sATURDAY sAMPLE:The Good People from the West by Jesse Falzoi , beer

 

 

The Wall had been down for three years when I first talked to somebody from the former GDR, not in 

Germany but in the community room of a hostel in Truckee, where I was waiting for a phone call from the police. My rental car had been stolen – and with it, my money, passport, airline ticket, and clothes. “The door wasn’t locked,” I’d said to the officer in the morning, “but I was back after two minutes. There’s practically nobody out there. The fucking place is empty. I am the only guest.”

And now I was sitting on a rundown sofa in front of the hostel’s fireplace to catch some warmth in my T-shirt – I’d taken it for granted that California would be warm and sunny and not as cold and gray as my hometown – when a guy came in. He was tanned and had shoulder-long, sun-bleached hair, like the surfers I’d seen in L.A., but was dressed appropriately (sweater, coat) apart from his feet which looked tiny and vulnerable in fake Birkenstocks. “How you doing?” he said with the most horrible German accent. That’s when I knew for sure; they hadn’t learned English at school, only Russian.

“Fine,” I answered in English. I was still hoping to be gone shortly. The last thing I wanted was a chat in my mother tongue with a compatriot, not to mention a fake one.

He looked me up and down, then he said, “First time in America?”

“No,” I lied, reaching for one of the books on the coffee table, which turned out to be by Hermann Hesse.

“Steppenwolf,” the guy said. “Big thing in my home country.” He extended his hand, smiled, and said, “Michael.”

“Rainer.”

“Guten Tag, Rainer,” he said.

A little later I heard him shuffle behind me, then he laughed and said in German, “Seems that we can’t escape each other.”

I turned around. He was standing behind the makeshift reception counter in the corner. I just wanted to say something when the guy who registered me the day before came in through the back door. “Hey, Michael, did you enjoy it?”

“Ja,” he said, holding his hands wide apart.  “Catch fish big wie Delfin.” (If he didn’t know – or didn’t like – a word in English, he just switched to German.) He turned back to me. “Are you hungry? Tonight, we’ll have a feast!”

“It’s okay,” the other guy said. “You can pay when you get your stuff back.”

“He can help out,” Michael said. “Earn bed and food, all right?” He looked at the other guy who shrugged and retreated to the back. “What about wood?” Michael called after him in English. “Is it genug?”

“Could use some extra hands.”

“Morgen. Today is… “ He paused and looked at me, then he said, “Celebration.” He smiled and switched back to German. “Don’t worry. I won’t let down a compatriot.”

I grew up right next to the former border. When in November 1989 all these pale, pathetically clothed people with their stupid haircuts and wounded eyes invaded our town all of a sudden, my friends and I were shocked. The older generations may have cheered; we looked at them with a mixture of disgust and pity. “Let’s check it out,” my then-girlfriend said the following spring, but I didn’t want to mess up my new car on the bad roads over there.

“What kind of car was it again, Rainer?”

The way he pronounced my name made me regret that I ever told him. “A red Honda. Nothing special. You don’t get far with a rented car anyway.”

“Well,” Michael said, “depends what you’re planning to do with it. Don’t get your hopes too high, Rainer.”

“Maybe I should take a bus to San Francisco and go straight to the embassy.” I smiled and said, “Could you lend me some money for the ticket and maybe a coffee? There’s nothing I can leave as a deposit though. You’d have to trust me.”

“Im Westen nichts Neues,“ he said.

I didn’t get it. I hadn’t seen the movie. Nor had I read the book.

Michael laughed. “Listen, Rainer, I wouldn’t do that. If the police stop you, they’ll lock you up. I heard of foreigners who rotted in jail for years.” He slapped me on the back. “As I said, I won’t let down a compatriot. You can help James with the wood. He’s having problems with his back lately. Aren’t you cold, Rainer?”

“No,” I said, stepping back so that he wouldn’t notice the goose-bumps covering my naked arms.

 

 

While Michael was cooking I sat on the sofa, holding the book, pretending to read. Despite the fire I was freezing. Finally he stuck his head through the door and said, “Let’s eat.”

It was only the two of us; the other guy hadn’t returned. “Smells fantastic,” I said as I sat down.

“My father often took me fishing on the weekends, to Rügen, ever been?” He piled up potatoes on my plate. “Did you visit the East at all, Rainer?”

I took a sip from the American beer, which was weak compared to the one in Germany but at least not the horrible GDR swill a friend of mine once brought to a party as a joke. “I was too busy studying.”

“Pity,” he said.

I nodded even though it was the last place I’d wanted to go. The photographs in our history books had given me the creeps: old men in gray suits, housewives queuing in front of empty shop windows, treeless ghost towns, and parades with lines and lines of soldiers marching in lockstep.

“We always came back with an overfilled trunk.” Michael carefully balanced a huge trout on the potato hill. “Our whole neighborhood lived from it for weeks.” He sat down and reached for knife and fork. “We had plenty to eat in the GDR.”

I picked into a potato. My appetite had suddenly gone. “Thank you for cooking,” I said.

“You gotta finish your plate if you don’t want any rain tomorrow.” Michael got up, turned the radio on, switched stations, and eventually sang along to Let’s get together and feel alright in his horrible accent. When the next song began, he turned the radio off. “My old man was in the same hospital in capitalist Germany for treatment,” he said. “He lay in the lounger on that terrace overlooking the lake, what was it called again?”

I shrugged.

“Anyway, he was there, right next to Bob Marley, and had no idea who that guy was.”

“They let him out? I thought that you guys couldn’t leave.”

“They let him out and back in again when he was cured. My old man used to say the devil was sitting in between them and they had to draw lots. When it fell on him, Bob swapped loungers, that’s what my old man says. Never knew his music but liked him anyway. Said that they were both fighting for the right cause. My old man wanted to flee after the operation, but how could he with that guy believing in him?”

“I was never much of a reggae fan,” I said.

“Coffee?” Michael said.

“If it’s not the stuff you had in the GDR?”

“You’re right. It was awful,” he said. “Once or twice a year my mother’s uncle from Hannover came by. Sat in the middle of the sofa, placed his fake leather suitcase on the table, and took out one parcel after the other, wrapped in layers of old TV-papers. West TV, of course. Our kitchen smelled of cakes or bread coming fresh from the oven, but we had to cheer at cheap store-bought stuff.” He leaned back and was silent as if trying to get back to those moments. “But the coffee,” he said after a while, “well, I guess it was the coffee that made my parents play along.” He passed me the pot which was cold by now, and so was the coffee. “What about you? Did you send care packages too?”

“My grandmother did for Christmas,” I said.

“Good girl!” Michael opened a drawer, took out a pack of cigarettes, Karo, the most popular brand in the former GDR, and sat down again. He offered me one, I shook my head. “I am not much of a smoker.”

“Take it,” he said, holding the lighter up.

I took one out, put it into my mouth, and leaned forward to reach the flame.

Michael grinned. “Say thank you, Rainer.”

 

 

My mother was born in Thuringia shortly after WWII broke out. How her parents came to live in the West had never been a topic and neither had my grandmother’s brother, who remained in the East. Even the preparing and the sending of packages were only discussed between my mother and my grandmother. Once I came into the kitchen while they were filling a huge cardboard box with presents for cousins I only knew from blurry photographs. When there was no new camera waiting for me under our Christmas tree a few weeks later, just a used one, I blamed them.

Michael shoved the cigarettes back to me as soon as I’d finished smoking. “Take another one.”

“They are a bit too strong for me.”

He smiled and said, “The cancer rate was twice as high in the former East, did you know?”

I smiled back. “Your cars weren’t helping, I guess.”

People in my hometown would throw coins and food from their windows as the endless line of tiny cardboard vehicles were slowly passing along every street, turning our clear blue sky into a smog dome. When we were drunk one night, we passed a snot-green Trabi covered with bananas and money. We checked that nobody was watching and each of us grabbed two marks for a beer.

Michael pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and passed it to me. “Take it, Rainer.”

I tried to inhale as little as possible, hoping he wouldn’t realize, and held the cigarette in my hand until there was only the filter left. I cleared my throat and said, “I’ll talk to my parents first thing in the morning. They’ll wire some money.”

 “Did I tell you that the rooms are being renovated? But don’t worry, I’ve got a cot upstairs. I’ll bring it down for you.” Michael opened the cabinet and produced a bottle of green liquid. “First a toast.” He filled two glasses to the brim, passed me one, and held up his. “A toast to the homeland.” And, closing his eyes, he began to sing his old national anthem: From the ruins risen newly, To the future turned, we stand. Let us serve your good weal truly, Germany, our fatherland.

I stood there, motionless, the empty glass in one hand, the cigarette bud in the other, and I realized that it was only us now and that it would be no-one apart from us any time soon.

Michael slowly opened his eyes and smiled, “Sorry, I forgot.”  He turned around and opened the drawer to take out a sharpie, with which he wrote the lyrics on the fridge. “Rainer, do you know the melody?”

I shook my head.

“It’s okay. I’ll teach you.”

We drank a glass of the sweet peppermint liquor after each verse and eventually replaced the empty bottle with a red one. It was long past midnight when he finally brought down the cot, and yet he woke me up when it was still pitch dark outside.

“Rainer,” he said, blinding me with a torch, “we need wood.”

I was naked. My body was so stiff from the cold that I could hardly move. “Where are my clothes?”

“In the washing machine. God, you made a mess.” He pointed at a pile of clothes on the sofa. “They should fit.”

I got up and wrapped the thin sheet around me like a toga. “I’d like to have a shower.”

“Later, Rainer, go get us some wood first, will you? It’s fucking cold in here.”

I waited for him to leave but he didn’t move, so I let go of the sheet and quickly slipped into the shabby underwear and socks he’d offered me. I put on a pair of jeans, the kind we laughed at in ‘89, and pulled a pullover over my head, which left my hair static for at least a minute. As I reached for my cowboy boots he said, “Let’s swap.”

I bought them in San Francisco. On the day of my arrival. First thing on my list. It was something I had been dreaming of for a long time, the trip to the US and the boots, and since I’d walked out of that small, dark shop filled to the brim with boots in all imaginable and unimaginable shapes, patterns, and colors, with that unforgettable odor of good, thick leather that could make you high, I hadn’t been out of them. “Come on,” I said, “your feet are much smaller than mine.”

He grabbed an old TV magazine, tore a page out, balled it up, and said, “When you guys sent us your old sneakers, they never came in the right size. But necessity is the mother of invention.”

Not only were his feet smaller than mine, I also was nearly a head taller and my shoulders were much wider. I could easily beat him up, I thought, and yet, I passed him my boots, watched as he filled them with newspaper clippings, and slipped into his fake Birkenstocks even though my toes and heels went over the edge. “Where’s the wood?”

“Hold on. I don’t want you to freeze to death, Rainer.” He handed me an oversized fake leather jacket with huge patches that looked as if cut from an Indian rug; all men from the GDR, no matter what age, seemed to be wearing them when they invaded the West.  “Take this,” he said.

“I’m fine,” I said.

He smiled. “If you say so.”

I followed him to the back door and out of the house. It was raining heavily. I was soaking wet when we arrived at a shed. He loosened the latch, opened the door, and said, “I totally forgot. There’s none left. Would you mind chopping some?” He stepped inside, took a hatchet from a hook at the wall, and pressed it into my hands. “You know how to do it, right?”

I didn’t, but nonetheless I said, “Where do you have your supplies?”

“There.” He turned around and pointed at the forest down the hill. “Take as much as you want.”

“It’s raining!”

“See, Rainer? You didn’t finish your plate.” He patted my shoulder and said, “Sure about the jacket?”

 

 

The trees were too big and too wet. After an hour or so I gave up and returned to the house. A huge fire was burning, a stack of logs was piled up against the wall. “Luckily, a neighbor helped out,” Michael said. “He lives down the road. Good guy. Very interested in our country. Took the first flight to Berlin when the Wall came down, fancy that! He was crying, he told me, walking through the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter den Linden, he couldn’t stop crying.”

      I remembered my English teacher mentioning something like that one Monday morning, and me thinking, Sentimental old fuck.  

Michael put a mug of coffee on the table. “Careful, Rainer, it’s hot.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Sure. But sit down first. Get some rest.” He gently pushed me onto the chair, saying, “God, you’re wet.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

He grabbed the horrible jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. “I don’t want you to catch a cold, Rainer.”

I reached for the mug, burnt my already callused and blistered hands, and let it drop onto the table, spilling half of the coffee.

Michael sighed. “Didn’t I warn you?”

I stood up. “Please let me call my parents.”

“Go ahead.”

I reached behind the counter to pick up the phone, quickly punched in the number, got lost twice, made it really slow the third time. There was no tone. I put down the receiver, picked it up again. Still no tone. “It’s dead.”

“Happens sometimes. Probably the rain.” Michael smiled. “We didn’t have a phone, Rainer. Most of us didn’t. We paid a visit when we wanted to talk to somebody.”

I only now noticed that the stairway to the upper floor with the only bathroom was blocked. In the morning I’d urinated sheltered by trees, but I would have to go soon again, and not for a pee only.

I walked to the fireplace and sat down next to it to give my clothes a chance to get dry.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Time for a schnapps, I’d say.”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “It gets lonely sometimes. The price of freedom. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.” He got up, returned with the green bottle and two glasses, and his strong cigarettes. “This place can be busy in summer, but the rest of the year not many people show up.”

“Any other Germans?”

“A few.”

He offered me a cigarette, I accepted. After the third I couldn’t hold back anymore. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“Well, Rainer, it’s also under construction.” He started to laugh. “Back home, I sublet my place while I am here. When I showed the guy around, when he realized that the toilet is outside the apartment, he looked at me like you are looking at me now.”

He stopped, most probably waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t, so he went on, “It’s not the end of the world, Rainer. He doesn’t even have to share it, nobody else has access. It’s just the fact that you have to come out of your cave to take a piss.” He grinned. “Or the other one.”

I still had nothing to say. Surely, there was a second bathroom. But by now I’d learned that it was wiser to keep my mouth shut in moments like those.

“Just make a few steps away from the house so that it doesn’t start to reek like a public pissoir here,” he said.

I cleared my throat and said, “Can I have some toilet paper? Or these wipes from the kitchen?”

“We ran out of both, sorry.” Michael passed me the TV magazine. “Back to the roots.”

 

 

In San Francisco, a man had been distributing large posters. There was a red square on it, surrounded by a white frame. In the middle, the words: I don’t remember. I asked him what he meant by it and he said, “It’s what most Germans answered when I interviewed them about the Fall of the Wall.”

I laughed. “That’s why I’m here. To get away from all that shit.”

He was an artist from NYC. He had German ancestors but didn’t speak the language. “East or West?” he asked.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “It’s humiliating.”

“Why?”

“Because…” I began, but then I just said, “From the West.”

 

 

Michael was still sitting in front of the fireplace when I came back. I sank down next to him and held my wet feet into the warmth. He turned his head and said, “Take another cigarette.”

“Thank you,” I said, and this time I meant it.

We sat in silence for a while, smoking and drinking. Then I said, “I really need to go to the embassy. Can you take me to San Francisco? I’ll pay you five hundred dollars.”

“Rainer.”

 “A thousand.”

He sighed and said, “You really think you can buy me again with a hundred deutschmarks?”

That’s what they got as a welcome present. There were endless lines in front of every bank. They were not only distributing money but pens, sweets, toys, and all kinds of giveaways. I didn’t have the feeling that they really controlled passports, there was no time with more than 16 million people wanting their money ASAP.

“We could say that we lost our IDs,” my friend once said, as we were observing them, those other Germans, who even months later seemed to have come from another planet.

I laughed out loud. I looked at his brand new Levi’s, the Fred Perry jacket we both had – his black, mine blue – and his Doc Martens he’d taken great pains to clean in the morning. “They’d never notice,” I said, still laughing.

With a wide grin, Michael added, “Or with bananas.”

The rain still hadn’t stopped. Even with that ugly jacket, I’d be soaking wet if I walked to the police station again. “You can keep my boots,” I said.

He put two cigarettes into his mouth, lit them, and carefully placed one between my lips. My best friend used to do it. We started smoking at the age of thirteen. I quit a couple of years later when I changed schools but never forgot the tenderness of that gesture, especially after I’d read somewhere that the first drag is the most harmful.

“The problem with you guys,” Michael said, “has always been that you think money gets you everywhere. You want to get rich to have a fancy car, a bigger house, a younger woman. If you’re unhappy, it’s because of money. But what if for once money doesn’t help? What if nobody cares how much money you have?”

I jumped up and flipped the cigarette into the fire. “Weren’t you happy? Weren’t you fucking happy to be free? To go wherever you wanted for the first time? To say whatever you wanted? To meet whom you wanted? To trust people because there was no Stasi anymore? To finally have shops with overfilling shelves? To buy all these things yourself instead of waiting for packages once a year?”

Michael got up, refilled the fire place, and waited until the flames returned again, higher and mightier than ever before. “Rainer,” he said. “You still don’t get it.”

That year, I was soon fed up with the documentaries about people walking through supermarkets crying, about their complaining how hard it had been for them to know what we all had, these masses of strangers, whom we were supposed to call brothers and sisters, who were nothing but ordinary refugees to me, to most of the people I knew.

Fortunately, I’d just graduated and could go away from that chaos. I was living in France when I heard about the reunification in the news. I listened to it with the same disinterest I would have shown for a famine in some unpronounceable African country. 

“What if we hadn’t let you in?” I said. “You all would have had to turn around and go back home. You’d have been shot or put into prison for the rest of your lives. Don’t you remember what happened in Prague?”

Michael looked at me in silence. “Rainer,” he finally said, holding up his glass, “would you mind cleaning up?”

I carried our glasses to the kitchen. The pile had grown overnight, as if the whole neighborhood had been dumping their dishes into our sink. I rolled up my sleeves and turned the water on. Then I turned it off again and opened the door to the community room. 

“Yes, Rainer?”

“You guys left your kids in the apartment. You didn’t care if they died in their own shit. The whole lot of you sold your souls to go shopping. Freedom of speech? Freedom to study what you wanted? Freedom to travel? My ass!”

 

 

It was dinner time when I was done but I wouldn’t ask for anything to eat. The cot had vanished so I lay down on the sofa and covered myself with the ugly jacket. Despite the cold – the fire had long burnt down – I fell asleep at once. But Michael woke me up, “You must be hungry, Rainer,” he said, and since I was, I sat up again and accepted the plate with potatoes, sauerkraut, and a very dark indefinable mash. I greedily shoved it into my mouth.

Michael watched me with a big smile. “Good?”

I nodded.

“My all-time-favorite,” he said. “We had it at least once a week.”

“What is it?”

“Dead grandma.”

I stopped chewing.

“Just blood sausage,” Michael said laughing. “That’s how we call it. Tote Oma.” He nodded toward the window behind which the rain was pouring down as strong as before. “Eat up this time.”

I finished my plate and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it. Sinking back onto the sofa I said, “Why are you keeping me here?”

Michael stood up, walked to the front door, and opened it. “It was never locked.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I needed to sleep. If I didn’t answer, he would leave me alone, I hoped. And really, I heard him walking out of the room after a while. But he soon returned, carrying a metal box. “I want to show you something, Rainer.”

He sat down next to me, opened the box, and took out a photograph of a young woman leaning against a tree. “This is Ingrid,” he said. “Great tits. Sat behind me in class. She always wanted to become an actress. Went to Berlin at the age of fifteen, an aunt of hers was living there. Every night she was standing in front of Berliner Ensemble until they hired her for all kinds of odd jobs. As she was cleaning the stage, Tenschert watched her. You wouldn’t have heard of him, of course. He was a famous director in the GDR.” He smiled and passed me the photograph. “A week later she performed in Brecht’s Mother.”

I looked at the girl in the tight black dress, who’d obviously wanted to copy Kim Wilde. 

“Langhoff fired her. He brought his people over from the West.” Michael gave me another photograph of three guys dressed in black, leather jackets, hair punk style. He pointed at the tall guy in the middle. “This is Alex, biggest Who fan ever. Somebody smuggled their songbook over which he translated with the help of a dictionary that only had half of the pages left. Most of the songs were totally unknown to him, but they played them anyway, in German.” He laughed. “We were disappointed when we heard the original for the first time.”

The next photograph showed two men wearing old-fashioned suits and a woman in an evening dress. One of the men reminded me of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his early, serious films, the black-and-white ones. The other man had his arm around the woman’s shoulder and was leaning into her as if he wanted to smell her perfume, eyes closed, smiling.

“Tina. She’s a poet,” Michael said. “And her husband, Marco, translator and literary theorist. He used to write the epilog to French classics for Rütten und Löning. You don’t know them, right? It was a prestigious publisher, gone of course.” He pointed at young Belmondo’s doppelganger. “Franz, activist, performance artist, musician, painter, and my best friend.”

He gave me another photograph, of a family this time, the child maybe two years old. Father and mother were around my age, and they were all lying in bed, John Lennon & Yoko Ono style, their heads bent over a huge picture-book. “My brother, my sister-in-law, and the cutest nephew you can imagine. She’s a doctor, he’s an electrician, and baby Kevin is in sixth grade now. He likes airplanes and Nirvana.”

Another photograph, of a woman in her forties, wearing a work coat, hammering away on some piece of stone. “My aunt Tatiana. She was trained by Inge Hunzinger. You wouldn’t have heard of her either. She’s a famous sculptor.”

I felt like back in school and decided that the wisest thing to do was to keep my mouth shut and listen.

Michael put the next one on the pile, saying, “Her boyfriend Richy, he works at a morgue. Tatiana’s favorite workplace. She helps them to resurrect, she says.”

 

 

This went on and on, until the box was empty. Then he left the room and came back with the cot and a sleeping bag. “You see us and there’s only one story in your head: totalitarian state, shortage, uniformity, subordinate mentality. We’re all the same to you, aren’t we? One look at us and you feel that you know everything.”

He unfolded the cot, opened the zip of the sleeping bag, pressed a pillow into a freshly washed case (I could smell the softener), and said, “Yes, you opened your borders. But you expected us to be ever so thankful, to condemn our fatherland. We had to denounce our past. Happiness, love, music, even sex wasn’t something you imagined us having. A life of misery, but thank God it was over on November 9^th, 1989, when the Good People from the West saved us.”

 

 

The next morning, I was woken up by quiet footsteps, definitely not Michael’s, unless he’d gotten out of my boots. It was the guy who’d checked me in. He told me that there was coffee in the kitchen and fresh bagels too. I got up, went outside to pee, and only when I was walking toward the house again, fully realized that it had stopped raining.

A little later I sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, gazing out the window when I saw the red Honda. At two o’clock in the afternoon I reached the airport, in the evening I boarded a plane to Frankfurt. Next to me sat a seventy-six-year-old woman from Chicago, born in Weimar, and married to a translator from Minneapolis, who had taken her to the States after the Nuremberg trials. She showed me a black-and-white photograph of two young women, both faces beaming with beauty and hope. “That’s my cousin,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since I left Germany. We went to a nightclub in Berlin, it was somewhere on Pariser Strasse, do you know it?”

“I’ve never been to Berlin.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You weren’t allowed of course.”

I didn’t correct her, and neither did I tell her that we’d been calling it Prison Berlin.

She put the photograph back into her purse. She couldn’t believe it when she was watching the news that night, she said. She would always remember Peter Jennings, in his khaki trench coat, standing in front of all these beautiful, colorful, courageous people, who were climbing or jumping down the wall. How small it suddenly looked, how harmless, like a toy. It took her two years to find her cousin, but here she was now, on her way to be reunified with her.

“That’s nice,” I said.

She smiled, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse, then she touched my underarm and said, “I am so happy for you guys.” 

FIND YOUR COPY HERE

 

Forget I Must NotBy Jerome McClimont,cold, sparkling water with a slice of lime.

The glass door slid open with a crisp hum, revealing a world untouched. Sharp barks of four-legged aliens shattered the stillness. A sea of tiny green needles stretched towards a boundary of statues. Every statue was faceless, each bearing the same vacant expression. Thousands of oval-shaped leaves sprouted from their rugged surfaces. They stretched high into the cedar scented air, clustered beneath a canopy of green armour.

A decaying structure stood just metres away, stark against the faded sky. Each room bore a melancholy dimness. The stuffy air brimmed with a fine powder, illuminated in the afternoon sun. A portal to the outside world lay embedded in the wall. The world revealed itself through the sheet of glass, golden and crisp. Statues scattered around the environment, exploding with leaves. The landscape stretched into the distance, disappearing at the edge of the galaxy. Hills overlapped throughout the distant horizon, barely perceivable to the human eye. As night fell over the landscape, a blanket darkness suffocated the structure. Dimness engulfed the room where we lay.

Brightness. It burst through the open curtains, dancing through the tenebrous cabin, full of life and energy. The golden sunshine was soon greeted with the muffled moaning of many. An explosive trill of birds infected the serene air, providing a piercing ambience to the steady drone of four-wheeled metal capsules.

‘Good morning.’ The greeting from a roommate carried across the still cabin. The roommate turned his head towards the window, squinting in the sudden brightness. He stood silently in the corner of the room. His tentacles floated helplessly through the heavy air. I pictured his sullen face, shrivelled like a prune. Scientists didn’t accept dreams as a distraction; they pushed them away; they forgot about them. I ordered myself to forget. Forget I must not.

As occupants uncovered their blankets, I was dragged away from serenity. They emerged from their mattresses one by one. The group filed through the entrance, embarking through the foreign landscape. The air teemed with a sterile smell of freshly mowed grass. The smell filled my nostrils with unforgettable memories.

We returned to base that night, exhausted after the hike. Darkness consumed the landscape, leaving the camp suspended in silence. My roommate’s voice transmitted a low signal. The conversation drifted through the night.

‘Go to sleep.’

Forget I must not.

 

 About the author

Alongside novel writing, Jerome enjoys writing a wide range of short stories. Jerome also writes short stories that explore the extraordinary hidden within ordinary experiences. 

Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the author the other half goes to expenses e.g. Maintaining the web site and setting up The Best of Café Lit book each year.

RODNEY THE RUNNER by Guy Pratt,a schooner of sherry

As we have entered the 21^st century technology has changed the ways much of business is transacted. One example is the way auction houses and the dealers and collectors who buy, can operate. Today the buyer can view auctioneer’s catalogues on line, each lot illustrated, and can request a more detailed description and images if required. The buyer can bid on line without attending the sale and after paying electronically can arrange collection and delivery of purchases by courier. Many auction houses now engage more specialist staff in different fields which may mean not so many bargains are found; better prices are achieved for the vendors, but of course it has all come at the cost of higher commission rates for buyers and sellers. Years ago, things were very different.

Rodney Marshall’s story goes well back into the 20^th century. Rodney had once been employed as a clerk in a warehouse, a humdrum job he didn’t enjoy, but his salary paid the bills. He enjoyed reading, but new books were expensive, and so on his days off, he would often go to a local auction sale and buy a cheap box of books. It gave him a selection of reading material at little cost. Gradually, over time he began to realise that occasionally some of the books he bought were scarce and of some value. He could travel to a nearby city where antiquarian booksellers would give him a generous price for them, which in turn augmented his salary.

He studied the shelves of these booksellers and looked at the prices pencilled in the volumes. Then he found a directory of second-hand booksellers and wrote away to them requesting catalogues which many of them specialising in different fields produced. His knowledge soon began to grow. He learnt that condition could often be of paramount importance. Modern first edition collectors desired books still in pristine dust jackets and collectors of 19^th century first editions wanted them in the original cloth bindings. He learnt that some books were sought after for their illustrators and some early books and atlases were highly valued by the print sellers who removed the prints and maps to mount and frame and sell individually.

When the warehouse was taken over by a bigger national company several members of the staff were made redundant, including Rodney. Having had a number of successes with his finds in local auctions, he decided to take the plunge and become a “runner” as those were termed who bought in local provincial auctions and sold on to the big second-hand bookshops. In fact, in the trade he soon became known as “Rodney the Runner”.

He now travelled to auctions further afield, but also began to find he was in a competitive business. There were other runners too and sometimes, if it was advertised that rare books were included in a sale, bookshop owners would turn up and it was hard to compete. On one or two occasions he was inveigled into going into the “ring”, a corrupt and illegal practice where only one dealer would bid thus buying the lot cheaply. The other interested parties would then privately re-auction the books amongst themselves and the difference between the saleroom price and the final bidder would be split between them. However, Rodney suffered a troubled conscience over this; the original vendor had been robbed of a fair price and the auctioneer defrauded of commission. He decided to take no further part in this.

At first this made it a bit harder for him, but he had been talking with a local antique dealer, Joan Fothergill. Joan was an older woman who had been in the antique trade dealing in furniture for many years. Whether in the saleroom or buying privately, Joan was always happy to pay sellers a fair price and tried to sell at fair, but not exorbitant prices. She was well known in the trade as “Honest Joan” and for years she had prospered because of her integrity. She secretly applauded Rodney’s disdain of the rings and was impressed when she learnt that he purchased from private sellers at fair prices.

Although she dealt in other period furniture too, her specialism was bureaus, bureau-bookcases and bookcases and anybody wanting to furnish a library or an office with antique furniture would visit Joan’s premises. Joan frequently needed books to enhance the shelves of the furniture in her shop. As she said herself “…not expensive rare collectable books, but ones with attractive leather or faux leather bindings and bright gilt titling on the spines. Old out of date encyclopaedias, that sort of thing.”

Joan mentioned this to Rodney and soon he was often buying very cheap defunct encyclopaedia sets for which Joan would give him a reasonable price. Some of Joan’s buyers were book collectors with special fields of interest and Joan would introduce Rodney to them and he would look out for titles for them. This helped him begin to develop a private client base, much more profitable than selling to booksellers at trade rates.

It was probably not to Rodney’s advantage, but Joan had been trading since before Rodney had been born and had several contacts in the trade. She didn’t deal in ceramics, fine paintings or books, but because she was trusted if one of the top city dealers became aware of an item in the local auction in their genre, they would leave it to Joan to bid for them and pay her a commission for the service. So occasionally, when Archie Spicer of Spicer and Brown, the top West End antiquarian booksellers, became aware of a rare tome in the local sale, he contacted Joan.

Rodney was making a bread and butter living most of the time, a slice of cake was infrequent. On a few occasions something rare came up, like the first edition of Black Beauty or the letter from Eric Blair in the front of a copy of Animal Farm, nobody else remembering Eric Arthur Blair was George Orwell’s real name. These he had taken up to London and were sold handsomely by one of the major auction houses. Finds like this were few and one could never count on them.

This particular week he had gone to the local auction room on viewing day prior to the sale day. As he entered the sale room, he passed Archie Spicer leaving. He wondered what Archie was doing there. Was there something special in the sale this week to whet Archie’s appetite. He picked up a 20p Roneo duplicated catalogue from Eric the porter and scanned through it. Individual book lots included a Victorian family bible with brass clasps, a couple of mid-nineteenth century books on farriery which often came up in farming districts, a fairly common miniature set of the works of Shakespeare in a little oak bookcase, but nothing out of the ordinary for a provincial sale room.

He went on to rummage through half a dozen boxes catalogued as sundry books. They contained a mixture of tatty paperbacks and book club reprints. These sort of lots were usually the stuff dealers put back into auction after they had removed the cream. Rodney had done it himself sometimes.

He was feeling a bit disappointed with this week’s offerings, but there was one lot to go – a large tea chest filled to the top with books. Rodney’s eyes started to light up when he saw at the top of the tea chest a copy of Arthur Ransome’ Swallows and Amazons, next to it Peter Duck and further investigation revealed all twelve volumes in the Swallows and Amazons series. All were in pristine dust jackets, but alas when he carefully examined each one all were late reprints, not one first edition amongst them. He squatted on the floor carefully emptying everything else out of the box. He went down through a number of modern cookery books, a couple of dictionaries, a bible, a first aid manual, a collection of modern novels, but none by sought after writers. At the bottom were some Penguin paperbacks, all reprints again and some half-completed crossword puzzle books.

 He was just about to stuff everything back in the box when he saw the small slim book. Somebody had covered it with brown paper to help preserve it. It may have lain in the bottom the chest for ages, looking almost like a discarded brown paper bag, the volume was so thin. He carefully removed the brown paper to reveal an intact dust jacket. It was a small book of poems by Conrad Layton. Rodney did not know a lot about Conrad Layton other than he was one of those sought after World War I poets who had survived the war only to die tragically in a motor-cycle accident a few years later. He turned to the title page and found it was inscribed “To Priscilla, with my undying love and affection, Conrad.” A small envelope fell out of the book onto the floor. Stamped with a George V stamp, it was addressed to Priscilla Robins at a local address. Rodney carefully opened it and unfolded the single sheet inside revealing a passionate missive from Conrad Layton to Priscilla Robins.

He replaced everything as it was, carefully wrapping the brown paper round the little book again and put it back in the bottom of the chest. Then he placed the rest of the books back in the box in the order he had removed them. Somebody had presumably put the Arthur Ransome books on the top hoping they would attract someone to buy the lot, unaware of what was in little brown paper covered volume. He needed to go the library and find out a little bit more about Priscilla Robins.

As he walked towards the library the thought struck him that was to haunt him until the sale day – had Archie Spicer found the little book and deliberately hidden it right at the bottom of the tea chest? Had he been on his way to ask Joan to buy the tea chest for him on sale day?

Sat at a table in the reference section of the library with some literary and art biographies he began to piece together some very relevant information. Priscilla Robins had been a very successful portrait painter in the 1920s, although she had lived locally with her wealthy landowner husband, she spent much of her time working at her London studio. She was frequently commissioned to do portraits of the leading figures of the time - politicians, stars of the stage and literary figures. Conrad Layton, who was separated from his wife at the time, sat for her. There had been rumours of an affair, but both parties had denied it and their families had later denied it too, when their biographers were doing their researches. However, a question mark had always remained.

In their respective fields of art and literature both had left an historic mark. Priscilla Robins portraits of the famous were still continually sought after and fetched high prices. On its own, without a dust jacket, Rodney knew that little book of poems could be worth £50; with its excellent dust jacket £500; signed as well maybe £2,000 or more; but being signed and inscribed to Priscilla with that endearing letter as well, the sky was the limit. It confirmed something that the art and literary world had always been unsure about. If put in a London sale room, it was one of those items that would attract the interest of top book dealers and collectors around the world.

Rodney went home with feelings roller coasting up and down. Joan Fothergill had recently hinted that she was thinking of letting a room in in her retail premises to someone dealing in paintings, ceramics, jewellery or even books; just as long as it was something that didn’t clash with her furniture business. If he could buy that tea chest of books that little volume with the enclosed letter could provide him the means not only to rent that room, but stock it too and establish his own retail outlet. Then fear and panic took hold of him. Had Archie Spicer found it too? If Archie hadn’t seen it would someone else come along and discover it when viewing?

The chest was lot number 33, early on in the sale, which would start promptly at 9.30 two days later. For two days Rodney was pre-occupied with his hopes and fears. He found it hard to sleep that night and once when he did drop off dreaming of success, he soon awoke from a nightmare in which he saw Archie Spicer triumphantly walking out the sale holding the little volume aloft.

The night before the sale he again had trouble getting to sleep. Slumber finally came in the small hours and then he overslept in the morning. He knew he was running a little late but the saleroom was only a few minutes in his car. He pressed the starter in the car again and again to no avail – the battery was flat. He gave up the car in despair. His neighbours on each side had already left for work leaving no chance of cadging a lift. He set off on foot – a race against time and the auctioneer’s gavel.

Red faced and panting he almost fell into the auction room only to hear the auctioneer announce “Lot number thirty-five. A Royal Albert tea service….” He was too late, he’d missed the tea chest by a couple of lots, the auctioneer was going fast this morning.

When he caught his breath he moved over beside Eric, the porter, who was holding up lots as they sold. “Eric” he whispered “What happened to lot 33, the chest of books?”

“Made twenty quid” Eric whispered back “Honest Joan bought it.”

Rodney felt miserable and dejected, his dreams shattered, so Archie Spicer must have spotted the little book.

The antique dealers usually bought the bibles with the brass clasps, they sold well to the Americans, but he’d wait for the farriery books and the little set of Shakespeare to be sold, there might be a little bit of profit to be made on them.

As he waited, still feeling dejected, Joan Fothergill came and stood beside him “Rodney, you weren’t here earlier. I bought that chest of books in the corner. There was a lovely clean collection of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books in it. I’m going to give them to my grandson for his birthday. If what’s left in the box is worth a fiver, they’re yours.”

Rodney’s dream materialised after all. In a few months he had opened his own small bookshop in a room in Joan’s store. He was chatting with Joan one day and something incumbent prompted him to share with Joan what he’d found in the tea chest, though he wondered how she might react.

“Us dealers always win some and lose some” she laughed “But, as long as we’re honest, we sleep well. I’ll tell you about a time from my dim and distant past when I met up with a very young Archie Spicer.” She started to relate the tale.

“It was a few years after the war. A farmer had died and the farm was to be sold up. All the livestock and farm machinery were to be sold and the contents of the house at the same time. The auctioneer was a specialist in selling farm live and deadstock, but knew very little about furniture and nothing about books. Antique dealers in those days knew virtually nothing about books either and bookdealers usually little about furniture. Although there was little else of value in the house my father, who ran the business then, knew there was a fine Louis XIV bookcase, a family heirloom someone had brought back from the Napoleonic Wars. On the wave of post war prosperity, the deceased farmer had invested in extremely rare books purchased from top London dealers. In his ignorance the auctioneer had catalogued it simply as book case and contents.

Rather than trigger speculation by his presence my father sent me to bid for the bookcase with instructions to go up to £700, a king’s ransom in those days. After bidding a cheeky opening fifty I didn’t get a look in. News of the death of their customer had reached the London bookdealers and three came down to compete for the books. Archie Spicer was the successful buyer at £850 and after bidding turned to me and said he hadn’t much room in his car did I want the bookcase for £50. Of course I didn’t need asking twice. Archie and I can laugh about it now.

On another occasion father sent me to buy a bureau, which I bought for a successful bid of £200, big money in those days. I was approached by a man who said there were some old coins in a drawer in it and asked to buy them. There appeared to be nothing special about them, so I happily took £10 for them feeling I had reduced the cost of the bureau. When I told father, he scolded me. I should have brought them back and got a proper valuation on them he said. We later heard the man had boasted of selling the coins for £300.

Most dealers can boast of that lucky bargain in a saleroom and if they are honest can also tell of the ones they have missed too. My father used to say the real test of a good dealer is whether they will give a fair price to the private seller in their home. Not all do, but he always said ‘an honest reputation is worth more than a pot of gold.’ ”    

About the author

 Guy Pratt is a retired octogenarian second hand bookseller who enjoys gardening, long walks with his dog and travel. He gravitated into the book trade after earlier years in farming, the army Intelligence Corps and the civil service. 

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Retrospective by Barry Garelick Black coffee

 

Robert’s house sat at the top of a hill in Sonoma, five miles up from a road that led into town. It was cold in Sonoma in the winter months, and when it rained it seemed to last forever. Rain was predicted for later that night, but now it was clear; the moonlight giving the landscape a bluish monochromatic glow.

Over the last few months Robert’s life had become relatively simple. Since his wife Katie’s unexpected death a year ago his days were spent less and less with the final paperwork involved with insurance, accounts, and bills. More time was spent preparing for and dreading an upcoming retrospective exhibition of his photographs at the Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa. His evenings were spent increasingly with Joyce, his girlfriend for the past three months and the curator of the exhibit.

Neither Joyce nor Robert had any children. He and Katie had moved from Los Angeles to Sonoma fifteen years ago when he was in his sixties and his name in photography had started to fade. Joyce was working as assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which she described as “a full-time position of being ignored.” She moved to Santa Rosa five years after Robert and Katie left Los Angeles and shortly after her husband died. Robert often wondered whether she moved to be close to them or because of the job opening at the museum. The museum gave her more responsibility, he knew; but he also thought of the museum as a place that featured artists who were either unknown or in the process of becoming undiscovered.

Robert now sat at the dining room table covered with folders of proof sheets and photographs, trying to decide which ones were worthy of showing. He reached for a vial of artificial tears and induced drops into his burning eyes. Although he wasn’t hungry, he went to the kitchen looking for something to eat, returning with pre-packaged squares of Tillamook cheddar and some Saltine crackers. An email from Joyce sent a few minutes earlier appeared on the screen of his laptop.

“I’ve been thinking more about the exhibition lately. (And you, of course.) I think you should include some of the photos you took of Katie. Or think about it at least. We need to talk more about the exhibition. I need blurbs for the photos; desperately.”

He started to reply but called her instead.

“I knew you would call,” she said. “I want to talk about the show and see what photos you’ve selected. I’d like to come over.”

“That’s fine. Come on over.”

“I’m coming over. And I plan to stay the night. If you don’t mind. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said and hung up.

Their pattern of banter hadn’t changed much over the years. Katie knew he was attracted to Joyce. In fact, Katie had told Robert that in the event of her death he should marry Joyce; she even mentioned it to Joyce. As much as he liked Joyce, Robert felt no one could ever replace Katie. Joyce wanted to be number one in his life, he knew. He knew this because she told him.

“I’ve been where you are now,” she had said as they lay in bed one night. “You’ll never forget her and you shouldn’t. I know someday I’ll be your number one. Maybe you know this, but probably not. I have more experience with this. It might be a while and that’s fine. I’m OK with waiting.”

It had started to rain when Joyce arrived. She hugged Robert, resting her head on his shoulder as she did so. “Am I holding you too tight?”

“It’s fine.”

“Just right then?”

“Just right.”

She let go of him and hung her coat in the closet. “About how many years worth of phone books do you have in that closet?”

“I haven’t counted.”

“I think it’s time you threw them out.”

She was a few years younger than Robert though she looked like she was in her late fifties. She talked about her day, focusing on a ‘horrible-awful’ poetry reading held at the museum. “It was some woman wearing too much makeup reading from a book of her poems that was just published; she was totally full of herself.”

“Glad I wasn’t there,” he said.

“You would have hated it. Anyway, I didn’t mean to talk about that. Do you know what photos you want to show? Or how you want to organize them?

They sat next to each other at the dining room table. On the wall facing them was a framed photograph of Katie. She was on a bicycle, left foot on the pedal, having come to a stop next to a tree. A church was visible in the background. She wore a long skirt and a wool sweater; her hair was long and straight, parted in the middle. The picture hung at his first group exhibition in Los Angeles twenty years ago. His last exhibition was part of a group show two years ago at a trendy new art gallery in San Francisco run by people who looked too young to run an art gallery.

“I’m not too happy about this exhibit,” he said.

“Why?”

“A retrospective exhibit is a not-so-subtle reminder that I’m in my retrospective stage of life.”

“We all are sweetheart. Get over it.”

“I guess. I just have my doubts about it.”

“OK, you can have all the doubts you want, but it’s still going to happen and I need your help. So what do you think?  By year, or by subject matter, or just random? I’m thinking by years or decades, but it’s up to you.”

The folders of proof sized prints she was now looking through held photos of people young and old in various locations: concerts, streets in large and small cities, farms, construction sites, amusement parks, and then just as many devoid of any indication of location. “I can sometimes tell what decade the pictures were taken by hair styles, clothes, and any cars that happened to be there,” she said. “But there are quite a few photos that don’t give any clues. I’d like to focus on those. The timeless ones.”

“Then organizing by year would be meaningless,” he said.

“Right. They should just be random. Or by mood. Happy, sad, indifferent. And what do you want to say on the blurb for the pictures?”

She held a photo of a man who looked like he was in his late twenties, in work clothes, part of a construction crew on a busy street. His head rested on his two hands which were holding the handle of a shovel with its blade on the street. His mouth was pulled slightly downward. “I like this one,” she said. “What was going on?”

“I think I remember. Hold on.” He looked for his notes on the photo. “Yes. I remember this one. Taken in Manhattan in 2009 in late October. I remember seeing a construction crew on a break; the guy asked me what I was taking pictures of. I said something like I was taking pictures of people who looked interesting. I remember he asked if I thought he looked interesting. I said yes, and we started talking.”

“What about?”

“The World Series. The Yankees had lost the first game of the World Series to the Phillies, and he wasn’t too happy about that.”

“It looks like he had lost a loved one.”

“Well, the Yankees are beloved in New York.”

“I’m serious. It looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders; that something happened.” She looked at the photo again. “It looks like he could be thinking about a lot of things.”

“Yes. That’s true. He could have been. It’s an illusion. Like when you imagine what a character in a movie or play is thinking, filling in what a character leaves unstated. You’re working off the context. You’re drawn into an illusion. It’s no different with photos.”

Joyce moved her neck from side to side to undo the stiffness that had come from being bent over, looking at photos. The sound of soft rain on the roof could be heard.

“So what can you say about it? For a blurb about the photo, I mean. Can we say when and where it was taken and what you and he were talking about?”

“No. I don’t want those details of what I might have talked about. I just want to describe what the person was doing; maybe where it was taken, and no more. ‘A construction worker in Manhattan.’ That’s all people need, really. Their own experiences will fill in everything else.”

“OK, but for your remarks about the exhibit, I’d like you to say what you just said about illusion, and context and interpretation.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

 “And I really do want one of Katie in there,” she said.

“Why?”

 “People like to know about the artist’s life outside the photos. Some hint or glimpse. Even some of Edward Hopper’s paintings had his wife in them.”

“Hopper’s wife was a model for the women in some of his paintings,” he said. “There was only one portrait where she was actually named.”

“Whatever. Find me one of Katie that we can include. I’m sure there are plenty.”

After a moment of looking like he was going to refuse, he pointed to the photo on the dining room wall. “That one,” he said. “It’s the first photo I took of her. It was when we first met. It was 1981 in Santa Cruz when I was living there. She was teaching linguistics as an adjunct professor at the university.”

“I want the blurb to identify her. And the time and place.” They both looked at the photo.

 

“I don’t want her identified,” he said. His reasons would remain unstated. “You can say it was a project for a magazine. Photos of people in front of churches.”

“She was beautiful,” she said.

 

When he took the picture, he thought he knew her from somewhere, like a memory of a place one visited and not remembering in what city or when it was. Her lips were open slightly showing a trace of a smile.

“Why did you take a picture of me?” she had asked.

He wanted to say it was because she looked kind and he found that beautiful, but he told her about the assignment instead.

“Sounds like an interesting project. I’d be interested in seeing the finished product.” The church bell rang and she looked up at the church.

“The service is about to start,” she said. “You’re welcome to join me.”

They sat together toward the back. He felt that she was watching him, though she looked straight ahead. During the singing of hymns he imagined her listening to him sing and heard his voice as if through her ears. He sung in a soft voice except when the music was in his vocal range; then his singing became louder and confident. At times he felt they were the only two people there.

They met for coffee the next day, and that evening went to a dinner party at a restaurant with her friends. Her friends were artists, painters mostly. One person in the group was a photographer named Noah who knew of Robert’s work though Noah was more well known. He was mostly friendly except for an occasional passive-aggressive barb that would come out of nowhere as happened that night when he asked Robert, “Are you still taking pictures of people staring into space?” This was followed by a just-kidding smile.

Katie told him later she was sorry Noah said that as he drove her back to her apartment. Katie painted watercolors on outings with the group, though she didn’t consider herself to be an artist. She painted watercolors, sometimes with her group of friends, but also alone. Her paintings were of places she had visited, people she had known, but mostly of nature. “I like seeing things that live in the silence surrounding them – apart from words that describe them,” she told him. “I love words, but nature and silence make me feel pure.”

One year later he and Katie were married; the friends he had met that night attended the wedding; they all remained friends for years. He liked all of her friends, though was guarded when he was with Noah.

***

“I wonder what people will think about what she might have been thinking in that photo,” Joyce said. It was starting to rain harder, the roof a sounding board for the rain drops. Joyce’s elbows were on the table, and she rested her head in her hands.

“Impossible to say. Largely pleasant thoughts is my guess.”

“Yes. I would say that.” She looked at it again.

“Any other photos of her that you’d like to include?”

“None,” he said. He had taken a photo of Katie the night she died. There was no reason to mention it to Joyce or anyone else for that matter.

She died while they were traveling on vacation through Morocco with the same group of friends he had known since they had first met, including Noah, the photographer. On that night they were taken to a place where they learned how to cook in a tanzine. They then sat around a long table to eat the food they had made, and shortly after they finished and comments about the food died down, Katie was suddenly very tired and said that she needed to lie down. Robert and Noah took her to an adjoining room that was dimly lit. She lay on a couch and fell asleep almost immediately, a faint smile on her face.

He grabbed his camera from the other room and took several pictures, adjusting for light each time, trying to highlight the face surrounded by the darkness of the room.

Some time later someone said that Katie wasn’t breathing. Three people tried artificial respiration and CPR which was continued in the ambulance. At the hospital she was wheeled into a room. He waited with Noah for any news. Several minutes later, a nurse came out; Katie had been dead for an hour, she told them. That meant that the people in the ambulance had been trying to resuscitate a dead woman, Robert remembered thinking.

The nurse told Robert she thought it was cardiac arrest; they wouldn’t know for sure until the medical examiner arrived, she said. “She didn’t have a heart problem,” Robert said, half believing that this fact would render the nurse’s words incorrect. “Yes, that can happen some time. I’m sorry I don’t have more information to give you. I’m very sorry for your loss.” The nurse put her arms on Robert and Noah’s shoulders as they both wept.

The days that followed were a confusion of paperwork, interviews with officials, and sorrow. In a conversation with Noah just before he left for home, Robert said he didn’t know whether she had already died when he took the photo of her on the couch.

“I think she was alive,” Noah said.

Robert chose to believe him. The picture he took of Katie that night would remain in his memory as the last photo of her before she died.

***

It was now ten o’clock; the selection and sorting of photos was completed. Proof sized pictures were laid out on the large table; those that didn’t fit were placed on the floor. All were assorted according to which ones would be on each of four walls of the room where the exhibit would be.

“We should have a picture of you,” Robert said.

“I don’t think I want to be in the exhibit.”

“No one will know who you are.”

“The people who work at the museum will.”

“So what. We’ll put it at the very end.” He picked up his camera lying in a corner of the room.

“What should I do? How do you want me to sit?”

            “Don’t do anything. Don’t think about anything. I’ll just take pictures.”

After viewing the photos on the camera’s screen she said, “I like the one that doesn’t look like me.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t look like you. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I didn’t like this. OK, now I want to take one of you to include in the exhibit.”

 “Fair enough. But you only get to take one.”

“What do I do?”

“The camera is on auto-focus and I’ve adjusted for exposure. Just aim. The camera will do the rest.” She took the photo and after viewing it he frowned.

“Why are you frowning? It captured you perfectly.”

He ignored her. “Let’s look at what we have,” he said and they walked around the room viewing the exhibit.

“How much of the conversations with the people in the photos do you remember without looking at your notes?” she asked.

“The notes just nudge my memory.”

“So you remember them all?”

He didn’t answer. It was now raining harder and he could tell that the run-off was filling a creek in the back of the house. The rushing water would eventually form a waterfall in the middle of the creek, reaching its maximum later that night. Joyce sat down, and Robert walked around the table of photos again. He imagined Katie by his side, asking her what she saw and in doing so seeing them through her eyes. The photos were a retrospective of images spanning many years without a timeline. “They’re timeless; best viewed in silence,” she would say. No more needed to be said, he thought, and bowed his head in reverence to the stillness. 

a|bout the Author 

 

 

 Barry Garelick writes about time, memory, and people facing transitions in their lives. His fiction is published in Empyrean Literary Magazine, Cafe Lit, Opiate, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife 

 Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the author the other half goes to expenses e.g. Maintaining the web site and setting up The Best of Café Lit book each year.