Photo by Darrell Berry.

Don’t Flinch

Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver
when you lift your eyes. It’s the glare. Don’t flinch
The news you were reading
(who tramples whom) is antique
and on the death pages you’ve seen already
worms doing their normal work
on the life that was: the chewers chewing
at a sensuality that wrestled doom
an anger steeped in love they can’t
even taste. How could this still
shock or sicken you? Friends go missing, mute
nameless. Toss
the paper. Reach again
for the Iliad. The lines
pulse into sense. Turn up the music
Now do you hear it? can you smell smoke
under the near shingles?

Read a new poem by Adrienne Rich in the latest issue of Granta, Exit Strategies.

I think of Gloria as my head jerks back and forth against the window of the bus. I try to imagine her standing in a landscape like the one in the pictures she’s sent. A lone woman surrounded by tall cedars and oaks. Even if it’s only June, the ground in my imagination is covered with white snow, looking like a bed of bleached cotton balls. This is my favourite way to picture her in America.

From ‘America’ by Chinelo Okparanta in Granta 117: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

You can also listen to 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.

Chinelo Okparanta will be announced as a New Voice on granta.com next week.

Illustration by Michael Salu.

Photo by the Highways Agency.

Supernovae

Theory cannot be tangible fact
like driving on I-95 to get to a lecture
on supernovae with pictures
of white dwarfs sucking mass,
of others fusing hydrogen to their iron cores
before imploding to black.
I’m delayed behind an accident,
one car with a fender blown off,
hanging on the median, driver pacing
the thin turf of tar shoulder,
on a cellphone, mouth gaping
and closing rapidly, hands stitching,
the story part factual, part theoretical.

You can pre-order the latest issue of Granta, Exit Strategies, or subscribe and receive it before the release date of February 2.

Photo courtesy of Maaza Mengiste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw Jay watching me in the mirror, smiling.

From ‘Summer’ by Jacob Newberry in Granta 117: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Photo by Brigitte Brignet / Agence Vu.

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

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

We walked home in the moonlight, past the tired men sleeping in doorways and snake people slithering in the shadows, whispering, ‘Loose joints, loose joints, three for a deuce,’ and when Stevie clutched my hand I’d tell him not to be afraid, they wouldn’t hurt us and we were almost home, and he kept his small, mittened hand in mine even after we’d crossed First Avenue, right up until we walked through the apartment door.

From ‘City Boy’ by Judy Chicurel in Granta 117: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Photo by Mónica Naranjo.

You can also hear Judy Chicurel at the following events:

The New York Launch
7 February, 7 p.m., BookCourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Granta editor John Freeman launches the new issue with Granta 118 contributors Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko, Claire Messud and Susan Minot.

Thirty Girls, The Interrogation and City Boy
9 February, 7 p.m., 192 BOOKS, 192 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011

Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko and Susan Minot explore the consequences of things beyond our control through readings from Granta 118 and conversation with Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan.

Photo by Kriska.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandy says, ‘Bev, who do you love?’

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

Goobie says, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, which Beatle do you love?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Love Paul, because I love Paul.’

‘Okay.’

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

‘Okay.’

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

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

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

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

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

Last summer, it was a Brooklyn accent.

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

‘Great. Keep going.’

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

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

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

Sandy: Pretty and Artistic.

Beverly: Beautiful and Athletic.

Lynda: Smart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But sometimes I agree with her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Go to bed.’

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

‘Lynda, I said go to bed.’

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

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

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

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

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

My beacon in the night. ■

‘She saw the girls out of the corner of her eye, gathered now beneath a tree, and instinct told her not to look in their direction.’

From ‘Thirty Girls’ by Susan Minot in Granta 117: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Photo by Guillaume Bonn.

The New York Launch
7 February, 7 p.m., BookCourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Granta editor John Freeman launches the new issue with Granta 118 contributors Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko, Claire Messud and Susan Minot.

Thirty Girls, The Interrogation and City Boy
9 February, 7 p.m., 192 BOOKS, 192 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011

Judy Chicurel, Aleksandar Hemon, Vanessa Manko and Susan Minot explore the consequences of things beyond our control through readings from Granta 118 and conversation with Granta associate editor Patrick Ryan.

Photo by Mikecogh.

The Cowboy

John Wayne Durler had always needed something to run from. If it wasn’t his older siblings or his parents, it was his teachers at school, and then, of course, the Draft, and a full-time job. But soon he had finished his studies, his siblings grew old, his parents died, the war was put to an end, and John Wayne lost three of his fingers, and consequently his livelihood, when he was thrown from La Muerte Roja at the Omaha Round-up Rodeo, after riding the bull a mere three seconds.

To avoid any questions or queer looks, John Wayne wore a glove most of the time. In the hollow slots he stuffed cotton and pipe cleaner. It wasn’t unusual for John Wayne: reshaping his defects, adding substance to places lacking.

Whenever someone did finally ask – usually a woman he aimed to touch bare-skinned or some asshole who said, Hey what’s with It wasn’t unusual for John Wayne: reshaping his defects, adding substance to places lacking. a glove in the summer? – he’d peel back the leather, revealing his lobster-claw hand, and he’d focus on the grotesqueries, the things he thought they’d most want to know, like how his fingers slipped right off – easy as plucking up weeds – or how he didn’t even realize they were gone until after he’d rose up from the dirt, ran across the arena, and scaled the metal fence to get clear of those horns.

They’d found all three fingers still tucked inside his riding glove, still roped to the back of the bull’s neck. They’d thrown them on ice until the doctor said it was no use.

And while John Wayne found it eerie, he also felt a little sad, knowing that his decay had no discernible pain, almost as if he would float away from this world, one molecule at a time, until he was just gone, and he had nothing left to run from. Not even death seemed an occasion to avoid.

The Saddle

He was twenty-eight at the time, and with the money he received from the insurance claim, John Wayne bought his girlfriend, Lila, a fancy ring, and with what was left, he purchased a semi-truck – a red-and-black-striped Peterbilt – that his daughter, Dolly (when she came along), liked to call The Ladybug.

Inside the truck, there were two seats in the front. Behind them were shelves for his clothes and a short refrigerator that John Wayne filled with pepper-flecked salami and loaves of white bread. Beyond the refrigerator, within an arm’s reach of the captain’s chair, was the sleeper unit, with its full-sized mattress and a black velvet curtain for when John Wayne desired a little privacy.

At first, he imagined the truck would be their own little adventure – Lila could leave her job at the meat-packing plant (and her studies at the college), and they would listen to Bob Dylan, and live like vagabonds, avoiding all structure save for the painted lines that divide up a road, and of course, the rules of space-time, Lila reminded him – but it was clear that Lila had other ideas, and within a few months, she was pregnant with Dolly, and soon thereafter they were married and mortgaged a house, and John Wayne took to the road alone.

The Frontier

Because he had never travelled much – his prior adventures led no farther than the rodeo circuit, places like Branson or Tulsa, cities just as brown and flat as his hometown in Nebraska – John Wayne felt, during his first few weeks on the road, a shift in his head, as if it had been yolked open and fitted with new wires.

He felt an emotion damn near unfamiliar, save for the moments he was riding a bull or a woman, but there it was, a command over himself and his direction, a pride rising up from his throat as he watched the corn fields blur into mountain peaks or marshlands (depending on which coast he was pointed at), and he finally realized, somewhere between the lines of one state or another, that he was still some kind of a cowboy, driving cattle, dead and frozen as they were, across the open land.

The Law

As Lila predicted, time still shed away and soon Dolly was born, and even sooner she was rolling, and sitting, and walking, and making words, so that it seemed to John Wayne, each time he emerged from the road, that Dolly was a different person entirely. Even Lila seemed different – a new haircut or a jacket morphed his already wobbly image of her, and John Wayne worried that maybe his perception had been faulty all along. Maybe he didn’t love her any more. Maybe he didn’t love Dolly, even.

To rekindle his homesickness, Lila came up with a plan. While the science behind olfactory recollection was an anomaly to John They’d found all three fingers still tucked inside his riding glove, still roped to the back of the bull’s neck. Wayne, he couldn’t deny that he still remembered his first blowjob any time he smelled buttered popcorn, or that just a sprig of alfalfa would shoot him back on to his childhood farm the day his horse crushed both his femur bones, or that the dry-wiry twine of rope made his entire left hand flare up in pain, so he let Lila, excited as she was to fix him, douse some of her perfume over a washcloth and seal her scent inside a Ziploc bag. She made another of Dolly’s baby talc.

Smell them whenever you miss us, she said. But John Wayne knew what she was up to – she wanted him to smell the rags in order to miss them – and it worked for a month or so, until she’d given him so many scents, even foul ones he had no fondness for, like the musty smell of his bathrobe or the zest of her dirty underwear, that his desire to make it home once a week petered out until he hardly returned at all.

The Alibi

For years it continued that way: John Wayne hauled sides of beef from the Midwest down to Los Angeles where he’d drop off the trailer and wait for an outgoing load, one that might lead up to Washington, or Montana, or, if he was really lucky, all the way across the country to New York or Delaware. While he waited, he parked in the same Fresno truck stop, where the showers cost fifty cents, and he had a few friends – waitresses and lot-lizards mostly – who would, from time to time, come out to John Wayne’s truck and help him roll joints or fuck in the sleeper.

His favourite of the lot-lizards was RitaMae, a leathery woman who chain-smoked Kool cigarettes, and liked to listen to John Wayne – whether he had paid her or not – tell his stories of adventure along the road.

Got caught on a blizzard out over the Rockies, snow blowing so hard it looked like static on a TV. Well, I threw them chains down over the tires while those other fuckers parked their rigs off on the side of the road. Sissies. Hell, don’t they know people still need to eat?

RitaMae always had a way of getting John Wayne back on the right track. Call your daughter, she might say around Christmas time. Or, When’s the last time you had something warm in your belly? But he drew the line when she asked him to come over to her house. Asked him to meet her ten-year-old son.

People got different sides they like show, RitaMae. And I like this side of you just fine.

The Trap

To his recollection, the last scents of his family began to fade around the same time his marriage to Lila fizzled out, and soon thereafter John Wayne threw all the bags out the driver’s-side window as his semi-truck punched forward, on through the moonless night.

Lila had finished college and gotten a job teaching ‘special learners’ by then, and though he’d never actually met any of Lila’s students, the handicapped kids he’d seen eating in the truck-stop diners or shuffling across the asphalt from a gas station to the back of their parents’ car made him feel a little on guard, as if they were just pretending to be different, and at any moment they could jump out of those bent and boney shells and shout out, You got it all wrong!

(He suspected, as the years went on, that maybe those kids just reminded him of that bitter stage in his life when he lost his family and his home, because it was only after she’d gotten the job teaching that Lila served John Wayne with divorce papers.)

Of course, it didn’t help his opinion of the malformed when the Sunday after he’d signed his name to the last document and he’d called to give Dolly a half-truth about why he’d be missing Thanksgiving, she said she spent her entire morning drawing pictures across her mother’s classroom chalkboard. She did it, she told him, so that when the students arrived Monday morning, they would feel like someone out there, someone other than their parents or their teachers at school, someone who didn’t have to, loved them for being different – Like I love you and your funny fingers, Daddy, she said to him.

The Showdown

Now, John Wayne couldn’t have his Dolly thinking he was nothing but his fucked up hand, so he made an arrangement with Lila to take Dolly for a big trip the following summer. John Wayne collected facts he thought he’d use to impress Dolly, like how he’d already driven as many miles as it was to the moon and back, or how the inside of the refrigerated trailer, where slabs of meat hung from chains, seemed like a horror show picture, but Dolly just yawned and said, Daddy, I have to pee.

Problem was, Dolly always had to pee.

And she didn’t care about all the dials and knobs on the dash – twenty-seven to be exact – that John Wayne had to monitor all at once. The transmission fluid, the Jake-brakes, the axle temperature, the motor fluid. She just wanted to know which button was the horn.

Ain’t a button, Dolly, he said. He pulled a cord that looped from the ceiling and the truck bellowed out into the vast yellow light.

Some nights, when he and Dolly were snuggled down in the sleeper, and she He was still some kind of a cowboy, driving cattle, dead and frozen as they were, across the open land. was frightened by the sounds of metal banging against metal, he would tell her that it was just the lot-lizards out there making all that racket, going from cab to cab, trying to get inside, and she imagined they were real reptiles – giant beasts who scurried beneath the axles of the trailer – and by the week’s end, she wouldn’t leave the cab of the truck unless it was by piggyback. When he finally told her that a lot-lizard was just a woman trying to make a few dollars, she lost her fear and seemed a little bored.

Problem was, Dolly always seemed bored. Never mind that he showed her the Grand Canyon, and her first palm tree, and the freezing cold ocean. Only thing that seemed to interest her was the CB radio, which he let her pull down when he grew tired of her jabbering at him.

Why do monkeys have four hands? Why can’t people have tails? Where do caterpillars’ souls go? Why can’t I change like that? Daddy, will I change like that? What about shooting stars? Who are they mad at? Why do fingernails grow back, but not fingers?

Go on and give her an answer, RitaMae told him when she came around, but John Wayne just shook his head.

Go on, he told RitaMae. Why don’t you give her an answer?

Honey, what is it you’d most like to know? RitaMae said, smiling toward Dolly.

Dolly bit her lip and thought this over. Are you a lot-lizard? she finally said.

RitaMae narrowed her eyes and turned to John Wayne. I don’t know, Dolly. John Wayne, why don’t you try to tell her? Then she stood up to leave.

The End

By the time Dolly was ten, the Peterbilt had over a million miles beneath its wheels – a trip to the moon and back twice over – so John Wayne traded it off for a new one. He sent Dolly a Polaroid of the new black-and-white truck in the mail, but she never replied.

John Wayne continued to haul beef carcasses to the coastlines. He brought crates of oranges and grapes back to the plains. He grew dull to the highways. The varied terrain seemed a stew of plant and rock and steel, but nothing more, nothing ever steamed up in his throat any more.

Before long, he turned soft around the waistline. He’d lost a circle of hair from atop his head. He forgot Lila’s eye color. He forgot Dolly’s age. He stopped calling altogether. He let the Pall Mall’s catch up. He forgot how his hand looked with all its fingers. Or how a breast felt beneath his palm. He forgot the smell of a rodeo or the feel of a bull between his legs. He forgot how Dolly looked as a child. Even more, he failed to imagine her as an adult, and when he could muster out a feature – a jagged tooth or a freckled nose – it was only as a brief worry when a new woman slithered up to his window to ask, after so many miles, if he could use something warm. ■

The forthcoming issue of Granta, Exit Strategies, is out February 2. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Yesterday Granta was delighted to announce two New Poets: Soledad Marambio and Caleb Klaces. In the week before the simultaneous publication of their poems the two talented young writers exchanged emails to discuss each other’s work, reading habits, being in several places at once and finding intimacy in the modern, hyper-connected world. You can read the full exchange below, beginning with a message from Caleb to Soledad.

Soledad,

It’s been a pleasure to read your poems. I’m very glad to be starting up this exchange.

It seems appropriate to be making contact by email, and odd, too, that I can send this instantly and directly to you without knowing even what country you are in. It occurred to me that in ‘sleeping far from home’, you have people speaking on the phone, watching TV, and asking for a book, which will soon be making its way from home to somewhere distant – all ways of sending messages, with different conventions and speed, across the world.

I’m tempted to draw a parallel between these and poetry. Phones and email speed talk up, but poems, and your poems in particular, seem to slow language down. They are deliberate and concentrated. They’re precisely regulated. I wanted to ask if you think about your poems like this – in relation to other ways of sending messages home? Are your poems anything like letters – or phone calls even? Have your poems been affected by email?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Caleb

Dear Caleb,

You are right. I do like to think of my poems as messages. When I started writing the collection ‘sleeping far from home’ belongs to, I was in my third year away from Santiago, Chile. Home. I hadn’t seen my parents or the friends I grew up with in all that time. And I’m not very good with Skype and I’m lazy with emails and phone calls, even though I prefer them. I like to feel the real distance and not pretend that it isn’t there because I have a computer. So the poems were a way to deal with that distance and the longing that came with it. A way to let my people know about my life here in New York because my other ways to talk with them are not very fluent or intimate. So, in that sense, I don’t think email has had much of an influence on my writing. If you see that influence though, I’d be happy to talk about it.

I’d like to talk about your poem, ‘The Sun in a Box’. I love the way it builds alternative spaces: caves, places to hide from a reality that is always present. I’m curious, now that you mention emails, about how the internet appears in your work (the suggestion to post footage of the expanding insulation, ‘like a sun in a box,’ a screen cracking). For you, is the web a place to hide or to open oneself up? What is the relation you see between that and your poetry?

Best,

Soledad

Soledad,

Yes, it’s amazing how Skype can end up making you feel more lonely, isn’t it. Often it’s more a reminder of the distance than a closing of it.

I can relate to your longing. The sequence that ‘The Sun in a Box’ comes from was written mostly in Austin, Texas, where I lived for two years. The poem was finished soon after I’d come back to Birmingham, which is where I grew up. While I’d been away, the place had been partially reproduced for me on Skype and on the phone, as well as on news sites and radio, and in books. So there were simultaneous layers of experience going on – memories, but also that feeling of looking down on myself while I was catching up with my dad in the house he now lives in on his own.

This seems increasingly the norm in parts of the world with broadband and smartphones. Just sitting in front of a computer in an office, or walking around a supermarket with a phone in your hand, you can see from space and from tiny cameras inside the body at the same time as everything else actually in front of you. With all the screens you’re both looking at and living inside, reality can feel a bit like a Cubist painting, so that often I don’t feel a separation between this proliferation of points-of-view and my experience of the basic things, like keeping the house warm. But it’s always one of the questions that poetry is a way of pursuing: how much of this experience is shared, and what of it is different for different people across the world?

One of the things I found being away was that I was more deliberate in what I read, partly because reading was a more fluent and intimate companion, as you put it, when relations with other people weren’t. I wonder what and who you return to in your reading, and whether that’s affected by your being away from home?

Warmly,

Caleb

Dear Caleb,

Since I left Chile (four years ago) I haven’t returned too much to anything, except Roberto Bolaño. Last year I reread The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile and The Insufferable Gaucho. His dark sense of humour and the rhythm of his prose always make me feel that I’m in a familiar place. But other than that I have been reading a lot of authors that I have always heard about and never read before and also a bunch of names that I have discovered for the first time here. Being away has been a certain influence on these discoveries I’m making. Everything is new: the streets, the bread in the morning, the subway, the bookstores, the language. The first two years I just read fiction and nonfiction prose and after that I felt that I was ready to start reading poetry in English. Since then I’ve read a lot and keep going back to Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Donald Hall and in translation the amazing work of Zbigniew Herbert and Cesare Pavese (I always think that Pavese must sound better in Spanish than in English, but I didn’t want to wait to get a Spanish version of his complete poems so I got a bilingual one: Italian-English. Not that I know Italian but I like to pretend that I do while I read his poetry out loud.)

The English language has very much influenced the way I write in Spanish. I was wondering how the two years that you lived in Texas changed the way you write (the style, the voice, the subject or any other feature of your work). I know that you continued to write in English, but was there another way of speaking that you picked up? More importantly I assume that in relation to Birmingham, Texas might not be just a different culture but a totally different world?

Abrazos (that’s Spanish for hugs)

Soledad

Soledad,

I love what you said about Pavese. I’ve been reading Peter Handke’s Nonsense and Happiness in a bilingual edition recently. I know no German at all, but sometimes, where the English translation feels wrong, I end up staring at the original, trying to divine from it a better poem. If the German wasn’t there, I think I’d be less likely to imagine this third text for myself – so it makes for a different, and hopeful, kind of reading.

For me, there seems to be a time lag between being in a place and its effects. Looking back, I may have been protective over the language I was using while in Texas – and how I wrote was defined to some extent in opposition to American English. Not even how other poets I knew were writing, which was in very diverse ways, but the spoken language. While I was there, I was writing a lot with Sir Thomas Browne – a seventeenth-century doctor from Norfolk, England; now, in London, I seem to be looking more often to contemporary Americans like Ben Lerner and Jack Gilbert. I’ve also become interested in the possibilities of more expansive, extended verse (like Carson’s
Autobiography of Red). There are loads of dead writers from both sides of the Atlantic to read for that – Milton, Blake, Pound – but, of those writing now, the vitality and stamina and risk seems to me concentrated over there.

The landscape has to have had an effect, too. Texas is endless and empty. I’m fond of London, but it sometimes feels like it’s built underground.

I’m intrigued by how English has influenced your Spanish. Are there ways you write now that you couldn’t have done before?

Caleb

Caleb,

Totally. I used to write much longer sentences or verses. This creates a specific and intricate rhythm, a texture that I like but that I’m happy to be breaking. English is more economical and direct than Spanish. It’s common to find a phrase or a verse that in just one line gives you a punch. I think – I hope – reading in English has helped me to be able to construct powerful images with very few words. Before, to write an idea that now takes me five words I would have written at least three lines. I think that living in an English-speaking environment gave me the opportunity to listen and contemplate Spanish from the outside, like if it weren’t so naturally mine. Because of that I saw my language and understood it and used it in ways that were new for me, which at first was a very subconscious process.

Speaking about new things that give meaning to old things, I’d like to know more about your literary trips to the past. Why did you decide to write with Sir Thomas Browne? Were you reading or rereading his work at the same time you were writing your poems?

Soledad

Soledad,

I came across Browne and loved his writing, then became interested in him personally, so I was reading biographies and history too. He was devout, but completely single-minded; he wrote dogged and popular myth-busting books (with the results of experiments he’d undertaken on an ostrich in his garden, for example), and what we’d now call autobiography. Generally, I would say similar things you’ve said about learning a new language as I would about writing using other texts and people’s lives. It helps you see your own life and language from a distance. Or even more than that, it’s an attempt to be in several different places all at once. To make yourself bigger and contain more. There were tensions with Browne because I both feel a real kinship with him, and can’t help having arguments with him. He gets under my skin, so there’s a push and pull in that attempt to expand and speak in different voices.

The poems of yours I’ve read are enviably concise. Browne had the opposite effect on me – the poems started to sprawl.

Sincerest thanks for this exchange.

Keep in touch,

Caleb

Caleb

Thank you very much.

To finish I’d like to take what you said and tell you that reading you was for me a way to be in different places at the same time: a prehistoric cave, an afternoon in front of the computer, a moment in a box. Thanks for the marvelous trips. I’ll keep in touch.

Best,

Soledad ■

You can read Caleb Klaces’s poem ‘The Sun in a Box’ here and Soledad Marambio’s poem ‘sleeping far from home’ here.

The Granta New Poets series showcases the best new work by writers who have or are about to publish their first pamphlet or book. Today, we are delighted to announce two New Poets simultaneously: Caleb Klaces and Soledad Marambio.

Soledad Marambio’s poem, ‘sleeping far from home’ is below and you can also read Caleb Klaces’s poem, ‘The Sun in a Box’, here. Tomorrow the two New Poets discuss their work with each other.

Photo by robotpolisher.

Translated by Natasha Wimmer.

The Granta New Poets series showcases the best new work by writers who have or are about to publish their first pamphlet or book. Today, we are delighted to announce two New Poets simultaneously: Caleb Klaces and Soledad Marambio.

Caleb Klaces’s poem, ‘The Sun in a Box’ is below and you can also read Soledad Marambio’s poem, ‘sleeping far from home’, here. Tomorrow the two New Poets discuss their work with each other.

Photo by madgerly.

Photos by Ming1967.

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

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

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

Photo by Dan Sinclair.

Jon McGregor talks about reworking his first published story ‘What the Sky Sees’ from the female perspective and reads from both the original and updated version, ‘In Winter the Sky’. He also discusses his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire and his new short story collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.

The Granta Podcast Episode 30. by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

‘In Winter the Sky’ is taken from This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor, published by Bloomsbury on 2 February 2012 at £14.99. © Jon McGregor 2012.

Exit Strategies Live
6 February, doors open at 6.30 p.m., event starts at 7 p.m., The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. £7, including a copy of Granta 118. Please RSVP to events@granta.com to reserve your place. Payment will be taken at the door.

In this special edition of Liars' League, Jon McGregor joins us to read from and discuss ‘In Winter the Sky’, his first-ever published story, found in Granta 78, and recently revised for his new story collection and the online edition of Exit Strategies. But first, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of desire and conflict from Granta’s latest issue.

The teeming enormity that is Istanbul and the intensity of my encounters had imparted to that visit a particular aura of necessity.

From ‘The Road to Damascus’ by Claire Messud in Granta 117: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Photo by Riccardo Venturi/Contrasto.

Photo by Paul Stainthorp.

In the summer of 2002, Granta’s Bad Company issue, which featured work by Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller, Gary Shteyngart and Edmund White, introduced a startlingly new voice: Jon McGregor. In his story ‘What the Sky Sees’, a young agriculture student from Lincolnshire is driving home after visiting his new lover, when he accidentally runs someone over. ‘As the car hit him his arms lifted up to the sky and his back arched over the bonnet and his legs slid under one of the wheels and his whole body was dragged down to the road and out of sight.’ Terrified of the consequences this will have on his chances of happiness, the man decides to bury the body and try to live with this secret knowledge, which inevitably takes a toll on his life and relationship. The story announced the arrival of one of the most significant talents of his generation, preceding the publication of McGregor’s first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

Ten years, two novels and many short stories later, McGregor returned to this first published work in order to rewrite it from the female perspective. The result is ‘In Winter the Sky’, which we publish today alongside the original story so that readers can compare the two versions.

The opening paragraphs of ‘In Winter the Sky’:

He had something to tell her. He announced this the next day, after the fog had cleared, while the floods still lay over the fields. It looked like a difficult thing for him to say. His hands were shaking. She asked him if it couldn't wait until after she'd done some work, and he said that there was always something else to do, some other reason to wait and to not talk. All right, she said. Fine. Bring the dogs. They gave his father some lunch, and they walked out together along the path beside the drainage canal.

She knew what he wanted to tell her, but she didn't know what he would say.

To read ‘In Winter the Sky’ click here. ■

On on the Granta Podcast this Friday Jon McGregor will discuss the process of redrafting this story and his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire.

‘In Winter the Sky’ is taken from This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor, published by Bloomsbury on 2 February 2012 at £14.99. © Jon McGregor 2012.

John Burnside made his first contribution to Granta in issue 94: On the Road Again. One of the most prolific writers of his generation, he has, since 1988, published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Asylym Dance, one collection of short stories and eight novels, including Glister. He is the winner of the Whitbread Poetry award (for The Aslym Dance) and has twice been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He talks to Rachael Allen about the presence of nature in his poetry, the role of myth in his latest novel (A Summer of Drowning) and learning to live with a feeling of nothingness.

RA: In your poems, nature and humanity often appear to swap roles. Are you trying to show us the tangled relationship between the two?

JB: I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace. I do hope that I come up against the harsh, the bloody, the seemingly cruel in what we think of as nature – including human nature. And I hope I preserve a sense of the mystery of that cruelty. Sometimes it’s a very beautiful cruelty – it’s not cruel, per se, of course, it only seems so to us, because we are attached to our own interests – and, on I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace.occasion, a sense of that beauty lifts one above one’s attachments. So that line between ‘the human’ and ‘nature’, the ragged edge of culture, so to speak, is still a source of fascination to me and a challenge. A challenge in the sense that an annunciation is a challenge – it calls us to possibilities that we hadn’t imagined, and perhaps wouldn’t have chosen, in what we think of as an ideal world. Maybe there’s a suspicion, alongside this, that the ideal world is sort of there, if we can only meet it halfway. Poetry is, I think, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of speech that closes down the possibility of such a meeting, an attempt to keep oneself open linguistically and sensually and imaginatively to the world as it is, rather than using it as a movie screen for received ideas and second-rate wishes. Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.

Do you attempt to bring about some kind of environmental awareness in your poetry?

Well, I’m not sure how I feel about this now. When I started writing poetry I had some naïve ideas about it, but that’s changed somewhat – partly because there is so much ‘environmental’ poetry about these days and some of it is marvellous and challenging, but some of it feels a bit New-Labour-Focus-Groupish in its orthodoxy. I still succumb to an old temptation to think poetry can make a specific point - the last very obvious environmental poem I wrote was a bemused gasp of horror at the simplistic view of the pro-wind lobby, so-called ‘greens’ who haven’t given the issue a moment’s real thought (or done much research), with the result that they are merely helping fat cats get (huge to massive) subsidies to erect gigantic commercial turbines that will have no effect on our carbon footprint, but will make a lot of the wrong people even richer, with further disastrous consequences for social justice and the environment. They are being played, in short. Frieda Hughes wrote very eloquently about this recently – but she was wise enough to do so in prose. And I think this is important: poetry sacrifices something when it starts campaigning for the environment, it has to work more subtly on how we imagine ourselves, and we could do with imagining ourselves as fuller, more sensual, more responsive – wilder, in the fullest sense of that term - than we are. If we could become authentically wild in our way of being, then we might save – in a wu wei sense of saving by not needing to save – ‘what’s left of the planet’ (by which, I mean not physical fabric as much as imaginative space).

You have been publishing poetry collections since 1988 and have brought out either a novel or collection just about every year. That’s a pretty prolific output by most standards. How do you manage to produce so much material so regularly?

There’s probably something reflexive in this, but I don’t actually think of myself as prolific. And I have to confess that I find my lack of a writing schedule fairly frustrating. I have a very full-time job and two incredible, captivating and endlessly challenging sons – and I do protest that fitting in the writing I’d like to do (both in terms of ambition and quality) is fairly difficult. That When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam saysmay sound odd, for someone who publishes so often, but the other side of my life is that I never stop thinking about my writing, or almost never. When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam says – rolling the lines around at the back of my head while in business meetings or driving to see clients or whatever. I work in similar ways now – which means I can seem distracted, occasionally lacking in the social graces, or just plain rude at times. I do write a good deal at night – insomnia may well be the defining malaise of my life. But really, I very rarely have the luxury of a writing schedule – in the past I have spent time away on residencies or retreats, and I got huge amounts of actual writing down on paper then. But the thinking, the working out, the imagining – that happens pretty much as and when.

Your new novel mixes myth and legend with what is actually true. What was the inspiration behind the novel?

It all started when I first visited the Arctic Circle, (which I now realise was back in 1996). I was invited to the University of Tromsø to take part in a symposium. As soon as I got there I fell in love with the place – especially with the island of Kvaløya, to which my friend Dag Andersson introduced me on that first trip, and to which I returned several times over the next few years (as well as travelling in Finnmark and northern Finland at various times). During one of those visits, I heard the story of the huldra. She is usually associated with places further south (if you go on the little tourist train at Flåm, you can actually see her – the company pays a local beauty to dance around in a red dress through the summer months, hard by the railway line), but some further research suggested that she was a more or less universal figure. Briefly, she is a troll who appears as a beautiful woman to beguile a young man, drawing him away from his safe world and into danger, usually leading to his death. What interested me about the core story is the detail that, if the young man can look behind her, if he can look past the illusion for a moment, he sees through it – in the Norwegian version, by noticing that this lovely woman has a cow’s tail, and in the Swedish version, by discovering a kind of Sartrean nothingness at her back, and so understanding that there’s a sort of flaw in the fabric of the universe there. This is what caught my attention initially – this sense that the story said something about the illusions that inform our social and sexual lives – and what happens to someone who sees that gap in the fabric of the world and has to accommodate it in order to carry on. For me, this is a central concern, even an obsession: Sartre says ‘nothingness haunts being’ – and I cannot help but feel that living in the wild demands that we learn to live with that nothingness. ■

The Summer of Drowning is published by Jonanthan Cape.

Photo by David Nickonvscanon.

We’ll always have Paris

Broke, almost, I came home by coach.
I’d gone there with my girlfriend of three years,
then left her three days after meeting you.

You liked me but I didn’t move you, couldn’t,
not as some could, and we slept together twice,
to prove it, in the studio I’d moved to

and where (there was a piano but no heating)
I’d sit, mid-Chopin, sobbing hoarse, raw sobs
I didn’t know I had inside me. Outside

Calais, the traffic thickened as we passed
a burnt-out pile-up, maybe twenty vehicles.

C’est quelque chose, our driver said to the guy
in the toll-booth, vraiment quelque chose.

Richard Meier's debut collection, Misadventure, will be published by Picador in March 2012 priced £8.99.

Photo by expertinfantry.

The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office, on placards scattered throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Woncheol’s back, their crippled sister, the weight of a few books.

The younger brother Choecheol ran ahead. Like a child, Woncheol thought, frowning, though he too was still a child, an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick. He picked across the public square, afraid to step where last month, the town had watched two men dragged in necklaces of bones and then hung for cannibalizing their parents. They passed a vendor and woman haggling as if on the frontier of madness. On the straw mat between them one frozen flank of beef? Pork? Or human? No one knew any more, though they pretended to.

‘She’s slowing us down,’ Choecheol said as he circled back, his whine like a roomful of lost children. ‘We’ll be dead before we reach China.’

‘Shut up.’ Woncheol tied his brother’s laces in symmetrical bows. For younger children obeyed the older one who obeyed the mother who obeyed the father who obeyed the Dear Leader. For the school textbooks stated that a swallow had descended from heaven at the Dear Leader’s birth, trees bloomed and snow melted in the Dear Leader’s presence. He stubbornly ignored the salmon fishery and the town’s vegetable gardens that the soldiers guarded, shooting intruders on sight. For there was an order to everything. Or there used to be.

Still, he soldiered his siblings up the mountain slope of granite and bare, spectral trees with the assurance of an oldest son. So certain he did not slow, though his legs shook under her slight weight. The Tumen River to China would be frozen for crossing, and he felt ready to make the necessary sacrifices.

Choecheol walked ahead, his nose close to the ground as he looked for acorns. He passed one near his shoe. Woncheol picked it up, Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office and waited until his brother was deep in the forest before he set his sister on a hillock of granite. While he struck the nut against a rock, she watched with the expectancy of someone who knew she was loved. And he fulfilled his promise, peeled the woody skin back a thin strip at a time. The acorn’s meat, wrinkled and gray. The size of a rat’s brain. He broke it into nearly perfect thirds, and into her waiting, open mouth fed Gukhwa the largest chunk. His hands were shaking. It was good, without insects.

‘Obba, where are birds?’ Gukhwa said, her breath a sick hiss.

‘You babo, it’s too cold for birds.’ He was angry because she still trusted him.

Then he remembered her thirst and scooped up snow, which she licked off his palm.

‘Obba, it hurts.’ She stuck her frozen yellowed tongue out for inspection. ‘Obba,’ she said again, and smiled, a little, as if the words older brother were a song she liked to sing.

He cleaned her face with his mittens, softly scraped under her fingernails with pine needles. Reminded himself again how impossible it was to carry her on the long walk to China. Then he closed his eyes, twisted their mother’s scarf around Gukhwa’s neck and choked her. It was better this way, he was convinced, than to leave her afraid, starving slowly to death. He did not let go until she stopped moving.

Oldest Son, please forgive my selfishness, his mother had written. You’re their mother and father now. No one but them, in the town created after the Korean War for the wavering or hostile classes, were surprised when their mother, rumoured to pollute her widowed flesh by selling herself to feed the three children, fled a week ago. She was only following the thousands escaping to China after the government stopped food rations in their town altogether. Hunger changed people, destroyed the strongest bonds between parents and children and young and old, and a woman with disgraced flesh was already a broken woman. As the old saying went, If you starve three days, there is no thought that does not invade your imagination. But Woncheol believed they would find her, the way he believed in the sky and the snow, the American imperialists that the Dear Leader said were starving the country out of existence. It was so inconceivable to be without his mother, he had even sacrificed his sister.

But the sack, now the weight of a house, a squid boat, Woncheol did not give up as planned. He lugged the sack with her body across rock, ridge, his hands burning, until he couldn’t. In the white sun, his cheekbones were nearly visible through the stretched skin. Gukhwa’s fingers were still haunting on his back.

‘What do we do?’ he said. ‘What did I do wrong?’

Choecheol’s face was blank with waiting because his hyeong, his older brother, always knew what to do.

But Woncheol only stared at the sack.

‘We can’t bury her,’ he finally said. ‘The ground’s all rock.’

The downbeat of his words skittered across the icy plain. Choecheol pivoted away. Eyes wild for escape.

He sang, ‘One dead American plus one dead American equals two dead Americans,’ while crushing snow into powder, trying to distract Woncheol.

But it was time. Woncheol turned back the lip of the sack. She tumbled out. He moved his hands over Gukhwa’s face, unable to comprehend what he had done. He could only look at her a fragment at a time. Her cheeks the shade of boiled snails. Her arms two stiff twigs.

‘I can do my arithmetic,’ Choecheol sang. ‘One dead American –’

Woncheol forced his brother’s face close. Their sister’s forehead stippled with sores.

‘Look hard,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’

His brother stopped. His eyes, as blank as coffin lids.

‘Ten comrades died this year,’ he said. He smiled so hard, he became teary from the effort. ‘If I don’t think about her, she’s not there.’

Their baby sister. The sun, hot on Woncheol’s chilled face, changed her into polished bone. Into something unworldly, numinous. Hunger changed people, destroyed the strongest bonds between parents and children He had fed and bathed her, had been her drifting house. Something stirred in him. A memory of an earlier time. The trees, heavy with swallows. When the birds rose into the air, the trees lifting with them. His sister’s feet the size of a swallow. Swallows, they could go anywhere, his mother had said, but they returned because it was their home. Suddenly Woncheol was afraid.

‘I killed her.’ He said this with surprise, as if he had just realized it himself.

‘You – didn’t – kill – anyone!’ Choecheol covered his ears and began to sing.

Woncheol began folding the sack in neat creases. The praise of his teachers. His mother’s trust. Nothing could help him now. He folded until Choecheol complained of the cold, his blue-tinted lips puckered like an old halmeoni looking for her teeth.

Only then, Woncheol took two fistfuls of snow. He smoothed it down over his sister and all his memories. Added snow until a shape grew resembling the tumuli graves of their ancestors. He stepped back and circled the mound, watching it.

Sooner or later, everyone in town heard the stories of those who crossed the border and returned with a miracle of money and food. Of ironmonger Lee safe in the German Embassy, or rice-cake-turned-grass-cake vendor Miss Han furtively married to a Chinese farmer, despite the Chinese government’s bounty on North Korean heads. But Mrs Ku with child was beaten off the US Embassy gates by Chinese police. Woojin, a boy of eight, killed by borders guards. Daejon’s uncle, drowned in the monsoon-swollen Tumen River to China. The young and beautiful Soonah, raped but lucky to be alive. Thirteen-year-old Sora, caught and sold by Chinese traffickers. Which meant rape too, Seungwoo’s aunt had said, but at least she’s in China. Whether any of this was actually true, no one knew, the same way they silently speculated whether someone was an ally or informer, or whether someone who disappeared in the night had been imprisoned in a concentration camp or had escaped to China, and they watched and waited as the rumours turned into hardened truth.

Still, as the sun set, the two black dots moved across the great white back of the mountain’s summit. Past the last stately granite boulders carved in with the Great Leader Kim il-sung’s and the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s epithets. The brothers moved without knowledge in the path their mother had embarked on a month ago when she had made her terrible decision, followed the ghostly steps of others whose hunger and despair had strained their allegiances to family, to country, to love. Behind Woncheol, his brother struggled from rock to rock. So small, Woncheol thought, so breakable, watching his brother’s back as if he would lose him if he stopped looking.

‘Careful!’ he said, afraid for him.

‘Yes, hyeong.’

After a few hours, they rested.

‘I’m wet all over,’ Choecheol complained, as he kept trying to strip, but Woncheol made sure his brother mittened his hands in socks.

It happened when Woncheol looked for walking sticks. As he wandered Fear hooked his throat like a fish bone and he screamed, his hands helmeted his head.between the trees, a white apparition lumbered into him. Its sound, an unearthly menace. Fear hooked his throat like a fish bone and he screamed, his hands helmeted his head. But it was Choecheol, laughing. His hair, shoulders, banked with crystals of snow, gave him a phantom look.

‘Babo,’ Woncheol said, almost weeping from fear.

She was only four, she was his sister. He remembered loving her. He dumped an armful of snow on his brother’s head. ‘You stink of American feet.’

‘I scared you.’ Choecheol’s voice fluttered with the nervous padding of birds. ‘There’s nothing to scare us, is there?’

As they walked, the rocks took on shapes. ‘Over there,’ Woncheol said. ‘See the pigs?’

He pointed at the gray-pink ears pinned back as the fatty snouts rooted for food.

‘You mean that patchy one, that speckly runt?’ Choecheol pointed at a rock canopied in snow. ‘Kill it! Eat it!’

They giggled now, unable to stop.

‘And when he walks, his balls wiggle,’ Woncheol said. ‘They’re melons!’

His brother pantomimed a melon-balled, strutting pig.

Woncheol laughed, hot with happiness, until his thoughts migrated to his sister. He stopped laughing.

They continued west. The wind was a bellow. The pine needles, tiny fingers. The crunch of snow, powdery bones. Even with newspaper folded into his ears, he heard the whispering sounds of Obba. Obba. From all four sides, she seemed to call him.

Other visions followed.

The bushes keened with animal sounds. He whirled, a rubber band out of his pocket ready to fire. But there was no squirrel, no soldier casting a fatal shadow; only their sister. Her pallid skin. She leapt from rock to rock like a fawn. She smiled and wiggled her tiny fingers at him in the air, showing him, no hands! His breath came in ragged gasps. Still, her waifish figure stood before him. The gourd shape of her forehead. Her face, an ivory varnish. She pulled a thread, unravelled her entire sweater before his next breath. Naked, her body flamed blue with heat. She bent until the back of her head brushed her heel, made an exaggerated shiver. The same Gukhwa, comic even in her revenge.

‘The most revered mountain in Joseon,’ Woncheol muttered. ‘Mountain Baeku, where our Great Leader Kim-Il sung was born. The second-most worthy flower, Kimjongilia.’

The school routines, the lists of historical facts that he had recited faster than anyone in his class, helped normalize his breathing.

But she was still there.

‘I’m a Joseon soldier,’ he said louder now. ‘I’m a fighting machine.’

He squinted, rubberband aimed.

His brother followed him the way he often did. He made his hands into a machine-gun, targeted a denuded fir tree.

‘I’m getting myself a long-nose,’ he said, and popped off each potential American.

Woncheol aimed the rubber band, shot. She darted behind a tree; he hurtled behind a knot of rocks.

‘Are you scared?’ Choecheol looked ashamed for him. His legs spread out at an exaggerated distance as if to show that he would not go hiding behind rocks. Then he clambered through her.

‘Watch out!’ Woncheol cried.

‘Watch what? The soldiers catch us, they kill us.’ Choecheol struck his foot outward in a crescent kick. ‘That’s all.’

‘It’s Gukhwa,’ Woncheol said.

His brother stiffened, stepped back. ‘There’s no ghosts here,’ he said loudly.

Woncheol shot again; it went straight through her. Gukhwa’s laugh was a baby’s gurgle that stopped abruptly. He covered his face with his hands, seeing the lumpy grain sack.

‘We have to go back,’ Woncheol said. ‘We were crazy to try.’

‘Do you want to die?’ said Choecheol. His voice newly sharp. He stepped on his brother’s shadow. ‘I want to live.’

Woncheol looked west to China, a country where somewhere, he had a mother. Naked, her body flamed blue with heat. There were a great many things he didn’t know, he realized, and as he gazed at the horizon of splintered peaks, it seemed that his life, once of great import, shrank in significance. He squeezed his hands behind his back until they stopped trembling. ‘Then let’s go,’ he said, forceful enough to reassure his brother.

Choecheol re-emerged, brambles in his hair. He stood at unsteady attention. A drunk cadet.

‘Yes, comrade!’ he cried. His voice ballooned with relief.

The night was a black glove. The mountains, an endless rubble of loose stones. The stars, the eyes of the dead. In the unnatural landscape, the one day felt as long as Woncheol’s entire life. None of this mattered when Gukhwa began chanting his name.

He covered his ears. His mind wild with cannonball thoughts.

Gukhwa’s face was swollen like a pincushion, her ashen toes, braced against a tree root like a seagull perching on a rock.

‘I want to sleep.’ Choecheol sat beside Gukhwa in the snow, his legs out like chopsticks. ‘I’ll do anything to sleep.’

‘If we sleep, we die.’ Woncheol stared at his two siblings, his loving burdens.

‘I want to sleep.’

‘A few minutes, then. Then we go.’

Woncheol drew a box in the whiteness around them. They huddled on that patch of dryness. Hugged for warmth.

‘We aren’t far,’ he said, though he did not know where they were. He spoke with the false calm of an older brother.

‘I wish we had a big rat,’ said Choecheol. He looked up hopefully at Woncheol. ‘We could roast it on the fire.’

‘Me too.’

Woncheol tilted his head, filled his mouth with snow. The sting woke up his sleeping tongue, made it throb.

‘It tastes like cold rice,’ he said, though he did not remember the taste of rice.

‘If we had an ear of corn . . . two! Roasted.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about food.’

His brother picked his nose, considered the wet curl of mucus before twirling it into his mouth. He said, ‘Do Chinese people really eat children’s brains?’

‘They don’t need to,’ he said. ‘They’re a land of rice bowls the size of you. That’s what people say.’

He said this, though he did not know who these people were, had only his mother’s word and the rumours spread by other kids hustling in the market, a hope kindled, flickering dead, then kindled again by a snatch of a word, the appearance of smuggled grain sold on the street.

‘It’s a special dish there. That’s what the older boys said.’

‘You saw what Omma brought back, the first time.’

‘Where is she?’ Choecheol hugged himself.

‘Nobody knows.’ Woncheol wrapped his arms around his brother and gazed over him west toward China. ‘Get your rest.’

They slept. There was only the emptiness of sleep, a peaceful forever, as if Woncheol’s body desired to become part of the snowy landscape and over time, become detritus for another generation. But a sharp movement like teeth sinking into his arm ended the quiet.

He rolled Choecheol deep into a snowdrift. Then he jumped on the darkness, his boot smashed at where the nose must be. Underneath him, his walking stick. His arms swung up, down. A pestle to corn. He struck and struck. He could have stopped, but didn’t.

‘I was born a killer, too!’ Choecheol’s voice buckled. ‘I’m a fighting machine!’

Only then Wonchoel stopped, looked at his brother’s head just above the snowdrift. A thread of mucus hung from Choecheol’s nose. He was crying. His own brother, afraid of him. And below, there was nothing. Only the shadows of trees. His own web of saliva in the moon. He stuffed snow in his mouth when a scream began. Choecheol clumsily put his arms around him, but he pulled away.

‘We’ll never find her,’ Woncheol said. ‘Omma left us. The way we left Gukhwa.’

‘Hyeong, don’t say that!’

But Woncheol was crying because he knew it was true.

Choecheol kicked a stone downhill. It rolled until their sister stopped it with her feet. Powdered in snow, she looked like a small, icy spirit. A chill smothered Woncheol.

‘There’s Gukhwa again,’ he said.

‘She’s a dead body.’ Choecheol shored himself up. ‘She’s someone who’s gone far away.’

‘She’s right there!’

‘There’s no such thing as ghosts!’ His brother charged ahead. ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!’

‘Wait for me!’ Woncheol cried.

The next morning, the Tumen River. There was the hike down, the dangerous rustle of leaves. Guards in outposts or on patrol with Soviet machine guns and murderous boots. From an escarpment above, Woncheol watched. Beyond was Yanji, a city where it was said the garbage could feed entire villages. Where streetlights actually worked. There was also Gukhwa, as cold as stone. Their father, embalmed beneath the roof of coal that had collapsed on him. The world, forever dark for them both. And Woncheol, still alive. He did not know why he deserved this when they had not.

Noon. The brothers began the descent toward the river. Snow fell steadily, erasing their traces. The phalanx of guards had their cozy outposts, their rice. Woncheol assumed that their uniforms would dry over lunch; they would want to stay indoors, they would not want to get wet. Still, his heart was too fast. He muffled the sound with his hands. They passed a glassy waterfall. Their fingernails chipped, their hands bled from the rocks. They moved from root of spruce and fir. Slowly. The iciness in his feet traveled through his body.

Finally. Before them, a gray landscape. Meager shapes before they became a river, mountains, China. In the distance were a Meager shapes before they became a river, mountains, China. desolation of cement buildings so tall, a person could disappear, never be found. The brothers stood where so many had stood in the past five years. Felt the same fugitive fears and hopes, the same dim sense that the world outstretched before them would never know or care about them.

‘You were a good hyeong.’ Choecheol’s voice was as heavy as schoolbooks.

‘I’ll never make you eat arrowroot porridge again,’ Woncheol said. ‘We’ll live differently.’

He could not articulate his muddy love and fear for his brother, so he just held his hand tightly, then let go.

They ran. They pitched into the clearing. Dashed toward the river. When their feet touched the ice beneath the snow, they skidded and fell.

‘Halt!’ A voice shouted. ‘Meom-cheoh, or I’ll shoot!’

The man was small from a distance; he looked like a toy soldier in his earth-coloured uniform and starred cap, a rifle slung over his shoulder like a school bag. He hefted the gun up. Stop, stop, Woncheol’s glottis throbbed. The man aimed ahead at Choecheol, zigzagging across the ice, and pulled the trigger.

There was the sharp shriek of a bullet, then nothing. No one had been hit.

Woncheol choked.

‘Run!’ he shouted as he slid across the plate of ice.

Choecheol looked back at him, now frozen.

‘Hyeong,’ he said. He was crying.

‘Your hyeong said run!’

And Choecheol ran, his light feet delicate on the ice. Each time he looked back, Woncheol shouted as he skidded forward, until finally his little brother was too far ahead to see.

Woncheol continued to skid forward, heavier and slower than Choecheol. His sister bounded in front of him. Her candle wax eyes, bright and white as the core of a fire. Her cheeks flamed – the only color in her stony face.

‘Please let me go,’ he begged.

Her tiny legs stayed squarely planted between him and China. He moved left; so did she. He moved right; she mirrored him. When he stepped back, she relaxed into a smile. She did not want him to leave her. He saw this now. His hand rose to strike her away, and her face rushed to a sad place. He could not do it. She was his sister, so he extended his hands toward her ruined body.

Across the frozen river, the thud of approaching soldier’s steps faded as Woncheol now saw the phantom world that had always been there. His schoolteacher scraped bark from the air. His best friend Gunhyeok, flush with his good luck, roasted a squirrel by its tail. While the sun was eclipsed by his father’s swallows, their family home drifted across the ice. The chimney smoke, it smelled of his mother’s vinegary cabbage, her loamy earth scent. There was his father wearing his salty smile, strolling beside countless, diaphanous figures. And behind them, finally, there were the shadows. ■

This story is taken from the collection Drifting House which will be published on 19 January by Faber & Faber.

Photo of Juan Pablo Villalobos discussing his novel with the Liberian Pigmy Hippos at London Zoo, by Rita Platt.

Juan Pablos Villalobos’s novel Down the Rabbit Hole (published by And Other Stories) tells the story of Tochtli, the son of a drug baron who lives in a palace surrounded by luxury, corruption and mystery. This hilarious and experimental first novel, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, follows a child’s quest to acquire a new pet for his private zoo, a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. The author spoke to his translator, Rosalind Harvey, about the way that Mexican politics informed the writing of his first novel, why there are few women in it and writing from a child’s perspective.

RH: One of the things that drew me to Down the Rabbit Hole was the voice of Tochtli, which is extremely strong and insistent. I read several books with child narrators as research, including Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and I think Tochtli’s voice is as searingly authentic as Roddy Doyle’s young protagonist. We’ve talked before about how for you it was more important to achieve a successful ‘literary’ child’s voice than simply a believable child’s voice – can you say a bit more about why this was important to you, and also which literary voices you drew on, if any?

JPV: While I was writing I wasn’t thinking about creating the plausible voice of a child of a certain age or condition. I was more interested in doing something with language, finding a voice that captivated me. I think that as writers our responsibility is to language, in my case Spanish, and that our commitment I’m not interested in ‘transparent’ or ‘objective’ narrators, I’m just looking for gripping fictional voices. lies in exploring and expanding the possibilities it has, including at a musical level. For me, there should be no difference between the ways a poet and a novelist work with language. The same thing happens to me as a reader: I’m not interested in ‘transparent’ or ‘objective’ narrators, I’m just looking for gripping fictional voices. Once I found Tochtli’s voice, I worked very hard at refining it, which is why it took me six months to write the novel but two more years to edit it. With hindsight, his voice has three important literary debts, two child voices and a teenage one: Un mundo para Julius [A World for Julius, University of Wisconsin Press] by the Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique; Cartucho [published in English, also as Cartucho, by University of Texas Press] by the Mexican writer Nellie Campobello; and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

After the trip to Liberia, Tochtli has supposedly seen something of the world outside the palace, but has also witnessed the brutal killing of the hippopotamuses, and he seems, at least temporarily, to have rejected his father Yolcaut as a figure worthy of respect. Yet once back in Mexico, he’s coaxed out of his samurai dressing gown and his muteness and into a bizarre family tableau, and calls Yolcaut ‘Dad’ for the first time. There is an oppressive ‘closing up’ of the novel and of Tochtli’s world here. Did you have this (or any) structure in mind before you wrote the book or was it more of an organic process?

I’d almost completely decided on the plot when I began to write. Obviously there are always ideas that come up during the writing process that you incorporate, but since it’s such a short novel there was very little space for improvisation. From the start I conceived of it as a triptych: enclosure–journey–enclosure. The structure corresponds to the basic premise of the novel, according to which the protagonist must undergo a change over the course of the story. In this sense, it’s a very traditional structure, and I associate it with coming-of-age stories. At heart, this is what Down the Rabbit Hole is: a coming-of-age novel about the loss of innocence, loneliness, loyalty, and learning how to exercise power.

You’ve said that this is a political novel. Was that intentional or perhaps simply unavoidable?

It was intentional and unavoidable. I started writing the novel in 2006, which I think was the year when drug-related violence in Mexico began to escalate. I remember that every morning when I sat down to write, first I would read the front pages of two or three online Mexican newspapers and they would be full of bodies and severed heads. On the personal side, the book is a reflection on my perception of Mexico from afar, about how my way of seeing the country changed due to my living abroad.

Many readers have commented on the lack of women (and above all the lack of a mother) in the novel as being significant, and it’s true that the only female characters conform to the stereotypical ‘whore’ side of the traditional Catholic dichotomy. I feel the novel would have been very different had there been more rounded female characters in it. Are there any female characters in your new novel and, if so, does this affect the book’s style or outcome in any way?

Down the Rabbit Hole can be read as a masculine novel, about the father-son relationship, but the absence of the mother – I remember that every morning when I sat down to write, first I would read the front pages of two or three online Mexican newspapers and they would be full of bodies and severed heads. which is never explained and which is intentional – is symbolic. I believe that in literature what is not said can acquire a meaning just as important, or more so, than what is said. Of course I know who Tochtli’s mother is and what happened to her, why she doesn’t appear in the story. I was interested in leaving this gap in the book, which we see only through Tochtli’s stomach pains. My new novel, which is also told from within a family, has a mother and sister. I’m only now finishing writing it, so I’m not going to say anything else about it because I’m quite superstitious.

There’s a tradition of Latin American writers moving to Spain to publish their first novels, and you were living in Barcelona when you wrote Down the Rabbit Hole. Was it necessary for you to have this distance in order to write about your own country, and do you think it would have been different had it been written while you were in Mexico?

Of course. As I said before, Down the Rabbit Hole is a reflection on Mexico from outside Mexico. I sincerely believe that I wouldn’t have written this novel if I hadn’t left Mexico. Firstly, because I might not have been interested in dealing with subjects like drugs and violence, being as they are so present in the media and everyday life. And secondly, because the focus would have been very different, perhaps more concerned with what is politically correct. The most important thing about the voice of Tochtli is that it isn’t moralizing, it doesn’t judge, and this is very difficult to achieve when you’re living immersed in that reality. ■

Down the Rabbit Hole is published by And Other Stories.