New Voices highlights six emerging talents each year on granta.com. The latest in series is Chinelo Okparanta, who also features in the latest issue of the magazine, Exit Strategies, with ‘America’. Below is her story ‘Runs Girl’, which tells of a young Nigerian girl, Ada, as she nurses her sick mother and looks for a way to make ends meet. Tomorrow we will be publishing an interview with Chinelo about the writers who have inspired her and the current crisis in Nigeria.

Photo by Genista.

The year Mama fell sick was the year Njideka confessed to me that she was a runs girl. I should have known. She walked around campus with shiny silk blouses hanging low on her shoulders, her stilettos making tiny dents in the earth. That year, the runs girls began to circulate the University of Port Harcourt campus. Or, maybe they’d always been around. Maybe I only noticed them that year, with their expensive outfits and accessories – money written all over their bodies – because Mama was falling apart, and there was almost nothing I could do.

A bird had flown over our compound with a mouse in its mouth. A black bird, maybe a crow. From the parlour window, we watched it fly. It was lovely and surreal, like a painting. Beautiful blue skies in the backdrop of blackness and death.

The bird dropped the mouse on the ground within a few steps of our front door. We found it that evening, just before sunset. Its tail was twisted around its body and its pelt had already stiffened by the time we saw it.

That evening, Mama snapped a branch off the guava tree in our backyard. She used the branch to pick up the mouse and to stick it in a plastic bag. I took the bag with me across the street, across the unpaved road, to the garbage dump there. I tossed the bag into the sea of trash.

Hours after I returned home, Mama began to feel sick. If Papa had still been alive, he would have chanted his usual saying: ‘The witch cried yesterday; the child died today. Who does not know the cause of the child’s death?’

But the doctors did not know. And even if they had known, chances are their diagnosis would have had nothing to do with the bird and the mouse. There were scientists, after all – not superstitious, like the rest of us.

It began with pain on the shoulder. Mama decided that for dinner we would have some goat meat in pepper soup, with more than the normal amount of utazi leaves. The leaves made the soup bitter. Mama said that the bitterness, in combination with the pepper, would chase the pain away.

But the next day she could barely move her left hand. We should have gone to the hospital straight away, but Mama said to hold off. They would charge us 2,000 naira just to see the doctor. That was the amount they charged the last time we went, when Mama was having all those sweats, followed immediately by chills. That time, the doctors ran their tests and told her she was fine. 2,000 naira wasted and nothing fixed.

There was no telling that the doctors would solve the problem this time. Besides, Mama was certain that it was the curse of the black bird. It was nothing a little praying and Bible reading couldn’t fix, she said. So, that second evening we read the Bible together, more fervently than ever.

NEPA had once again taken light away, but there was still a little glow from the sun, coming in through the windows of our parlour, which was where we prayed every evening, kneeling on the tile floor, our bodies resting on the seat of the couch. Happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise Mama was certain that it was the curse of the black bird. It was nothing a little praying and Bible reading couldn’t fix, she said. not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole. He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. Her voice shook as she read. And the mosquitoes flew about the room, making soft whistling sounds near our ears. Mama must have found the sounds more irritating than usual, because suddenly she was no longer reading, and I was looking up to find her swatting the area around her head. And then she let out a piercing shriek: a sound I hope I never hear again for as long as I live.

When night finally arrived, Mama’s moaning had still not stopped. Hours passed but there was no sleep for her, and no sleep for me. The pain was somewhere on her back, she said, also inside of it, on the left side between the upper shoulder and the lower back. She could feel it also in her front. Just like what she would expect a heart attack to be, except there was no indication that her heart was the part in which the crumbling was taking place. It seemed the heart would be just fine, she said. Yet I observed the signs; all of them were far from promising.

In the end it was I who forced her to go to the hospital. We walked out the door early the next morning, taking small steps, my hands fastened securely around her waist.

‘Slower, Ada,’ Mama said.

I tightened my grip on her. ‘Ndo,’ I said. Sorry.

We took a taxi to the teaching hospital, one of those three-wheeled keke napeps that looked like something in between a minivan and a motorcycle. The roads were riddled with potholes, and in the keke napep, small as it was, we felt every one of those holes. Each time the vehicle bounced, Mama let out a yelp. And then she’d look at me, her eyes repentant, as if she’d somehow misbehaved.

I should have told her I loved her. But how? Aside from prayers and practical exchanges, we rarely even talked those days just before she fell ill. I was busy with my studies, and she was busy with the market. And so there were silences, as if we no longer valued spoken words, as if spoken words were gaudy finishes on a delicate piece of art, unnecessary distractions from the masterpiece, whose substance was more meaningfully experienced if left unornamented.

There was no longer the Mama who used to tie her scarves on my head, making bows or floral designs out of the tailpieces. No longer the Mama who used to take me on long strolls around the neighbourhood, buying me corn and native pear or roasted bole. Those days, she’d tell me jokes and we’d laugh out loud as if we were the only people in the world. Some nights, she’d even rub a little lipstick on my lips, and she’d take me to Papa and say, ‘Look how beautiful our daughter is!’ And Papa would say, ‘She’s beautiful even without all that lipstick.’ Mama would nod. ‘Of course,’ she’d say. ‘But every girl needs to learn how to put on lipstick.’ And we’d laugh, and I’d dance around and pucker my lips at Papa. He’d smile and humour me, until I grew tired of the show.

That Mama disappeared soon after Papa died. Year after year, she had grown less gregarious. Her mind was always on the market; how we would make money from the crops she sold to pay for this and for that. Of course, I understood her worry. Papa had gone and left us to fend for ourselves in a world where it was hard for a woman to do so honestly.

If I had tried to tell her I loved her on our taxi ride that day, it would not have made things any better. I would not have even known how to say it. Mama, I have something to say? Or, Mama, I’m not just saying this because you’re sick. I really feel it. Do you feel it for me, too? Or, simply, Mama, I love you. No matter how I said it, it would have felt contrived, because we no longer said such tender things. And so, I remained silent, only patting her lap gently each time the pain caused her to moan.

I sat on a chair in the corner of the examination room. The fan buzzed on the ceiling, and the fluorescent lights above were shining bright.

A bald-headed doctor entered the room. He took her blood pressure, which he reported was just fine. Then he unbuttoned her shirt, just enough that he could take a look at her chest. Her skin was a light shade of brown, and it was easy to see that there was redness and swelling in the area around and below her left shoulder. And in the corner where her sternum met the clavicle, just beneath her neck, there was a bulge.

He tapped around those areas. Every time he tapped, she yelped.

‘We’ll have to run some tests,’ the doctor said.

We walked down two sets of crowded hallways, descended two flights of concrete stairs, with flies buzzing, children crying and Mama moaning.

First they attached thin wires to her chest and arms with tape. Then the machine beeped and reported the results on a strip of pink graph paper: horizontal markings of lines that peaked and dipped at regular intervals. Perhaps it was her heart after all, I thought. But the electrocardiogram results were normal. Her heart appeared fine.

Next were the X-rays. I waited outside while the nurse took Mama into the room. It was afternoon by the time the results came back. The fluorescent lights had flickered off sometime during our wait, and the fan had slowed to a stop; NEPA had taken away the light.

‘The generator will come on soon,’ the doctor said as he entered the room. In the dim light, he introduced himself. He was charming, tall and young, with a full head of hair. His loafers were black and shone even in the dim light. He was a rheumatologist, he said.

According to the X-ray, there were no fractures in the bone but there were patchy lucencies in the head of the clavicle and destructive changes in it.

Because of the destructive changes, he said, an abscess – a localized fluid collection – had formed in Mama’s shoulder, a sign of infection in the area. He would insert a needle into the area where he was sure the abscess was located and drain it out. Then he would give Mama antibiotics through an IV to help ensure that the infection did not spread. She would have to be admitted to the hospital for all this to be done.

‘You’ll be just fine,’ he said.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said to Mama, agreeing with the doctor. ‘It’ll be fine.’

I stayed at home with her the weeks after she was discharged, only leaving to run small errands: filling her prescription and stopping by the market to buy the ingredients for pepper soup.

My first day back at UniPort was about a month into Mama’s illness. I spent most of that day in a daze, not really hearing the lecturers, not taking notes in class. Outside of the lecture halls, I gazed at the other students, the wealthy ones who wore shiny shoes on their feet and, on their ears, tiny Bluetooth headsets – those wireless square buds, barely noticeable from a distance. I watched, transfixed by the way they displayed their wealth, the men swaggering, limping slightly on one leg, as if that leg were weak and dragged – in imitation of the way the American rap stars walked.

The girls had their own kind of swagger. They swayed their hips as they walked, hands dangling limply at their sides, as if they had no care in the world. Their patent leather handbags glistened, only a little less sparkly than the sequins on their stilettos. Their patent leather handbags glistened, only a little less sparkly than the sequins on their stilettos. They drove Hondas and Jeeps. Their cellphones were always ringing, and they’d walk around saying, ‘Darling’ or ‘Sweetheart’, their voices turning more and more saccharine as they spoke. Such good humour must have been the soothing effect of having so much money, I thought, the effect of having so little to worry about. After all, there were only a few problems in life that money could not fix.

I was sitting on the cement steps of our classroom building when Njideka came to me.

‘Na wetin dey trouble you?’ she asked.

We were in the same government policy class. There were only two of us girls in the class. We would probably not have become friends if not for that. There could have been no two girls as different from each other. For one thing, her weave was always pristine. Sometimes I liked to imagine her head under all that artificial hair: I envisioned bald patches and a thinning hairline, and it was comforting to think that deep down, under all that perfection was a version of her that was just as imperfect as me.

That day, I shook my head and I told her that nothing was the matter.

‘Na your Mama?’ she asked.

I did not answer.

She patted me on the shoulder, gently, then began to rub my back. She wore her weave in loose curls that day. They tumbled around her shoulders. A soft wind was blowing and carried in it the scent of her hair conditioner, something floral and welcoming, like the scent of bergamot.

And so, I told her. That Mama was in pain, and the doctors did not know the cause.

‘You need good doctors,’ Njideka said. ‘Private doctors, not those underpaid teaching hospital doctors who are always going on strike.’

I shook my head bitterly and rolled my eyes at her. We could not even afford the teaching hospital doctors. How would we afford the private doctors?

‘At the private practices, they’ll have state-of-the-art technology, not that old, broken-down equipment that you find in the teaching hospital. There’ll be electricity, too,’ Njideka said. ‘Generators. No reliance on NEPA, which comes and goes like the wind.’

‘Mama says it’s the curse of the black bird,’ I said. ‘We’ll just stick to praying for now.’

‘Go to the private doctors,’ Njideka said. A command. ‘I know a good one I can refer you to.’

I shook my head. The sun was shining. The wind was stirring up the dust, and not too far from where we sat a light-coloured bird was perching on a branch. If this one would carry a mouse in its mouth and drop the mouse in front of our house, would it also be a curse? Or, would its near-whiteness reverse the curse of the black bird?

‘Do you hear me?’ Njideka asked.

I nodded. And I told her honestly, that we had no money.

Her phone began to vibrate. She picked it up. ‘Darling,’ she said. Then she cupped the speaker of the phone and whispered to me, in proper English, words impressively articulated, the way I knew she would speak to whomever it was on the phone: ‘I’ll help you out,’ she said. ‘Stop by my place this afternoon. I’ll be home.’

And with that she was gone.

I went to her flat after my final class of the day. Mama would not worry. She expected that I’d be late, with having to catch up with so much missed schoolwork.

‘I don’t dash money,’ Njideka said to me. ‘It’s not my style.’

I nodded. Not that I had come expecting that she would dash me the money for Mama’s doctor visit. All the same, in case I ever felt the urge to ask, I now knew better.

Her voice was more vibrant than ever that afternoon. And I latched on to each and every one of her words, her intonations, because there was freedom in them, the way they rang out confidently, without restraint, without worry. Nothing like words between Mama and me.

Her primary patrons were the Yahoo Boys, she told me. They were the ones Nothing like words between Mama and me. who rolled into town in sleek cars and with pockets full of cash, even American dollars. I had seen many fancy-looking young men around campus, but I had just assumed that they came from wealth. It had not crossed my mind until that visit with Njideka that many of them built their wealth off internet fraud.

She also told me about the mugus, the older men, oil executives – often foreigners – overflowing with petro-naira. The mugus didn’t hang around campus but in fancy restaurants and hotels. They bought her jewellery and paid for her recharge cards, sometimes paying as much as 20,000 naira per month, because, of course, she had more than one phone.

‘It’s not hard work at all,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they just want you to have private dinners with them. Sometimes, they just want to look at and have an intelligent conversation with a pretty woman,’ she said.

Her television was on, and from the corner of my eye I could see the images fluttering across the screen. The room was cool, owing to the air conditioner. It was not something Mama or I had ever even contemplated buying – an air conditioner, let alone a television which took up nearly half the surface of one wall. I had not even thought that such a television existed until I saw it in Njideka’s flat.

‘You could pay for your Mama’s bills with the money,’ she said.

‘Abeg, comot from here!’ I said, glaring at her with my eyes wide open, shocked that she would even suggest such a thing for me. She could do as she pleased. But to go so far as to involve me in her sinful ways, that was another thing. ‘Tufiakwa!’ I said, snapping my fingers. ‘God forbid!’

‘You’re a pretty girl,’ Njideka said. ‘Or at least you can be. And I know of a man who would love a girl like you.’

She tugged the scarf that I was wearing around my head. Thin braids fell loose around my shoulders. She stood up and disappeared into one of the rooms of the flat. She came back holding a wide mirror, and a bag of beauty products: nail polish, lipstick, eye pencil, lip liner, small boxes of blush and eye shadow. ‘Ten minutes’, she said, ‘and I’ll show you what you can look like.’

She brushed the hair at the base of my scalp, straightening out the tight curls. She rubbed powder on my face, smoothing it on with soft cotton balls. The movement of her fingertips was hypnotic. Slowly I surrendered myself to her hands. She rubbed her blusher on to my cheeks. She finished with my lips. It was my same pale skin, my same bushy brows. But certain features had become magnified, and others had been changed, moulded to arrive at something more striking.

She took out a handful of plastic-wrapped packets from a small box which she had brought from the room. She stuck them in my purse. ‘Condoms,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’

‘I didn’t say I’d do it,’ I said.

‘Your mama is sick, and there’s a good chance you won’t even have to sleep with the man.’

‘My mama is waiting for me at home,’ I said, tossing the condoms from my purse. I picked up my headscarf and stuck my purse on my shoulder. ‘It’s sinful,’ I said, and walked out the door.

Back at home, there was no light, and I used a kerosene lantern to prepare Mama’s pepper soup. She’d still not grown tired of the soup, or perhaps she was still clinging to the hope that it alone could cure her of the curse.

I’d grown tired of it. I roasted a plantain and ate that with some tomato stew.

That night, Mama asked that I helped her to bathe. For a week, she had only been able to give herself sponge baths, because it was a painful chore for her to climb into and out of the bath.

I boiled a kettle of water on the kitchen stove. We waited till the sun had gone completely down, and then I poured the hot water into a bucket, took it to the tap outside and filled it with cool water, so that the mixture was just the right temperature for bathing.

There was a cement slab in the backyard on which we washed our clothes. Above the slab were wire lines on which we hung the clothes to dry. Mama stood on the cement slab. She crouched a bit, as if shielding herself from peering eyes. But our fence ran the whole way around the house. And the houses nearby were flats like ours, not high enough to allow the possibility of second-storey Peeping Toms.

It was the pain that made her crouch. And though it was mostly dark outside, the moon and stars shined brightly enough that I could make out the redness all around her shoulder and chest, starting just above her neck and down just above her breast.

With a small bowl, I poured the water down her shoulders, down her back. I lathered up a washcloth with a bar of soap and rubbed her skin gently with the cloth.

I poured the water down her breasts, lifted them one at a time and washed underneath. They were heavy and sagged, nothing like mine, though I knew that mine would surely one day become weighed down with age, too.

She squeezed her eyes shut each time the cloth touched her skin. It didn’t matter how gentle I was. The fear had been implanted in her, and so she’d squeeze so hard that wrinkles formed on her forehead and crow’s feet around her eyes. That night, it was hard to tell what the droplets on her face were: tears from so much pain and suffering, or merely splashes of bath water.

Even with the aroma of the soap, there was still something yeasty, almost stale, and a little honey-like about her scent. It was a smell that resembled that of the powdered milk which we used to drink our morning tea. And I thought, so this is what it smells like to be old and weak.

I imagined rubbing powder on her face, all over her body, smoothing her out, the way Njideka had smoothed me out. I imagined erasing the age from her face, imagined putting life into her cheeks. If only it could be as easy as rubbing some of Njideka’s blush onto them. But of course, that was not an option.

We prayed again that night and Mama read again from Job. Despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole.

You must speak good English,’ Njideka told me the next time we met. It was a Friday, after classes had wrapped up. I had told Mama that I’d run some errands, university business, pick up groceries at the market. Those types of things. She had nodded and told me she’d be waiting, whenever it was that I arrived. ‘None of this pidgin that we use when we are by ourselves,’ Njideka said. ‘These men are looking for intelligent women who can hold conversations with them.’ Of course, I could do just that. I could discuss budget and political issues comfortably. It was what I studied at the university. If I did well, I could bring in 500 dollars or more. American dollars.

I would do it just that one night. To get the money for Mama. To get the money so that I could take her to a specialist, one of the ones that Njideka would recommend. I’d tell Mama that I’d taken up a short-term job. It would be the truth. I knew she’d ask more questions. What kind of job? How did you find it? I’d figure out answers for those questions later, I thought.

Njideka did my make-up like she had that first afternoon. Then she lent me a red wrap-around dress, a little too tight on her, she said, but just my size. It formed a V-neck around my neck. I’d never before given any thought to my collarbone, but in the mirror that evening, I thought what a beautiful thing the collarbone was. And I thought how terrible that Mama’s was so damaged.

The man arrived in a BMW, a Be My Wife, Njideka teased. He was tall and dark, his simple linen buba and sokoto crisply ironed, and his shoes shone even in the dim evening light. He reached out his hand and took mine. He drew my hand upwards, and tipped his head just a bit as he placed a kiss on the back of my hand. He wore gold rings on three of his five fingers. They were not massive rings, but small diamonds circled each of them and sparkled so that the rings appeared much larger than they actually were.

It was supposed to be a simple dinner, at one of those fancy restaurants in G.R.A., Blue Elephant or G’s Barracuda, those That night, it was hard to tell what the droplets on her face were: tears from so much pain and suffering, or merely splashes of bath water. expensive hangout spots for the wealthy. And it seemed that this would be the case, as we headed down Abacha Road, past the G.R.A. Everyday Emporium, that upscale grocery store with the escalators and security guards. But then he continued to drive, taking some turns and winding up in a place that, in the dark, I did not recognize. He stopped the car there and asked me to untie my dress. I shook my head, smiling just a bit, like a mother gently scolding a misbehaving child.

‘Come on,’ he said, his voice soft and pleading. ‘Don’t be afraid of me, beautiful Ada.’

My name on his tongue sounded vile. Like an insult. Or, perhaps I imagined it so.

‘What about dinner?’ I asked, trying to sound calm. ‘Let’s go eat first, and then we’ll go from there.’

‘Come on,’ he said again, his voice more gravely, more urgent. He lifted his buba, lifted it so high that I could see the drawstring of his sokoto and the dark coils of hair just above, on his belly.

I shook my head again. ‘Dinner first,’ I said, my voice shaking. Njideka had said that most of the men wanted nothing beyond dinner and maybe a kiss. How could I have been so unlucky as to wind up with this man? I began to cry, begging him to take me back home.

He patted me on the back, then opened his door and stepped out. He came around to my side, pulled me out of the car and into the backseat, all the while telling me not to worry, that he would not hurt me. Then all his weight was on me and he was pinning open my thighs with his, only pausing to tear open the condom from its plastic wrap. I screamed, but it was dark all around, empty space like in an open field. Who could have heard?

He dropped me off several blocks away from Njideka’s flat. It was just as well, I first thought. But as soon as I got off the car, I decided that I could not bear to see her. It would be like staring my sin straight in the face. It would have been too difficult a thing to do.

And so I walked home, many kilometres on bare feet, holding the sequined heels that Njideka had lent me. I found the stash of bills in my purse as I walked. One thousand dollars. All that money, because he must have known that I had never been with a man. Perhaps Njideka had told him. It was more than enough to pay for Mama’s visits to a specialist.

Mama was kneeling by the sofa, her arms and chest resting on its cushion, as if she’d been in the middle of praying. She was wearing her grey wrapper tied around her chest. She turned slowly, her eyes probing. She must have seen the streaks of mascara coming down my face, the blotched lipstick around my mouth, the dried bits of blood that had dripped down my thighs, a darker shade of red than the dress I was wearing. I went to her, kneeled before her. But she only shook her head. ‘Mama, ndo,’ I said. Sorry.

She shook her head again. Her eyes appeared sunken, and her shoulders appeared lower than ever before. She only shook her head, and then she walked away.

Days went by, and then weeks. Every day I made her pepper soup and brought it to her. But each time I went back for the bowl, the soup was just as I had left it, only cold. She did not speak to me.

Then one Saturday, I brought her pepper soup again in a tray, and for the first time since my night as a runs girl, she looked at me, her eyes dull. ‘It’s been a long time since we went to church,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow we should go to church.’

‘Yes, Mama.’ I wondered how she could possibly make it through the bus ride.

That evening I came back to collect her bowl of soup, and again, it was cold and untouched. She was leaning on the sofa again, as if about to pray.

I left her where she was and went off to wash the plates, to sweep the floors, to bathe. When I returned to her, she was still leaning on the couch. I called out to her. ‘Mama! Do you hear me? Mama!’ She did not respond. And then suddenly I was turning her around, checking for breath. And there was none.

Papa’s brothers and sisters came, and some of Mama’s cousins, too, distant relatives, many of whom I did not recognize. She did not have any siblings. Together, we buried her in the cemetery not too far from our flat, the same place where we buried Papa.

‘Ekwensu,’ some of the funeral guests called it, when I explained to them how the pain began. The work of the devil.

Sometimes I go to the cemetery to visit Mama and Papa. On days when I’m overwhelmed by shame, I go in the evening or at night, as if the darkness will somehow mask the shame. And I remember the days before Papa died, and if I listen carefully, sometimes I can hear Mama’s laughter ringing out, somewhere far away from the cemetery.

And sometimes I think that if I were to be placed in a valley full of bones, She was leaning on the sofa again, as if about to pray. I would create a new Eve, create her from a new set of bones. And I would lay sinews upon her dry bones, and flesh upon the sinews. And I would cause there to be a noise, a clicking noise, and everything would fall in place. And I would cause breath to enter in, and this new Eve would live.

And this new Eve would walk amongst the trees of the garden. And she would drink from the waters of the river of the garden. And again, she would eat the forbidden fruit. But she would not be cast away from the garden, because she would be given the opportunity, just once, to ask for forgiveness. And she would be forgiven. ■

You can also see Chinelo Okparanta read and discuss her work at the following events:

Iowa City, IA
9 February, 7 p.m., Prairie Lights, 15 South Dubuque Street, Iowa City, IA 52240

Join Chinelo Okparanta and Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) for readings and conversation.

Chicago, IL
10 February, 7.30 p.m., Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60640

Granta’s New Voice Chinelo Okparanta joins local Granta author Nami Mun for readings and discussion of their work.

New Voices highlights six emerging talents each year on granta.com. The latest in series is Nick Dybek, whose forthcoming novel, When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man, is extracted below. Set against an unforgiving and spectacular landscape, Dybek takes us to a place where the line between fiction and reality blurs.

Photo by Ingrid Taylar.

Loyalty Island was the stink of herring, nickel paint, and kelp rotting on moorings and beaches. The smell of green pine needles browning across the ground. It was the rumble of outboards, wind, and ice machines, and the whine of hydraulic blocks. It was grey light that flooded and ebbed at dawn and dusk.

It was the habit of loneliness. We spent our time watching calendars, waiting for the chaos that came when the radios crackled and the phones rang and tires kicked dust in the parking lots around Greene Harbor. We searched the horizon for returning fishermen, who arrived shaggy and greasy, telling their stories but not their secrets.

It’s only natural to think that the place you were born is unlike any other, but there were towns like ours across the entire peninsula, across the entire Washington coast. Behind the forest, white mountains blinked in the mist. Our libraries were stocked with books that were always checked in and movies that were always checked out. Our children played baseball in overgrown fields. Our high-schoolers played hooky in greasy spoons and tried their parents’ curse words on tongues scalded by sweet coffee. Our adults bought cars and washing machines on credit. We cried and consoled one another when faced with tragedy, of which we had more than our share.

Loyalty Island wasn’t actually an island at all. The town sat on a nub of land jutting into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a thin peninsula that turned ninety degrees like the neck and head of a giraffe. At our backs, a rain forest sprouted ferns and moss that glowed green against the bark. The highways were lined with leaning trees, dense enough to block the light, turning the roads into chutes you’d slide through as though over ice. Behind the forest, white mountains blinked in the mist.

The strait was a chameleon of grey, blue, green, and black water. You could spend days on a pier, or a hill, or, if you were lucky, as my family was, in your living room, thinking of nothing but naming the colour. And beyond these plates of water and light the horizon was broken by islands, matted with dark trees. Beyond the islands the ocean pushed clouds across the sky. It rained all fall, winter, and spring. The sky rose and sank. The ocean dragged out and rushed in, but Loyalty Island never changed.

Every fall the boats left for Dutch Harbor. Every spring they returned. And every summer the sun stayed out late for parties around the grills in Cousins Park. On weekends, fireworks lit the sky over Greene Harbor, and a band played on the small stage near the boardwalk. My father read to me each night before bed, mainly, I think, to impress upon my mother how seriously he took her order that I not follow blindly in his footsteps. The year I turned eight he read Treasure Island to me front to back three times.

I loved the young narrator, Jim Hawkins, but rooted for the doomed pirates. Blind Pew, trampled in the street. Black Dog, his fingers mangled like those of my father’s friend, Don Brooke. Israel Hands, struck down by the swinging tiller. And especially Captain Flint, dead and buried like his treasure. Captain Flint, whose shadow still fell years after he’d drunk himself to death in Savannah. I begged my father to tell me more.

‘What more can I tell you?’ he asked, laughing. ‘You’ll have to ask Robert Louis Stevenson. He’s dead? All right, let me think.’

I waited under the covers as my father settled down in the blue beanbag on the floor and switched off the bedside lamp. I could smell the nightly cup of coffee on his breath. ‘Years ago,’ he began, ‘when Flint was still a good man . . .’

Every night for the rest of the summer my father told me a new story. Captain Flint defended villages from bandits in Haiti, freed slaves in Brazil, and befriended the yeti in Nepal.

By August Safeway had stocked up on frozen food and powdered milk. The men who had spent the summer sleeping late or watching baseball returned to work, to paint and mend the boats and gear. The rest of us could only watch the summer dwindle, weeks to days to hours.

Every man had his own way of leaving. Justin Howard, a deckhand on Sam’s boat, drove all the way to Ashland, to see a play at the Shakespeare festival because he was in love with one of the actresses. Andrew Ramzi stayed up all night watching movies so that he’d have something to replay in his mind during the shifts on deck. Others, many others, drank themselves off their stools at Eric’s Quilt.

My father shaved off his beard. Every September: the click of scissors as he trimmed; Captain Flint, whose shadow still fell years after he’d drunk himself to death in Savannah. I begged my father to tell me more. the swish of the old-fashioned brush as he slowly painted his face; then the scrape of the razor, the shaving cream peeled away. Until he had a new face, a face that seemed less kind somehow, maybe because I knew what it meant. That night he’d hug me against a smooth cheek smelling of Bay Rum and in the morning he would be gone, leaving only the trimmings in the sink – almost red against the white of the bowl, though the hair on his head was brown.

Those of us left behind dug in. Through the fall, through the winter, it seemed we lived on the border of a real life lived elsewhere. It seemed that the absence was ours somehow, not theirs, that we were the ones who were gone. I went up to my room and tried to see it as though through my father’s eyes. Bookshelves stuffed with Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. A Mariner’s pennant, gaping shark’s jaws, a print of Van Gogh’s room I’d gotten from my mother. My fleet of Lego ships – schooner, sloop, aircraft carrier – rested at anchor on the top shelf, complete with eye-patched, peg-legged sailors. Is it any surprise that so many of us would have given anything to be part of that life, no matter how little it suited us, no matter how little of it we understood?

I don’t want to romanticize their work because I’ve never done it. But they romanticized it because they suffered for it. They stumbled from their bunks, having slept two hours in seventy, onto decks sheathed in ice, onto twenty-foot seas. They winched up enormous crab pots dripping foam, dredged from the bottom of the coldest ocean. How could each man explain to himself a lifetime of red eyes and frostbitten ears, of knees in salt water, elbows in chopped herring? It had to be part of some larger destiny; the fight to stay awake and alive had to be turned, somehow, from drudgery to heroism.

To venture from the wheelhouse, on the rare clear day when the sea lay as still as glass, the live wells plugged with red king crab that would sell for one dollar fifty a pound – already negotiated with the cannery – was, to them, as good as it would ever get. To pilot a steel ship that slid over fathoms of ocean churning secretly below was art. Out there you had the freedom to do anything. Out there, who could tell you otherwise?

But their freedom came with risk and was shaped by consequence. Don Brooke lost his index finger at the knuckle. My father shattered his ankle on the second day of tanner season and had to grimace through two weeks of constant work. But it was Sam North who’d suffered the most.

Normally the boats were worked exclusively by men from Loyalty Island, but one year one of the crew learned of a family emergency just In the morning he would be gone, leaving only the trimmings in the sink – almost red against the white of the bowl before they shipped out of Dutch Harbor, and was obliged to fly home. They filled his slot with a kid named Ramo who’d arrived in Dutch Harbor with a duffel bag and half a degree from USC. By the time they’d motored out fifty miles, Ramo was green with nausea. Seasickness was permissible, even an omen of good luck. But Ramo refused to work through it. Apparently it wasn’t even the rollers that dropped his stomach; it was the smell of the bait herring.

The crew a man short, Sam left the wheelhouse to take shifts on deck. With one of the eight-hundred-pound crab pots – a steel frame the size of a double bed, covered in nylon mesh – in the launch, Sam crawled in to bait it with the same herring that had driven Ramo into fits of nausea. But his fingers were numb from the cold, and, at forty-five, he was no longer built for baiting. He lagged an extra ten seconds, more than enough time to invite calamity.

A rogue wave – a real monster – washed the deck, knocking everyone off their feet and sending the crab pot over the rail, Sam along with it. The pot was weighted to sink five hundred feet to the bottom of the Bering Sea, and, as the door shut behind him, Sam realized that he would be coming along.

How many times have I seen this in nightmares? Liquid ice flooding Sam’s boots, sleeves, and nostrils. His fingers curling around the mesh of the pot. The pressure after only two fathoms beginning to rattle in his ears, the vertigo of black water and weightlessness. He tries to pull his hands away but his fingers are claws in the net; the electricity in his blood and brain is already slowing, freezing.

The pot races downward, wrapped in violent foam. Sam’s hands still won’t release, and he writhes against the mesh. He feels the shallowness of the pot, the narrowness. In the black rush of water the pot feels, of course, like a coffin. He’s deep enough now to have been buried four times over. The pressure is in his sinuses, his inner ear and his temples; it seems to curl up his fingernails and earlobes. Somehow, amazingly, he resists the temptation to scream and to breathe. He imagines he can smell the herring as its slotted plastic jar floats behind him like a streamer on the back of a bicycle. The herring that will be a siren call to armies of king crab, three feet wide, scuttling across the bottom of the sea, pincers raised and swinging like lanterns. Sam pictures himself dead, after a two-day soak. The pull of the hydraulic winch, the pot rising, breaking the surface, banging against the Cordilleran’s steel hull. He is unceremoniously dumped onto the deck, his body swollen by seawater, half devoured to white bone.

His feet stab the dark, and, miraculously, the pot breaks open at the bottom – It had to be part of some larger destiny; the fight to stay awake and alive had to be turned, somehow, from drudgery to heroism. or the top? His fingers finally release; he pulls back his arms. He slides from the pot into open water and is tempted to breathe it like air. He wants to kick his legs, but is afraid they might only take him deeper. He spins, trying to locate himself in the gauze of bubbles and spies the buoy line, nearly phosphorescent in the darkness. With the line to orient him, he can see the pot rushing away like a train.

He’s down fifty, maybe sixty feet. He follows the buoy line up, hand over hand, starving for breath as his ears pop again and again. He bursts from the water and has just time enough to draw a three-quarter breath before a breaker hurls him back down. When he comes up a second time, the ship is nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t expect to live, but is grateful that he won’t die caged on the ocean floor. He gropes for the buoy, brings it to his chest with both arms.

He wakes below deck, wrapped in blankets, shaking and vomiting. He can hardly feel his body but figures the crew would not be gazing at him with such open-mouthed amazement if he was dead.

Each spring, my father returned home in either a frenzy or a depression. It took him weeks to sleep through the night, to sit still for an entire meal. He paced from room to room, as if needing to relearn the house. But these were the easy readjustments. He must have felt that he came home to a new son every spring. I gained inches and lost teeth. One year I loved Robert Louis Stevenson, the next radio cars, and my father never caught up. Sometimes I wondered why he came home at all.

Some years the boats came back heavy, some years they came back light. If the fishermen caught enough crab, they kept their work, and, How many times have I seen this in nightmares? Liquid ice flooding Sam’s boots, sleeves, and nostrils. consequently, the teachers and the electricians kept theirs. Bob Rusk continued to pull pints of Olympia at Eric’s Quilt (named for the blanket that warmed Bob back to life after he was fished from the Bering Sea). Mrs Zhou continued to press the button at the dry cleaner’s, whirring her carousel of plastic garment bags to life. Will Percy continued his awkward chats with the patrons at the single-screen Orpheum Theatre, its lobby always smelling of his pipe smoke. Mrs Gramercy, whose face was half frozen from Bell’s palsy, continued her rounds, wiping the dust from spine to spine to spine in the stacks of the public library.

The year I was ten, the boats came back heavy. The season was highline. There would be a summer with money for everyone. You could feel the vibrations of this everywhere, in the pitch of voices in line at Belinda’s Deli, in the popcorn at the Orpheum, in the starch in Mrs Zhou’s laundry. Money, as my father used to say, is only energy, energy that – in this case – began as worms and mollusks on the floor of the Bering Sea. Energy that passed to the bellies of king crabs, to the bellies of steel ships, to the bellies of steel banks.

My father brought home a VCR for my mother, a luxury in those days, along with an armload of the movies she loved by Kurosawa, Antonioni, and Bresson.

‘Anything for me?’ I asked.

‘Get in the car,’ he said. ‘You’ll need this when we get to the Laurentide.’ He handed me a fillet knife in a black plastic sheath.

We parked in front of the Laurentide’s slip and climbed the steel ladder. The deck had just been washed down; fresh water beaded the rails. My father breathed in with his nose and slapped his thighs.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, grinning, ‘so no ideas about joyriding, okay?’ He went below deck, returning a few minutes later with an enormous king salmon slung over his shoulder. Before I could say anything, he swung the fish by its tail and whacked me in the arm. I slipped on the deck and went down hard. ‘That’s my present?’ I asked, but my disappointment was faked. We were both laughing.

We set the salmon on the worktable in the stern. My father took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, folded it in half and tied it around my forehead.

‘We don’t want sweat in your eyes. Now, the scalpel, Doctor.’

He unsheathed the fillet knife and presented it to me on the flats of his hands. I’d seen him do this a hundred times. I rolled up my sleeves and took the knife as two brown pelicans flapped onto the rail, tucking long beaks against their breasts.

‘Gills first, right?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, now careful. I can’t take you home with a finger like Don’s.’

I dug the blade into the salmon’s head, just behind the gills, sliced vertically and then drew the knife towards the mouth. The flesh was as cold as the water it had come from, but the knife glided. Above me, gulls screamed. The gills, on the inside, looked like maroon clay. I tossed the scraps overboard without looking, the way I’d seen my father do it. I could hear wings beating, a chorus of shrieks and splashes. I flipped the salmon and attacked the other side.

‘That’s it, Doctor,’ my father said. ‘Belly-dance him, now.’

I looked up at a swirl of feathers. More birds had descended around the table. They swooped and dove, coming close enough that I could feel a rush of air.

‘What are you waiting for?’ my father said. ‘Not too deep. Don’t slit the stomach or these birds will go crazy.’

Bits of scale clung beneath my fingernails. My hands felt covered in sticky snow. I wiped a palm on my doctor’s bandana and pointed the tip of the fillet knife just below the gills.

‘Stay on the beam,’ my father said. ‘Steady hands. Watch the stomach, now.’

I knew the trick was to go just deep enough to flay the flesh without messing the organs. But as I sliced, I imagined the gulls alighting on my shoulder, felt their feathers under my nose and their beaks in my ears. The knife clung to a scale and I pushed smoothly through, not sawing, just the way I’d seen him do it. But too deep. I was carving through the stomach. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. I looked up at the swirling white birds, and when I looked down again my hands were covered with black needlefish. The needlefish poured from the stomach, hundreds of them, over the cleaning table and onto my pants and shoes.

I dropped the knife and stumbled three or four steps back, brushing at the needlefish as if they were sparks. I think I managed not to cry out. The gulls descended, shrieking, stabbing the fish, puffing their wings. They tore at the deck, all white feathers and black eyes. Then they fell silent, mouths too full to shriek, and the deck churned as if under white clouds. My father shooed three gulls with his boot and stooped for his knife.

‘All right, wash up before you get in the car. I’ll finish this off.’

‘Let me help you,’ I said.

He smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkling like cellophane. But in answer, he only cuffed the back of my neck and rubbed it with his rough thumb.

The next summer was a different story. My mother cancelled the cable, then the newspaper. Would we even be able to last until the start of the next season? The violet puffs under my father’s eyes told me not to ask. He spent the evenings slumped in his chair, a bamboo-framed tiki with green jungle-print cushions. He winced when the phone rang, as if each jangle dropped like a link of chain. One night I answered to snowstorm static, to a man’s voice saying, ‘Bollings? Fucking Bollings? Bollings?’ Those were the sounds of Alaska. My father snatched the receiver and slammed it to his ear.

‘How many other ways can I say it? No.’ As always, he spoke softly and slowly, as if his tongue could barely lift each word. ‘I don’t care what you’ve heard. Have we been there every last one of these ten years? Damn straight.’ He dropped the phone into the cradle and offered me a low-watt smile. ‘Game?’ he asked.

He pulled the taped and retaped Connect Four box down from the top shelf of the hall closet. We set up, as always, at the kitchen table, the plastic grid in the centre, our checkers stacked before us. As we played he rubbed his beard or towed out the hair at his temples.

‘You’re worried?’ he said. The sharpness in his voice surprised me.

‘I don’t know. Not really.’

‘Why’s that?’ He cocked one eye, aligning it with a hole in the board. I didn’t answer.

‘Know who doesn’t worry?’ he asked. ‘The same people who don’t pay their taxes. Fools, fucking assholes.’

He’d never sworn like that, not at me anyway, and I felt the words prickle my neck. The gulls descended, shrieking, stabbing the fish, puffing their wings. They tore at the deck, all white feathers and black eyes. We continued to play, wordlessly. Dinnertime passed. The kitchen windows turned the deep green of a chalkboard. The evening rain began, beading against the glass of the back door like sweat. I won game eight and, as victor, pulled the lever, spilling the checkers back onto the table. As we sorted through reds and blacks my father said, ‘We might not always have the luxuries we do now, that’s all I’m saying. We can’t just float around and wait for money to fall like mensa.’

‘Manna,’ I said. I wouldn’t have corrected him, but I could see him cracking, getting angry. I’d always suspected that there was another side to my father that he left in Alaska each year, a part of him we never saw. ‘Mensa’s the club for geniuses.’

His eyes narrowed through the board, his mouth narrowed under his beard. ‘Which you’re clearly in.’ He still didn’t raise his voice.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘What do you know?’ He leaned back against the kitchen booth, snapping his heels on the floor, and it was as though a beam had been broken, this trance I had finally pushed us from. ‘How are you going to learn anything when you know it already?’

Normally he spoke in tight phrases, self-contained as packets of salt. But now he was practically foaming at the mouth. ‘You haven’t breathed a breath that didn’t come easily, and you still think you know everything. So when I hear you say ‘I know, I know,’ I want to reach across this table and strangle you.’

He clamped his hand to my shoulder, scattering his pile of black checkers. I tried to twist away, but he held me firmly in place for a moment before he drew back. I shrank against the booth, still feeling the vise of his fingers.

We blinked at each other.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Are you all right? Sorry.’

Later that night I found him sitting alone under the yellow fixture in the breakfast nook. He patted the bench next to him when he saw me in the doorway. The overhead fluorescents were off and the table lamp showed just enough light to reveal the grey threads in his hair. There was a map of the Bering Sea spread out across the table, held flat by two empty beer steins.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you where I’ve been.’

He pointed to Bower’s Ridge and the Pribilof Islands, talking fast, sipping from I’d always suspected that there was another side to my father that he left in Alaska each year, a part of him we never saw. a blue-flowered mug of black coffee. ‘We were here, and here, and here,’ he said, spreading his thick fingers over the map. Abruptly, he picked up one of the steins and let the map roll shut. He leaned back against the bench and blew out a sigh. ‘It’s hard,’ he said. It seemed like a perfectly simple truth to me, but he continued. ‘Because when you’re out there all you can think about is back here, and when you’re back here, all you can think about is out there.’

All that winter I’d thought about Captain Flint. How, I wondered, did the good Captain Flint change into the man who buried his treasure on Skeleton Island and murdered his crew to protect the secret, the man who left Allardyce to rot, his outstretched arms pointing the way?

‘It’s just stories, Cal. You know that, right?’ my father said.

I said I did.

‘Well,’ he said, as I followed him into the living room, ‘he probably just got greedy.’

His hands were as thick as strip steaks, and scarred, especially at the tips of his fingers. He had wide shoulders and short legs that seemed engineered for a rolling deck. Even at home, he stood with his legs apart, as if guarding his balance.

‘Greedy for what?’ I asked. ‘What did he want?’

I wish I could remember his answer, or if he answered at all. ■

What to read more? Nick Dybek spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson, here.

Yesterday Nick Dybek was announced as the latest Granta New Voice. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about his forthcoming novel, When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man, finding the ‘right’ location for the story, the writers who have most influenced him and why he has become a fanatical record collector.

TH: One of the things that fascinated me about ‘When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man’ is the slight blurring between the family’s reality on Loyalty Island and the fictions that the son (and our narrator) is captivated by, particularly Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Would you say that his fascination with ‘doomed pirates’ and their fates is his way of making sense of the violence and chaos of his young life?

ND: In children’s books the villains are usually doomed while the heroes make it to the end; in Treasure Island, for example, the reader knows Jim Hawkins will survive because he’s telling the story, but there’s no such guarantee for John Silver. It’s Silver that you need to fear for. Perhaps because of this, I was always more interested in the villains than the heroes when I was a kid.

I imagined Cal, the narrator, to be similarly fascinated by the villains of Treasure Island, by the tension they produce whenever they I was always more interested in the villains than the heroes when I was a kid. step on the page. As your question suggests, anxiety and apprehension are familiar feelings for Cal; his father (and all his male role models) live with constant, excruciating risk, a sword always hanging over their heads. Because of their jobs, they are imperilled – just as a book’s villains are in the mind of a child-reader. It made sense to me, therefore, that Cal would identify his father with the endangered and yet dangerous pirates; at the same time, I thought he would want to see his father as a hero. I think the Captain Flint stories resonate for him in part because they offer a means of reconciling those competing impulses.

Fatherhood here seems to be presented as an ill-fitting mask. When he returns to his family, after long intervals, the father veers between being heroic and unknowable and even, at times, sinister. His shaving stubble left in the sink is unexpectedly red to his son; a mistake gutting fish produces disappointment and when the son corrects his father’s use of the word ‘mensa’ he loses his temper. Does the son’s fascination with the also shadowy yet paternal figure of Captain Flint have to do with his wanting to understand what makes a hero (or a father figure) fall from grace?

As I wrote, I was definitely interested in exploring the ways we negotiate between our often-idealized images of the people we know or love, and those people as they truly are. This turned out to be an especially complicated negotiation for the people of Loyalty Island, a It is much easier for Cal to think about Captain Flint, to question the motives of a made-up character rather than a real one. community in which a significant part of the population – and nearly all the father figures – are gone for half the year. Their collective absence makes them easy to aggrandize; their continuous absence makes the resulting romantic image slow to dissolve. It also turned out to be a complicated negotiation for Cal, whose adolescence is itself putting pressure on long-held assumptions, hopes, and illusions. It’s his age as much as anything that causes him to test his father by correcting him in conversation, or to search for clues about who he really is in the stubble left in the sink. I think this sort of detective work is something Cal is conscious of only in retrospect; at the time of the action, it is much easier for him to think about Captain Flint, to question the motives of a made-up character rather than a real one.

There’s a nightmarish scene in which the father recounts a story about Sam North, the fisherman he worked alongside who ‘suffered most’, who is caught beneath a crab pot and plunges down to the sea bed. Our narrator tells us that his face returns to him in dreams often. Do dreams and nightmares, I wonder, have as much hold over us as our waking lives?

I think dreams – waking dreams and flights of imagination anyway – probably do, especially for children and adolescents. A child has no choice but to encounter certain things in his mind first, to rely on stories and rumours to substitute for the actual experience – having a job, kissing someone, travelling – that will come later. You mentioned the blurring of reality and fiction in your first question, and I think that blur is as good a definition of childhood as anything else. Maybe it’s what draws so many writers to the adolescent perspective; during that time, imagination and experience are in a death match, one made no less compelling by the expectation that experience will get the pin.

Dreams, nightmares, and imagination absolutely have a hold on Cal, Imagination and experience are in a death match, one made no less compelling by the expectation that experience will get the pin. as they do on many members of his community. In fact, the role imagination might play in such a landscape is part of what drew me to it. So much of life in Loyalty Island is defined by what occurs in a place – Alaska, a harrowing, awesome, extreme place – a thousand miles away, which leaves the town’s inhabitants unusually reliant on their imaginations. The pressure this mystery might put on a community’s dream-life – how its inhabitants might shape that unknown place even as it shapes them – fascinated me.

You write poetically about Loyalty Island and its relationship to the elements, especially the sea. What part does a sense of place and intimate knowledge of local details, such as tides, play in your writing?

I did a lot of research and even moved to Seattle to be closer to what I was trying to write about, but I wouldn’t say that my knowledge of the Northwest, the sea, or any towns on the Olympic Peninsula is close to intimate. I grew up in Michigan. I can barely read a tide chart. That said, getting the sensory and cultural details of the place right, capturing the insular nature of the community as well as its dramatic landscape, was very important to me. But I guess I should back up because ‘right’ is a misleading word in this context – maybe it would be a better to say ‘convincing.’ There is no ‘right,’ because there is no Loyalty Island, WA; the town is based on a few different places, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, and Newport, OR, for example, but I wasn’t necessarily trying for verisimilitude.

It was definitely important to me, however, to write about a setting that fuelled my imagination – maybe because place lends itself to When I had the initial idea for this novel, I had to really look for a setting that I could draw from, one that would inspire invention. physical and sensory description, and such description is the portal to so much else in fiction. A lot of writers find this spark in a setting they do know intimately from childhood or later experience, but, for whatever reason, that hasn’t happened for me. When I had the initial idea for this novel, I had to really look for a setting that I could draw from, one that would inspire invention. It was kind of interesting how it worked out; I was trying to imagine a place, Loyalty Island, and in doing so was living in parallel to the narrator, who is trying to imagine life in Alaska.

Objects such as the son’s toys and the father’s knife seem to play a vital role here, with lives of their own that seem to continue without their owners. As a prose writer are you drawn to write the lives of these inanimate things as you might be to one of your characters?

These objects are important, but mostly as they relate to and illuminate character. As I was writing When Captain Flint . . . I was interested in the way the characters’ relationships to objects might articulate their more inchoate feelings; Cal’s attachment to his Lego ships, for example, might say something about his anxious view of his place in the culture that he can’t say directly. I’m excited that you noted the role of objects in this excerpt because the characters continue to use objects to express, or even to define, themselves later on. For example, Cal’s mother is a serious record collector; she even has a room in their home devoted to her collection. That room and the music within it take up a fair amount of space not only on later pages, but in the minds and emotional lives of the characters who occupy them.

It’s an interesting time to be thinking about the role of objects (in fiction and in life), given that the necessity for books, records, movies, and even the sort of board games Cal and his father play is diminishing with digitization. I went back to a couple of classic memoirs about adolescence, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. I’ve always been a big music fan, and since the rise of mp3s and digital downloads I’ve become nearly as obsessive a record collector as Cal’s mother. Once CDs went obsolete I tried iTunes, but missed the feeling of going to the record store, of flipping through the stacks, of inspecting the shine on the vinyl. Even though the physical properties of records have very little to do with the music they play, their tactility gets me closer to something that I care about – something that has always been a big part of how I think about myself. I think the characters in this novel pay special attention to objects of significance to them for similar reasons; those objects help them realize and express the identities they’ve invented for themselves.

The son poses a question about the ‘larger destiny’ of the men his father works with as if it might be something external, as opposed to coming from character itself. Is this one of the questions that the son is trying to figure out?

Certainly Cal is trying to figure out his own ‘larger destiny’ and the role of his father’s work in it. I think it becomes quickly clear to him that his character doesn’t suit the place and time into which he was born. At the same time, the extreme sacrifices members of this community make for their livelihood drive them to romanticise their work. Even though Cal doubts his own suitability for fishing, he is as susceptible to this pressure to aggrandize it as anyone else (his fondness for adventure stories might even make him more susceptible). This tradition of describing daily life in romantic terms such as ‘destiny’ continues to influence and afflict Cal, even once he’s old enough to reject it.

Robert Louis Stevenson is clearly a writer who means a lot to you. Which other writers have been important touchstones for you?

For this project I went back to a couple of classic memoirs about adolescence, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. The influence of those books on the sensibility and the prose is probably apparent. I’m also a big Graham Greene fan: I love his control of tone, his economical but beautiful prose, his unexpected black humour. I also love that his adventure stories make use of all the expected conventions – romantic settings, betrayal, and intrigue – and yet his grasp of psychology is so acute that the most compelling adventure occurs inside the characters.

Your father, Stuart Dybek, is one of the most celebrated American voices of his generation, particularly known as one of the quintessential Chicagoan writers. To me your voice is entirely distinctive and yet it is striking that you write about patrimony with such insight here. As a father has he been encouraging of your writing and what has your journey been with negotiating his influence (if you have considered it to be one)?

The first or second day I was in Iowa City, a friend shoved a copy of The Anxiety of Influence into my hands. I appreciated his concern, but I haven’t gotten around to reading the book. My dad gave a toast at the wedding in which he admitted to whispering words like ‘astronomer,’ ‘physicist,’ and ‘marine biologist’ to me in my crib. Certainly I learned to love reading from both of my parents, though I probably came to creative writing a little later than I would have otherwise had my dad not been a writer. It didn’t seem like much of a rebellion. Did he encourage me once I began writing seriously? He’s always happy to offer help when I’ve asked, whether in the form of criticism, advice, or a pep talk. On the other hand, I got married a few months ago, and my dad gave a toast at the wedding in which he admitted to whispering words like ‘astronomer,’ ‘physicist,’ and ‘marine biologist’ to me in my crib.

Can you tell me what you are working on right now?

Struggling through the opening of a novel about the aftermath of World War I. So far it has involved lot of research; there are more great books about the subject than I could ever read. They’re all a little depressing, though. ■

You can read the full extract from When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, here.

Samantha Smith’s policeman father was involved in the rescue effort immediately after the planes struck the Twin Towers. Here she talks to Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson about the effect this had on her family, her dream of being a writer, the multilayered structure of her memoir and what it means to be selected as one of Granta’s New Voices.

TH: Did you always dream of being a writer or was writing something that you began doing in response to what happened to your father and family after 9/11?

SS: I always dreamed of being a writer, but as a child I focused so much on basketball I had a hard time envisioning myself doing anything else. As a kid, I loved making up fictional stories, especially mysteries or twists on real scenarios. It wasn’t until college a few years after 9/11, that I seriously considered writing a book. I took a memoir-writing course where the professor gave us distinct assignments. I realized with each topic, I was writing about my family. From then on, I felt a need to share our story. At the time, there weren’t many people to talk to about my father’s anger that came home to us after his rescue work post-9/11 and even fewer who understood how it was manifesting in his younger children. Writing really helped to get it down and sort it all out.

You write beautifully about the influence that music had on you when you were growing up. Do you think that stylistically your beloved lyrics and songs have shaped your own voice?

I grew up on my father’s music, mostly classic rock. But he also had a penchant for Broadway musicals: from Les Miserable to Tommy to The Phantom of the Opera. It was such a large part of our relationship that I don’t think there was any way I could write about him and I without including the music we loved. I definitely think songs and lyrics shaped my voice. While writing, I usually had music playing in the background – a different genre for each scene I worked on. I thought that if I couldn’t have a soundtrack that was sold with the book then I’d add the feel of the music in the prose to compensate.

Was writing this memoir cathartic for you?

In some ways, it did feel like an emotional purge. There were certain times when I’d stare at the computer screen through tears and wonder why I was putting myself through the pain of losing the close relationship I had with my father all over again. To write this memoir, I’ve had to open old wounds and go back to them again and again. My grandparents would call me ‘a glutton for punishment’. But the hard work and emotional journey was all the more rewarding when the scenes read together. I’ve gained a whole new perspective, like a person watching a movie reel of their life playing before them. You see important things you missed before.

It’s clear that 9/11 was a defining moment in your life and the life of your family. Has it altered your politics?

I was only 14 years old on the day of 9/11, but I believe it shaped and formed my politics. I was very concerned about my father and his work at ground zero. I started reading articles about rescue workers and the health issues they were facing. I attended an oral history conference at Columbia University this summer and its theme was ‘Rethinking 9/11’, which explored the ‘politics of representation’. For the first time, I was in an environment where people were looking at the attacks from an academic standpoint. I’m grateful for the experience; it helped me temporarily set aside my emotions and understand 9/11, and the political atmosphere afterwards, in an entirely different way.

Mark Twain famously said of memory ‘It has no order, it has no system, it has no notion of values, it is always throwing away gold and hoarding rubbish.’ The structure of the memoir is non-linear: you move back and forth from moments before and after 9/11, when your father was undamaged and then, drastically altered. Did this structure enable you to weigh up which were the golden layers of memory you wanted to horde?

I tried numerous times to write a linear story, but it didn’t read the same as it did when I traveled back and forth using 9/11 as an axis of sorts. After much trial and error, I juxtaposed scenes by way of association. The structure highlights my ‘golden’ memories. I wanted to drop them in to remind a reader of the change my father underwent after his rescue work. And to feel the disconnect I did when he walked back into the house after nine months spent ‘in the pit’. But my father was never a conventional parent – he once told me I had a tapeworm when I asked for more dessert as a kid. This back and forth structure allowed me to explore and highlight the complexity of the characters in my narrative.

What does being selected as one of Granta’s New Voices mean to you?

To have the opportunity to share a part of my memoir is incredible, especially for a publication like Granta that features some of the best and brightest writing talents. I’m especially proud to be part of a series that celebrates emerging writers.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m still working on finishing this memoir. It’s very close to done and I’m hoping someone out there believes in it as much as I do. I have so many ideas for a next book, but I’m keeping them at bay until this book is officially sent out into the world. ■

Want to join the discussion? Come to one of the worldwide Granta events to mark the launch of Ten Years Later, including this one featuring Samantha Smith:

New York, NY
The Fireman’s Family and the Soldier
6 September, 7 p.m., Barnes and Noble, 150 East 86th Street, New York 10028

Peter Carey, the novelist and executive director of Hunter College's MFA in creative writing, introduces two fresh voices from this program, both of whom are recent Granta contrinutors. Ex-Marine and Granta 116 contributor Philip Klay and Samantha Smith, who is the most recent inclusion in Granta.com’s New Voices series, will read and discuss their work, which explores themes of family, homecoming and the reverberation of the events of September 11, 2001. Free.

Over the past three years granta.com’s New Voices series has showcased some of the most exciting emerging writers. The latest name to feature in this impressive array of upcoming talent is Samantha Smith. The following is an extract from her memoir concerning her father, a policeman who was involved in the 9/11 search and rescue response and the devastating impact this had on her family. You can also read an interview with Samantha by Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson, here.

To Stand in the Shadow

I lie on the couch in the empty family room, the clicking of the clock above pounding in my head. My eyes are salty and dry, puffed red. The clock ticks and echoes. I remember the many times from childhood when I would sit and listen to this noise, the second hand moving full circle. It used to calm me, the reliable click breaking the silence. Now the clock reminds me of passing time, the end of things.

It’s November, the trees full of vivid hue: red, yellow, orange. Each autumn, I note the beauty of nature’s death.

I orient myself in time with ‘before’ and ‘after’, using September 11 as a placemarker. It has been twenty-three years since my parents were married, twenty-two years since I was born, eight years since September 11, six years since my father retired and unleashed his anger on us, and one day since he moved out.

As it rings our house phone tells us who’s calling in a distant, electronic voice. My brother Marrick, away at college, is on the other line, removed from our familial disintegration, 376 miles separating him from the family. I get off the couch slowly and pull the phone from its cradle to stop the chanting digits.

‘Mom home?’ Marrick asks.

‘No, she’s out.’

‘Dad home?’ he asks.

‘He moved out. Try his cell. He’s living at the lake.’

‘Are you OK?’ he asks. ‘You sound upset.’ We’ve all known this was going to happen for a while now. Still, my father’s leaving strikes me with a wave of emptiness.

‘Yeah, I have to go. I have a lot of work to do and Dad moved out today.’ I hang up the phone.

The house is once again still with only the ticking clock organizing my thoughts. My other siblings are still at school. The second-hand moves around and around as I sit and stare, paralyzed with emotion.

I turn on my iPod and play music from me and my father’s favourite Broadway musical, The Phantom of the Opera. I think of Christine Daaé from the play, alone in the cemetery, searching for her father.

When we were younger, my mother would send all of us upstairs to wake our father after his midnight shift. My younger siblings andWe are all born into the before and the after. I would creep into my parent’s bedroom slowly and quietly, assuming our positions around him. We would begin to pick the lint out of his belly button, giggling, throwing the fuzz to the floor. If that didn’t work, my little sister would tickle my father’s feet, and one of his eyes would open a sliver. He’d then shoot up smiling, grabbing us all.

‘How did you sneak in here?’ he asked.

You were once my one companion, you were all that mattered. You were once a friend, a father, then my world was shattered.

Each song has a parallel meaning now, a memory attached between us. Every time I hear the soundtrack, I think of him.

As I lie alone on the family room couch, the clock keeps ticking.

I was the only one he didn’t say goodbye to when he collected his clothes, packed up his truck, and drove off.

My phone vibrates at my feet on the couch. It’s a text message from my father. I debate whether to read it or not.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to u. I miss n luv u’, he says.

‘I miss and love you too. I hope you come home soon.’ I text him back.

‘It’s not up to me’, he says.

‘Well I hope you figure it out’, I say.

‘Wat do I hav to figure out?’

I delete my text messages and decide not to answer.

I scroll down to the Phantom soundtrack on my iPod and play ‘Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again’. I mouth the words alone as the music plays through my headphones.

I wonder what my father’s doing alone at the lake. Whether he’s unpacking or maybe lying on his couch like me.

I saw him before he rushed to get there, just briefly – my last look at him, the man who was my father before he left to join the rescue effort.

Tuesday. My second day of my first year of high school after a beautiful summer, a LabourSunlight illuminates the hallway, sparkling, as it hits dust particles suspended in air. Day with family. I sat in a crisp, new postman-blue uniform, in a building full of strangers. I could count the people I knew on one hand. St Joseph Hill overlooked the city and during homeroom, I found myself looking out the windows, drifting. It was beautiful that morning; the clearest day God gives September.

In my all-female Catholic high school, there were many rules printed in a large bound handbook we were required to keep with us at all times. We had to sign the rule pact as soon as we crossed the St Joseph Hill Academy threshold, carry it with us everywhere, even to the restroom.

Our pleated skirts were to touch the floor when we knelt down and our saddle shoes were to bear no scuffs, on penalty of being locked in a classroom to watch the clock for an hour after school. Often girls painted their saddle shoes with whiteout, over and over again, to hide the mud, the cracking leather.

We were the only Catholic girls’ school on Staten Island that hadn’t updated its uniform since the 1950s, and the first to require that each student buy a personal laptop to use in class. Our blazers had embarrassingly large shoulder pads and any student spotted commuting to school without it was issued detention.

Under no circumstances was any girl allowed to deviate fromA fluttering and pang clashed within me; childish jitters. the norm: no dyed hair or blatant highlights, no make-up, no nail polish, no accessories, no coloured backpacks. We had uniform socks, uniform raincoats, uniform trench coats and uniform gym clothes. Conformity, or as they described it, ‘a level playing field on which to learn’, was the goal.

We left our hair unwashed, slept in our uniforms, and worried about the SAT instead of boys. We started with 120 girls and by graduation, there were just eighty-six, a small group of ‘Hilltoppers’.

We were stripped of our beauty and our liberty for the sake of our education and school felt a little like prison those first years. We grew to tolerate the rules, and then to prefer them.

But there was no guidebook for what happened in my first week at Hill.

First Period. Religion. Learning the mission statement: ‘St Joseph Hill Academy, in keeping with Christian values and the traditions of the Daughters of Divine Charity, seeks to educate and empower young women to be confident, independent thinkers with strong character and leadership qualities, who stand ready to meet society’s challenges.’

Second period. English with Ms Levi, the announcement came over the loudspeaker.

‘Students,’ it called out. There’s been an accident.’ We all stopped writing and listened. ‘At the World Trade Centres. We will keep everyone updated when we know more.’

I didn’t panic even though I knew my father’s ESU team responded to the first bombing at the towers in 1993. I hadn’t known the buildings could collapse, or that the planes were aimed carefully to destroy as many lives as possible. A fluttering and pang clashed within me; childish jitters.

Ms Levi continued. I found it hard to sit still, to continue reviewing the lessons for the upcoming year, the time breakdown of grammar versus literature.

Third Period. Spanish. Introducing oneself to the rest of the class. Hola. Me llamo Samantha Smith. Soy de la cuidad de Nueva York.

Fourth Period. Computer processing. Laptops open, typing. Fingers fanned on keys, letters.

‘Students,’ the loudspeaker recited. ‘The Twin Towers have been hit by airplanes. The extent of the damage is unknown at this point. Please take a moment of silence. Let us pray.’

The school is silent. All I can hear is the chirping of birds from outside the window. Then just moments later, endless sirens blaring, passing our school heading towards Manhattan.

I watch people react around me as if in slow motion.

I leave the class slowly. Girls are lying in the hall against lockers, sobbing. Crying stops. It is quiet and calm. It is all we have.So many parents work at the Towers. The girls who have cellular phones cannot get in touch with their families, the call volume surging phone companies. Lines are dead. Sunlight illuminates the hallway, sparkling, as it hits dust particles suspended in air.

Bodies crumble around me. Cries and screams. We’re told to leave the classrooms, turn off the televisions. On our hill, we have a perfect view to watch the city. They do not want us to see the smoke clouding Manhattan.

Instructed to go downstairs to a basement classroom, we find it cold, new, sterile. Sister Denise walks in, slowly. Her habit shields her head, a halo of humility. She tells us to hold hands with the girls next to us until we form a circle. We say the rosary, softly.

Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Deliver us from evil. Amen. World without end. Amen.

I know this is a day I will come back to again and again.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

Crying stops. It is quiet and calm. It is all we have.

I can see it in their eyes. The girls called out of our circle to be picked up don’t want to leave, to cross the threshold of our classroom and go home. We’re safe here, together, praying. Each word brings resolve.

Somehow we accept the unknown. We know why faith makes sense. Why at the possible end of our lives, the suspected end of the world, prayer releases us.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

We pass around printouts of hymns. We sing softly. The low hum numbs our fear. Something aligns within me, my body acquiring knowledge it lacked just minutes before. Faith is all we have. Life makes no sense without it.

I’m worried about my grandfather who frequents the Towers for work meetings. I know my father works midnight hours and I hope that he is already home sleeping when the planes hit.

A friend’s parent drives to school and picks up five of us, the only girls I know, the girls I attended grammar school with and drops us home around 10:30 a.m. Something aligns within me, my body acquiring knowledge it lacked just minutes before. On the way down from our campus, we see the plume of thick, dark smoke covering the city. When I walk in my house, I’m surprised to still see my father standing there. I assumed he’d be in Manhattan by now. I later learn that my mother begged him to stay with us, and he did for a short time, only to regret it years later.

My siblings are watching the news, footage of the towers crumbling over and over again, endlessly looping.

I turn off the television. Aidan is three years old. He’ll remember my parents hugging, crying together in the kitchen, listening to the radio. We are all born into the before and the after. Our lives can shift around events, derail from our previous course.

Now, when I think of that day, I think of the basement. I think of thirty teenaged strangers clasping hands in prayer. It was all we knew.

My father created me in his likeness, infused me with his desires, his passions. Whenever I turn on the radio, pick up a basketball, or go out drinking I am reminded of him and his abandonment. His disinterest feels like a denial of who I am, the person I molded myself into – for him.

His eyes now refuse to see me. Sometimes it seems that if he willed it, I’d cease to exist. ■

Want to join the discussion? Come to one of the worldwide Granta events to mark the launch of Ten Years Later, including this one featuring Samantha Smith:

New York, NY
The Fireman’s Family and the Soldier
6 September, 7 p.m., Barnes and Noble, 150 East 86th Street, New York 10028

Peter Carey, the novelist and executive director of Hunter College's MFA in creative writing, introduces two fresh voices from this program, both of whom are recent Granta contrinutors. Ex-Marine and Granta 116 contributor Philip Klay and Samantha Smith, who is the most recent inclusion in Granta.com’s New Voices series, will read and discuss their work, which explores themes of family, homecoming and the reverberation of the events of September 11, 2001. Free.

Our New Voices series publishes fiction by emerging authors exclusively on the magazine’s website (read the most recent story here). Here we catch up with three more of our writers: What did being a Granta new voice do for their careers? What are they working on now? Any advice for writers starting out?

Soumya Battacharya

Well, first and foremost, it helped me find an agent. David Godwin read the extract that appeared on granta.com; it was then a novel in progress. He immediately got in touch with me. He wanted to read the finished novel, and, having read it, he took me on as a client. The novel was a success in India, but hasn’t yet appeared in the UK. It was a great honour – appearing in Granta is something that was a dream from the time that I wanted to be a writer (without quite knowing what one should write about).

I hesitate to talk about what I am working on at the moment because it’s far easier to do the talking about what one is writing than it is to do the writing itself. My memoir about cricket and India – a sort of sequel to my first book – is just out in the UK. I am off next week to the University of Chichester in Sussex as a writer in residence for two months. I hope to be able to figure out over there what exactly I am working on now. I suspect it will be a collection of loosely linked stories about people who live in the same apartment building in Bombay. I am also due to finish a memoir about the perils and pleasures of 21st-century fatherhood. It’s based on a weekly column I do for my newspaper, the Hindustan Times.

There’s no education like reading. And writing. And rewriting. And being patient, and humble, and ambitious and aware of the canonical writers, and learning from them. And being ready to live with the loneliness and agony and self loathing and occasional bursts of joy of writing.

Read Soumya Bhattacharya’s story, ‘If I could Tell You’. You can also follow Soumya on Twitter

Hannah Gersen

Well, I just finished a collection of interconnected short stories that includes ‘Fox Deceived’, so in a way, being published on the Granta website gave me the confidence to go ahead with that project, which I had been contemplating for a while. I’ve also been lucky to win several grants and fellowships over the past couple of years, and I’m sure ‘New Voices’ helped with that.

Mainly I’m writing short stories and essays, but I’ve recently begun research for a novel. I’m also helping to edit Amherst College’s new literary print journal, The Common, which just came out with its first issue this month!

My advice is to read first thing in the morning, before you start writing. Develop good posture at your computer. Use the internet-blocking software, ‘Freedom’.

Read Hannah Gersen's story, ‘Fox Deceived’

Evan James Roskos

Being a New Voice got me some attention – I was contacted by a couple of agents, and an editor who saw the feature and asked to see more of my work. Considering how hard it is to get an introduction sometimes, this proved to be quite valuable. A couple of short story publications at competitive journals followed my appearance.

I’m working on a novel about parental angst. I became a dad for the first time last year and it has me full of anxiety – so I thought, why not put it to good use? But rather than wallowing in self-analysis, I'm writing about a woman with an older son. After seeing him arrested on TV, she begins to suspect – even hope – that she is not his biological mother. So, she goes on a quest to figure out if it's her fault he’s such a screw up. Despite the grim nature of some of my other work (including my New Voices piece), this manuscript is designed to be funny. Hopefully I won’t be the only one laughing...

Here in the United States, agents are not interested in short story collections. So, use your stories to become a better writer – experiment, find your voice, master the core elements of storytelling – but don’t expect stories alone to be your ticket to book publication. I have received many positive rejections for a story collection that all ended with, ‘Definitely contact me when you’ve completed a novel.’ Positive rejections are fantastic – you can certainly refer back to the rejection when you DO finish that novel and query the same agent.

Read Evan James Roskos’s story, ‘Conspiracy of Males’

Visit the New Voices section for a full list of stories and interviews by thirteen writers. Our most recent is Jaime Karnes, with her story ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

Our New Voices series, which publishes fiction by emerging authors exclusively on the magazine’s website, continues with a new story this week. We also caught up with some of our other writers from the series: What did being a Granta new voice do for their careers? What are they working on now? Any advice for writers starting out?

Billy Kahora

It definitely garnered some international attention. I got into the Iowa International Writing Program partially on the strength of this – it has also helped with invitations to panels and talks while I’ve been in the U.S.

I am working on a creative non-fiction novella on Juba, Sudan and a novel based in Kenya.

To borrow from an Australian writer I met recently – the word writer is not a noun but really oriented around a verb. Forget everything else that comes with the idea of being a writer and just write. And write, and write. Structure your life around your writing, not writing around your life, if it is something you take seriously. And when you are not writing, read as much as you can ...

Read Billy Kahora’s story, The Gorilla’s Apprentice, or an interview with Billy.

Jessica Soffer

In a word: everything. The publication plucked me from the muddy and claustrophobic cave of scribbling where I’d lived for years and put me on some kind of map where I could begin to engage with others about my work. Until then, the engagement had been strictly critical (as in workshop, for example) but the publication etched my words – regardless of how flawed they may have been – into something more finite, more real, which offered me a little room to imagine that I might move people, as good writing has moved me my whole life. Until the work is ‘out there’, it’s hard to believe that’s possible. Though, of course, that’s the reason many writers write, and keep writing. On a more practical level, I began talking to editors and agents, each crucial in navigating me through the next stages.

I’ve just had the very wonderful news that my novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, will be published in 2013. I’ve been reeling – and working on some food writing, particularly on beloved authors and their quirky eating habits. Iraqi-Jewish and French cuisines are at the heart of Apricots and I’ve fallen in love with the language of food. For now, I can’t imagine writing about much else.

My advice is to keep the writing close to your chest for as long as you can. It’s so easy to corrupt things when you show them to the light too soon. Also, find readers you trust and don’t write under a rock forever. It’s possible to do all those things. I haven’t figured it out yet, but there are people who have and I tip my hat to them.

Read ‘Beginning, End’ by Jessica Soffer now.

Evie Wyld

Just being associated with Granta is enough to get people to prick their ears up, and having an interview, a short story and a biography as a single package on the website was really very useful. You’re able to impart a whole lot of information about yourself without feeling like you’re going on and on and being intrusive. I still get people directed from New Voices contacting me on my website.

I’m working on two things. I’m three quarters of the way through a second novel which is partly set in Australia and partly in the UK. It’s got sheep and sharks in it, but that’s all I can say at the moment, because all else may change. The other thing is a graphic memoir with illustrator Joseph Sumner, which is proving to be a long process but very well worth it. Lots of sharks in that one too.

Read your whole book out loud to yourself. If you trip up over words there’s something wrong with the sentence. That sounds like water divining but it works!

Evie Wyld contributed to our sex issue – read her memoir essay ‘Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual’ here. Her New Voices story was an advance extract from her novel After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Visit the New Voices section for a full list of stories and interviews by thirteen writers. Our most recent is Jaime Karnes, whose story ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was published on Monday.

Our latest New Voice is Jaime Karnes, whose story ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was published yesterday. Here she talks to Ollie Brock about what inspired the story, and her early sessions at the typewriter.

OB: How did you come to start writing fiction?

JK: I know I began telling stories as a child – a way to guarantee invitation to sleepover parties. I told stories to girls about the boys they liked – about adventures we would have, the grown-up lives for which we prematurely longed. In the third or fourth grade I typed the entirety of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8 on my grandmother’s old Remington and presented it to my father as my own creation. I suppose in many ways I aped my childhood idols. I liked rewriting their worlds: Roald Dahl and Judy Blume and E.B. White. I presume it was sometime early in high school when I began my own work – creating my own worlds.

There’s a fantasy at the heart of this story which transforms a girl and her brother into husband and wife, and their sick mother into a child. Where did that come from?

I suppose the impetus was to explore the affects of young adults losing a parent to a degenerative illness over a long period of time. In many ways a role reversal occurs. In the best of all worlds, children become the caregivers – they couple up and work together. Their love is not physical, nor familial; it becomes intimate and based on responsibility, akin to a partnership. The fantasy honestly grew from the opening passage of the siblings driving their mother (crippled in the back seat) to the hospital, and the brother caring for both mother and sister as a ‘It made me love them as I wrote – forced me to try and understand them.’ father or husband would. In the early stages, I obsessed over a potentially disastrous misinterpretation of this as literal incest, though the more the extended metaphor grew, the less I worried. There is simply nothing about the relationship between these siblings that I ever felt was less than an exploration of great responsibility in the face of terrible loss. It made me love them as I wrote – forced me to try and understand them. To me that’s what imagination and character creation is about. They are married to their fate, which binds them as husband and wife, if not more, because they cannot divorce themselves from their grieving. I felt these siblings were in the trenches of loss and love and discovery – left only, in the final moments, with each other.

The incident with the man in the gorilla suit stands out. An episode from real life, or pure invention?

The gorilla suit is pure invention. The sign about the free soda for kids however is from real life. I saw it at a gas station in New Jersey as I was driving home to Vermont for a short visit. I stopped at that station with intent. Perhaps mere curiosity. Either way, I engaged with the nice man behind the counter who refused me a free diet soda. I didn’t need one, but I found the advertising absurd and potentially insulting. Height? I qualified. A daughter? Also qualified. Yet I was denied. I felt embarrassed for the owner. I invented the guy in the gorilla suit as another symbol of capitalistic desperation.

I can’t tell if this story is gentle or rather bitter. How does it feel to you?

Well, those are certainly diametric responses to the story! I can say that the tone of the story is not its heart- the characters beat it for me. I can also say that I didn’t intend to force a reader into a choice between the two. I’m not sure I chose as I wrote it. I’m also not entirely convinced it’s gentle, but I don’t think it’s overtly bitter or, at least, that was never my intention. Though I revel in the idea that a reader be allowed to feel empathy or regret or even bitterness from the narrator, surely it’s not a sentimental story, but just as surely, I find both interpretations plausible. I’d be flattered if readers felt differently. To me, even as I read it, I gain new sensibilities of the narrator. She seems torn between what is expected of her, and how her brother adopts a responsibility she’s incapable of or, in the moment, frozen from in fear.

What are you working on now?

I’ve completed a collection of short stories loosely connected by the theme of ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and now I’m writing a novel based on the Canadian Genocide of the twentieth century. It focuses on the inner lives of the children who were orphans during the time of Premier Maurice Duplessis – a time known as the ‘Great Darkness’ when Montreal could no longer afford their orphanages and so sent thousands of children to asylums where they were tortured, drugged and lobotomized. I’ve spent a year researching and am hoping to finish a draft this summer at the MacDowell Colony.

Read ‘Here Comes the Sun’ now; or, by other New Voices, enjoy a recording of Bilal Tanweer's story ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’, or Kseniya Melnik’s essay about her return to Russia.

Our current issue is Aliens. Visit the issue page to enjoy exclusive fiction, essays and photography from the online edition – including a new short story by Madison Smartt Bell – as well as a fiction extract, by Aravind Adiga, from the print edition. Click here to buy the issue now.

New Voices is a series that promotes six emerging fiction writers each year by publishing stories exclusively online. Our New Voice for April 2011 is Jaime Karnes. We chose her story ‘Here Comes the Sun’ for its tender, imaginative approach to responsibility and loss.

Here Comes the Sun

I pretend we’re a happy family. My brother is the doting husband, I am his bouncing wife; and our mother, in the back seat of the car with her body folding deeper and deeper into itself, is our beautiful child, curled up like a sleeping bird. We are proud pretend-parents. Taking pictures for the world to see, striking the poses of happiness in this way for nearly ten years.

Look at our bird now, on her way to the hospital. Such a brave little bird, isn’t she?

My brother is in love with me, his wife. Though he wasn’t comfortable with it at first, he’s grown to accept our roles over the years. I can sense his resolve when the traffic suddenly stops – and he reaches his arm across the console, creating a barrier around my midsection.

You may not understand, so think of it this way: if the radio were on, it would play the Beatles during our trips every day to and from doctor’s appointments, specialists’ offices, emergency rooms. We would buckle in our bird, then ourselves as always. We’d turn the key. The engine would hiccup as always, and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ would play and repeat. Because isn’t that, after all, the happiest song any of us knows?

I pretend our baby is singing along, humming gaily, her auburn curls blowing in the crisp January air, of which I’ve let in less than an inch. But our baby coughs a sad sick-bird cough and we both look back at her, lovingly. I close the window. Almost there, little one. Stay strong.

We make a hard left into the Fletcher Allen parking lot, last night’s snow piled high on its curbs. I give my brother a look that says be careful, my love. If he doesn’t slow down, and brake at the perfect speed, we could fishtail. We could lose control and spin about, spilling our family, losing our love. What then of our happiness? Certainly we’d no longer be the happy family people envy. We’re the kind of family you think other people have, and they think you have. Actually, if we all took our clothes off and stood still and listened, we’d realize not one of us has that family; not really anyway.

My brother carefully slides the car into the closest spot available. Baby has fallen asleep again.

I tell him I will wake her if he fetches a wheelchair. He tells me that the snow is slush now and a wheelchair is worthless. He will, he says, carry his baby inside. I think this is the grandest of all grand gestures. And then I think: When will someone carry me?

Wake up, little bird.

I watch my brother carry her into the hospital, and I love him with parts of myself I didn’t know were capable of love. I love my brother with the space behind my eyes, the skin between my fingers, the ends of my hair, the crease in my neck. I love him with the centre of my belly button, that place that feels electric to touch. It’s more love than anyone has ever felt, I’m sure. I have an urge to donate it to children in Africa, or give it to the girl that works the kiosk in the mall. I’ll give it to a lonely continent.

I’ll sift it from myself like specks of sand and sprinkle it over Palestine, over Israel. I’ll feed it to the world.

My love is so deep it could colour the Black Sea.

The doctors don’t seem to believe in our love, that pretending to be this happy family can save us. That caring for our bird will protect her. They say it’s time. They say they’ve done everything they can for her. They touch our shoulders when they tell us.

Love is not the happy ending we expect.

My brother waits with our mother in the small room, her shrivelled body snaked in tubes, covered in plastic, and I go outside into the parking lot, into the storm. The wind slaps my face and cracks my empty expression. My eyes are the corners of an empty gorge with my mouth at the centre. I breathe deep, trying to freeze my organs.

Across the street, on the other side of the four-lane highway, I see a man wearing a gorilla suit. He waves. I wave back. Unsure he is even waving to me, I wave harder, with both hands. Soon my arms are above my body as if separate from me, uncontrollable, inconsolable. I must look crazy, like a drowning child. I’m waving, Hello! but it looks like, Help! I don’t stop.

I move through the parking lot to the edge of the highway to get a better look at him. He’s holding a sign that reads: Kids Under 5ft Tall Get a Free Soda, Today Only. I wonder how much the gas station pays him to stand there in the cold. He motions for me to come across the road. He wants me.

He’s not as immense as I first thought. He’s more like a boy inside a hand-me-down suit. He lays his palm across the top of my head, air-measuring my five-foot-nothing height. I decide this means he thinks I qualify for a free soda.

There are so many choices. Diet this and diet that. Explosive caffeine in this, cherry-flavoured that. I wonder what flavour my brother would like. I think Pepsi sounds fine, but it’s free and I want to get something different, something I’d never choose if I were paying for it. I settle on Raspberry Riot and its promise of five-hour energy. I fill a twenty-ounce cup to the top with ice, watch as the pinkish water beats into it, listen as the carbonated liquid pops and sings.

The woman behind the counter has hair on her upper lip – it’s sparse but I can see the fine fuzz above her mouth. She says that’ll be one dollar and twenty-nine cents.

But it’s free today, isn’t it? I ask.

She says it’s only free for kids.

I want to shout: but I am a kid! I am, I swear. Maybe she sees me as a mother, too old to be a child. But I am someone’s child, at least for another few days, the doctors say. At least until then.

I ask her to repeat the amount.

One dollar and twenty-nine cents. She holds out her hand, her eyes all over the store. I can tell she doesn’t understand. Doesn’t care that I qualify based on something as trivial as inches. I think the best things are immeasurable, and besides I didn’t ask for the soda. The gorilla man offered it. He wants me to have it. Please.

My mother is across the street, I say. I don’t have any money with me.

The woman twists her lips to the side of her face, chewing the inside of her cheek. She has to think about this one, I can tell.

Before our bird was a bird, she was our mother. And before she was our mother, she was a stenographer. Before she was a stenographer, she was a student at Syracuse. Before Syracuse, she was a farm girl from Hoosick with red hair and blue eyes. She had her own bird then, her own mother.

I can’t give you the free drink, the woman says. It’s too risky on my end, you understand?

I do. I set the bright blue cup with its extra-long, super-wide straw down in front of me, between us. A circle of sweat builds at its base. I think the promise of Raspberry Riot has ruined me, raked me over and left my love someplace between home and the hospital.

Did you have a sip? the woman asks.

No, I say. I didn’t even try it.

Outside the hospital, my brother is waiting. He’s angry. Where have I been? What’s taking so long? We have to go back to the room now and wait with our bird, hold her hand as she readies herself for flight.

Dr Whitney said it’ll be a few hours, he says.

Time closes in on us. She needs things from the house and we must hurry. Air is thick with snow. Fat flakes land on my brother’s face, cling to his eyelashes. Past him, the gorilla man looks at my empty hands, shrugs his shoulders. I shrug back. I want to run to him and tell him it’s not his fault, explain that I don’t qualify because I am no longer anybody’s child, or I won’t be soon.

She wants her afghan, my brother says, and the photo of us from Christmas three years ago.

That was before her hair fell out, I think. Before they took her uterus. Before they took her teeth. That’s a very good idea, I say, the afghan. It’s yellow like the sun. She’ll like that.

My brother’s car starts hard; the engine doesn’t want to turn over. I look into the empty back seat. My brother asks if I’m hungry – he’s worried that I haven’t eaten. Suddenly I’m thirsty, thirstier than anybody has ever been.

The yellow afghan is buried beneath a stack of papers: month-old unpaid bills, receipts from our mother’s prescriptions; and sticky notes, hundreds of them. She started using sticky notes after the doctors said that seventy-five per cent of her brain had been covered with lesions. She wanted to remember our birthdays.

The photo is covered in dust. I snatch it from the bookcase and rub my palm across our smiling faces.

The tree was beautiful that year, my brother says.

I roll the car window all the way down on the drive back to the hospital. I pinch my outer thighs until I’m sure they are bruised.

Dr Whitney is waiting for us outside our mother’s room. She explains that a coma was to be expected. She says she is sorry. I see that the foundation is thick around her frown lines. Our mother wasn’t the kind of woman to wear foundation.

I watch my brother lay the afghan across her body. He’s meticulous. He pulls at each edge, smoothes the wrinkles. He walks around the bed, repeating this four times. He tucks her in, sliding the yellow wool behind her knees, around her feet. I think today will be the day that I did not help him. Today will be the day that I watched instead.

He takes the frame from my hands and places it beside the bed. I can tell he’s checking to see if it’s at an angle precise enough for our mother to see when she opens her eyes. We both know she’s not going to open her eyes.

I notice they’ve removed her dentures. Her hollow cheeks make her look dead, not dying. I scan the room for her teeth. I would put them back in when no one was looking.

My brother holds her hand. We’re standing on each side of the bed now.

Say something, he says. I look at him blankly.

Damn it, Paige. Say something.

I scan the room. The television in the corner is off, the shades in the window are drawn and the door is closed. I can’t find an idea. I can’t find a borrowed word. I can only stare at my husband.

I lean in to our bird’s face. Her breathing is shallow, and she smells like unwashed scalp. The way a pillow smells after someone you love has left.

Well? my brother asks.

I whisper, here comes the sun, little darling, and kiss her empty mouth. ■

Read other stories from our New Voices series, by writers including P.D. Mallamo, Kseniya Melnik and Ali Akbar Natiq. Tomorrow, an interview with Jaime Karnes about her writing, and this story.

Our current issue is Aliens. Visit the issue page to enjoy exclusive fiction, essays and photography from the online edition – including a new short story by Madison Smartt Bell – as well as a fiction extract, by Aravind Adiga, from the print edition. Click here to buy the issue now.

Photograph © William Hartz

Bilal Tanweer (right) was our New Voice for February 2011 (New Voices showcases work by emerging fiction writers by publishing stories exclusively on Granta.com). Our latest podcast is a dramatized reading of Bilal’s story, ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’. It was read by Rhik Samadder at a Liars’ League event in London. Click on the player below to listen to the recording – we’ve also reproduced the story so that you can follow it as you listen.

Our original post of the story includes an interview with Bilal; you can also explore our New Voices section, with stories and interviews from authors including Billy Kahora, Jessica Soffer and Evie Wyld.

The Granta Podcast Episode 15

(If the player does not display in your browser, click here.)

After That, We Are Ignorant

Yesterday, an old man, bloody idiot, surely off his rockers, got on the bus from the Lucky Star stop … tall in his height, some six-three, wore a new, bright red Coca-Cola cap that you get for free these days, bloody joker. His shirt I think he had been re-ironing since the creation of Pakistan. His crumpled brown pants seemed never-washed ... He caught my eye as soon as he got on the bus. I pulled out my sketchbook and started to make his cartoon. The rectangular golden frame of his spectacles covered his long, thin face. Acha, at first he did not say anything, just took a seat, sat there and looked around. Then turned to the guy next to him and without any, whatsitsname, any hesitation questioned him, ‘Who are you?’

At this, the guy was startled and he looked at him cluelessly. Obviously, bhenchod! Anyone would jump at such abruptness. If someone asked you who are you, randomly, just like that, on the bus, and that too, a weird-looking old creep wearing a red cap and shirt with broken buttons, what would you say?

But that guy was some bugger, he smiled and replied, ‘I am a human, thank you,’ and shook the old man’s hand. Hehe. Bastard. Guess what the old man did? He just said, ‘Okay,’ and turned away. I was laughing to myself from my seat and seeing me, others also got interested in what was going on. I thought the old man was no less than a cartoon himself. He was staring at the back of the seat in front of him – like this – his face completely blank – like this. And then after staring for a few seconds, he turned back to the guy he questioned earlier and said, ‘I am Comrade Sukhansaz! Happy to meet you!’ and pushed out his hand toward him.

Now whatever the hell is a Comrade! Most people don’t even know what these creatures are. There was a time when these Comrades and Reds and Lefties were a common breed, but that general, Zia, that dog of the CIA, he ate them all up. He liked blood, that dog. Where else do you think all this Islam and drugs and guns and bombs came into this city? They are a recent invention. Americans gave him the money and guns and a carte blanche for drugs to fight the Soviets, and he fucked the country and this city for his jihad next door, thank you. You do find some Comrade occasionally, still bitten, his ass still bleeding and bandaged. All of them hate Zia. Haha! I mean whatever but you’ve got to admire Zia for the kind of barbaric treatment he gave them – jail, torture, lashing them in public! I mean, no human can imagine things that he actually made his policy. The joker even put his name in the constitution! He used to see things in his dreams and made them his policies. Yup, Americans loved his dreams because he was screwing the Soviets and Comrades in them. So yeah, most Comrades are dead now.

So guess what that guy said when the Comrade said, ‘I am Comrade Sukhansaz?’ He was some smartass – he returned a dumb expression, and asked: ‘Sukhansaz, that’s the word for poet … But what’s your name? And what’s Comrade … Is that a Muslim name?’

Hahaha! Whatshisname, Comrade, he turned red, even though technically that wasn’t possible because he was so dark, but oh, you should have seen his face – imagine a dry, savage brown flashing with colour! At first Comrade Sukhansaz didn’t reply, just turned his face and stared at the back of the seat. After a few moments, he began bumbling in a low voice. ‘In this country, everything is either Muslim or non-Muslim, everything, everything. Is your shoe Muslim? This cap, does it go to the mosque with you? Does your spoon and knife say their prayers on time? Everything, bloody everything is Muslim or non-Muslim! Is this colour a Muslim colour? And then no one can talk about religion … Names, now names are Muslims and non-Muslims!’

That I-am-human fellow was acting like a smartass but really you should have seen his face, nervous like hell. I mean what do you expect when you are sitting next to this nutcase? The Comrade turned to him again and said, ‘I am a poet. I was in jail. Yes, jail. For eight years. People love me. You know, they love me. They know me. The whole world knows me.’ He fell silent and looked around in the bus. He saw us sniggering, all thoroughly entertained.

Praise be the worm up my ass, I shouted, ‘Haan, so mister Comrade Sukhansaz, let us hear something, some poetry, some of your amazing verses … ’ And oh brother, I tell you, the moment I finished my sentence, he sprang into action, as if he had been waiting. He stood up, and then holding his seat with one hand, like this, his fingers all twisted backward, started reciting poems, one after another … I cannot tell you. And he was so good! I remember a few lines:

The argument between this lover with the other
is who loves more. After this, both are ignorant.

The tussle of this believer with the other
is how to worship. After this, both are ignorant.

The brawl of this politician with the other
is how to gain power. After this, both are ignorant.

It turned into a circus soon when a group of college students sitting at the back of the bus started to make noises in between his recitation. Each time the Comrade Sukhansaz paused between the couplets, they made a sound: Dha Dha Dha Dhayyn … like those Hollywood action movie soundtracks. At first Comrade was confused, because some of us were actually enjoying the poems and praising them as well, but soon the boys began to rattle him. He ignored it a few times, but then suddenly, haha! I remember he was saying: We will win against darkness too! And then he broke off yelling, ‘Abay O rowdy idiots! listen to what I am saying!’

It was so funny – abay! listen to me! I am telling you about darkness and winning!

For the boys, well, this was what they were looking for to begin with. It added to their fun and then they started purring and barking in between his verses. You got to love their timing! Imagine a dog’s whimper – aaoo aaoo aaoo – as if someone has kicked it in its gut – after both are ignorant.

Comrade got really riled though. He stopped abruptly and took his seat, muttering under his breath. And then the whole bus broke into applause, clapping for him. I whistled. You know the one I whistle, the long loud one. I shouted, ‘One more Comrade, one more!’ But he didn’t pay attention and continued to blather to himself in a low voice and kept staring at the back of the seat. Haha! Old bugger. The man sitting next to me was looking over my drawing. He said to me, smiling, ‘Why tease the old fellow. Let him be … ’ Well, I really didn’t give a toss about him or his poetry. For me, I had to finish up my sketch. He was a God-sent cartoon on the bus. What more can a cartoonist ask for? I had to do him for my records.

I was trying to get his nose right but he turned his face the other way. I waited but then I got impatient. I shouted, ‘Comrade, you old man, have you forgotten your poetry?’ That really got him! He turned immediately and began shouting, ‘Who said that? Haan? Who said that?’ And waving his fists, stood up from his seat, ‘I will break your bones!’ The college boys were having a ball. They were laughing like mad. One of them barked again loudly, at which the old man let his lid fling off and he began shouting at the bus driver. ‘STOP THE BUS! STOP THE DAMN BUS! I AM COMRADE! COMRADE SUKHANSAZ! STOP THE BLOODY BUS!’

Oh the bus conductor really panicked. He was already glancing suspiciously at the racket throughout, now he thought some fight had broken out or something. He brought out his steel rod from under one of the front seats and came directly toward the old man and waving it toward the old man, he said, ‘Babaji why making noise haan? Where do you get off?’

‘Show me some civility! I am a poet! People know me! They love me!’

The bus conductor was scratching his crotch, and seeing everyone laugh, he relaxed a bit and said, ‘Babaji, just don’t make any noise. Take your seat.’ He pointed the rod to an empty seat. ‘Your stop is about to come.’

As soon as he finished saying this, someone shouted again from behind: Oye Chicken-saz! You crazy old man! Comrade turned to the students again, and having really lost it this time began shouting, ‘Fuckers! I have seen the likes of you many times! I have fought police with bare hands. I went to jail. Yes, jail! For eight years! People love me! Sisterfuckers! What do you know! I have given sacrifices for this country! I have fought against the exploiters, and you, you fuckers like you, don’t care about anything!’ Everyone in the bus was in fits. The conductor then came to him, ‘Get off, babaji, your stop has come. Get to the gate, come on, come on hurry-up!’

As the old man moved towards the door, the boys kept up their chants:

Fight me, Comrade!

Why are you scared, Comrade?

We also love you, Comrade!

Comrade, you crazy old buffoon!

Another poem Comrade, please?

Fight, Comrade! Fight!

He got off at Cantt Station, right at the end of it.

Yeah, just about ten minutes before the bomb blast. He was the closest person I knew who probably might have died there. Well, no, I don’t know what happened after that. I have his cartoon though. Here. ■

***

Read other stories from our New Voices series, by writers including Jessica Soffer, Billy Kahora and Kseniya Melnik.

Granta 114: Aliens
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Ali Akbar Natiq is our latest New Voice. His story ‘A Mason's Hand’, was published last Wednesday. Here, Ali Akbar Natiq tells Ollie Brock how he came to writing, and discusses the themes he explores in his stories and poems.

OB: ‘A Mason’s Hand’ is your first piece to be translated into English, but you’ve been publishing in Urdu for some time. When did you start writing?

AAN: My family, during the creation of the state of Pakistan, had migrated from eastern Punjab (now part of India) and settled in the suburbs of Okara – a city in the central Punjab (Pakistan). We were facing poverty, and I had to work as a labourer at an early age to help my father. Nevertheless, I continued my studies privately. I started reading fiction, poetry, history, religion and sometimes philosophy. Having spent about thirty springs of my life with farmers and labourers, I started visiting big cities. One day I happened to meet a renowned poet, then head of a literary organization based in Islamabad. He turned out to be a kind man; he heard some of my poems and appointed me junior clerk in his organization. It was there that I had the opportunity to observe the elites from close up, and found that the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged was huge. During my stay with that organization I wrote five stories and sent them to Aaj, an Urdu literary magazine. The editor liked my work and published all five stories.

'A Mason's Hand' is heavy with destitution, and there's no redemption in the ending. Is it a pessimistic story?

Superficially, the readers will find appalling characters in my stories but I understand that they illustrate faithfully a society and culture in which abhorrent practices and actions are disguised under the quilt of religion, and used as a weapon by the oppressors. No character in my stories is an ideal person; they are mere human beings who can either be oppressors or oppressed, or sometimes both at the same time.

The divisions between nationalities and the various professional strata are made very clear throughout this story. Are social hierarchies a special concern in your fiction?

I have spent most of my life among people from the deprived sectors of society, both experiencing and observing the plight of people living in small villages and towns. I felt a deep pain, as if their deprivations were my own. These deprivations turn malignant. People who are unaware of their basic rights and their aspirations can behave in strange ways. I saw them become happy over little favours but then turn furious and even take human lives over petty things.

What else are you working on?

Along with short stories, I am working on a novel, which will attempt to explore the complexities of life that are the outcome of our current social trends.■

Translated by Khalid Channa.

Read ‘A Mason's Hand’ here, or visit our New Voices section for a full list of stories and interviews.

Click here to explore more Pakistani writing, as well as artwork and a special animation.

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In our New Voices series we publish the work of emerging fiction writers exclusively on the website. Our latest New Voice is Pakistani writer Ali Akbar Natiq, whose story ‘A Mason’s Hand’ impressed us with its melancholic tone and black humour. Read other stories in our New Voices series here.

A Mason’s Hand

Haji sahib, these kids are beyond me. I can’t teach them any more. Please make some other arrangement,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air.

‘Why do I need another arrangement when I have you?’ Haji Altaf sounded apologetic. ‘I have tried every good tutor in the city but nobody has lasted even a month. I thought you were from a good family and needed a job. You are the only one who can teach these rascals. You can go and look for another job but while you are looking, please keep teaching them.’

‘Haji sahib, that’s all very well. But your grandsons don’t respect me, they don’t listen to a single thing I tell them. I am wasting their time as well as my own. I do hard manual labour all day – I just don’t have the energy to do this too.’ Asghar started to walk out of the door but stopped and turned. ‘Haji sahib, if you really have any sympathy for me, see if you can get me a proper job.’

‘Okay,’ Haji said. ‘But I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life building minarets for mosques.’

‘Then what shall I do?’ he asked.

‘Why don’t you go to my sons in Saudi?’ Haji Altaf patted his shoulder. ‘God will create some opportunity for you there.’

Asghar put his palm on the wall to check if it was wet. If the wall was even a little dry it would be difficult to plaster. He decided it wasn’t ready yet. He asked a labourer to splash some more water on the wall and went to his father who was fixing decorative tiles on an already plastered section of the wall. Tiling was easier than plastering, so this is how they divided their work. Asghar did the hard labour himself and let his father do the lighter work. They had worked together for fifteen years. Asghar observed that his father’s hand trembled slightly as he fixed the tile. He looked at the old man’s white beard closely, the little specks of cement stuck to it. His cheek bones stuck out.

He had an overpowering feeling that his father had grown too old for this kind of work. He was an expert mason and had worked on many of the new mosques in the city. Everything that Asghar knew, he had learned working alongside his father.

He remained silent for a while, then abruptly related his conversation with Haji Altaf to his father.

His father put his trowel and bucket aside after hearing him out. ‘You should do what you think is good for you. But let me tell you one thing. There is nothing but humiliation in those Arab places. You know that I was in Kuwait for three years. My lot didn’t change; I couldn’t put down this trowel and hammer even for a day. As for Haji Altaf and his sons : those traders and jewellers will get themselves skinned but won’t spare a single paisa. They’ll never help you out.’

Asghar listened to his father’s advice patiently – but he had already made up his mind.

After arriving at Jeddah airport, Asghar rushed to the immigration queue. There were five counters but no staff. He found himself in the queue at one of the counters. Soon there were hundreds of people in every queue. Then came another large group of people with shaved heads, long beards and rosaries; they all wore ihrams. They gave off a terrible odour. Asghar thought that if he had to wait with them for a long time he would throw up. Reluctantly he spoke. ‘Baba ji, you should get in the queue. I was here before you.’

‘Don’t worry son,’ the man in the ihram replied. We know that we have to wait for our turn to get our passports stamped. We are here on a pilgrimage, we’ll never do anything unjust.’

But as soon as the immigration staff arrived the pilgrims surged forward, shoving everyone aside. In the ensuing pandemonium, Asghar found himself at the end of the queue. After being pushed around for more than an hour he reached the immigration counter, where shurtas pounced on him and snatched his passport. He wondered what was going on. ‘Be warned Haji, fifty riyals,’ one shurta said.

‘But I don’t have that kind of money,’ Asghar said in his broken Arabic.

‘Then you head straight for Mecca. You have got a visa for umrah. You’ll get your passport back in Mecca. You are not allowed to enter any other city,’ the shurta told him.

Asghar started to think about his situation. He wasn’t wearing an ihram. He didn’t have enough money to stay in a hotel. Of course he wanted to perform the umrah but first he had to meet up with Haji Altaf’s sons in Jeddah. He had informed them of his arrival over the phone and they had reassured him that they would receive him at the airport. But here he was in a situation that he hadn’t anticipated. He had only one hundred riyals. After mulling over the situation for a while he approached the shurta again. ‘Can’t you reduce that a bit?’

‘Fifty riyals or straight to Mecca,’ the shurta said cruelly.

Feeling hopeless, Asghar put fifty riyals on the shurta’s palm and left the immigration hall quickly. Taxi drivers mobbed him as he came out but he didn’t pay them any attention. He was sure that Haji Altaf’s sons would be waiting outside. He came out of the airport and looked everywhere but there was no sign of them. He went into a telephone booth and called them and found they hadn’t left for the airport. They gave him their address and told him to take a taxi.

His bag slung on his shoulder, he stood reclining against the trunk of a date tree. A taxi driver looked him over and approached him. ‘Sir, are you from Pakistan?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Where do you need to go?’

‘Bani Malik,’ Asghar handed him the address. The taxi driver glanced at it, returned him the piece of paper and opened the cab door for him.

Gingerly, he approached the taxi. ‘How much would it cost?’

‘Brother, forty riyals only, since you’re from our own Pakistan.’

‘Forty riyals is too much.’ He backed away.

Asghar took his bag, walked away from the taxi stand and wondered what would happen if he walked up to the road leading to the city and tried to get a lift. He could save some money that way. He walked on the roadside for a while and left the airport behind. There were clusters of date palms on both sides of the road. He put his bag next to one of the trees and entered the moonlit orchard. In the last hours of the night, the moonlight filtering through the date trees in the desert transported him into a world of wonder. Ripe dates were strewn on the sand. He picked one up and ate it. The fruit was sweeter than anything he had ever eaten. He picked up more dates and ate them. The fronds of the date palms rustled in the wind and cast a magic spell on him. Whenever he saw the headlights of an approaching car, he would come out and wave but the cars whizzed past him. This would have bothered him, had he not been feasting on the dates. For about one hour he roamed around in the orchard. He picked quite a few dates and put them in his bag. Then he heard the azan for morning prayers. As soon as he heard it he came back on the road and started walking towards the airport. He was bored with eating dates and wanted to reach the city as soon as possible. He had concluded that nobody was going to offer him a lift here because of the simple reason that he had left his Pakistan behind. He came back to the taxi stand.

After arriving at the house of Haji Altaf’s son, Haji Nasir, he slept. He woke around the time of Asr prayers. The air conditioner had chilled the room and he felt very cold. This was the first time he had slept in a room like this and Asghar felt that his whole body had stiffened. He came out of the room and a gust of hot wind scorched his face. He had never felt winds this hot. He made his ablutions, returned to the room and offered his Asr prayers. He promised himself that he would never be late for any of his five prayers, and that as soon as he found a job he would call his family.

He started to enjoy the idea that the next day he would see with his own eyes all the places that he had read about in history books and sacred texts. He was lost in these thoughts, as he roamed Jeddah’s street with Haji Nasir. He was surprised to see thousands of Pakistanis, Indians and Bengalis in the streets. Some seemed prosperous, but there were beggars too. They reached a square where they saw gangs of Indian boys loitering around. When he asked about them, Haji Nasir said that the boys who were standing in that square sold blue movies to Arabs. Some sold themselves as well, he added.

As soon as the azan for evening prayers went up that night, humans of a thousand varieties reached in their pockets for their prayer caps and rushed towards the mosques. Asghar found himself joining them.

That night he was restless and couldn’t sleep in anticipation of his pilgrimage to the haram in the morning. He thought about all those multi-millionaires who are so forsaken that despite all their wealth they never get to see the aram. He was still lost in these thoughts when the morning arrived. He got up quickly, took a bath and put on his ihram. Haji Nasir had lent him three hundred riyals and his own ihram for the umrah. For ten riyals he took a taxi that he shared with three other men. As soon as he sat down in the taxi he asked the taxi driver impatiently. ‘Brother, how far do you think is the haram?’

‘We should get there in an hour,’ the driver replied.

‘What would you say is the total area of the haram?’ Asghar asked him.

‘How should I know, my friend?’ the driver said, bitterly.

After the driver’s rude response, Asghar sat quietly in his seat, leaned back on the headrest and watched the desert and barren mountains on both sides of the road. They sped past the occasional hut, and every so often a dust devil rose from the sand and headed for the sky. He wondered if the Holy Prophet had walked the same route. Although the taxi drove fast, Asghar found the journey slow; time seemed to have stopped. He distracted himself by thinking about the tribulations of fourteen hundred years ago; Prophet Muhammed’s invitation to Islam, Abu Talib’s support, the exile, the battles of Badar, Uhad and Khandaq. He was lost in these thoughts when the taxi driver startled him. ‘This is where you get off brother. Here is your haram.’ Asghar picked up his bag and jumped out of the taxi. Right in front of him was the haram’s east door, which pulled him towards it with its terrifying splendour.

Asghar let himself get pulled in. People of various races, black and white, walked around in an easy companionship. Thousands of pigeons roamed and fluttered in the compound, feeling no fear. It was eleven in the morning and despite the sun he felt no heat. He entered the haram, offered his prayers and started performing the umrah rituals. Staying close to the wall of the Kaaba, he completed seven circles around it all the while reciting, ‘O Allah, I am here.’ Although there was a sea of people, during every circle he managed to kiss the Black Stone. Then he did his walk between Safa and Marwah. On the Safa Mountain he could see groups of women, looking like fairies in their white ihrams, but he didn’t want such distractions on a day like this. He sought out and studied every place that he had read about in history books. He held the sacred black cloth that covers the Kaaba and prayed for a very long time. After spending his whole day in the haram, he came out just before nightfall.

After performing the umrah, there were other places Asghar wanted to visit but he felt too tired and postponed the visit to the following day. In an open field, he placed his bag under his head and went to sleep. He was right next to Abu Qubais Mountain, where the Prophet’s uncle Abu Talib once lived. Many pilgrims who couldn’t afford to stay in the hotels were sleeping here. Oblivious to his surroundings, Asghar slept a deep sleep and was finally woken up at the time of Fajr prayers, when a shurta kicked him.

Asghar offered his Fajr prayers and went out into the streets of Mecca. All the streets and roads were paved and very clean. Wandering around, he asked for directions and reached the Station of Hajoun where the graves of the Prophet’s family members and Bani Hashim were. He visited a number of other holy places by noon and returned to the haram for his Zuhr prayers. This became his daily routine. He would wander around in the valley of Mecca in the morning and return to the haram before the afternoon.

It was his eighth day in Mecca, and despite being very careful with his money Asghar had spent one hundred and forty riyals. He decided that he should immediately go to Medina and, after his pilgrimage, find himself a job.

He had just got on a bus after paying forty riyals for a ticket when a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old black boy accompanied by two little girls boarded the bus. They were probably his younger sisters. There was a strange and attractive innocence in their features. The girls occupied one seat; the boy looked around and then sat next to Asghar. As soon as the bus started its journey, the boy broke the silence.

‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Ali Asghar.’

‘My name is Abdullah,’ said the boy. Then he took out banknotes from various countries and started showing them to Asghar. He told him that he had friends from every country: America, Europe, Africa, Iraq, Syria, India, Iran; everywhere.

‘Don’t you have a Pakistani friend?’ asked Asghar.

‘No. No. All Pakistanis are bastards. Thieves all of them.’ He was suddenly very angry. ‘I do not have a single friend from Pakistan.’

All colour drained from Asghar’s cheeks and he turned to look out of the window. After a few moments’ silence, the boy spoke again. ‘You are from Iran?’

‘No. I am from Pakistan,’ Asghar said in a cold voice.

It was his fifth day in Medina. He had visited the Prophet’s Mosque, Uhad, Khandaq – all the places he knew about. Day and night he would roam the open bazaars and clean streets of Medina and then head for the date orchards surrounding the city. Here he would watch the sunset from a lush green valley of date trees to the west of Medina. The sun would put little red and golden robes on the floating clouds before disappearing behind the mountains. Every day he would stand in front of the Prophet’s mausoleum and say his benedictions. He was surprised at the Iranian rascals who carried their shoes in their bags, desecrating the Holy mosque.

That day Asghar wanted to see the entire Medina, as he wasn’t sure when he might be able to visit again. After visiting the Prophet’s Mosque and all the other holy places he went to the west of Medina where he spotted a plaza under construction. If he got mason’s work on this site then not only would he be able to continue to live in Medina, he would be a permanent pilgrim and could earn a living as well. He went in, found the supervisor and introduced himself.

‘What can you do?’ The supervisor observed him closely.

‘I can do all kinds of masonry work,’ Asghar said with confidence.

‘You are here on an umrah visa, right?’ The supervisor asked him.

‘Yes, I have an umrah visa but if you give me a job here, slowly I’ll be able to work my way towards a work permit as well.’

‘Okay. Let’s see if you can raise this wall by one foot.’ The supervisor pointed to a wall that was being built.

Asghar stepped forward, picked up the tools and, like an expert builder, started on the wall. Within no time he had raised it by a foot and a half. The supervisor seemed pleasantly surprised. After evening prayers he gave Asghar food and told him that he himself used to be a mason, but that his employer, Iqbal sahib, had been impressed by him and appointed him supervisor. ‘Tomorrow is Friday. Come over the day after tomorrow – I’ll talk to him and then give you work.’

‘Who is Iqbal sahib?’ Asghar asked.

‘He is an engineer, he is from Lahore. He is looking after a number of construction projects here.’

‘Why don’t you just give me some work now?’ Asghar said impatiently.

‘Brother, this is a dangerous place. You see all these shurtas roaming around? They check us three times a day to make sure that nobody is working without a permit. Engineer sahib will first talk to someone. Only then will you get a job.’

After Isha prayers, he returned to the compound of the mosque – delighted that, because of the blessings of the Prophet’s mausoleum, he was soon to get a job.

Asghar now had fifty riyals left and he thought that if he got a job within the next two or three days, he wouldn’t go back to Jeddah. He’d stay here in Medina, and every morning, every evening bow his head at the Prophet’s mausoleum. The very idea made him ecstatic; he took off his shoes and went inside the mosque. He sat next to the mausoleum for a long time. When the mosque administration expelled all the pilgrims from the compound at ten that night, he also came out and started looking for his shoes. But despite desperate efforts, he couldn’t find them.

He went barefoot for the rest of the evening. At night-time he put his bag under his head and slept next to the wall of a plaza. He woke up with the call for the morning prayers, rubbed his eyes and saw a boy sitting next to him. Both went to the mosque, and after offering their prayers they began talking.

‘Where are you from?’ The boy asked.

‘I have come from Okara,’ said Asghar.

‘Found work yet?’

‘Not yet, but someone has promised. Where are you from?’

‘I’m from a little town called Raja Jang near Raiwind. Name is Naveed. I have lived here for two years. These days I have no work and I have run out of money as well. I saw you sleeping last night and I thought you were a Pakistani. Maybe we can get to know each other and do something together. What can you do?’

‘Tiling, plastering, painting, mirror work, I can do all types of masonry work,’ said Asghar.

‘On the other side of Uhad mountain there is a settlement and I have a Bengali friend who lives there,’ said Naveed. ‘He also works as a mason. If you want to find work, I can take you to him. I am also thinking of working with him. And the real advantage is, there is not a single shurta in that place.’

They arrived in the Uhad town before ten in the morning. After paying for breakfast and a taxi, Asghar was left with fifteen riyals. The Bengali wasn’t home so they had to wait till the evening. Asghar thought that he should get himself a cheap pair of shoes so that he wouldn’t have to put up with the shame of walking around barefoot. They both visited the little bazaar in the town but they couldn’t find a pair that was less than twenty-five riyals. The gravelly earth burned like hot brass and it was impossible to step on it. As the sun rose, heat crept up to his head. Burning pebbles pierced the soles of his feet. Finally they sat down under the shade of a date palm. In the afternoon he gave Naveed five riyals and asked him to get some food from a restaurant. He was in no condition to walk there himself. Naveed brought food, they ate and then lay down till the evening.

Your daily wage will be fifty riyals.’ The Bengali spat out betel juice and said, ‘I won’t charge you anything for food and accommodation. If your work is not up to the mark, there will be a deduction from your wages. On your day off you’ll have to pay for your own meals. If you accept my conditions you are in, otherwise do what you will. But just remember one thing, I am taking a big risk by offering you this work.’

Asghar inspected the room while the Bengali spoke. A mat, bedding and some filthy utensils were strewn all over the place. He felt very unsettled. Everything in the room, including the Bengali man, was so filthy and smelled so foul that Asghar was nauseated. Whenever the Bengali opened his mouth to speak, his stained teeth frightened Asghar. Instead of listening to the man’s conditions, he wondered how he could bear to spend even one night in that place.

Early in the morning he woke Naveed and they left without informing anyone. They didn’t have enough money for a taxi fare so they decided that they would take a short cut by climbing the mountain and coming down on the other side. That way they would reach the Uhad plain; the Prophet’s Mosque was only three kilometres from there. But by the time they were halfway up they had realized it wasn’t as easy as they had imagined. The rays of sun were slowly heating the dry rocks and just putting a foot on the ground was torture. And the mountain seemed endless. As soon as they climbed over one rock, they confronted another. By now Asghar had blisters on his feet which grew inflamed and painful. With great difficulty they reached the summit at two in the afternoon and realized that descending on the other side was much harder than climbing it. The field of hot, pointy stones that he saw ahead scared him. They were surrounded by small bushes but there was no shade. Thirst and hunger had completely drained him. ‘I can’t walk any more,’ he told Naveed and collapsed in a small cave, surrounded by tiny acacia bushes. He had been lying down for a long time when a wave of pain travelled up from his feet, which were now swollen. He could hear the call for evening prayers in the distance; he could also clearly see the minarets of the Prophet’s Mosque. They had slept for four hours but only felt more tired from hunger and thirst. The moon rose in the east and they started their journey again. The rocks had cooled down a bit and he liked it when the wind caressed him softly amid the silence of the mountains. Although the blisters in his feet had burst, and his soles were bleeding, they wanted to continue their journey in the moonlight. At about eleven o'clock they lay down again. Asghar’s feet bled so much that when he stepped on a stone, it was stained crimson. The pain was now stabbing with such intensity that Asghar fainted.

When he came to and wiped his face with his hand he realized that he was covered in dew. He looked around but Naveed was nowhere to be seen. He looked everywhere, then called out for him but there was no response. As the sun was beginning to come up again, Asghar decided to make a move. But as soon as he reached for his bag, he was shocked to find out that it wasn’t there. His passport and other papers were also in the bag. Involuntarily his hand reached into his pocket. It was empty too. Naveed was gone with his bag and his last five riyals.

He invoked Allah’s name and started to walk. After stumbling forward for three hours, he came down the mountain. He was dying of thirst. He desperately looked around for water and saw an iron drum next to a goat barn. There were stacks of dry hay in the barn and the goats were busy munching.

He put his hand in the drum and started drinking the same water that goats had drunk earlier.

The water was so hot that it pierced his throat and burned his stomach.

Somehow Asghar managed to start his walk towards the Uhad plain. He tried to harness all his energies and go as fast as he could. When he approached the plain he saw a ten- or twelve-year-old boy outside a house. Asghar fell in the shadow of the wall and signalled the boy for some water. He felt alive after drinking some cold water but before he could ask the boy for something to eat, he went in and shut the door. Starving and weak, Asghar walked on his injured feet and arrived in the Hamza mosque where he splashed cold water on his face. Then he reclined against the wall and started to stroke his feet. He was overwhelmed with hunger, but he had never before begged for food, or anything else. He wanted to get hold of something to eat but the very idea of going out in the sun again frightened him. His feet were still swollen and bleeding. He had not yet made up his mind when the call for Asr prayer began and people started to come in.

He got up, stumbling, and came and stood at the mosque door. He saw an Arab in a very fine dress arrive, take off his shoes at the entrance and go in. The shoes were made of soft leather. As soon as the Arab entered the mosque, Asghar slipped into them and turned to go. The guard standing by the mosque door grabbed him and started to shout ‘Sariq, sariq!’ People came rushing at him as if a roadshow had just started. He was slapped and kicked. The Arab caught him by the scruff of his neck and two people tied his hands at the back. They kept asking him questions in Arabic but he couldn’t reply. In fact, in his weakness, he could hardly hear a thing.

‘My lord, right in front of my eyes this wretched man stole this gentleman’s shoes. Both these gentlemen witnesses and many others saw the crime with their own eyes,’ the mosque guard said in his statement in front of the court. After the guard, other witnesses testified. ‘But the accused must get a chance to defend himself,’the cadi ordered, looking towards the interpreter.

The interpreter repeated this to Asghar three times but Asghar stood mute, with his eyes shut. His ears were ringing. He didn’t even understand why he had been brought to the court.

Because of his shabby appearance and refusal to utter a single word, the cadi was convinced that the accused was a hardened criminal and professional thief. Keeping in mind the demands of justice as well as the injunctions of Sharia law, the cadi delivered his verdict. It was heard and hailed by everyone present except the accused.

After the call for morning prayers, when they brought him out of the lock-up to chop off his hand, Asghar had forgotten that he was an expert mason. He couldn’t even remember his old father’s face. ■

Translated from the Urdu by Mohammed Hanif, whose story Butt and Bhatti was published in our Pakistan issue, which you can buy here.

Read an interview with Ali Akbar Natiq about this story and how he came to write it. Read other New Voices stories and interviews here.

Bilal Tanweer is our latest New Voice, with his story ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’, published yesterday. Here, Bilal tells Ollie Brock about about his book of connected stories, of which ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’ is one, and the importance of voice in his fiction.

OB: You’re both a writer and a translator. Which came first? Do they exercise completely different parts of your brain, or is it similar work?

BT: Fiction writing came first, although it came very late – during the sophomore year of my undergraduate studies. I started translating even later, when I wanted to win a translation competition during my MFA at Columbia. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it immensely and have been translating ever since. It also anchors me, keeps me thinking about words, writing and language.

For me, translating is very much like writing itself; and like every other translator, I also feel that literary translation is underrated and underappreciated (and underpaid) for the amount of imaginative and technical labour it requires. One has to make a lot of choices that are similar to writing fiction, and many that are specific to translation itself. On the whole, it could be as imaginative an enterprise as any other creative endeavour. William Weaver once used the metaphor of a performance for translation: you must act out the text in a different language. Ultimately, I feel every good translator is a writer first. Yes, translating can be tedious and oppressive if you don’t find some kind of personal affinity with the work you’re translating, or if you don’t believe in it. If you love the work, it’s like travelling to a new country with the person you love. At heart, I think, all good translators are like writers: they want to share something important, something urgent, something beautiful with the world.

The book I just finished translating (and sent out to a few publishers – fingers crossed!), a humorous novel from Urdu, Love in Chakiwara (and Other Such Adventures), I enjoyed translating immensely because I found a connection with the narrator’s voice – mischievous, oppressed, trying to show spine to somebody who is openly fleecing him but cannot do so because he also admires and hero-worships him. Great fun!

The story we’ve featured has a very distinctive style: a rough, brazen monologue from an angry, rather cruel narrator. What inspired it?

In my writing, the voice is the primary concern for me, and most of the time I construct everything else from it. My influences are mainly from Urdu poetry, and for this story, Karachi street language. The writer I go back to for voice is N. M. Rashed, one of the pioneers of modernist poetry and free verse in Urdu, and also among its finest practitioners. His poetry started making sense to me when I understood the voice. It also made me realize how important voice is for my own writing. I was also influenced a lot by Grace Paley’s stories. Goodbye and Good Luck is one of my favourites.

It’s interesting you consider that narrator to be ‘cruel’. I think it comes from the fact that he is vehemently a know-it-all guy, who is not prone to being surprised – at least he won’t admit to being surprised. So whatever he narrates, it will be with the intention to entertain, with the pretence that he knows and understands everything perfectly well. Perhaps the cruelty also comes from the fact that he’s ostensibly enjoying what he’s narrating. But this could simply be his way of telling the story. He might be performing for an audience who would not have it any other way.

The bomb-blast of the ending seems to deny all meaning to the encounter on the bus. Is this deliberate? Does it reflect something about life in Pakistan?

This story is part of a larger work. The bomb blast at the end ties it to the other stories in the same book, which are all about the same bomb blast. The book is 80 per cent done. It is deliberate, yes, because the book is trying to show a host of different characters and how they are affected by the blast.

I am not sure if it reflects anything about Pakistan except that there is an occasional bomb blast somewhere and people just factor that risk into their lives and go on with their business.

Our last issue’s theme was Pakistan, and it brought together some of the country’s finest novelists and non-fiction authors. Does it feel like a good time to be a Pakistani writer?

I do think that a sense of community is healthy in all circumstances. I also feel that all the Pakistani writers I’ve known (almost all of them!) are incredibly generous and supportive and helpful. I wrote my first story for Kamila Shamsie’s workshop and since then, she has been one of my key supporters and mentors. For the last two years or so, Musharraf Ali Farooqi has been unbelievably kind and helpful, especially with the translations but also with just about everything else.

Is it a good time? It certainly feels good to know that if you write something worthwhile, there is an audience for it, although I am not sure how much of that applies to short stories because agents and publishers tend to gravitate towards novels. The international audience – I am told repeatedly, and by reliable sources – has no appetite for Pakistani or South Asian short stories.

Tell us a little about what you’re working on now.

I finished the translation of Love in Chakiwara last month, a humorous Urdu novel considered to be one of the milestones of Urdu humorous fiction. Now I am writing the final two chapters of my Karachi book, of which ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’, is the opening chapter. Another chapter appeared in The Life’s Too Short Literary Review last year. ■

Read ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’ here, or visit our New Voices section for a full list of stories and interviews.

Click here to explore more Pakistani writing, as well as artwork and a special animation.

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Granta is delighted to announce the next instalment in its New Voices series, which showcases short fiction from emerging writers exclusively on the website. The first New Voice of 2011 is Bilal Tanweer, with ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’. We chose the story for its captivating atmosphere and highly convincing voice, both of which are sustained with a rare confidence.

Scroll down for an interview with Bilal, in which he talks about his book of connected stories, of which ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’ is one, and the importance of voice in his fiction.

After That, We Are Ignorant

Yesterday, an old man, bloody idiot, surely off his rockers, got on the bus from the Lucky Star stop … tall in his height, some six-three, wore a new, bright red Coca-Cola cap that you get for free these days, bloody joker. His shirt I think he had been re-ironing since the creation of Pakistan. His crumpled brown pants seemed never-washed ... He caught my eye as soon as he got on the bus. I pulled out my sketchbook and started to make his cartoon. The rectangular golden frame of his spectacles covered his long, thin face. Acha, at first he did not say anything, just took a seat, sat there and looked around. Then turned to the guy next to him and without any, whatsitsname, any hesitation questioned him, ‘Who are you?’

At this, the guy was startled and he looked at him cluelessly. Obviously, bhenchod! Anyone would jump at such abruptness. If someone asked you who are you, randomly, just like that, on the bus, and that too, a weird-looking old creep wearing a red cap and shirt with broken buttons, what would you say?

But that guy was some bugger, he smiled and replied, ‘I am a human, thank you,’ and shook the old man’s hand. Hehe. Bastard. Guess what the old man did? He just said, ‘Okay,’ and turned away. I was laughing to myself from my seat and seeing me, others also got interested in what was going on. I thought the old man was no less than a cartoon himself. He was staring at the back of the seat in front of him – like this – his face completely blank – like this. And then after staring for a few seconds, he turned back to the guy he questioned earlier and said, ‘I am Comrade Sukhansaz! Happy to meet you!’ and pushed out his hand toward him.

Now whatever the hell is a Comrade! Most people don’t even know what these creatures are. There was a time when these Comrades and Reds and Lefties were a common breed, but that general, Zia, that dog of the CIA, he ate them all up. He liked blood, that dog. Where else do you think all this Islam and drugs and guns and bombs came into this city? They are a recent invention. Americans gave him the money and guns and a carte blanche for drugs to fight the Soviets, and he fucked the country and this city for his jihad next door, thank you. You do find some Comrade occasionally, still bitten, his ass still bleeding and bandaged. All of them hate Zia. Haha! I mean whatever but you’ve got to admire Zia for the kind of barbaric treatment he gave them – jail, torture, lashing them in public! I mean, no human can imagine things that he actually made his policy. The joker even put his name in the constitution! He used to see things in his dreams and made them his policies. Yup, Americans loved his dreams because he was screwing the Soviets and Comrades in them. So yeah, most Comrades are dead now.

So guess what that guy said when the Comrade said, ‘I am Comrade Sukhansaz?’ He was some smartass – he returned a dumb expression, and asked: ‘Sukhansaz, that’s the word for poet … But what’s your name? And what’s Comrade … Is that a Muslim name?’

Hahaha! Whatshisname, Comrade, he turned red, even though technically that wasn’t possible because he was so dark, but oh, you should have seen his face – imagine a dry, savage brown flashing with colour! At first Comrade Sukhansaz didn’t reply, just turned his face and stared at the back of the seat. After a few moments, he began bumbling in a low voice. ‘In this country, everything is either Muslim or non-Muslim, everything, everything. Is your shoe Muslim? This cap, does it go to the mosque with you? Does your spoon and knife say their prayers on time? Everything, bloody everything is Muslim or non-Muslim! Is this colour a Muslim colour? And then no one can talk about religion … Names, now names are Muslims and non-Muslims!’

That I-am-human fellow was acting like a smartass but really you should have seen his face, nervous like hell. I mean what do you expect when you are sitting next to this nutcase? The Comrade turned to him again and said, ‘I am a poet. I was in jail. Yes, jail. For eight years. People love me. You know, they love me. They know me. The whole world knows me.’ He fell silent and looked around in the bus. He saw us sniggering, all thoroughly entertained.

Praise be the worm up my ass, I shouted, ‘Haan, so mister Comrade Sukhansaz, let us hear something, some poetry, some of your amazing verses … ’ And oh brother, I tell you, the moment I finished my sentence, he sprang into action, as if he had been waiting. He stood up, and then holding his seat with one hand, like this, his fingers all twisted backward, started reciting poems, one after another … I cannot tell you. And he was so good! I remember a few lines:

The argument between this lover with the other
is who loves more. After this, both are ignorant.

The tussle of this believer with the other
is how to worship. After this, both are ignorant.

The brawl of this politician with the other
is how to gain power. After this, both are ignorant.

It turned into a circus soon when a group of college students sitting at the back of the bus started to make noises in between his recitation. Each time the Comrade Sukhansaz paused between the couplets, they made a sound: Dha Dha Dha Dhayyn … like those Hollywood action movie soundtracks. At first Comrade was confused, because some of us were actually enjoying the poems and praising them as well, but soon the boys began to rattle him. He ignored it a few times, but then suddenly, haha! I remember he was saying: We will win against darkness too! And then he broke off yelling, ‘Abay O rowdy idiots! listen to what I am saying!’

It was so funny – abay! listen to me! I am telling you about darkness and winning!

For the boys, well, this was what they were looking for to begin with. It added to their fun and then they started purring and barking in between his verses. You got to love their timing! Imagine a dog’s whimper – aaoo aaoo aaoo – as if someone has kicked it in its gut – after both are ignorant.

Comrade got really riled though. He stopped abruptly and took his seat, muttering under his breath. And then the whole bus broke into applause, clapping for him. I whistled. You know the one I whistle, the long loud one. I shouted, ‘One more Comrade, one more!’ But he didn’t pay attention and continued to blather to himself in a low voice and kept staring at the back of the seat. Haha! Old bugger. The man sitting next to me was looking over my drawing. He said to me, smiling, ‘Why tease the old fellow. Let him be … ’ Well, I really didn’t give a toss about him or his poetry. For me, I had to finish up my sketch. He was a God-sent cartoon on the bus. What more can a cartoonist ask for? I had to do him for my records.

I was trying to get his nose right but he turned his face the other way. I waited but then I got impatient. I shouted, ‘Comrade, you old man, have you forgotten your poetry?’ That really got him! He turned immediately and began shouting, ‘Who said that? Haan? Who said that?’ And waving his fists, stood up from his seat, ‘I will break your bones!’ The college boys were having a ball. They were laughing like mad. One of them barked again loudly, at which the old man let his lid fling off and he began shouting at the bus driver. ‘STOP THE BUS! STOP THE DAMN BUS! I AM COMRADE! COMRADE SUKHANSAZ! STOP THE BLOODY BUS!’

Oh the bus conductor really panicked. He was already glancing suspiciously at the racket throughout, now he thought some fight had broken out or something. He brought out his steel rod from under one of the front seats and came directly toward the old man and waving it toward the old man, he said, ‘Babaji why making noise haan? Where do you get off?’

‘Show me some civility! I am a poet! People know me! They love me!’

The bus conductor was scratching his crotch, and seeing everyone laugh, he relaxed a bit and said, ‘Babaji, just don’t make any noise. Take your seat.’ He pointed the rod to an empty seat. ‘Your stop is about to come.’

As soon as he finished saying this, someone shouted again from behind: Oye Chicken-saz! You crazy old man! Comrade turned to the students again, and having really lost it this time began shouting, ‘Fuckers! I have seen the likes of you many times! I have fought police with bare hands. I went to jail. Yes, jail! For eight years! People love me! Sisterfuckers! What do you know! I have given sacrifices for this country! I have fought against the exploiters, and you, you fuckers like you, don’t care about anything!’ Everyone in the bus was in fits. The conductor then came to him, ‘Get off, babaji, your stop has come. Get to the gate, come on, come on hurry-up!’

As the old man moved towards the door, the boys kept up their chants:

Fight me, Comrade!

Why are you scared, Comrade?

We also love you, Comrade!

Comrade, you crazy old buffoon!

Another poem Comrade, please?

Fight, Comrade! Fight!

He got off at Cantt Station, right at the end of it.

Yeah, just about ten minutes before the bomb blast. He was the closest person I knew who probably might have died there. Well, no, I don’t know what happened after that. I have his cartoon though. Here. ■

Read other stories from our New Voices series, by writers including Jessica Soffer, Billy Kahora and Kseniya Melnik.

Ollie Brock speaks to Bilal Tanweer

OB: You’re both a writer and a translator. Which came first? Do they exercise completely different parts of your brain, or is it similar work?

BT: Fiction writing came first, although it came very late – during the sophomore year of my undergraduate studies. I started translating even later, when I wanted to win a translation competition during my MFA at Columbia. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it immensely and have been translating ever since. It also anchors me, keeps me thinking about words, writing and language.

For me, translating is very much like writing itself; and like every other translator, I also feel that literary translation is underrated and underappreciated (and underpaid) for the amount of imaginative and technical labour it requires. One has to make a lot of choices that are similar to writing fiction, and many that are specific to translation itself. On the whole, it could be as imaginative an enterprise as any other creative endeavour. William Weaver once used the metaphor of a performance for translation: you must act out the text in a different language. Ultimately, I feel every good translator is a writer first. Yes, translating can be tedious and oppressive if you don’t find some kind of personal affinity with the work you’re translating, or if you don’t believe in it. If you love the work, it’s like travelling to a new country with the person you love. At heart, I think, all good translators are like writers: they want to share something important, something urgent, something beautiful with the world.

The book I just finished translating (and sent out to a few publishers – fingers crossed!), a humorous novel from Urdu, Love in Chakiwara (and Other Such Adventures), I enjoyed translating immensely because I found a connection with the narrator’s voice – mischievous, oppressed, trying to show spine to somebody who is openly fleecing him but cannot do so because he also admires and hero-worships him. Great fun!

The story we’ve featured has a very distinctive style: a rough, brazen monologue from an angry, rather cruel narrator. What inspired it?

In my writing, the voice is the primary concern for me, and most of the time I construct everything else from it. My influences are mainly from Urdu poetry, and for this story, Karachi street language. The writer I go back to for voice is N. M. Rashed, one of the pioneers of modernist poetry and free verse in Urdu, and also among its finest practitioners. His poetry started making sense to me when I understood the voice. It also made me realize how important voice is for my own writing. I was also influenced a lot by Grace Paley’s stories. Goodbye and Good Luck is one of my favourites.

It’s interesting you consider that narrator to be ‘cruel’. I think it comes from the fact that he is vehemently a know-it-all guy, who is not prone to being surprised – at least he won’t admit to being surprised. So whatever he narrates, it will be with the intention to entertain, with the pretence that he knows and understands everything perfectly well. Perhaps the cruelty also comes from the fact that he’s ostensibly enjoying what he’s narrating. But this could simply be his way of telling the story. He might be performing for an audience who would not have it any other way.

The bomb-blast of the ending seems to deny all meaning to the encounter on the bus. Is this deliberate? Does it reflect something about life in Pakistan?

This story is part of a larger work. The bomb blast at the end ties it to the other stories in the same book, which are all about the same bomb blast. The book is 80 per cent done. It is deliberate, yes, because the book is trying to show a host of different characters and how they are affected by the blast.

I am not sure if it reflects anything about Pakistan except that there is an occasional bomb blast somewhere and people just factor that risk into their lives and go on with their business.

Our last issue’s theme was Pakistan, and it brought together some of the country’s finest novelists and non-fiction authors. Does it feel like a good time to be a Pakistani writer?

I do think that a sense of community is healthy in all circumstances. I also feel that all the Pakistani writers I’ve known (almost all of them!) are incredibly generous and supportive and helpful. I wrote my first story for Kamila Shamsie’s workshop and since then, she has been one of my key supporters and mentors. For the last two years or so, Musharraf Ali Farooqi has been unbelievably kind and helpful, especially with the translations but also with just about everything else.

Is it a good time? It certainly feels good to know that if you write something worthwhile, there is an audience for it, although I am not sure how much of that applies to short stories because agents and publishers tend to gravitate towards novels. The international audience – I am told repeatedly, and by reliable sources – has no appetite for Pakistani or South Asian short stories.

Tell us a little about what you’re working on now.

I finished the translation of Love in Chakiwara last month, a humorous Urdu novel considered to be one of the milestones of Urdu humorous fiction. Now I am writing the final two chapters of my Karachi book, of which ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’, is the opening chapter. Another chapter appeared in The Life’s Too Short Literary Review last year. ■

The online edition of our Pakistan issue includes poetry, essays and fiction, with selections from the print magazine as well as web exclusives – and extra material available to subscribers. Visit the issue page to browse the selection of memoir, reportage, artwork, poetry and essays.

Photograph on this page by Zerega
Home page photograph by Anas Ahmad

Granta is thrilled to announce another writer in its New Voices series, which showcases short fiction from emerging writers exclusively on the website. Our latest choice is Kseniya Melnik, whose story ‘The Witch’ impressed us with its tender portrait of illness, and a child’s bewildered absorption in a world that only she can see.

Scroll down to read an interview with Kseniya, in which she tells online editor Ollie Brock about the genesis of the story, and how to prioritize the day’s literary activies.

The Witch

We set out for the witch’s house in the still-grey morning. Babushka drove, squeezed tight behind the steering wheel of the boxy yellow Zhiguli. Mama sat in the front, fumbling with my migraine notebook. Over the last year the doctors had failed to establish any correlation between the pain and what and how much I ate, when and how much I slept, what I did, the season, the weather, my geographical location. No medication had helped. The witch was our last chance.

Although Babushka, who was a nurse, had assured me that this good witch, a healer, had cured her friend’s heart disease, I was scared. I kept picturing the fairy-tale Baba Yaga, who lived in a cabin that stood on chicken legs, surrounded by a fence of human bones and lanterns made from skulls. She flew in a giant pestle and mortar, on the hunt for children to cook in her oven and eat. Were these two witches sisters? Were all witches sisters? And how often did they visit each other for tea?

The car smelled of gasoline, and a familiar cauldron of nausea was already brewing in my stomach. I didn’t need the migraine diary to predict another cursed day. Soon the world would be ruined by blobs, like a fresh watercolour smudged with rain. Everything familiar would shed its skin to reveal a secret monstrous core. And after a tug-of-war between blackness and fire, the invisible UFO would land on my head. The tiny aliens would drill holes in my skull, excavate deep tunnels inside my brain, and perform their terrible electric experiments. I’d rather be eaten by Baba Yaga.

We took the same road out of the town as for the mushroom-picking trips we’d been on and kept going. The trees grew in two solid walls, the leaves silvering like coins in the windy sun. Mama stared out the window. After whispering late into the night, she and Babushka hadn’t said a word to each other all morning. This was a strange summer: instead of remaining home with Papa, Mama came to Babushka’s with me. In fact, she hadn’t been herself all year: always awake, eyes and cheeks burning, always telling me to remember that she loved me most of all in the world, as if she was about to die or go away somewhere.

If you decide on it, at least make sure you don’t bring them the same gift, like your brilliant stepfather Lev Davidovich. Twice,’ Babushka suddenly said in a brash, joking tone. ‘Did I already tell you this story?’

Mama ignored her.

‘Goes to Sweden, brings me a watch,’ Babushka went on. ‘I look at the receipt in the box, says two ladies’ watches. Gets all nervous, says they made a mistake at the register. Right – a mistake at a Swiss register. One of the best criminal defence lawyers in town, and a complete idiot in life. A few months later I’m unpacking his suitcase from another business trip – two nighties. One small, one big. I leave them, see what happens. Lo and behold, he gives me the bigger one, the small one disappears. Says, he wasn’t sure what size I wore, so he got two. After sixteen years of marriage he wasn’t sure!’

‘Quit it,’ Mama said and turned back to me. ‘How are you feeling, kitten?’

‘Another one’s coming,’ I said. I missed my old illnesses – precocious coughs and stuffed noses, lazy ear infections. I missed the game-like remedies: mustard chest compresses, an orchestra of little glass cups tinkling and tingling on my back, a night in a headscarf soaked in vodka.

‘Of course, I later gave him and that witch such a beating they took turns writing complaints to the regional Ministry of Health. Fools,’ Babushka cried out. ‘I always had more friends than him because I’m a good person.’

‘The witch?’ I said.

‘Another witch, Alinochka,’ Babushka said. ‘A bad witch.’

‘Mama, enough. This is not helping. And you’re scaring Alina.’

‘I just don’t want you to do something you might regret for the rest of your life.’

‘Don’t you think I know that? Why do you keep torturing me?’ Mama yelled. My heart jumped. ‘Stop it now. If it passes, you’ll be the first one to know, I promise. For now, please let’s focus on Alina.’

‘Precisely,’ Babushka said.

Mama climbed over into the back seat and curled up next to me, her head on my lap.

‘Don’t listen to us getting worked up over trifles, Alinochka. The most important thing is for you to get better.’ She kissed my hand and put it under her cheek, which was flushed and covered in fine hairs, like a peach.

We stopped for a picnic lunch. A sea churned inside my stomach. My ears burned – two red signal flags for the incoming UFO. I couldn’t swallow.

After lunch Mama returned to the front seat and I lay down in the back. From time to time she looked at me with worry, circling her lips with her finger. She and Babushka kept arguing, but I no longer heard them.

Soon we reached the witch’s house. It wasn’t a cabin on two chicken legs but a regular izba, a one-storied timber cottage, on the edge of a small village. The airport inside my brain throbbed with light. As usual, to disorientate me further, the UFO beamed its invisible radioactive rays and turned Mama into a grey rabbit and Babushka into a brown bear.

Babushka the Bear got out the plastic bag for the witch, and Mama took my hand in her soft paw. The three of us went up to the witch’s doorstep. Babushka crossed herself and knocked. My skull vibrated under the UFO’s landing gear. I closed my eyes.

The door creaked open. ‘Hello. Come in, come in.’ The witch’s voice was low and kindly. I felt a light touch on my head and opened my eyes. Instead of an old hag with rotten teeth and eyes like live coals, before us stood an orange fox in a blue floral housecoat. Dainty metal-framed glasses perched on her long, thin nose. ‘So, this is Alinochka, our little patient. Does your head hurt now?’ I nodded. ‘Nu, don’t be so gloomy. We’ll cure you.’

We went in. The room was dominated by a giant, old-fashioned stove, on top of which Ivan the Fool, the youngest and laziest of the three fairy-tale brothers, usually snored away his days. And where Baba Yaga cooked naughty children! Dark, oily icons hung on the walls in one corner, lit up by a church candle. Yellow halos around the stern faces of the saints shimmered with gold. An episode of The Rich Also Cry, Babushka’s favourite Mexican serial, played on a small black-and-white TV on a bookshelf in front of the bed. Multicoloured carpets covered the walls and the floor. A disappointingly ordinary home for a healer-witch.

‘Welcome. Please sit down.’ The Fox turned down the volume on the TV and motioned to the table, on which stood a gold samovar, several white teacups and a plate laden with honey-cakes. Mama nervously smoothed her denim skirt. She looked so slight and grey next to the lustrous fox.

‘Thank you. This is for you.’ Babushka offered her the bag. I’d seen her pack a bottle of vodka and a box of chocolates in addition to the money.

The Fox waved it away. ‘Afterwards, afterwards. Alinochka, why don’t you sit on the bed while I talk with your mother and grandma?’

As I settled on the scratchy plaid throw, the Fox poured some tea and added a coffee-coloured liquid from a brown bottle. The black label was covered with ornate golden designs and lettering, some of which was not in Russian. At once a sharp, herbal smell filled the room. ‘Now, tell me about your daughter from the beginning, from birth.’

Mama laid out the migraine diary in front of her, then hesitated for a moment, looking around the room and at the Fox with vague suspicion, as though she’d forgotten how we got here and why. ‘All right, from the beginning then. Alina was born in the winter and at two weeks caught pneumonia. She completely skipped the crawling stage and began talking at six months, walking at seven. Chronic sinus infections.’

She enumerated the dates and durations of all my colds, flus and childhood illnesses. The Fox listened attentively, wrinkling her nose after each sip of tea. From the shadow of the corner her fur appeared almost flat, like freckled human skin. Her little paw, clad in a high-heeled slipper, danced under the table. Babushka took a big bite from a honey-cake.

‘Soloist in her music school choir. Popular.’ Mama listed the names of my first-grade and neighbourhood friends. ‘As a toddler, prone to tantrums. Often in a bad mood. The migraines started a year ago, but Alina still managed to finish first grade at the top of her class. I’ve kept the diary, like the doctors advised. Here, take a look. The average episode lasts four hours, the auras before are …’

I tuned out. The aliens had begun their working day, drilling on the right side of my skull. I took off my shoes and wound into a kitten-ball. The Fox’s pillow was uncomfortable: hard, cold and pierced with stems of goose feathers. The holes in my vision were like smears on the glass of a diving mask. I recognized the two-tone spines of the World Literature series on the shelf. A low choral humming emanated from the icons’ corner. I squinted to see whether the saints were moving their mouths, but their dark, mournful faces only stared, flickering in and out of the candlelight’s golden fog.

Flashes of white light began to pulsate in my eyes, and a relentless countdown began. Ten, nine … I jumped off the bed and stumbled towards the table, hoping to reach someone before the explosion. Babushka caught me. Eight, seven ... She sat me on her sturdy knees and held me tight.

‘You’re forgetting Chernobyl, Vika,’ she said.

‘I need to know everything before I can start the healing,’ the Fox said.

‘Let me explain,’ Mama addressed the Fox apologetically. ‘Alina was in Kiev when it happened. With her grandparents, on her father’s … my husband’s side. But the cloud didn’t go over Kiev. There was no direct radiation. She wore that radiation meter for months.

I’d been only four then, but I remembered that day at the zoo. Or thought I did. I’d looked so many times at a picture we had taken: me sitting astride a big stuffed bear; Grandpa Sasha and Baba Zoya, who’d been recently diagnosed with cancer, on either side. A donkey flanked her, and he had a live monkey in a red vest and a purple skullcap on his shoulder.

Suddenly, the migraine lifted. The countdown stilled to a whisper, then died. The aliens retreated in disappointment. I saw them all clearly now: Babushka, Mama, and the red-haired woman in glasses and a blue floral housecoat. She was much too beautiful and young to be a witch. Her pink lips were lined with maroon; a small golden cross twinkled on her freckly chest. She didn’t seem to have noticed the change.

‘We never know the whole story. No one can be trusted,’ she said in a doctorly tone, the way Babushka spoke to her patients. ‘These days we have to take all matters into our own hands.’

‘That’s what I’ve been telling her,’ Babushka said. ‘But she doesn’t listen to anyone’s sensible advice. About anything.’

Mama sighed and shook her head with exasperation.

‘There are many causes for ailments. But besides a few microbial and viral infections,’ – the Witch nodded at Babushka – ‘the causes are rarely biological. For one, Russia … Well, what am I saying, the whole world, the whole world is full of spirits thirsty for revenge,’ the Witch said. ‘Wars, revolutions, genocide. The crafty ones find their way into a new life. But most are too broken. They linger around, haunt the streets, haunt our homes, contaminate the minds and bodies of the most innocent. They hide in the hollows of the heart, warming themselves in the downy scarf of the child’s soul, leaking poisons of old hurt.’

‘Well, this philosophy seems rather –’ Mama began.

‘Listen carefully, Vika, and try to think,’ Babushka interrupted her harshly, as though Mama was a disobedient child. ‘She is very sensitive.’

I was about to say that it didn’t hurt anymore when the Witch called me over. She took out a measuring tape from her pocket and wrapped it around my head. With a magician’s flourish she showed Mama and Babushka a thumbed number.

Then she dug her cold fingers into my scalp. ‘Ah yes, I can see the pain now. You poor child,’ she chanted in a low voice. ‘The pain is like black ink, filling your head and your head is a giant inkwell. All those spirits are floundering in the ink – I see them so clearly. They want to express their pain through you. But we will banish them out of your head, tell them to go and cry elsewhere.’

The Witch encircled my head with her hands and rubbed it, singing something folky under her breath. She smelled not like a witch at all, but like Mama – of dishwater and borsch and Lancôme perfume. She massaged her song into my head, hard and fast, now building my hair up into a crown, now letting it fall to my shoulders. ‘Into the forest they go! Into the forest!’ she yelled. Her breath was loud and uneven.

It felt good, but so what: the Witch didn’t know what she was doing. She was wrong in her diagnosis of my pain. I was doomed.

Finally, she lifted off her hands and blew hot breath on my nape.

‘How do you feel?’ Mama said. She was pale, her big, grey eyes shining with fever. I so wished that I could, when I grew up, shrink her into a little doll and always carry her in my pocket like Vasilisa the Wise.

‘It’s doesn’t hurt anymore,’ I said and smiled. ‘She stopped the pain.’

Mama jumped from her chair and clutched me to her chest. ‘Oh, God, thank you, thank God. Thank you, Galina Kirillovna.’

The witch’s name turned out to be just an ordinary Russian name. ‘You’re welcome. This one wasn’t too hard because she’s so young,’ she said a bit too excitedly. ‘May your daughter grow up healthy and happy. And remember that the child’s health depends on the mother’s.’

She measured my head again and showed the mark to Mama and Babushka. My head had shrunk two centimetres. I felt it with my hands. Ears, mouth, nose, eyes – everything seemed intact. Maybe something had happened after all. Maybe she’d somehow altered the surface of my skull to make it impossible for the UFO to land there in the future.

‘Galina Kirillovna, do you by any chance do card readings?’ Mama asked.

‘Card readings? Of course. I do everything,’ Galina Kirillovna said gamely.

‘I wouldn’t trust the cards with such matters,’ Babushka snapped, but didn’t make a move from the table. She handed Galina Kirillovna the payment and took another honey-cake.

‘Alinochka, drink this. You need to rest now. Go lie on my bed,’ Galina Kirillovna said and gave me a cup of tea. Its bitter, herbal smell made me sneeze.

My eyelids became heavy as soon as I lay down. The bed didn’t feel as uncomfortable anymore. Through the syrup of sleep I heard the familiar incantations: For you, for the home, for the soul. What was. What will be. What will calm the heart.

I woke up in the back of the Zhiguli on the way home, nauseous again, but this time with hunger. Babushka drove, occasionally dropping her head forward to stretch her neck. Beneath the neckline of her green floral dress she had a small fatty hump. Mama was asleep in the front seat, her face turned to me. A slight smile hovered about her chapped lips. But whatever had calmed her heart was probably a lie or a mistake. This Galina Kirillovna could be a healer-witch or an evil witch, like the one Babushka beat up in her story. Or not a witch at all.

It will be clear soon enough. And if the doctors can’t help and the witches can’t help, and Papa and Babushka can’t – who else is left?

The ink of the night leaked from the corners of the sky on to the day’s bright canvas, as Galina Kirillovna would have said. She liked talking about the ink; maybe she’d make a better poet than a healer.

Birches, birches, birches forever. The notches on their white trunks looked like sad black eyes. They had long tired of staring at the world without blinking, but they could never close and go to sleep. ■

Read other stories from our New Voices series, by Billy Kahora, Catherine Chung or Evie Wyld.

Ollie Brock speaks to Kseniya Melnik.

OB: Your portrayal of the child's illness is creative but highly convincing. Why did you choose this as a subject?

KM: I wanted to write a story about the levels of pain, the ways people describe and explain sickness, and to what lengths they go to find a cure. The material came from several sources. I’ve heard many stories of people in Russia seeking help from healers and witch-doctors if traditional medicine has failed them. There are usually interesting rituals involved, ranging from head manipulation to lifting of a curse through the victim’s photograph. At the same time, the topic of how emotional lives affect our bodies is constantly in the news. We’ve all heard that many illnesses are caused by stress. But I’ve also heard people attribute cancer to a destructive affair or a toxic relationship, or hypertension to a curse from a jealous neighbour. A recent New York Times article, ‘Death and the Broken Heart’, discussed medical and anecdotal evidence of the broken heart syndrome. There are instances of this on a larger scale. In his book, Awakenings, Oliver Sacks documented case histories of people affected by the sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918. Could this have been a psychosomatic response to the world changed forever by World War I?

In my story, the narrator tries to make sense of her world in fantastical terms because this is a language familiar to her. She is a bright and sensitive child who has read a lot of fairy tales. Another level of pain in the family is explored through the mother, who has fallen madly in love with someone and is contemplating an affair. In this case, love could be seen as a certain kind of sickness. Finally, although the Witch is not an especially reliable character, she brings up an interesting point about the accumulation of suffering caused by large-scale tragedies. How does the collective pain affect the health of a particular society or country?

You taught an introductory creative writing course at New York University in the spring semester of this year. People often find it impossible to teach and write at the same time - did you?

I didn’t find that teaching interfered with writing as long as I scheduled my literary activities throughout the day in the correct order of influence. Start by reading good literature (preferably the classics), then write, then critique the writing of others, and finish the day with fiction unrelated to one’s own work.

I learned as much, if not more, from my students than they did from me. In addition to workshopping stories, I led discussions on literature from the craft perspective. In the beginning of the course, it was hard to get the students interested in the nuts and bolts of a story. After all, one doesn’t need to know the exact mechanism of the circulation system in order to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the human body. At the same time, it was eye-opening to hear young people’s pure emotional and intellectual responses, unadulterated by excessive concern for literary technique. Sometimes they didn’t like the stories that my graduate classmates and I considered to be at the very peak of literary sophistication and vice versa. The students related the stories and poems much more directly to their immediate life experiences. In one or two precious instances, I witnessed a declaration that a story or poem changed a student’s life.

You lived in Russia until you were fifteen. Do you only write in English? Do you think your stories would be read in a different way there?

I started writing in English at fourteen and still do exclusively. I’ve never had a strong desire to write in Russian, though, depending on the mood of the piece and whether I’d been reading in Russian beforehand, I might come up with whole passages in Russian, which I then translate. I often think of words in Russian first when I’m searching for the right nuance. And I’m usually not satisfied with the English equivalent, despite the fact that there are more words in English than Russian. Russian forms seem more flexible, more responsive to tonal and emotional adjustment, at least to my ear.

It’s hard for me to imagine how my stories would be read in Russia, especially in translation. My only Russian audience so far has been my family – and that’s a whole other type of animal. I’m always concerned with whether I am saying something new. Writing about Russia and Russian immigrants in America is a built-in shortcut to newness and exoticism (up to a point, of course), which I wouldn’t have in Russia. Because I haven’t been back since I immigrated, I’d also be worried about inauthenticity in my writing, although I realize that I didn’t, and no writer ever does, sign a contract to represent their entire culture throughout all of history.

I guess it comes down to the fact that Russian literature is holy to me, and, however pretentious it might sound, writing in Russian would be akin to jumping into the ring with Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Bulgakov and the other heavy-hitters – a scary proposition.

You work for an online journal - any tips for writers submitting to magazines?

In my experience at Our Stories Literary Journal and as a reader for The Paris Review, I found that most people start submitting too early in their writing career; either the plot, or the characters or the prose isn’t strong enough. But, it’s also important to remember that editors have their own tastes, and journals often have themed issues and/or general style preferences. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of the stars aligning. I’d like to believe that a good story will eventually find a home.

Incidentally, Our Stories (ourstories.us) provides written feedback on every story submitted to our contests, so writers get more than a rejection for their reading fee.

Can you tell us about what you're working on at the moment?

I am working on a collection of linked stories that centre around my hometown, Magadan, and emigrants to the US from there. Magadan, which is located in a remote tundra region across the Bering Strait from Alaska, called Northern Far East, has an interesting history. From the 1930s on, it served as the administrative centre of a vast Gulag system. During its renaissance in the ’60s and ’70s, it was home to a curious mixture: highly educated, cultured new arrivals, and former Gulag inmates – many of whom, of course, also came from the higher echelons of society. Then there was the economic collapse of the ’90s and exodus to central Russia. The stories are set in different eras, ranging from the ’50s to now, and feature narrators from various walks of life.

Buy your copy of our current issue, ‘Pakistan’, now – or browse some the web exclusives, which include:

– ‘High Noon’: contemporary Pakistani art with an introduction by Hari Kunzru
– ‘How to Write About Pakistan’, a satirical feature by four of the issue’s contributors
– ‘Six Snapshots of Partition’, John Siddique’s memories of his father
– An animation using the cover art from the issue, by Caco Neves

Six times a year we showcase original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices project. We are proud to announce Catherine Chung as our latest featured writer. We enjoyed her story, published exclusively below, for its rhythm, poise and restraint.

Click here to see a full list of New Voices stories; or read an interview with Catherine Chung.

The other day at dinner, you told this story about a student who fell in love with you. At the end of the semester he brought you a gift: a box you opened in private containing a ring you never wore, and afterwards you met him somewhere for coffee and told him, gently, that nothing was ever going to happen. When you told this story, I watched your face and was jealous of that boy. I knew you were kind to him, and sweet, and that for a moment, in exchange for his impossible little crush, he received the heady rush of your attention.

Another time at dinner, before you told that story, you mentioned that we always ended up sitting next to each other. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it always made me happy when somehow I found myself near you. I don’t know exactly what I wanted from you then, except that I wanted it badly. Still, I tried to avoid sitting next to you after that: I didn’t want you to grow bored. And then one morning as we walked to your studio, we slid in the snow, arm in arm, and you said you wished we were twelve years old and I wished it too. I wished I could give you my first kiss, which I gave to another boy with your name when I was almost twelve.

I wished, also, that I could give you my first love, which I gave to a boy who had eyes like yours, laughing, swift. He left for college when I was fifteen, and too young to follow him, too young to hold his attention. And somehow when I met you, you returned me to that time, when half baffled with desire I leaned out my window every day waiting for someone who never came.

That day in front of your studio, you asked about my father, and I told you he’d just passed away. You made a sound in your throat that was the sound of a child crying out in surprise or sorrow, and I wanted more than anything to crawl into that sound. I said let’s not talk about it, because I wanted then to be done with words.

Everything I wished I could give you, I’d already given away. I wanted to give you the whole of my mislaid girlhood. I wanted, like your student, to make a gift of myself to you. And for you to understand, and to be kind and wise, like a teacher, and for a moment really notice me. I felt reckless. This thing, which for you would have been casual and fleeting, for me would have been an open door that I don’t know I could close.

Whatever I want is impossible. Maybe I’d like you to see this. Maybe I’d like you to tell me so.

(For M)

We are delighted to announce Catherine Chung as our latest selection for granta.com’s New Voices series, which showcases fiction from emerging writers. Her story ‘Wish’ was published on 6th April 2010. Below, she speaks to Ollie Brock about the beauty of maths and writing.

OB: As well as a degree in creative writing, you have one in mathematics. When did you decide to start writing, and why?

CC: I think my interest in mathematics was that of a writer: I was always trying to translate it back into a story. The two interests come from the same source though, which is an obsession with language and its capacity to explore things larger than ourselves. I discovered mathematics as an undergraduate, and fell in love with how beautiful it was: it can be so precise and elegant – and asks all sorts of big questions.

I think I started writing, on the other hand, because it allowed me to actively engage with language in a critical way. When I was growing up, we spoke Korean at home, so I didn’t learn English until I started school. It was very bewildering: all of a sudden I had a name I’d never been called before, and couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Weirdly enough, I learned to read and write at the same level as the rest of my class before I could track even the most basic conversation in real life.

Much of your story ‘Wish’ is a direct address in the second person. Why did you use this device?

I wanted the story to be very intimate, almost like a conversation overheard from the inside of someone’s mind. I used a direct address because I wanted to the reader to be pulled into that intimacy, to feel part of it.

Your prose has a lovely rhythm to it. Do you write poetry as well?

Thank you! I’m flattered because I’ve always wanted to be a poet, but I’ve written just one poem in the last ten years. I was so excited when it came to me, and hoped others would follow. Alas, no such luck – it was the only one.

You’ve taught creative writing in both America and Germany. What was different about the two experiences, and the students?

Teaching creative writing is always rewarding and fun, and occasionally exhilarating. It’s tricky to try to differentiate between two groups though, because of course there’s so much variation between individual students in any given classroom.

What I learned from teaching in both places is that literature, that compulsion to share yourself through language and the imagination, really does transcend borders and nations. On some level our struggles, and what we care about and want to write about, are the same – as are our difficulties in expressing them.

If anything, being in Germany affected my writing much more than my teaching. I was working on Forgotten Country, a novel I’m just finishing up. So I was there, trying to write about things like dislocation and divisions within families and histories and nations, and it was incredible, because those things had just happened there. The friends I met had grown up in East Germany, and lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. It was exciting to find myself in a place where people retained a cultural memory which resonated so well with everything I was thinking about.

Any tips for young writers?

Oh dear. The advice I give myself is to risk more, be patient, and remember that life is pretty big. But I think my mom’s advice is better: Eat and sleep right, exercise, remember to take breaks, and treat yourself gently, because you will write other things but you only get one life – so above all, take care of your health!

Our New Voice for February was Billy Kahora, with his story ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’. Read all our New Voices stories here, as well as interviews with the authors.

Six times a year we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices project. We are proud to announce Kenyan writer Billy Kahora as our latest writer to be featured. Click here to see a full list of stories, and here to read more about Billy Kahora, including an interview.

That last Sunday of 2007, just a few days before Jimmy Gikonyo’s eighteenth birthday – when he would become ineligible to use his Nairobi Orphanage family pass – he went to see his old friend, Sebastian the gorilla. Jimmy sat silently on the bench next to the primate’s pit waiting for Sebastian to recognize him. After a few minutes, Sebastian turned his gaze on Jimmy and walked towards the fence. The gorilla’s eyes were rheumy, his movements slow and careful. Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past.

Jimmy removed the tattered pass from his pocket and read the fine print on the back: This lifetime family pass is only for couples and children under eighteen years of age.

There was a sign on the side of Sebastian’s cage: ‘Oldest Gorilla in the World. Captured and Saved from the Near Extinction of His Species After the Genocide in Rwanda. Sebastian, 56. Genus: Gorilla.’

The Sunday Standard beside him said: Nairobi, Kisumu, Kakamega and Coast Province in Post-Election Violence After Presidential Results Announced.

That Sunday morning was strangely cold for late December. When Jimmy looked around, every one of the animals seemed to agree, each exhibiting a unique brand of irritation. 11 a.m. was the best time to visit the orphanage. The church-going crowd that came in droves in the afternoon was still worshipping, so the place was empty.

He had come here first as a toddler. They acquired their family pass in the days when his father was a trustee of the Friends of Nairobi National Park but his father soon found the trips boring, and for some years, Jimmy had come here alone with his mother.

When Jimmy was twelve his father left them, and Jimmy began to come on his own, except for the year he had been in and out of hospital. That year, he borrowed a book called Gorilla Adventure by Willard Price from a school friend. He had read it from cover to cover, in the night, using a torch under the blanket and eventually falling asleep. He woke up to find the book tangled and ruined in urine-stained sheets. He had received a beating from the owner that had only increased his love for the mountain gorilla. For the rest of his primary school years he would take the lonely side in arguments about whether a gorilla could rumble a tiger, or whether a polar bear could kill a mountain gorilla.

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Today Granta relaunches its project ‘New Voices’, in which we publish short fiction by exciting new writers; we will now be publishing an exclusive short story online six times a year. It is our chance to give these writers some of the recognition we feel they deserve, and to publish a few more of the many stories we receive - extending the space available in our print edition.

We are delighted to announce that our New Voice for February is Billy Kahora, whose story ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’ will go online tomorrow.

About Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora studied Creative Writing as a Chevening Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in 2007. Before that, he spent eight years studying and working in South Africa, and was Editorial Assistant for All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He also has degrees in journalism and media studies.

Kahora now lives and works in Kenya, where he is Managing Editor of the literary journal Kwani, established in Nairobi in 2003. He has called the publication ‘non-academic and non-institutionalised’. The writers and editors come from backgrounds of fiction and social commentary – and rather than coming from an already-established group, such as a university, want to create their own literary community.

Billy also edited ‘Kenya Burning’, a visual narrative of the post-election crisis in Kenya, published by the GoDown Arts Centre and Kwani Trust in March 2009. He is now collaborating on a book of non-fiction on environmental corruption in Kenya.

In an editorial for Kwani in 2005, entitled ‘The Fire Next Time OR A Half-Made Place: Between Tetra Paks and Plastic Bags’, Billy wrote:

‘All I might ask, starting with myself, is that my rhetoric, my theories, my musings – at least if I call myself a writer – can be seen between the pages of a book. That I am part of the defining texts of the here and now, and that they are written down and not just talked about. Because we really need them, as much as we need many other things, if we are to avoid, faint hope, the fire next time. And if we can’t avoid it – the moment has been defined for all to see.’

Interview

Granta’s Online Editor Ollie Brock spoke to Billy about his story ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’, his online journal Kwani, and the current state of literature in Africa. Read the interview here.

Granta.com’s New Voices series showcases original fiction from emerging writers. The latest story in this series is ‘Beginning, End’ by Jessica Soffer.

You were born. You named yourself. You walked your turtle. You went to school. You had dirty feet. You lay in a field. You piled into the Vanagan. You carried signs. You grew long legs. You met someone. You were just a kid. You didn’t keep it. You got into college. You moved east. You shaved your armpits. You took up jogging. You discovered hairspray. You crossed your legs.

I saw you at that party, holding a rock in your fingers. I popped a mint. I cleared my throat. I had pennies in my loafers. I ate red meat. I could change. I told you, I would change. I knew by your face, you weren’t so sure. I was drunk. I wasn’t your type. I kissed you on the Lakefill. I lifted a lash off your face. I didn’t tell you, my parents belonged to a country club. I had season tickets. I thought, you looked so clean, you smelled like stems.

I walked behind you. You led the rallies. I lost my mother. You rubbed my back.

We got a place. We read a lot. We rescued a dog. You worked at a shelter. I was a terrible handyman. My father called friends. We moved to the city. We ordered in. We picked up dry-cleaning. We hailed cab after cab. We were promoted. We hardly saw each other. I drank too much. You wouldn’t kiss me. You said I was my father. I stood there, half-listening, sick of your hoping. You said, you weren’t angry just tired.

We got a bigger apartment. We ran along the pier. We ate organic. We tried for a baby. We tried again. You took hormones. You pushed me away. I moved out. I slept with our dermatologist. You buried our dog. You forgave me. You cut your hair. I moved back in. We almost adopted. We went to counseling. We got a puppy. We held hands on the bird trail and the puppy scampered ahead.

We wore pyjama sets. We saw Spanish films. We took our time at the market. We got a stationary bike. We feared the wind. We helped each other dress. We went to Tuscany. You wanted to stay. I bought you an MG. You named it Brando. I got mugged in broad daylight. I shattered a kneecap. We had to wonder.

We bought some land. It gave us hope. I loved the farm stands. We moved in April. You bought second-hand books. You painted the bathrooms. I planted tomatoes. We sat on the porch. We had soil in our fingernails. We let it be. We reminisced. We didn’t miss it. We left the door unlocked. You found a lump. I took you to the doctor. You had to drive. I blamed the hormones. I blamed that commune. I blamed soy. I blamed the sun. You took long baths. Your hair fell like feathers. I did the laundry. I managed your pills. I spoon-fed you yogurt. You asked for nothing. You gripped my sweaters. I didn’t sleep. I watched you breathing. You were quiet as a plant. You were the same but with a different face.

I always knew, you said, that I’d go first. You weren’t looking for an answer. I couldn’t say it anyhow. I couldn’t commit you to it. You were a shell.

Now, I think we should have adopted. We should have stayed in the city. We should have made more friends. This house is too big. You picked all the colors. Your earrings hang from a lamp. Your socks stiffen in the hamper. Your bookmark stops midway through. I sleep with your wallet. It sticks to my cheek like dead skin. Still. I try to walk every morning. I make big portions and freeze them. I donate to our college. I’ve been meaning to volunteer. I’ve been avoiding classical music. The best hours are at night when I can’t be sure if I’m dreaming.

Just the other day, I was moving the dust. The house was whipped by thunder. I covered my head. My arms were wet wood. I didn’t think of God. I got onto the floor. Before, I’d sat here like this. You were falling asleep. You put your hand on my shoulder. Isn’t it something, you asked. I knew what you meant.