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.
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