Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who created Sherlock Holmes, was a loon. He seriously disliked Irish people and steadfastly believed in the English rule of Ireland. He was awarded a knighthood for a pamphlet he wrote defending the use of British concentration camps during the Boer War.

Lord Byron's bear


At Cambridge University Lord Byron was forbidden from keeping a dog in his room. After scouring the rule book the young poet made a discovery and acquired a pet bear which did not contravene the regulations.

How can we not love Oscar Widle?

While studying at Oxford University Oscar Wilde used to walk the streets with a lobster on a leash. It is thought to be tribute to the French poet Gérard de Nerval who had a pet lobster called Thibault.


Films I've watched recently



Marseille (French with subtitles) I binged watched this and now I’m heart-broken it only went to two seasons before Net Flicks, the politically correct film distributor, cancelled the series after that. I fuck’n hate Net Flicks.   


Anyway, Marseille is a French drama starring Gérard Depardieu who plays Robert Taro, who, after r 20 years as mayor of Marseille, enters into a war of succession with his former protégé turned rival Lucas Barres (Benoît Magimel). Otherwise there are all sort of things going on in this series, murder, sex, seduction,  betrayal, corruption, revenge, the Mafia,….you name it, its here.  Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Carbon (Carbone….French with subtitles) I’m a true crime buff and was the film is based on a little known (In the US) but true crime e Carbon Connection scandal of 2008-2009, which involved billions of euros being siphoned from France and other EU countries by a network of criminal and con men. So, for me, this was fantastic. 


Better yet, Gerard Depardieu is in it. (But underused)  Bookended by a voiceover ala Carlito’s Way, the film opens and closes with the shooting of its leading man Antoine Roca (Benoit Magimel) Again, like Carlito’s way, the movie is told through a series of flash back to five months earlier. I’ll leave it there for you but if, like me, you’re a crime film fan, this is a must see.

Modern Love. An Amazon series of eight 30-minute episodes. I enjoyed this. Its adapted from the New York Times column of the same name, primarily by creator John Carney, the series attempts to transform essays into short plays the finest of which is  “When the Doorman is Your Main Man” 



Back to Burgundy (French with subtitles): “Back to Burgundy," details a year in the life of a fictional wine-making family in Burgundy. It is a slow, occasionally funny, warm film that offers a detailed look at the international subculture of wine and wine making.
When his father becomes ill, Jean (Pio Marmaï) returns home to the family vineyard in France after 10 years abroad. He has had no contact with the family since he left. His two siblings, Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jérémie (François Civil) have stayed on to run the family vineyard. When their father dies, the siblings (now including the returned Jean have to decide to sell the vineyard or figure out a means to pay an enormous inheritance tax.
This is a well written and physically beautiful film filled with plots and sub plots about maturity, growing up, life mistakes and dealing with the past and family.  Some found the film slow, I didn’t.  I thought it was well paced and filled with a series of believable characters, different sorts of intimacy and personnel journeys.



Paris je t'aime: Ben Gazzara’s in it, so right there, it makes the film worth wading through. This is a collection of 18 short films, each 8 minutes long, by a host of international directors who offer their take on passion and romance, all taking place in Paris.


 The film and the films within the film  is varied, quirky and unpredictable enough to keep the viewer interested.

Jo-Jo Rabbit: I $7.00 to watch it and turned it off after 20 minutes because I just can’t take another holocaust movie. Okay, we got it, the holocaust was awful. My father, at age 18, joined the Army and slugged a BAR across Czechoslovakia and shot, I’m sure dozens of Nazis before the buried a hundreds of pieces of flack into his legs and back.   Everyone does what they can.  Okay, we got it, the holocaust was awful.

Golden Exits: A lean but meaty film, with a knockout cast,  about relationships and trust. The film is set in a small area of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, which nowadays is a ritzy place. A young Australian Naomi (Emily Browning) takes a job assisting a forty-headed-for fifty archivist named Nick (Adam Horowitz) which, understandably, reawakens trust issues in Nick’s wife Alyssa (Chloë Sevigny), a psychologist, who's still dealing with Nick’s many past infidelities with younger women.


Nick doesn’t let her down. He is inappropriate with the girl, who has far better sense than he does (Its Hollywood, all white men are weak idiots)  His infatuation with her grows despite the boundaries she sets. In the meantime, Naomi falls for Buddy (Jason Schwartzman), a music producer who knew her when she was a girl. The married buddy, Buddy spends time with her as a favor to his mother, but, like the married Nick, falls for her and tries to hide it from his wife Jess. (Analeigh Tipton) Some of the films photography is refreshing, its always good to see a revitalized Brooklyn.

Knifes Out: The good thing is, this dog finally ended so I didn’t have to shoot the TV to put me out of my misery. Daniel Craig, an English actor, plays famous detective Benoit Blanc who has a southern accent. I really wanted to go into the film and ask him why he was talking like that and to please stop it. 


Look, here’s a helpful hint for actors. A real Southern accent falls into one of two categories and their both based on class. The original southern accent was used by the wealthy so they could let the world know that they learned to speak English from their Black nannies, who spoke English with a mixed west African accent, hence the southern accent. Jimmy Carters accent is an example  of a studied, upper class southern accent.  Everything else is a drawl, from a German word meaning “to delay.”  You can have one or the other, not both, unless your Daniel Craig in a film that doesn’t end, like Knifes Out.
The film is, of course, politically correct. Almost all the white people are morons and the Blacks and Hispanic aren’t. The cast is exceptional and some of the photography is wonderful. It’s the convoluted story line that makes this a film to flee from.
Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, God bless him) is a successful writer who dies. I can’t say I blame him. I would kill myself too if I were in this film. His housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson) finds him with a slit throat. It looks like suicide, but maybe not.
The cops show up and jeopardize their entire investigation by illegally allowing a private detective (This would be Mr. Craig and his multi-southern accent) to tromp around the crime scene.  Jamie Lee Curtis is in this, and she can do no wrong in my book. So is Don Johnson and the delightful and talented Michael Shannon and the equally delightful and talented Toni Collette. Anyway, skip this one and use your time to watch something else, something good. 

Horse Girl: Two things save this film. Molly Shannon is one of them. She is a quirky delight. The other thing that saves this film is that it is an accurate display of a person (Sarah, played by Alison Brie) in the midst of  deteriorating mental health crisis, but that isn’t clear unless the film is watched from beginning to end. It is a complicated story to tell and it’s told, overall, well. We need more films that address the horrendous  state of mental health in America.


The only reason I figured it out id that I watched with my wife who is a psychotherapist.
Sarah, Idiosyncratic, a bit goofy and loveably naïve, is a socially awkward craft store employee whose family has a history of mental illness and she doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand she is slowly but surely slipping away.
The film ambles through the reassuring sameness of Sarah’s days and her nights of strange dreams and nightmares. Slowly she comes to believe that she's a clone of her dead grandmother, and a time traveler who has been abducted by aliens although all of it is a result of her poor psychological state of mind.
One of the problems with the movie, however, is that the rambling tends to lead to nowhere once too often and it would have been easier on the viewer if the story line made it clear somewhere along the line that “Horse Girl” is about a woman progressively terrified of her mental state and not of the figments her mental state has produced.


Tumbleweeds: I would recommend you pass on this one. There is just nothing about it worth your time.The truth is, I watched it with my wife because I had manipulated our screen time with foreign art films with subtitles and I figured this would be a reprieve for her.
This is another “On the Road-headed west to a new life”  flick.



"Tumbleweeds," , a gritty film, is about a troubled mother and her wise pre-teen daughter, (Of course the kid is wiser than the mother, Hollywood has a problem with American adults and parents families) who share a road journey to California while both deal with the mother's immaturity, astounding ability to pick the wrong man,  and free style sex life.
Michael J. Pollard is the film, his last I think, and of course is absolutely refreshingly creepy.   Jay O. Sanders plays a co-worker who lost his own wife and is a truly gifted actor, but he’s been miscast in this film. Not for a second did I buy the story line that a guy like that would be dumb enough to involve himself with a nut case like the mother.



THE RIVER WARTA. A short story by AMY GUSTINE




Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a room for days, it collected nothing but a thin, almost imperceptible layer of dust. Her daughters’ bedrooms grew stiff and gray with disuse. In her own bed, Frederick’s pillow remained plump and smooth, the case free of his coarse, white hair, and Caroline—though she knew it was ridiculous—took this as an affront. It unnerved her that nothing changed in the house unless she changed it.
So when the cat meowed, a ridiculous predatory supplicant outside her window in a golden twilight during Indian summer, Caroline did not broom it away as she would have a year ago. With the Depression on, she’d become used to homeless, hungry visitors. She stood at the window looking down at its twisting, black body, its chartreuse eyes, and whispered, “What’s the matter? Are you lost? This isn’t your house. Go on now, go,” aware that her tone was more inviting than dismissing.
The next day, her youngest girl, Eva—who’d inherited too much of her mother even in her mother’s opinion—came by. “There’s a stray cat around the house. Where’s the broom?”
“Leave it be,” Caroline said. “It’s doing no harm.”
The night before, she’d watched the cat lap at the milk she’d slipped out on a tea saucer, marveling at the strange distance between herself and this woman who stood in front of the window. She who would not tolerate a cat’s filthy tongue on her good tea service, especially now that she could no longer replace what might be broken. But this woman, who was using her dishes, her hands, her eyes, had carried the saucer out and watched with amusement and even pride as the animal satisfied itself.
“Where did it come from?” Eva asked.
“Nowhere,” Caroline said. “I don’t think she has a home.”
Eva was Caroline’s plainest daughter. She lacked Sophie’s spunk— however annoying—and Addie’s supple beauty. Sometimes, studying Eva, at once both diffident and haughty, Caroline felt embarrassed, as if she were looking too long in a mirror, and it made her love her youngest daughter with a humiliating ache.
“Everything comes from somewhere,” Eva said. “What you mean is nobody wants it.”
Caroline, then called Karolina, was born in 1880 in Poznań, Poland, a city on the Warta River. As a girl she liked to stand by the river when a thunderstorm was coming in, watching blue sky skitter to gray in the water’s reflection, the mirrored clouds cut in half by waves. In summer the rain felt good on the insides of her wrists, where she rolled up the sleeves of her dress.
The river seemed a majestic, mysterious transport, always on the way to something else, and as she entered adolescence Caroline began to imagine what she might do if she were a boy. She’d escape for sure, maybe as far as America. At the very least she would have used her time down at the river for something useful, like fishing.

But the summer after she turned eighteen, her last summer in Po-land, Caroline could no longer look at the river. It had become like her parents—a lonely, menacing thing with a dark, inscrutable surface. And it took a courage she would not have guessed she had, a will that even scared her a little—reminding her as it did of her parents’ steely, stubborn resolve—to board a boat on that same river, a boat which would join a ship that would take her to America.
The cat did not leave, which, given how Caroline fed him, should have been no surprise. Since Black Tuesday not even an animal could afford to abandon a decent meal for the promise of something better down the block.
On Saturday her new son-in-law, Dobry, came to rake the leaves. After Frederick became too ill to work, he used to hire out such tasks to homeless men who walked the neighborhood looking for odd jobs. He’d send them off with a generous wage, Caroline’s kielbasa sandwiches, and a dozen pickled eggs. Now that he was gone, though, Caroline didn’t feel safe hiring strange men and making them meals. This left her with noth-ing to take care of—unless she counted the cat.
Dobry crouched, sliding his thumb against the tips of his fingers, and made kissing noises to the animal, who trotted up, stopping shy of his reach, and smelled the air appraisingly. Caroline stood at the back door, the screen breaking her face into a thousand tiny diamonds of shadow and light. “I don’t know how to get rid of it. It’s been urinating on my bushes.”
“Looks well fed,” Dobry said, scratching the hard spot between the cat’s ears.
“Well, they are predators,” Caroline said, seeing too late she’d forgot-ten to bring in the plate on which she’d left a smear of butter and ham rind that morning. It gave an odd satisfaction, having something wild, unreachable through logic or language of any kind, decide it needed you.
In Poznań Caroline’s mother owned a white cat named Silk with blue eyes and an unusually long tail she used the way a ballerina does her arms. Silent and indifferent to verbal commands, the cat perfectly suited her mother, who had gone deaf at the age of four from scarlet fever and talked as if she had a marble on her tongue. She never used sign language because Caroline’s grandmother thought it the recourse of the mentally deficient and had swatted her if she ever so much as gestured.
Caroline’s father was a chemist. He’d been born with a deformed left arm, the hand a mere nub of tissue just below what should have been his elbow. He had a dog named Atlas—a black and brown shepherd with triangular ears that stayed upright even while napping—whom he’d trained to open doors. At the chemist shop and around town, if her father was carrying something in his good hand, Atlas would grip the doorknob with his mouth and twist, leaving teeth marks behind in the wooden knobs.
Caroline remembered her mother having all the knobs in their house changed to smooth, metal spheres on which Atlas couldn’t gain any pur-chase. In retaliation her father had taken all the pens and pencils out of the house, forcing her mother to make herself understood with verboten gestures and futile attempts at proper pronunciation.
It was only after Caroline escaped to America and had to consider what she herself could expect from life—just another foreigner with a strange accent whose education and family lineage meant nothing—that she had begun to understand the seed of her parents’ bitterness and re-sentment toward one another. And only now, in the time she’d had to think since Frederick died, had she finally found a single word for it: humiliation.
The next week the weather grew much colder and the cat began to cry at the back door. One night, when Caroline reached outside with the saucer, it darted inside. She couldn’t find the thing until those glowing eyes gave it away, huddled beneath the dining room table. Caroline moved the chairs out and scolded, “You weren’t invited in. What’s the matter with you?” She clapped her hands and the cat ran.
 It took several minutes to herd it toward the door and finally out into the dark.
The next day was colder again. Snow fell for an hour in the morning, then melted in the afternoon sun. The cat sat under the awning on the concrete slab of patio with its paws tucked tight against its body. At the kitchen window, Caroline shook her head. If she had allowed herself to indulge in the fantasy of cats having emotions, she might have said the cat seemed hurt by her treatment the day before. It refused to come onto the porch for its milk, and didn’t meow when she poked her head out. It just looked at her a moment, then sat down, staring across the wet grass to the dark, dirty street beyond the fence.
The rest of the day Caroline tried to forget about the cat, and when she looked out around four o’clock, it was gone.
The last summer Caroline lived in Poland, after she’d finished school, her mother began a list of men—old men, young men, all rich men. She wrote them in her large, calligraphic script right across the printed text on pages torn from her father’s books, then stuck the pages to the walls in Caroline’s room with a paste made from flour and water. If the men were older, the rituals of questions and answers were private, passed among friends who knew friends who knew the man in question. If the men were Caroline’s age, her mother would invite their mothers for tea.
In July, during the hottest part of the summer, her mother didn’t al-low anyone to open a window because of the flies, so when these women came, they sat in the formal parlor with the still air like a warm, moldy cloth across their faces.
The visits were an effort for Caroline’s mother, requiring all her atten-tion and focus. Her words were practiced, nearly identical from tea to tea, lady to lady, and they were few. While the other woman talked, Caroline’s mother had to stare at her mouth to read her lips. Some people seemed to take offense at this, though they knew the reason. Hence there were long awkward silences in which the mothers would turn and smile at Caroline as if she were a picture on the mantel, and that was the face Caroline put on, the one she held for portraits, a mindless smile with fixed, wide eyes. Once in a while a boy’s mother would deign to ask Caroline a question, but she was always careful to answer while looking at her own mother so her lips could be read. As she talked, she studied her mother’s gray eyes, flecked with blackish-blue, the color of bruises before they turn, and tried to figure out if the narrowness was the study of pleasure or disgust.
During the meeting her mother would stroke Silk, who lay stomach down across her lap, paws dangling over her knees. At the end of the meeting, if things didn’t go well—which mostly they did not—her moth-er would snatch the paper she’d written the man’s name on off Caroline’s wall, ball it up and slip it up her sleeve.
After her mother began the husband search, Caroline’s father came into her room and stared at the papers. “My prospects,” Caroline mut-tered. “Mother did it.”
Her father nodded, then peeled one of the pages off the wall and licked its back. “That’s the good flour,” he said with disgust.
Caroline never heard her father talk to her mother about the papers on her wall, the flour, or anything else. He rarely spoke to her at all. Dare Caroline allude to this, he scowled and shook his head. “Why would I do that? How do I know what she thinks I’m saying?”
After the husband search began, her father began to move through the house as soundlessly as her mother, as if he didn’t need to fidget with locks or open doors like the common man, as if his useless arm were like a fin to a fish, letting him slip through the world silently, effortlessly, on his way to somewhere else. And just as quietly, he would open every window in the house to let the flies in. For hours afterward her mother stalked the floor, swatting with a magazine or newspaper, Silk trailing be-hind, pawing at the black corpses. One time Caroline’s mother broke her favorite vase. It was the only sound, that cracking china, all evening long.
 After Caroline had children of her own and their noise filled the house, she realized she had often felt as though she didn’t exist in her parents’ bitter silence and that the invisibility had seduced her. She didn’t want to contradict it. Sometimes her own girls would jump when she came into a room behind them. “Mother,” they’d complain, “why can’t you make noise like a normal person! It’s like having a snake in the house.”
By the end of the week the cat had forgiven her and come back up to the porch for its twice-a-day milk and scrap of food. Caroline’s neigh-bor, Mildred Putramack, must have been watching her feed it all along. She came out on her porch. “Giving something to an animal, huh? Not enough food for us, even.”
Caroline was not unaware of her good fortune—a generous pension from Frederick’s company and a patent on a glassblowing technique he’d invented. The house was paid for and her needs had shrunk as she grew older. Shopping had become more a chore than a pastime. Recently she’d gone downtown to buy a new pair of hose and seen men on the court-house lawn in pup tents, others sitting on stools selling handfuls of pen-cils, bushels of apples, and ears of corn.
Caroline stood up straighter. “There’s been mice around. Seems like a sensible way to get rid of them.”
Mildred huffed. “I’ve not seen any mice around my stoop.”
All night Caroline worried about what Mildred would be saying to the neighbors. She’s giving meat to a cat when people are starving. Letting filthy animals in her house. Going a little batty living there all alone. The thought of people talking about her made Caroline’s skin feel tight, as if someone were pulling a million strings attached to her million pores.
The next morning, she began to clean the house. In the last several weeks she’d let her daily chores lapse. Now, the dirt and bits of leaves on the front walk and the sticky film on the kitchen floor inspired a mild panic. She scrubbed the tiles, shook rugs, dusted tables, swept the sidewalk. Then she remembered the windowsills. The first night she heard the cat, she’d pulled back the drape and noticed an accumulation of dead flies and spider webs. Now, as she tugged open each window, it occurred to her the cat may have been out there hours, even days, be-fore she noticed him because she always kept the drapes shut to guard against sunlight fading her furniture. She thought of her daughter Ad-die, her favorite, who’d confided to Sophie, who later told Caroline, that she didn’t like to bring friends home because Caroline made them nervous. Was she so formidable?
She left the drapes open. What did it matter if her couch faded a shade or two? And who could guarantee she would live long enough to notice?
Caroline was cleaning out the refrigerator—the new electric kind she bought just before Frederick fell ill—when Eva and Sophie arrived. They were arguing as they came in the door. Neither seemed at all surprised to see her cleaning, which relieved her sense of being the wrong person in the right body.
“Mother,” Sophie said, “Mrs. Putramack waylaid us in the backyard. She said you’ve been feeding some cat, a stray.”
“Is she talking about the cat I saw last time? The black one?” The note of displeasure in Eva’s voice made Caroline angry. She also noted the surprise, remembering the plate and saucer Dobry must have seen.
“I don’t know what that old woman wants me to do—firecracker it?” After Frederick died last summer, some kids put a stray cat in a cardboard box on the Fourth of July, then stuck lit firecrackers through holes in the box. Addie, who’d been helping Caroline sort paperwork, saw the boys do it. She chased them off, but too late, and came back in crying, saying she wished her father were here, he’d make those boys sorry. Caroline patted her back and looked out the window at the way orange shadows played against the house next door. For several days after that she’d felt frightened and out of place, as if she’d woken up in a world that looked like hers, but upon closer inspection was more like the props to a play, with hidden gears grinding behind paper-thin doors and windows with-out glass.
Before the girls left, Caroline said, “I thought Dobry was going to finish burning my leaves,” a more imploring tone in her voice than she’d intended.
“He’ll come by Saturday, Mother,” Eva said. “I promise.” Caroline never knew whether to take Eva’s kindness as a sign of love or fear.
Later, Caroline was cleaning upstairs and opened Frederick’s ward-robe. The smell of long-confined cedar filled the air. With the weather getting cold, she knew she ought to take his wool coats and suits to the Salvation Army. She was afraid, though, that one day she would pass a man wearing Frederick’s brown and green checked overcoat and she would—for just a moment—think him still alive, then have to remember that, of course, he was not.
Caroline didn’t want to marry any of the men her mother had chosen. She resented being discussed and measured like a piece of cloth. She wasn’t something this man was going to wear around his skinny neck. But it felt impossible to avoid the marriage. Where would she go? How would she support herself?
One Saturday morning—another warm, wet day, the rag on her face—Caroline’s father called her down to breakfast. He sat across from her mother at the dining room table in his undershirt, his short, shriv-eled appendage in full view. Caroline knew this annoyed her mother, who preferred he keep the embryonic limb out of sight.
Her father’s arm made Caroline think of dried fruit, baked in the sun until all the moisture had leeched out. After she learned of gan-grene, the way it begins at the spot of injury and, if unchecked by am-putation, migrates toward the center of the body, it seemed impossible the desiccation would stop of its own accord. She began to study her father’s shoulder and the right side of his neck for signs of wrinkling or flaking skin.
Caroline slid into her seat. The dining room table was set with the morning dishes, blue forget-me-nots on a yellow plate. Her teacup was full of orange juice because her mother disliked the way a juice glass interrupted the place setting, and her plate held toast and two eggs, poached, because that was the only way civilized people ate eggs. A cut-glass bowl in the center of the table held blackberry jam. Caroline didn’t particularly like it, but she always ate it because her mother thought jam messy and her father considered it indulgent.
Caroline carefully ran her knife along the edge of the bowl, and spread the jam on her toast. It was in returning the nearly clean knife to the bowl that a black spot appeared on the table. Her mother’s eyes didn’t move. Her father’s features remained still. The words, when they came, seemed to float in from behind Caroline, as if meant for someone else, someone in the neighboring house perhaps, and only through fault of the wind had they found her. You’ve ruined the tablecloth. She didn’t even know who said them. The words were too distinct to be her mother’s, the voice too high to be her father’s. Caroline looked up and her parents were sipping their coffee. Then, in her marbled speech, Caroline’s mother said to her father, “See, I told you she is making a bad impression. She’s as clumsy as you with that stump.”
Her father spoke slowly, looking directly at her mother, “Maybe they’re afraid of you.” He invoked an old folk saying. “The deaf cannot be trusted.”
At the Salvation Army Caroline lay the coats and hats, the suits and shoes with laces tied together, on the desk. “I want someone to have these, someone who needs them.”
The man at the desk, a face like a well-worn rock, nodded. “Sure.” Caroline watched him sort each item into different boxes, the suits folded against all good sense on top of work shirts and canvas pants. At home the cat sat facing the door. “What are you doing? Hm? Get away from there, go.” It was the end of October and Caroline thought of Halloween. She’d given out treats when Frederick was well—popcorn balls, cookies, and often, in her neighborhood, pieces of sweet bread or paczki—but after he became ill, she hadn’t felt like it, causing her house to become the target of hooligans who tossed eggs at the front door, or left dog excrement in a bag of fire on the porch.
This year the expectation of harassment did not trouble Caroline as it had before. Nothing felt as it had when Frederick was dying, or right after he’d passed, the day Adelaide sat crying over the damn cat in the box. Now it seemed instead that the person turning the controls on her found the boys’ petulant punishment amusing. They wanted their sweets, and this was her sentence for not providing them. Unlike the cat, who’d done nothing, she had refused them a treat. Fair enough. She would sim-ply put gloves on, throw the paper bag away and scrub the egg off her windows. No harm done.
Dobry bicycled up the walk and around to the back gate about an hour before sunset, the evening cool setting in and Caroline closing the windows and making sure all evidence of feeding the cat had been cleaned up. The animal sat on the concrete walk behind the house where the sun came down hard at sunset, its face turned up to the warmth, the tip of its tail flicking like the tapping fingers of an impa-tient monarch.
Dobry raked the few newly fallen leaves into the burn pile while Caroline stood watching from the window. The cat watched too, unin-timidated by the crackle of the piles or the twing of the metal rake as it sprung against twigs and tangled grass. Dobry was a good-looking, tall man with wide shoulders and curly dark hair. He was better look-ing than Frederick, and sometimes, in the secret part of her heart, she was surprised he had married Eva, a girl as plain as Caroline. Once or twice Dobry had said something that gave Caroline the impression he’d intuited her surprise and resented it.
Of course, he might also resent Caroline because she made no at-tempt to hide her opinion that Dobry was a disappointment for Eva. What she never explained is that it was his love—not his family’s more recent immigration, or that they’d been farmers in the old country— that disappointed her. Dobry’s feelings for Eva, nearly worshipful in their purity and degree, required no change or improvement, and so Eva would remain like Caroline forever because she’d found someone who would allow her to.
Caroline made coffee and went back to the door. The cat was gone and Dobry was burning the piled leaves on the far side of the yard, the hose at the ready in case any flames leapt free. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door. “You’re all set.” She noticed that none of her sons-in-law ever called her anything. She wondered if they would simply call her Busia when the children started to arrive.
“Why don’t you come in and have some coffee?” Caroline said. “I want to ask you something.”
Dobry wiped his feet and sat down at the kitchen table.
Caroline put his cup down with the bowl of sugar and a spoon. “I was thinking I might get the house painted next summer. Would you be will-ing to do that? Or know someone I could hire?”
“I’ll do it. That’s no problem. Save you some money.” “Oh no, I’ll pay you.”
“No.” Dobry shook his head. “You hold on to your money. You never know when you might need it. Rainy day.”
When Dobry stood to go, Caroline asked, “Do many children go to the houses in your block for Halloween?”
“I think there’s more than there used to be. People feel bad for them. It’s the only time of year they get a treat.”
“Does Eva make paczki?”
  “We didn’t get too many children in the apartment. She gave them some coffee cake.”
Dobry walked down the back stairs. It had grown nearly dark while he was inside. There were kids shouting a few yards over, on the other side of a chain-link fence. Boys, Caroline could tell, from their posture: jittery, absentminded, backs to the dark. As Dobry mounted his bike, Caroline caught sight of a box and the black body writhing in the boys’ hands. She ran across the yard to the fence. The struggling creature cried out while the boys shut the box.
“Get out of there!” she yelled. “I see you! Go away! Leave it!” “What’s the matter?” Dobry jogged up.
“Chase those boys away,” she said, pointing. Then hollered, “My son-in-law’s coming down there and that cat had better be untouched! You hear me! I’ll find you boys!”
The boys ran and Dobry loped over and retrieved the box, which had been taped shut. The firecrackers had fallen out, and lay around the box like a child’s drawing of sunrays. Dobry opened the lid and the cat leapt for the bushes. Caroline told Dobry to wait there and went in the house, where she retrieved a can of tuna fish.
They lured the animal out and took him home, where he sprawled beneath the kitchen table, his bright eyes disappearing into the blackness of his vaselike face.
“I didn’t think you much cared for cats,” Dobry said.
“Well, I don’t want to see anything murdered.” Caroline wiped the counters with a sponge and ran it under steaming water.
As Dobry opened the back door to go, the cat scuttled into the dark-ness of the adjacent dining room. “You want me to chase him out?”
“Why not finish up this coffee with me?” Caroline said. “It’ll go to waste otherwise. And I’ve got some cake.”
Back at the table, she asked, “Do you know why I came to America?” Dobry shook his head.
 Caroline smiled. “Of course I never told anyone. I never even told Frederick. Can you believe that? Thirty years of marriage.” She looked down at her cup, then into the dining room. The cat couldn’t be seen in the darkness, but she knew he was there.
When she looked back up, Dobry’s face waited like a blank piece of paper—neutral, open, empty.
Silk had disappeared. Her mother asked if she’d seen the cat.
“No, I haven’t.” Caroline looked under her bed, where the cat some-times slept. Her mother waited a moment, then left.
Caroline could hear her walking through the house, whispering the cat’s name in her slurred speech—“Sik, Sik.”
When her mother was still whispering half an hour later, Caroline went to help. Silk hid when Atlas was home because he’d bitten her once, but when he was at the shop with her father, the cat normally sat with Caroline’s mother. Sometimes, though, in hot weather she would sleep on the brick floor of the porch off the kitchen or under the parlor sofa. Her mother caught Caroline checking the latter on her hands and knees. “I’ve looked,” she said.
“Perhaps she’s in town,” Caroline said, “getting mice.” Silk liked to go to the docks and catch mice, which she’d leave in her food dish. She never ate them. She was too full from the chicken and fish Caroline’s mother gave her.
Caroline suggested other possibilities too. None of them moved her mother to even respond. They sat until dark, skipping the dinner the maid had left in the icebox. Every few minutes her mother would get up and look out the back door. Normally Silk sat on the stoop when she was ready to come back inside.
Caroline’s father arrived home later than usual, assembled his dinner and settled in without a word at the dining room table. Caroline could see him through the glass doors, his sharp frame wavy and dissected through the seeded panels and their wooden mullions, his arm almost whole in the shadows cast by the flickering oil lamps.
After dinner her father headed toward his study. He’d just passed the parlor, where Caroline still sat with her mother, when he stopped and she felt, rather than heard, him and Atlas come back toward them. “My dear,” he said, his face close to a lamp to be sure her mother could read his lips. “I almost forgot. I think there’s something wrong with your cat.”
Caroline’s mother almost didn’t move. It was very close, but she did. Her eyes widened, just a moment, then back to normal. Her father went to his study. Her mother went out to the back porch and there Silk was, wet, limp, a potato sack next to her with a coarse rope fallen loose from her neck.
“Oh no,” Caroline moaned.
Her mother whirled as if she’d heard her, but it must have been a mo-tion caught from the corner of her eye. “Sh!” She picked up the dead cat and took her inside as if she were merely damp from the rain.
The next day and the next and the next was like any other in their house. Caroline’s father and Atlas left for the shop at eight o’clock sharp. It opened at nine and he liked to be sure the money was in the register, the counters freshly dusted, the front window washed. At home Caro-line’s mother did needlework while she read in her room.
Sunday arrived, the maid’s day off. In the morning they went to church, then her father went to his club. That Sunday, after he left, Caro-line could hear her mother in the kitchen, pots being set down, a fire starting. Usually they ate leftovers on Sunday, so Caroline wondered what she was doing, but decided to stay in her room, pretending she couldn’t hear.
When her father came home, her mother had already laid the table for dinner. Neither parent had said a word about her marriage all week. Though she hadn’t liked any of the men her mother had chosen, and moreover disliked the very process of their choosing, it occurred to
 Caroline the alternative to marriage would be staying here, with her parents.
Finished with dinner, her father pushed his chair out from the table. Her mother tilted her head, drawing out her deaf-softened words.
“Before you go…” Her father stopped. The same slight widening of the eyes. Caroline saw in retrospect that he’d already known, just that fast. “I wondered,” her mother continued, “did you enjoy dinner?”
Her father looked at his plate, hardly anything of the meat left. Red meat. Unusual for her mother. Caroline looked at her own plate. Half-eaten. Her mother’s gone completely. Then she knew too. Atlas never went with her father to the club. He wasn’t allowed in.
Caroline ran out the back door, heaving, convulsing, choking on the red chunks of half-digested dog. In the distance, she could hear the slap-slap-slap of the water as the wind moved hard across the river.




MY ISTANBUL. A short story by EMINE SEVGI ÖZDAMAR





FROM:GERMAN
Translated by : Katy Derbyshire

A Turkish philosopher from Istanbul once visited me in Berlin. He was only there for a few days. He looked at the street and said quietly, ‘I don’t think I could live here.’
Not the summer planes but the winter planes brought many people who were crying from Europe to Istanbul, crying because their fathers or mothers had died in Turkey. Three years ago, I was on a winter plane. Suddenly, a woman got up from her seat, threw herself on the floor of the plane and started wailing. All the people stood up.
‘What’s the matter?’
Two of the woman’s children had died in a car accident in Istanbul, and she had to go to the funeral. The stewardesses put her back in her seat, held her hand. The woman wailed, ‘Open the door. Throw me out. I want to look for them in heaven.’ She kept looking out of the window, as though she could see the dead in the sky.
‘Open the door.’
Then she looked at the other passengers behind her, as though she wanted them all to walk into the sky with her to look for her dead. She wanted the plane to move around like a car, left, right, back, forward, and look for the dead. But the plane flew straight ahead, as though pulled across the sky along a rail…
Back when I still lived in Istanbul, twenty-five years ago, I got on a ship one summer night, and it took me from the European side to the Asian side. The tea-sellers brought people tea, small change jingling in their pockets. The moon was huge, as though it lived only in the Istanbul sky, loved only Istanbul, and polished itself every day only for this city. Wherever it looked, all doors would instantly open to let the moon wax in. Wherever you touched, you touched the moon too. Everyone held a piece of moon in their hands. Now the moon lit up two faces next to me on the ship. A boy, a girl. He said, ‘So, you gave Mustafa your key too. I’m leaving. Goodbye.’ He leapt from the ship’s deck into the sea and dived into the moonlight. The ship was exactly mid-way between Asia and Europe. Not saying anything, the girl stayed in her seat in the moonshine. All the other people dashed to the ship’s rail, the boat leaned with the crowd, and the tea glasses also slid towards the rail on their saucers. The tea-seller shouted, ‘Tea money. Tea money.’ I asked the girl, ‘Is he a good swimmer?’ She nodded. The crew threw two lifebelts after the boy but he didn’t want a lifebelt. The ship turned and sailed after the boy, a rescue boat pulled him out of the sea. The moon watched everything that happened, and when the boy had to go to the captain with wet clothes and wet hair, the moon lit him up with a circle of light like a clown in the circus. The ship turned back towards the Asian side, the tea-sellers found their customers and collected up the change. The moon shone on the empty tea glasses, but suddenly the ship turned back for the European side, because it had left the lifebelts behind in the sea. And the moon was always there above Europe and Asia.
At the Istanbul airport, the people waited, a long corridor of people, some of them crying.
How many doors were there now in Istanbul? Twelve million people, how many doors did they open? And can the moonshine wax in under all the doors? Can the moon manage that?
When I was a child, four hundred thousand people lived in Istanbul.
Our neighbour Madame Atina (‘Athena’), one of Istanbul’s Greeks, used to pull back her aged cheeks and tape them in place behind her ears. I was supposed to help her with it. She told me, ‘I’m a Byzantine like the Hagia Sophia church, which was built in the time of the Byzantine emperor Constantine the Great, 326 A.D., a basilica with stone walls and a wooden roof. In the Hagia Sophia, the Byzantines believed they were closer to God than anywhere else, and I too believe I’m closer to the moon in Constantinople than anywhere else in the world.’ With the tape behind her ears, Madame Atina would go to the greengrocer’s. I’d go with her. She looked young with her cheeks pulled back so I walked quickly. She wanted to walk as quickly as me and sometimes she fell down on the street. The greengrocer was a Muslim, and he’d joke with Madame Atina, ‘Madame, a Muslim angel came, he put his finger in a hole in a pillar and turned the Hagia Sophia to face Mecca.’ I loved the Hagia Sophia; its floor was uneven and the walls sported frescoes of Christ without a cross, a muezzin sang the ezan from the minaret, and in the night the moon shone on Christ’s face and on the face of the muezzin.
One day, Madame Atina took the ship with me to the Asian part. I was seven years old. My mother said, ‘Look, the Greeks of Istanbul are the city’s salt and sugar.’ And Madame Atina showed me her own Istanbul. ‘Look at that little tower by the sea. The Byzantine emperor, who had received a prophecy that his daughter would be bitten by a snake and killed, had this Tower of Leandros (Maiden’s Tower) built and hid his daughter inside it. One day, the maiden longed for figs, so a basket of figs was brought to her from the city. She was bitten by a snake that had hidden in the basket, and she died.’ Madame Atina cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘My girl, with those beautiful eyes you’ll burn many men’s hearts.’ The sun lit up her red-painted fingernails, behind which I saw the Maiden’s Tower by the sea.
Then Madame Atina walked with me across the Bridge of the Golden Horn. As I walked across the low bridge that moved with the waves, I didn’t yet know that Leonardo da Vinci – the Ottomans called him Lecardo – had once written a letter to the sultan, on the 3rd of July 1503. The sultan wanted him to build a bridge across the Golden Horn, and Leonardo sent the sultan his suggestions in that letter. Another suggestion came from Michelangelo in 1504. But Michelangelo had a question: ‘If I were to build this bridge, would the sultan demand that I adopt the Muslim faith?’ The Franciscan abbot who discussed the sultan’s suggestion with Michelangelo said, ‘No, my son, I know Istanbul as well as Rome. I don’t know which city holds more sinners. The Ottoman sultan will never demand such a thing of you.’ Michelangelo couldn’t build the bridge in the end, though, because the pope threatened to excommunicate him. For centuries, the Ottomans didn’t build a bridge between the two European parts of Istanbul because Muslims lived in one and Jews, Greeks, and Armenians in the other. Only fishing boats ferried the people to and fro. It was Sultan Mahmut II (1808–1836) who wanted to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together at last in Istanbul and had the famous bridge built. Once it was finished, the fishermen beat at the bridge with sticks because it had taken away their work. The bridge became a stage: Jews, Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Albanians, Armenians, Europeans, Persians, Circassians, women, men, horses, donkeys, cows, hens, camels, they all walked across the bridge. One day there were two crazies, a woman and a man, both of them naked. The man stood at one end of the bridge, the woman at the other. She shouted, ‘From here on, Istanbul is mine.’ He shouted, ‘From here on, Constantinople is mine.’
At the airport, I took a taxi. Since Istanbul had become a city of twelve million, the taxi drivers would no longer find the addresses and they’d lose their tempers. ‘Madame, if you don’t know where you want to be driven, why did you get in my car?’ I wanted to go to a friend’s house, I no longer had a father and a mother to go to first.
Years ago, I had come to Istanbul once before on a winter plane to bury my parents, who had died three days apart. My mother was the first to go. My father had sat in his chair, the opposite chair empty. He took out a pair of false teeth with sheep’s cheese still stuck to them, and said, ‘Here, your mother’s false teeth.’ Two days later he died too, and his coffin stood on a raised stone slab for the dead in the mosque’s courtyard. There were two other coffins on the other slabs, and the mosque got the coffins mixed up. They didn’t know which dead man belonged to which family. At the cemetery, the gravediggers took the corpses, wrapped in shrouds, out of the coffins, and a man from each family – the women weren’t allowed to stand near the graves – had to see which of the dead belonged to them. My brother looked at the three dead men’s faces and said, ‘That’s our father.’
In the taxi, I now drove past the cemetery where my parents were buried. I couldn’t remember which grave was my father’s. All I knew was that you could see the sea from his grave. Since Istanbul has become a city of twelve million, the cemetery management has demanded that relatives buy up the graves, otherwise new dead are laid on top of the dead. At the time, my brother called me in Germany: ‘What shall we do? Buy the grave or let him get lost between the other dead?’
‘What do you think?’
‘We can let him lie with the other dead, that suits him better.’
As no one visits cemeteries in Istanbul, we didn’t mind where the dead would lie. The cemeteries are empty, the only quiet places in the city. As a young girl, I sometimes used to go to the cemeteries with a poet. He had written down what it said on the gravestones. He said, ‘These are people’s last words. There are no lies.’ He wanted to use those words in his poems.
Although no one visits cemeteries in Istanbul, every cemetery has its own crazy. They wander between the gravestones, and cats wander after them because they give the cats cheese and bread. At my parents’ cemetery, there were two crazies who lived there for years. One of them would always give the other a lira. One day, he gave him three lira instead of one. The other man got angry and said, ‘Why are you giving me three lira, I only want one lira.’
‘My son, have you not heard of inflation? Three lira is one lira now.’
The other man started to cry; his friend gave him a handkerchief.
The taxi driver couldn’t find my friend’s address and he broke out in a sweat. I gave him a paper tissue and said, ‘Drive me to the city centre.’ Thirty years ago, there was a film producer in Istanbul who only filmed sad stories. He knew all the viewers would cry, so he had handkerchiefs made out of the finest cotton. He stood outside the cinema himself and handed the handkerchiefs to the moviegoers. He laughed all the while. In those days, there was a famous cinema crazy in Istanbul, who especially admired a particular Turkish actor. Because that actor was killed in a film role, the crazy came to the cinema with a gun one evening and tried to kill the murderer before he could shoot – and fired six shots at the screen. Istanbul loves its crazies. The city gives them its breast and suckles them. It has been ruled by several crazy sultans. When a crazy comes along, Istanbul gives him a place.
I got out of the taxi right outside the cinema where the crazy once shot at the screen. Before I left for Berlin twenty-two years ago, I would often stand outside that cinema waiting for my friends.
Now I’m standing here again, looking at the faces of the people walking past. It looks like films from all different countries are being screened one over another. Humphrey Bogart is speaking to an Arabic woman, asking her the time. A Russian whore is speaking to a man who moves like Woody Allen.
I look for my friends from back then in these people’s faces, but I’m looking for them in the young faces of today, as though my friends hadn’t got older over these twenty-two years, as though they’d waited for me with their faces from back then. As though Istanbul had frozen to a photo at the moment I left for Europe, to wait for me – with all its baths, churches, mosques, sultans’ palaces, fountains, towers, Byzantine walls, bazaars, wooden houses, steel lanes, bridges, fig trees, slum houses, street cats, street dogs, lice, donkeys, wind, sea, seven hills, ships, crazies, dead, living, whores, poets, porters. As though Istanbul had waited for me with its millions of shoes, all waiting for morning in the houses, with its millions of combs left below mirrors spotted with shaving soap.
I’m here, so now all the windows will open. The women will call out to their friends from window to window. The basil plants in the flowerpots will give off their scent. The children of the poor will throw themselves into the Marmara Sea in their long cotton underpants to wash. All the ships between Asia and Europe will sound their horns. The cats will yowl for love on the roofs. The seven hills of Istanbul will awaken. The gypsy women will pick flowers there to sell in the city centre later on. The children will climb the fig trees. The birds will peck at the figs.
‘Mother, do you make fig jam from the male or the female fig trees?’
‘The male ones. Look, their figs are small and hard.’
In the tulip gardens at the sultan’s palace, the tortoises will walk around with lit candles on their shells, the tulips will bend their heads towards the sea in the wind, the tortoises’ candle lights will flicker in the same direction. The wind will push the ships along today and make them sail faster, the passengers will arrive home sooner. When the men are at home, the lights will go on across the seven hills. The fathers will wash their hands. Sounds of water. ‘My daughter, will you pass me a towel?’
‘Yes, father.’
Opposite the cinema were a few shops. Some of the shopkeepers recognized me and said hello; they all had white hair and white eyebrows.
Next to the cinema stood a poor man, perhaps a farmer, trying to photograph the people passing by with a Polaroid camera.
‘Photo souvenir of Istanbul, photo souvenir of Istanbul!’
I let him take my photo; the picture was blurred. ‘Take another picture.’
‘I haven’t any more film.’
A beggar woman took the photo out of my hand and said to the photographer, ‘You’re the artist, aren’t you, why didn’t you photograph this lady in front of McDonald’s?’
She looked closely at the photo and exclaimed, ‘Oh, how beautiful my treasure is, how beautiful.’
I thought she meant me, but there was a cat on the wall behind me in the photo. I was blurred but the cat was in focus.
Then I called the Turkish philosopher who didn’t want to live in Berlin.
‘Where are you?’
‘In Istanbul.’
I took the ship over to him, to the Asian part of Istanbul. Sailing alongside the ship sailed a fishing boat transporting two horses. The moon shone on the faces of the horses, which were perfectly calm. I dipped my hands in the sea to touch a little moonshine; the moon looked suddenly like it had in my childhood – as though it lived only ever here in the Istanbul sky, as though it loved only Istanbul, and polished itself every day only for this city.
________________________________________
*This story is taken from: Der Hof im Spiegel by Emine Sevgi Özdamar. © Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne/Germany.

Edward St. John Gorey

Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was a writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.