of decay. It will want to lay in repose as everything that is capable marches its way towards you and begins to chew you up. Embalming slows the decaying process long enough for our loved ones to say their goodbyes. A coffin or cremation, depending on your preference, halts the stealthy animals eager for carrion. We will be aware of none of the dangers or precautions, deaf to the eulogies, and oblivious to the mournful tears. Even if we are remembered fondly, we will be at the mercy of all that life brings to those who cared enough to weep when we died. Even memories fade. We will one day disappear completely.

There is a moment in The Divine Comedy when Dante, glimpsing Beatrice for the first time, turns to tell his trusted guide, Virgil, about her appearance. He quickly realizes that the wise old poet has vanished without a word. Despite the presence of the woman who once made him tremble, and the familiar ‘mighty power of old love’ that surges in him, Dante cannot help lamenting his sudden loss. ‘But Virgil had deprived us of himself,’ he exclaims and adds that even ‘all our ancient mother lost / was not enough to keep my cheeks . . . / from darkening again with tears’. Like a child who has lost ‘the gentlest father’, he seems incapable of looking at what he has now. It is as if what is gone holds more power than what stands before him.

Standing in front of Rosalia’s see-through coffin, I think back to this particular moment in Dante’s Purgatory. My instinct has been to compare the little girl to Beatrice, to see Rosalia as a kind of pure, shining example of our glorious possibilities, even beyond life. But bearing witness to Rosalia’s corpse points me instead to the vanished Virgil and It seems that despite our breakthrough innovations and our vigilant care to stay alive, stay healthy, stay here, the most natural thing is to go. Dante’s heartbreaking anguish. Dante speaks of his guide in life-sustaining terms; he calls him ‘Virgil, he / to whom I gave my self for my salvation’. In the beginning of his journey he needed Virgil to guide him away from where he once stood: ‘within a shadowed forest / for I had lost the path that does not stray’. He relies on his guide to lead him through the terrifying Inferno and Purgatory, until they reach the edge of Paradise. Virgil warns Dante when they first meet that he can only go so far, then ‘a soul more worthy than I am will guide you; / I’ll leave you in her care when I depart’. Yet Dante’s first response when Virgil is gone, even as he yearns to follow Beatrice and knows that he will do so, is a startled, shaken sorrow that calls to mind General Lombardo’s devastating sadness at the death of his daughter.

I stay with her for a long time, mesmerized and disturbed not only by what I see, but what I imagine to be all the necessary moments that took place before she was put in the cell. I soon notice something, however. She does not look like the photos or postcards that I’ve seen. Her skin is darker, her cheeks rougher and dry. Something has changed. Perhaps it is the same something that tugs at the other mummies held straight by wires on the wall. Despite the reinforcements, many lean forward or tip to one side; their heads dangle at the end of delicate vertebrae, their chins sag against brittle collarbones. Even those more rigidly tied hunker down against the upward pull. Gravity has set in; time is still busy in the crypt and Rosalia seems to be no exception.

Photo-oxidation is leaving its mark on Rosalia Lombardo. Light is scraping away at her bit by bit, and adjustments have to be made to stop the process. Salafia’s formula, however well it worked, could not fight her body’s inclination to crumble and fade away. It seems that despite our breakthrough innovations and our vigilant care to stay alive, stay healthy, stay here, the most natural thing is to go. Even a distraught Dante understood the necessary transformation that beckoned him forward, a shift that would pull him out of the cerebral world of his learned guide, to the intimate, deeply personal voyage Beatrice promised. And like Virgil, we must be unafraid to disappear when we have reached the end of our path, no matter what we leave behind, no matter how quickly we will be forgotten. The lost are those who have refused, who find themselves forever trapped in the shadowed forest. They have nowhere to turn but back to dust at an agonizing pace. We are each of us, in the end, captive to that downward tug or the wayward flight of ash. But maybe that is not so bad after all. ■

Photo by Mr Thomas.

My mother has a theory about the ideal mode of Texan architecture: When you live in a place like Florida, it’s all about having views of the sea. When you live in Colorado, it’s all about looking out at the mountains. But, in Texas, what you want most is a house with a view of all that blue, blue sunny sky.

My family’s house, a slight variation on essentially the same blueprint for the tens of thousands of McMansions of Plano, Texas, is an expression of my mother’s sunny aesthetic: the second floor is mostly confined to the periphery, allowing space for the fifteen-foot windows that fill the rooms with relentlessly cheery light.

The sun! I think I must have a photosynthetic nature. I can feel downright spiritual when I’m in the sun! My mother rhapsodizes, but I’ve Plano was one of the fastest growing cities in America, but the hard and dry earth beneath it was not always accommodating. always found all that blue sky and sunshine a bit oppressive. In dense and intricate Brooklyn, where I’ve lived since I was twenty-two, spaces feel personal, a person’s size and voice seem enough to fill an area. But as a kid in Plano it felt like I could do anything – I could get punched in the liver on the running track during gym class; I could curse at my rising archipelagos of acne; I could hear the students outside my high school spread the news that yet another kid had killed himself – and the impassive blue dome would absorb it; the moment would pass and then there would be only that silent brightness.

It was my seventeenth birthday, in February of 1999, and I was driving home from school.

The sky out my windshield was faultless, another bright day of a winter drought. The city had begun to ration water supplies; police officers patrolled the subdivisions for rogue sprinkler usage. Plano was one of the fastest growing cities in America, but the hard and dry earth beneath it was not always accommodating. On that day, as tractors stripped the prairie in outsized swaths to make way for future mini-malls and housing developments, the arid dirt rose in miniature dust storms, drifting masses of brown and orange.

School usually let out at 4:15 pm, but on that day I was driving home, and it wasn’t yet noon. I had arrived before the first bell that morning to find the school’s faculty red-eyed and listless. My first-period teacher, famously affable, snapped into a rage at a snide question from one of my classmates. By the third period, students were wandering the halls and slumped against their lockers, where they sobbed. The administration, not knowing what else to do, let school out early. And so it was not even lunchtime, when I was driving home.

My parents moved us to Plano for the reasons so many move to Plano: jobs, good schools, a town perfectly engineered to render successful families. Plano, famous for its prosperity, regularly appears in magazines as one of the country’s top cities to raise kids. It is an invented, anonymous place, a patchwork of chain stores, corporate branches, and mass-produced houses, all arranged for productivity and simplicity, like a new airport.

Recently, on a visit home to Plano, I walked with my mom through one of the town’s manicured parks. Pausing on a little observation deck, we looked out at the city’s bright and bland geometry. Well, she concluded, it’s a place to raise a family. Everything makes sense here. I knew you and your brother would be safe.

And so we lived in Plano, because, at least in part, Plano seemed to promise our safety. But, as it turned out, even in that sunny city there was a tremendous darkness that resurfaced sporadically, in terrible and sudden forms.

Within one year, in the mid-1980s, as Plano rapidly transformed from a farm town to a proper suburb of Dallas, five students at my future high Within one year, in the mid-1980s, as Plano rapidly transformed from a farm town to a proper suburb of Dallas, five students at my future high school committed suicide. school committed suicide. Reporters arrived, en masse, to deliver familiar and vague explanations: the lonely plight of latch-key kids, the existential emptiness of a town without history, parents’ relentless pursuit of wealth to the neglect of their children, the strange psychological phenomena of suicide clusters. For a year or two, the city struggled to overcome an unwanted notoriety (The Suicide Capital of America, reporters dubbed it), but Plano continued to proliferate, and the instant city was expanding too quickly for any memory to stick to it for long.

And yet, like a supernatural curse, that particular darkness returned. During my Sophomore and Junior years, eighteen kids died in an epidemic of heroin overdoses, then another cluster of suicides.

What did I know of those deaths? Little, at first.

Many times, in those months, I arrived at school to find it hushed by the news of a death of another kid I didn’t know. Mine was a class of seventeen hundred students; the deaths were at a distance from me, but also all around me.

One day, a boy whom I had never met raised a trashcan over his head during lunch. He screamed at the tables, and hurled garbage across the cafeteria. That night, he shot himself in the head with his father’s pistol.

My classmates and I affected a grim and cynical tone, a deepening of our standard adolescent mien, when reporters came to interview us. Our adolescent ennui justified into crude sociology: Of course, we would say, it makes sense that a lot of people can’t tolerate such a sterile, soulless place. Of course, this rich, spotless city neglects what is most important. All this success, we would warn, comes at a price. We would recite our reasons and take a kind of perverse pride in the fact that, despite all our comforts, despite our orderly, healthy lives, news people came to ask us how we survived it.

But when a friend of mine, Ken McKinney, asphyxiated himself in his family’s car one night, there was no longer any perverse pride. There was no real explanation, only the senselessness of a sixteen-year-old kid, gifted and charismatic, killing himself.

After Ken’s death, the school counselors spoke with us about grief and depression, but their words seemed as vague and inadequate as anyone’s. And at last it seemed clear that there would never be a way to explain any of it. On my seventeenth birthday, I arrived at school to learn that the night before, one of our counselors had shut her garage door, started her car’s engine, and waited until the fumes took her life.

As I headed home that day, westward in my parents’ Ford, the city of Plano gave way to blank lots, where workers were stripping and levelling the old farmland to make way for new retail franchises and subdivisions. The wind gusted and paused, and the dust that the backhoes and tractors stirred accumulated into strange figures, earthen Rorschachs. The clouds drifted like rusty ghosts out onto Parker Road. The city was growing so quickly that the street was nearly unrecognizable from even a month before.

Eighteen kids had killed themselves, and now our school counselor, too. The dust was doing something I had never quite seen dust do, hanging over fields and roads in shapes that seemed to defy physics. I felt exhilarated and afraid, subject to the sway of strange new forces. The clouds drifted into the road, and I accelerated into them, reckless The dust was doing something I had never quite seen dust do, hanging over fields and roads in shapes that seemed to defy physics. to whatever they might conceal. Inside each, my windshield browned, and, for a moment, I couldn’t see to the hood. Again and again, I emerged, heightened and cavalier, to the scrubbed blue day. I picked up speed, and abandon. More dust-clouds gathered around me; they seemed personal. I took a right at a traffic light a half-mile from my house to look down the long empty stretch of Communications Road, over which rested the largest cloud yet, sitting there like a sci-fi time-portal for coming traffic, as if to swallow modern cars and deposit them in some gritty Texan past. I accelerated into the brown.

Inside the cloud, at forty miles an hour, a sudden human figure. A person, leaping away from my hood, but it was too late to swerve or break. In an instant, my car halted, and the explosion of my airbag flung my arms to the roof. The fact of what I had done – I have hit someone, I have killed someone – opened another future, one forever marred by this moment. The dust did not dissipate; my windshield was an opaque trapezoid, through which I could see nothing.

When at last the wind swept away that cloud, I exhaled. The figure in the dust had been either a trick of the light or else a trick of my mind. It was not a person I had hit but an SUV, its chrome bumper reflecting my face from a distance no greater than two feet.

Suicide is contagious. Psychologists call it The Werther Effect, and its influence is easily measurable: after a well-publicized suicide, not only does the overall rate of suicide increase, but there is also a dramatic spike in the rate of single-driver car crashes. Psychologists offer various theories to explain the phenomenon, but no one can really know why this deathly consensus is wired into our thinking, why the compulsion to death can pass so easily and so subtly from one person to another. I still can’t explain the Plano suicides, why they began that year and why they stopped, and I don’t know if my own near-fatal collision was bound to those deaths by some algorithm of social cognition. More than a decade has passed, and when I talk to my Plano friends about that grim year, none of us can agree on the numbers of the dead, and we have trouble remembering the causes that we explained so certainly when we were sixteen. But I can still see that human figure, leaping in front of my car, even if the wind finally erased him into Plano’s immaculate sky. ■

Detail from ‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Flailing at the black water, hardly knowing which way was up, gulping vast amounts of air from my dive tank, I tried to focus on not panicking. Then, in the darkness, my hand brushed against something. I lurched my head around and, in the narrow beam of my head torch, saw the gaping jaws and blank eyes of a Moray eel. A terror from childhood. Managing, somehow, not to swallow my mouthpiece, I withdrew my hand and began what I hoped looked like a controlled ascent to the surface about twenty-five metres (seventy-five feet) above, but was actually a frantic escape.

An unlikely series of events had put me in a remote part of Indonesia on a night dive for which I was ill-prepared and on which I had been abandoned by a more experienced dive buddy. Then, in the darkness, my hand brushed against something. I lurched my head around and, in the narrow beam of my head torch, saw the gaping jaws and blank eyes of a Moray eel. Fortunately, the moment of primal horror passed in seconds, and the next day I carried on as if nothing had happened. I was there to learn from scientists who were observing remarkable creatures in the wild (among them, Leopard sharks and Upside Down jellyfish) before attending an international conference on the state of the oceans. And that conference, which took place the following week, confronted us all with a prospect that is truly horrific: it is likely that tropical coral reefs, which are among the most diverse, productive and beautiful ecosystems on Earth, face an extinction unparalleled in many tens of millions of years as a consequence of global warming and ocean acidification caused by humans.

I have made it my business to try to understand – and, in as far as I can, contribute to averting – this potential catastrophe and a few years ago came to the unoriginal conclusion that at the heart of the problem is a calamitous failure of imagination in our culture and politics. We live in an age of wonders, with almost daily revelations about the natural world, amazing scientific advances and even a few hopeful occurrences in human affairs. But other trends – notably the failure over the last few decades substantially to address our dependence on fossil fuels or to develop better institutions to anticipate and resolve crises – suggest that even in the best case we are in for a bumpy ride. The global climate system, says Earth scientist Wally Broecker, is an angry beast, and we are poking it with a stick.

Albert Seda, ‘Hydra’.

In the middle ages people believed that every creature in the natural world embodied a religious or moral lesson. Striking testament to this are the bestiaries: books of beasts which approached an art-form as illustrated manuscripts in the decades before the Black Death. In bestiaries, every animal is allegory and symbol. Since at least Hume and Darwin we no longer believe any such thing, but as we increasingly shape the world through science and technology (not to mention our sheer numbers), the animals that do thrive and evolve increasingly become corollaries of our values and concerns. The Enlightenment and the scientific method may, therefore, result in the creation of a world that really will be allegorical because we will have remade it in the shadow of our values and priorities. Perhaps the philosopher John Gray is right when he says that the only genuine historical law is a law of irony.

Science shows that every animal, even those with which we imagine ourselves to be familiar, are, when looked at closely, much The global climate system, says Earth scientist Wally Broecker, is an angry beast, and we are poking it with a stick. more astonishing than most of us have ever imagined, and easily surpass mythical animals in beauty and bizarreness. This is as true for the Moray eel as any other. And after my encounter on the reef I determined to overcome what I knew was an irrational fear once and for all by finding out what it is actually like. I learned that there are over 200 distinct species of Moray eel. They are, I now appreciate, spectacularly beautiful. But natural selection has given them an anatomical feature that, though harmless to humans, vividly recalls the wildest edge of science fiction or horror movies.

Until very recently the conspicuous success of Morays was something of a mystery. Most carnivorous fish engulf prey into their mouths by opening them quickly from a closed position and thereby creating a sucking effect. But Morays’ mouths are already open most of the time. Further, their visible jaws are actually quite small and weak given the animal’s size. How then, do they sustain themselves? The answer, observed in 2006 for what was believed to be the first time, is astonishing. Moray eels have a second set of jaws deep at the back of their throat which shoot forward at high speed, grab the prey, and rapidly protract backwards again, pulling the prey down into the oesophagus as the animal closes its mouth. This extraordinary ability to ‘vomit’ up a second set of fearsome teeth gives the Moray the best of both worlds: it can reach out to grab its prey without moving far from its narrow hiding place.

Image of the Chauvet cave.

Monsters of one kind or another are woven into virtually all the cultures of which we have record - from the earliest days of our kind, when the sabre-toothed cat Dinofelis dined regularly on our Homo habilis ancestors. But as humans expanded across the globe and, over the course of a few thousand years, exterminated or marginalized every beast that challenged our dominance, those monsters have become increasingly elusive and hard to pin down. Now, we sit astride the world and almost all the monsters are within us - the realities, challenges and consequences that we fail to face out of fear. Perhaps, as science reveals ever more wonders and possibilities, we may find the strength to face them. Understanding more about the natural world need not lead to disenchantment but it can eliminate the kinds of magical thinking with which we often harm ourselves and other beings.

In Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, David Quammen reflects on the paintings of Now, we sit astride the world and almost all the monsters are within us - the realities, challenges and consequences that we fail to face out of fear. animals in Chauvet cave in southern France which, at around 30,000 years, are the oldest known. Writing, perhaps, with a little more wisdom than Werner Herzog brought to his remarkable film about the cave, Quammen focuses on an image of several lions gathered for attack, noting that whoever painted it did not do so with fear and loathing but with ‘a skilled hand, a calm heart, and an attentive, reverential eye.’ By the time, more than a thousand generations ago, that these paintings were created, humans had already learned to recognize the sublime in what they had previously only feared, and in this fact there may be hope. ■

Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings will be published by Granta Books in 2012. He blogs at barelyimaginedbeings.blogspot.com

Photo by Katerha.

My dad worked a lot of jobs. As a young man, in Ohio, he repossessed cars for a summer. (‘Don’t ever repossess cars,’ he told me. ‘Nobody likes you. I had to carry a baseball bat and keep a loaded pistol in the glove compartment, just in case of trouble.’) He then worked as a desk clerk at a hotel in Washington DC. Later, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he stood in a caged room all day and checked out camera equipment to staff photographers. When the Apollo program began to wane in the mid-1970s, he quit ahead of the layoffs that were coming, honed his skill at fixing cars, and got a job as an auto mechanic. But after a few years, the owner retired and sold the garage.

And so my dad mulled around for a bit and flirted with the idea of becoming his own boss. He looked into opening a liquor store, a cafeteria-style restaurant, a wholesale inner tube business . . . But he lacked the one thing a man with a dream needs to get anywhere: capital. He would become a realtor, he decided. He would sell houses. He got his license and tried that for a while – just as the real estate market in the area was entering a major slump. By coincidence, his marriage to my mother was also in a slump; they separated on the eve of their twenty-third wedding anniversary and divorced soon after.

He moved to Virginia. He tried real estate there for a while, couldn’t sell a single property, and got a job at Dulles International Airport overseeing the luggage-handlers for one of the major airlines. A year later, the airline went broke.

At a low point, he filled out an application at a convenience store. They hired him for the night shift, where he mopped the floor and restocked the shelves when he wasn’t carding minors trying to buy beer and cigarettes. The store was part of a nation-wide chain, and they did right by him. More than a dozen years later, he was a regional manager with a whole fleet of stores under his control.

And then, at last, came retirement. Or semi-retirement. He’d remarried by then, and after saying goodbye to the convenience store chain and being presented with a nice mantle clock that bore the His full head of snow-white hair was buzzed into a high flat-top.store’s logo, he and his second wife moved to South Carolina, where he took a job three days a week washing cars at an Alamo Rental Car agency. He didn’t mind the work. It got him out of the house, allowed him to socialize with several other semi-retirees. But he looked forward to the day when he could, as he put it, ‘be done with all this shit and do nothing. Well, not nothing. I want to sit on my ass, figure out TIVO, and read.’

He was sixty-eight years old. He had bad posture, mild arthritis and a hiatal hernia at the bottom of his oesophagus that spasmed in the middle of the night and made swallowing a challenge every four or five bites; other than that, he seemed to be doing fine. His full head of snow-white hair was buzzed into a high flat-top, he was sporting a chinstrap beard and, as I discovered on a visit to his house that Thanksgiving, an earring. Standing at his backyard grill, wearing a parka and a pair of aviator sunglasses and wielding a spatula, he asked me out of the blue, ‘So how do you think the old man looks?’

I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.

‘Why the earring?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I want to get a tattoo on my ankle, too. I just haven’t decided what it should be.’

We’d always read, in my family. We read what is known as popular literature: mass market paperbacks that didn’t cost much and had the word ‘bestseller’ stamped on their covers. Stephen King. V. C. Andrews. The occasional disaster novel and a dip, now and then, into the occult. Rosemary’s Baby and The Amityville Horror. It was communal reading, and the unspoken rule was that the book stayed on the coffee table in the living room when it wasn’t being read so that we could all be reading it simultaneously. I don’t remember ever having family discussions about these books, but by the time they’d been around the house a few weeks, they were dog-eared and curling, their cheap spines well-broken-in.

Like many retired – or semi-retired – couples, my dad and his wife lived on a severely fixed income. While they were both avid readers, We’d always read, in my family. We read what is known as popular literature: Stephen King. V. C. Andrews. they stopped buying books and got everything from the library, putting themselves on waiting lists for the more popular titles, sometimes waiting months for a particular book. My dad read for hours every day. During my visits, I’d do my own reading, sitting across from him in the living room, but I’d also watch him read. He was keen on political thrillers, now, and he would page through one after another with absolutely no reaction in his face. When he finished one of these books and set it on the coffee table, retaining his bookmark for whatever was next, I asked him what he’d thought of it.

‘It was good,’ he said. ‘Good story.’

I knew better than to expect a more lengthy assessment. He’d read my books with the same flat response – including the one I’d dedicated to him (which I had to point out, because he hadn’t noticed): ‘It was good,’ he said about each one. ‘Good story.’

Just a few months after my dad’s sixty-ninth birthday, on a routine checkup, his doctor said he wouldn’t mind taking a look at that hiatal hernia that had been waking him up at night. My dad didn’t see the point of inspecting something he knew could never be fixed, but he consented, and they set up an appointment to numb his throat and have him swallow a miniature camera.

The results showed a tumour as big as a thumb hugging the side of the hernia.

‘Is that why you’ve been having more and more trouble swallowing?’ I asked, trying to calm the panic I felt rising in my own throat.

‘It’s not easy to tell,’ he replied in his usual deadpan. ‘The tumor doesn’t hurt, but it causes the same discomfort as the hernia, which is why I didn’t even know it was there. But it’s cancerous, they know that much, and it can spread. So I have to deal with it.’

Right away, the doctor wanted to start him on a regimen of chemo and radiation. Following ninety days of that would be an ‘invasive surgery’ (is there any other kind?) wherein they would remove the hernia and what was left of the tumor – along with most of his oesophagus for good measure; they would then draw up his stomach lining and sew it to the bottom of his throat.

Chemo. Radiation. Invasive surgery. I was alone at work when he called me with this news. I was pacing the floor with the phone held away from my mouth, crying and not wanting it to funnel into the conversation. ‘So that’s it?’ I said stupidly. ‘We just do the treatment, and then have the surgery, and hope for the best?’

‘Who’s ‘we’?’ he asked. ‘You got a mouse in your pocket? I’m going to do the treatment, which they say is going to make me sick as hell, and then I’m going to have the surgery, and that should take care of things. Small meals from here on out, small bites. But no more cancer.’

It occurred to me that, for all the jobs he’d had, he’d never once called in sick (that I knew of), never once had the flu or even a cold. ‘You’re going to beat this,’ I said, trying to sound encouraging.

‘I’m telling you I’m going to beat it. If I don’t, I don’t, but I think I will. The truth is, I plan on being around for another ten years, so I can sit on my ass and not work,’ he said, and I could feel him grinning through the phone. ‘You’re stuck with me.’

I couldn’t bear the thought of his having to wait for what he wanted to read while he wasn’t feeling well, so as soon as he started the chemo and the radiation, I started sending him books. I stuck to political thrillers, because that’s what I knew he enjoyed. If I sent him a particularly long one, he’d thank me over the phone but say that, with his energy level so sapped, he just wasn’t up for tackling more than a few hundred pages of any one book.

A month into his treatment, he called me with an update from his doctor: things seemed to be going well. The tumour, on scans, was noticeably smaller. He hadn’t lost any of his hair. But he felt rotten and slept a lot and had no appetite; I should be prepared for the sight of him on my next visit, he warned, because he was a lot thinner than he’d been just a month ago.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

‘That Robert Bourne knock-off you sent. It’s not awful, but it’s not very good, either. You know what I really want to read? The new Stephen King. Dome-something.’

‘Under the Dome,’ I said.

‘That’s it.’

Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine – they’d all passed across our coffee table when I was growing up. But as far as I knew, he hadn’t read a Stephen King novel in years. ‘It’s a big one, isn’t it? Like, a thousand pages? I thought you weren’t up for anything too long.’

‘I’m not, but I saw him talking about it on TV and I thought, that sounds like a good book. A good story. I’d like to read that.’

‘Well, then you should read it,’ I said, thinking, You should do whatever the hell you want. You should go to the Grand Canyon, see Venice, the Pyramids. For godsake, you’ve earned a spree.

But this was a man who’d never owned a passport. He didn’t want to travel; he wanted to sit on his ass and relax.

‘I’ve got my name on the waiting list at the library,’ he said. ‘It’s Stephen King, though, so it could be a year before I get it.’

Ahead of my next trip to South Carolina, I purchased Under the Dome on Amazon and had it delivered to his house.

He insisted on driving to the Myrtle Beach Airport to pick me up, but he told I was pacing the floor with the phone held away from my mouth, crying and not wanting it to funnel into the conversation. me in advance that they wouldn’t be meeting me inside the terminal. ‘Get your bag and come outside. We’ll be right there.’ He was standing next to the car, waving at me, during the moment it took for me to recognize him. He looked like an empty costume of himself hung on a coat hanger. His eyes appeared bulbous and his jawbone pronounced, but this was only because his face had sunken in around them.

‘Guess what?’ he said into the rearview mirror on the drive back to his house.

Questions like this were never rhetorical. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘I’m almost halfway through that Stephen King book. I feel like shit, most of the time, and I fall asleep a lot – ’

‘At dinner!’ his wife said from the passenger seat. ‘The other night, he fell asleep at dinner!’ She sounded annoyed, but I could hear in her tone that she was scared, and most likely exhausted.

‘True,’ my dad said. ‘But I woke up in time for dessert.’

‘Huh. One bite,’ his wife clarified. She’d lost her first husband to cancer. She was facing sideways now, staring out the window at the shoulder of the road.

‘Anyhow,’ my dad said, ‘I feel like shit and I fall asleep a lot, but I’ve still managed to get almost halfway through that book. It’s a good story.’

‘What do you like about it?’ I chanced, wondering if, at last, I could get him to articulate why he enjoyed what he was reading.

‘It’s about everyday people thrust into a shitstorm, and what they do to deal with it – or not deal with it,’ he said. ‘You want to know what happens, so you keep reading.’

‘When did you start using the word “shit” so much?’ his wife asked, still staring off to the side.

‘Always,’ my dad said, grinning at me in the rearview mirror. ‘Shit’s a good word.’

He kept reading. During my visit, I watched him sit like a shrunken gnome in the wingback chair of his living room, in his bathrobe, turning a page, falling asleep, starting awake and turning another page.

I was desperate – maybe selfishly desperate – to feel good about something. I’d given him this big fat book and he was sticking with it, despite his exhaustion, his frustration with feeling sick, his fear that maybe – just maybe – things wouldn’t look so good when they finally cut him open.

He finished Under the Dome within a few weeks. It was the last book he ever read. ■

Photo by wwww.ficg

José Saramago came from the poorest of backgrounds – his grandparents, on both sides, were illiterate agricultural workers, and his father ‘rose’ in the world to become a policeman in Lisbon, where the family lived in cramped and insalubrious lodgings, and where, given scant schooling, Saramago virtually taught himself to read. He grew up, too, in the repressive Portugal of President António de Oliveira Salazar, and saw, at first hand, the effects of that regime on ordinary working people; under Salazar, the rich, needless to say, continued to flourish. Those early experiences informed all of Saramago’s writing, his unvarying theme being the ordinary man or woman pitted against an indifferent or hostile authority. If that sounds desperately dull and worthy, I should perhaps add that it is hard to think of a more imaginative novelist, one whose books are so full of humour and humanity and invention.

It is usually said that Saramago did not write his first novel until he was in his late fifties; in fact, he had already written two neo-realist novels: Terra do Pecado [Land of Sin] in 1947 and Clarabóia [Skylight] in 1949. Terra do Pecado was published, not to any great acclaim, but Clarabóia, for reasons that remain unclear, never was. It is hard to think of a more imaginative novelist, one whose books are so full of humour and humanity and invention. When the manuscript came to light years later, Saramago chose to leave it unpublished during his lifetime. When I read Clarabóia for the first time recently (it is due to be published in Portugal in November), it occurred to me that perhaps Saramago chose not to publish it simply because the book is so at odds with his mature style. It is a good and very involving novel about various struggling working-class families or middle-class families fallen on hard times, who all inhabit the same rather run-down apartment building in Lisbon. The classic Saramago theme is there, then, but the novel is entirely orthodox in its use of punctuation and sentence-length and seems, somehow, curiously old-fashioned and entirely un-Saramago-like. It made me realise how oddly constraining conventional punctuation can seem, compared with the freedom of those adventurous, sometimes page-long sentences we expect in a Saramago novel.

I’ve just finished translating Levantado do chão (Raised from the Ground), published in 1980 and hitherto untranslated into English. It was in this novel, as he himself commented, that Saramago first found his unique style and voice. The book charts the changing fortunes of a family of landless peasants in the Alentejo from the early part of the twentieth century until Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, as well as the role of the Communist Party in fighting for workers’ rights. Saramago said in an interview:

I was already at the twentieth section of the book and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

Here’s a brief example of that new style. What follows is the prelude to a description of a brutal attack on a political prisoner by two PIDE agents (Salazar’s secret security police). Having lingered outside the prison, we now go inside:

We have missed the preliminaries. We lingered to look at the landscape, to play with the little boy who so loves to play in the sun, however often his parents call him indoors, and to ask questions of Cesaltina, whose husband is not involved in these troubles, he works for the council and is called Ourique, but all these things were merely excuses, delaying tactics, ways of averting our eyes, but now, in between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things.

In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature. And by using ‘we’, Saramago not only abandons the guise of omniscient, God-like narrator, he also involves us, the readers, in the whole experience, and then goes still further, to give us an ant’s-eye view of this incomprehensible act of brutality, which makes it seem even more absurdly brutal. In this and later novels, dialogues (each new utterance signalled only by a capital lettter), descriptions, and the narrator’s own interpolations and speculations become part of the great wash of prose, and we, carried along on the swell, are made to feel part of what is being revealed.

One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. Saramago’s dense pages of prose may look daunting, but once you step in, you are immediately swept along on that seamless flow of thought and utterance, all the while chivvied and cheered on by a genial and garrulous narrator, eager to involve you in the narrative process, and occasionally confessing to certain narratorial misdemeanours – like jumping ahead of the plot – or apologising for not being able to spend more time with certain secondary characters, about whom he could tell us more, if only he had the time . . .

Saramago was overtly political in the themes of his novels: the dangers of ignoring the rise of Fascism (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis); the rise of mindless consumerism (The Cave); what would happen: if the Iberian peninsula broke away from the rest of Europe (The Stone Raft), if a plague of blindness was visited on a country (Blindness), if people refused to vote (Seeing), if people stopped dying (Death at Intervals). The books, however, do not read like political or polemical tracts, far from it, because Saramago gives equal (and possibly more) weight to human relationships. It is how we relate or fail to relate, it is love (in all its varieties), that makes the difference, that makes the individual willing and able to stand out against some, often anonymous, Authority intent on trying to deny or destroy the individual. In the unrelenting grimness and inhumanity of Blindness what shines out is the tolerance and kindness of the doctor’s wife and the group of people whom she, quite accidentally, gathers around her. In The Cave it is the little family unit – father, daughter and son-in-law – who form the warm, substantial human opposition to the shadows on the cave wall, which is all that is on offer from the Centre with its myriad entertainments and distractions. In Death at Intervals, even Death herself is vanquished by love.

As well as dispensing with inverted commas, semi-colons, colons, question marks and exclamation marks, Saramago had also abandoned the use of capital letters for some proper names as far back as The Cave. In his last novels, The Elephant’s Journey and Cain, no proper names are capitalised (unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence or utterance); kings and elephants, gods and nations, prophets and outcasts, secretaries and archdukes are thus all made equal. An example from The Elephant’s Journey:

Meanwhile, the king had received the scroll from his master of the horse, and had himself unrolled it, once he had untied the ribbons sealed with the archduke’s coat of arms, but a quick glance was enough for him to see that it was written in latin. Now dom joão, the third king of portugal to bear that name, although not entirely ignorant of the latin language, for he had studied it in his youth, knew all Saramago’s dense pages of prose may look daunting, but once you step in, you are immediately swept along on that seamless flow of thought and utterance. too well that his inevitable stumblings, prolonged pauses and downright errors of interpretation would give those present a wretched and erroneous impression of his royal self. The secretary, with the agility of mind we have noted before and equally quick reflexes, had already taken two discreet steps forward and was waiting. In the most natural of tones, as if the scene had been rehearsed, the king said, My secretary will read the letter, translating into portuguese the message in which our beloved cousin maximilian is doubtless responding to our offer of the elephant solomon, it seems to me unnecessary to read the whole letter now, all we need, at the moment, is the gist, Of course, sir. The secretary ran his eyes over the super-abundance of polite salutations, which, in the epistolary style of the time, proliferated like mushrooms after rain, then read further on and found what he was looking for. He did not translate, he merely announced, The archduke maximilian of austria gratefully accepts the king of portugal’s gift.

Saramago wrote The Elephant’s Journey after having survived a near-death-dealing bout of pneumonia. As you can see he still has a spring in his step and remains spryly true to his egalitarian principles, which, as we have seen, he extended even to punctuation and proper names, thus setting himself and his readers free to see and hear anew both world and language, untrammelled by convention. ■

José Saramago: a celebration, with Margaret Jull Costa, Ali Smith and Maya Jaggi is taking place at the Royal Society of Literature on 7 November at 7 p.m.

Raised from the Ground is published by Harvill Secker.

Note: Readers wishing to know more about Saramago’s work should read David Frier’s excellent book: The Novels of Saramago: Echoes from the Past, Pathways into the Future (University of Wales Press, 2007).